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I began badgering Dmitri Nabokov ...
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Complete article at following URL:
http://www.slate.com/id/2193477/pagenum/all/#page_start
the spectator: Scrutinizing culture.
Are Those Shakespeare's "Balls"?
Should "A Lover's Complaint" be kicked out of the canon?
By Ron RosenbaumPosted Thursday, June 12, 2008, at 3:15 PM ET
If I can be said to have a favorite kind of column, it's one in which I can bring to your attention an exciting literary development—one whose importance has not received the notice it deserves outside the ivory tower—and then tell you what to think about it.
Or, to put it more gently, interactively, Webbily: suggest what questions you might want to ask about it. It's true some don't find this approach gentle. I began badgering Dmitri Nabokov back in 2005 to make a decision about publishing The Original of Laura (his father Vladimir's final unfinished work, which V.N. had asked his heirs to destroy) and renewed my pressure in two recent Slate columns. When Dmitri finally gave in and announced he would save the manuscript, he attributed his decision to make a decision at least in part to that "impatient writer, Ron Rosenbaum."
OK, I'm not generally known as a patient sort, but here's an important literary development—a Shakespearean controversy—that I've patiently waited for someone outside academia to make a fuss over for more than a year! I've been holding back because of my peripheral personal involvement in the matter. But now I think the time has come to get you—the educated reading public—involved.
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Should we risk the posthumous "wrath" of Shakespeare, famous for having put a curse in his epitaph for anyone daring to move his bones? Or has he been suffering from four centuries of wrath at having the awful "Complaint" attributed to him? Would he have wanted it burned, like Vladimir Nabokov, if he'd had a chance? Is Jonathan Bate risking the curse or the blessing of the bard?
I don't think there's a way of answering this with certainty. Almost every method of analysis has its drawbacks. Vickers and Duncan-Jones rely on literary history and yet come to different conclusions. (I'm sure Vickers has an answer for each of Duncan-Jones' objections.) Nonetheless, I tend to believe that—at a certain point, having read and reread Shakespeare attentively for a good portion of my life—one can go by the aesthetic equivalent of a gut check. Those cartoonish "balls" did it for me. Unless, of course, the whole thing is parody, but it just feels too leaden for that. (Slate readers who want to conduct their own gut checks can go to the RSC Web site, where the poem is at least preserved in pixels, and decide for themselves.)
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