In re-reading Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars I have been struck by his introductory essay in which he attempts to pin down some of the attributes that make Shakespeare so wonderful. It’s an intriguing question. We take it for granted that Shakespeare was a giant amongst English writers, and that he retains his primacy in English literature—indeed, world literature—even to our own day, 400 years after his own. But what stands behind that? Surely it isn’t the plots of the plays, many of which are recycled from earlier material. There are those who will point to the language itself as the primary vessel of Shakespeare’s greatness—but while that might give him a massive boost with the lit-crit types who gush over David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, it isn’t liable to excite public adoration to such an extent.
So what’s so special about him? In Rosenbaum’s mind, it is Shakespeare’s ability to provide seemingly endless layers of interest, especially upon repeated readings. You can enjoy a play the first time around, either off the page or in a performance, but it really takes multiple readings before the clamshell begins to open. With plenty of time, even one passage from a particular play can reveal astonishing surprises, layers and layers of them, with the increase being exponential upon repetition. Rosenbaum used that legendary tribute to synaesthesia, Bottom’s “dream” speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as his example, but the plays and poems offer any number of treasures that can be mined for gold. I have my own fixations: Henry’s soliloquy the night before the battle of Agincourt, Macbeth’s “tomorrow and tomorrow” speech, the “Death of Gonzaga” scene in Hamlet, Prospero’s epilogue in The Tempest, and particularly Falstaff’s wry exordium on honor in Henry IV, Part I. I suppose every Shakespeare devotee has his or her own list.
As the old saying goes, if an ass looks into a mirror don’t expect an angel to look back. Shakespeare is wasted on a lot of folks. For vast swathes of Americans, Shakespeare is little more than a name, a few familiar lines (“to be or not to be”) and a vague memory of high school/college boredom mixed with incomprehensibility mixed with frustration. Maybe a touch of PBS drivel along the lines of “well, he didn’t really write the plays, you know” or “well, he was actually a closet Catholic, you know” or “well, he was probably gay or bisexual, you know.” Maybe Joseph Fiennes drilling Gwyneth Paltrow in the sack.
Upping the pedagogical dose isn’t necessarily the best remedy. English classes, especially at the university level, typically do more harm than good. How much damage has accrued from despicable syllabi that plod through Julius Caesar (“Essay: identify and explain three separate tropes in Mark Antony’s funeral oration”) or reduce Shakespeare’s language to a series of formulae (“Explain the reasons for the switch from iambic pentameter to dactylic tetrameter in lines 1004-1012 of Love’s Labour’s Lost”) or force readers into faddish post-modernist straitjackets (“List four ways in which Twelfth Night expresses hostility towards women’s reproductive rights.”) Discussion groups in which just about everything except Shakespeare’s actual text is dissected and analyzed. Arcane academic theories and deconstructionist blather. Stuffy cheaply-made videos. Old RCA Camden LPs with plummy British actors singsonging their way through a sexless drawing-room Antony and Cleopatra.
Rosenbaum acknowledges all that and more. Yet Bottom awakens from his enchantment and utters a deliriously topsy-turvy paragraph that has held Rosenbaum enthralled for two decades. That’s where the rubber meets the road; it’s in that never-ceasing progression of layers, always something else to discover, always more surprises.
Which works pretty well for me as a description of great music as well. A piano teacher once told me that the test of a work’s greatness isn’t how well you like it the first time you hear it, but if it still moves you the thousandth time you hear or play it. That’s a terrific litmus test, but it isn’t foolproof. Repetition alone does not guarantee quality. I have re-read certain favorites, not only Shakespeare, but also Dickens and Fitzgerald and Hardy and others. I have almost memorized some novels via abundant repetition. Never do I feel that I have run out of interest in those books, or that I really know them in any absolute sense of the word. Dickens can still catch me up short with a stunning turn of phrase or a sudden glimpse at a layer of meaning I hadn’t hitherto noticed. Yet my re-reading isn’t restricted to masterpieces. I have also read a series of downright abysmal 1950s-era space cadet novels practically down to pulp. There is no way that they quality as literature, much less great anything. But I keep them handy and give them a go on a yearly basis, and I never fail to enjoy the experience.
However, I do not read Blast Off for Mars! to find new layers or make discoveries. I read out of fond nostalgia, born of a long summer in 1965 when I was bedridden for months from a nasty case of mononucleosis. Books, records, and my kitty cat were just about my only entertainment. Those space cadet books took me to Mars, Venus, the Moon, the moons of Jupiter, even a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. They took me to Space Academy where I gazed lovingly at the pure-crystal Tower of Galileo and piloted an atomic rocket ship into space. They gave me buddies in my fellow space cadets as we got into scrapes, excelled at just about everything, had grand adventures, and defeated every no-good space scumbag who was foolish enough to take us on. I was just a sick little kid in his room in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, but thanks to “Carey Rockwell” — an artificial pen name, like Laura Lee Hope or Franklin W. Dixon, applied to staff-written kid’s books — I was a young hero of the Solar Alliance and a shining hope for my (lily-white and American) space-age civilization.
So Revolt on Venus doesn’t count. I re-read it in the same sense that I have a hot fudge sundae from time to time, solely for empty calories and the sweet pleasure of it all. But while a golden sheen of long familiarity also emanates from David Copperfield and Tess of the d’Ubervilles, I do not revisit those solely out of nostalgia. Inevitably something catches me up short, something fascinates me all the more.
So while my piano teacher’s litmus test isn’t 100% accurate, it’s pretty doggone good. How many times have I heard the Mozart G Minor Symphony, anyway? How many times have I taken it apart for students or audiences, how many times have I helped students score-read it at the piano, how many recordings and performances have I heard? And yet I never feel as though I have plumbed the depth of the thing, never been certain that I have wrung everything out of it that can be wrung. That’s mostly me, naturally, and not it: I grow every time I examine it, so the next time around my growth has given me new perspectives. Some years ago I began applying Schenkerian technique to the first movement and my relationship to the piece changed dramatically; suddenly passages I had more or less taken for granted became puzzling, challenging: what’s that actually doing there? How is that playing out within the context of sonata form? Wait a minute here: I’m losing sight of the fundamental line; is this midground or closer to foreground? Why is this cadential figure bothering me so much? And so forth and so on. Every time I have another go at the Mozart G Minor I come out enriched.
Maybe that’s it, at least enough of an ‘it’ to express in plain English. Just as the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao, there is no actual naming the Mozart G Minor, no naming of the Beethoven Eroica or the B Minor Mass. I can like On the Trail of the Space Pirates as much as I want, but that doesn’t make it King Lear. I think I’ve grokked On the Trail of the Space Pirates quite thoroughly. I had it down pat back in 1965, maybe more than now given that I wasn’t uncomfortable with, or aware of, its one-dimensionality, its sexism and racism and ethnocentrism, its creaky physics and even flimsier cosmology. I’ll never grok King Lear, though. It isn’t that it’s more complicated than On the Trail of the Space Pirates, although it most certainly is. It’s that deep mirror into the depths of my own understanding, the penetrating gaze it takes into my own heart, that makes Lear and the Mozart G Minor and the Eroica and other such works so endlessly compelling. Oh, maybe I could subject Blast Off for Mars to a deep reading, write some learned essay on its America-first tropes or its relation to newly-arisen Cold War tensions. But that would be academic masturbation. To perform a deep listening of the Beethoven Ninth is to take on the universe. Given I have only so many hours before I become a standing rib roast, I’ll take the universe every time.