Barry Day: This Wooden 'O': Shakespeare's Globe Reborn (1996)

Published: Oberon, 1996

The story of how the Globe Theatre, where many of Shakespeare's most famous plays were first staged, was reconstructed in London near its original site is a fascinating one. From the dream first taking hold of American actor Sam Wanamaker to the completion of the project in the mid 1990s took around fifty years, meanly because of the disorganised nature of Wanamaker's enthusiasms combined with reluctance by the British establishment to take an American seriously - the assumption was that he wanted to create a downmarket Shakespearean Disneyland - and bad timing. The scheme came up against indifference to the heritage at the start, fears that it would be a distraction from plans to build a national theatre in the middle, the difficulty of fund-raising for a project which had nothing yet to see (especially as the plans kept on getting bigger with nothing tangible appearing), and the politics of developers and one of London's more extreme left wing councils throughout (leading to a massive lawsuit in the eighties).

Perhaps it would be better to say that the story "should be" rather than "is" fascinating. Despite the ringing endorsements, Day's telling of the tale is uninvolving, confusing, and riddled with irritating clichés and stylistic quirks. The illustrations exemplify the problems of the book: it is about a building project, but there are no pictures of the spectacular finished object. (Though to be fair, the book was written and published to be ready as a souvenir when the opening took place - but there are not even pictures of architects' models of the final design.) The first of these issues, that the narrative is uninvolving, stems to a large extent from the other two. Though we are told that Wanamaker was enthusiastic about the idea of reconstructing the Globe, it is never made clear to the reader just why they should share this enthusiasm. It is perhaps a difficult thing to convey in such a book - I became a convert to the idea through the revelatory experience that it can be to attend a performance in the theatre as a groundling in the pit. Generally, I seem to remember performances without much sense of their location: the interior of one West End theatre is, to the playgoer, much like any other. But at the Globe, particularly if you have a groundling ticket, the venue is inextricably and uniquely part of the performance.

The confusion in the story is due to the way that it has been structured. The individual chapters seem to take the history forwards, only for the next to leap backwards, and frequently go over some of the same events again. The narrative is also full of forward references, for example (one of many), "The Battle for the soul of the Rose Theatre was foreshadowed eighteen years in advance" (chapter 2, capitalisation Day's) is relating what is being discussed to something else that isn't described for another ten chapters, and is an unhelpful reference except to someone who already knows everything in This Wooden 'O' - who would not be in the intended audience. I did at times wonder if the book had been written as three or four separate long essays, which were then chopped up to make This Wooden 'O': one on London's Elizabethan theatres (which is very similar to the information found in the Everyman Companion to Shakespeare - had nothing new been discovered in the intervening twenty years?), one an obituary of Sam Wanamaker, one a description of the ideas of theatre historians about the layout of the Globe, and so on, but I have the feeling that even when re-ordered thematically like this the book would still be chronologically confusing. Much seems to be left out, too; aspects of the story that must have happened are glossed over. We learn, for example, of Mark Rylance's appointment as artistic director of the Globe from a caption to a picture, not from the text even though that quotes his ideas about the function of the reconstructed theatre at length.

Also confusing are contradictory pictures of Sam Wanamaker presented in This Wooden 'O'. The clichéd words "amiable eccentric" are used at one point, but Day gives little evidence in the rest of this book of his amiability. From Day's descriptions of Wanamaker's efforts to bring his vision to fruition, "complex, irascible, obsessed, disorganised eccentric" would appear to be more accurate; "amiable" seems to be an adjective used simply because eccentrics are frequently described this way.

The most irritating aspect of This Wooden 'O' is Day's writing style. The text is full of clichés of many kinds, so much so in places that it seems to be a parody of tabloid journalism. It becomes very wearing to read at the length of an entire book. The narrative flow keeps being strained to bring in some quotation or other, usually from Shakespeare; restricting their use to one per chapter - or even one per page - would help enormously with the book's readability. Some quotations should be even more restricted: how many times can the project really have experienced "the best of times, the worst of times"? Every second or third paragraph ends with an ellipsis, which appears to be Day's idea of how to signpost a remark he considers amusing: that is not the function of this punctuation!

This is a story that needed to be written, but it has been done here so poorly that this cannot be considered a definitive account.

Dennis Kay: Shakespeare: His Work, Life and Era (1992)

Edition: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1992
Review number: 401

As yet another biography of Shakespeare, a book needs to have something different about it to fight its way through all the others. Apart from his eminence which means that there is much competition, his life also suffers from a scarcity of hard facts as opposed to legends. Kay's particular slant is to aim to place the plays and poems in the context of the life and the times. It is almost more a work of literary criticism than a biography, if unfashionably centred on the author rather than the reader. He has little to say about the life that isn't well known, his descriptions of Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and theatrical history are more interesting, but it is his summaries of the themes and circumstances of the plays themselves that are the finest parts of the book. Each play gets about four pages, little enough space to describe them; but Kay is able to illuminatingly set out the themes which show Shakespeare's concerns and development as a writer. He is unfailingly orthodox, keen to avoid the strange obsessive flights of the imagination that characterise many writers on Shakespeare, most obviously (recently) Ted Hughes. He does not want to use the writings to illuminate the life, a dangerous but common practice, but vice versa.

The book has a terrible index (but even that is more than Hughes' Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being). Every play is given space in the book, but some are not listed at all in the index.

S. Schoenbaum: Shakespeare's Lives (1970)

Edition: Oxford University Press, 1979
Review number: 343

One of the big problems with Shakespearean scholarship is that so little is known about the man who wrote the plays and poetry. His life is almost a complete blank, the major documentary evidence provided by occasional legal documents in which he is mentioned for one reason or another. Many of these documents were unknown before the second half of the nineteenth century or even later, and the background (knowledge of, say, the financial arrangements through which early seventeenth century theatre existed) less well understood than they are today.

The lack of knowledge combined with an extreme reverence for the works themselves proved a fertile incentive for the invention and elaboration of traditions and theories, culminating in the attribution of the plays to other hands entirely. It is the history of these traditions which forms the subject of Schoenbaum's famous book.

Schoenbaum has a rather enjoyably caustic style, dismissive of the more baseless fantasies. Some of these are pretty laughable, such as those which "prove" that Shakespeare spent part of his life following the same profession as the fantasist - a sailor, for example, wrote a book describing how Shakespeare ran away from home at 13 to sign on as the cabin boy on Drake's famous trip around the world, and carried on a sailing career until wrecked on the shores of Illyria years later. The only evidence for this sort of suggestion is the unimaginative idea that everything Shakespeare wrote about must relate to his own experience; the whole thing springs from a desire to remake Shakespeare in the image of his admirer.

Schoenbaum has more sympathy for those whose 'bardolatry' took them beyond the bounds of sanity, including the rather pitiful forger William Henry Ireland. Ludicrous though his work may seem, it would not be right to deride someone clearly not at all normal mentally.

His most acid dismissals are reserved for those who suggested that other people wrote the plays of Shakespeare. This is inspired by a species of bardolatry, the feeling that the person who wrote the plays must have been more eminent than Shakespeare. Many candidates have been put forward, including Christopher Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth I (both dead when most of the plays were first performed), and a committee of eminent Elizabethans, but the most widely espoused causes are those of Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Schoenbaum describes these theories as madness, taking passing delight in the fact that the Oxfordian theory was first put forward by a man named Looney. Certainly, there doesn't seem much to recommend either idea, particularly when connected, as they often are, with some of the more outlandish speculation in another field that has generated much Shakespearean rubbish, the identities of Mr W.H., the Dark Lady and the Rival Poet from the Sonnets. The cryptoanalytical side of the theories (Bacon hiding sentences proving his authorship, or even explaining that he is the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex in the works) is the sort of meaningless speculation common to the sort of esotericism caricatured by Eco in Foucault's Pendulum. Arguments identical to the Baconian cryptology have been advanced in attempts to ridicule the idea, to show, for example, that the works were written by prominent nineteenth century figures.

There is little to criticise about this book. Schoenbaum gives credit where it is due, and its opposite where that is due; no writer is perfect or all bad. His writing is clear, and his critical appraisal of each writer he describes easy to understand. In reading the second edition, I rather miss what has now been left out to make room for an expansion of other material, a discussion of Shakespeare's role in fiction. In the year of Shakespeare in Love, this would have been most interesting to read.

Ted Hughes: Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992)

Edition: Faber and Faber, 1993
Review number: 258

One of the last books written by Ted Hughes, this monumental piece of literary criticism aims to show connections between the plots and imagery of many of Shakespeare's plays. These connections are based around what Hughes calls 'the Tragic Equation', derived from the two early poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. The supposed fascination of Shakespeare with this theme is based on Hughes' reading of the spirit of the Elizabethan age, with the barely suppressed warfare between Catholic and Puritan reflected in the unconscious of a sensitive man like Shakespeare. (The two poems are explained as expressions of the central 'myths' of Catholicism and Puritanism respectively, Venus and Adonis dealing with the power of the Goddess - whether the Virgin or the Church is intended, Hughes doesn't say, and The Rape of Lucrece the downfall of the Goddess at the hands of Yahweh. The fact that these interpretations of the poems would be deeply offensive to both devout Catholics - the idea of the Virgin or the Church as a sensualist! - and evangelical Protestants - God as a rapist! - is not even considered.)

The Tragic Equation synthesised from these poems' themes goes something like this. The tragic hero falls in love with the pure woman; a moment of double vision means he sees her also as the faithless "Queen of Hell"; in rage, he destroys her, or himself; sometimes he or she returns to fuller life to end the play on a note of redemption.

There are, I think, many problems with Hughes' general idea. The major problems seem to stem from his own captivation with it, which makes him rather unwilling to consider other possible interpretations of the plays. The offensiveness of his Catholic and Puritan interpretations of the poems which has already been mentioned is a good example of this.

Hughes develops the Tragic Equation from play to play as he sees Shakespeare's use of it growing in understanding (which may be - probably to Hughes should be - unconscious); however, from a sceptical point of view, he ends up tailoring the details of the Equation to fit the play. The play that his analysis illuminates most is Othello, which is probably not coincidentally the play which the bare version of the Equation given above fits best. (The moment of double vision, caused by Iago's false but convincing accusation of Desdemona, and its expression by Othello, is the basis for one of the best sections of the book.)

There is a tendency to argue without supporting evidence, as when Hughes takes the view that the plays Pericles Prince of Tyre and The Tempest, which he views as the culminating use of the Tragic Equation, reflect Shakespeare's integration of mystical Gnostic parables with the equation. Hughes takes the popularity of the philosophical ideas of the Gnostics among the Jacobean intelligentsia on the one hand and Shakespeare's use of similar imagery and themes (to do with rebirth and a spiritual journey to enlightenment) on the other, and says the two must be connected. But, like the Equation itself, there is a lack of evidence that Shakespeare was really doing this. The connecting themes are sufficiently vague - and certainly part of the orthodox Christianity which every Elizabethan and Jacobean was taught as a child - that it would be possible to see them in just about any work of art; and to see a connection in the use of flower imagery is to my mind just silly.

Hughes is strongest, as you would expect from a poet of his calibre, when analysing Shakespeare's language in detail. His linked discussions of Shakespeare's use of neologisms and of the word "and" to create poetic effects are particularly interesting. ("And" is often used to connect two contrasting ideas, instantly creating a vivid picture in the imagination.)

Other than his eye for detail, the strongest points in the book are the analyses of the lesser known plays, such as Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens and Pericles. In general, Hughes' ideas are interesting and thought provoking, but just not convincing.

A final, minor, point: a book of this length and complexity should really have been given an index.