The Meaning of Recognition (22 page)

Those who don’t already think that such an indifference to the perennial topic of Shakespeare’s appearance is exactly right should take a quick look at
Shakespeare’s
Face
, a compendium of essays dedicated to the questions supposedly raised by the ‘Sanders portrait’. A judicious essay by Stanley Wells might slow the quick look down by about
thirty minutes. Wells talks nothing but sense about Shakespeare. As a result he has almost nothing to say about the portrait. The other contributors, among whom the editor Stephanie Nolan is the
most prominent, have a lot to say about it. The portrait came to light in Canada, where it was big news. ‘Is this the face of genius?’ asked the
Toronto Globe and Mail
. Art
experts confirm that it is indeed a contemporary portrait. What nobody can confirm is that it is a portrait of Shakespeare. The scientific dating was a bit of a blow to my own theory that it is a
portrait of John Malkovich, but I have whistled in a scientist of my own who suggests that the prankish and well-funded Malkovich could have engineered the whole deal with the aid of artificially
aged carbon. Marjorie Garber, a Professor of English and Director of Visual Arts at Harvard, assures us that ‘the male minx in the Sanders image, with his knowing eyes and flirtatious,
up-curved mouth, seems about to burst into words – words as witty and perhaps as improper as our current taste will permit.’

How witty would that be, I wonder? We can better imagine how improper. The flirtatious, up-curved mouth, however, certainly looks as if it once adorned an actor – an actor of a particular
kind, the kind some of us call a lip-licker. Shakespeare was an actor, but he was probably not a lip-licker. The lip-licker finds the fountain of his expressiveness in the pool of Narcissus. In my
forthcoming thesis on the mannerisms of actors (it’s called
Ah, Bogie
! Spot the reference) I address the question of whether lip-licking is the cause or the consequence of a career
gone haywire. David Caruso was already licking his lips in the first series of
NYPD Blue
. Keen observers didn’t have to wait for
CSI: Miami
– in which he not only
licks his lips but keeps putting on and taking off his dark glasses – to decide that he was out of his head with self-regard. Mickey Rourke had a suitcase-full of collagen injected into his
lips in order to give himself bigger lips to lick. As for Malkovich . . . but I don’t want to give too much of my book away. Back to
Shakespeare’s Face
, a book which has so
little to give away that one feels compelled to toss it a bone. Here is the bone.

The book does have one merit. It assumes, surely correctly, that Shakespeare had ambitions beyond the lonely garret. The sumptuary laws specified plain cloth for anyone not noble. Shakespeare
was out for the velvet. Contending with his energy for the right to exalted goods, he was a precursor of the bourgeois world we live in now. The grand total of 480 pictures that have at one time or
another been supposed to be of him probably don’t include even a single authentic case, but if there were ten times as many they would scarcely reflect his determination to take his place as
a man of the world. Holding to the notion that an artist should be above such things, we can frown on that determination if we wish, but it is very doubtful if he did. So
Shakespeare’s
Face
is not quite as useless as it appears to be at first glance.

Nor, even, is Harold Bloom’s scholarly new super-squib
Hamlet: Poem Unlimited
. Less than 150 pages long but somehow weighing like 1,500 pages of pulped railway timetables,
Bloom’s booklet engages itself in the doomed task of convincing us that Shakespeare was a great writer, and that
Hamlet
is a great play. The task is doomed because nobody in his
right mind doubts these things. There are even people in their wrong minds who know them to be true. People who think Shakespeare was Queen Elizabeth know
Hamlet
is a great play: that is
why they think Queen Elizabeth wrote it. But Bloom thinks we do not understand. He talks to us as if we were wilfully failing to take in an intractable fact. He is a British Airways stewardess
trying to tell Liam Gallagher that the bar is closed. He tells us that
Hamlet
is up there with the
Iliad
, the
Aeneid
, the
Divine Comedy
and
Leaves of
Grass
.

But is
Leaves of Grass
really up there with
Hamlet
? If Bloom can’t tell the difference between chalk and cheese, or anyway between cheese and lesser cheese, the
deficiency in taste can scarcely be irrelevant to his pretended historical sweep, which means little if it fails to detect points of quality and join them up. From that angle, Bloom ought to be
safe with
Hamlet
: it is, after all, pretty good. But it is less certain that
Hamlet
is safe with Bloom, or that Shakespeare himself is safe either. Possibly there is a
professional deformation that we ought to consider. ‘You cannot get beyond Hamlet, which established the limits of theatricality.’ When F.R. Leavis decided that there could be no
completely serious English writing after Lawrence, he allowed it to be inferred that there might be one exception: Leavis. If Bloom is saying that only he fully appreciates Shakespeare, he might
also be saying that only he inherits Shakespeare’s capacity to view the world. This is a view of the world in itself, and one that could be hatched only in the dark.

A star academic can get away with it. Anyone who worked on the outside would be thought to have looped the loop. But really not even Bloom is wholly isolated, because Shakespeare won’t
allow it. In front of his class, and even in his study, Bloom is a Shakespearean character, and in his deepest heart he knows which one. He is Falstaff, talking up a storm, pinning Hal to the wall
before the world intrudes. His histrionic urge gets him to the party after all. Picking your character is a good place to start with Shakespeare. You can imagine yourself in tights, which helps you
to remember that once they had to be paid for, washed and ironed, and that the expense came out of the profits that Shakespeare and his fellow partners were keen to retain intact. In the world of
art they created, it was the practical and the physical that made the spiritual so intense. The year after he graduated, Michael Wood played Oberon in a combined Oxford–Cambridge production
of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. All the women in the cast, and several of the men, were enchanted by his elegance of leg. I can remember him now, striding across the stage with his
nose pointing at the audience, the boyish portent of a shimmering career.

TLS
, 11 July 2003

Postscript

This piece was written too early to catch Stephen Greenblatt’s
Will in the World
. Though so strong on the background that its hero pales in the foreground, the
book survives its cute title. Few critical works on the subject contribute as much. But a good many of them contribute at least something: if not a fact, then a slant of interpretation that looks
not utterly invalid in the light of recent history. The question is about what exactly is being contributed to. How much of all this commentary should we have time for? When Greenblatt and I were
graduate students in Cambridge in the late 1960s, some of our contemporaries risked failing grades in English by spending too much time acting for the dramatic societies. But quite often they were
acting in Shakespeare, and wasn’t every speech they learned by heart worth a hundred pages that had been written about it? The question haunts me still. (I think it still haunts Greenblatt:
one of his best qualities.) At gunpoint I would have to say that the study of Shakespeare shouldn’t end with merely memorizing what he wrote: after all, even the question of what he wrote is
a subject for scholarship. But it should certainly begin there. J. Dover Wilson’s
What Happens in Hamlet
is a classic of scholarship that every student should read, so as to have an
inkling of what being a scholar takes. But the student should know
Hamlet
first, and preferably by heart. It is a matter of priorities. Armed with the memory of a few lines spoken by
Cassius and Brutus on the night before the battle of Philippi, for example, I have an answer ready for Harold Bloom’s deafening contention that
Hamlet
is the greatest play in the
world. Yes, keep your voice down, nobody disagrees; but if
Hamlet
didn’t exist, wouldn’t you have to say the same thing about
Julius Caesar
? Or, failing that, about
King Lear
? About
Macbeth
? About
Antony and Cleopatra
? There is a special kind of academic madness that wants to get in amongst the great works of art and make itself
indispensable by sorting them into some plausible order of importance. In the behavioural paradigm usefully supplied to us by Nick Hornby’s
High Fidelity
, that specific breed of
nutter can be hired as a part-time sales assistant, but he must never be left alone to run the store.

1. The New Labour Machiavelli

‘Yes,’ said Peter Mandelson, ‘but you’re a wizened old media hack.’ He said that to me, and I was flattered out of my wits. The trick of painless
teasing is the height of charm, and Mandelson has so much charm that he pays the inevitable penalty: he makes an enemy of anybody from whom he withholds it. For those on whom he confers it,
however, only one inference is possible: here is a fine mind. The question of what the fine mind is up to suddenly becomes subsidiary. It was on Tuesday that he called me a grizzled old media hack,
and even though our close friendship was scarcely into its fifteenth minute, I had already decided that I had met the political genius I was waiting for – the one who could see that I, deep
down, was a political genius too. Since, in all practical matters, I had previously been regarded as a joke figure even by my local residents’ association, this was a late but welcome
endorsement of my hidden qualities. But before I draw further conclusions about this historic one-on-one confrontation across Mandelson’s kitchen table in Hartlepool, let us go back to the
long-gone day – more than a week ago now – when Tony Blair announced a General Election clearly fated to confirm him in the post which he could well hold until the next arrival of the
Messiah, who will almost certainly be wearing a Labour rosette.

As you may remember if you are the sort of person who relishes the shower scene in
Psycho
, the Prime Minister launched his campaign at St Olave’s school in South London. Blair is
a man who has a special voice for everything. At the funeral of the Princess of Wales he had a special voice for reading the Bible, as if the measure of its prose needed assistance from himself,
with extra pauses, swoops and emphases to eke out its poverty of cadence. At St Olave’s he had a special voice for speaking to children, as if children were a category of human being limited
by delayed comprehension. The girl who pulled the sweater over her head was not a political dissident: she was a theatre critic. Two elections from now she might well vote for him, but she will
never go to see him playing Hamlet, because she already knows that he will take his doublet off in the opening scene, thus to prove, in his shirtsleeves, that he is a pretty straight sort of
Prince. Even the friendliest newspapers thought that Blair’s performance at St Olave’s reeked of stage management. Really this should have been old news. The Labour party has been
controlling its leader’s image for years: it’s the Mandelson emphasis, as interpreted in recent times by Alastair Campbell. What made it news in the opening hours of the campaign was a
creeping sense that the puppeteers were getting their wires crossed.

The creeping sense broke into a gallop a couple of days later, when a staged event in a Warwickshire tea room went so smoothly as to defy belief. Fated to go down in the annals of salesmanship
as Blair’s Spontaneous Encounter with ‘the ordinary couple in Leamington Spa’, the event featured such ecstasies of spontaneity from Blair, and such paroxysms of ordinariness from
the ordinary couple, that any cat in the area would have died laughing. But there were no cats in the area. They had all had their accreditation withdrawn, lest they be caught on camera, rolling
around with their paws up in the throes of hilarious death.

*

Unlike the Millennium Dome, which achieved incredibility through everything going wrong, the Leamington Spa Spontaneous Encounter Experience achieved incredibility through
everything going right. The ordinary couple didn’t turn up drunk and Blair didn’t deliver the script meant to inspire two rehabilitated burglars in Stevenage the following week. But
nothing was accomplished except a hefty reinforcement to the growing impression that, for Blair’s management team, efficiency came first, even if reality had to be adjusted to suit the
message. The downside to such an attitude is that the manipulation becomes another message. Blair’s protean multiplicity of special voices lends weight to the view that this all-pervading
bogusness comes from the top down. When Rory Bremner was thrown off the Labour Battle Bus, it occurred to me that Blair had realized Bremner was really in politics, and had realized it as a
consequence of Bremner’s having realized that Blair was really in show business.

By Friday the media had concluded that Blair’s politics of the fixed smile had lost Labour the first week. The polls didn’t shift, but the perception did. Hague and Kennedy had mixed
it with the hecklers. Blair’s minders had allowed him to face nothing more dangerous than a baby. Blair didn’t stop smiling even when he kissed it. The baby could have been scarred for
life with the imprint of ivory: the shadow of your smile. ‘He’ll look back on it in years to come,’ said the baby’s on-message mother. Over the weekend, the media consensus
was that Millbank’s management of their man was sclerotic in its finesse. The machine Peter Mandelson had helped to create was in a shallow dive on automatic pilot. Already there were
whispers that the man who built it might be the only man who knew how to fix it.