Padavan does admit to walking through the chamber, "to obtain a cup of coffee from the member's lounge," but said that "in no way did I take any action to ‘check in,' or to have myself designated as present."

David Paterson said earlier that he believes Padavan and will not sign any bills enacted by the Senate today. But, as someone pointed out to me, what happens in 10 days, when bills passed by the Assembly and now the State Senate become law automatically? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say his affidavit will show up as evidence in some legal action. Just a hunch.

Mr. Bercovici quotes The New York Post's Adam Buckman's review of Heroes in which he cites this line of cribbed Shakespeare—"There's a divinity that shapes our ends - rough hew them how we will"— and suggests that it's "crazy nonsense" and that its speaker, Malcolm McDowell, "should win an Emmy for keeping a straight face while reciting these lines."

As Shakespeare would say, "Pwnedeth!"

It’s a graceful use of a stage direction, even if the brokers are referring to a bear market, not the fate of Antigonus and Perdita.

The release in question reminds those in the industry that for every cloud – in this case, a sun-obscuring whirlwind worthy of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film – there is a silver lining. Bargains! Hurray!

The release is below.

A bear market is defined as a prolonged period in which investment prices fall, accompanied by widespread pessimism. However, we at Wharton Property Advisors are optimistic that there are now bargains to be had for the discerning office tenant. But you need a good agent in order find them if (1) you are not in the real estate industry, and (2) don't have time to spend on an extensive search. We are monitoring the market closely and scouring the available opportunities for bargains that will benefit our clients.

Is your lease coming due soon or have you outgrown your space? If so, then Wharton Property Advisors can help. We search NYC for the most advantageous office space situations and then help our clients negotiate favorable terms. Or, if you like your current space we can help renegotiate your lease. We always represent our clients with honesty, diligence and integrity.

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Wharton Property Advisors, Inc. helps NYC office tenants find and dispose of office space. We provide the full range of commercial real estate services. Finding and negotiating great deals is our specialty. Moreover, we represent our clients with intelligence, honesty and diligence!!

According to Bill Bryson, “The amount of Shakespearean ink, grossly measured, is almost ludicrous. … The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare—twenty years’ worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day.” Yet here’s another, written by Mr. Bryson himself, “not so much because the world needs another book on Shakespeare,” he candidly admits, “as because this series does.”

The series in question is Eminent Lives, which describes itself as “brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures.” (The general editor, James Atlas, is the matchmaker.) Thus, Mr. Bryson sets off on a mission: “[To] see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record.”

The short answer to this is not much. We don’t know, for instance, exactly when he was born or how to spell his name or whether he ever left England or who his best friends were. “His sexuality,” Mr. Bryson deduces, “is an irreconcilable mystery.”

On and on go the disclaimers: “We know precious little ….” “We hardly know what he was as a person.” “Ever a shadow in his own biography, he disappears, all but utterly ….” And yet Shakespeare: The World as Stage is not an ongoing discouragement, because Mr. Bryson is so cheerful as he goes about debunking received wisdom, cockamamie theories, eccentric research and serious but flawed scholarship. Like Show White sweeping up for the Seven Dwarfs, he whistles while he works.

Mr. Bryson begins by telling us what Shakespeare did (or did not) look like. Here’s his very first sentence, about the onetime owner of a Shakespeare likeness now in the National Portrait Gallery: “Before he came into a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.” Right off, the author’s established his blithe and sunny tone: If a trio of witches were cooking up this book in a cauldron, there’d be a pinch of P.G. Wodehouse, a soupçon of Sir Osbert Lancaster and a cup of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. One can be firm of purpose and blithe at the same time, it turns out; one can write a seriously entertaining book.

Shakespeare: The World as Stage is aimed at general readers, not Shakespeare scholars, though the latter do make appearances now and then, not always is a flattering light, but always entertainingly. It will be up to academics to re-ravel what Mr. Bryson has unwound. Along these lines, the last chapter—“Claimants”—is particularly pleasurable, as the author trounces various theorists of alternative authorship of the plays. The Bard could hardly have a more devoted advocate. For instance, there is Mr. Bryson’s marvelous and succinct rebuttal of the Christopher Marlowe claim: “He was the right age … had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work.” How nicely ironic it is that Mr. Bryson is now himself a kind of über-academic, having been named chancellor of Britain’s Durham University in 2005, and being very active in the preservation of the “rural life” of Merrie England.

Which, according to Mr. Bryson, wasn’t so merry in Shakespeare’s day. For after he tells us what we don’t know about Shakespeare, and some few facts that we do, Mr. Bryson proceeds to contextualize his subject by depicting his time. Here, where facts abound, the author is in his element. He gives us pages and pages of lists about Elizabethan, and then Jacobean life: about food, clothes, printing methods, theatrical practice, language and its orthography, usage and evolution, and much, much more. It’s as if you came to visit me, and when someone said, “What’s she like?”, proceeded to describe my apartment in detail, including an inventory of its contents, a description of the original floor plan, and a copy of the co-op bylaws. We learn about Shakespeare, sometimes minutely—but we’re never, as it were, in the room with him.

Mr. Bryson goes off at times on amusing tangents, makes pointed parenthetical remarks and is otherwise completely charming and conversational, like a good host. The pleasure of his company cannot, to borrow a phase from him, “be emphasized too strenuously.”

He’s neither a literary critic nor an English professor, yet one wishes, at times, that he’d written a bit more about the writing rather than the writer. Only here and there, as in the chapter titled “The Plays,” do we have a sense of the deep pleasure he takes in reading Shakespeare, as opposed to sleuthing around after him. “It is often said,” Mr. Bryson writes, “that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work—every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career—is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language.”

Just as we know to some degree how Shakespeare knew what he knew, we also know the same to some degree about Mr. Bryson, for he provides a Selected Bibliography listing “principal books referred to in the text.” There are some three dozen of these, the earliest dating from 1910, the most recent from 2006. But just as significant as these sources are the people Bryson visits (among them an expert in portraiture, an archivist at the National Archives in West London and an assortment of scholars) and the places he goes. As you may know, in addition to being the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), Mr. Bryson is a very well loved travel writer, and what he’s done here is not so great a departure from that genre.

In this book he time-travels. An American expat born in Des Moines, Iowa, a Briton by choice, Bill Bryson is an intentional and perpetual tourist, and it’s a great pleasure to accompany him on his foray into the 16th century.

Nancy Dalva, senior writer at 2wice, reviews books regularly for The Observer. She can be reached at ndalva@observer.com.

When you produced Macbeth in Central Park last summer, your claim that it was a timely war play for “our divided and war-torn nation” was made, I can only imagine, in the spirit of over-exuberance. The theme of Macbeth—it’s no secret—isn’t war, but murderous, consuming ambition. You were trying to make the play relevant to our times when there was no need.

And here you go again in your notes on King Lear, the current production at the Public, starring Kevin Kline:

“A country is thrown into turmoil and war by the stubborn, foolish decisions of the men who lead it. In the moral confusion that follows, the best of the young are deluded, foolish and ineffectual, while the worst flourish and rise. It must be time to do King Lear.”

I’m sorry, Mr. Eustis—that’s a terrible description of a great play, and this is getting ludicrous. King Lear—arguably the finest, most moving tragedy of human existence—isn’t about war per se; least of all is it about any vague, convenient sense of our political present. (“It must be time to do King Lear”!)

It’s always time to do King Lear, actually. In addition to Mr. Kline’s version, Christopher Plummer, Alvin Epstein and André De Shields have all put themselves to the fire recently in the unrelenting, near-impossible role. Coming soon: Ian McKellen’s Lear with the Royal Shakespeare Company at B.A.M. Why, there are even more King Lears than Hedda Gablers, and about as many all-male Twelfth Nights—two of them in Brooklyn this season alone. Or that overcooked plat du jour of Shakespeare productions, Romeo and Juliet—the searing and timely anti-war play the Public will be staging in the park this summer.

Why can’t you leave Shakespeare alone, Mr. Eustis? There’s an awesome lack of modesty in a director who proceeds to rewrite him, but it hasn’t stopped your James Lapine. He firstly infantilizes King Lear with his addition of three pretty little girls as the childhood ghosts of Lear’s daughters. (Mr. Lapine’s early play, Twelve Dreams, revealed an interest in Jungian psychology.) His addition of the three ghostly girls is just a banal, sub-Freudian director’s conceit—a sentimental reference to happy families that couldn’t be less appropriate to King Lear. This is a monumental tragedy, after all, about unspeakable events—not a fairy tale, but a swirling, near-surreal nightmare whose comfortless essence is the foundation of Beckett’s masterpiece, Waiting for Godot.

Mr. Lapine’s use of tinkly, dream-like background music is only consistent with his muddled view that King Lear is somehow a lightweight drama of magical enchantment like—well, like Twelfth Night. Shakespeare set King Lear in pre-Christian times, at the dawn of civilization: Enchantment has no place in it. The merciless play strips humanity bare, to the elemental “thing itself.” The 80-year-old king’s belated journey toward self-knowledge and death is “above strangeness”; it’s beyond anything we know.

That’s why so much of the play takes place outdoors in a wasteland where a half-naked, deranged patriarch howls at a storm in the company of a clever fool, where madmen and homeless beggars roam in search of shelter and salvation, and a wretched blind man with his eyes gouged out tries to jump off a cliff that doesn’t exist.

We might question, then, Mr. Lapine’s choice of modish modern dress (costumes by Jess Goldstein) for a play of pagan timelessness, or question the usual all-purpose industrial set, along with its sand pit that’s like a small beach or a playground (scenic design by Heidi Ettinger). But can there be any doubt that King Lear has no need of New Age–y Muzak to help the action along, to help us relax and enjoy? The music by Stephen Sondheim—for it is He (with orchestrator Michael Starobin)—is so plainly wrong that one wonders if Mr. Sondheim bothered to read the text at all.

But then, Mr. Lapine is so determined to improve on poor Shakespeare’s play that he takes a verse of the Clown’s farewell song that closes Twelfth Night and transfers it to King Lear, where “The rain it raineth every day” is now performed by the king in crazed duet with the Fool. As Sophocles used to say, gimme a break.

There’s also the addition of Sonnet 43, now spoken by the Fool (“When most I wink / Then do mine eyes best see”). There isn’t quite enough poetry in King Lear for James Lapine. Rumor has it that he even considered having Lear recite “To be or not to be,” but changed his mind at the last minute because he thought one or two people might notice.

IN LONDON THEATER, TO BE CALLED A GREAT CHARACTER is a high compliment. Kevin Kline is one of America’s best—his Falstaff attested to it. His confident ease with Shakespearean verse is without equal. But Mr. Kline isn’t a tragedian (though his Hamlet was admired by some). He’s a romantic hero with a flair for light comedy. Innate charm and intelligence are his calling cards.

But ruined Lear possesses neither charm nor, in his foolish dotage, intelligence. Mr. Kline makes far too thoughtful and restrained a Lear. The scale and tragic heft of the ancient king are fatally absent. And with them, our overwhelming awe at the downfall of this symbolic godhead of paranoid power and majesty.

Mr. Kline’s opening scene, in which Lear demands irrational, unconditional love from his daughters in return for the spoils of his divided kingdom, proves a forewarning and near-disaster. There’s no simmering sense of danger in it. Lear’s terribly forbidding opening line, “Meantime we shall express our darker purpose,” is thrown away as if he were announcing good news. His chilling “while we unburden’d crawl toward death”—neutrally delivered by Mr. Kline as if crawl had no significance—is greeted by loud, silly laughter from Lear’s daughters.

The die is cast: Mr. Kline’s mild, reasonable Lear (who’s given to occasional temper tantrums); a neurotic, giggly Goneril (Angela Pierce); an unremarkable hag in Regan (Laura Odeh); and an unsympathetic, crucially untouching Cordelia (Kristen Bush). Only two actors in the entire company seem right: Michael Cerveris’ outstanding Kent and trusty Larry Bryggman’s Gloucester. Though Mr. Kline occasionally hints at Lear’s fury and convulsiveness, his storm scene is but a light shower, while his mad scenes in loincloth and wreath come uncomfortably close to the harmless mischief of a bushy-bearded, antic sprite.

Doubtless encouraged by Mr. Lapine, the star has over-thought his Lear to such an extent that we’ve no emotional connection to him or anyone else. (Gloucester’s eyes are literally “plucked out” in the blinding scene, provoking audience laughter.) Yet this is Shakespeare’s most emotional play. “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” is its defining line.

Lear’s death scene ought to pierce our hearts every time. The grieving, dying old king enters with his beloved daughter Cordelia dead in his arms. Father and daughter were recently reconciled, but Cordelia has been hanged in prison. In what must surel y be the most moving scene in the entire Shakespeare canon, Lear carries her body and weeps. (“She’s gone forever!”) And longs pitifully for her to breathe and live again. (“Cordelia, Cordelia stay awhile.”)

No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all?

Mr. Kline distracts us from the unbearable scene by fussily trying several times to wrap Cordelia’s limp arm round his neck as if she were a rag doll. If that stage business weren’t tricksy enough, he then beats his heart with each “Never, never, never, never, never” before dying.

No scene in drama speaks to us with such direct, uncluttered, primal feeling. It’s no crime for Mr. Kline to have stumbled trying to make sense of Lear’s “great stage of fools.” But we can only end as we began:

Mr. Eustis, when will your Public Theatre—and ours—trust Shakespeare enough to stop settling for third-rate, “timely” productions? When are you going to permit Shakespeare to speak for himself?

The key that Mr. Abraham has unlocked is Shylock’s humanity. Yet he does so without a trace of the sentimental. The new production of The Merchant of Venice is paired in ambitious repertory at the intimate Duke Theater on 42nd Street with Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, a lesser play. Mr. Abraham plays that cartoon ogre, Barabas. Small wonder the anti-Semitic T.S. Eliot greatly admired Marlowe’s savage caricature of the Jew. There are echoes of The Jew of Malta in Shakespeare’s later Merchant. But the lunatic Barabas is a fairytale devil and bogeyman of the medieval Miracle Plays who literally ends up in a boiling cauldron, whereas the tortured Shylock is a modern, mortal man whose life ends in humiliation and tragedy.

Shakespeare would have seen The Jew of Malta—the smash hit play of the day. I’ve always imagined him—Marlowe’s great rival, after all—thinking to himself a bit enviously as he watched the crowd-pleasing grotesqueries of The Jew of Malta’s laborious plot unfold: “I can top that!” He did. W.H. Auden pointed out that Shakespeare could have made his Shylock as absurdly wicked as Barabas, who poisons nuns for sport. As Auden shrewdly argued, “The star actors who from the eighteenth century onwards have chosen to play the role have not done so out of a sense of moral duty in order to combat anti-Semitism, but because their theatrical instinct told them that the part … offered them great possibilities.”

Not a narrowly stereotypical Shylock, then, nor a cravenly sympathetic one. Mr. Abraham’s sure theatrical instincts have created the most authentic Shylock I’ve seen. Quite simply, you believe he exists in all his complexity. This is a Shylock who’s no longer a dramatic myth, but flesh and blood. So complete is Mr. Abraham’s rigorously intelligent, passionate performance—and Shylock is nothing if not a man governed by unruly passion—that even the hackneyed “Hath not a Jew eyes?” is delivered freshly in burning, despairing indignation, as if for the first time.

It troubled me initially that the admirable director, Darko Tresnjak, had set his minimalist production in modern dress, as though we were on Wall Street. (Shakespeare’s Venice is at best token, and the word ghetto is mentioned only once.) In any case, Mr. Abraham, dressed in a business suit and yarmulke, brings an entire world onstage with him—the world history of the persecution of the Jews.

Shylock is many things, but not a hypocrite. The hypocrites are the double-dealing, “virtuous” Christian elites, with “fair” Portia, the idealized symbol of Christian virtue, the racist. (“The villainy you teach me I will execute,” goes Shylock’s infamous self-justification, not without cause). Mr. Abraham conveys a Jew who’s cultivated, pious, pedantic, loving, contemptuous, convulsive and merciless. Shylock, the usurer, is no sweetheart. But among the good things about this conflicted man are his religious faith, learning, sobriety, respect for the law, love of his daughter, reverence for his adored late wife, and blind belief in the very thing he can never have: justice.

“I crave the law!” is the desperate demand of someone the law will always betray. The line between justice and vengeance in A Merchant of Venice is almost invisible from any angle. The defection of Shylock’s beloved, feckless daughter, Jessica, into a Christian marriage marks his descent into near-madness. His insistence on the letter of the law and his pound of flesh amounts to a license to murder. And yet we feel sympathy for the righteous, perverse Shylock. He’s practically the only character in the play to keep his word, though his word is his pitiful destruction.

The trial scenes—usually a forgone conclusion, a ritual to be got through, like the often wearisome casket scenes—contain a real sense of tension for a change. The outcome seems to hang in the balance, as all good trial scenes must, until “fair” Portia moves the goalposts and condemns Shylock to the ultimate humiliation of Christian conversion. To witness Mr. Abraham’s cowering, broken Shylock then is too terrible.

How we miss Shylock when he’s dispatched into history! He appears in only five of the 20 scenes—and he takes the play. But Mr. Tresnjak’s cool, modernist production, with its Mac PowerBooks and witty photo ops, makes the dread casket scenes genuine fun, and if one or two of the jokes misfire, it’s forgivable. Among the fine, well-spoken ensemble, Kate Forbes—whose Helena in Mr. Tresnjak’s All’s Well That Ends Well was a supreme achievement—confirms with her compelling Portia that she’s among America’s leading classical actors. This production is a model for all those who insist that only the British know how to act Shakespeare.

I wish I could say the Marlowe was just as successful. The Merchant of Venice is the future, and this Jew of Malta is a serious misstep backward. I’m afraid that David Herskovits’ interpretation is only in tune with the campy, anything-goes productions of the classics in the park. It treats the costume drama as a mere romp, and as the night wears on threatens to turn into Spamalot, though without the laughs. You cannot caricature a caricature. The production lacks the wit and moral seriousness of The Merchant, while reducing to a farce Marlowe’s scathing view of the Christian world.

Under the circumstances, Mr. Abraham’s Barabas seems almost genial. “Asleep!” the actor gently chastised a lady in the audience without breaking stride. She’d nodded off in the second half. “Caught you asleep there!” There was good-natured laughter both onstage and off.

Nobody nods off when Mr. Abraham is Shylock. To the contrary, we’re awakened to his unforgettable, brave new interpretation.

Columbia Professor James Shapiro, come on down!

Although I’m involved personally in the matter, let me emphasize that there is a larger issue here. We’ve been living through an era in which the ethics of journalists have been subjected (and rightly so) to severe scrutiny—the better for all involved, particularly readers, who deserve to know if something they’re reading that poses as a fair consideration conceals a biased hidden agenda.

But what about the ethics of academics, particularly those who take it upon themselves to sneer loftily at journalists, as Mr. Shapiro does?

Three weeks ago, I pointed out to Eric Banks, the editor in chief of the respected literary journal Bookforum, that Mr. Shapiro had concealed from Bookforum’s readers the fact that he’d reviewed a book (mine) that subjected Mr. Shapiro’s views to ridicule.

Mr. Banks, an honorable man, agreed to revisit the pages in question in The Shakespeare Wars, in which I’d called attention to the foolishness of Mr. Shapiro’s reasoning in a key controversy over Hamlet texts. After having read my pages and the review, Mr. Banks quickly called me back to apologize for not having vetted the matter more closely before publication—and promised to publish an apology in the next issue in his letter to readers.

But really, it is Mr. Shapiro who owes an apology to Mr. Banks, for putting him in this position. More importantly, he also owes the readers of Bookforum an apology for concealing his conflict of interest from them.

There’s nothing wrong with disparaging a book that one reviews, but there’s something very wrong in concealing from readers the fact that the book you’re disparaging has made you out to be a bit of a fool.

An editor must rely on the integrity of his reviewers to come clean about just how severe a conflict of interest may be involved in a review. The reader must rely on the reviewer not to conceal them.

It seems to me that Mr. Shapiro himself was, to say the least, “economical with the truth,” as the phrase goes, in not disclosing the degree to which my book made his views seem laughable.

I characterize Mr. Shapiro as promoting a “dumbed-down” version of Hamlet, an “action-film” Hamlet, “a diminished version of literary art” based upon unproven assumptions “without any foundation” in evidence, aside from Mr. Shapiro’s dubious attempts at “read[ing] Shakespeare’s mind.”

In addition, I make fun of his jejune Freudian analysis of The Merchant of Venice, in which he actually takes seriously the notion that the “pound of flesh” Shylock demands is really a displaced reference to the genitals. (I’m not making this up, I swear.)

The idea that these remarks on his work would not prejudice his evaluation of my work is ludicrous. By the way, I think there is much of value for secondary-school students in his sedulous if soporific analysis of the historical background of Shakespeare’s work in his book, 1599. I think he benefited from non-specialist reviewers’ unfamiliarity with Hamlet text issues in advancing his evidence-challenged opinions on Hamlet text questions as if they were fact, which is one reason I felt the necessity of correcting them in my discussion of the issues, so that unsuspecting readers would be warned.

He could easily have disclosed my critique of him and taken issue with it, and then at least readers might have taken his overall appraisal with the appropriate shaker of salt.

Let me re-emphasize that this is not a matter of my complaining about a less-than-laudatory review (in fact, he bestows some compliments on my book) or the complaint of someone who feels unduly injured by academics. In fact, as this is written, less than a week after publication date, The Shakespeare Wars has been blessed with enthusiastic reviews from writers both inside and outside the academy: John Sutherland, professor of English at University College London (in The Financial Times); William E. Cain, chairman of the English department of Wellesley College (in The Boston Globe); John Gross, respected independent Shakespearean scholar and theater critic for the London Telegraph (in The Wall Street Journal); John Simon, notorious curmudgeon (in The New York Sun); and independent critics such as Stephen Metcalf (in Slate) and Walter Kirn (in The New York Times Book Review).

Yes, there have been some dissents and mixed reviews, but none—as far as I know—with a shamefully concealed conflict of interest such as Mr. Shapiro’s.

But one of the things that his act of concealment does is permit me to bring his flawed reasoning to the attention of future readers of his book, who might otherwise have taken his word for them.

For the past quarter century, the entire Shakespearean scholarly profession has been riven by a civil war over what kind of writer Shakespeare was. (Mr. Shapiro absurdly and disingenuously claims that the Shakespeare wars were over in the 1960’s—particularly ironic for someone conducting his own little covert war.)

In any case, the ongoing war asks the question: Was he the one-draft wonder of Shakespeare in Love, who dashed off manuscripts for the playhouse and then never gave them a second thought? Or do the variations in the early printings of works like Hamlet and Lear indicate that he went back to his early drafts and altered them in both subtle and substantial ways, leaving us essentially two distinct versions of each play that some have characterized (not without hot dissent) as first and second “drafts”?

Were the variations in the early texts the result of errors by typesetters, changes by actors and theater managers, or did they indicate that Shakespeare himself made the changes?

And there is a war within the war over whether Shakespeare revised. If Shakespeare made the changes, did he do so to make the play more suitable for the theater, because he was, as one sub-faction argues, primarily “a man of the theater”?

Or, as an important and controversial 2003 book by Lukas Erne has argued, was Shakespeare primarily a “literary dramatist” who may have made expedient changes for the theater but preferred the earlier wordier Quarto versions?

(No Shakespeare wars?)

Mr. Shapiro falls into the circular fallacy of some of the revisionists by accepting without any evidence that every change in the later, allegedly more theatrical Folio version was brilliant because it must have been made by Shakespeare, and that it must have been made by Shakespeare because it was brilliant.

ONE FOCUS OF THE CONTROVERSY IS Hamlet’s final 35-line soliloquy, the one that begins “How all occasions do inform against me … what is a man … ?”

It’s the soliloquy that Hamlet utters in the fourth act of the 1604 Quarto version, when he sees action-hero Fortinbras marching his army all over the landscape, willing to send thousands to their death for an empty title, for “an eggshell.” This leads Hamlet to reprove himself at great and eloquent length for lacking the will to exact vengeance for a far more concrete wrong, the murder of his father by his uncle.

To some people, like Mr. Shapiro, this soliloquy—35 lines of Hamlet’s most agonized eloquence—should be cut, the way it is in the posthumous 1623 Folio version, because (in this simplistic view) it repeats the kind of self-lacerating self-reproach we’ve heard from Hamlet before. Why listen to Hamlet examine his thought process further? (Unless you think what makes Hamlet distinctive is precisely its examination of Hamlet’s thought process.)

But Mr. Shapiro suggests Shakespeare chose a simplified, dumbed-down, fast-moving, direct-action Hamlet, rather than the Hamlet who might indeed have returned to further self-examination. In fact, the soliloquy that Mr. Shapiro says Shakespeare cut (on the basis of reading Shakespeare’s mind) might be seen to have taken self-examination to an even deeper level, a kind of self-consciousness about self-consciousness.

No: too complicated for Mr. Shapiro, who wants Hamlet to be more like the Terminator at this point, an action-film figure who dispenses with self-doubt. Well, it’s one point of view—a simple-minded one—but there are others who believe the soliloquy is the essence of what makes Hamlet Hamlet, and that those like Mr. Shapiro who want to cut Hamlet’s last soliloquy to move things along more quickly are giving us a “diminished view of dramatic art,” as the respected scholar Edward Pechter put it.

But Mr. Shapiro believes that Hamlet’s last soliloquy should be cut, that it belongs in the play “only if we want to see Hamlet as dark and existential.”

To which I reply, in my book: “Hamlet ‘dark and existential’? Who could possibly want that? Let’s have a Hamlet who becomes an action-film hero!”

I could go on (and do in the book), but I think it’s fair to say that I leave Mr. Shapiro’s argument in tatters for the half-baked, unexamined assertion it is, and that it’s not surprising he would not want a reader of his review to know about this, that he would not seek to defend it, and that he would not find anything good to say about my book.

But it’s also true that he manages to find something demonstrably false to say about my book, a desperate give-away of the supercilious condescension he demonstrates throughout his disingenuous review. In sneering about the fact that I left Yale graduate school to become a mere reporter rather than the lofty academic pooh-bah he fancies himself, Mr. Shapiro suggests that, as a reporter, I should have analyzed the “market forces” behind the decisions that publishers have made to divide Hamlet texts and to include dubious poems like the so-called “Funeral Elegy” in the canon (until it was discredited).

After all, reporters should concern themselves with grubby things like market forces, he implies. In fact, anyone reading my chapters on textual issues would find pointed discussion of the market forces in the Shakespeare publishing industry, and my chapter on the “Funeral Elegy” contains substantive analysis of the market forces behind the decisions made in that fiasco.

One would think Mr. Shapiro would be ashamed to have included such a flagrant misrepresentation (akin to his laughable claim that postmodern literary theory has triumphed for all times).

But then again, his conduct in this affair indicates a surprising degree of shamelessness.

Columbia Professor James Shapiro, come on down!

Although I’m involved personally in the matter, let me emphasize that there is a larger issue here. We’ve been living through an era in which the ethics of journalists have been subjected (and rightly so) to severe scrutiny—the better for all involved, particularly readers, who deserve to know if something they’re reading that poses as a fair consideration conceals a biased hidden agenda.

But what about the ethics of academics, particularly those who take it upon themselves to sneer loftily at journalists, as Mr. Shapiro does?

Three weeks ago, I pointed out to Eric Banks, the editor in chief of the respected literary journal Bookforum, that Mr. Shapiro had concealed from Bookforum’s readers the fact that he’d reviewed a book (mine) that subjected Mr. Shapiro’s views to ridicule.

Mr. Banks, an honorable man, agreed to revisit the pages in question in The Shakespeare Wars, in which I’d called attention to the foolishness of Mr. Shapiro’s reasoning in a key controversy over Hamlet texts. After having read my pages and the review, Mr. Banks quickly called me back to apologize for not having vetted the matter more closely before publication—and promised to publish an apology in the next issue in his letter to readers.

But really, it is Mr. Shapiro who owes an apology to Mr. Banks, for putting him in this position. More importantly, he also owes the readers of Bookforum an apology for concealing his conflict of interest from them.

There’s nothing wrong with disparaging a book that one reviews, but there’s something very wrong in concealing from readers the fact that the book you’re disparaging has made you out to be a bit of a fool.

An editor must rely on the integrity of his reviewers to come clean about just how severe a conflict of interest may be involved in a review. The reader must rely on the reviewer not to conceal them.

It seems to me that Mr. Shapiro himself was, to say the least, “economical with the truth,” as the phrase goes, in not disclosing the degree to which my book made his views seem laughable.

I characterize Mr. Shapiro as promoting a “dumbed-down” version of Hamlet, an “action-film” Hamlet, “a diminished version of literary art” based upon unproven assumptions “without any foundation” in evidence, aside from Mr. Shapiro’s dubious attempts at “read[ing] Shakespeare’s mind.”

In addition, I make fun of his jejune Freudian analysis of The Merchant of Venice, in which he actually takes seriously the notion that the “pound of flesh” Shylock demands is really a displaced reference to the genitals. (I’m not making this up, I swear.)

The idea that these remarks on his work would not prejudice his evaluation of my work is ludicrous. By the way, I think there is much of value for secondary-school students in his sedulous if soporific analysis of the historical background of Shakespeare’s work in his book, 1599. I think he benefited from non-specialist reviewers’ unfamiliarity with Hamlet text issues in advancing his evidence-challenged opinions on Hamlet text questions as if they were fact, which is one reason I felt the necessity of correcting them in my discussion of the issues, so that unsuspecting readers would be warned.

He could easily have disclosed my critique of him and taken issue with it, and then at least readers might have taken his overall appraisal with the appropriate shaker of salt.

Let me re-emphasize that this is not a matter of my complaining about a less-than-laudatory review (in fact, he bestows some compliments on my book) or the complaint of someone who feels unduly injured by academics. In fact, as this is written, less than a week after publication date, The Shakespeare Wars has been blessed with enthusiastic reviews from writers both inside and outside the academy: John Sutherland, professor of English at University College London (in The Financial Times); William E. Cain, chairman of the English department of Wellesley College (in The Boston Globe); John Gross, respected independent Shakespearean scholar and theater critic for the London Telegraph (in The Wall Street Journal); John Simon, notorious curmudgeon (in The New York Sun); and independent critics such as Stephen Metcalf (in Slate) and Walter Kirn (in The New York Times Book Review).

Yes, there have been some dissents and mixed reviews, but none—as far as I know—with a shamefully concealed conflict of interest such as Mr. Shapiro’s.

But one of the things that his act of concealment does is permit me to bring his flawed reasoning to the attention of future readers of his book, who might otherwise have taken his word for them.

For the past quarter century, the entire Shakespearean scholarly profession has been riven by a civil war over what kind of writer Shakespeare was. (Mr. Shapiro absurdly and disingenuously claims that the Shakespeare wars were over in the 1960’s—particularly ironic for someone conducting his own little covert war.)

In any case, the ongoing war asks the question: Was he the one-draft wonder of Shakespeare in Love, who dashed off manuscripts for the playhouse and then never gave them a second thought? Or do the variations in the early printings of works like Hamlet and Lear indicate that he went back to his early drafts and altered them in both subtle and substantial ways, leaving us essentially two distinct versions of each play that some have characterized (not without hot dissent) as first and second “drafts”?

Were the variations in the early texts the result of errors by typesetters, changes by actors and theater managers, or did they indicate that Shakespeare himself made the changes?

And there is a war within the war over whether Shakespeare revised. If Shakespeare made the changes, did he do so to make the play more suitable for the theater, because he was, as one sub-faction argues, primarily “a man of the theater”?

Or, as an important and controversial 2003 book by Lukas Erne has argued, was Shakespeare primarily a “literary dramatist” who may have made expedient changes for the theater but preferred the earlier wordier Quarto versions?

(No Shakespeare wars?)

Mr. Shapiro falls into the circular fallacy of some of the revisionists by accepting without any evidence that every change in the later, allegedly more theatrical Folio version was brilliant because it must have been made by Shakespeare, and that it must have been made by Shakespeare because it was brilliant.

ONE FOCUS OF THE CONTROVERSY IS Hamlet’s final 35-line soliloquy, the one that begins “How all occasions do inform against me … what is a man … ?”

It’s the soliloquy that Hamlet utters in the fourth act of the 1604 Quarto version, when he sees action-hero Fortinbras marching his army all over the landscape, willing to send thousands to their death for an empty title, for “an eggshell.” This leads Hamlet to reprove himself at great and eloquent length for lacking the will to exact vengeance for a far more concrete wrong, the murder of his father by his uncle.

To some people, like Mr. Shapiro, this soliloquy—35 lines of Hamlet’s most agonized eloquence—should be cut, the way it is in the posthumous 1623 Folio version, because (in this simplistic view) it repeats the kind of self-lacerating self-reproach we’ve heard from Hamlet before. Why listen to Hamlet examine his thought process further? (Unless you think what makes Hamlet distinctive is precisely its examination of Hamlet’s thought process.)

But Mr. Shapiro suggests Shakespeare chose a simplified, dumbed-down, fast-moving, direct-action Hamlet, rather than the Hamlet who might indeed have returned to further self-examination. In fact, the soliloquy that Mr. Shapiro says Shakespeare cut (on the basis of reading Shakespeare’s mind) might be seen to have taken self-examination to an even deeper level, a kind of self-consciousness about self-consciousness.

No: too complicated for Mr. Shapiro, who wants Hamlet to be more like the Terminator at this point, an action-film figure who dispenses with self-doubt. Well, it’s one point of view—a simple-minded one—but there are others who believe the soliloquy is the essence of what makes Hamlet Hamlet, and that those like Mr. Shapiro who want to cut Hamlet’s last soliloquy to move things along more quickly are giving us a “diminished view of dramatic art,” as the respected scholar Edward Pechter put it.

But Mr. Shapiro believes that Hamlet’s last soliloquy should be cut, that it belongs in the play “only if we want to see Hamlet as dark and existential.”

To which I reply, in my book: “ Hamlet ‘dark and existential’? Who could possibly want that? Let’s have a Hamlet who becomes an action-film hero!”

I could go on (and do in the book), but I think it’s fair to say that I leave Mr. Shapiro’s argument in tatters for the half-baked, unexamined assertion it is, and that it’s not surprising he would not want a reader of his review to know about this, that he would not seek to defend it, and that he would not find anything good to say about my book.

But it’s also true that he manages to find something demonstrably false to say about my book, a desperate give-away of the supercilious condescension he demonstrates throughout his disingenuous review. In sneering about the fact that I left Yale graduate school to become a mere reporter rather than the lofty academic pooh-bah he fancies himself, Mr. Shapiro suggests that, as a reporter, I should have analyzed the “market forces” behind the decisions that publishers have made to divide Hamlet texts and to include dubious poems like the so-called “Funeral Elegy” in the canon (until it was discredited).

After all, reporters should concern themselves with grubby things like market forces, he implies. In fact, anyone reading my chapters on textual issues would find pointed discussion of the market forces in the Shakespeare publishing industry, and my chapter on the “Funeral Elegy” contains substantive analysis of the market forces behind the decisions made in that fiasco.

One would think Mr. Shapiro would be ashamed to have included such a flagrant misrepresentation (akin to his laughable claim that postmodern literary theory has triumphed for all times).

But then again, his conduct in this affair indicates a surprising degree of shamelessness.

Ms. Streep, at least, is wonderfully wayward! She appears to be kicking the entire production into heroic life, though the now-mythic Mother Courage alone cannot carry Brecht’s demanding saga of war on her broken back as if dragging her cart behind her.

All eyes are inevitably on Ms. Streep, whose flawed, fantastic performance is inspired and unpredictable at its core. Perhaps three or four actresses in the world possess her magnetic, electric pull onstage. (Vanessa Redgrave at her greatest is one.) There are those who believe Ms. Streep can be too perfect and too transparently technical. If so, a rough, spontaneous daring is the springboard to her staggering performance, as if we were witnessing Ms. Streep do battle with the near-impossible role itself.

The soldier’s cap she wears at a jaunty angle is a peculiarly willful mistake. (The pragmatic, most unjaunty, raggedy Mother Courage, who makes a living off war by unscrupulously supplying troops on any side with anything they need, would in any case have sold the cap.) Ms. Streep’s ersatz military uniform is similarly too much the all-purpose costume in place of a strict Brechtian reality. But the star is living dangerously in every conceivable way.

Though Brecht never denied tragedy its low comedy, she affects a wisecracking delivery and Bronx accent—a defense mechanism of overcooked comic flippancy that reduces Mother Courage’s desolation. But in her staggering, self-lacerating Act One closer, “The Song of the Great Capitulation,” Ms. Streep is so furious and astonishing that she touches a kind of sublime madness. Her brutal lament for a world that has fallen from grace takes us to the end of days. The song—and Ms. Streep sings well—left me laughing uncomfortably to myself. “I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh” was Brecht’s hope for the witnesses to his plays.

Mother Courage, a saga about the cost of war and survival, is a good choice for our times by Oskar Eustis, the new artistic director of the Public Theatre. But I have yet to see a great production of what is arguably Brecht’s best and most challenging play. Michael Feingold of The Village Voice reminds us that the opportunistic, amoral Mother Courage has accidentally raised three idealistic children—“one brave, one honest, one loving,” and “lives to see all three die for not being like her.” We ought not to admire Mother Courage, then, as many people mistakenly do, for “surviving.” Brecht was no sentimentalist. The formidable Mother Courage doesn’t survive, except as an empty shell. Her courage is practical, not idealistic. Rather, she’s a tragic example of humanity destroyed.

And she’s destroyed as much by peace as war. (Hence Brecht’s sick, sardonic line, “Peace has broken out!”) The play isn’t specifically “anti-war.” Brecht, the Marxist, treats war as a continuation of peaceful business by other means. In that sense, Mother Courage is a symbol not of the survival of noble virtue, but of conniving capitalism.

No one appreciates this better than the play’s new translator, Tony Kushner, whose fine work mirrors Brecht’s earthiness and the direct, unvarnished truth of his stage poetry. “I won’t let you knock war,” goes the bitter, uncompromising line of Mother Courage. “ … the weak don’t fare any better in peacetime. War feeds the people better.”

Even so, Mr. Kushner reveals a welcome jokiness and weakness for bad puns in the midst of the bleakest events. (So did Brecht and Shakespeare.) I remain uncertain about the anti-Bush jabs for the gallery. “But it’s expensive, liberty,” announces the Cook (played by Kevin Kline, of all refined cooks). “Especially when you start exporting it to other countries …. ”

One should always endeavor to cut a line when it’s greeted with applause, as the liberty line was. For the audience isn’t applauding the line, but itself. Like Brecht, Mr. Kushner is no purist, however. As Brecht advised in Saint Joan of the Stockyards:

Be two in one! Be here and there!

Keep the lofty and the low one

Keep the righteous and the raw one

Keep the pair!

But George C. Wolfe’s production of Mother Courage is showbiz Brecht, oversimplified for the masses, neither here nor there. In the maddening essentials, the production is no different from the notoriously uneven, pedestrian Shakespeare productions in the Park. It’s the same populist formula.

It doesn’t trust the play to speak for itself, but craves to please and “entertain.” Needlessly trying to show the continuity of war, the costumes are from every era, including the present—as they were in Macbeth, the previous production in the Park. The battle scenes are once again fought in slow motion (as was the big battle scene in Macbeth). The all-purpose costumes, the slow-mo deaths have been done so many times before—when will they stop?

But the production also tries to popularize a tragedy (subtitled “A Chronicle of the Thirty Years’ War”) with the usual very familiar effects—rain, snow, fire or the introduction of a U.S. jeep onstage to remind us blatantly of the Iraqi war. The death scene of Mother Courage’s heroic daughter is itself a special effect. Harnessed clumsily to wires in advance, she flies off above the battlefield to the heavens like Peter Pan.

Mr. Wolfe’s window dressing is the antithesis of everything Brecht tried to do. The new score by the usually excellent Jeanine Tesori is a pastiche and synthesis of many different styles—including Weill, Dessau, Sousa and the blues—which suggests a world view, but lacks the enduring stamp of any individual voice. The songs themselves aren’t acted/sung, as Brecht required, but almost always “sold” to the audience, as Broadway tradition prefers. “Song of Fraternization,” the ballad of the hooker Yvette, thus becomes a conventional showstopper that would have thrived in Mr. Wolfe’s jazzy production on Broadway of Jelly’s Last Jam. Similarly, Mr. Kline’s “Song of Solomon” is delivered like a showy star “turn” in a spotlight center stage.

The Park productions invariably have star actors (Ms. Streep and Mr. Kline) to attract the crowds, but there’s never any sense of an authentic ensemble or uniform acting style. Anything goes. Though Mother Courage is heavily miked, there’s lots of shouting. Nothing is ever left ambiguous.

So goes the Public’s weary formula for success in the Park, where tickets are mostly free. I’m sorry, but it’s become too high a price to pay. If only they would trust the play more—and with the play, the intelligence and open minds of eager audiences. Ms. Streep aside—a big aside—and despite all good intentions, George C. Wolfe’s production of Mother Courage amounts to un-Brechtian business as usual.