Berryman's Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings

Issued in the wake of major books on Shakespeare by Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, this compendium of admiring, cogent and reflective essays, which have remained uncollected since Berryman's suicide in 1972, testifies to the unusually resilient and enduring value of the Bard's oeuvre. A poet known primarily for his sequence poem The Dream Songs (1969), Berryman gave three lecture series on Shakespeare but left his ambitious written projects, including an annotated edition of King Lear and a critical biography, unfinished. Given these circumstances, readers will be grateful for Haffenden's extensive introduction, which helpfully contextualizes the bibliographical ambiguities of the extant editions of the plays. The book's five sections afford readers an opportunity to examine Berryman's lifelong obsession with Shakespeare's characters, imagery, plots and, crucially, the textual puzzles that convinced him that poets make better annotators than editors. The introduction and notes to his edition of Lear are included, as is his correspondence (a letter to his mother illustrates his healthy, wry sense of humor, imagining Shakespeare ""now merry with wicked joy peeping over Olympus at sorrowful scholars""). In essays arranged both chronologically and by individual play, Berryman offers readings of the plays that are not only fresh and immediate but reflect his own literary personae. He identifies prevailing themes, examining in the tragedies both ""sexual loathing"" and ""the Displacement of the King""; in The Tempest he notes ""how often, and with what longing, sleep is invoked."" Like the writings of Coleridge and J.V. Cunningham, this is a book that relishes its resources, by a poet-critic who felt Shakespeare's language on the pulse. (Feb.)