Review by New York Times Review
SHAKESPEARE'S POWER TO ENDURE has been ensured by twin track modes of survival: his life on the page and on the stage. His texts are pored over scrupulously by academics, read dreamily by kids and scanned with soft remembrance by the sere. At any given moment, his dramatic verse is sung, shouted, muttered and sometimes spoken with the warm assurance it needs, from hundreds of stages to thousands of eager spectators. Two new books - "Shakespeare's Library," by Stuart Kells, and "What Blest Genius?," by Andrew McConnell Stott - offer insights from each strand. Stott's book delivers a vivacious portrait of the Stratford-upon-Avon Jubilee of 1769, organized by the actor and manager David Garrick, whose goal was to make a lot of noise for himself and in the process marmorealize Shakespeare. Kells goes on a quest through the oddly perverse world of booksellers and bibliographers, in search of Shakespeare's own tomes. Coming from a performance rather than an academic background, I have a greater propensity for the Garrick story, but whatever your background, it's easy to distinguish between a book to be cherished and one to be thrown across the room. Garrick's Jubilee of 1769 runs the Fyre Festival of 2017 close for overambition, chaotic planning and near disaster. Garrick, unlike Billy McFarland, somehow got away with it. Britain was in a state of turbulence, with the public, Parliament and crown in revolt against one another. Benjamin Franklin said he witnessed around England at this time "riots about elections; riots about workhouses; riots of colliers; riots of weavers; riots of coal-heavers; riots of sawyers; riots of sailors." When Garrick attempted to reduce the number of discounted tickets at his own Drury Lane, a riot ensued from the pit in the presence of the king, the queen and Casanova, which led to the shredding of the theater. As a grand distraction, Garrick threw a fabulous party in the middle of England to canonize a new English saint, William Shakespeare. Talked up by the froth-thirsty press and obsessed over by sensation-hungry society, the event was a must-see. As the date approached, the poorly kept roads between London and the modest market town that was Stratford were clogged with coaches. On the day before the opening, it became impossible for carriages to get in or out across the one narrow bridge. When ticket-holders finally arrived, accommodation was to be had only at a ridiculous premium; Lord Daft and Lady Bonkers found themselves sleeping in local stables with the cows. As a Midlands morning dawned to kick things off, gray clouds filled the skies, and soon began to weep. They carried on doing so for three days. A lavishly costumed pageant was canceled, and logistics were horribly disrupted. The centerpiece of the event was a newly built wooden rotunda to house musical performances, feasts and balls. By the time of the final dance, it had filled up with water: "As the evacuees splashed away, the rotunda creaked and groaned, loosening its hinges as its founda- The actor tions imperceptibly rose and began to float." The image of the British aristocracy wading through muddy quadrilles is irresistible. Yet Garrick pulled it off. Though barely a word of Shakespeare was spoken over the three days, the actor summoned the entire throng to the rotunda late one morning to listen to a self-penned ode to Shakespeare. The verse here is both incantatory and ordinary but Garrick's performance, full of fiercely restrained passion and a mystical sense of otherness, gathered the energy of the whole event into a time-stopping instant. For an enchanted moment everyone held a breath and felt history occurring. Many swooned, many sobbed, none forgot. This is a hallowed form of what can best be described as The Higher Hogwash. It is deferential, humbled and in touch with the gods. It manages to be both transparently bogus and movingly convincing. It has got English actors through a whole load of scrapes across the centuries. A serious need for devotion lay beneath the sodden bombast. Stratford was a Catholic-leaning town, and England was a nostalgically Catholic country, however far and wide Protestant sympathies rampaged. When Lord Grosvenor raised a cup carved from Shakespeare's mulberry tree, treating the "blest relic" as if it were a chalice filled with Communion wine, the eyebrows of the more puritan present were raised high. The same tree competed with famous Christian icons for its rate of reliquary dismemberment. It's not hard, in a country that felt an atavistic hunger for saints and sanctification, to grasp the need for such bardolatry. Stott quotes Boswell's enthusiasm for Garrick's acting by saying that he made "particles of vivacity" dance within him "by a sort of contagion." The same compliment is owed to Stott for the manner in which he tells this eccentric story. Stuart Kells's search for Shakespeare's lost library takes him down highways and byways, which will be fascinating to those obsessed with books and manuscripts but full of unintended comedy for everyone else. He tells us early on that "among Shakespearean researchers (very, very broadly defined), more than one died from arsenic poisoning or narcotics; more than one perished in prison. There are serious whispers of a Shakespeare Curse." It would be truly hard to come up with a more expansive definition of "researcher." While sifting through details of how in the course of history someone passed on an obscure quarto edition to someone else, it is hard not to think that the curse is on the reader. There is an enduring paradox in the centuries of bibliographical obsession with the work of a man who didn't give a hoot about books. We owe much to the heroism of John Heminges and Henry Condell for collecting Shakespeare's work, and to Edmond Malone and generations of others for carefully editing it. But it is exhausting dealing with the higher priests of Shakespearean arcana, who believe that because they are enthralled by book bindings, frontispieces and vellum, then Shakespeare must have been too. In the world of these high priests, nothing can be what it seems. Heminges and Condell can't have compiled the First Folio simply because the historical record says they did; Ben Jonson can't have approved of his contemporary because he wrote just that; and finally, of course, we tumble into the monumental blindness to reality of the authorship question. Shakespeare cannot be Shakespeare, because he was. Kells discounts the authorship nonsense efficiently, but not before giving it an unjustified amount of airtime. Two acquaintances in Melbourne, where he lives, were Shakespeare skeptics, an academic choice that Kells is keen to portray as one of living-on-the-edge excitement. To complement their literary risk-taking, we are told of the dangers of their local neighborhood: "Bushfires regularly threatened the district. On the main road, reckless kangaroos jumped precipitously into the path of cars." Somehow his friends survived the perils of kamikaze marsupials to become passionate supporters of the authorship case of Sir Henry Neville. Having debunked most of the betterknown rival claimants, Kells settles on his own theory, which is that Shakespeare was only a dramatic adapter of previous texts, and a clumsy one at that. Most of the quality in the plays comes from the editing process. In Kells's surmise this was done by John Florio and Ben Jonson, who "did what editors do today: tighten syntax, enrich vocabulary, improve structure and flow, enhance rhythm and rhyme, and beautify the whole." It's hard to imagine that he has ever looked at the First Folio. One of the principal proofs for his argument is that he knows of two Jacobean contemporaries who bought both Jonson's "Workes" of 1616 and the First Folio of 1623, suggesting that the two volumes were seen at the time as "part of a single endeavor." This defies belief. A book so determined to chase its own tail in its pointlessness has every right to become a cult classic. Everyone, as has been frequently commented, makes a Shakespeare in his or her own image. His comprehensive universality, and his ability to match each and every one of us and become uniquely ours, is another of the modes by which he survives - fresh, pertinent and alive. The Shakespearean umbrella is broad and embracing, and it can happily cover egomaniacal actor-managers, and even kangaroo-endangered bibliographers. Dominic dromgoole was the artistic director of the Globe Theater from 2006 to 2016. His book "Hamlet Globe to Globe: Two Years, 190,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play" was published in 2017.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
In Shakespeare's prominence in the literary canon, Stott sees not the inevitable consequence of the writer's talent but rather the contingent outcome of unpredictable cultural events. In chronicling the course of those events, Stott teaches readers about privileges afforded certain royal courtiers at the reopening of Britain's theaters at the end of the Puritan Interregnum, making it profitable to stage adapted versions of Macbeth, The Tempest, and other Shakespearean plays neglected for decades. But the event Stott highlights as pivotal in securing the Bard's fame, the 1769 Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon, springs from the ambitions of actor David Garrick, who magnifies his own thespian celebrity by presiding over a national affirmation of Shakespeare's genius. Recounted partly from the colorful perspective of biographer James Boswell, the story of this carnival-like event surges with the energies of scholars, enthusiasts, opportunists, and inebriates, who, for three rain-soaked days, forget their political and regional differences to honor a dramatist who understood the dizzying diversity of human types. A vibrant re-creation of an epoch-making festival.--Bryce Christensen Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Stott (The Poet and the Vampyre) entertainingly chronicles the 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon, which he asserts cemented Shakespeare's status as the "weightiest of cultural authorities." The book describes the Jubilee as the brainchild of Stratford-upon-Avon's civic leaders, who hoped to thereby raise their town's profile. To do so, they enlisted the aid of renowned actor David Garrick, who had built his career around Shakespeare, whom he revered. While the Jubilee itself was largely a disaster, plagued by heavy rains, flooding, price gouging, and tacky displays, Garrick emerged unscathed. The ode he wrote to Shakespeare was the hit of the festival, and Stratford-Upon-Avon became a popular tourist destination. However, it's James Boswell, famous as Samuel Johnson's biographer, who emerges as the book's true star. Boswell, a good friend of Garrick's, shameless self-promoter, and fervent Shakespeare lover, attended the Jubilee, recorded and published his impressions, and managed to enjoy himself despite the event's many failings. Whether or not the Jubilee was the watershed moment in Shakespeare veneration Stott claims, he provides a lively, page-turning narrative, and proves that shamelessly overhyped media events are not just modern phenomena. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A marvelous account of the world's first literary festival.Early on in this delightful book, Stott (English/Univ. of Southern California; The Poet and the Vampyre: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature's Greatest Monsters, 2014, etc.) notes that after Shakespeare's death in 1616 "his plays quickly fell from the repertoire." When Charles II became king in 1660, public performances were encouraged, and works by Ben Jonson and others flourished. Shakespeare's playssometimes heavily revisedand his reputation made a comeback thanks to cheap editions of his works. In 1769, the great English actor David Garrick, "fast on his way to becoming the most famous man in Britain," decided to celebrate the Bard with a grand Jubilee in sleepy Stratford-upon-Avon. Stott chronicles in luscious detail the ups and downs of the event, from the extensive preparations to the key players involved, including Garrick's younger brother, George. James Boswell, soon to be author of a masterful biography of Samuel Johnson, called it a "festival of genius." Johnson "dismissed the Jubilee with scorn." The Stratford townspeople were apprehensive. Who would pay for it? Where would the anticipated 3,000 visitors stay? Tickets, signed by Garrick, portraits of Garrick and Shakespeare, and commemorative ribbons were issued. A statue of Shakespeare was erected in Stratford, and a massive, wooden rotunda to host balls, dinners, and stage events built. Unfortunately, the event was met with unceasing rain. Roofed chairs carried visitors through the mud, and a pageant was cancelled. Garrick's lengthy Ode to the "blest genius of the isle" was delivered by the ringmaster himself, with musical accompaniment followed by an elaborate fireworks display that fizzled in the cold rain. As Stott writes, Jubilee was "a defining moment in our cultural history, and one that goes to show how, through a confluence of intent, mishap, and grubby self-interest, the most glorious and enduring of myths was made."A thoroughly enjoyable and engaging literary history. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
