Books: Play Worlds

Play WorldsSHAKESPEARE—Mark Van Doren—Holt ($3).

In the 20th Century a whole tribe of scholars and interpreters have encamped on the slopes of the Bard, assaying his every semicolon. Their discoveries have made a gulf great & wide between the specialist’s knowledge of Shakespeare and the ordinary reader’s memory, in which the plays are likely to seem bombastical old standbys, crested here and there with great quotations. To distill the specialist’s knowledge, to provide a lucid and sound account of what art may now be seen in every play, remained an important job for somebody.

Mark Van Doren* has done this job and maybe more. His qualifications would be hard to better. As a critic, Van Doren began his career in 1916 with a study of Thoreau, followed by an acute book on Dryden in 1920. An instructor at Columbia, he collaborated with his brother Carl on a textbook in 1925 (American & British Literature Since 1890). A poet of steadily finer weave and frosty skill, he published his Collected Poems this year. From 1935 to 1938 he studied cinema as The Nation’s movie critic. And for the last ten years he has taught at Columbia a course called English 35 and 36, in which all the plays of Shakespeare are read through one after another.

“If the plays of Shakespeare had not been easy to write,” says Mark Van Doren, “they would have been impossible. . . . The great and central virtue of Shakespeare was not achieved by taking thought, for thought cannot create a world.” Having thus dismissed the academic worry about “problems” he goes on to dismiss the word “Elizabethan,” never uses either word again. In 34 brief chapters (average length: 10 pages) he describes with citations, line by telling line, the world of imagination created in each of the plays.

The result, a compression of wonders perceived by a sensitive ear and mind, is to prove the plays strange and fresh enough to have been written yesterday or even tomorrow. Illuminated and relieved of their characteristic length and considerable dross, some seem almost too attractive, too clearly themselves. Not that Shakespeare’s flops are spared. “The poet in The Comedy of Errors puffs with unnatural effort. . . . His rhymes . . . rattle like bleached bones.” But The Merchant of Venice, in which money and love go hand in hand and uncorrupted, is a “gentlemen’s world,” inhabited by “creatures whose only function is to sound in their lives the clear depths of human grace.” In Henry IV, however, Van Doren considers that Shakespeare came to mastery by discovering that poetry can be better than beautiful; Hotspur, who hates poetry, is a fine poet “out of a hot love far nothing except reality and hard sense.”

This sane contribution to critical theory is made by a spare, shrewd, genial gentleman with a wide mouth, bright dark eyes and close-cropped head who has played the game of professional letters with uncommon distinction. More of an artist, less of a literary figure than his elder brother Carl, he has earned enough by journalism, writing and teaching to summer comfortably, with his husky wife Dorothy (who does the brief book reviews for the New Yorker) and two sons, on 150 wooded acres near West Cornwall, Conn. There, last week, while the yellowjackets reeled through the orchard, Mark Van Doren was preparing to spend his sabbatical year writing a long poem.

*Not to be confused with: Carl Van Doren, 54, oldest of five brothers (others: Guy, Frank, Mark, Paul), who started the tradition of Van Doren editors on The Nation, where he was “the life of the office.” Once headmaster of a fashionable girls’ school in Manhattan, he taught at Columbia University from 1911 to 1930. He has written five biographies, one autobiography, five books of criticism, one novel, one volume of short stories, translated a play from the German, edited two anthologies, has written introductions to more than 50 books—30 of them in one year (1931). His Benjamin Franklin last year won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.