Why do people read a biography of Shakespeare? Either as a substitute for or as a supplement to a reading of his work. I may read about Byron or Orton because the life itself is both well-documented and well worth watching; but Shakespeare’s life is neither. How he behaved, what he endured, who he knew, where he went — such information does not expand or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works — various and ambiguous as they are — tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far more often, we must apply our pre-fabricated theories about the world and the human in order to interpret the artifacts and ambifacts before us.
So why write about the life, instead of the works? The life is a cover for an interpretation of the works; it gives the pretence of objectivity and the pleasure of narrative to a few hundred pages of critical fiat. Russell Fraser’s Shakespeare: The Later Years contains 88 pages of notes (the text itself is only 280 pages); but the overwhelming majority are simply line-references to phrases culled from Shakespeare’s plays and poems, verbal glitter with which Fraser decorates his own rococo prose. Some pages of notes (290, 296, 300 …) consist entirely of such citations, and some pages of text consist largely of such quotations (pages 50 to 57, for instance, contain 80).
This is the second half of a two-part biography; Young Shakespeare, published in 1988, is now in paperback, and we can probably look forward to a boxed set, which ambitious grandparents will bestow upon thousands of helpless teenagers. Both volumes give the impression of serious documentation, and quite a few people have taken the biography as a serious piece of scholarship. But Fraser’s apparatus tells you almost nothing that you could not find yourself, assisted merely by a concordance, and the same is true of Fraser’s text, a recitation of numbingly conventional interpretations of the works, dangling from a thin, dirty-from-overuse string of biography. For anyone at all familiar with this subject or this period, having to read both volumes is like being forced to eat, hour after hour, mouthful after mouthful of stale cake.
The moral — or premise — of Fraser’s story is that Shakespeare is the greatest: “he had no rivals, ancient or modern.” Admirers of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe or anyone else, see ye the error of your ways, and repent: abandon your idols, and worship the one true god. Fraser devotes three and a half pages (pages 170-74) to the whole of Jacobean drama, brusquely dismissing Webster and Jonson and Ford, not even mentioning Middleton — except to dismiss The Revenger’s Tragedy, which he continues to misattribute to Tourneur — apparently as uninterested in the last two decades of textual scholarship as he is in the first two decades of 17th-century drama. Shakespeare stands alone. Good monotheism, but bad biography.
What, in the gospel according to St Fraser, makes Shakespeare so great? He is unfailingly impartial. He has no opinions, and expresses them beautifully. St Fraser, by contrast, is full of opinions, which unassisted readers will often have difficulty distinguishing from facts. On page three alone, he asserts, without qualification, that The Comedy of Errors was Shakespeare’s “first attempt at comedy,” that three of his first plays were printed by “pirate publishers,” that by 1594 Shakespeare was already known for “kingly roles and old man’s roles.” The first claim is at best debatable, the other two simply wrong.
—Gary Taylor
Ambifacts
The War on Drugs may have failed, but it certainly hasn’t ended: every 25 seconds in the US, someone is arrested for drug possession.
The second presidential debate on Sunday night was a strange one, with Donald Trump appearing to be on the brink of a meltdown in the first 20 to 30 minutes and then steadying himself the rest of the way. But here’s the bottom line: Based on post-debate polls, Hillary Clinton probably ended the night in a better place than she started it. And almost without question, she ended the weekend — counting the debate, the revelation on Friday of a 2005 tape in which Trump was recorded appearing to condone unwanted sexual contact against women, and the Republican reaction to the tape — in an improved position.
In less than an hour the polls will open. Americans nationwide will join together with Americans around the world. And you will be launching the largest voting effort in the history of Americankind. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interest. Perhaps it is fate that today is the day to elect Hillary Clinton. And that once again you will be fighting the forces of fascism. Fighting tyranny, oppression, and persecution. Fighting annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. As gay, straight, black, Asian, white, woman, transgender, immigrant or native born. For today is the day that America declared in nearly one voice “We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We are going to live on. We are going to survive. And we are going to defeat the Orange Menace!“
He [the boy] disappears soon, you know. And the baby too. She is the first to vanish from the scene. The drama consists finally in this: when that mother re-enters my house, her family born outside of it, and shall we say superimposed on the original, ends with the death of the little girl, the tragedy of the boy, and the flight of the elder daughter. It cannot go on, because it is foreign to its surroundings. So after much torment, we three remain: I, the mother, that son. Then, owing to the disappearance of that extraneous family, we too find ourselves strange to one another. We find we are living in an atmosphere of mortal desolation which is the revenge, as he [indicating the son] scornfully said of the Demon of Experiment, that unfortunately hides in me. Thus, sir, you see when faith is lacking, it becomes impossible to create certain states of happiness, for we lack the necessary humility. Vaingloriously, we try to substitute ourselves for this faith, creating thus for the rest of the world a reality which we believe after their fashion, while, actually, it doesn’t exist. For each one of us has his own reality to be respected before God, even when it is harmful to one’s very self.
By that point it was pretty apparent by his actions that it was already his [Mitch McConnell] number one goal. He validated what I think most of this town knew. When I came into office, my working assumption was that because we were in crisis, and the crisis had begun on the Republicans’ watch, that there would be a window in which they would feel obliged to cooperate on a common effort to dig us out of this massive hole. Probably the moment in which I realized that the Republican leadership intended to take a different tack was actually as we were shaping the stimulus bill, and I vividly remember having prepared a basic proposal that had a variety of components. We had tax cuts; we had funding for the states so that teachers wouldn’t be laid off and firefighters and so forth; we had an infrastructure component. We felt, I think, that as an opening proposal, it was ambitious but needed and that we would begin negotiations with the Republicans and they would show us things that they thought also needed to happen. On the drive up to Capitol Hill to meet with the House Republican Caucus, John Boehner released a press statement saying that they were opposed to the stimulus. At that point we didn’t even actually have a stimulus bill drawn up, and we hadn’t meant to talk about it. And I think we realized at that point what proved to be the case in that first year and that second year was a calculation based on what turned out to be pretty smart politics but really bad for the country: If they cooperated with me, then that would validate our efforts. If they were able to maintain uniform opposition to whatever I proposed, that would send a signal to the public of gridlock, dysfunction, and that would help them win seats in the midterms. It was that second strategy that they pursued with great discipline. It established the dynamic for not just my presidency but for a much sharper party-line approach to managing both the House and the Senate that I think is going to have consequences for years to come.
Nevertheless, according to the latest Marquette poll, 44 percent of the respondents believe that at least as many illegal votes are cast as legal votes. In 2014, for example, 2.9 million votes were cast in Wisconsin’s congressional elections. You do the math. If the 44 percent of the respondents in the Marquette poll are right, then there were well over a million votes cast illegally in that election. This is, to put it mildly, so insanely detached from reality as to make you wonder whether or not alma mater’s pollsters oversampled schizophrenics and people who see the face of Jesus in their wallpaper.
In fact, growth in all of these countries slowed in the years after 1997 when they switched from running trade deficits to surpluses. The slowdown was less in Vietnam than in the other countries of the region, but even Vietnam had slower growth in the period touted by Popper than in the years from 1991 to 1997. In other words, the idea that manufacturing workers in the US had to take a hit to allow people in the developing world to escape poverty is absurd on its face.
I frequently read stories that should have been spiked because they don’t really say much of anything. The problem is that after spending days or weeks reporting something, no reporter wants to leave empty-handed. So they write something, even if it’s little more than narrative or innuendo. Editors should be more aggressive about killing stuff like this.
David Brooks has a new reason to be disappointed in Obamacare. The problem is not so much that the new law has done bad things — he concedes that it has insured 20 million people — but that it was sold on a false basis. It is mostly helping poor people obtain insurance, he observes sadly, rather than overturning the entire system. “[T]his is not bad. But we’d have had a very different debate if we knew the law was going to be a discrete government effort to subsidize health care for more poor people,” writes Brooks in his column today. “For one thing, Democrats would have probably paid a much smaller political price if their effort wasn’t billed as an extravagant government grab to take over the nation’s health care system.” This is a great point. Why, exactly, did the Democrats decide to advertise their plan as an extravagant government grab to take over the nation’s health-care system? That turns out to have been a really poor choice!
