****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
The conservative columnist Joe Sobran was "surpassingly intelligent" (Jeff Hart of Dartmouth) but raninto trouble in the late 80s when he was accused of becoming preoccupied with "Jews and Shakespeare".The Jewish question eventually resulted in Bill Buckley's In Search of Anti-Semitism, which also addressedPat Buchanan and Gore Vidal (which nobody remembers, because unlike PJB and MJS, Vidal was seen as aleftist iconoclast, like, well basically everybody in this era of cancel culture and being woke and all that).The right had its own cancel culture, as Paul Gottfried's new book (as editor) shows regarding Mel Bradford. Anyway, Sobran, like the minority of scholarship, believed that "Shakespeare" was actually Edward de Vere,the 17th Earl of Oxford. He recommended this commentary by Goddard as the best introduction. Heappears to be orthodox on the authorship question.Volume 1 ends chronologically with Hamlet and includes most of my favorite Shakespeare plays, althoughvolume 2 has Macbeth, Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello. Goddard cross-references the charactersand plots within Shakespeare, and also makes references to other authors. There is a lot of the Russiannovelists Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, as well as poets like Eliot and Dickinson. Of course there are the classicsof Homer, Aeschylus and Virgil, as well as Dante and Goethe. Goddard has a great command of all thismaterial to make comparisons, contrasts and links within Shakespeare's work and among the variousauthors.Most of the comedies are earlier in Shakespeare's career, while the tragedies are later. These includeComedy of Errors, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and As YouLike It. One of the more interesting ones for this politically correct age is Taming of the Shrew, whereGoddard shows how to read Katherine with irony. Also, and with reference to the question of anti-Judaism, there's the Merchant of Venice, where he has analysis of Shylock's complexities, but alsoa more nuanced and ambiguous understanding of Portia. There's a lengthy treatment of Henry IVpart 1 and 2 and Henry V, with the great character of John Falstaff. As Sobran pointed out in thetalk "Shakespeare on War and Empire", Goddard is writing right after WWII, when England hasheroically fought the Nazis, but in Henry V the poor little English are the ones invading France!So the audience is in quite a different place from the scene in the drama.Romeo and Juliet. Recently I found I couldn't get into some parts of this, the way I did in high school,so I am seeking what Paul Ricoeur calls the second naivete. Goddard shows how their love is the realdeal, contrasting the title characters with the wonderful foils of Mercutio and the Nurse. But Romeofell, like most of these characters, to the level of Mercutio and Tybalt. A recurring theme in Goddard'stakes is that violence is usually bad, even when the audience doesn't get it. Another point is thatthe chorus doesn't speak for Shakespeare, the chorus is just the chorus when it says the lovers arestar-crossed.For example-Julius Caesar, where the protagonist is actually Brutus, but the ghost of Caesar hauntshim. Goddard strikingly says "Caesar stabbed Brutus" with his et tu, Brute. Portia, more clearly thanthe Portia of the Merchant of Venice, is a great heroine and truly Brutus' "better half", a phrase thathas become cliche but is non-ironically true here. People keep debating whether Brutus was right,when he clearly says "I killed not thee with half as good a will".Hamlet doesn't disappoint. Again, Goddard shows how violence is bad, even though almost everyaudience throughout history has taken for granted that the ghost is right, and Hamlet is supposedto take revenge and is taking too long. As Romeo failed in love, Hamlet failed in art by giving in toviolence. He was an artist and a philosopher, but became a killer like everybody else in political life.Goddard says Hamlet is like Shakespeare himself, if he gave up art and became a warrior. The strikingconclusion is that Shakespeare is a Hamlet who didn't fall.
