The Shakespeare Wars

I’ve started reading The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum (Random House, 2006). I would call it a work of literary journalism exploring trends in Shakespeare textual scholarship and theatrical interpretation. Rosenbaum introduces us to his topic by describing how his life was profoundly changed by Peter Brook’s Royal Shakespeare Company staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the outset of the Seventies. Those of you who are theatre history junkies may know that such an extreme reaction to this production was not an uncommon one. I just wanted to offer a quote from the book about the production and leave it at that:

I’ve come to believe, on the contrary, that what made it so thrilling was not the way in which Brook’s Dream was new but rather the way it was radically old. The way in which it seemed to capture what one imagines was the excitement of the moment the play was first produced four centuries ago. The moment when its lines were first uttered, when its language burst from the lips of its actors in a kind of spontaneous combustion, as if the words were not recited so much as thought up and uttered, freshly minted, for the first time…it had more to do with the language, with the “verse speaking,” as Shakespeareans call it. With a company that had so totally mastered the technical and emotional nuances of the verse that it sounded less like recitation than utterances torn from them. Each line fluid, lightning-like, inevitable. It never seemed, as it does in so many mediocre productions, like emoting. The speech bubbled up, burst out, and then sparkled like uncorked champagne. And it had something of a champagne-like effect on me; I felt as if I were imbibing the pure distilled essence of exhilaration. For me it was like the night they invented champagne. It was like a love potion.