Something on which Ive found that many Oxfordians and Stratfordians agree: Stephen Booths 1977 edition of The Sonnets is a superlative and essential work of scholarship and interpretation. I know I personally have learned much from that one book. Below a cognitive scientist describes -- at times pointedly, at times tangentially -- how Booths reading of the works anticipated some of the recent advances in his field. Here, to me, was the nugget. QUOTE Until the early decades of the 20th century, Shakespeare criticism fell primarily into two areas: textual, which grapples with the numerous variants of published works in order to produce an edition as close as possible to the original, and biographical. Scholarship took a more political turn beginning in the 1960s, providing new perspectives from various strains of feminist, Marxist, structuralist, and queer theory. Booth is resolutely dismissive of most of these modes of study. What he cares about is poetics. Specifically, how poetic language operates on and in audiences of a literary work. Close reading, the school that flourished mid-century and with which Booth’s work is most nearly affiliated, has never gone completely out of style. But Booth’s approach is even more minute—microscopic reading, according to fellow Shakespeare scholar Russ McDonald. And as the microscope opens up new worlds, so does Booth’s critical lens. What makes him radically different from his predecessors is that he doesn’t try to resolve or collapse his readings into any single interpretation. That people are so hung up on interpretation, on meaning, Booth maintains, is “no more than habit.” Instead, he revels in the uncertainty caused by the myriad currents of phonetic, semantic, and ideational patterns at play. END QUOTE In the context of this forum, then, it should be emphasized that Booth took the Stratfordian ethos of anti-biographical reading to its logical conclusion. Here, hes revealing, is the utmost that one can wring from these poems without looking to or drawing from any salient biographical details. Its a valuable exercise, no matter where one stands on the authorship question. But its perverse too. Ultimately, an author did write these poems, and his life and experiences did arguably resound through some or all of his writing. Booth could in that sense be shelved alongside numerous scholars who have over the generations come up with extremely clever ways of evading the biographical problem that has plagued them since they started compiling full-on accounts of the life of the man from Stratford. And found, time and again, that the shoe just dont fit the foot theyve found. So, instead, they find ways to distract. And divert. All in all, though, the article does do a fine job of demonstrating some of the ways that Booths edition leads to greater appreciation of these wonderfully enigmatic poems. And, without directly saying so, how readings from a more biographically oriented approach might be built on his foundation too. nautil.us/issue/18/genius/shakespeares-genius-is-nonsense
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 05:11:19 +0000
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