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Reading Shakespeare

The Rough Guide to Shakespeare,
Andrew Dixon
How to Read Shakespeare,
Nicholas Royle
William Shakespeare, in his times, for our times,
Michael Rosen

Munira Mirza
posted 1 December 2005

Walk into any bookshop these days and you will find a panoply of 'books that are not books'. Situated near the door or counter (so that you don't have to spend long wandering around for them), these little products are the ultimate in unimaginative gifts: famous quotations for women, a pocket-sized collection of cocktail recipes, lists of literary trivia. The industry of 'books that are not books' has sprawled into the world of literature itself, so that it is now possible to buy books that condense great classics into one page summaries, enabling you to digest Dickens in a mere ten minutes, whilst sitting on the loo.

For no other writer has the industry for 'books about books, that are not books' grown than for Shakespeare. There are books offering neat synopses of his plays, (yes, Shakespeare on the loo), dictionaries about the people who have performed in Shakespeare's plays, as well as the people featuring in his own life. If you want to savour the wisdom of his plays without actually reading them, you can even read What Would Shakespeare Have Done? which is a self-help guide, using lines from his works to illuminate personal situations (it has a sticker on the back offering a wristband for readers). As well as the books there are posters, bookmarks, maps, stickers and much more besides.

Arguably, the growth of such products responds to a genuine public fascination with Shakespeare and reflects the popularisation of his works in film and theatre adaptations around the world for the past sixty or so years. Nor has such interest merely churned out pop-Shakespeare. There has also been some thoughtful and engaging criticism. Publishers have been willing to give professors a stab at the mass market. Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode, and Jonathan Bate are just a few academic names who have reached a popular readership on the back of the 'Shakespeare industry'.

One of the better introductions to the bard is the Rough Guide to Shakespeare, set out (unsurprisingly, considering its publishers) in the form of a travel book and packed with information about the plays, the textual histories, historical context and the range of performances on stage, film and even on DVD. The book delves into the literary criticism surrounding individual plays in remarkable detail and each work is accompanied with interesting and insightful essays by writer Andrew Dickson. The book promises everything you might need if you were about to embark on a year long trip to Shakespeareland, which in some ways might be its weakness. You sense it probably has too much in it to be digested by the reader. Indeed, this works better as a resource to refer to after reading a play, in order to find out more about it. The handy synopsis of each play is particularly useful for the first time reader who may have lost the plot. This is an ideal option for a parent looking for an educational birthday or Christmas present for their sixteen year old who is reading Shakespeare at school. However, it would also suit someone coming to Shakespeare for the first time after many years, who feels daunted by the challenge and wants a helping hand.

How to Read Shakespeare, by Nicholas Royle, is an antidote to the conveyor belt of books about Shakespeare which never actually refer to his language. This concise and clear guide takes seven of his plays and attempts to explore some of Shakespeare's themes, ideas and imagery through the hook of a single word in each. This works to excellent effect, using sections of Shakespeare's plays to illuminate the whole. Royle does not deliver a comprehensive reading, but merely provides a springboard of thought. This is a particularly important lesson for the sixth form student who might be tempted to scan the internet for a quick essay 'explaining' Macbeth within a set GCSE essay word limit. Royle's success lies in the way he opens up Shakespeare's language and demonstrates his word play. He shows that long before Derrida and his cohort of postmodernists, Shakespeare was already playing with the fluidity of words and their meanings. There is no endpoint, no final conclusion to the plays, just a delicious revisiting, only to discover the interpretation has changed.

Royle is careful not to reduce Shakespeare to linguistic readings, but to imagine the theatricality of the language as it would have been performed too. He cites the line spoken by Lorenzo to Lancelot in The Merchant of Venice: 'I shall grow jealous of you shortly Lancelot, if you thus get my wife into corners'. By using the word 'corners' Shakespeare is playing on its sexual connotations - as it was often used to mean female genitals - and also with its resemblance to 'horn', signifying cuckoldry. However, Royle also points out that on stage, Lancelot and Jessica will be stood on one side of the stage in a corner, away from Lorenzo. The words are intertwined with the physicality of the play. Royle's reading of Macbeth through the word 'safe' is perhaps the most persuasive in the book. Although Macbeth is the murderer, his victim sleeps peacefully, whilst he remains vulnerable to his own doubts and anxieties. He draws upon the language of the play, as well as the texts that Shakespeare himself would have read, to reveal to us the sensitivity with which Shakespeare presents Macbeth's and Lady Macbeth's inner lives.

William Shakespeare, in his times, for our times by Michael Rosen, is a much more explicit backlash against the Shakespeare industry. Rosen complains that Shakespeare has become emasculated by being turned into a marketing phenomenon. He wants to restore the political messages and subtext of the plays. The argument is valid and the reader has some sympathy for his cause. Of course Shakespeare was a man who wrote about the upheaval and social issues of his own time, and truly the battle of ideas remains as crucial for us today. Rosen opens with a blinding demonstration of Shakespeare's ability to crystallise social change through the character of Edmund in King Lear. Here is the bastard son of a nobleman, who is more talented and brilliant than his legitimate brother, Edgar, yet receives less admiration from his father because of the accident of birth. He is Modern Man, the new merchant class who can steal the wealth of titled ancestors by sheer wit. He is emblematic of a new world order that was emerging in Shakespeare's own time.

Despite claiming to want to save Shakespeare from the sanitised readings of professors and literary critics, one can't help feel Rosen is not exactly original. Lionel Trilling in 'Sincerity and Authenticity' wrote insightfully about the social dynamics of Shakespeare's villains over forty years ago. With Iago, he explored the way in which men who make their own character and fate are destined to contravene the known order. He showed how 'evil' was nothing absolute, but designated so because it presented a challenge to the political order. In this sense, Trilling never counterposed character and politics as Rosen does; seeing them rather as entwined. Rosen may wish to rescue the radicalism of Shakespeare, but he needn't bin 'character analysis' in doing so.

This is an enjoyable book and tells the reader something about the historical context of Shakespeare's writings. It is not as detailed as the writings of Stephen Greenblatt, who pioneered this 'New Historicist' approach, but it provides a good introduction. Sometimes Rosen hits bum notes, though. Comparing Jacobean England to the miners' strike of Thatcher's Britain is a crude device, and not a little patronising to the reader. Indeed, the tone of the book assumes that the reader has never noticed that Shakespeare is political and that all we care about is fairies and love and all that guff.

Perhaps the weakest point of the book is the complaint that Shakespeare remains the preserve of the elite, whilst ordinary people are denied the political weaponry of his plays. It may have passed Rosen by, but the biggest threat to Shakespeare is not his aggrandisement, but the 'tyranny of relevance'. He is being repackaged as an ordinary bloke, a grammar school boy with no O Levels, who made it good. The fad for doing Shakespeare in the modern world and dressing up Romeo and Juliet in shell suits shows a belief that ordinary people won't understand the sophistication of his plays, so they need it brought down to them in a less intimidating way. The 'political' importance of his plays however, is more mediated and nuanced than such interpretations allow. Shakespeare is not writing about Thatcher (though it's true, she looked a bit like Elizabeth I). He is writing about ideas and these require a sophisticated understanding of the language and historical context of the plays. Truly to grasp the radicalism of Shakespeare, you need an education in him. The fault of our society is that such an education is rarely found in schools. For all the shallow attributes of the 'Shakespeare industry', these intelligent guides at least give the novice reader a fighting chance.