Shakespeare by Mark Van Doren

What now of his vices, and why is it that they have not the sound of vices? None of them is an end in itself--that is their secret, just as Falstaff's character is his mystery. He does not live to drink or steal or lie or foin o' nights. He even does not live in order that he may be the cause of wit in other men. We do not in fact know why he lives. The great boulder is balanced lightly on the earth, and can be tipped with the lightest touch. He cannot be overturned. He knows too much, and he understands too well the art of delivering with every lie he tells an honest weight of profound and personal revelation.

Years ago I set a goal for myself: I wanted to read all of Shakespeare's plays. It helped to have read a bunch of them already, but if you try to stick to one book by an author per year like I do, filling in the gaps takes a while, and soon you find you're down to the dregs: the Henry Sixes, the Pericleses, the Titi Andronici. So for a few years I let it slip. What I needed, I suppose, was inspiration: a Shakespeare-loving voice to bring me back into love with the words again. This collection of essays by Mark Van Doren--professor an father of Charles Van Doren, the Quiz Show cheat--serves quite nicely for the purpose.

Writing a little essay about each play--what a fusty old pastime, with a smell of New Criticism. Bloom had his, but I'm sure he and Van Doren are not alone in having written their little Shakespeare books. Like Bloom, if I remember correctly, Van Doren arranges his by what was accepted as chronology at the time, beginning with the Henry VI plays and ending with Henry VIII. Like Bloom and the New Critics before them, Van Doren is chiefly in love with the words of Shakespeare's poetry: history and historiography, the wrangling of source material, the political and social context of the plays, these are all asides at best. What one gets instead is a lot of words, and though Van Doren says in his introduction that he will keep quotations as brief as possible, he actually loves to stack quotations one after the other, in full pages of text, as if to overpower us with the power of the poetry--or sometimes, depending on the judgment, its lack. Furthermore, Van Doren likes to thread words and phrases borrowed from the plays into his own words, leaving the reader--me--not always certain if a lovely turn of phrase is Van Doren's, an accomplished stylist, or Shakespeare's.

Shakespeare is chiefly concerned with passing judgments. Shakespeare is in control of his genius, or not in control of his genius, or reaching toward genius. He controls his theme, or the theme controls him, or the theme escapes his control and becomes genius. Most of the judgments are as expected, but a few plays come in for surprising disregard--All's Well That Ends Well--while some are lifted surprisingly to the ranks of the greats--like Antony and Cleopatra. It's all sort of an antiquated-seeming exercise, but let's be honest, it's what most of us dilettantes love to do: argue about which plays we love and which ones we don't quite get. It was enough to whet my appetite to dive back into the plays--even Henry VI.