{"product_id":"the-shakespeare-wars-isbn-9780812978360","title":"The Shakespeare Wars","description":"“[Ron Rosenbaum] is one of the most original journalists and writers of our time.”\u003cbr\u003e–David Remnick\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Shakespeare Wars\u003c\/i\u003e, Ron Rosenbaum gives readers an unforgettable way of rethinking the greatest works of the human imagination. As he did in his groundbreaking Explaining Hitler, he shakes up much that we thought we understood about a vital subject and renews our sense of excitement and urgency. He gives us a Shakespeare book like no other. Rather than raking over worn-out fragments of biography, Rosenbaum focuses on cutting-edge controversies about the true source of Shakespeare’s enchantment and illumination–the astonishing language itself. How best to unlock the secrets of its spell? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith quicksilver wit and provocative insight, Rosenbaum takes readers into the midst of fierce battles among the most brilliant Shakespearean scholars and directors over just how to delve deeper into the Shakespearean experience–deeper into the mind of Shakespeare.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWas Shakespeare the one-draft wonder of \u003ci\u003eShakespeare in Love\u003c\/i\u003e? Or was he rather–as an embattled faction of textual scholars now argues–a different kind of writer entirely: a conscientious reviser of his greatest plays? Must we then revise our way of reading, staging, and interpreting such works as \u003ci\u003eHamlet\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eKing Lear\u003c\/i\u003e?  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRosenbaum pursues key partisans in these debates from the high tables of Oxford to a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop in a strip mall in the Deep South. He makes ostensibly arcane textual scholarship intensely seductive–and sometimes even explicitly sexual. At an academic “Pleasure Seminar” in Bermuda, for instance, he examines one scholar’s quest to find an orgasm in Romeo and Juliet. Rosenbaum shows us great directors as Shakespearean scholars in their own right: We hear Peter Brook–perhaps the most influential Shakespearean director of the past century–disclose his quest for a “secret play” hidden within the Bard’s comedies and dramas. We listen to Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as he launches into an impassioned, table-pounding fury while discussing how the means of unleashing the full intensity of Shakespeare’s language has been lost–and how to restore it. Rosenbaum’s hilarious inside account of “the Great Shakespeare ‘Funeral Elegy’ Fiasco,” a man-versus-computer clash, illustrates the iconic struggle to define what is and isn’t “Shakespearean.” And he demonstrates the way Shakespearean scholars such as Harold Bloom can become great Shakespearean characters in their own right. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Shakespeare Wars\u003c\/i\u003e offers a thrilling opportunity to engage with Shakespeare’s work at its deepest levels. Like Explaining Hitler, this book is destined to revolutionize the way we think about one of the overwhelming obsessions of our time.Ron Rosenbaum studied Shakespeare at Yale. His bestselling work of cultural history, \u003ci\u003eExplaining Hitler\u003c\/i\u003e, has been translated into ten languages. His work has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHarper’s\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e. He writes a column for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Observer\u003c\/i\u003e and lives in New York City.Chapter One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Dream Induction\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the last evening of the summer of 1970 in the vil-  lage of Stratford-on-Avon, birthplace of Shakespeare, I had an experience  that changed my life and has haunted me ever since. One that left me, ever  after, with a question I’ve been trying to answer: What was that about?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    An improbable chain of circumstances had resulted in my witnessing one of  the first performances of a now-legendary production of A Mid-  summer Night’s Dream, one that I subsequently learned changed more lives  than mine: it changed the lives of an entire generation of Shakespearean  players and directors, changed the way Shakespeare has been played ever  since.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But for me, that Dream—a Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by  Peter Brook—was a kind of initiation into a new realm, a realm I’ve sought  with mixed success to return to ever after. It was the experience that,  for me, gave a lifelong urgency to the conflicts over Shakespearean  questions examined in the ensuing chapters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Perhaps I should introduce the conflicted, divided person I was back then  when I piloted my rented Austin Mini into Stratford by introducing the  forbidden question that led me to flee graduate school, and indirectly set  me on the path to that life-changing experience at Stratford.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Just two years before that I had begun what seemed like a promising  academic career at Yale Graduate School’s Department of English  Literature. As an undergraduate at Yale, I had studied primarily  pre-seventeenth-century literature and had been granted a Carnegie  Teaching Fellowship to Yale Graduate School, a fellowship designed to spur  those undecided about an academic career to spend a year tasting the  supposed fruits of such a career without many onerous responsibilities. I  was only required to take one graduate seminar and teach one undergraduate  class per semester, in return for which I was given an official-sounding  appointment to the Yale faculty and named a Junior Fellow of Jonathan  Edwards (residential) College.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The latter made me briefly a colleague of Stephen Greenblatt, also   a Junior Fellow there that year. Greenblatt would go on to found the   most influential new school of Shakespeare scholarship in America—New   Historicism—and like many original thinkers develop a cultlike following.  He would of course end up as star of the Harvard English department and  the author of a best-selling Shakespeare biography. I’ll never forget an  argument Greenblatt and I had that year about the Black Panthers and  historical truth, which oddly foreshadowed, in transposed form, our  subsequent positions on New Historicism and Shakespeare. (I discuss it  further in chapter 4.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At first things went swimmingly: I was thrilled to find I’d been admitted  to a select seminar with Richard Ellmann, the acclaimed biographer of  Yeats and Joyce, masterminds of modernism, and felt quite vain when  Ellmann singled out a paper I’d read at the seminar, a critique of the  determinism of Yeats’s muddleheaded mystical cosmology.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But sometime in the second semester, although enjoying a Shakespeare  seminar with Howard Felperin, I lost heart, or maybe it was more that my  heart was broken. In point of fact, my heart was broken by a question I  asked—and an answer I got—about love.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The occasion was a special, ad hoc, invitation-only seminar I’d been asked  to, a presentation by one of the English department’s favorite wunderkind  scholars. A paper on Chaucer’s lesser-known love-vision poems, including  the Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Unlike the wild digressive fabliaux of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s  love-vision poems are exquisite and mysterious shorter works, and I was  looking forward to the occasion, although by this time my disillusion with  graduate school life had already begun to undermine the pleasure I felt  from the study of literature. The faculty sherry parties had a lot to do  with it: watching my fellow graduate students assiduously sucking up to  Harold Bloom and other stars of the department, their sherry-flushed faces  perspiring from the damp mothball-mildew warmth of their tweeds. While the  world outside—it was 1968!—was exploding with fearful, thrilling events.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I’d gotten a taste of the adrenaline-fueled rush of reporting when I’d  gotten press credentials to cover the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention  for a local daily newspaper. And to return from that history-changing riot  to the shallow cynicism of graduate school culture was intensely  dismaying. What was wrong with these people? I asked at first. Then: What  was wrong with me? Why was I staying there?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The love-vision seminar moment crystallized my doubts. It wasn’t Chaucer  who was the problem. Nor was it the wunderkind scholar himself, whose  paper I recall to be an intelligent if somewhat overwrought examination of  the way in which the narrators of Chaucer’s dream visions consciously  re-envision their visions as poetry. Something like that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No, it was his response to a question about love. It was a question I  asked in the discussion period after his presentation. A question about  the vision of love in the love-vision poems. I forget exactly what the  offending question I asked was, something along the lines of whether love  was more than human delusion in Chaucer’s work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A shocked silence ensued among the other grad students and faculty, and I  realized I had committed a terrible solecism, a faux pas of Richter-scale  proportions, in asking such a naïve question. I had expressed interest in  the ostensible subject matter of the poem!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    With a wan, disdainful smile and dismissive wave of his nicotine-stained  fingers, the wunderkind scholar informed me that “Love is such an  uninteresting question.” The truly interesting questions raised by the  love-vision poems, he said, were not about love but about “the making of  poetry.” This meta-poetical question, newly fashionable at the time, was  far more significant than something as trivial as the nature of love.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    All the other acolytes nodded and chuckled. Of course! How naïve! The  making of poetry, yes!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Sez who?” I muttered to myself—one of my father’s favorite  Brooklynisms—as I slunk off.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What am I doing here, I thought to myself as I drove back out to the house  on the Sound I’d rented with some friends. That night I stayed up late,  desperately searching the classified job sections of the papers for  something, anything, even a traveling salesman job that would get me out  of the sherry parties and on the road.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Two years later, through a couple of lucky breaks, which began with  reading the classified ads that night, I was on the road, heading for  Stratford-on-Avon. I’d become not a traveling salesman but something  analogous: a journalist. A journalist who wanted to write about cops and  criminals, under-  world and undercover types. I wanted to live life among Falstaffian rogues  rather than read about them. But I was still under the spell of  literature, a spell graduate school had not broken. So in September 1970 I  found myself driving through the English Midlands having decided to  undertake a reverse pilgrimage, a pilgrimage from Chaucer’s Canterbury to  some of the icons of my academic literary past, my abandoned academic self.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I headed north toward my first stop, Winchester, where I went to some  effort to locate the ridge in the rolling countryside where Keats stood on  September 19, 1819, and gazed at the sunset vista on the penultimate day  of summer, a vista that gave rise to the haunting and lovely ode “To  Autumn.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I arrived there that same day, September 19, and found the landscape had  not been altered: that one could still see exactly what Keats saw. I could  understand for the first time the line “While barred clouds bloom the  soft-dying day, \/ And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.” I saw those  stubble fields! I felt the “soft-dying” end-of-summer melancholy Keats  evoked with its intimation of mortality, of the autumnal harvest and the  more final harvest of death to come.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    An ordinary ecstasy IN NEW HAVEN\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And with that cheerful iconic vista under my belt, I headed farther north  to Stratford, to the birthplace of William Shakespeare. I should say I was  not a Shakespearean obsessive at that point. I had taken a graduate  seminar on Shakespeare at Yale with Howard Felperin, a seminar that  focused on the   relationship between Shakespeare’s Tragedies and his Late Romances.  Felperin would later become an avatar of stringent Derrida  deconstructionism, although he still made sense to me at the time (and  later renounced his deconstructionist perspective). But I hadn’t even read  all the plays, I can’t recall whether I’d seen more than a few  productions, I didn’t carry around copies of the plays the way I did the  works of Keats and Donne, say. I’m not even sure if, when heading up the  motorway toward Stratford, I knew that one of the most influential  productions of the twentieth century, Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s  Dream, had just opened. Frankly, I’m not even sure if I knew they put on  plays there. The only thing that I was sure of was that it was the  birthplace of Shakespeare, and I felt a pilgrimage might in some way help  me connect with what I’d been missing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It’s true I had had one extraordinary, puzzling, almost mystical  experience of Shakespeare before then. It happened during the seminar on  literature I was teaching at Yale. I had assigned my class Shakespeare’s  Sonnets. They were not particular favorites of mine at the time; when it  came to love poems, I preferred the more knotty and overtly intellectual  lyrics of John Donne and the other seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets  to the Sonnets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But there had been a moment when . . . Well, I recall standing at the  blackboard in the seminar room. I had written out one of the Sonnets on  the blackboard and was leading the class through its flickering  ambiguities. I think it could have been either Sonnet 44 or 45, both of  which play upon the themes of absence and presence: how two united as one  in love can both be, and not be, apart (can both “two be” and not “two”  be). In Sonnet 45 the speaker tells an absent loved one how his thought  and desire are “present-absent.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    How he’s there, one with the distant lover and thus absent from himself;  but to be absent from himself is to be two selves, one there and one not  there, although the one not there actually is there—one with the absent  lover—so really it’s one self at two different places. Is that all clear?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He’s not split into two so much as flickering in and out of being one and  two selves. Not just back and forth from being at one with—to being—the  loved one, but “with swift motion sliding,” shifting back to being  himself. He’s not just being in two places at once, he’s two beings in  alternation. Two be and not two be.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In any case, I recall standing at the blackboard in that seminar room on  Prospect Street in New Haven attempting to unfold for my students this  shifting, this flickering-back-and-forth effect, this dual prospect,  conjured up not just by this Sonnet but by so many others. In which  embracing one aspect of a verbal ambiguity and then shifting back to its  counterpart involves something more than a shift in meaning in the poem,  but a shift in the reader’s being. In effect you are not merely reading  alternative meanings into the poem, the poem is reading alternative  meanings, alternative identities, into you.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But suddenly that day this became more than an abstract insight. I recall  banging the chalk in my hand on the blackboard, back and forth from  “present” to “absent” in the phrase “These present-absent with swift  motion slide”—and suddenly experiencing something strange. In some  peculiar but pronounced and dramatic way, my self, my identity seemed to  be shifting, sliding back and forth from presence to absence, from being  there in that classroom to being somewhere absent, looking back on my  presence, and then “with swift motion sliding” back to where I was  standing again. I was no longer reading alternative meanings into the  Sonnet, I felt like the Sonnet was shifting me back and forth between  alternative selves, almost physically. I was standing inside and outside  myself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It wasn’t an intellectual experience, or it was disturbingly, mysteriously  more than an intellectual experience. An ecstatic experience in the  original meaning of the word “ecstatic”: standing outside oneself. It was  almost an out-of-body experience, or an in-and-out-of-body experience. I  came to think that at least in part this flickering-back-and-forth effect  is one thing the Sonnets are about: the attempt to induce this state,  which as Stephen Booth points out, is not unrelated to the shifting,  flickering state of being in love.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I’ve subsequently also come to believe that this ecstatic experience of  identity change and exchange, of what might be called an alternating  current of two-ness and oneness, can be found recurrently throughout  Shakespeare’s plays and poems. It is embodied most explicitly in his often  overlooked mystical love-vision ode, “The Phoenix and Turtle.” A poem that  seems to express directly some powerful visionary sexual and metaphysical  experience of oneness and two-ness that is echoed elsewhere in his work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In any case, that moment of transport, or transposition, one might say,  was unlike anything I’d experienced before, certainly not reading poetry.  And I never experienced anything like it again—until that night in  Stratford-on-Avon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As I said, I had no such expectation as I drove into Stratford. I was  unaware how lucky I was to get tickets to both productions playing at the  Shakespeare Memorial Theatre that weekend: Trevor Nunn’s staging of Hamlet  and Peter Brook’s of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Hamlet was memorable, one of the very best I’ve ever seen. But it was  the Dream that changed my life. I count it one of the greatest blessings  of that life to have been there for that moment. I’d never experienced  anything of such radiant clarity. To say it was “electrifying” does not  capture   the effect; it was more like being struck by lightning. I felt  “transported”   in the literal sense of being physically as well as metaphysically lifted  from the muddy vesture of the earth to some higher realm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was a lifelong love potion. It was a lens through which I could not  help see all Shakespeare, indeed all literary art, ever after. It was:  “Oh, that’s what the fuss is about.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was more than merely the shock of a “first time.” It was more than the  fact of its being my first experience of Shakespeare played by great  Shakespeareans because in the decades that followed I’ve never seen  Shakespeare to equal it. I’ve seen great Shakespearean moments, great  Shakespearean performances, unforgettable scenes; I’ve had illuminations  reading passages in Shakespeare, some in other writers. But nothing like  the total experience of that Dream. Ever after I’ve sought in vain for  something to equal it. I’ve rarely found it in art, I’ve rarely found it  in life. There’s nothing like it, the initial falling-in-love business, is  there? But it doesn’t last, alas, nothing like that does. This Dream did.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When I say it changed my life let me elaborate a little bit. For one thing  it changed the way I came to experience Shakespeare. Suddenly it changed  on the page; the words became charged with that electricity I’d felt  transmitted to me by that Dream experience. I began to read, I began to  hear Shakespeare when reading, in a way I never had before. I began a  cycle of reading and rereading all of the plays, sometimes in rough  chronological order, sometimes all histories, then all comedies, then all  tragedies, sometimes whatever emerged on top of a collapsing pile of  editions. Sometimes I’d read through the slender, elegant, sparsely  annotated Penguins and Pelicans, sometimes the substantial  footnote-fattened Ardens, later the often-  exciting new Oxford and Cambridge editions, the Facsimile of the First  Folio, the ever trustworthy Folger, Riverside and Bevington Complete  Works. And every edition of the Dream, which I’d read over and over with  an ever deepening sense of wonder: What happened that night?Author of the New York Times bestseller Explaining Hitler;[quote]--Cynthia Ozick","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301076553957,"sku":"NP9780812978360","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812978360.jpg?v=1767741486","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-shakespeare-wars-isbn-9780812978360","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}