Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“1606 – WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND THE YEAR OF LEAR” by James Shapiro (first published in 2015);  “HOW SHAKESPEARE CHANGED EVERYTHING” by Stephen Marche (first published in 2011); “THE FINAL ACT OF MR SHAKESPEARE” by Robert Winder (first published 2010)

            I cannot remember exctly how it happened, but for some years I was the go-to person on both the Listener and the Sunday Star-Times when it came to William Shakespeare. Whenever a book about Shakespeare passed across the books editor’s desk, he would pass it on to me to review. In the process, I augmented my own Shakespeare collection with quite a few books.

            Sometimes the books about Shakespeare were excellent scholarship, sometimes they were popular rip-offs, and sometimes they were cranky nonsense. I well remember, back in 2005, having the pleasure, in one long article in the Listener, of taking down Brenda James’ nonsensical piece of bogus scholarship The Truth Will Out, which asserted that the obscure Sir Henry Neville was the “real” author of Shakespeare’s plays. In the same article I dealt with Clare Asquith’s more reasonable Shadowplay, which argued that Shakespeare was a Catholic. This is a plausible theory, but regrettably Asquith overstated it, to the point where we were meant to believe that nearly everything Shakespeare wrote was a coded sectarian statement.

            At the more scholarly end of the spectrum, in 2010 I enjoyed reviewing at length, for the Sunday Star-Times, James Shapiro’s Contested Will – Who Wrote Shakespeare (a review which I reproduced on this blog). It is an excellent refutation of all “alternative authorship” theories about Shakespeare’s plays.

            Some of my reviews of books about Shakespeare were relatively brief and jocular, especially when the book in hand was clearly intended to be a piece of fun.

So here, simply for your amusement, is a selection of three such reviews. The first, by James Shapiro, can be taken seriously, but with some reservations. The second, by Stephen Marche, is basically designed for light amusement. And the third, a piece of fiction by Robert Winder, is a rollicking fantasia. All three reviews are presented here unaltered from their original appearance in newspaper or magazine.

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[The following review appeared in the Listener, 23 January 2016]

 “1606 – WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND THE YEAR OF LEAR” by James Shapiro

            James Shapiro, professor of English at Columbia University, has the knack of keeping it scholarly while also making it accessible. His Contested Will is still the best one-volume squelch to conspiracy theorists who want to believe that somebody other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays. You don’t have to be a palaeographer, cryptanalyst or textual expert to get his drift, but he covers all the main areas of scholarly debate. The same goes for his 1599, in which he takes one fruitful year in Shakespeare’s writing life and relates it to the public events that would (probably) have influenced Shakespeare.

            1606 follows the pattern of 1599, but it is in no sense a mere follow-up. As far as publishing history and surviving theatre records can confirm, 1606 was the year when Shakespeare wrote three of his greatest – King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

            Shapiro rightly asserts that Shakespeare was as much a Jacobean dramatist as an Elizabethan one. The company to which he was attached performed far more often before King James 1 than it had done before Queen Elizabeth 1, and playwrights were very responsive to public events. So, examining changing theatrical conventions, the fortunes of acting companies, and the contemporaneous work of many writers as well as Shakespeare, Shapiro sets out to show how much King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra were products of their historical moment.

            In King Lear, with its story of a kingdom divided, he sees close reference to the tensions attending James 1’s attempts to unite England and Scotland, and resistance to such a plan. In Macbeth he finds far more echoes of the fears aroused by the “Gunpowder Plot” of late 1605 than have hitherto been publicised. In Antony and Cleopatra he detects a growing nostalgia for the reign of Elizabeth (and perhaps the character of the Earl of Essex) once the original bright promise of King James’ reign had worn off. The text is detailed, densely end-noted, and plunges us into fascinating issues such as reasons for the popularity of masques as royal entertainments, the effects of outbreaks of plague on theatregoing, the decline of acting troupes of children and the scrambling of playwrights for patronage and preferment.

            Once again, Shapiro plays fair, telling us when he is speculating (as any biographer of Shakespeare often must). He reminds us that nobody can say for sure what Shakespeare’s personal beliefs were, nor can anyone pin down the fine details of his everyday life. Shapiro is also aware that the “Gunpowder Plot” was to some extent the Jacobean Reichstag Fire. There really was a plot, but the received version of the story was as much government invention as historical fact, justifying a crackdown on a group (dissident Catholics) which the government intended to penalise anyway.

            Are there any minuses to this erudite, readable and thoroughly absorbing book?  Only one – but it may be a biggie. By so closely relating three of Shakespeare’s masterworks to specific political and cultural events, Shapiro might mislead some readers into thinking that they now know the “real” meaning of each play. This sort of reductionism is not Shapiro’s intention, but it could be inferred from the text. And surely one reason for Shakespeare’s durability is the fact that his best plays outsoar their age. King Lear might in part relate to obscure or forgotten manoeuvres involving the first Stuart king. But it continues to speak to us by what it says about old age, fatherhood, families, the provenance of evil and the thin hold civilisation has over howling wilderness.

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[The following review appeared in the Sunday Star-Times, 10 July 2011]

“HOW SHAKESPEARE CHANGED EVERYTHING” by Stephen Marche

            In 1890 Eugene Schieffelin, a New York businessman and amateur Shakespearean, cooked up an eccentric idea. He would introduce into the United States all those species of bird that are mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. With the help and approval of various acclimatization societies, he imported live thrushes and nightingales from England. But they did not thrive in the Yankee climate and quickly died out. Only one type of bird imported by Schieffelin went forth and multiplied and multiplied and multiplied - to the point where it became an ecological disaster. This was the starling, which happens to be mentioned once in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One.

            So why are starlings swarming cities and parks, crapping, squabbling, chasing native birds away, threatening crops and being as much of a damned nuisance in America as they are everywhere else?

            It’s because somebody liked Shakespeare.

            Canadian freelance critic, and Esquire columnist, Stephen Marche spends half a chapter telling this tale in his brief canter through some of the stranger ways Shakespeare has influenced the modern world.

            How Shakespeare Changed Everything is really a sequence of ten short essays more-or-less on Shakespeare. They are at their most likeable when they have the weirdness of the Schieffelin story. Creepier is the account of John Wilkes Booth’s obsession with Shakespeare, which led him to model himself quite consciously on the bard’s noble Brutus as he set about assassinating Abraham Lincoln. More inclusive is the chapter on how Shakespeare has been appropriated by every political persuasion imaginable. More stirring is the chapter on the black American actor Ira Aldridge, who practiced an interesting reverse racism in the nineteenth century by playing Shakespeare’s white tragic heroes (Lear, Shylock) in whiteface. This made up for some of the blackface Othellos of white actors.

            While most of this is harmless fun it has its downside. Marche is one of those pop savants who desperately wants to sell Shakespeare to the kids. This means chapters in which he strains to show how hip Shakespeare is. There’s a woeful chapter on Shakespeare and sex (“Look, kids, here are all the dirty bits from the plays!”) and an even more woeful chapter on how Shakespeare invented the idea of the teenager (“Look, kids, Romeo is almost as good as Justin Bieber!”). They have the patronizing tone of a teacher talking down to school-kids in the hope of interesting them in something boring.

            Mustn’t grumble, though. This is an engaging little bedside book. C.J.Sisson’s classic essay The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare is better than Marche in showing how foolish it is to identify the playwright with characters in his plays. James Shapiro’s masterly Contested Will is better than Marche in dismissing the folly of crank theories about people other than Shakespeare writing Shakespeare’s plays. But in these matters Marche is on the side of the angels, and he manages to be fun with it.

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[The following review appeared in the Sunday Star-Times on 18 April 2010]

“THE FINAL ACT OF MR SHAKESPEARE” by Robert Winder

            I strongly suspect this boisterous historical novel grew out of three well-known historical facts.

            Fact No. 1. Any sane historiian would now agree that the version of King Richard the Third popularised by Shakespeare is largely fiction. The real Richard was no better and nor worse than other kings. The image of the hunch-backed monster murdering his way to power was the propaganda invention of the Tudors, the line of monarchs who grabbed the throne off Richard. Because they had virtually no legitimate claim to the throne themselves, in was in the Tudors’ interest to invent the legend of Richard as villain.

            Fact No. 2. The only one of Shakespeare’s plays that appears to support unequivocally the newfangled and Protestant Church of England is the very dull chronicle play Henry the Eighth. It’s generally regarded as Shakespeare’s very last play. But for a long time serious critics suspected that this is not really Sakespeare’s work at all. It seems to have been written mainly by the playwright John Fletcher, with Shakespeare contributing at most a few touches.

            Fact No. 3. It was during a performance of the toadying Henry the Eighth that the Globe theatre burned down in 1613.

            Out of these three circumstances, journalist, Granta sub-editor and sometime literary editor of the Independent Robert Winder had woven a cheerful historical fantasia. This is the tale of how Will Shakespeare, towards the end of his writing career, repents of the lies he put on stage in Richard the Third. Shakespeare in this version is a crypto-Catholic, or at least has Catholic sympathies, a theory that has found support from some reputable literary historians. Anyway, he comes to London determined to set the record straight.

            He rounds up his old mates the King’s Men. Together they plan to write a play showing what a greasy chap Henry the Seventh, the first of the Tudor kings, really was. Trouble is, while this potentially treasonous enterprise is in progress, Shakespeare is threatened and blackmailed by the chief justice Sir Edwards Coke into producing an admiring play about Henry the Eighth. Shakespeare sub-contracts this tiresome job to John Fletcher while he himself gets on with writing the play he really wants to write.

            Winder is cunning in setting this fiction towards the end of Shakespeare’s writing life. It means that Shakespeare and his mates can quote freely from nearly the whole Shakespearean canon whenever they want. The effect is like the famous spoof novel No Bed for Bacon or the tongue-in-cheek film Shakespeare in Love, where we were invited to groan at the way familiar Shakespearean quotations were mangled and dropped into conversations.

            Then there’s Winder’s additional cunning in having Shakespeare write his play atelier-style. His mates Richard Burbage, Edward Alleyn and others gather around him and improvise scenes of dialogue in chatty conversations. This spares us the potentially boring image of the writer at solitary work, toiling away silently at his desk or perhaps talking to himself. To me the scenes of play-writing come across as the most jolly-jolly version of theatrical life since Dickens did his Vincent Crummles scenes is Nicholas Nickleby, or since J.B.Priestley sent his Pierrot review troop on tour in his bestseller The Good Companions. It’s pure tosh but great fun.

            There are, of course, some moments that are so silly and outrageous in their anachronisms that Winder seems to be thumbing his nose at us.

            Will Shakespeare contributing to the Protestant Authorised Version of the Bible? Pull the other one. The Authorised Version gets called the King James Version, a term that was invented [for it] by Americans only in the last century.

            Will Shakespeare and his mates dreaming up the plots of both Don Giovanni and Dracula? As the Tui ads say, “Yeah, right.” But then you forgive Winder this sort of thing because you can see he is quite consciously messing around. As his introduction shows, he knows how much foolery goes into this sort of enterprise and is not like dumber historical novelists who don’t realise they are writing anachronisms.

            Winder’s main joke is to eventually to give us the whole script of Shakespeare’s non-existent play Henry the Seventh. OK, it lacks a really strong arc of dramatic action. Its language abounds in words that didn’t exist in the early 17^th century. But it bounces along in such well-trimmed cod blank-verse iambic pentameters that you can’t help admiring Winder’s sheer cheek.

            I thoroughly enjoyed this extremely silly, historically inaccurate, fantastical and jolly piece of fluff, even if it does meander past 400 pages. Does it present a convincing view of Jacobean London? As much as some reputedly serious studies have. Does it reflect the way Shakespeare really was? It would be nice to think it’s somewhere near the truth.