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  • The Great William: Writers Reading Shakespeare by Theodore Leinwand
  • Kenneth Gross (bio)
The Great William: Writers Reading Shakespeare. By Theodore Leinwand. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Illus. Pp. viii + 232. $35.00 cloth.

I never yet knew how amazing his stretch & speed & word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace & outrace my own, seeming to start equal & then I see him draw ahead & do things I could not in my wildest tumult & utmost press of mind imagine.

—Virginia Woolf, quoted in Leinwand, 71

Lear's renovation is going on rapidly & ruins me altogether for anything else. I am willing, however, to be destroyed in this cause: I hope to have some permanent effect."

—John Berryman, quoted in Leinwand, 3

Such a funny mind Shakespeare had, a funny ear, a funny mind, funny tongue.

—Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Leinwand, 150

For the sake of candor: I wrote a blurb for this book. In it I noted Theodore Leinwand's fine picture of Shakespeare as a huge walking ear with tiny legs taking [End Page 98] in the chaos of all the world's words. I'd add here that Leinwand's own generosity and acuteness of ear (and eye) mark the book, as he explores the curious, probing, hungry, illuminating, reckless, and obsessive attentions of his seven writer-readers. In addition to the three quoted above, these are Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Charles Olson, and Ted Hughes.

The Shakespeare writings studied here include formal essays and books but also unpublished lecture notes, letters, journals, word lists, outlines, marginalia, and even, in the case of Ginsberg, tape recordings of lectures from the 1970s and 80s at the Naropa Institute (including heckling by Gregory Corso [146–61]). And then there are simply the underlinings, bracketings, and marginal X's in much-used books that may be all we have of a writer's response to a certain passage. Leinwand's attention to these scattered things—an attention that is intimate, subtle, mercurial, and scrupulously scholarly—gives a quickened texture to this fascinating, moving book.

Leinwand sharply evokes the physiology, gesturality, nervosity, somatics and psychosomatics of reading. You feel how Leinwand's own eye travels on the pages he's reading (often during travels to unplumbed archives). He aims to get closer to his writers' voices, their habits of mind, their moments of love and inspiration, the idiosyncratic styles of judgment that make up their dialogue with dead and living things. Such exchanges often unfold in the white spaces beside or between the words, and even, you can think, behind them. As much as possible, Leinwand shows you the writers inside the text, fiercely attentive, reentering Shakespeare's words and letting the words enter them, weighing the words, grabbing them for their own uses. Perhaps because these writers' own large ambitions come into play so quickly as they read, they have a remarkable way of letting the part evoke the whole in their descriptions of Shakespeare. Throughout, Leinwand lets you feel the pleasure and friction of their reading, moving between poles of self-assertion and self-effacement, giving you the materials of a peculiar, sometimes secret autobiography, a map of different Shakespearean selves. If their marginalia, etc., often bring you back to the point of these writers' inspiration, you are invited to think that, at moments, you might also get some glimpse of Shakespeare's inspiration—the moment of his hearing and glossing of the world, its words.

You follow Coleridge's way of tracking the inner logic of words and transformed metaphors, the rapid-sketch motion of Shakespeare's mind bound up with the movement of Coleridge's own "intellecturition" (his coinage). In glosses, letters, and poems, you see the traces of Keats's enthusiasm, competitiveness, ventriloquism, and poetic opportunism ("Give me new Phoenix-wings to fly at my desire" [49]), his dire wish for a matching immortality. Woolf's diary and reading notebooks mark startling combinations of strain, brooding, astonishment, and wild pleasure—her feeling for "the pelt of ideas & words" in Shakespeare (81). Olson finds in the impersonal, "objectivist" tenor of Shakespeare's late verse a model of his own...

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