John Gross is a man of learning, flair and energy. He did a remarkable job as editor of the Times Literary Supplement in the ’70s, and is always worth our attention. Oxford University Press has recently presented or re-presented him in two of his hats: he pulls the strings behind two widely differing anthologies.
The more original and, surely, more arresting of these is his celebration or many-headed critique of Shakespeare: the Don Bradman of Western literature. All manner of writings are assembled here, woven together with Gross’s own observations. These contents range from Borge’s wonderful story in which God finishes up saying to the poet, ‘like me, you are everything and nothing’, to Cole Porter’s ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’; from Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’ back to sturdy Ben Johnson.
As this will suggest, the book is a feast with a great many kinds of dish, with cooks of many schools. There are novelists, critics, poets, diarists, satirists and an 18th-century Swiss weaver, who actually kept a Shakespeare journal. This gentleman was at least the sympathetic opposite of silly Frederick the Great, who complained that in German theatres ‘you will find the abominable plays of Shakespeare being presented, and audiences in transports of joy listening to these ridiculous farces, which are worthy of the savages of Canada.’
Not all monarchs were such neo-classical barbarians: Catherine the Great, we are told, translated The Merry Wives of Windsor into Russian. And now, in an age when we desperately need Maynard Keynes to be reborn, it is nice to have his sound comment that ‘We were just in a financial position to afford Shakespeare at the moment when he presented himself!’
Once, in Washington, making my way to the airport I listened to the African-American taxi-driver explaining why it has to be the case that Bacon wrote the Bard’s plays; confusingly, he went on to point out how clear Bacon’s style was, and how richly dense Shakespeare’s. There are no Baconians here, nor yet the Marlovian thesis of Mike Rubbo, but there is a charming essay by Leslie Stephen demonstrating how W.S. wrote Bacon’s works.
Again, some kinds of postmodern thinking have sought to dematerialise the man from Stratford, turning him into a series of textual traces and historical sites. This anthology does much to maintain his solidity, as does Brian Vickers’ recent study of the writing processes, Shakespeare, Co-Author. If we are to be deconstructive, we