BERRYMAN’S SHAKESPEARE
Editor by John Haffenden
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 396 pages, $35
During his prolific and tormented life, John Berryman completed many ambitious undertakings, most notably his long poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” and his epic sequence of 385 short, autobiographical poems, the “Dream Songs.”
But of his work on Shakespeare there was no end. Throughout his career as poet, scholar, teacher and critic, he wrote essays, lectures, letters and thousands more pages he hoped ultimately to decant into at least five books on the Bard, including “a large psychosocial critical biography” to be called “Shakespeare’s Reality.” By the time of his suicide, in 1972, Berryman had finished none of these books. He left behind a maze of manuscripts, as wayward and self-overlapping as Pooh’s and Piglet’s footprints in the snow. His biographer, John Haffenden, has chosen what he deems “the most polished examples” of Berryman’s work on Shakespeare, and has arranged them in a sensible sequence: first a set of lectures that amount to a compact version (170 pages) of the planned critical biography; second a cluster of more detailed scholarly articles and letters on “King Lear,” the sonnets and “The Taming of the Shrew”; and last a series of short meditations on the poems and on individual plays. Taken together, these pieces make a peculiar, flawed and wonderful book.
Some of the flaws are the editor’s, some the author’s. Haffenden offers no clear, consistent account of when and for whom Berryman wrote (or rewrote) each of the pieces presented here; no easy cues for matching endnotes to text; no index to help the reader assemble and enjoy everything the poet has to say (in his many resayings and revisions) about a particular play, or character, or speech. Haffenden deserves thanks for opening the labyrinth of Berryman’s writings to public view, but he has scanted his duties as guide and gatekeeper.
The flaws in the pieces themselves have to do not with the impressive things Berryman accomplishes, but with the impossible thing he tries. Any biographer of Shakespeare works within a paradox of vacuum and surfeit. The documentary record reveals too little; the plays tell too much: Who, if any, among those hundreds of characters speaks for the “real” Shakespeare?
In all psychosocial biographies of Shakespeare, the biographer’s own psyche and social assumptions intervene to select the data, to fill the gaps, and to shape the account. So it is with Berryman. He sifts the evidence with a scholar’s patience. He labors obsessively among the details; he once tried to read everything Shakespeare had read, in hopes of coming closer to the wellsprings of the plays. Still, at many moments in the book, Berryman’s Shakespeare markedly resembles Berryman himself: as a poet who discloses his authentic inner life in a long sequence of short poems (the sonnets, the “Dream Songs”); whose work is haunted by his father’s death; who suffers a lifelong identity crisis that sunders him from himself but bears fruit in his writings; and who at the end of his career (in “The Tempest,” in the “Dream Songs”) longs for rest, for death.
It is easy to spot these convergences, but it is easy also to be moved by them, and to be convinced of their usefulness for a reckoning of what Shakespeare did and who he was. Lately we have had Shakespeare in abundance or (as the man himself once wrote) “Will in overplus”: Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare, Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, with many more to come. Berryman’s Shakespeare is something else again: a Shakespeare tracked closely and passionately by a brilliant fellow poet.
Berryman’s biography is as imaginary as any, but more imaginative than most. It is better informed, not only by his massive erudition but by his affinity as an artist. When Berryman suggests that, until late in his career, Shakespeare “probably did not yet regard himself, as a dramatist, as part of the great line of love poets stretching from Euripides through Virgil and Ovid to Chaucer,” his surmise possesses the authority of experience, with the memory of what it’s like to labor long amid the shadows of intimidating masters.
Always interesting on Shakespeare’s life, Berryman is often astonishing on Shakespeare’s words. Writing not merely as critic but as poet, he catches effects the rest of us might miss. Take one of his favorite Shakespearean moments, to which he returns repeatedly. After a life of exuberant villainy, Richard III seeks slumber on the eve of battle. But the ghosts of his many victims have arisen in a dream to foretell his death the next day. Awake and shaken, he tries to reassure himself that at least “Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I.” (The argument is precarious: Richard’s present panic gives this seeming logic the lie; he will shortly declare, “O, no, alas, I rather hate myself.”)
Here is some of what Berryman has to say about the line “Richard loves Richard . . .”:
“The pivoting of the line after its fifth syllable has no parallel at this date. . . . It obliges us to contrast three heavy first words, a strong unit, with the hesitant traipsing that follows. . . . (W)e can say with confidence that what is in question here is an unmasterable identity crisis, and see that (Shakespeare’s creation) of an imperturbable and omnipotent ego for Richard . . . was undertaken just toward this last-ditch line, where the rocking, unstable, unconvincing, double self-assertion suddenly reverses the process and he goes to pieces.”
The pscyhologizing here is intriguing enough, couched in Berryman’s characteristically flowing, forceful prose. But the listening is nearly matchless. Perhaps only a poet could fully register the way the line, in its beat and its wobble, acts out Richard’s failure to fool himself and thereby consummates Shakespeare’s whole huge design.
This kind of ear training takes place on page after page, where Berryman teaches us to hear the wonders in lines well off the beaten path of Quotable Shakespeare, far from the familiar precincts of “To be, or not to be.” One of Berryman’s “Dream Songs” begins with these lines: “I have strained everything except my ears,/He marvelled to himself.” In this book on Shakespeare that he never could complete, Berryman’s efforts as scholar and biographer do show occasional signs of strain. But his ears remain a marvel, a source of revelations.
