The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups

With so many excellent books about Shakespeare, where do you start...with Harold Bloom or Ron Rosenbaum? What book would you give to the teenager who is afraid of the Bard. I would select this book, not because it contains the best analysis of the plays, but because it imparts an infectious enthusiasm that is irrepressible. Over and over again, the author talks about how HE reacts to a performance or a line or a film of the Bard...and that is good. He starts with his overwhelming experience of seeing (Peter Brook's) Midsummer Night's Dream in Britain, an experience perhaps similar to the ecstasy of St. Theresa in brushing close to God. (I never saw that performance but I was impressed with Max Reinhardt's black and white film of the DREAM produced in 1935) Let's take an example of how he approaches Shakespeare. He rails against the recent attempts to soften Shylock and the anti-semitism of the Merchant of Venice. In response, I believe that Shylock is a deeply complex character and that the recent attempts such as Al Pacino's film performance are valid. The point is not the argument but that the author forces us to think about the issue. Again, that is good. Thus, I wholeheartedly recommend the volume to get excited about the meanings of the plays. Ron Rosenbaum deliberately avoids discussing the biography of Shakespeare and indeed argues that much of the biographical work is counterproductive. To him what matters are Shakespeare's words, not Shakespeare's bed partners. The argument against the biographies is a point well taken. To quote the author, we don't know much about Homer yet we can still read and appreciate his Illiad and Odyssey just the same. Indeed.

If you want to buy the book. I suggest you do. It's entertaining yet delves into the minuetae of Shakespearian debate. I knew a lot of theories and arguments before picking up this book, but the author provocatively introduced me to many more. Learning about some these 'great' debates; discovering new-to-me depths in Shakespeare and having it conveyed by a passionate and opinionated author were refreshing. As for the incomplete sentences: my god, that's the way of the world now. Do you read newspapers? How can you even listen to a news broadcast, teenager, or read any book published after 1951 if such fragmented linguistics are so bothersome? It didn't bother me, and yes, I did notice, but it fit the tone and story telling structure. There are poorer writers than this one (ever try to wade through the ungrammatical stylings of Thomas L. Friedman? yikes!)and the subject is tantalizing from beginning to end.

Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars is a delightful, engaging, very readable and sensible way to access the last 20 years or so of Shakespeare scholarship and theater. For those who care about Shakespeare, but haven't time to digest all the arcane literature of the academics, it's a spicy Cliff Notes to dozens of scholars and their thousands of pages. For those who haven't the time or money to follow Shakespearean theatre, it's a compendium of the trends in productions, the views of directors, the art of the actors. For those who've shunned or shortchanged the popular biographies or synoptic interpretations, it places the host of these in the larger context of the scholarship and the even larger context of the cultural clash of the western canon vs. political correctness. I am in my mid-50s, was educated in the liberal arts tradition in the early 70s and have a daughter now in college, who like me, likes Shakespeare. I have frequently conversed (or tried to converse) with her about Shakespeare, indeed about what is passing for a higher education in the arts these days. I say try as I gather my education is now considered obsolete and we fumble toward dialogue through the fog that separates post-modernism from what came before. Hence I enjoyed most his chapter on Bloom, whose championship of Fallstaff is something of a proxy for the western liberal tradition (and me), in which at least one post-modern and feminist scholar tips her hat to him--or at least takes some well aimed shots at the sterility of her own camp. To quote, " Our institutionalist debunking of the bourgeois subject has calcified us into an elite corps of yuppie guerilla academics." Amen, say I. If Bloom is over the top in contending Shakespeare invented the human, too many post modernists are completely off the radar screen of the literate public. "The world doesn't give a fig for our critiques of humanist ideology." Those lines made the book more than worth my while. At fifty-five, of course, I'm getting a little Fallstaffian myself, I like to think in its positive and redemptive ways. In any case read Rosenbaum as perhaps he may triangulate for you, as he did for me, some new course for the uses of Shakespeare, post post-modernist and possibly even a little bourgeois and humanist. After all, if everything old and white and male is suspect and irrelevant, what's the point of keeping Shakespeare on the program at all?

This book is a must have for anyone who is interested in Shakespeare or in literature, or for anyone who enjoys seeing a person talk about an overriding passion. The author's enthusiasm for reading Shakespeare's works is apparent in every line of this marvelous book, and holds a seductive power of its own. Think you'd be bored to tears by scholars' debates over whether King Lear did or didn't say two lines at the end of the play in Shakespeare's original draft? Think again - Ron Rosenbaum makes this and so many other topics into a book I literally could not tear myself away from. His fascinating exploration of Shakespearean textual scholarship and the joys that come from a close reading of the text opened up a whole new world for me. As soon as I finished this book, I picked up Shakespeare's Sonnets, and was amazed at how much I hadn't noticed before. If Ron Rosenbaum ever reads this review, let me say thank you from the bottom of my heart for this wonderful book and for rekindling my interest in a long-standing but recently dormant love of my own. This book was a transformative experience for me.