The Anxiety of Intellect

You usually associate street smarts with some one who knows how to negotiate in business. Donald Trump apparently considers this ability to be a top of the line requirement for statesmanship and something which qualifies him to be president of the United States. He has boasted that he will have a wall built between Mexico and the United States which the Mexicans will pay for. You don’t usually associate streets smarts with the world of intellect, but indeed there are intellectuals who exhibit the same kind of intuitive abilities that work in deal making within the realm of intellectual arguments. That is to say there are intellectuals who approach such questions as the branch falling in the forest with no one listening or the question of whether you would turn the trolley in the direction of one hapless soul in order to save five (the Trolley problem) with some degree of swagger. Such thinkers are way beyond reason and deductive logic. For instance Harold Bloom, the literary scholar who coined the term “anxiety of influence” probably can reiterate his theories about the provenance of poetry in his sleep, ditto Steven Greenblatt the Shakespearean authority who wrote Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Trump who has been around the block a few times when it comes to business probably thinks that he can run rings around a tough guy like Vladimir Putin (and part of his credential may relate to the fact that two of his wives Ivana and Melania come from the Czech Republic and Slovenia respectively) or the notorious bumptious Kim Jong-un. Similarly if you are a street smart intellectual you have to know how to handle the likes of the deconstructionist maeven Stanley Fish, if you’re going to get your feet wet at the MLA. And you’d better have the brashness of a Bill Maher if you find yourself knocking heads on the subject of race with the philosopher Cornel West. Imagine a series like The Sopranos, except set it in the competitive world of upper west Jewish intellectuals, the inheritors of the mantle held by Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Susan Sontag and the old Partisan Review crowd. Remember Woody Allen’s line “I had heard that Commentary and Dissent  had merged and formed Dysentery?" You need an intellectual shock jock, a kind of Donald Trump of ideas, to make a dent amongst these kinds of egghead mafiosi.

Will in the World

What is it that makes you push for the last ascent, or surge ahead when you've reached the putative wall that faces runners in the marathon and what, on the other hand, is going on when you start to feel the weakening of the spirit and the sickening feeling that tells you you’re going to throw in the towel? Of course this spectrum of feeling applies to extra physical activities too and understanding instances where stamina is not simply a matter of physical strength or conditioning, throws a light on what accounts for the longevity that characterizes some individuals’s approach to human existence and the short tether on which others seem to hang—and also a whole host of responses in between. "Giving up" is the derogative term that's usually put on the failure to persevere, but it doesn’t really describe the complexity of the phenomenon. Firstly, there are those who are simply held back by unconscious forces out of their control. They have not dealt with their fear of winning and victory—which they may deem to be a triumph over the idealized parent whose retribution will be the withdrawing of love. That’s the classic oedipal view. But not all of human existence is defined by family dynamics. Sometimes triumph and failure can only be understood in terms of broader concept out of the lexicon of esthetics and religion, like for instance tragedy and fate. There's something divine in the spirit which propels a winner and something fearful and awe inspiring in the specter of the individual who fails in moments of potential triumph. The double entendre in the title of Stephen Greenblatt’s book on Shakespeare, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare will not be lost on those seeking to understand the limits of human striving.

The Last Will

Imagine Through a Glass Darkly with Shakespeare as the writer returning home to his family. What greater palette for the examination of the narcissism and brilliance of the artistic personality than that of the greatest creative mind of all time! That’s what Robert Brustein is up to in The Last Will, his wistful look at a Shakespeare who comes home to make peace with his family, currently playing at the Abingdon Theater and directed by Austin Pendleton. Like Stephen Greenblatt who wrote Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Brustein plays upon the double and triple entendres of the playwright’s name in examining both his literal will and his legacy. In The Last Will, flashes of Othello’s jealousy, Lear’s paranoia and host of other affects are conscripted in the service of the venereal disease which has afflicted Shakespeare’s (Austin Pendleton) mind in his last days. Indeed, he’s decided to leave  everything to his daughter Susanna (Merritt Janson), an Anabaptist, whose dream is to shut down the theaters which play her father’s sinful works. In his fever, Shakespeare calls Anne Hathaway (Stephanie Roth Haberle) Gertrude and his other daughter Judith (Christianna Nelson), Desdemona then Perdita. He can no longer distinguish the characters he’s created from family and friends, like the great actor Richard Burbage (Jeremiah Kissel). Curiously Brustein’s portrait of Shakespeare’s marriage is reminiscent of the conflict between the Lincolns portrayed in the Spielberg movie, right down to the presence of a dead son who haunts the narrative. Long a scholar of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brustein, founder of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, and one of America’s most brilliant theater critics, is uniquely qualified to find a place for Shakespeare in a pantheon of characters whose flames burned too brightly.