Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (15 page)

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In the English language, over the past four or five centuries, nobody has spoken to more of us—nobody has, in this sense, possessed more of what I am calling authority—than Shakespeare. He has been vilified by English schoolboys and eminent Russian novelists; he has been bowdlerized and travestied by Victorian theater producers, who sought to replace his tragic endings with more commercially viable happy ones; he has been abused by the Germans (who felt that Schlegel’s translations of Shakespeare were far superior to the originals) and disdained by the French (who found him messy and verbose in comparison to his contemporary, Racine). He has been borrowed by each succeeding ideology to prove that its own perspective is the only correct one, and his work has lent itself to social commentary of all stripes, including the apolitical, purely psychological stripe. And yet he endures, always and only himself, available as freshly as ever to each new generation of readers and viewers.

We know so little about Shakespeare the man that the Lawrentian problem hardly exists in his case. There
is
no artist, just the tale. But what tale is it? Which performance, when they are all so different, is the definitive one? Can there be a final, perfect version of a Shakespeare play on the stage—and if not, does the literary work only exist in a kind of ghostly form, waiting to be tentatively, imperfectly embodied by each new approach?

I have opinions about these matters, but I do not have the answers. No one does. This is why Shakespeare raises to such an intense degree the question of authority. There are no operating instructions handed down to us by the writer (as there were, say, with T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and James Joyce’s
Ulysses
), and there are no regulations issued by the estate (as there notoriously have been in Beckett’s case). In terms of productions, anything goes. You can put a piece of toast on the stage and call it
The Merchant of Venice
, and no one can stop you. We want to be able to say that the piece of toast is not Shakespeare—we know this, even if we cannot prove it. But how far does this knowledge go? Is a
Merchant of Venice
in modern dress Shakespeare? Is a
Merchant of Venice
done in blackface or by an all-female cast Shakespeare? Is a
Merchant of Venice
performed in German and set in a Mercedes Benz factory Shakespeare? (I have actually seen that version, done by the Berliner Ensemble, and it was one of the high points in a lifetime of theater-going.) Different people will get off this coach at different stages, and there is no firm point at which we will all be able to say in unison:
Now
it has passed beyond the pale. Now it is toast, not Shakespeare.

There is still another bothersome question about Shakespeare’s authority, and that is, how do we hear it? In a play—which by definition has no narrator, and in which the only words are the characters’ lines—there are no sentences we can point to as stemming specifically from the author. (It would be silly in any play to insist that the author’s presence is felt only in the stage directions, and in Shakespeare’s case it is not even an issue, because he used almost no stage directions.) Yet those of us who love Shakespeare love him, in particular, for his authority. He creates a world for us, and that world feels incomparably right, and true. He does not seem capable of setting a foot wrong, not at the line level, where the poetry is perhaps the best ever written, and not at the structural level, where everything coheres into a profound theatrical experience. If there are problems in the plays—the anti-Semitism in
The Merchant of Venice
, the stern, cruel justice in
Measure for Measure
—these are
our
problems, the result of our not yet having figured out how to cope with the disturbing material. Plays that once seemed equally intractable, such as
Othello
,
The Tempest
, and
The Winter’s Tale
, have turned out to be audience favorites, now that the sticky patches have been resolved—resolved, I mean, in a way that leaves the underlying darkness and conflict intact. Such problems can only be solved temporarily, for each new generation raises new sensitivities, new concerns. That too is a source of Shakespeare’s continuing authority: his infinite flexibility, his adaptability to the needs and sensibilities of each era.

All this makes him seem like a miracle worker, or even a god. And I do believe, in my thoroughly agnostic way, that Shakespeare’s plays are small miracles. Like the ancient Greek temples left standing on the southern shores of Italy, they seem not to stem from powers we think of as human. And yet they
are
human; and unlike the ruined temples, Shakespeare’s plays even feel human in scale. Side by side with the hugeness and the impressiveness of his work is something much smaller, much more graspable, much more easily recognized. If Shakespeare at times comes across as a grand remnant of the oversized past—one of those monumental “bare ruin’d choirs,” to quote his own line—he is also our most intimate mirror, the one in the bathroom perhaps, where we casually catch our own faces morning and night, hardly even aware of what we are seeing.

FIVE

GRANDEUR AND INTIMACY

Consider the emotion we call love. Which category would you put it in? Is it a grand, consuming passion, bigger than anything else we experience on earth? Or is it the very essence of intimacy, the closest we ever approach to another human being? For Shakespeare, it can be both.

Look, for example, at what he does with
Antony and Cleopatra
. In this complicated drama—at once a love story, a history play, and a tragedy—he gives us two larger-than-life figures whose passion for each other ultimately brings about their deaths. Everything we hear about Cleopatra—from the famous description of her by Antony’s friend Enobarbus (“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety”) to the manner in which Antony himself addresses her (he often calls her “Egypt,” as if to equate her with her whole country)—suggests her outsized personality, her enormous power. Her strength is evident even in retreat, as Antony discovers when he finds himself following her after she flees during a sea battle against Caesar. “O, my lord, my lord, / Forgive my fearful sails! I little thought / You would have followed,” she cries, to which he responds:

                Egypt, thou knew’st too well

My heart was to thy rudder tied by th’ strings,

and thou shouldst tow me after. O’er my spirit

Thy full supremacy thou knew’st, and that

Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods

Command me.

For a man like Antony, this is what it means to be in love: you cede to someone else a control over you that is even greater than your own sense of honor. It is a painful position for him to find himself in, and it is to his credit, as a lover, that he only rarely allows this awareness to interfere with his passion for Cleopatra. Or perhaps it is precisely the nature of his passion that it
can’t
be interfered with, even if the enslavement sometimes chafes. (We can hear it chafing in that repetition of the slightly accusing “thou knew’st.”)

But to Cleopatra it is Antony who is the greater force, the immortal figure. After his death, and shortly before her own, she reflects longingly:

I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony …

His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm

Crested the world: his voice was propertied

As all the tunèd spheres …

Think you there was or might be such a man

As this I dreamt of?

The question is seriously meant—this is, among other things, Shakespeare asking us whether any mortal person could be as huge as the Antony created by his and Cleopatra’s fertile imaginations—but it is also the kind of self-mocking, painful, slightly flirtatious joke that Cleopatra is in the habit of making. For the man she addresses with this question is an emissary of Caesar’s; and when the Roman answers, “Gentle madam, no” (it was, after all, a dream, so what else is he supposed to say?), she lashes out at him, “You lie, up to the hearing of the gods.” The gods are frequently invoked by these two lovers when they speak about each other, as if they both consider their love affair to be so gigantic as to be noticeable even from a heavenly distance. And the phrase conjures up a theatrical distance as well: in Shakespeare’s time, as now, the cheap, high seats in English theaters were known as “the gods,” so this line of Cleopatra’s, like that other one about an actor boying her greatness, once again places her both inside and outside the play, in her time and also in ours.

The grandeur, then, is evident. But what about the intimacy? Fleeting examples of it are scattered throughout the play—in Enobarbus’s odd description of how he saw Cleopatra “hop forty paces through the public street,” in Eros’s tender words just before he kills himself to avoid killing Antony—but I will focus here on a single scene, where Antony and Cleopatra have been arguing about the fact that she let one of Caesar’s emissaries kiss her hand. Antony is in such a jealous fury that he becomes downright insulting: “Have I my pillow left unpressed in Rome / Forborne the getting of a lawful race, / And by a gem of women, to be abused / By one that looks on feeders?” She tries to interject a soothing word or two, but he continues to berate her for minutes on end, even as he has Caesar’s man soundly whipped. Finally he sneers, “To flatter Caesar, would you mingle eyes / With one that ties his points?”

“Not know me yet?” she responds, invoking all their shared history in a few words.

And this, though he has been in a towering rage, appears to catch him up. “Cold-hearted toward me?” he asks in what seems a rather sudden turnabout. I suppose that line
could
be delivered in a taunting or sarcastic tone, but it makes more sense if the actor says it with an almost apologetic tenderness, as if inviting her to join him in ending their spat. She, at any rate, accepts that invitation: “Ah, dear, if I be so, / From my cold heart let heaven engender hail, / And poison it in the source, and the first stone / Drop in my neck…”—and there we are, back in the grand manner, with the gods overseeing the behavior of the oversized lovers. But that “ah, dear” has another tone entirely, a nearly domestic tone. And so does another line of hers that comes only a few seconds later, after they have kissed and made up. “It is my birthday,” Cleopatra announces out of the blue. “I had thought t’have held it poor. But since my lord / Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.” I have always wondered if it really
was
her birthday, or if she just made that up on the spur of the moment, to give them something extra to celebrate. In any case, the idea of a privately remembered birthday (as opposed to the massive, preplanned public occasion one would normally associate with a monarch of Cleopatra’s stature) makes her seem winningly personal. It is part of her infinite variety, no doubt, that she can sometimes seem as tiny and mortal as we are.

You can find passages like this in Shakespeare’s other great tragedies—in
King Lear
, for instance, in the scenes between Lear and Edgar, where the real madman treats the fake madman with unusual kindness; or in
Macbeth
, when Macduff has trouble taking in the news that his family has been slaughtered, and so keeps repeating himself in disbelief. In each case, what makes the intimate moment so noticeable is the grandeur of the surrounding play. The characters, speaking in poetry that in no way resembles ordinary speech, have been presented to us as something hugely admirable or terrible (or, generally, both), something beyond the merely human. So when they descend to a moment of ordinariness, the pathos is extraordinary. It is the sudden change of scale that does it.

The balance will vary, of course. Some works (the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, Conrad’s
Nostromo
, Melville’s
Moby-Dick
) seem to lean heavily toward the grand. Others (the novels of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Jane Austen) come across as mainly intimate—though even as I say that, I can think of ways in which that’s not really true: James certainly has his moments of grandeur, especially in the language, and Wharton’s
Custom of the Country
, though it’s a very good novel, strikes me as neither intimate nor grand. They are slippery categories, these two. It’s possible, I suppose, to see everything as falling somewhere on the spectrum between them, if one tries hard enough. But I’m more interested, for the moment, in looking at what a literary work is doing when it brings together these two things that seem like opposites (though, granted, they may turn out not to be opposites).

Grandeur does not imply grandiosity. When it appears in literature, its claim to largeness has been well earned; it is not the result of delusional narcissism or boastful hype. It may partake of what we think of as “the grand manner,” but it is not annoying in the way people who assume the grand manner often are. Literary grandeur is not snobbish. Rather than alienating or diminishing us, it enlarges us with its own largeness, and we find ourselves readily assenting to its outsized views. Those views tend to be panoramic or telescopic in nature (though not exclusively so), and they lend us a perspective that is often lacking in our regular life. This can be achieved with high-flown vocabulary and complicated syntax, but it can be done equally well through a cool austerity, a shriven bareness. Beckett’s plays, in their own down-in-the-dumps way, are no less grand than those of Sophocles, for both authors aim to get at some kind of massive truth that is hidden behind the facades of daily existence. That this truth is something dark and frightening, though also cathartic and in that sense exhilarating, is partly what gives these works their stirring intensity.

That feeling of being stirred is one of the ways you can recognize grandeur in a work of art. It’s possible to be briefly stirred by false grandeur, and you need to be on your guard against deceptions of this kind. But true grandeur is unmistakable. It gives you a sense of lift-off that is nearly physical in its pleasure, as if you had been granted the power of flight.