Much Ado About Shakespeare in Editor’s Rambling Tale

ME AND SHAKESPEARE

Adventures With the Bard

By Herman Gollob

Doubleday

344 Pages, $26

Herman Gollob served as a book editor for 31/2 decades before leaving what had been a rewarding occupation. “A certain weariness had begun to overtake me. In fact, I’d begun to resemble my briefcase: outside, battered and worn; inside, musty and cluttered,” he writes in “Me and Shakespeare,” his memoiristic account of the six years following this retirement when he indulged his all-consuming interest in things Shakespearean.

Gollob’s intrigue was reignited by an astounding production of “Hamlet” on Broadway starring Ralph Fiennes. With time on his hands and a curious mind sparked by this production, the septuagenarian Gollob delved into the works of Shakespeare with all the passion he’d brought to book editing at Little, Brown and other publishing houses.

In the bard’s masterpieces, he discovered a quality similar to that he’d encountered years earlier when he’d returned to his Jewish roots and had a bar mitzvah in his 50s. “I felt I was sharing some kind of mystery, that I was being drawn in by a spiritual quality,” he writes, “that I was being transformed and lifted out of reality into something deeper and more profound.”

“Me and Shakespeare” takes readers chronologically through his budding interest, into the many courses, lectures, books and research he mines, to discussions he has with great actors and directors of Shakespearean drama (including David Suchet and Cicely Berry), into the classes on Shakespeare he teaches to adult students and, finally, to a stunning production of “Hamlet” at the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London. Recounting his growing obsession with passionate writing and a proselyte’s enthusiasm, Gollob also casts many backward glances to his youth, his college-aged aspirations to acting, his earlier career as a theatrical and literary agent and his book-editing experiences.

The resulting narrative is nearly impossible to categorize. It’s not clearly a memoir of his expedition into all things Shakespearean, though the memoirist lens is often used to examine his growing ardor; it’s not entirely a text to help readers get the most out of their own reading of Shakespeare, though it shifts regularly into that didactic mode; it’s not a scholarly dissertation on a specific aspect of Shakespearean drama, even if at times it reads as such (particularly as Gollob researches his own theory that Shakespeare was inspired by a Jewish acquaintance and that Shakespeare’s works, particularly “King Lear,” were influenced by Hebrew theology); nor is it a memoir of how his upbringing and early career choices influenced his later appreciation of Shakespeare, though it contains these elements as well.

“Me and Shakespeare” is a sprawl covering all these subjects and then some, slipping in tone throughout--declaiming scholar one moment, confiding autobiographer the next--and, though filled with great eagerness, is not particularly adept at inspiring the same enthusiasm in readers.

Those not as well versed in Shakespearean drama as the author, for instance, may find themselves lost amid the esoteric details he discusses with few contextual clues to completely understand his references. He does provide a stunning account of the Globe’s “Hamlet” filled with important plot details and a concise overview of the play, but not until the final pages of the book, too late for many of the earlier references to have made total sense to a neophyte.

Gollob delves regularly into highlights of his editing career with only the slimmest fiber to tie these stories to the subject at hand--usually, that a particular writer or co-worker reminds him of a Shakespearean character.

Throughout, Gollob shuffles between the tragedies and comedies, following his own random research path, along with the syllabus of the class he teaches at an adult education institute in New Jersey, weaving in stories of his childhood and early adulthood and assembling these disparate tales upon a structural scaffolding built of whim and happenstance.

In other words, his obsession with Shakespeare remains his own, with little room for the reader unless that reader is already similarly fascinated. This is most apparent when Gollob writes of taking a three-week summer course at Oxford and recounts in painstaking degree his every conversation with the instructor, the research he unearths for the optional end-of-class paper, even quoting whole-cloth sections of his final paper for the reader’s edification.

In an emblematic scene, Gollob explains that the instructor has asked class members to keep their final presentations to 15 minutes, but Gollob decides his paper, which cannot be delivered in less than half an hour, deserves the class’ attention and proceeds to usurp it. “Taking a seat facing the class, I sensed how it would feel to defend a doctoral thesis,” he writes.

No doubt readers who share his extreme fascination with Shakespeare will find in this narrative fuel to keep that fire burning. For the uninitiated, though, the book becomes little more than a rambling lesson in self-indulgence. Considering the author’s many years as a book editor, where part of the job is to rein in the egocentrism that can creep into manuscripts, a saying comes to mind: “Physician, heal thyself.”