To Pause or Not to Pause?

Ron Rosenbaum examines the correct phrasing of a line and other white-hot debates in The Shakespeare Wars (Reviews, June 26).

It's incredible that the behind-the-scenes world of Shakespeare scholarship turns out to be so complex.

Also exciting and significant. I wanted the book to appeal to the intelligent, educated reader who's seen and read Shakespeare and has probably been turned off by the academic literature, and probably hasn't learned a lot of new things from the endlessly repetitive slew of biographies.

What's your aversion to Shakespearean biography?

There's really not enough continuous knowledge about Shakespeare's personal life to justify all the projections of his life upon his work or his work upon his life that biographers tend to do. I think much of Shakespearean biography over the last centuries has been beating the life out of a few tired old anecdotes and not illuminating the work in any useful way.

Most people don't realize there may be two Hamlets, three Lears.

Most nonspecialists are unaware and the specialists themselves can't agree on it. It's a fascinating problem. Did Shakespeare revise or was he the one-draft wonder of Shakespeare in Love? Everyone cites King Learas though they know its deep meaning, and yet there's a vast schism among scholars as to whether the dying words of the Folio King Lear are Shakespeare's own, or the words of some actor in Shakespeare's company. It makes all the difference as to whether Learis a redemptive work or a bleak, nonredemptive work.

What about Shakespeare on film?

When it's done brilliantly, film can bring us closer to Shakespeare than mediocre stage productions. Sir Laurence Olivier's Richard III, Peter Brook's King Lear, Paul Scofield as Lear, Richard Burton as Hamlet are as good as anything the average person is likely to see on stage in his or her lifetime.

What do you think about restoring the "original" language, whether in spelling or performing with the original Elizabethan pronunciation, as the Globe Theatre has done recently?

Restoring the original spelling of Shakespeare's texts gives you a lot of new exciting ambiguities and ways of hearing Shakespeare. Sir Peter Hall's attempt to find a way back to the way Shakespeare's iambic pentameter line was spoken—where you put the pause—is valuable because it can transform the way Shakespeare is spoken onstage. To me what makes Shakespeare so exciting still is the language, and I'm fascinated by the different theories of how to speak the verse and how it's spelled on the page.