Berryman's Shakespeare: Essays, Letters and Other Writings by John Berryman [Paperback]

Unless you are preparing a PhD thesis on Berryman, this book will not offer you any insight into his poetic works, including THE DREAM SONGS. However, for those interested in Shakespeare, it will offer fresh and not-so-fresh insights into Shakespeare's methods, similar to Bloom's SHAKESPEARE: INVENTION OF THE HUMAN. How interested in Shakespeare must you be? Well, you have to be into Q's and F's (quartos and folios), obsure Elizabethan personages (William Houghton anyone?), and reading text with lots of u/v j/i substitutions. John BERRYMAN'S SHAKESPEARE is not much like Anthony BURGESS' SHAKESPEARE, though they are probably next to each other in most libraries.

Parts One and Two cover scattershot the entire Shakespearean oeuvre, including CARDENIO and SIR THOMAS MORE, with lots of historical dalliance. It is clear that Berryman knows his drama Elizabethan, and often the best insights are who was borrowing what plot from whom, if not what words. His take on HAMLET is standardly Freudian, but I did enjoy his heretical insights into ROMEO & JULIET and A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM as well as his discussion of why the so-called historical 'tetralogies' are actually 'trilogies.'

Where this book is a must read, although admittedly for a small number of people, is in Berryman's writings on KING LEAR. The Introduction prepares you for the massive depth and critical brilliance that Berryman brought to his never-finished edition of the great play. For those who are excited to hear that Berryman has an arsenal of proof that Q was taken by shorthand during an actual performance, and includes changes the actors made in their lines, the Lear portions are a must. Covering about half the volume and including Berryman's correspondence with W.W. Greg, the discussion of Lear is a scholar's wet dream, a veritable barrage of evidence and counter-evidence, two tantalizing texts (Q and F) that may represent two equally authorial versions, i.e. Shakespeare rewrote Q to eliminate a character and streamline action for a performance in another context.

I have adressed my review to the various readers that may be approaching this book (Berryman fans: don't read; Shakespeare fans: maybe, Lear scholars: read-for-god's-sake-read-it). I hope that my recommendations prove useful.

John Haffendon has done Shakespeare readers a great service with this compilation of poet John Berryman's writings and musings on Shakespeare, both the man and the dramatist. Included in this compendium are extensive excerpts from a projected biography of the bard; introductory fragments of an authoritative edition of King Lear; conjecture as to the identity of Mr. W.H. ("the onlie begetter" of the sonnets); as well as short essays on a number of plays, including The Comedy of Errors, King John, and Macbeth. As one might expect of a poet of his caliber, Berryman has a keen ear and an insightful intelligence. He calls Dogberry "the supreme and triumphant enemy of the English language"; he sizes up Lady Macbeth as "unscrupulous, but short-winded," "single-natured...[b]ut nihilistic"; sonnet 135, he informs us, "is among the most indecent formal poems in English." Treasures such as these can be found throughout these wonderfully rich essays. Never intended for publication in this form, the book does contain a good deal of repetition: a comment regarding King Lear, for instance, or a supposition about Shakespeare's source reading will be mentioned here, repeated there. This does little, however to mar the surprising cohesiveness of the book; it very nearly reads as a completed volume. Haffendon does reveal a bit more than he should in the more-than-fifty-page introduction, giving away some of the surprises Berryman has in store for us. It might have made a more appropriate afterword. Similarly, "Letters on Lear,"--a bit overly pedantic and tedious--might have fitted better into an appendix, although it does offer a fascinating insight into the workaday efforts and integrity of a scholar like Berryman. The letters also contain at least one laugh-out-loud moment when the poet casually and parenthetically corrects Dr. W. W. Greg: "I am not 'Dr.,' by the way." In the closing pages of this fascinating book, Berryman rewards us with a compelling meditation on the King of France's recollections of Bertram's father from All's Well That Ends Well. It is a striking passage, "nearly fifty lines, contributing nothing to the play" and without support in Shakespeare's sources, but nevertheless, asserts Berryman, "the most remarkable tribute in the whole Shakespearean canon." His thoughts on this passage (and others besides), offer the attentive student as much insight into Berryman and his works as into Shakespeare and his plays.

This posthumous collection of essays, letters, and unfinished writings by John Berryman is one of the most vivid and interesting works of Shakespearean literary criticism I've read. Berryman's insightful essay on "Shakespeare at Thirty" is alone worth the cover price. The real heart of the book is the author's lectures on Shakespeare's body of work, from the earliest comedies to "Shakespeare's Last Word" ("The Tempest"). While I disagree with some of Berryman's idiosyncratic readings, such as his endorsement of an Oedipal complex for Hamlet and his disparagement of "Much Ado About Nothing," I nevertheless found the book consistently interesting, always readable, and sometimes brilliant. I would rank it among the best general-interest books on Shakespeare in the last fifty years or so. Also recommended: Harold Goddard's two-volume THE MEANING OF SHAKESPEARE.