The Bard on the Boards Dept.: Here’s a pair of book reviews that turned up in a recently discovered pile of clippings, and it’s one of the few pieces I was asked to write for the Albany Times-Union before that publication tired of me or couldn’t afford me or just plain chose to hate me. I never know for sure, but I am a very dislikable guy.
SHAKESPEARE BIOGRAPHERS are hamstrung by the almost complete lack of documentation about the playwright’s life. But that hasn’t stopped them from coming out with many volumes of what amounts to educated speculation.
Part of the book’s fun lies in seeing how Bryson juggles those few known facts. Acknowledging that the reader is probably aware of most of them, he reinforces his discourse with the scholarship of others, from reliable writers like Sam Schoenbaum to frauds like the 19th-century fanatic Delia Bacon, who kicked off the somebody-else-wrote-Shakespeare’s-plays movement that embarrassingly persists today.
Almost as elusive as biographical facts are reliable portraits of the theaters in which Shakespeare worked, but, again, Bryson collects what’s been construed and offers what comes across like well-founded opinion. The plays themselves come under brief scrutiny – Bryson rightly celebrates the first five lines of Hamlet as being among the most terse and effective openings in dramatic literature – but the heart of the book remains a tour of the politics and society of the playwright’s time.
We see Queen Elizabeth I go nuts and welcome the succession of James I, all the while exploring the impact of the changing religious climate upon what was written and performed. Bloody aspects of Macbeth make more sense, for example, when viewed in light of the foiled Gunpowder Plot.
No study of Shakespeare can be complete without considering the sonnets, which, writes Bryson, “have driven scholars to the point of distraction because they are so frankly confessional in tone and yet so opaque.”
Was the “fair (male) youth” of sonnets 1 through 126 the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Pembroke, or one or more of several possible others? And where, in terms of the poet’s sexual preferences, does that place the “dark lady” of numbers 127 to 154? With no conclusion available, Bryson has fun detailing the outrage this ambiguity has provoked through the centuries.
Shakespeare wrote during a time when the language changed significantly, and he contributed much to those changes. But it’s still language from another time. If the meaning of many phrases seems mysterious to our ears, the double-meanings can seem even more distant.
Oxford scholar Pauline Kiernan won acclaim for her book “Shakespeare’s Theory of Drama,” and now tackles the playwright’s lustier intricacies in “Filthy Shakespeare” (Gotham Books, 303 pages, $19.99), a zesty volume that categorizes the many puns and allusions by category (body part, action, sensibility, locale, and even appliance). To call this book thorough would be an understatement: it’s thorough to a fault. If there’s a whisper of a possibility that a secondary, racier meaning lurks behind a word or phrase, Kiernan leaps upon it like a bull in rut.
Her argument, and it’s a convincing one, is that Shakespeare’s audiences were much more attentive to the subtleties of language than we are today. The First Folio editions by Neil Freeman bear this out, proving that the texts not only are dense with meaning but also with clues for the actors.
But Kiernan seems to grow overly obsessive about mining filth. At times she sounds like a sex-crazed adolescent, reading double meaning into nearly everything. The major precedent for this book is a delightful volume from 1947 titled “Shakespeare’s Bawdy” by Eric Partridge, who takes a more didactic approach. And who doesn’t see sex in quite as many corners as does Kiernan.
Free of footnotes and bibliography, the scholarship in this book floats on conjecture. The first section, introducing us to the milieu and mores of Shakespeare’s day, gives in a few pages what took Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland a couple of hundred in their excellent volume “Shakespeare Alive!” But Kiernan’s over-imaginative smut-translations of the plays seem relentless. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” as Freud (or whomever it was) said, but I have to confess to enjoying seeing how far Kiernan lets herself go.
And there’s no doubt that I’ll be paying much closer attention to Shakespeare’s texts after reading this book.
– Albany Times-Union, 27 April 2008
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