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KLMNO Book World
SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010
William Shakespeare
SHAKESPEARE REVIEW BY LLOYD ROSE Francis Bacon to the playwright’s pen Pretenders “Poor old Shakespeare! I
fear it is all up with him.” — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in an 1888 letter to a family friend, referring to the cryptographic “proof” that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
T
he question of whether William Shakespeare, the petty bourgeois from Stratford, was capable of producing the crown jewels of English litera- ture has exercised cranks, partisans and legiti- mate scholars for 225 years. Francis Bacon has
proved to be an also-ran. The current money is on Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who had the acceptable aristo- cratic and educational pedigree for the job — presuming, that is, that you must practice falconry in order to write about it. Following this line of reasoning, we can assume that de Vere had seen his father’s ghost, an opportunity denied Shakespeare, as his own father was still alive when “Hamlet” was written. Surely, this is a Tempest in an academic teapot if ever there was one, and James Shapiro doesn’t take the theo- ries themselves overly seriously. The real, and fascinating, focus of “Contested Will” is on the circumstances and per- sonalities surrounding the genesis of those arguments, the way the historical and personal shaped the theoret- ical.
Along the way, Shapiro visits not only the best-known of the alternative-proposers (Delia Bacon, the 19th- century champion of her unrelated namesake; J.T. Looney —pronounced “Loney,” please — the former positivist sect
member whose 1920 “Shakespeare Identified” made the case for Oxford), but also such brilliant and opinionated dissenters as Mark Twain (Bacon), Sigmund Freud (Ox- ford) and Henry James (ambivalent — no surprise there). James was put off by the “sordid material details” of the man from Stratford’s life, including an unseemly atten- tion to money. Twain never quite specified why he favored Bacon, just remained eager, in his pugnacious, populist way, “to see our majestic Shakespeare unhorsed.” By far the most interesting motives, as one might expect, are Freud’s. Shapiro’s mind-boggling account of how Freud abandoned Shakespeare for Oxford when he realized that the former’s authorship threatened the reality of his Oedi- pal theory (which he believed was actually better illustrat- ed by “Hamlet” than by “Oedipus Rex”) is worth the whole book. It was Freud who wrote that there is a “powerful need” in human beings to know the answer to “the riddle of the miraculous gift that makes an artist.” But crazier impulses than need came into play with Shakespeare antagonists — one Oxfordian claimed to have contacted Shakespeare, Bacon and de Vere at seances, and Ignatius Donnelly tried to have Francis Bacon’s tomb opened so he could get to the manuscripts he was certain were buried with him. This is very near to the more morbid elements of mod- ern celebrity worship, and Shapiro dryly makes clear the growing, sometimes absurd, deification of Shakespeare since his death. A major contributor to the “Swan of Avon” mythos was the 18th-century English actor David Garrick, who had become a star playing Shakespeare and built a shrine to him on his estate. He was called “Shake- speare’s priest,” and his congregation extends down
CONTESTED WILL Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James Shapiro Simon & Schuster 339 pp. $26
through the 19th century: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Heine, Emerson, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Melville. (It may have been this adulation that got under the always iconoclastic Twain’s skin.) In 1913 the scholar J.M. Robertson suggested that the Bacon theory would never have taken hold “had not the idolatrous Shakespeareans set up a visionary figure of the Master.” By that time, as Shapiro points out, attitudes, even of the faithful, were shifting. The iconic Shakespeare character of the 19th century was the majestic patriarch Prospero, a benevolent magician in complete control of his world who sets that world right. But the 20th century belongs to the haunted, uncertain Hamlet, lost in the labyrinth of Elsinore and killer of a king. The book is rich with insight and analysis. Shapiro’s
examination of how the social situations of Looney and Delia Bacon contributed to their theories is sensitive and convincing. He sketches an incisive picture of Twain as the first author-corporation, complete with marketing plan. His proposal that practical theatrical reasons ac- count for Shakespeare’s turn to tragicomedy at the end of his career is bracingly down-to-earth. And in his attack against those who would limit what an artist can produce to what he has directly experienced, he champions not only common sense but creativity. How did the humble glover’s son from the provinces write all those varied and complex characters? “He imagined them all.”
bookworld@washpost.com Lloyd Rose is a former chief theater critic for The Washington Post. Edward de Vere
IMAGES COURTESY SIMON & SCHUSTER
HISTORY REVIEW BY BRIAN HALL When the cavalry needed saving
THE LAST STAND Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn By Nathaniel Philbrick Viking. 466 pp. $30
B
y this point, it might well be impossible to write much that is new about the Battle
of the Little Bighorn. The archives have been ransacked, the battle- field has been scoured by relic hunters and archaeologists. There have been pro-Custers and anti- Custers with their impassioned briefs; military tacticians with their dense, measured arguments; semioticians with their witty writ- ings about other writers’ writings; and popular historians, who strive to weave it all together into a nar- rative both accurate and entertain- ing — often contradictory aims. Nathaniel Philbrick’s new book,
“The Last Stand,” is popular his- tory, and it’s not fair to expect him to bring new evidence to light. To be sure, there’s the more or less ob- ligatory reference to a new source — an unpublished account by the daughter of one of Custer’s sol- diers, quoting from her father’s private papers — but Philbrick wisely doesn’t try to convince the reader that this is important ma- terial; it’s a touch here and there of marginalia.The only fair questions are whether his account is well re-
searched, his judgments reason- able and his writing engaging. The answers are yes, yes and yes. More- over, the book is a model of organi- zation, with lots of maps and pho- tographs and extensive endnotes properly delineating Philbrick’s sources much more clearly than is usual in this kind of work. The writing of good popular
history is a subtle art, and it’s worth comparing “The Last Stand” with James Donovan’s “A Terrible Glory,” which appeared only two years ago. The two books are concerned with the same event, draw on the same sources and take basically the same nar- rative approach, favoring a sim- plifying lucidity over confusing complexity (unlike, say, Evan Connell’s marvelously tortured and quixotic “Son of the Morning Star”). At times, reading the ac- counts in tandem feels like listen- ing to the same fantasia played by two different musicians. Dono- van’s performance is quite good; but Philbrick’s, in a number of small, nuanced ways, is superior. Philbrick, also the author of the
National Book Award-winning “In the Heart of the Sea,” better evokes what surely must have been the feeling of that day among the cav- alrymen, in which ignorance and overconfidence descended gradu- ally into reluctant confusion, then suddenly fell off a cliff into panic,
disbelief and death. A writer’s an- gel is in his details, and here’s an example of where Philbrick shines: During the initial charge on the Indian village, a soldier named Roman Rutten lost control of his horse, which raced ahead with him alone toward the enemy. Donovan mentions this briefly among a welter of other details, whereas Philbrick seizes on it as an opportunity to carry his readers vividly into the madness of the mo- ment: “Not until astride a runaway horse, it has been said, does a rider become aware of the creature’s true physical power.... Unable to stop or even slow his horse, Rutten apparently did what another trooper in the Seventh had done three years earlier when his horse bolted in an engagement during the Yellowstone campaign. ‘I, in desperation, wound the [reins] in one hand as far ahead as I could reach,’ the trooper remembered, ‘and pulled with all my might and pulled his head around . . . and got him turned.’ Rutten’s horse kept running, but at least he was now running in a circle. Over the course of the next two and a half miles, Rutten’s horse literally ran circles around the troopers, circumnavi- gating the battalion no fewer than three times.” Later, during the soldiers’ chaot-
ic retreat up the bluffs, interpreter Isaiah Dorman is about to be killed
LITTLE BIG HORN BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL MONUMENT A scene from the Battle of Little Bighorn, as drawn by Wooden Leg, a Cheyenne participant in the fight.
by several Indians closing in on him. Rutten, still clinging to his panicked horse, comes blasting through. “Goodbye Rutten!” Dor- man calls. A few yards farther on is Lt. Donald McIntosh, also seconds from death: “ ‘The horse tore right across the circle of Indians of which McIntosh was the center,’ Rutten later told an interviewer, ‘and on [I] went.’ ” That day must have been full of such lunatic snap- shots, their frail human comedy making the terror more terrible. Philbrick’s sense of the unex-
pected and the absurd lurking in human affairs pays off in larger ways. Donovan was plenty critical
of the command decisions of Cus- ter, his superiors and his subordi- nates, but he tended to hurry over their mistakes and their rivalries, whereas Philbrick brings them to the fore in a way that I find better explains the disaster. His Custer is not an egregious example of reck- less command; no, Philbrick’s case is more damning than that. He convincingly portrays the entire U.S. military in the West as a ca- pable producer of catastrophes, filled with insubordinate officers who hungered for personal glory at the expense of their soldiers, and who betrayed each other with ap- palling predictability. Just as Phil-
brick’s good eye attracted him to Rutten’s horse, his good ear picked out a beautiful quote from Theo- dore Roosevelt about that day, which could serve as an epigraph, and an epitaph, for any account of it: “Odd things happen in a battle, and the human heart has strange and gruesome depths and the hu- man brain still stranger shallows.”
bookworld@washpost.com
Brian Hall is the author, most recently, of “Fall of Frost” and “I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company.”
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