The Shakespeare Wars, by Ron Rosenbaum

A great joy of public libraries is coming across books you heard about when new, didn't get around to reading then, and which subsequently slipped to the back of your mind. This is one, and I found it compelling reading but oddly mixed in quality.

Rosenbaum's "wars" are scholarly disputes over the reading, editing, meaning, and interpretation of Shakespeare's works. He robustly declares that Shakespeare's biography does not interest him: we don't know enough about him to write one meaningfully, and our only interest in the man is that he wrote the works, so why not study the works instead? That's where the genius lies. I am with him all the way when he says that Shakespeare's life (or even an alternative author's life, if one believes that rot, which Rosenbaum has no time for) doesn't explain the genius.

Unfortunately Rosenbaum fails to follow his own advice, and spends one of his long chapters desperately trying to find echoes of Shakespearian dramatic ambiguity in Shakespeare's personal testimony as a witness in a lawsuit. A very dull and confusing lawsuit, by the way.

Nor is Rosenbaum capable of explaining a stage-directorial controversy over the proper speaking of Shakespeare's lines without an audio recording showing what the different approaches sound like.

He is better in discussing Shakespeare editing, especially the textual divergences in Hamlet and Lear and the recent revolution in how to present them, but that may have been clear to me because I already knew all that stuff.

It was cheering to read Rosenbaum's thorough demolition of foolish and over-rated Shakespeare scholars like Harold Bloom (who, if you take Rosenbaum's word for it, argues that Falstaff was the first and possibly greatest rounded human being in literary history) and Donald Foster (who, having raised a legitimate question as to whether an obscure anonymous poem might have been by Shakespeare, then fell into his own trap and declared it was definitely so, and then had to crawl back and admit it definitely wasn't).

But my confidence in Rosenbaum's charaterizations of contrary positions was shaken ( behind the cut )

the kind of minor factual errors ...

"the kind of minor factual errors ... that will mean nothing to most people but that, when you do recognize them, and they keep popping up to poke you in the eye again and again, began to make a book seem like it was put together as a silent protest against the lack of editors in the publishing industry" - Phil Nugent

Charles Peters, distinguished founding editor of The Washington Monthly, who is 84 years old, just published a book on Lyndon Johnson for "The American Presidents" series edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who is dead.

On page 33, we learn that after the Republican Party won control of Congress in 1946, "in the Senate, the new majority leader was Robert A. Taft." No. Taft was a leading Republican senator, but he did not become majority leader until a few months before his death in 1953.

On page 40, when Johnson joins the Senate in 1949, he "received a quick lesson in Senate culture when he attempted to pressure the Senate president pro tem, Carl Hayden, for a large suite of offices, only to have his importunings ignored." No. It was Hayden (Robert Caro tells this story in full), but though he was a leading Democratic senator, he didn't become president pro tem until 1957.

Come on, guys. I don't claim to have your knowledge and experience as a political junkie, but I know this stuff off the top of my head. Get it right, or don't waste our time with your books.