Well, maybe not. But the author of the recent phony Shakespeare book has just taken a massive hit whether or not he cares to acknowledge it. For a Renaissance scholar, getting your butt kicked by Alastair Fowler is kinda like being an electrician and being told by Thomas Edison that you have your wires crossed. (I can't get the link to work, so am appending the entire article to the end of this post.) He is being called on his shit, is Spanky--the name I gave him in gradualschool, the name countless now-tenured professors call him privately because they were my colleagues and, like me, they were exasperated by his silly pretensions and his stupid leather pants. ". . . And Our Gang" kept echoing in my head as I watched his eager sycophants suck up to him while he struck his various bankrupt intellectual attitudes, so I christened him "Spanky," and it stuck. We knew he was a whore; we just didn't know his price. Now we do: $1 million. Barely enough to buy a decent house, these days, where I live (in a trailer).
Here it is, from The Guardian, 2/16 (http://education.guardian.co.uk)
Where there's a Will there's a payday
There are few greater pleasures in the academic world than reading a
rave review of one's own book or a devastating review of anyone else's
book. Not, that is, a nasty review, a spiteful review, a small-minded
review, or a venal hatchet job - but a dismembering, joint by joint, that
does to the book under review what was done to Mel Gibson at the end of
Braveheart.
It's not love of academic bloodsport that gives relish to reading a
devastating review (always assuming, of course, that it is not directed at
one's unlucky self). Done well, like urban demolition, such reviews
clear the ground. They also, if done well, reassert standards and the
intellectual authority that makes a discipline just that - disciplinary.
All this apropos of a truly devastating review by Alastair Fowler, in
the TLS the week before last, of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World:
How Shakespeare became Shakespeare.
It's Godzilla versus King Kong: two very big beasts of the academic
jungle. Fowler, retired Regius Professor at Edinburgh, is formidably
learned in the Renaissance period of English literature. In the other
corner, Greenblatt is a reigning giant of the American academic scene. For
forty years Fowler's magisterial edition of Milton (done in partnership
with John Carey) has established the benchmark for erudite commentary in
his (and Greenblatt's) field. Fowler went on, in the 1970s, to devise a
whole new way of making sense of Milton's and Spenser's epics and
Shakespeare's sonnets - numerology. If you could do the maths, Fowler's
exegeses were persuasive. But one could feel one's brain bursting with the
effort at keeping up with him.
Fowler's review went at Greenblatt's biography of Shakespeare like a
wrecking ball. The research was lazy. "Greenblatt has only to state a
fact or a figure to blur or falsify it," Fowler asserted, citing a string
of howlers. Not that Greenblatt had troubled to acquaint himself with
all the facts to hand, relying instead on "imaginings" (a word Fowler
rolled round the review with sarcastic emphasis). The Elizabethan
background of Will in the World would have shamed an A-level student; it
displayed "a mind quite innocent of British history". After citing a
catalogue of egregious historical errors, Fowler suggested, with mock
bewilderment, "It almost looks as if Greenblatt is drawing on the film Young
Bess." But perhaps, Fowler mused, Greenblatt had concocted his
"imaginary" historical backdrop "in the hope his book would be filmed". Hadn't
Stoppard done rather well with Shakespeare in Love?
Nor, in Fowler's view, was Greenblatt much cop as a literary critic:
"When he ventures on criticism of Shakespeare's plays, he distorts them
unmercifully." A series of distortions followed. So it went on, for some
4,000 devastating words.
"How", Fowler concluded, "did the intelligent Greenblatt come to write
so 'sloppy' a book?" The answer was left for the reader to supply.
Money. Rumour (which probably, as always, exaggerates) whispers that
Greenblatt got a million dollars for Will in the World, which makes it the
highest paid work of scholarship ever (Guinness Book of Records take
note). Greenblatt may be innocent of British history, but he is clearly no
dunce where the Greenblatt finances are concerned.
The American publishers, Norton, put huge promotional effort into Will
in the World. "Professor Greenblatt", they proclaimed in their PR
blurb, "is widely acknowledged as the greatest Shakespearean scholar in the
world" (tell that to Professor Fowler). The book was short-listed for a
National Book Award. Greenblatt appeared, starringly, on late night
talk shows. Reviewers (whose Shakespearian expertise was often
non-existent) fell into line and dutifully raved. Will in the World made the New
York Times bestseller list, and was proudly prominent on literate coffee
tables across the nation.
In this country, published by Cape, Will in the World has also reached
parts that works of lit crit rarely do. Victoria Coren, in last
Sunday's Observer, in a column about the Donald Trump-Melania Knauss wedding,
embellished her sprightly gossip with lengthy reference to "Stephen
Greenblatt's brilliant new book". Ms Coren would not, one imagines, have
reached out for Fowler's ingenious exposition of the numerological
design in Epithalamion (Spenser's wedding poem - but you knew that, didn't
you?)
Greenblatt's pedigree, up to the point of his writing this latest book,
was as professionally orthodox as Fowler's. He made his name with a
monograph, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), which founded the school
of New Historicism. Greenblatt's innovative approach was seized on by
many in his profession with relief, offering as it did a way of out the
dead ends into which "theory" had led them. New Historicism put
literary criticism's feet back on the (historical) ground.
I suspect that Renaissance Self-Fashioning, published by the University
of Chicago Press, didn't make its author a heap of money. But the
payoff in professional advancement was vast: prestigious chairs (Greenblatt
went on to hold two at once, on different coasts), presidency of the
MLA and, to crown it all, the Mephistophelean invitation to write the
great book about the great dramatist for a great sum.
Underlying Fowler's review, as I read it, is a polemical question. Are
great sums of money good for scholarship? Is Greenblatt's life of
Shakespeare as good as Renaissance Self-Fashioning? No. What is Harold
Bloom's best book? The Anxiety of Influence for which he probably got
peanuts. What is Bloom's worst book? Without doubt, Shakespeare: The
Invention of the Human, which, like Will in the World, made the NYT bestseller
list and reputedly earned its author hundreds of thousands.
Universities began in monasteries. Most of those who enter the
profession today do so in the knowledge that, like their monastic forebears,
the job comes with a vow of poverty. The authorities gratefully concur.
Like working dogs, the trick with academics is to "keep 'em lean, keep
'em keen". Don't overpay the professors, it just makes them fat and lazy
(administrators' salaries are, of course, something else).
In my experience most academics want no more than a decent professional
salary. Enough money not to have to worry about money. The rewards of
their chosen career are not monetary. The joy of teaching and
scholarship is what makes the job worth doing. There are many ways of ruining
scholars. Overburdening them with administration is one (little joy
there). Another is offering them so much money (offers they can't refuse)
that they write books which the hucksters in the book trade want rather
than the books their discipline needs.
That, if I read him correctly, is the point that Alastair Fowler was
making, in such disciplinary fashion. Or, of course, it may be that he
simply thought that Will in the World was a stinker and deserved some
stick.
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
