The Shakespeare Wars

Chapter One

The Dream Induction

On the last evening of the summer of 1970 in the vil- lage of Stratford-on-Avon, birthplace of Shakespeare, I had an experience that changed my life and has haunted me ever since. One that left me, ever after, with a question I ve been trying to answer: What was that about?

An improbable chain of circumstances had resulted in my witnessing one of the first performances of a now-legendary production of A Mid- summer Night s Dream, one that I subsequently learned changed more lives than mine: it changed the lives of an entire generation of Shakespearean players and directors, changed the way Shakespeare has been played ever since.

But for me, that Dream a Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Peter Brook was a kind of initiation into a new realm, a realm I ve sought with mixed success to return to ever after. It was the experience that, for me, gave a lifelong urgency to the conflicts over Shakespearean questions examined in the ensuing chapters.

Perhaps I should introduce the conflicted, divided person I was back then when I piloted my rented Austin Mini into Stratford by introducing the forbidden question that led me to flee graduate school, and indirectly set me on the path to that life-changing experience at Stratford.

Just two years before that I had begun what seemed like a promising academic career at Yale Graduate School s Department of English Literature. As an undergraduate at Yale, I had studied primarily pre-seventeenth-century literature and had been granted a Carnegie Teaching Fellowship to Yale Graduate School, a fellowship designed to spur those undecided about an academic career to spend a year tasting the supposed fruits of such a career without many onerous responsibilities. I was only required to take one graduate seminar and teach one undergraduate class per semester, in return for which I was given an official-sounding appointment to the Yale faculty and named a Junior Fellow of

Ron Rosenbaum studied Shakespeare at Yale. His bestselling work of cultural history, Explaining Hitler, has been translated into ten languages. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He writes a column for The New York Observer and lives in New York City.