Love's labours

Ron Rosenbaum is unabashed in
his lust for Shakespeare as he takes
his readers on a journey to discover
what was so Shakespearean about
the great writer. By Walter Kirn

'My job, as I see it," said my ninth-grade English teacher, "is to turn you on to Shakespeare". Her phrase embarrassed me, maybe because it suggested that her real turn-ons, her physical turn-ons, were somewhat few. Or maybe because it promised a sort of spasm that I was reluctant to undergo in public — even if I believed that such a thrill was possible. Which I didn't, being just 14.

In his besotted, passionate new book about contemporary Shakespeare studies, The Shakespeare Wars, the literary journalist Ron Rosenbaum sets out to do what my teacher tried and failed to do: explain and transmit a sense of ravishment, "unbearably pleasurable", brought forth by the "bottomlessness" of Shakespeare's writings. Like my erotically animated teacher, Rosenbaum isn't afraid of being breathy. He isn't shy about speaking with flushed cheeks. Shakespeare's work, he assures us from the start, is a love-object worthy of rapt, minute devotion – the sort of devotion courtly sonneteers paid to their mistresses' alabaster bosoms and to every charmed blemish to be found thereon. Rosenbaum begins with an account of the moment he lost his cultural virginity at a fabled 1970 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Staged in Stratford-on-Avon, and directed by Peter Brook, the play had a "charismatic aphrodisiac effect" that Rosenbaum had trouble fathoming and couldn't help dwelling on afterward. Why the chills? Whence the trance? His search for the answer turns his book into a sort of romantic detective story. Playing the impassioned amateur sleuth, he interrogates expert witnesses (scholars, actors, directors), examines conflicting documentary evidence (various versions of the plays and poems), and spins and revises hypotheses as he goes. What he wants to determine is not who Shakespeare was — not in a biographical sense, at least, which he believes is futile and intellectually irrelevant — but what was so Shakespearean about him.

To follow Rosenbaum down these dusty trails, which wind through university libraries, professors' offices and even one Alabama doughnut shop, the reader must supply from his own stockpile – or borrow from the author's – a certain measure of lovestruck, manic scholasticism. The book's first few chapters are tricky, devoted to the arcane relationships between the early editions of the plays (the quartos) and the later ones (the folios). Soliloquy by soliloquy, line by line, and finally word by word, Rosenbaum and a roster of all-star scholars (who endlessly feud and squabble with one another, vying for power on a tiny stage) weigh the urgent question of whether Shakespeare was a spouting poetic fountainhead, whose output fell perfectly upon the page, or a deliberate literary craftsman who revised his works as he grew older.

At issue especially are various passages, some legendary, some less so, from Hamlet and King Lear. Depending on how one views these cuts, additions and changes – as intentional alterations by the playwright, thoughtless slip-ups by the typesetters or flawed recollections by performers – our sense of Shakespeare's genius shifts. According to tradition, Rosenbaum tells us, the idea was that the different versions of Hamlet, for example, pointed back to some "lost archetype", presumably impeccable and complete. The infallible Shakespeare, according to this model, got it right the first time, while those who came after him somehow messed things up, provoking centuries of confusion.

But then – in just the last few decades – came a revolution in academe that killed off the poet who could do no wrong and substituted, using evidence gathered from painstaking textual analysis, a man of many second thoughts (usually, it was felt, superior ones). The iconoclasts behind this uprising, the so-called "new disintegrators", are posed by Rosenbaum against the classicists, who seem to doubt Shakespeare could be bettered, even by an older and wiser Shakespeare.

It's an informative, diverting tussle, with Rosenbaum jetting back and forth between the brainiacs' ivy-covered strongholds to referee, and sometimes rev up, the fight. He is not a passive presence in the book. Like a cross between some pesky quiz kid and the sly inspector in Crime and Punishment, he's always concealing some devastating small point which he ventures at the last moment, provoking admiration or consternation from the specialists. This could be an irritating habit, and at times it proves so, but for the most part it enlivens the discourse and keeps it from growing too lofty or disembodied. Further, by making no apologies for his bouncy hobbyist's zeal, Rosenbaum reminds us that scholarship need not be an insular, impotent pursuit but, when the subject is grand enough, can be a freewheeling battle royal. By getting a word in edgewise with the know-it-alls, he convinces us that we could, too, if only we were as knowledgeable and agitated.

Keeping us agitated with him over such matters as whether Lear's last words were suicidally depressive or poignantly self-deluding; over whether Shakespeare's antique spellings enrich the possible readings of his lines; and over whether the plays are best enjoyed on film or in the theater is Rosenbaum's unceasing, booklong labour – and he's generally successful at it. The works of Shakespeare, he argues, constitute a secular Bible as well as the only map that we possess to a supremely gifted human consciousness. To be tired of Shakespeare, for Rosenbaum, is to be tired of life, while to be excited about him – in every inky nuance and detail – is to live a deeper, wider life. With Shakespeare, that is, nothing is academic, even the infighting of academics.

And how it rages! The limited sphere of Shakespeare studies, we learn, is, for those who dwell inside it, the globe. There's money at stake, for one thing, in the form of textbook sales. There's also glory and honour. In one of the book's most involving, personal sections, Rosenbaum narrates his veritable blood-feud with a professor named Don Foster, who grabbed headlines several years ago by claiming to authenticate, using computers, a 'new' poem by Shakespeare, the "Funeral Elegy". (Foster, employing similar methods, was the man who outed the journalist Joe Klein as the author of the novel Primary Colors.) Rosenbaum suspected from the start that the vacuous, conventional elegy was beneath Shakespeare, and he said so in print, incurring Foster's wrath. When the elegy was exposed as bogus Shakespeare, Rosenbaum felt firsthand the exaltation of the triumphant professional pedant.

Most love affairs are private obsessions, of course, and if Rosenbaum had picked anyone but Shakespeare to lavish with such rhapsodic scrutiny it might be hard to join him in his endeavor. As it is, though, he acts as our romantic surrogate. His compulsive quest for intimacy with every clause and comma Shakespeare touched – or some printer's apprentice retouched – is not the result of some eccentric turn-on but of an enduring, collective arousal. His sighs are the sighs of all Shakespeare lovers, concentrated.

Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His most recent novel is Mission to America. p

© New York Times