The journey of the List returns, as it will periodically throughout its wending, to Shakespeare, by far the most frequently appearing author on it, and his universally well-known but perhaps only sporadically well-understood plays. I find as a middle-aged man of no particular distinction or status that it is hard to make a claim on Shakespeare and his art as anything having much to do with me. If it did, after all, shouldn't I be better? Much better? Wittier, more economically productive, more energetic, more generally competent, more able to at least contend with the government and corporations among a million other things? That is the world in which Shakespeare moves, or would seem to lead to if he is all that he is said to be. Yet I have reached a point where I can barely read him. I mean I can still read him, but not at leisure, often not without being so tired that I dose off or lose the thread of where I am, not so that I can become so immersed in the stories that ideas about them occur to me. I am reduced in such cases to simply reporting on my emotions as I revisited the play for what must be in this case the third or fourth time.
One thought that kept recurring to me, and that I have often had recur to me when I try to think about Shakespeare, was a memory of my junior high school locker room. The most perfectly developed athlete in the class for some reason which I forget had a beef with some hapless nerd (not in fact me, but I could easily imagine the dynamic repeating itself with me in this other gentleman's stead) which required rectification and the reminder to certain individuals of their various places in the social order. The athlete, clad only in a white towel, his taut muscles gleaming under the 1960s era lamps, reprimanded the other for his impudence calmly but firmly and unsmilingly. The humorous aspect, if it can be called that, of this spectacle was all of the backup that the athlete had. A substantial crowd had formed behind him, posing and glowering in varying degrees of seriousness, while no one was directly behind the nerd, including me. I was somewhat off to the side at an oblique angle, though with a more or less head-on view of the athlete, behind whom stood a skinny, weaselly boy who was about as substantial as the unfortunate victim himself, gloweringly ferociously at the offender while massaging the neck of the hero in anticipation of the violence that it was threatened could ensue. Often when some man arrogantly asserts a personal understanding of or affinity with Shakespeare's greatness that is lacked by just about everyone else who attempts to read him, which always includes me, I think of the sneerer as this neck-stroking fellow, only the neck being massaged is that of Shakespeare, who is relaxed and smirking with his earring and his long hair, holding over your head the threat of instant evisceration via language at any moment of course, not likely to carry it through all the way, but he doesn't have to, since the manifest nature of the threat alone has already crushed you in the eyes of the public and finished off your pretentions to being any kind of full man, which fate they themselves to this point have avoided.
I have said thus far very little about the play itself because what is there to say? It has been to this point and still is one of my favorites among the comedies/romances, the sensibility in it is so fine and soothing. The genius, much admired by me, in melding the evocative, proto-modern European aspects of the setting and characters and convincingly presenting their expressed thoughts as representative of the general universal mindset is prominent here. One feels it is a vision of life as it should be more often, not in the sense of social organization or other macro-structures, but of being alert to and engaged with the world and other people around one and the power which speech and thought give to that end, which I daresay most people rarely experience. Are the characters, particularly the female characters, your Rosalind, acceptably deep depictions of female personhood for our age? I'm sure an argument can easily be produced that they are, or at least are deeper and more interesting than either most comparable artistic depictions of women or of the majority of living specimens themselves, though that wherein lies their supposed depth would perhaps be dismissed as either not realistic or not concerned with the right qualities. I suppose I am confused on these matters myself now. There is still clearly a great deal of relevant meaning in the highest caliber literary and other artistic works and what they have to say about men and women and being human and so forth and even if most people are not interested in them or reject them there are still many who do not but I don't have any sense anymore of what these stories mean to them or what they take from them or how they influence their beliefs or how they live their lives. I am really at sea on this, perhaps especially with Shakespeare, since as a force in the world his writing is kind of a repudiation of my entire approach to life yet I still really do love him after my own fashion.
To our modern sensibility I suspect Jaques and Touchstone the clown are the most realized and immediately acceptable characters. They certainly are to me at least.
I had thought of something else to say about this the other day but I forgot to write it down and now I don't remember what it was.
The Tournament
1. William Shakespeare--Much Ado About Nothing.............................................688
2. Dava Sobel--The Glass Universe........................................................................57
3. Cynthia Greenwood--The Complete Idiot's Guide to Shakespeare's Plays........10
4. Poul Anderson--The Snows of Ganymede.............................................................5
5. Charles Boyce--Critical Companion to William Shakespeare, Volume I.............0
6. Christopher Berry-Dee--Talking With Psychopaths and Savages.........................0
The qualifying did not give us much for this renewal of our celebration of the arts.
Preliminary Round
#3 Greenwood over #6 Berry-Dee
No libraries in my state carry the Berry-Dee book. One carries Greenwood.
#5 Boyce over #4 Anderson
Boyce uses a similar formula to overcome Anderson, at one time evidently a moderately successful science fiction author now neglected by librarians. Boyce has published other Shakespeare-related books as well and would appear to be accepted as an Expert on the man's work.
Final Four
#1 Shakespeare over #5 Boyce
In general I think the master beats his scholar in these kinds of matchups. Most of Shakespeare's plays are not eligible for the Challenge here, being already on the IWE list, but Much Ado is for whatever reason one of the handful that got left out. It hasn't got much competition for the title.
#2 Sobel over #3 Greenwood
The subtitle of the Sobel book is How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. This makes it sound like one of those breezy modern books that doesn't necessarily imply that history has exactly lied to you, but that its emphases and choices of where to shine its lamps have been regrettably narrow and benighted enough that it is not clear how fully we can trust any of its claims. Dava Sobel is however a best-selling author of historical science books for a popular audience--Longitude and Galileo's Daughter are two titles recognizable even to me--which indicates that she must be at the least a highly readable author--and this is her latest book.
Championship
#2 Sobel over #1 Shakespeare
This was a very close final game, and according to the formula Shakespeare should have won, and indeed I am not even familiar enough with Much Ado About Nothing as a play (I think I've read it once but don't recall it well) that I feel comfortable about letting it slide. My reasoning went something like this: 1. With Shakespeare and Shakespearian-related words scheduled to recur repeatedly throughout these challenges there is a good possibility it will come up again. 2. I am going to be on vacation in a couple of weeks and in the event that I go somewhere I want a somewhat longer book so that I don't have to carry a bunch of little books around with me. So Sobel wins over The G.O.A.T.
