Late April is a time when one reliably hears a little more about Shakespeare than is common, and when otherwise normal people participate in various Shakespeare-themed activities, which serve to commemorate Shakespeare's (likely enough) birthday on April 23, 1564. Recent anniversary years have spawned noticeable events. The Robinson Shakespeare Club at Notre Dame sponsored a 24-hour read-a-thon, and for several weeks the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, housed in the Shakespeare family home in Stratford-upon-Avon, invited lovers of Shakespeare to post YouTube clips in which they expressed or explained said love. In The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Arts & Academe" column last year, American poet Heather McHugh was the latest of the countless who have paid literary homage to Shakespeare: McHugh, the kind of inventive wordsmith and pun- and etymology-lover that would make an Elizabethan poet proud, composed her own sonnet with lines that were anagrams of corresponding lines in one of Shakespeare's sonnets.
It is strange, really, that Shakespeare's birth date remains such a rallying point. Walking by Capitol Hill Books in Denver, late one night last April, I noticed a sign in its window that listed "April 23" and said, above a sympathetic illustration with oversized head and quill prominently in hand, "Happy Birthday, Will," as if he might soon walk by, too, just a little behind me, and be touched by this show of thoughtfulness. The date has more broadly become a symbol of reading and culture generally. A few blocks away, at Denver's Tattered Cover Books, one of the better known independent bookstores in the country, a poster by the front door, making no mention of Shakespeare, still touted his birth date for World Book Night: "Spreading the Love of Reading Person to Person."
Shortly back in Chicago, I read at a local poetry event on a Sunday afternoon, and Shakespeare was everywhere there, too. One of my poems shamelessly riffed on some glorious lines from Measure to Measure, while another's verse echoed "What dreams may come," from Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy. Another poet wrote sonnets that began with the first two lines of Shakespeare's sonnets, and then created her own more modern-sounding arguments. When asked his name, yet another reader, an ornery older fellow, said without missing a beat, "William Shakespeare." Later, when I overhead that his name was Barry, he still insisted that it was Barry Shakespeare, which is what I proceeded to call him for the rest of the afternoon. It would please me greatly to know what William Shakespeare, that amiably enigmatic Warwickshire man who died nearly four centuries ago, would make of "Barry Shakespeare," and the rest of us echoers, in that charming café in Westmont, Illinois.
Of course Shakespeare's cultural presence extends far beyond the increasingly rarified attention of bookstores, or an admiring, emulating group of local poets. Shakespeare, somehow, always seems to turn up in small but definite ways in our stories of greatest national importance or interest. He haunts our public nightmares and inspires our breathtaking triumphs. For example, Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers, liked to quote Shakespeare and Nietzsche. In a video he recorded shortly before the school massacre, he reassures his parents that they could not have stopped him, and then recites a line from Shakespeare that equates him with Richard III: "Good wombs have borne bad sons." The line also appeared in his day planner, in the square for Mother's Day. One classmate, interviewed in Rocky Mountain News, made it clear that she was not friends with the killers, but defended the violent stories they had shared in creative-writing class. "You write about what you want," she said. "Shakespeare wrote all about death."
At the other extreme, Shakespeare takes his predictable place as a fellow genius in Walter Isaacson's bestselling biography Steve Jobs. We learn how the young inventor's intellectual interests grew in high school, when he began to read Plato and Shakespeare. He was particularly fond of King Lear, apparently. Later, when Jobs was fired from Apple in the mid-'80s, he met with representatives at Oxford University Press to discuss the press's recently completed Shakespeare edition, which he wished to include in the new computer he was creating, NeXT. Jobs was already envisioning a world of digital books, and Shakespeare's complete works seemed like the ideal text to inaugurate that shift. "You will be at the head of the parade," Jobs told his OUP counterparts. And so the Oxford text was there when the NeXT system was unveiled in October 1988 in San Francisco's Symphony Hall. What we have done, Jobs declared that day, is make the first real digital book.
More tellingly, Isaacson himself as biographer could not resist a narrative framework that is inherited from Shakespeare. He describes Jobs, our own age's great inventor, with the Chorus's famous opening lines from Henry V—"O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention"—but the connection for him is more than a punning one. Elsewhere, he describes Jobs' early separation from Apple and his subsequent pursuits as early "acts" of the drama of his life; in the breathtaking third act, Jobs returns to Apple and proceeds to enact his own corporate victories at the Silicon-Valley equivalents of Harfleur and Agincourt. Exchanging Henry V's royal and military contexts for ones corporate and technological, Jobs wins the field.
Isaacson is simply a subtler example among the very many—authors, directors and actors, filmmakers, scholars and critics, public officials, and on and on—we might consider heirs of Shakespeare's invention. The playwright himself employed this metaphor when writing more formally as an Elizabethan lyric poet seeking aristocratic patronage, in dedicatory letter to his narrative poem Venus and Adonis: He hopes to honor the earl of Southampton, he writes, with some future "graver labour," unless the "first heir of my invention prove deformed." In other words, the offspring of his imagination is the poem in hand. If it prove disappointing, he will "never after ear so barren a land." The pun here involves "heir," "ear," and "air," the medium of poetic speech. (Recently I encountered a contemporary poet, Peter O'Leary, working with the same pun in the opening line of "The Geophagy of the Imagination"—"Love the craft ear is heir to.") Printed in 1593, Shakespeare's letter is a rare example of a piece of writing in Shakespeare's own voice, although the fawning conventions of such letters from writers to noblemen undermine the genuineness of voice that what we might expect.
Shakespeare's ongoing influence, and the cultural centrality suggested above, surely is a significant reason why the various conspiracy theories of the "Shakespeare Was Another" camp continue to find traction, and even thrive and expand. The very making, and full-throttle marketing, of the film Anonymous exemplifies the welcoming social and cultural precincts that these views increasingly enjoy. To discover a secret is satisfying, and to discover a radical secret of mistaken identity regarding our greatest author—well, that is not just satisfying, but a case of sublime ratiocination.
Although one of the older books here, James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare is worth including because it provides an updated, long overdue treatment on the phenomenon of "alternate author" theories regarding Shakespeare, which, as Shapiro points out, never really arose till the end of the eighteenth century. He finds in these theories the contours of the detective story, a genre emerging at the same historical moment, and with an eye toward today's cultural landscape, he argues that the internet is giving these "anti-Stratfordian" groups newly effective platforms, after many years of their work being excluded from traditional academic publishing. Shapiro is less concerned with showing once and for all that Shakespeare was, indeed, Shakespeare (though he quickly declares that this is his view), than in exploring a different question: "Why, after two centuries, did so many people start questioning whether Shakespeare wrote the plays?" He sets this interest within a broader study of the formation of Shakespeare's reputation as a singularly great author. Shapiro often approaches these goals by providing profiles of some of the colorful early theory-casters, such as Delia Bacon and J. T. Looney, along with details of forgeries and other rather industrious efforts to support this or that claimant to Shakespeare's writing.
One caveat he offers us readers is to beware of reading backward into the past with a contemporary lens. He believes the anti-Stratfordians do this because readers today generally have heightened expectations that we will find a good deal of the author in anything that she writes. But, he reminds us, those holding to the traditional view can be equally guilty of such misperceptions. Shapiro's book, then, is not in the withering vein of criticism, such as C. J. Sisson's 1934 essay, "The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare." It is a level-headed and profitable book, although to say as much, for many in the opposed camps, will be tantamount to relegating it among the allegedly unfair, defensive, self-interested studies produced by those in the Shakespeare guild. Against "disheartening" demands that first-hand experiences appear in Renaissance texts, even dramatic ones, Shapiro defends the vast imaginative capacities of a certain man from Stratford. Shakespeare was able to conceive of far more than he may have personally experienced, Shapiro argues, and therefore we should not reduce his powers of literary representation to some thin variety of realism or life-writing at once, somehow, both coded and confessional.
The release two years ago of the feature film Anonymous made Shapiro an obvious candidate among status-quo respondents. Other pertinent events included the exhibit "The Changing Face of William Shakespeare" at the Morgan Library, and, in a most witty reductio ad absurdum, Eric Idle's humor piece in The New Yorker: "Look at Shakespeare. Poor bloke. Wrote thirty-seven plays, none of them his." Shapiro treated with more concern the film's thesis that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, played by Rhys Ifans in the film, was the actual author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. In his New York Times piece, he pointed out the Anonymous' makers had conveniently devised a circular argument. Since there is no evidence of de Vere's authorship of Shakespeare's plays, there must have been an immediate conspiracy to destroy said evidence. No evidence, then, is a tell-tale sign of anti-Oxford malice. But this was not the film's greatest disservice: "in making the case for de Vere, the film turns great plays into propaganda." Other scholars and professors expressed consternation for such products as the "pictorial moviebook" Anonymous: Shakespeare Revealed, or even a carefully prepared and massively distributed lesson plan meant for use in history and literature classrooms. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells soon produced a free e-book to counter the film's claims.
Other critics seemed less worried with the film's potentially misleading influence, assuming that such a poor, muddled piece of cinema will have negligible influence. "You can't keep the bastards straight in Anonymous," wrote David Denby, irritably referring to the thick brew of incest and secret-birth subplots that, somehow, takes a wonderfully intriguing time in English court history and makes it alternately ludicrous and dull. Likewise, the era's bright-yet-enigmatic personalities (the earls of Southampton and Essex, for example) are nearly all forgettable in their smudgy characterizations here; they drift quickly into the London fog that might as well be credited as a co-star in the film. Denby summarized the film as a "farrago" and "preposterous fantasia," and lamented this heavily marketed revival of the Oxford theory of authorship, the "dreariest of snobberies."
As for me, well, what else can I bear to say about this mangy jade of a movie? Like any Shakespeare teacher, I was regularly asked last year what I thought of Anonymous. The question was usually asked with some tentativeness, as if the mere mentioning of the film might provoke a defensive scholar's tantrum. I then had to say I hadn't yet seen it, and this usually evoked a presuming smile that I was one of the high-minded, high-principled ones (read, "snooty") who was refusing to see the film. Far from it. Despite my reflexive sigh when I heard that Anonymous depended centrally on the Oxford theory, I loved the trailer's cinematic appeal—its vision of Renaissance London, with narrow lanes as if cloaked in conspiracy, was at least initially captivating. I was eager to see it. That said, interested viewers had what seemed like one week to see it, and then it abruptly disappeared from screens. Like critics, apparently, audiences found the film or its premise wanting.
Only last spring did it become available on DVD, and like critics and audiences both, I too found it neither provocative nor infuriating, or even pleasing in some solely aesthetic way, but mainly underwhelming and, finally, hard to finish. The script is too often sophomoric, and with de Vere's speeches especially, overly romanticized: "My poems are my soul," he says, and later, "Words, words will prevail." I mean, I am a poet, and yet I, as anyone else would, find this language gag-worthy. "We had the honor to live," someone later says, and yet these Elizabethan lives increasingly feel interminable. Watching the film became an extreme trial of the spirit.
Is anything here worth commending? Well, let me try. Appearances by legendary Shakespearean actors Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, among the more prominent alternate-authorship believers today, add a much-needed if far-too-brief spice. If they were stuck in a cesspool, they would still bring to it a little dramatic energy and brightness and presence. Rylance recites the "Muse of Fire" speech mentioned above. The film's narration of the Essex Rebellion is handled with a modicum of suspense and rewarding pacing. Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, the portrait here of William Shakespeare, the actual person but fraudulent author in the film, is as at least watchable for one historical aspect it offers. As this provincial fellow takes credit for plays such as Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Twelfth Night, we see him transformed from an awkward bumbler into a preening, squinty-eyed megalomaniac—an early-modern version of Ben Stiller's model character in Zoolander. Talentless but now the object of adoration, he comes off as a vapid rock star. Utterly ridiculous, or course, but watchable, and even relevant to estimations of Shakespeare—typically earlier ones preceding his rise to the status of "National Poet" and "World Author"—that emphasize his humble origins, pragmatic aesthetics, and English pluck. (One of my English friends likes to speak of him, affectionately but deflatingly, as "Willy Wobbledagger," as if Shakespeare, hailing from a Midlands market town, were at best a bit-part shepherd in a low pastoral comedy.) Finally, though, Anonymous' version of this biographical type is, like so much about the film, unlikeable. In truth, Shakespeare during the height of his working years and shortly after his death was highly regarded. Ben Jonson called him the "Soul of the Age," but more frequently fellow authors speak of him as "sweet" or "gentle" Will, in tones not of breathless fawning that we associate with today's celebrity culture, but with measured respect of one workman for another. Playwrights in Shakespeare's day were far closer to common laborers than to literary hotshots, although Shakespeare's own success contributed to a shift that would soon lead to more respectable professional laureates.
Anyone wishing to trace Shakespeare's contemporary reputation, the rise of his writerly status, and the multiple fluctuations and emphases since, can do no better than consult David Bevington's Shakespeare and Biography, a recent addition to the many titles in the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series. This compact study is not one more biography per se, but rather a consideration of how efforts at writing Shakespeare's life have evolved through the centuries. Bevington first reassures readers that we know far more about Shakespeare than about any of his fellow English Renaissance playwrights, thanks to the archival discoveries of indefatigable scholars through the centuries. Yet one constant problem facing biographers is Shakespeare's own sense of himself as an artist—his job was to entertain and edify audiences, and so he effaced himself as storyteller and dramatist. That is, he "wrote essentially nothing about himself." He accepted, Bevington argues, that his very nature was to be, in the words of sonnet 111, "subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." Bevington presents the factual information, provides an overview of biographical works on Shakespeare, and moves forward from there. A concluding "L'envoi" ponders those phases of Shakespeare's life that remain least known to scholars, and he weighs in on some of the different authorship theories and what he calls, with courteous restraint, the "Stratfordian reply." Bevington's final comment involves Shakespeare's purported weaknesses, which for him "strengthen the case for seeing the man in his writings." Numerous plays explore the "tortured psyches of husbands," which we might expect from one who historically seems to have faced marital strains. Our playwright, we might begin to believe, was mortal after all. If he did not straightforwardly record his life in his writings, maybe he wrote in part to come to terms with his own life's confusions and imperfections.
Another timely responder to Anonymous' claims was Stephen Marche, a Canadian novelist and, as he's proud to say, a former teacher of an "Intro to Shakespeare" course at the City College of New York. He wrote a lively piece for The New York Times Magazine in which he shrewdly connected the Oxfordian conspiracy theorists with the "Birthers" of our own day. He also took gleeful shots of all manner of anachronism committed in the Anonymous. The film claims that A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed in roughly 1560, which, as he explains, is long before secular comedy was even invented in Renaissance drama. (Marche's doctoral background is in this genre.) Offering a comparison, he says its' one thing to claim that someone other than Jay-Z wrote "The Blueprint," but another to say "this clandestine Jay-Z wrote 'The Blueprint' in 1961." Accessibility characterizes Marche's book How Shakespeare Changed Everything. Keeping constantly in mind the book's clearly introductory angle may instill some readerly generosity and ward off eye-rolling at sentences like this one: "There would be no Obama if there were not first Othello, just as there would be no Leonardo DiCaprio if there were not first Romeo." A bit of an odd yoking, no? And both causally problematic, or just silly. I also grew tired of reading how Shakespeare could never have imagined that four hundred years later etc. etc. etc. for the umpteenth time.
Yet for readers put off by what Marche calls a "vague impression of British stuffiness" surrounding Shakespeare, his book will be both enjoyable and informative, and many examples of Shakespearean influences upon how we think and live will invite reactions, even if Marche overstates some examples of reception. The Othello-Obama connection becomes more interesting than it first sounds. Marche focuses on the historic performances of Othello by the black actor Paul Robeson (whom the author rather grandiosely claims was saved by "Shakespeare's humanism"), and then argues that President Obama's 2008 election "retold Othello obliquely and redemptively"—a man overcomes a difficult past through personal merit, is an eloquent outsider, and so on. Marche also revels in Shakespeare's word-hoard, from blunt words such as "farmhouse" and "eyeball" to Latinate thoroughbreds such as "auspicious" and "consanguinity." Some words—"gnarled," "hobnob"—make Shakespeare the "special-effects master of everyday speech." Marche points out popular misreading or famous lines taken out of context. For example, "let's kill all the lawyers" sounds less admirably roguish when you realize that the base character Dick the Butcher says it. And then we're back to the Big Claims: Shakespeare created, through Romeo & Juliet, our modern understanding of adolescence, and he was poised to do so because he was a sex god in London's sex district (meaning the suburbs or "liberties" outside of London's proper city limits). Every author deserves some cheerleading now and again, even if misguided.
Another book, an exhibition catalogue of Shakespearean objects drawn from various libraries and centers at Yale University, is far too elegant to filed under "cheerleading," but is nevertheless also serves as an ideal introduction of a different sort to Shakespeare and his world. Shakespeare exists for us today, write David Kastan and Kathryn James, thanks to "various acts of memory," and the items featured in the exhibit "chart the process of remembering" that has made Shakespeare the world's "most highly valued author." One method of Shakespearean invention was the printing of his writing, which was not a given for someone working in the medium of drama. Once his writing was preserved, the author's stock rose fast, so that by the time of Nicholas Rowe's edition in the early 18th century, the frontispiece featured muses and angels crowning Shakespeare's portrait with the laurel. Preservation, though, was a complicated business. Restoration dramatists altered Shakespeare's plays with abandon, adding characters and passages, changing endings, though George Granville in The Jew of Venice (1701) already had some sense of a need to tread softly with a canonical predecessor: he assured readers he has placed quotation marks around his own added lines so that "nothing may be imputed to Shakespear that may seem unworthy of him."
The Shakespeare Almanac, compiled by Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Gregory Doran, is yet another book that will be extremely friendly for any Shakespearean neophyte, or anyone interested in beliefs and pastimes during the English Renaissance. As the title suggests, Doran provides entries for each day of the year, in which he intends to "chart the year through Shakespeare's words." His introduction meditates on the plays' seasons and the changing seasons in Stratford, from violets to swallows to cuckoos and yellow leaves, and from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Winter's Tale. More personally, Doran provides here a diary of his daily walks in Stratford, to and from work at the RSC. Passages included here are not just from Shakespeare's works but also from those of contemporaries (Thomas Nashe and Thomas Dekker) and those writing slightly later (Robert Burton, John Aubrey). Cultural touchstones are present, such as John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, as well as little-known authors such as Thomas Tusser or John Taylor the Water Poet (deservedly little known, some might say).
To provide a brief sampling: I learned that on my birthday "Francis Bacon died after trying to freeze a chicken," and the entry features several descriptions of Bacon. Shakespeare's birthday obligatorily focuses on St George's Day, with an extended discussion of the zodiac. Other days feature sheep shearing and the first professional performance of Shakespeare in what is now the United States (June 2, 1752). This would be a dreary book to read cover to cover, but that is not what it is for: read a passage each day, or flip through a few entries now and again. It'll reward the attention.
If you are wishing for something a little less melodramatic and hard-to-follow than Anonymous, yet still fundamentally in the same vein as the Oxfordian film, then check out one of the more handsome of Shakespeare-related offerings, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy. This volume culminates a career's worth of lawyer Richard Paul Roe's explorations of Shakespeare's or "Shakespeare's" references to and possibly firsthand experiences in Italy. It is hard not to suspect that Harper Perennial's high production values (oversized format, glossy pages, admittedly gorgeous full-color reproductions) are meant to offset the generally low bar for scholarly investigation and logical reasoning here, despite the book's pointed use of the word "forensic." The goal, finally, seems to be a determination of true authorship. Roe's daughter writes in a foreword (her father died in 2010) that whoever wrote Shakespeare's plays must have, "unlike William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, ventured out of England and onto the Continent." This exclusion of the Man from Stratford does not seem necessary, since biographers for centuries have suspected that the historical Shakespeare did indeed travel to Italy, or was a sailor, or a secretary for a barrister, or what have you. Yet this exclusion remains the primary claim, with the secondary claim being that the author of these plays "could only have seen Italy with his very own eyes."
This guide, then, provides one individual's passionate, idiosyncratic treatment of a familiar pairing—Shakespeare and Italy—as a way of appreciating better what Roe identifies here as the "Italian Plays," the surprising number of Shakespeare's plays set in Italy, both well-known in their locales (Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice) or less so (All's Well That Ends Well, The Winter's Tale), or one on the periphery of Italy (The Tempest, in which Milan is the place that haunts Prospero, and from which he was exiled in the play's unstaged—but described—past). At least one play is ostensibly set elsewhere, A Midsummer Night's Dream, with its Athenian setting, but Roe claims an actual if concealed Italian setting of Sabbionetta.
"There is a secret Italy hidden in the plays of Shakespeare," begins Roe, invoking the preferred authorship language of code to be broken, of hidden thing only now revealed. "It is exact; it is detailed; and it is brilliant." Roe asserts that scholars have never allowed for the fact that Stratfordian Shakespeare ever left England, and he is happy to take his own misprision at face value. Someone, then, "the real author of the Italian plays, whoever he was," has shown in these plays a "vast erudition" with regard to multiple cities and regions in Italy. Critics who have seen obvious mistakes, even geographical howlers, in Italy-related passages have until now gotten it all wrong. Closer reading, and the use of plays "as though they were books of instruction" while journeying in Italy, makes clear the eyewitness authority of these texts, and of this suddenly mysterious playwright. We might ask how a Renaissance play even remotely invites a reader to treat it as a book of instruction for travels, in Italy or elsewhere, but this use seems less strained in the world of Roe's study, which in truth is primarily a genre mash-up of travel guide and detective novel.
The Shakespeare Guide to Italy is admittedly a visual pleasure, chock full of old Italian maps and scores of the author's own sightseeing photos. Sycamore trees outside Verona's Porta Palio show that Benvolio's description in Romeo and Juliet was right, and, having found sycamores in Verona today, Roe is right, too. He says of a local church, San Francesco al Corso: "This is where Friar Laurence married Romeo and Juliet." He likewise identifies Prospero's island in The Tempest as Vulcano, just north of Sicily and due south of Naples, and Portia's Belmont in The Merchant of Venice with the Villa Foscari on the Brenta canal. Roe does do general readers a service in introducing canal travel common in Italy. Thus the Martesana canal makes the notion of sailing to Milan in Two Gentlemen of Verona less patently absurd.
Feeling occasional need to ground certainties about Shakespeare's Italian experiences in scholarly precedent, he makes much of Ernesto Grillo's Shakespeare and Italy (1949). I know this book, and it is perfectly charming, but it is no monograph upon which to build a book's arguments, no matter Grillo's credentials ("M.A., D.Lit, LL.D., D.C.L.") or the imposing author photo that serves as frontispiece, in which he resembles Carson the Butler on Downton Abbey. No, the ongoing scholarly undertaking regarding Shakespeare is not Roe's inheritance, but rather belongs to the enemy, those still holding their "orthodox beliefs" at the expense of the "actual words of the English playwright," whomever he may be. Roe is a priest of the eyewitness confirmation. For him, recording what he himself calls yet one more "pilgrimage," seeing makes it so.
Two other titles can be grouped with Roe's guide as slightly unusual and offering a visual feast. The first is The Tempest by Julie Taymor, being a coffee-table book with stills and production photos from her recent adaptation of Shakespeare's play, now available on DVD. It, too, like Anonymous, suffered a short screen run, and so this opulent book is rather a curiosity: the film was generally thought to be underwhelming, and so presumably only a select few enthusiasts will rush to obtain this memento. On the other hand, for those who know nothing about Taymor's project, it is far better to watch the film instead of reading about it here. Much more so than Anonymous, Taymor's version of The Tempest is worth seeing, and having seen it once, I find it worthy even of watching again sometime soon. Scholar Jonathan Bate in his opening essay identifies some of the most salient details about this late play: its dramatic unity, as its action seems to occur in real time; the connection between Shakespeare and his magician Prospero (played in the film by Helen Mirren as Prospera); its focus, through the lens of magic, on the process of art-making; and the contextual fact of the play's early performances in an indoor theater, Blackfriars. The play, explains Bate, is a great drama of both special effects and the close-up, and thus is ideal for film. He of course praises Taymor's production ("The closing credit roll of Julie Taymor's Tempest is perhaps the most beautiful such sequence of film ever made"), and places it in a long tradition of adaptation. Sometimes this effusion irks: Bate claims that Russell Brand as Trinculo is a "true successor to Robert Armin," a clown in Shakespeare's original company, whereas I found Brand's performance mostly distracting and out of place.
In her own reflective essay, Taymor discusses what for her were some of the benefits of casting Mirren as the "sorceress/scientist Prospera," who becomes a widow and is sent into exile after being accused of witchcraft. We lose the sense of political negligence that leads to Prospero's ouster in the original play, and the peculiar regret that haunts the male character, but it is true enough that the relationship between (now) mother and daughter (Miranda) feels fresh in the film. We view a well-known relationship with suddenly different eyes. Another interesting connection, which both Bate and Taymor point out, is Shakespeare's borrowing a passage from Ovid's Metamorphoses involving the witch Medea, who becomes a complex source figure for Prospera here. Taymor also defends a need to retain artifice in a film such as this, even when technology enables the effects to have a high level of believability. She instead strove for a "heightened expressionism." This is certainly so, and not just because of the film's exotic filming locations in Hawaii (think cracked, red earth, and black lava rock). One scene where the spirit Ariel menaces some of those shipwrecked on Prospera's island, full of CGI and electric guitar, felt like something out of a rock opera or video game. Even this extreme example fits with the ambitious, imaginative approach for which Taymor is known, done to great success with her earlier Shakespeare film Titus and her Broadway version of The Lion King, and less so lately with Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark. (This assumes that legal proceedings with former partners are, in general, "less successful.")
Scholar Michael Witmore and photographer Rosamond Purcell have collaborated on Landscapes of the Passing Strange, a project entrancing for both its visuals and the connections between them and Shakespearean texts. Purcell uses reflections in the mercury glass of an old apothecary jar to create otherworldly, imagination-saturated photographs. This method became for Purcell, as she narrates in a concluding essay, a "looking glass" by which to consider better Shakespeare's own "mirroring" art. She and Witmore found it natural to pair these images with Shakespeare's words because, as he writes in an opening essay, "Shakespeare thought in pictures." Take for example Romeo and Juliet's "Queen Mab" speech, or the Dali-like surrealism of Antony's comment on how the people's hearts "do discandy, melt their sweets / on blossoming Caesar." It is hard to do justice to Purcell's prints here, and so I urge readers to see for themselves, but even to read through this thin book and encounter the quotations is a pleasure. Some surprise, such as an early passage from Much Ado's Dogberry (of all characters!): "Thou wilt be condemned into everlasting redemption for this!" Across the page, we see a cartoonish mouth caught in the glass surface. Some scenes, such as Hermione's statue-like animation in The Winter's Tale, seem custom-written for Purcell's reality-bending artistry. Others of the 72 color images, such as "The Field of the Cloth of Gold," accompanied by a passage from Henry VIII, give occasion for a display of opulent, almost Byzantine-like color, while a gloomier, shadowy image evokes the violent woods of Titus Andronicus. Still others reimagine by now iconic scenes, such as Ophelia's death by drowning.
Three final authors will make a fitting end here, for each of them exemplifies how minds of different tenors and expertises can still find much that is worthy in this writer who is four hundred years old and endlessly analyzed. Stanley Wells may just be the Hugh Hefner of Shakespeare studies. By my count, he has written three books on sex in Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Sexuality (with Catherine M. S. Alexander), the gloriously titled Looking for Sex in Shakespeare (a university-press publicist's dream title, I should think), and now Shakespeare, Love, & Sex, recently out in paperback. The book is a reader's delight, learned without being tone-deaf, by which I mean clinical or humorless with regard to the subject. Wells sets out here to treat Shakespeare's views and dramatizations of human sexuality, and to situate these occasions within the social, literary, and intellectual contexts of the author's own day. He also sets himself against a long tradition of denying sexual frankness and fun in Shakespeare, from Alexander Pope (who assumed that off-color words or jokes in the plays were the result of the dirty actors' additions) to the Bowdlers' "Family Shakespeare" edition of the early 19th century. This expurgated version was frequently reprinted, and similar treatments continued to appear throughout the next century. Sexual language should not be ignored, Wells believes, but he also admits it is hard to know when we, or when original audiences, were hearing it. Hamlet's "Get thee to a nunnery" is widely thought to be an ironic command, signifying a brothel, but Wells sees no reason to go along with one editor who infers a menstrual rag from the word "dischclout" in Love's Labour's Lost. Much of the book is concerned with such issues of slang and connotation, and Wells frequently refers to different stagings of passages in question, to show readers how important performance is to these suggestive moments. He also compares word or phrase uses with contemporary authors such as John Donne.
Fortunately Wells is also mindful of bigger questions that interested Shakespeare regarding human sexuality—tensions between the spiritual and earthly, and questions about how much people, or characters, can be sexually at extremes, either promiscuous or severely suspicious of sex (one thinks of "precise" Angelo from Measure for Measure), and how it affects happiness or fulfillment. "When, Shakespeare often seems to be asking, does desire stop being lustful and start being love? What is the relationship between lust and love?" The extended, chapter-length reading of Romeo and Juliet, one of Shakespeare's most romantic plays and also, Wells claims, one of the bawdiest, is a highlight of this book. In the end, Wells feels that he has come to understand Shakespeare a little better both as writer and man. He knew that abuses of sexuality could lead to a "prostitution of all that is best in man," but also viewed sex as "an essential component of even the highest forms of human love."
A pair of books on Shakespeare has appeared in the past year from the prolific, polymathic Garry Wills. They differ in subject, but both are short and can be read in one sitting. Their length belies the learned attentiveness that makes each book so worthwhile. Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, resulted from Wills' delivering the Anthony Hecht lectures at Bard in 2009. The little book is a model for close reading, with its successive focuses on the types of speech that Julius Caesar's main characters use, and how Shakespeare diversely employs his rhetorical skills to create these different speech styles. A historian and lover of classics like Wills seems made to consider how Shakespeare handled his various classical sources. Let me treat at greater length now Wills' second book, for early in Verdi's Shakespeare: Men of the Theater, he makes clear his own view on the authorship controversies by emphasizing this book's subtitle: those claiming that Bacon or the Earl of Oxford created Shakespeare's plays fail to appreciate how much they reflect a creator whose life was in the center of, and, to degrees underappreciated today, was dependent on London's theater world.
Both Shakespeare and Verdi, then, produced work "on a heavy schedule," were sensitive to audience demands, and the even more pressing demands of the theaters that employed them. Both artists, Wills admits, were "creative volcanoes," but poured into their works their "hands-on life of the stage, not a remote life of the study." That last phrase, make no mistake, is a dig at those who need their Shakespeare to be in truth a reticent scholar or an aristocrat forced into secrecy. The process began with actors, with the play fitted to the performers. It is thus absurd, says Wills, to imagine the Earl of Oxford writing the large, challenging part of Cleopatra with no sense of a capable boy actor who could play the part. The real Shakespeare's changing characterizations reflect a "day-to-day observer of what the troupe could accomplish." Likewise, Wills favors a more contextual, market-driven explanation for why Shakespeare began to write romances such as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest late in his career. As opposed to critics such as Edward Dowden one hundred years ago who inferred from these plays a newfound "inner serenity" in the playwright, Wills argues simply that the romance had become a popular genre in the Jacobean theater—Shakespeare was merely being commercially shrewd.
Wills treats in turn Verdi's adaptations of Shakespeare in Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff. For each story, he surveys performance history from Shakespeare's own day to Verdi's era and beyond, considering those artists influencing Verdi (such as Rossini's Othello opera, for instance) and more modern versions by Edward Elgar and Vaughan Williams. The performance emphasis also shows in Wills' dedicating of this book to (and acknowledging expert advice from) Barbara Gaines, director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, who has directed both Shakespeare's play and Verdi's opera, the latter recently at the Chicago Lyric Opera.
Verdi's Shakespeare begins with a vivid impression of how the great maker of operas was first of all a most dedicated reader of Shakespeare. Not speaking English, he did his best to appreciate the original texts in a number of translated editions, received help from his English-speaking wife and scholar friends, and sought information on early English stagings of the plays. Poche parole! he kept insisting to his librettist when at work on Macbeth—"Fewer words!" He wished to be true to that most economical, compressed, and dramatically intense of Shakespeare's plays. Wills presents more thematic sections for each play, as with his attention to diabolism and psychological depth in Macbeth. (That former section, it should be said, borrows freely from Wills' earlier book Witches & Jesuits.) For example, he shows how Verdi's vision of the Macbeths includes a more pronounced role for Lady Macbeth (the "Lady" in Verdi's opera) than is the case in Shakespeare's play, where she is arguably the inciter of Macbeth's murderous behavior but not actively involved in or even aware of her husband's killings. Verdi encouraged his librettist, Arrigo Boito, to make the character a "dominating demon."
When the same librettist tried to encapsulate Falstaff and the ample, vital world of the Henry IV plays, he spoke of facing an "enormous Shakespearean pomegranate." Wills does the most service here when presenting in detail, with the kind of descriptive writing about music that is not easy, how one artist, Verdi, transformed the great work of a predecessor. Capturing the effects when one sips sweet wine, the libretto to Falstaff reads, E il trillo invade il mondo!, which Wills loosely translates, "THE UNIVERSE IS TRILLING." He carefully explains how one of Verdi's most famous compositions brings this passage to musical life, and then, backing away and considering the work of the chapter on Falstaff, he summarizes overall the opera's move from the pompous or deflating ("Weirdo!" Falstaff is called at one point) to the higher flights of laughter and forgiveness in its conclusion.
Finally, the Scottish poet Don Paterson's Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets is one of the fuller voiced, memorable critical engagements in recent years. Not only is it fitting to end with a work dedicated to Shakespeare's sometimes overlooked lyric poetry, but Paterson himself, by subtitling his collection of short responses to every sonnet "a new commentary," has in mind a certain category of criticism about the elusive Sonnets—a poem-by-poem commentary. The poet here intentionally eschews the rigorous ways of his scholarly predecessors (Stephen Booth's and Helen Vendler's editions most immediately come to mind), in which variable readings, multiple word choices, and syntactic untanglings mounted up, it was hoped, to something like an exhaustive analysis. Refreshingly, Paterson has less grand aims, and the lower pitch of his project makes you want to read over his shoulder all the more. The sonnets suddenly seem more inviting, and reading them less like a duty of gathering multiple interpretations. Paterson admits that a "hideously exposed bluff at a party" made him realize that he really didn't know these famed sonnets as well as he thought, and in fact, their very status as ideal love poems too often relieved readers of the trouble of reading them carefully. He was determined to read them in just this way, one by one.
From the opening pages Paterson's language about books and reading is colorful and surprising: he intended to read the Sonnets "in a tearing hurry," and he describes the The Passionate Pilgrim, the collection in which a few of Shakespeare's sonnets were first printed, as a "dog's dinner of an unauthorised miscellany." He's also quick to share his advice and opinions: don't read the whole collection in one sitting, he says, and, raising the question if Shakespeare were gay, he replies, "of course he was." As a poet, Paterson approaches the sonnets in unique ways, and often he sounds like a more honest reader by being less intensive, less interested in clinical understanding. Structure in poetry, he argues, "is most often an emergent phenomenon": "Poems are written by poets who don't quite know what they mean yet, and the poem is their way of discovering it." Immediately this freedom allows him to plow fresh ground, as when he hears in the notoriously enigmatic dedication to the Sonnets an allusion to John 3:16. Some of his paraphrases had me laughing out loud, as this one about sonnet 66: "Get me out of this godless hellhole! You're the only thing keeping me in this dump." About the famous sonnet 116 he says, "even Coleridge thought this one was special," and turning to the first of the Dark Lady sonnets (who, in an abbreviating habit of his, Paterson calls DL), he quips about the previous 126 poems, "Well, that was that. Now we have a whole new sequence." And just like that, Paterson has given us a whole new attitude with which to read these sonnets. Shakespeare's poems may be demanding; these three-page commentaries are hardly so, and that is their virtue.
Well, that is that. Clearly there's no shortage for moviegoers wishing to be freed from the bunkum that is Anonymous. And even this ample list of nearly a dozen titles barely catches the scholarly hummingbird in flight, so to speak. Many other titles will likewise reward, or are forthcoming and will soon. For wonderful, up-to-date overviews on a variety of topics, there's The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare, edited by the tireless Arthur Kinney, and Jonathan Bate's and Dora Thornton's, Shakespeare: Staging the World, the catalogue from last summer's British Museum exhibit in conjunction with the London 2012 Festival and Cultural Olympiad. It consists of objects representing London in 1612, by that time already a world city of sorts. For Shakespeare's faith and theological thought, see Shakespeare and Religion by Alison Shell or Arjan Plaisier's The Deep Wisdom of Shakespeare: Theological Reflections on Shakespeare Plays and two just-published books, Piero Boitani's The Gospel According to Shakespeare and Richard C. McCoy's Faith in Shakespeare (which argues that Shakespeare's faith was in theater itself). For pure intellectual stimulation and breadth of reading, check out Julia Reinhard Lupton's Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life. For something more global, see Stephen Landrigan's and Qais Akbar Omar's Shakespeare in Kabul or Margaret Latvin's Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost. And if you haven't had your fill of questions about Shakespeare's life and authorship, see Lois Potter's William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography, Graham Holderness' more novel Nine Lives of William Shakespeare, and Dympna Callaghan's Who Was Shakespeare? Since you've been reading this, another handful of titles have appeared. "The rest is silence," says Hamlet, but for the ever busy Shakespearean trade, there is never a silence, not even for a moment.
Brett Foster teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at Wheaton College. His book Shakespeare's Life, a volume in a "Backgrounds to Shakespeare" reference series, was published last year. He regularly speaks at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
Books discussed in this essay:
Anonymous Written by John Orloff Directed by Roland Emmerich
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? James Shapiro Simon & Schuster
Shakespeare and Biography David Bevington Oxford University Press (Oxford Shakespeare Topics)
How Shakespeare Changed Everything Stephen Marche HarperCollins
Remembering Shakespeare David Kastan and Kathryn James Yale University Press
The Shakespeare Almanac Gregory Doran Hutchinson/Random House
The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard's Unknown Travels Richard Paul Roe Harper Perennial
The Tempest Julie Taymor Abrams
Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare Rosamond Purcell and Michael Witmore W. W. Norton
Shakespeare, Sex, & Love Stanley Wells Oxford University Press
Verdi's Shakespeare: Men of the Theater Garry Wills Viking
Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets Don Paterson Faber
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