The Peripatetic Reviewer

READING Shakespeare when young can be a very uncongenial exercise. The textbooks in my day were not inviting, and the thin kidney-red plays with their grim type and multiplicity of notes looked like work and were. We tackled Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar the same year that we were plodding through Caesar’s Gallic Wars; and while we went faster in English, the ordeal was much the same. We tried to cover a scene a day, though the pace was often too much for us; and as I had a clear enunciation and was unafraid of the jawbreakers, I was one of the class who was frequently called upon to read a part aloud. I’d pipe away and then one of the others would come in; and at a suitable moment the teacher would pause and ask, “Now, what does it mean?” No one knew. So the last part of the session was spent in finding New Jersey idioms for the Elizabethan English. We decoded the words, we straightened out the intricate syntax, and we dealt with things called “gerunds” and “nominative absolutes.”There was also a “passive periphrastic” and this was an infallible teacher-block: when we hadn’t done our lesson and knew it, a question about the “passive periphrastic” would stop all forward progress while class and teacher baffled each other.

For homework we were given passages to memorize. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. . . . “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. . . .” “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world/Like a Colossus. . .”Memorizing Shakespeare was complicated by the difficulty of the unfamiliar words, and when we groaned about it at home we found no sympathy whatever. Instead, Mother or Aunt Em would spiel off the most incredible stretches which they had learned by heart when they were girls. Gosh, didn’t they have anything better to do?

Shakespeare at college under Professor George Lyman Kittredge was even more exacting. Nothing like a scene a day here; we inched our way down the page splitting open every word and phrase and writing down the hidden variations on interlinear sheets in our text. Memorizing was now a matter of hundreds of lines, and we were sure to be asked for part of it in the Final. The question was, which part? For Kittredge the words were magnified, the characters secondary, and the emotion of the play was taken for granted. Yet, on one occasion I can remember his dilating on that pitiable scene in King Lear, Scene 3 of Act 5, when the blinded Lear enters with Cordelia’s body in his arms. For a moment the bare platform became charged as Kittredge, gray suit, blue tie, and majestic white beard, gave us the terrifying, tortured king. “ Has it occurred to you,” he concluded, “why King Lear is so seldom produced today? Even if you could find an actor great enough for Lear? Because a modern audience has too tender sensibilities: they could hardly bear to see it; it is too intolerably moving.”

Because of all this required reading, I doubt if Shakespeare really comes alive for most of us until after a great production. If you saw Robert Edmond Jones’s production of Hamlet with John Barrymore in the lead, or his equally unforgettable Othello with Robeson and Ferrer, you must have come away staggered by the sweep of the action and the depth of the feeling. The words over which we had strained so hard in school had suddenly become electric in their force and beauty.

When I was married in 1925, my sister-in-law had the generous notion of giving the groom a wedding present. She asked what I wanted, and without much hesitation I said a set of Edmund Malone’s Shakespeare. I even told her where such editions could be found — one at Goodspeed’s in Boston, the other at Lauriat’s. Be it added that she gave me the more expensive of the two sets, the 1821 edition, the previous owner of which, so said the flyleaf, had been M. Louis Blériot, the pioneer airman and the first to fly the English Channel.

I had first seen the Malone edition in the library of the Cambridge Union in England, and had fallen in love on the spot with the beautiful type page. The plays are set in generous type with a wide margin; three-quarters down the page in a smaller point are the interpretations of the disputed lines which you can pause over or ignore. Edmund Malone was a close friend of James Boswell. Indeed he was said to be the man most responsible for keeping Bozzy at his writing of the great Life when the bottle tempted. Their friendship comes through in the Advertisement which Boswell wrote for my edition, in the course of which occurs this charming sentence: “It was the object of Mr. Malone, from which he never deviated, to furnish the reader, as far as it was possible, with the author’s unsophisticated text.” “Unsophisticated” is precisely the right word, for the plays in this format are free to move at their own pace, untrammeled by the mechanism of scholarship. And so they should be.

There are twenty-one volumes in the Malone edition, and my set in full calf was easily the finest item in our budding library. The point I want to make in passing is that we were proud of our books and intent on building a library even that first year in our two-room flat. As a modest literary man, I never had the means for expensive editions, but I began collecting Winston Churchill back in 1925 and have first editions of all his books; I have an assortment of association volumes, in all some five thousand books, which overflow our home on Beacon Hill.

These books and my fly rods are my prize possessions, and in this, I suspect, I am dated. For when I glance at the photographs of modern architectural interiors or visit the homes of young couples, I see that there is less and less provision for caring for books. Bookshelves are under the cocktail table, or in a little box beside the bedside lamp, the assumption being that anything you are reading is for the moment, to be thrown out as soon as — or before — you finish. Look about you when you visit the homes of the young marrieds. You will see a place for the television screen, and a conspicuous place for the record player with its library of records, but few books and nothing to suggest that either the architect or the young couple had any thought of a private library. (This does not apply to Atlantic readers, who, according to our most recent survey, in Rochester, New York, average $58 a year on the purchase of new books.)

Mind you, I do not think that this disinclination for books is necessarily fatal. What we need are new processes which will turn out books in small editions at lower prices and in handier sizes. The paper-bound book is only a step in this direction. Space is the controlling factor, and invention will have to find the way.

The new Coronation Edition of Shakespeare (Random House, 4 vols., $35.00) is a case in point. If you want to restrict your library to the Bible and Shakespeare, and you wish a set of Shakespeare that is beautiful to look at and sheer delight to read, this Nonesuch Press edition is it.

Twenty years ago the Nonesuch Press, who have produced some of the most exquisite printing in our time, published a complete Shakespeare in seven volumes at something over $200 the set. Critics called it the most enjoyable edition ever printed and wished that “it might be accessible to every purse.” Alarms and excursions intervened, good paper became scarce, and printing costs more than doubled. Sir Francis Meynell, who is the directing genius of the Nonesuch Press, is to be congratulated for the skill and resourcefulness with which he has compacted this new edition of four volumes which will occupy under five inches of shelf room. The problem “of trying to put much matter into a reasonably small space without a sacrifice of either looks or legibility” he solved first with a specially made paper — not a “Bible paper,” but a thick India paper which is opaque, gives the type a sharp clarity, and turns easily. “The text itself,” he says, “is the sheerest Shakespeare there can be: . . . Shakespeare in the exact text of the First Folio with all the Quarto variants.” The marginal notes are a whispered guide rather than a distraction. The plays are set apart with half titles on stiffer paper in charming headpieces by Reynolds Stone; and in his Introduction, Ivor Brown very deftly presents the known facts about Shakespeare, the reasons for the present chronology, the grouping of the Sonnets, and an explanation of those doubtful plays in which Shakespeare may have had a hand. This is a very distinguished, very modern example of bookmaking.

The Traitor and the Spy by James Thomas Flexner (Harcourt, Brace, $5.75) is the most vivid and sympathetic interpretation I have yet read of those three persons who entered upon the darkest betrayal in American history. It is a murky, sinister story and in some places beyond the reach of Mr. Flexner’s spotlight; it is a very human story with its pitiable side, too, for Arnold on a battlefield was unquestionably intrepid and a leader; Peggy Shippen was a belle of great charm who faced disgrace with persistent loyalty to her children and her aging, ailing husband; and the gay, talented André might have proved of sterner stuff had he lived.

The story begins in the Connecticut of Arnold’s youth. Arnold’s father was a drunkard; his mother fought a losing battle against poverty and disease — of her seven children only Benedict and his younger sister Hannah survived. The boy, who bore a grudge against society, was apprenticed early to an apothecary in Norwich, and we have his own words for it that he was “a coward till he was fifteen years old.” Then he shot up fast, his spur the determination to make money and a name. At the age of twenty-two, he had opened a store for himself in New Haven, and as he prospered he bought ships and speculated in the coastal trade from Canada to the Indies. This was the making of his fortune, and he plunged into this investment again and again all through his soldiering.

Arnold’s finances are always in a shadow, for he kept no books. We never know the size of his fortune or from whom he borrowed; we are told too little about his first wife, Margaret Mansfield, and too little about his concern for his three sons. But when Arnold gets into uniform and rides off to Ticonderoga; when he plans for the invasion of Canada and begins his endless contention for recognition, rank, and privilege, his biography really can be documented.

Mr. Flexner is plausible in his handling of young André, whose career we follow in alternate chapters. The man’s charm, conceit, and industry are well conveyed; and while his reasons for hating this country never convince me, his growth as an officer of Intelligence does. André had all the skill in human relations which Arnold lacked; and as we see the two men drawn together by the grave-eyed flirt Miss Shippen; as we see her rebel first against her father and then against Philadelphia, until her resentment is the spark which sets fire to Arnold’s long smoldering feeling of abuse, we realize more fully than ever before the motives in a tragedy that has become an American classic.

The legend of Tristram and Isoud is most moving when least explicit. The glamorous old tale lives on in poetry and in music, but not in a libretto. By following the main outlines of the story quite faithfully, and by excising the poetic elements, by inserting a number of archaeological details and some distinctly modern attitudes which seem out of place, Dorothy James Roberts has converted a fine myth into a cozy romantic novel, The Enchanted Cup (Appleton-Century-Crofts, $3.75).

“Cozy” is the best adjective I can think of for this book. Everything is smaller than life and arranged to make the reader comfortable. The characters are oversimplified to a few easily grasped essentials, and in the process Isoud is made up as a pretty ingénue and Tristram a nice boy with a talent for swordplaying. Everything that readers will expect is dutifully included: clothes and jewelry are described with a miniaturist’s precision, and we have full-fledged jousting in the manner of Walter Scott. Everything that might alarm the modern reader is either excluded or smoothed over. There is some talk of witchcraft and enchantments, but these matters are firmly dismissed by the resident clergy as imaginary evils despite the fact that the Church was still burning witches and necromancers a thousand years later. The love potion becomes a minor coincidence: Tristram and Isoud are already in love when they drink the stuff, not knowing of its alleged magical properties, and show no trace of its alleged influence afterward.

Devoid of mystery, terror, passion, and the sense of a strange time and place, The Enchanted Cup is full of orthodox opportunities for Technicolor, and probably the easiest reading of this or any year. It will not ruffle the most delicate sensibilities.