In love with Shakespeare
Poet John Berryman's long affair with the bard, in lectures, essays, memoirs of great performances

Author: By William H. Pritchard

Date: SUNDAY, March 7, 1999

Page: H1

Section: Books

In 1937, the young John Berryman, recent graduate of Columbia, won a fellowship to study English at Cambridge University. In his book of poems ``Love & Fame,'' published the year before his death by suicide in 1972, he expressed his anticipatory state of mind back then as, full of brash confidence, he sailed toward England: ``Yeats, Yeats, I'm coming! It's me. Faber & Faber, / you'll have to publish me some day with eclat / I haven't quite got the hang of the stuff yet / but I swamp with possibility.'' At Cambridge he submitted a 77-page essay, ``The Role of the Heroine in Shakespeare,'' for a prize he did not win (the board decided not to award one). Thus began -- though surely it had already begun -- the lifelong involvement with Shakespeare that, 27 years after his death, has eventuated in this extraordinary volume.

Its editor, John Haffenden, published the first biography of Berryman back in 1982; he has been working on and off for 20 years on the thousands of notes and drafts of Berryman's writings on Shakespeare. They include, as assembled here, pages from what would have been, had he completed it, a critical biography of the poet. There are also a number of lectures on the different periods in Shakespeare's career and on individual plays (Berryman delivered 34 lectures on Shakespeare at the Harvard Summer School in 1954 alone!), also some published and some unfinished essays. The two longest pieces in the volume are on the text of ``King Lear'' and on the possibility that one William Haughton was not only Mr. W. H., the ``friend'' of Shakespeare's sonnets, but a collaborator with him on ``The Taming of the Shrew.'' Haffenden says that this edition of Berryman's Shakespeare writings represents ``the most polished examples of the essays and lectures composed,'' and his 38-page introduction attends carefully to each item, while explaining the design of the whole.

For all these editorial efforts, it's hard to take the book that has resulted as more than an extremely impressive bag of Berryman's Shakespearean efforts. The essays on Lear and on Haughton take up more than 100 pages, and though Berryman liked to think of himself as a sleuth -- and he was indeed adept at conjecture and supposition -- only a ``Shrew'' specialist is going to rise to the Haughton essay. The pages on ``Lear'' make a bold and passionate plea that a good editor of Shakespeare cannot be a detached ``objective'' observer but must bring all the discipline of the literary critic to establishing the best text (the Quarto and Folio texts of ``Lear'' are significantly different). In this defense of the subjective element, Berryman went against the editorial dictates of the great scholar W. W. Greg, to whom he was indebted and whose interesting exchange of letters with Berryman is included by Haffenden. Berryman's admirable effort to make the fullest, most inclusive response to Shakespeare -- as reader, critic, biographer, and scholar -- is what gives his writing such continuous life. But the pages on ``Lear'' are hard going, as the critic works his way through various textual cruxes, and not all readers of this volume will persist in so doing.

From reading the three essays on Shakespeare published in Berryman's earlier collection of criticism, ``The Freedom of the Poet'' (1976), one had the sense of an enlivening personal voice that gave authority to his perceptions and judgments, as in some remarks from ``Shakespeare at Thirty,'' where he argues that the early ``Henry VI, Part 2,'' is a more considerable achievement than it has usually been taken to be, especially when compared with other plays of the period: ``Consider the superiority alone in theatrical address, the setting up of a story. `2 Henry VI' springs into being as ceremonial, joyous, expectant -- the King's bride, whom he has never seen, is about to arrive -- everything looks splendid -- then a fact, which we feel as odd, is introduced: she comes without dowry -- the King pays no attention -- but he is shrinking in our sight as the peers grow tall -- a qualm -- and suddenly, as the author loses the peers, power is pulling exactly seven ways -- in Scene ii, power pulls an eighth way -- and under this comparison, none of Shakespeare's rivals seem to have a story to tell at all.'' The long sentence, casually constructed, it seems, and stapled together by dashes, brings the scene before us fresh, and we are willing to grant the play's strength: So this is the way it arrestingly begins.

And, in ``Shakespeare's Early Comedy,'' an essay from late in Berryman's life that would have been part of the biography, we hear more about his fondness for this little-read and seldom performed history: ``But I took a friend, the poet and playwright Louis MacNeice, to a production at the Old Vic in 1953, and he agreed with me afterwards that it is a damned good play.'' Shakespeare scholars don't write this way; Berryman gets away with it and then some. His enumeration of Shakespearean qualities apparent even in such an early work suggests the passionate inwardness he brought to the dramatist, whose play revealed ``an intellect, an imagination, a structural sense, a wit, a sweetness and energy of versification, a syntax, gifts equally for plenitude and concision, all incomparable'' with his contemporary rivals.

Berryman is provocative and ambitious in his attempts to tell a story about Shakespeare's development, especially in its early stages. In 1594, having composed ``triumphs'' like ``Richard III'' and ``Love's Labour's Lost,'' and having attained some ``professional security,'' Shakespeare strikes out in new directions, ``turns his back upon all that at which he had shown himself most brilliant,'' and writes ``Richard II,'' ``Romeo and Juliet,'' and ``A Midsummer Night's Dream'' -- plays in which demonstrated intellectual brilliance has been replaced by the ``pathetic and dreamy.'' Berryman is equally interesting in his investigation of ``Antony and Cleopatra'' and ``Coriolanus'' as ``powerful, competent, even, and splendid'' plays, yet inferior to the great tragedies that immediately preceded them. Every so often he settles down and does some close reading of a sequence of verse; yet, intimate as he was with New Criticism, his chief interest is along different lines: the distinguishing of one style from another, and the historical and biographical dimensions to be considered by way of making a story out of Shakespeare's career as a dramatist.

Every so often, as with the memory of seeing ``2 Henry VI'' with MacNeice, a personal touch lights things up. He remembers seeing John Gielgud play Richard II in 1937, ``so exquisitely, so weakly, with such self-pity, such grotesquerie, so ridiculously, that the proper young lady with me threatened to leave me in my stall if I did not stop laughing.'' Or there was the performance (and how one would have liked to have been there) of ``Twelfth Night'' with Laurence Olivier as Sir Toby and Alec Guinness as Aguecheek, the latter ``equipped with a blond upstanding forelock exactly like Laurel's (of Laurel and Hardy).'' The drinking scenes between Olivier and Guinness were played ``so slowly that they might almost have been dead. First one, then the other, would rouse himself, Toby from all fumes, Sir Andrew from his brainlessness, and make a remark and lean back.'' Part of what makes Berryman such a vivid critic is his responsiveness to dramatic performance and the fact that he seems to have been there at all the best ones.

His occasional moments of irritation with a Shakespeare creation are refreshingly unacademic, as when, dealing with ``Much Ado About Nothing'' he takes a moment to abuse not only the bastard Don John (``a tedious, empty villain'') but adds that ``His crumby associates are no more interesting.'' But it is when he rises to admiration, as in describing the amazing opening scene of ``Lear,'' that he shows why Shakespeare's work ``seems different not simply in degree but in kind from the attempts and achievements of all other dramatists.'' To introduce nine important characters in an opening scene, then to follow it with Edmund's soliloquy, setting up the entire second action, is a task such that ``any sensible playwright, confronting all this, would adopt another trade.'' ``But,'' he asks ``what sensible playwright would have imagined all this? Perhaps we touch, here, in Shakespeare, the moment of self-confidence supreme in the craftman's portion in human art.''

In his introduction, Haffenden says that Berryman would have completed his biography of Shakespeare ``if only his life had allowed it.'' But perhaps that life, in its ambitious excess -- poetic, alcoholic, sexual, scholarly, critical -- was not the sort that ``allowed'' for prudent, limited achievements. When, near the end of his life, he applied for a fellowship to complete, in his own words, the ``large, psychosocial critical biography,'' his old professor and recommender, Mark Van Doren, told him privately, ``You will never finish the Shakespeare book. There will always be metal more attractive: poems, novels, a memoir, a collection of pensees -- God knows what else.'' Van Doren was right, but it's the imaginative excess in Berryman's criticism -- his refusal, like Shakespeare, to be a ``sensible'' writer -- that gives this rich collection permanent value.