Brief Guide to a Long Wonder
“I always take Shakespeare in my suitcase.” Faulkner[i]
I. Is Shakespeare worth studying? When one notes how many of his plays are performed around the world each year, how many Shakespeare festivals there are, in how many green parks Shakespeare is free, notes how many local companies perform the plays and how many amateurs read him aloud together, and then reflects that these performances must please, it seems superfluous to ask: is Shakespeare worth studying. Moreover, there is so much study of Shakespeare; so many courses in colleges, so many articles in journals, so many dissertations in universities, so many books in libraries, so many new ones each year, and even a library solely devoted to Shakespeare that stands close by our Supreme Court, our Congress, and our White House, like a fourth branch of free government. And this august respect for Shakespeare is even surpassed by the reverence that has razed up Shakespeare’s own Globe theatre, four hundred years after it was torn down by irreverent fanatical Christians.
Nevertheless, it is still worth asking whether Shakespeare is worth studying. After all, perhaps his cold contemners, the French; his great critic, Shaw; and his great detractor, Tolstoy, are right in their comprehensive opposition; maybe Shakespeare is a self-deluding hoax, a madness so widely shared it seems sanity itself, and yet as evidently illusory to the sane as a cardboard sword. Worse, maybe the original moralists, the London mayors and Anglican bishops who wanted to shut down all the theatres, sure that actors came from the devil and plays provoked God to send the Plague to close them, and their Puritan children who did tear all of them down, maybe they were right? Maybe Shakespeare does bring in new gods and corrupt the youth, like Socrates; maybe he, like Christ, does lend himself to be worshipped as a God who will restore the nation; and so if he does undermine our civilization, surely he merits present death. However, maybe the enraged professors who regard Shakespeare as a teacher of the evils about race, gender and class, are right; maybe he should be banned not for undermining but for supporting Western Civilization. If ideas, ones of beauty, of goodness, and of truth, just cover oppression and injustice, why look up to their most splendid and amiable perpetrator; and if all there is but power, if “the world as it is, . . . it better were not, and with regard to the world as it should be, . . . it does not and cannot exist”[1] then why study Shakespeare, except to extinguish the joy the ignorant take in him.
Yet, if as a recent author (Harold Bloom) has claimed, Shakespeare invented what it is to be human, then maybe Shakespeare invented us, and if we wish to change ourselves, we need to think back, back through Shakespeare, removing his invention of ourselves, revealing whatever preceded it, or if we feel something better lies in our future, still we’d have to study Shakespeare who invented us, to root him out of ourselves, to get beyond Shakespeare to something else. Can one get beyond Shakespeare or back before Shakespeare? The parties of the future (be they the totalitarian Marxists or the individualist Nietzscheans) and the parties of the past (be they partisans of the Ancients or the Christians), unless they assume he is of their party, would all like to put Shakespeare aside, but can they? As Emerson said “Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably.” In other words, you cannot think differently from Shakespeare.
And, say this is so, as I do, but not because Shakespeare invented what it is to be human, but because he discovered what it is to be human, for what it is to be human is a matter of nature, and not art (or creativity, unless God’s); then of course we cannot get behind Shakespeare, shouldn’t want to, for he didn’t invent something, which could be changed, replaced with another invention; for what is discovered is firm; it just has to be lived with, known, better understood, and lived up to. This is not to say that others before Shakespeare discovered nothing; human nature was not unknown before Shakespeare; and it is not to say that still others have discovered things since Shakespeare. It might only be that his discoveries are so beautiful, so good, so wonderful, and so immense, that to know ourselves, we need to know him, and thus to study Shakespeare is to study yourself, to come to know yourself.[ii] In knowing himself, a wise man knows all others, and meeting one such man in a lifetime, would add to your self-knowledge. Certainly many a person witnessing a play has said “yes, that’s true of me” (as usurping, murdering King Claudius says of himself seeing a play that represents his crime, providing him a mirror to look himself full in the face, which does provoke him to repentance, and to prayer, though not to reformation and confession). And many a young person hearing Romeo and Juliet speak, has said yes that’s the way I feel, or if younger “that’s what I’d like to feel,” and then sought some partner to it. (And many a parent, remembering yes that’s the way we felt, either worries all the more for them, or moderates their anxiety about their children with a touch of self-knowing memory.) Or witnessed Henry V leading a nation and said to themselves, oh please, let me find some good cause to which I can dedicate all the services of my soul and lead others to it. If so, Shakespeare is to be reckoned with. And met with, something indispensable, in every person’s life. “Not to know Hamlet by middle age is like having lived all one’s days in a coal mine,” said Berlioz.
II. “Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe,” say Heminges and Condell in their preface to the First Folio, “To the great Variety of Readers,” and you should. It is almost always better to read another Shakespeare play, before reading criticism of the one you just read, until you have read them all, and even then usually better to reread them before consulting the critics. One order in which to read them is of course the order in the First Folio, but if you have only a term say, then I recommend the “Henriad” (the four continuous Histories: Richard II, 1 Henry IV; 2 Henry IV; and Henry V); the four great tragedies: Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and Othello; and among the Comedies: As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing; Winter’s Tale and Tempest. Colleges used to have year-long courses in Shakespeare, required for English majors, which reflected the correct judgment of his excellence. Of the hundred best works you could ever read in English, a score and more are by Shakespeare, and that’s counting Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as “in English” because their prose can be well translated (while a densely lyrical author as Rilke can never be so well brought into English. However, considering how Shakespeare is now taught, maybe it is merciful that he is not required. Merciful to him, but not to you.
Very well what text should you choose? Shakespeare has the largest vocabulary of any great author, 28,000 active by one count, which would be more than half of all words in Elizabethan English. Not all would have been familiar to his audience, but he was aware of that and brought them along with his vivacity. He will bring you along too, but you do need the aid of good notes. As a rule, I suggest keep reading, until you must look to the note for the meaning, but on later reading, go slower and pay attention to more notes.
For the works of Shakespeare, the best one volume editions is the Riverside (gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans) though the older Pelican (gen. ed. Alfred Harbage), which I began with, is lighter in your backpack. The newer Oxford (gen. ed. Stanley Wells et al), upon which the Norton is built, is flawed by insisting the plays are meant only for the theatre, and not reading, for striving for novelty in editing, and for finding more imperfection, division, and even disunity in the texts than there is. For these flaws there is some evidence but it is best considered after one has read, and reread all the works in a handier edition.
For the student the best annotations and explanations I have found are in Four Tragedies ed. David Bevington and David Scott Kastan (Bantam). Keep your eye out, as I do, for any other handy volumes edited by these two, or the senior one, David Bevington, whose one volume Shakespeare I might prefer if I knew it better. For full, subtle and intelligent summaries of the plays, seek out Helene Adeline Guerber; here the Histories:
https://archive.org/stream/storiesshakespe02shakgoog#page/n304/mode/2up
Of course, any one volume Shakespeare is a heavy fardel to bear. For individual plays that fit in your pocket, that you can read in bed, or take out to quote aright to a friend, I recommend the New Pelicans, also good for having amble margins for comments, in pencil unless you do not want in 20 years to look back and realize how mostly foolish you were when young. Yes, I do recommend writing in books. Adding your thoughts makes the book your own, and it tends to make you the book’s, elevating you as it delights you, but writing separate comments, what I call journals, and call for, is yet better. If you get the habit of preparing for all classes, whatever the subject, by writing such “journals,” so that if teacher asks you, “Please take us into the heart of this,” and you can do it, whether with fine comments or fine questions, you will have become a better student, whatever you study, and able to get more out of any course than it offers, especially if it just offers entertainment, and expect nothing more than chatter, and assigns no writing.
Worth looking at, and ever authoritative is the Norton Facsimile Edition of the First Folio (ed. Charlton Hinman); it puts in your hands a copy of something not to be bought —after I spoke at the Elizabethan Club at Yale I held in my hands an original one— and yet truly above all price, as constitutive of our civilization as the Parthenon, the Forum, Chartres, or Parliament, and as great a gift to us humans as the Socratic dialogues. Without the First Folio half of all the plays would not reach us. (Quartos of only half the plays, some good texts, some bad, were published during Shakespeare’s lifetime.) The First Folio is also authoritative, for the editors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, being Shakespeare’s fellow actors and share-holders in their acting company, really did know him, his ways, and his preferences. For twenty years, they worked together, acted on stage together, deliberated and made decisions together about all manner of things dramatic. And they raised each other’s children, left each other gifts in their will, and had such amity, they were a wonder to other companies that broke up. We wish Shakespeare himself had published all his plays, but in lieu of the master, it is reasonable to trust his best friends, trust and re-trust them, and trust them far more than later editors, especially any who feel superior to Shakespeare. Even the punctuation is worthy initial trust, for it was put down for the actors.[iii] Thus Patrick Tucker in Secrets of Acting Shakespeare: the Original Approach (London: Routledge, 2002) maintains that every thing an actor needs to know is taught by Shakespeare in the First Folio texts of his plays.[iv] To recall or find things in Shakespeare, the Harvard Concordance ed. Marvin Spivack (1973) is reliable and complete, but I just checked http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/ and with it quickly found the word “romage,” in Shakespeare only once, that I would most like to revive. Also, for finding words: https://shakespeareswords.com/
There must be many more Shakespeare sites, with the text, the First Folio, and other useful things.
III. In what order should one read Shakespeare? You need not read him in the order of his “career.” That order is importantly conjectural. While we often know the date of a first performance or quarto publication, we don’t know when Shakespeare first conceived the play, let alone what he would say if we could ask him: “When did you get the idea for that one? And when would you say you completed it?” Like any author, he might say, “last winter” and then with a smile “all my life.” Decisive in guiding us readers is that Shakespeare no where says that such an order of composition has any instructive authority. The friends who knew him well, Heminge and Condell do not order the plays according the sequel of his career, but into the three genres (or families): Comedies, Histories; and Tragedies, and within the Histories, by the times represented. It is only after the massive self-interest of Rousseau burst upon the West, in his Confessions, which encouraged a hundred like endeavors (such as Wordsworth’s Prelude), that it became “self-evident” that one should study Shakespeare’s works in the presumed order of his making them.
How did Shakespeare think of his works, his plays and his poems? And how would he have us think of them? Since he left us no instruction, as Nietzsche does in his autobiographical Ecce Homo (especially the part entitled “Why I Write Such Good Books”) and as Kierkegaard does in his Point of View of My Work as an Author, we can only infer his counsel from those works themselves, from the poems, where they speak of art, and from the plays not only where someone speaks of his art, such as Hamlet’s instructions to the visiting players he wants to perform something in front of rotten Claudius (instructions that would fault the Hamlet play he’s in), but above all from where some characters put on plays within these plays, such as Bottom the Weaver and his bumbling fellows do in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or where someone practices some other part of Shakespeare’s art, like Hamlet acting mad, or the friends of Beatrice and Benedick whispering fictions to get them to fall in love with each other, or most revealing: where a character acts like a playwright and director, as Iago does, putting on a “handkerchief” play to get a loving husband (Othello) to kill his loving wife (Desdemona), or where director Prospero in the Tempest commands the very winds to put a crew of voyagers through sufferings that may change them, or not. What all these characters and others know about playing, acting, and making plays, must be part of what Shakespeare knows. Not that there may not be more as well, and more in these works, even than Shakespeare himself knows, for the mark of a really successful “creation” is its independence from its creator, such that the creature might know things the creator might learn from, or that some other person on Shakespeare’s level might discern and he, on the Blessed Isles hearing it, might say “That’s interesting. Let’s talk some more.” What then of the “critics” as we call discerning readers these days.
You should read and reread Shakespeare, but in the course of doing so, you might consider what others have thought of their experience. Again, look only for those who look up the Shakespeare. Even Goethe did. Those who don’t look up measure themselves not him, and if they carp, they degrade themselves, not him.[v] Even the great such as Tolstoy who couldn’t abide Shakespeare and said so, thereby showed a flaw, in his case a painful blindness, a self-blinding almost, for as Orwell divined, he hated to see that getting rid of all property did not make King Lear happy. And pay no attention to, nay scorn all those who are sure someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare; it is very telling that they never have anything interesting to say about the works. The footprints outside their caves all face in.
A pervasive form of such limitation by identification, more prevalent in the past, was to say Shakespeare was an “Elizabethan” and cannot have thought anything other than the average Elizabethan in his audience thought. (Which in practice meant you, the student, would have to read pages and pages of what a modern historian said the Elizabethans all thought.) No, such a mind as Shakespeare is not limited by whom he first wrote for. As soon say that God is no smarter than the average sinner in the Scriptures, or sinner reading the Scriptures, including the fool who says in his heart there is no God. No, while communicating with the audience at the Globe, Shakespeare elevated them, and though he does communicate with readers, in quartos then, and now in the First Folio, it would be presumptuous to think very many of us have reached his level. Just for a moment, compare what play you’d be capable of writing with the least he did write. It’s like comparing you working, planning, planting, weeding your little garden, comparing that with God who, from of old and the foundation of the World, regularly coordinates all nature, with all its mighty, its middling, and its tiny things going to provide once again so grand a thing as Spring!
A subtler form of mistaking Shakespeare, and thus not learning from his works, is the assurance that he was an X, X being someone one is very much in favor of, a better version of oneself perhaps, be one an atheist, a Christian, a skeptic, or almost any other kind of person one either is, yearns to be, or needs desperately to find. Yet Shakespeare is so good at being all the 900 or so characters in his plays, so good at letting them speak just as they must, and expressing their opinions so vividly, so catchingly, so memorably, that if you come to Shakespeare sure of something, you are sure to come away sure he is as sure as you are sure about it. These people seldom notice that going to and coming away from Shakespeare are thousands of souls driven by or seeking sureties just as sure as theirs, and just as differing from all others as can be, and with just as much evidence as they have, and yet all, including themselves, with nothing like enough evidence to convince a genuine student, for they pay no attention to what contradicts their desire. Such persons of surety are not students at all.
Among some Christians a currently attractive conjecture would have Shakespeare’s ‘lost years’ spent in a Catholic lord’s estate in Lancashire and somehow fulfilling the mission of one of his grammar school teachers (later caught, tortured, and killed for advancing the old faith); yet even if the dots were filled in to satisfy a judicious neutral, there would still remain the task of imagining the conversation, in the afterlife, of Edmund Campion and his former student, Shakespeare, but imagining that conversation would have to be based on the enduring task, the task and the pleasure, of reading Shakespeare’s works.
There be few readers who seek Shakespeare to discover things, to take them to heart, and to wonder at them. Among Christians who do so, I count Robert G. Hunter, for his Comedy of Forgiveness and his The Mystery of God’s Judgments (pity that the critics who found the first comforting were disturbed not instructed by the second and more’s the pity if Hunter froze because he listened to them). Among a-theists, I count Allan Bloom, but more for his late Love and Friendship than his Shakespeare’s Politics (though his preface remains golden). And among the skeptics, I count George Santayana (esp. for his “The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare”). All in some measure are, in studying Shakespeare, seeking something they did not already know.
For a biography that sticks to the known record and life experience of Shakespeare, with a vast and solid knowledge of the times, aptly adduced without ostentation (yet alas without footnotes), read Marchette Chute’s Shakespeare of London (1949). You’ll learn features of Elizabethan life, the fundamentals of the Elizabethan stage, how his company performed, forty plays a season, fifteen new, the Office of the Revels, etc. and a hundred ancillary things, as Shakespeare knew them, for Miss Chute limits herself only to records from his time, nothing of the layers and layers of opinion from later biographers, and she conjectures prudently only on their basis. It would take you thousands of hours, with hundreds and hundreds of books, available only in a few big libraries to learn on your own what she provides. Being based on her Shakespeare of London, her Introduction to Shakespeare is the best for youngsters; both her novel for youngsters, A Wonderful Winter and also Susan Cooper’s risks presenting Shakespeare spending the day with a boy actor and succeeds; and Chute’s Stories from Shakespeare is the best retelling, better than the celebrated Lambs’ and even Nesbit’s. As John Jay Chapman said, “The whole future of civilization depends on what is read to children before they can read to themselves.” And with only a little exaggeration, he added, “If one could find two boys of twelve who were exactly alike, and if one of them should begin to read Shakespeare with interest, he would become more intelligent than the other lad in fifteen minutes.”[vi]
Thick with the relishing details of the life surrounding Shakespeare, selected with a sure hand, and written as if an Elizabethan Pepys kept a diary week by week during Shakespeare’s active years, are The Elizabethan and Jacobean Journals: Being a Record of Those Things Most Talked of in the Years 1591-1603, 4 vols., ed. by G. B. Harrison. All the actual documents relating to Shakespeare, his life and his activity, in the theatre, at law, and back in Stratford, many in picture and near facsimile, are gathered in Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Clarendon: Oxford, 1975). Responding to a reviewer who observed, but I can’t hold it in my hand, Schoenbaum supplied A Compact Documentary Life (OUP, 1987). For a faithfully reconstructed Globe Theatre, you must go to London, head south over London Bridge, turn right, but there is, for the less ambulatory, a video on their website. http://www.shakespearesglobe.org/abouttheglobe/virtualtour/
IV. Should one primarily read, or hear, or see Shakespeare? The Elizabethans spoke primarily of hearing a play. And yet it is interesting that Heminge and Condell, in their preface to the First Folio, only speak of reading the plays: “Reade and reade him.” Nowhere do they say playing Shakespeare, for example preserving the possibility of doing so (should the Puritans tear down all the playhouses, as they did a score of years after the publication of the First Folio in 1623), is one of their purposes in publishing this big book.
I favor reading the plays aloud, taking parts, with friends, or with students, and then discussing them, and later writing about them. Reading aloud with friends, one makes mistakes, but also learns a lot, and enjoys a lot. One Sunday afternoon you can read half a play and discuss it, and finish the next week. To be sure, beholding a performance, one can suddenly grasp a line, recognize there is a joke, and come to appreciate some feature of character because of an actor’s excellence.[vii] Seeing Shakespeare, especially in a movie, seems to me less rewarding, for movies emphasize spectacle more than Shakespeare did; he called upon your mind’s eye not your eyes; and at least these days in both movies and on stage, the dress, and sometimes the un-dress, may be distracting; there will be close-ups, there will be skin, as not at his Globe. Worse, the metaphoric delicacy of Shakespeare’s words will be ruined by crude gestures. Bad images linger in the mind. Better they never got there.[viii]
And in this the era of the director —there was none in Shakespeare time— there will be large cuts made, large additions imposed, and large gimmicks advanced for admiration. These egoistic impositions will be called creative, for the director’s creed is: “Ask not what I can do for Shakespeare, I only ask what Shakespeare can do for me.” Not for him, the subordination of self to greatness. “Let us, ciphers to this great accompt, / On your imaginary forces work.” That these wanton tamperings are worked by those who claim ‘Shakespeare really only lives in the theatre’ would, if classical music were treated the same way, raise howls from Vienna to Tokyo and back (as Jacques Barzun said). Really there should be howls these days, at least in London and New York and in many a Shakespeare Festival town. In general, the more expensive the ticket, the less respect for Shakespeare. Oft have I found local players, without the money for fancy lighting, lumber for sets, and paint for scenery, but with more love, more pleasing. Such in the summers I spend in Vermont have been the Hubbard Hall Players (Cambridge NY), Adirondack Shakespeare (Schroon Lake), and Shakespeare on Mainstreet (Poultney VT).[ix] Faithful can be best. Shakespeare’s company tried it, and succeeded, and by the way, with no lighting, scant scenery, and no rehearsing, except the dances and fights, and with no directors. Thank God, Heminge, and Condell for the First Folio.
“While Shakespeare remains, Literature is firm,” says Emily Dickinson.
V. It is natural, having read Shakespeare, seen some, and thought about it, to want to share one’s experience and its fruits with others, and receive theirs in return. One way would be to study literature. Though natural, this desire is imperfect if it does not expand to the lofty concerns of the soul. Instances without maxims are deaf (while maxims without instances are blind). Thus in practice, you should major in both literature and philosophy. Unfortunately, the prospects for either have narrowed recently. In philosophy, the dominance of “analytic philosophy” means the great concerns of the great philosophers are, if treated at all, regarded with a squinting eye. When they say, “I do philosophy” it would be unintelligible to Socrates: “Do love of wisdom, do wisdom, what could that mean?” For Socrates, “I’m a philosopher” was not an expression of academic pride, but a confession of profound ignorance and sleepless desire. It is, however, much worse in literature.
Since about forty years ago, if on the campuses of the Universities and Colleges of the West, you wanted to find the craziest thing, you would be well advised to go to the English Department. It is no longer natural for some one who grew up loving literature and especially Shakespeare to major in English. That he is no longer required anyway, does save one from the way he is now taught, as an occasion for you to show you share the rage of the teacher about “race, class, and gender,” show it in some ingenious way, and in a neglected corner.[x] If you were to speak, as Edgar at the end of Lear advises: speak what you feel, not what you ought to say, you would not be rewarded with your highly inflated grade.[xi] Thus, in general the older the book or article the better; if it is by someone formed before 1968 it is likely to be better than after. When I studied at Yale, it had reason to consider itself the greatest English Department in the world; for how good it sometimes was, read Al Kernan’s memoir In Plato’s Cave (Yale, 2000), but in the twinkling of an appointment, of Paul de Man (who hid both one abandoned family and one youthful career supporting the Nazis occupying his country) to change; “theory,” as in “critical theory,” is far from what the Greeks meant by theoria, but to understand that and stand against it, one would have had to have been philosophic. The older professors at Yale, Mack, Whimsatt, Brooks, and Kernan coming up did not have enough study of the great philosophers to recognize that “theory” was a raging disorder of soul quite opposite to the love of wisdom and of life that is in Shakespeare and in life. However, my advice “trust nothing after 1968” is no law, or even rule, just a caution. Since English professors stopped reading literature with pleasure, there have been some Shakespeareans, e.g. Nuttall, Bate, Saccio, Hawkins, Bevington, who remained sane and delighted. At all times, there have been few professors of Shakespeare who were also students of Shakespeare. Lucky if you find one.
Two guides on elementary, but essential matters are Alfred Harbage’s William Shakespeare: A Reader’s Guide (Noonday, 1963) and William G. Leary’s Shakespeare Plain (McGraw-Hill, 1977), though it is a bit plain. Good on how and why to read the verse aloud is Paul Edmundson’s guide, Shakespeare (Profile, 2015). For how to pronounce words as Shakespeare did, consult The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation by David Crystal (with link to a website to hear it all). For how Shakespeare and his audience lived, read Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England; addressing you as if you will soon visit that England livens everything immensely; you will learn what not to say about Queen Elizabeth, how much archery you, now a citizen, must practice each week, and what to do if you are accused of witchcraft. Similiarly imaginative but slicing things differently to emphasize work is How To Be A Tudor: A Dawn to Dusk Guide to Tudor Life (2015) by Ruth Goodman, who seems to have practiced all the common trades, done all the chores, and lived all the common lives of that time. And exceedingly full, yet lively, is Lu Emily Pearson’s Elizabethans at Home (1957).
For short vivacious appreciations of each of the works, read Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare (Doubleday, 1939), which arose from his teaching. He says just enough to provoke but not overwhelm one. Read Van Doren along with your first reading of a work. As G. M. Hopkins wrote to his brother, “Shakespeare and all great drama have their maximum effect on stage but … must be studied at home before or after or both.” For a set of longer essays, to be read after you’ve read a work several times and come to your own first view of it (and, at best, written out your view), you might turn to the unjustly neglected Shakespeare: Life, Art, and Character, 2 vols. by Henry Hudson (1872: Haskell House, 1970). W. H. Auden’s course, Lectures on Shakespeare ed. Arthur Kirsch (Princeton, 2000), and essays in The Dyer’s Hand (Random 1962) give you the thoughts of the most intelligent English poet since Coleridge (on the most intelligent ever). Among recent readers, treading a narrow way like Durer’s Knight amidst theory monsters, deconstructive devils, new historicists harridans, but keeping cheerful, A. D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker (Yale, 2008) stands out, as do Peter Saccio’s two courses for the Teaching Company, and Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, somewhat hobbled by his hobby-horses, but also spurred by his lancing the three horsemen of the theory apocalypse, Race, Class, and Gender.
On particular plays the Signet and Norton Critical editions include good essays; however, the new editions of these add the now-obligatory feminist, materialist, etc. special pleadings, which are blessedly absent from the older Twentieth Century Views collections, on the genres, and on individual works, and competing ones from other publishers. On the tragedies, C. S. Lewis on Hamlet is indispensable, because if you cannot take the Ghost seriously, you cannot take Hamlet, who does, seriously; on Lear, Stanley Cavell’s “Avoidance of Love,” and in it on the “love test” Sigurd Burckhardt in his Shakespearean Meanings and Harry Jaffa’s “The Limits of Politics” in Shakespeare’s Politics, seem to me indispensible; on the Histories, Robert Ornstein’s Kingdom for a Stage seems to me the best comprehensive book, but don’t miss older Henry Hudson on the Histories. On the Comedies exemplary are Martin Yaffe’s Shylock and the Jewish Question (Johns Hopkins, 1997), Barbara Tovey on the Tempest in the journal Interpretation, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_11-3.pdf Robert G. Hunter’s Comedy of Forgiveness, Northrup Frye’s “Argument of Comedy,” and maybe C. L. Barber’s Festive Comedy. However, thinking of individual works, many essays come to mind.
The best anthology is Frank Kermode’s Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism (Avon Books, 1965). And for Continental authors, translated, you must get Oswald le Winter’s Shakespeare in Europe (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1963). This last has Goethe’s “Shakespeare and No End” and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Shakespeare’s Kings and Noblemen,” which I consider the two best essays on Shakespeare ever. Goethe begins: “The highest achievement possible to a man is the full consciousness of his own sentiments and thoughts,” but he does not stop there, he continues with a secret, “for self-understanding gives him the means of knowing intimately the hearts of others.” And to show how thoroughly noble some Shakespeare’s men and women can be, to their finger tips, Hofmannsthal points to Lear’s polite address to mad Edgar; to Hermione’s firm, yet loving defense against her distraught husband’s charges; to Brutus taking the lute from the now sleeping Lucius, lest it break and, just as much, lest the boy wake; to Antony sending his treasure after revolted Enobarbus, and to Duncan remarking that swifts nesting in his host Macbeth’s castle must mean the air is hospitable.
The third greatest essay is by the “great agnostic” Robert G. Ingersol, and entitled, “Shakespeare”: https://archive.org/stream/shakespearelectu00ingerich#page/36/mode/2up It is sentence after sentence of lyrical insight.
I could name many more good books and articles, as I do in the footnotes to my writings, but I have already named enough for a full start. Actually, the two anthologies I just named are so stuffed with fine things, that while taking a semester Shakespeare course, or even a year’s, reading all the selections in these in addition to Van Doren and Hudson, would be too much. As a treat in your future, when you have read and reread all of Shakespeare several times, do explore an anthology of the works inspired by Shakespeare: After Shakespeare: Writing Inspired by the World’s Greatest Author, ed. John Gross (Oxford, 2002). Shakespeare is not only a wonder, and a pellucid vessel of the wonders of the world, but the cause of wonder in others. It is natural then not to limit yourself to Shakespeare.
The “specialization” that the modern university divides the whole (the uni) into does turn up knowledge, but it is really only useful to a genuine student, who can judge it and see where it might fit in the whole, in other words a student who is philosophic; the specialist, swollen with thin-loungeried pride in his mediocrity, often gets in the way of such natural betters. Shakespeare was no specialist. (Or you might say, he specialized in nature, man and God, and if you insist, rightly so, that those are not “specialties,” then consider him a specialist in 512 things.) And He did not limit himself to literature. The great poets study much more. Chaucer was an experienced diplomat. Milton knew enough physics and astronomy to stop in on Galileo. Dante obviously aspired to know everything worth knowing; and, to judge souls as well as God, one would have to! The great poets hunger for a full education, and you should too. (Read Adam Zagajewski’s ”Young Poets, Please Read Everything” in his In Defense of Ardor.)
An internet site I happened upon (but have not visited enough to judge) is: http://theshakespeareblog.com/2012/06/shakespeares-infinite-variety/
For searching words used in all Elizabethan writings, try: Early English Books Online: (EEBO, http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home),
Literature Online (LION,
Lexicons of Early Modern (LEME,
http://leme.library.utoronto.ca
on line variorum of Hamlet: www.hamletworks.org
VI. Postscript: I wish I did not have to provide this postscript, but a certain errant distraction requires it. Any person who thinks Shakespeare was not Shakespeare should be referred to Shakespeare in Fact by Irvin Leigh Matus; or for something shorter, visit Kathman and Reddy’s website: http://shakespeareauthorship.com/howdowe.html For some other Elizabethan to have written Shakespeare would have required a conspiracy of hundreds. That no serious Shakespearean credits this “fake news,” you may discover in the books by Wells, Schoenbaum, and Shapiro. The delusion is a cave with footprints only heading in, and most sad, it is a desert next to living waters. The obsessed exclude themselves from something wonderful, namely hearing, seeing, beholding, reading, discussing, discovering, and thinking with Shakespeare. His works have roused the despairing with joy, drawn the wicked to virtue, given philosophers things to think about, taught statesmen sagacity, united lovers, through them began families, and constituted the English-speaking world, and enhanced human civilization. To reach the great, you must look up, in wonder, and awed, kneel down, not ignore them. If you need more encouragement, you might read my “Shakespeare, Humble, and Ardent” (Touchstone, December 2014).
VII. Since I offer this guide to you and you may not know me, let me put a list of writings below, some directly on Shakespeare others nourished by him, the better for you to decide if you want to follow my advice. Easiest to find is “Shakespeare for Life” on the Claremont Institute and the James Wilson websites.
Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare. Salzburg Studies in English Literature. Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1976. (301 pages).
Reviews: Shakespeare Jahrbuch (West) 1977, p. 195. (Hermann Heuer); Independent Journal of Philosophy, III (1979), pp. 144-46. (John Alvis);
Times Literary Supplement (3 July 1981) listed among the few books that make Shakespeare studies as “inviting and stimulating as the ocean.”
SECOND EDITION. Lanham: University Press of America, 1983 (336 pages).
Reviews: Will Morrisey, Interpretation: Journal of Political Philosophy, XIV (1): January, 1986, pp, 115-133. Shakespeare Jahrbuch (West) 1986, Ina Schabert, “Shakespeare als Politischer Philosoph: Sein Werk und die Schule von Leo Strauss,” pp. 7-25.
THIRD EDITION. Lanham: University Press of America, 2010? (ca. 125, 000 words)
Shakespeare’s Christian Prince. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, Lexington Books, 2019, so I hope.) (ca. 120,000 words; entitled Shakespeare’s English Prince, it was accepted by UPA/Rowman; being a sequel to Rome and Romans, it might appear with its third edition .)
Seven Wonders of Shakespeare, in 2018 from St. Augustine Books (In 1998 when it was 25,000 words, it was warmly desired by Steve Wrinn for Rowman/Lexington Books; but is now 125,000 words)
Machiavelli and Shakespeare Converse on the Histories (25,000 words which I’ll shortly publish on the internet myself)
ARTICLES and ESSAYS:
“The Rape of Lucrece and the Republic for Which It Stands,” The Centennial Review,
XIX (2): Spring 1975, pp. 59-79. (reprinted with revisions, in my Rome and Romans)
“Looking at the Body,” Hastings Center Report, V (2): April 1975, pp. 21-28.
(Dialogue on anatomizing a corpse and looking at Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp)
“Interpretation,” Interpretation: Journal of Political Philosophy, V (1):
Autumn 1975, pp. 109-130. (dialogue on interpretation and friendship)
“Looking at Bodies,” The Independent Journal of Philosophy (Vienna),
Volume III: (1979), pp. 87-90. (brief chronicle of humanity and dust)
“Falstaff in the Valley of the Shadow of Death,” Interpretation: Journal of Political Philosophy, VIII (1): January 1979, pp. 5-29.
Reprinted, with revisions and additions, in Major Literary Characters: Falstaff ed. and intro. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1991), pp. 171-202.
With augmentation, to appear in my Shakespeare’s Christian Prince.
“Shakespeare’s Apology for Poetry,” in Shakespeare and the Arts: A Collection of Essays from the Ohio Shakespeare Conference—1981, eds. C. W. Cary and H. S. Limouze
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 231-244. (on Tempest 1.1)
“Tragical, Comical, Historical,” in The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition:
Poetic—Epic—Tragic , Analecta Husserliana; Volume XVIII, ed. A-T. Tymieniecka
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), pp. 379-399. (on Shakespeare)
“To Emulate or To Be: Hamlet and Aeneas,” in Law and Philosophy: The Practice of Theory [Essays in Honor of George Anastaplo] ed. William Braithwaite, John Murley, & Robert Stone. (Ohio University / Swallow Press, 1992), Vol. II., pp. 917-936.
“Shakespeare’s Richard III: Can There Be a Christian Tyrant?” Interpretation: Journal of Political Philosophy, (18,000 words, accepted, set in type for XXI,3, (1993), yet to appear) To appear, with augmentation, in my Shakespeare’s Christian Prince.
“Shakespeare’s Richard II: Can There Be a Christian King?” Interpretation: Journal of Political Philosophy, (18,000 words, accepted, set in type for XXI,3, (1993) or later, yet to appear) To appear, with augmentation, in my Shakespeare’s Christian Prince.
“Shakespeare By Phone,” Practical Home-Schooling ed. Mary Pride, Vol. III, No. 4
(Winter, 1996) pp. 28-29. (excerpt from my Shakespeare class conducted by phone)
“The Whole of Shakespeare,” Practical Home-Schooling Vol. IV, No. 3 (Fall 1996)
“Shakespeare for Life,” on the Claremont Institute for Statesmanship web site (since 2001) (with remarks on Lincoln’s reading of Shakespeare) 10,000 words
<http://www.claremont.org/scholars/id.288/scholar.asp>Michael Platt
“Words, Words, Words,” Thomas Aquinas Review (2010?)
(ca. 15,000 words, on Shakespeare’s words, accepted by editor Ron MacArthur)
“Shakespeare, Humble, and Ardent,” Touchstone Nov/Dec 2014 (27.6) pp. 40-44;
follow up with “Richard III’s Darkness” Touchstone Sept/Oct 2015 p.7.
Reviews:
Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1993)
in The Review of Metaphysics Vol. 49, no. 4 (June 1996), pp. 913-915.
(several solecisms and infelicities introduced without my knowledge)
Theodore Dalrymple Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005) in Society September 2006
RELATED:
“Souls Without Longing,” Interpretation: Journal of Political Philosophy, XVIII, 3, (1991) pp. 415-465. (thoughts à propos of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind)
“The Young, The Good, and The West,” in America, The West, and the Liberal Arts
ed. Ralph Hancock (Savage: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) pp. 83-143.
(essays by, inter alia, Allan Bloom, Stanley Rosen, Harvey Mansfield; mine includes Wister’s The Virginian) sections V and VI reprinted by the Lyceum School (Cleveland) in its Newsletter
“The Good, the Great, and the Small,” Faith and Reason Vol. XXIII, nos.3-4 (1997-98), pp. 323-354. (on the first precept of the natural law, Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q 94, a. 2, c.)
To search for a word in Shakespeare:
Caboose: add where?: Robin Headlam Wells, “Postscript: Shakespeare’s Politics and Modern Criticism” in his Shakespeare’s Politics: A Contextual Introduction (Continuum, 2009). “to eschew arrogant ignorance and submit to wit, wisdom and wonders,”
Movies: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbElZhYv-l6jmaYXBJpYx3UMvBXpPhaWt
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBD1uffdDBLhkapQvl3EBmg/videos
version of Venus and Adonis:
End notes
[1] F. Nietzsche , Musarion Ausgabe, XIX 79; also to be found in Will-to-Power, No. 585a.
[i] More exactly: “I always take an edition of Shakespeare in my suitcase.”
[ii] There is something similar in Thomas; the first precept of the natural law was a discovery; no one else had ever said: the good is to be done and followed and evils shunned [Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q 94, a. 2, c]; no one before saw, or saw so clearly and consequently, that there are two relations to the good, but because it was a discovery of what is, what exists, not what is invented or fashioned or made, Thomas drew no attention to its discovery, just to it, let alone himself the discoverer.
[iii] In his Shakespearian Punctuation (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1911), Percy Simpson explains why Shakespeare sometimes omits the relative, interrupts speeches, leaves sentences incomplete, and capitalizes some nouns, but not others. Additionally supportive of the authority of the First Folio are the experience (as a translator) and the reflections of Richard Flatter, whose Shakespeare’s Producing Hand (New York: Norton, 1948) shows that many “irregular” features of the text are not mistakes of the printer or neglects of the author, but Shakespeare’s deliberate directions to the actors. (There was no distinct director or producer in Shakespeare’s company.)
[iv] See also Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), for its wealth of evidence on the matter. For good coaching on how to speak Shakespeare’s lines in accord with the directions implicit in his text, consult Patsy Rodenburg, Speaking Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 2002).
[v] To judge the comprehensive work of Will and Ariel Durant, I read their account of some Renaissance figures, felt informed, but when I turned to the pages on Rembrandt and then Shakespeare, figures I know well, I discovered the Durants’ pretending to judge Shakespeare, almost heckle him. What someone says about a great soul you’ve come to know allows you to trust, or not, what they saw about things you don’t know. Thus when Freud on Michelangelo exposes his low envy it puts you on the lookout for the same in his view of human nature. For a cultural history that looks up to lofty souls, with not a word of contentious carping, consult Egon Friedell’s learned and witty Cultural History of the Modern Age and for the Renaissance, of course Burckhardt. And for the range from Homer to us, done on a plan that introduces you to some great authors, in the best way, though well chosen passages, get the humane and masterly, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach. What a wonderful guide.
[vi] In his essay “Shakespeare” in Selected Writings ed. Jacques Barzun (New York: Farrer, Straus, & Cudahy, 1957). See also his A Glance Toward Shakespeare (1922).
[vii] Here is a source of audio of Shakespeare’ plays on the internet:
[viii] A charming exception is the movie of Comedy of Errors (BBC 1983) with Roger Daltrey, lead singer and guitarist of the Who, playing both of the Dromios exuberantly. What fun. Shakespearean fun.
[ix] And there used to be the New England Shakespeare Company which played without rehearsals; any actor might be told that morning what role to play and had to play it with a Q-script on a dowel and helps from the prompter.
[x] In Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2006), Ross Gregory Douthat, then a recent graduate of Harvard College, reports that the hard thing is lining up the internships, for the next step in your career, and the easy thing is figuring out what the (Humanities) teachers want you, too, to be enraged about and then you show you’re your flattering orthodoxy, not slavishly, but ingeniously in a far-flung area to earn your inflated A. For the progress of inflation, see Chapter IV, esp. page 114. In 1955 Honor grades were only 15% of all grades. The big jump came in the late 60s. (In my time of 1960-64, I remember it said that A grades were only 13%.)
[xi] If a student in courses in Women’s Studies and Black Studies, expressed skepticism about feminism and racism, in science courses asked hard questions climate change established by historical conjectures and future changes estimated by models, and attribution of such change to man-made causes, or asked for experimental evidence of the evolution of species through natural selection, and in other courses mentioned being a young Republican, what’s your guess, would he get inflated or deflated grades?
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