Still the one.

Shakespeare After All, by Marjorie Garber (Pantheon, 1,008 pp., $40)

OF all the books that have been written about Shakespeare, is this the best? Shakespeare has entered our consciousness and is there to stay. In this volume, Marjorie Garber deals with all the plays, and does so comprehensively. Her scholarship is superb, and she is alert to the movement of Shakespeare's verse, its rhythms, pauses, texture expressing the whole mind of a character; and there is nothing modish here, no French theory, no ideology, no axes to grind. Shakespeare after all, she says with a smile. And that's enough.

When Harold Bloom a few years ago advanced the idea that Shakespeare "invented human personality," the claim might have seemed excessive. Yet, as Garber points out in her excellent 38-page introductory essay, the self-understanding of our species has indeed come to express itself in Shakespearean terms: "[Hamlet] from the Romantic era on has been established as the premier Western performance of consciousness ... the Macbeths have become emblems of ambition, Othello a figure for jealous love, Lear a paradigm of neglected old age and its unexpected nobilities, Cleopatra a pattern of erotic and powerful womanhood, Prospero in The Tempest a model of the artist as philosopher and ruler. Romeo and Juliet are ubiquitous examples of young love, its idealism and excess."

And about Shakespeare's women she writes that they "have become models of speech and conduct across the centuries, from the 'shrew' Katherine to the loving daughters Cordelia and Miranda to Juliet, the modern paradigm of love and longing." A Harvard professor, Garber is too polite to add that Prince Hal, in his youthful days with Sir John Falstaff, Mistress Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet, was the first Yale Man.

Garber hears that Shakespeare's characters all speak with their own voices, the poet himself disappearing into the characters he has made.

   Shakespeare's plays do not have a single
   voice, a lyric "I," or a "focalized" character
   through whom the audience or
   reader is tacitly expected to interpret the
   play.... The audience is given extensive
   evidence within the play to judge and
   evaluate the truth claims and ethical
   assertions that are so eloquently set
   forth by these charismatic speakers. We
   should remember that some of the most
   effective soliloquies ... are put in the
   mouths of, and at the service of,
   Machiavellian characters: Richard III,
   Iago, Edmund.

Exactly right. Shakespeare's erasure of himself seems almost magical. And yet--I know that I am probably deluded on this point--I believe that when you have immersed yourself in Shakespeare you do hear a Shakespearean voice, somehow between the lines but always present: the voice of the man Ben Jonson in his elegy called "Gentle Will." This man listens to the world. He holds himself in abeyance, he lets things Be, and what one hears is a comprehensive understanding, the Shakespearean voice saying, of so vile a person as Iago, only "Poor fool." Shakespeare hears truths about the world even in the Machiavellian voices of such wretches as Iago and Edmund--partial truths, to be sure, but truths nevertheless. Garber cites Keats on this Shakespearean "negative capability," contrasting it with the Romantic "egotistical sublime"--and also Keats's observation that this poet "has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen." Shakespeare looks upon his creation and finds it splendid.

The Shakespeare scholar Robert Hunter correctly called the late comedies "comedies of forgiveness," noticing the sacramental quality of The Tempest: the Fall occurring in Naples, then baptism (Prospero's storm), followed by contrition and repentance, confession, forgiveness, and marriage. The storms literal and spiritual that rage in the tragedies at last are ended, and the whole sequence of Shakespeare's plays can be seen to form an overall pattern like that of The Divine Comedy. You can make a discovery just by picking up a volume of The Tempest: It is much thinner than the volumes of the other plays. It has far fewer words, because a production includes so much music, expressive of joy and harmony; and, in a sense The Tempest wants to be music, the harmonious music of the spheres. Of course Prospero (and Shakespeare) says goodbye at the end. What more is there to say?

We see here, guided by Garber, that Shakespeare could write anything. He knew that Petrarch had written those famous love poems, his octet-sestet sonnets to Laura, so he begins Romeo and Juliet with a Petrarchan sonnet--but violates rosy expectations with mention of that ugly feud: "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, / Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean." Another Renaissance form of love poetry was the aubade, or dawn song, the lover's song at dawn. You want an aubade? As Garber notices, in Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare tosses one in, and plays with the form:

JULIET: Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.

It was the nightingale and not the lark ...

ROMEO: It was the lark, the herald of the morn,

No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east ...

One wonders whether the crowd at the Globe picked up the aubade there. John Donne famously used the aubade form, pushing it to a spiritual extreme in "The Good-morrow." Read that one, if you don't already know it: a great poem sounding like a Shakespearean soliloquy. (Incidentally, there is speculation that Shakespeare used the young Donne--brilliant, unpredictable, erotic--as a model for his Prince Hamlet.)

Mark Van Doren (who also wrote very well on all the plays in his 1939 book Shakespeare) once remarked that Shakespeare must have written his plays easily or he could not have written them at all. There is just too much in them: so much brilliance, so much meaning, all happening at once. This is all too much if a writer has to work it up. Shakespeare wrote plays the way Mozart wrote music.

Shakespeare is a dangerous author to test yourself against as a teacher or critic: the greater the writer, the greater the danger. While you read the work, the work reads you, and judges your adequacy. Shakespeare has ruined many critics. Marjorie Garber comes through her heroic effort here wonderfully. She and Helen Vendler, probably the best close reader of lyric poetry today, provide Harvard with a formidable team, and must attract the very best students, whether undergraduates or Ph.D. candidates. Sneer at Harvard all you like: If Harvard pays any attention, it just laughs.