Berryman's Shakespeare : [essays, letters, and other writings]

471 Pages·1999·2.36 MB·English

by  Shakespeare

For Kate
Table of Contents
Title Page
Preface
Introduction
PART ONE
Shakespeare’s Early Comedy
DRAMATIC BEGINNINGS
EARLY COMEDY
PART TWO - The Lectures
Shakespeare at Thirty
Pathos and Dream
The World of Action
All’s Well
The Crisis
The Tragic Substance
The End
Shakespeare’s Last Word
JUSTICE AND REDEMPTION
THE FREEDOM OF THE POET
PART THREE - King Lear
Project: An Edition of King Lear
TEXT
COMMENTARY
Textual Introduction
THE HYPOTHESIS
THE METHOD OF REPORTING
Staging
CAST
The Conceiving of King Lear
Letters on Lear
PART FOUR
William Houghton, William Haughton, The Shrew, and the Sonnets
INTRODUCTION
THE DATING OF THE Sonnets
WILLIAM HOUGHTON
SHAKESPEARE’S FRIEND
THE DEPOSITION: LETTERS ON THE “DISCOVERIES”
PART FIVE - The Essays
The Sonnets
The Comedy of Errors
1590: King John
2 Henry VI
3 Henry VI
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
On Macbeth
Shakespeare’s Poor Relation: 2 Henry IV
Also by
APPENDIX
NOTES
Notes
Copyright Page
Preface
BY ROBERT GIROUX

IT STARTED IN THE THIRTIES, when John Berryman and I studied
Shakespeare with poet Mark Van Doren at Columbia College. One aspect of
Van Doren’s greatness as a teacher was his technique of pretending that you
were his intellectual equal. Since you knew he expected your best, he got it more
often than not. His course covered the thirty-seven plays, the two narrative
poems, the sonnets, “A Lover’s Complaint,” the wonderful songs, and “The
Phoenix and Turtle,” the amazing poem about two-becoming-one. One of
Berryman’s best moments in class occurred on the day we discussed Macbeth,
when he cited Hecate’s prediction of overconfidence as the cause of Macbeth’s
downfall—“And you all know security / Is mortals’ chiefest enemy”—and Van
Doren asked him to show us the couplet’s lines. At first Berryman could not find
them, but he did just before the class ended and Van Doren admitted, “Having
read the play hundreds of times, I’m amazed I never caught that.” Van Doren’s
high regard for his student was also proved when Berryman became ineligible at
the last moment for a Cambridge University fellowship, after an antagonistic
professor flunked Berryman and at once sailed for Europe. Van Doren persuaded
the Dean to arrange for a special exam in the same subject (English literature);
Berryman not only earned an A but subsequently won a prestigious Shakespeare
prize at Cambridge. He was a genuine and passionate scholar, who developed
into an outstanding poet and critic.
John Haffenden has performed an admirable service for letters in compiling
and annotating this book, which required enormous ingenuity and research. One
of my favorite sections is Berryman’s deferential and knowledgeable exchange
of letters, when he was teaching at Princeton, with the great Shakespeare scholar
W. W. Greg. “Shakespeare’s Reality,” printed in the appendix, is a key to
understanding Berryman’s remarkable insight into the subtle question of a
character’s identity. The lines he cites from Richard III and All’s Well have an
affinity with Shakespeare’s assertion in sonnet 121: “No, I am that I am.”
Though Berryman’s tragic illness (alcoholism) crippled his later years and
ended in suicide, I repeat my conviction, as his close friend, editor, and
publisher, that biographers have underrated his lifelong torment over his father’s
suicide, as well as the sinister role of his possessive mother, about which I have
set forth my conclusions in “Henry’s Understanding” in The Yale Review (April
1996). His first “Dream Song” includes a stanza that perhaps sums up his life:
All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry’s side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.
Critic Donald Davie got it right, in his review of Berryman’s book of
criticism, The Freedom of the Poet, when he wrote: “The man behind this book
was not only one of the most gifted and intelligent Americans of his time, but
also one of the most honorable and responsible.”
Introduction
BY JOHN HAFFENDEN

IT IS FITTING to open this volume by quoting the preface that John Berryman
chose to draft on January 26, 1970, only two years before his death:
As I put this preface together and take leave at last of the work—
the third most demanding I have ever done—I come this evening
on a Shakespearean note new to me, and I sit up straight with
sympathetic pleasure. It is by one of my favourite writers, a man
who suffered from many plans. He even managed to lecture and
write a good deal on Shakespeare, though never a book. But one
day excited he took a sheet of paper (watermark 1796) and set
down:
MEMORANDA
for a History of Engl Poetry _______________
1. English Romances—compare ___________
_______________/ &c.
and so on thro Chaucer, Spenser, the Ballads, making notes on
how each was to be treated, till he came to 5, when all he wrote
down was this:
5. Shakespeare!!! ALMIGHTY! a
J.B.
Although Berryman did not manage to bring to a completion his large critical
and biographical work on Shakespeare, I became convinced many years ago—
judging from the high degree of originality of his writings, as well as their
substantial scholarship and their communicative zest for the subject—that his
papers should be brought together in a permanent form. I have therefore worked
on these papers off and on for over twenty years, and so I am particularly
grateful to Robert Giroux, when I showed him samples of these materials a few
years ago, for agreeing that the volume should be published by the poet’s
longtime American publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
AN OVERVIEW
JOHN BERRYMAN (1914–72) occupies a major place among the outstanding
poets of recent times. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956) was hailed by
Edmund Wilson as “the most distinguished long poem by an American since The
Waste Land”; and the two volumes 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His
Dream, His Rest (1968), which together constitute the major work known as The
Dream Songs (1969), an astonishing modern epic in which Berryman displayed
much of his personality and experience, earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
(1965), a Bollingen Award (1967), and the National Book Award (1969). The
autobiographical daring of his poetry began in 1947 with Berryman’s Sonnets
(published in 1967), a sequence which charts the fortunes of a love affair.
Berryman’s posthumous reputation has been enhanced by Collected Poems,
1937–1971 (ed. Charles Thornbury, 1989); and his standing as one of the most
perceptive critics of the modern period was confirmed by The Freedom of the
Poet (1976), a collection of essays and short fiction.
Throughout his career, Berryman was also a dedicated and scholarly student
of Shakespeare. Understandably, he regarded himself as “lucky” to have been
able to study under two exemplary teachers: Mark Van Doren at Columbia
College, New York (“the hottest teacher of Shakespeare in the country,”
Berryman later avowed, “as well as a critic of great & original power”), and
George Rylands (“one of the 3 or 4 most acute critics of the 1930s of
Shakespeare’s poetry & style”) at Cambridge University, where Berryman held
the Kellett Fellowship for the years 1936–38. Thereafter he was keen to
acknowledge his primary indebtedness to the scholars E. K. Chambers, John
Dover Wilson, and W. W. Greg (whose The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare:
A Survey of the Foundations of the Text [1942], Berryman had adulated in The
Nation,1 and with whom, in the 1940s, he enjoyed a rewarding correspondence
on King Lear which is included in the third section of this volume)—as well as
(to quote from a preface he drafted in the winter of 1970) “to the exhilarating
parade of Shakespearean scholars and critics, among whom it cannot be
invidious to single out Aubrey & Rowe the pioneers, Dr. Johnson, Malone,
Coleridge, the brilliant if unscrupulous Collier, Bradley, the laborious Lee, the
subtle but mostly convincing Harley Granville-Barker …”2 I am happy to note
too that, more than once among his vast array of notes, he advised himself:
“Consider Empson’s criticism.” Indeed, there is no doubt that he was deeply