Michiko Kakutani's Review of The Shakespeare Wars, by Ron Rosenbaum

Kakutani giveth while Kakutani taketh away.

In the same breath, Michiko Kakutani builds up solely for the purposes of tearing down, a literary slumlord evicting once-promising tenants from her house of favor.

The review begins with so much praise for Rosenbaum’s previous effort, Explaining Hitler, that one suspects more than a dash of hyperbole – she can’t be so effusive for the entire review – and all so that the inevitable fall comes from still greater heights, a Goliath toppling a previously ballyhooed David. She calls the 1998 book “the very model of cultural history-writing at its most insightful and provocative.”

To my mind, she takes things too far, relishing the hunt in spite of the prey being unaware of the chase. “Surely,” Kakutani speculates, “the author, an ardent student of Shakespeare will…shed new light on the playwright’s work; perhaps he will show what current thinking about Shakespeare says about our larger cultural assumptions.” The reader knows where she’s going, and the effect is that of watching a spider approach a fly that’s already struggling, caught in a web of inevitability and spun silk. She even lets Rosenbaum’s words become his poison, quoting his foreword thus: “He hoped in this book to serve as ‘a kind of guide – leading the reader, like Virgil in Dante, down into the scholarly inferno.’” Comparing himself to Virgil? The cliff grows even taller, awaiting Kakutani’s push.

The verdict is delivered in eviscerating fashion. The Shakespeare Wars is “a convoluted, self-indulgent and nearly impenetrable tome.” Kakutani uses twenty-one insults to pelt Rosenbaum, including “windy” twice. She charges that, in focusing on bard-related arguments and feuds, Rosenbaum is distancing himself both from an honest analysis of Shakespeare the Man and from his readers, who are likely unaware and uninterested in such trivialities.

The problem with the review is that Kakutani makes herself out to be a great scholar on the topic, dishing the details of the aforementioned tete-a-tetes as though they’re old hat. I daresay that many readers, weaned on People magazine and Entertainment Tonight would find academic spats to be more fascinating than actual engagement with the text of Shakespeare’s plays. In the end, she embodies the blowhard intellectualism that she disdains in Rosenbaum, saying of his attempt at examining the cobwebs of Shakespeare scholarship that his efforts “belong on a Shakespeare blog, not between the covers of a book.” But if Rosenbaum is writing for actual readers instead of stodgy professors and enigmatic critics, the populist feel of a blog might not be so bad.

Michiko’s Vocabulary Builder of the Day: Perspicuity



Original Review