National Review | JANUARY 31, 2025

Mark Van Doren at his farm in Cornwall, Conn., July 17, 1969 (Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images)

Shakespeare with Van Doren

On learning from the legendary professor Mark Van Doren (1894–1972)

Jay Nordlinger

A phrase from Mario Vargas Llosa comes to mind: “those of us who did not attend his classes and yet feel ourselves to be his students.” He is writing of Isaiah Berlin and the many who are indebted to him — whether they ever met Berlin, in the flesh, or not. You will find Vargas Llosa’s discussion of Berlin, and other influences on him, in his book The Call of the Tribe.

(I reviewed that book in November 2022, here.)

Can you be a student of someone you have never laid eyes on? Sure, in a way. You may wish to sign up with Mark Van Doren, the great professor of English who lived from 1894 to 1972. In 1938, he wrote Shakespeare, which can be had in an edition from NYRB. The foreword is by David Lehman, a poet and critic born in 1948.

Among Van Doren’s students, in the flesh, were Lionel Trilling, Thomas Merton, Whittaker Chambers, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Podhoretz, John Berryman, Jack Kerouac, Meyer Schapiro, John Hollander, and Jeffrey Hart.

Bill Clinton styled himself “The Man from Hope” (for he was born in Hope, Ark.), and Van Doren was another. He was born in Hope, Ill. (a dot on the map in Vermilion County). He studied at the University of Illinois and then at Columbia, in New York. He would make his career at Columbia, teaching.

Another professor of English, Charles W. Everett, wrote the following about him:

Dr. Johnson said of Burke that a stranger meeting him in a shed where both were taking refuge from the rain would go away feeling that he had met an extraordinary man. That is the first and major effect produced by Van Doren, all the more for his own insistence that he has in him nothing of the extraordinary, that anybody can understand anything he wishes to, that anybody can teach great literature and philosophy.

Van Doren was known by a wider public, too. As David Lehman tells us in the foreword I have mentioned, Van Doren edited an anthology of poetry that sold so well, he was able to buy for his family a house on Bleecker Street, in the Village. Lehman further offers this: Van Doren was “one of the experts discussing great literature on Invitation to Learning, a half-hour radio show that aired on Tuesday evenings starting in 1941.”

That show was a hit. Do you think something like it would be possible today? Would the public want it?

Thomas Merton wrote that, in Professor Van Doren’s classes, “literature was treated, not as history, not as sociology, not as economics, not as a series of case studies in psychoanalysis, but, mirabile dictu, simply as literature.” Van Doren loved literature, and was a great exponent of it. A scholar, to be sure: but also a poet, a novelist, and so forth.

Merton, as you know, became a Trappist monk. He and Van Doren were friends for life, though the teacher outlived the student, as Merton died in 1968, at 53.

I will again quote David Lehman, in a passage that tells us something about the character of Van Doren:

At a moment when Ivy League prejudice against Jews was not uncommon, Van Doren acquired a reputation for philo-Semitism with an essay published in 1927 in the Menorah Journal, the magazine that years later would be rechristened Commentary. In “Jewish Students I Have Known,” Van Doren wrote perceptively and it turned out somewhat prophetically about some of the gifted young men he was teaching at Columbia.

These included Trilling and Schapiro.

His Shakespeare book is dedicated to Raymond Weaver, his colleague at Columbia, with whom he shared an office. Weaver, says Lehman, had been “nagging” Van Doren to “collect his thoughts on Shakespeare and turn them into a book.” In the summer of ’38, at the Van Dorens’ farmhouse in Cornwall, Conn., he did it.

It was on the farm, says Lehman, “that Van Doren got to do nearly all his writing; his dedication to his students and his classes left little surplus time during the academic year.” I think of Mahler — who composed for about six weeks in the summer, out in the country. Otherwise, his conducting duties engulfed him.

To his Shakespeare, Van Doren wrote an introduction. It begins,

I have imagined the reader of this book to be a person already acquainted in one degree or another with the poems and plays of Shakespeare, and willing now for the first or hundredth time to consider them as human documents and as works of art.

He goes on to say,

I have made each chapter as brief as I could, my endeavor being always, with neither novelty nor convention as my guide, to say the things that seemed to me essential. The quotations, many as they sometimes are, have been kept as short and few as possible. They will need attention even when they are familiar, for they carry the discussion; but I have assumed in the reader an awareness that Shakespeare was never writing quotations, and that the force of anything he said was in a peculiar sense relative to the force of other things.

That is a key point. Here’s more:

As a whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, so a complete poem is richer than the sum of all the things that can be said about its passages. Twice as many quotations as I have used, and ten times as much critical wisdom as I may chance to possess, would still provide no substitute for Shakespeare.

I have ignored the biography of Shakespeare, the history and character of his time, the conventions of his theater, the works of his contemporaries, and with respect to the plays themselves, most questions having to do with their text and authorship. These matters are important, but it was more important for my purpose, and more practical, to proceed on the theory that the interest of the plays as they have come down to us exceeds the interest either of the individual who wrote them or of the age that produced him.

Yes, yes, yes. You know, I feel exactly the same way about Bach and most other great composers. (Beethoven, I have some personal interest in. I mean, I am interested in him as a man. Most of the others, however, I find in their music, solely, and that is enough — more than enough.)

Back to Bach. I, and others, have frequently said about him that he contains all of music — all the music that came before him, all the music of his own time, and all the music that would ever, or could ever, come after him. Van Doren says of Shakespeare that every kind of poetry and every kind of prose is found in him — moreover, at their best.

More, from our professor, Van Doren:

It is literally true that while we read a play of Shakespeare’s we are in it. We may be drawn in swiftly or slowly — in most cases it is swiftly — but once we are there we are enclosed. That is the secret, and it is still a secret, of Shakespeare’s power to interest us. He conditions us to a particular world before we are aware that it exists; then he absorbs us in its particulars.

Forgive one more analogy to music: Wagner has some of this power, too (in fact, a lot of it).

When Shakespeare writes poetry, says Van Doren, it is seldom for its own sake. He did not regard poetry as the most precious thing in the world. Nope, the world was more precious — the world itself. “What he dealt in,” says Van Doren, “was existence, and his dealings were responsible, high-hearted, and humane.”

I don’t think I had heard that word “high-hearted.” It means, according to Merriam-Webster, “full of courage or nobility”; also “full of gaiety.”

Says Van Doren,

Shakespeare loved the world as it is. That is why he understood it so well; and that in turn is why, being the artist he was, he could make it over again into something so rich and clear.

I have quoted a lot, and I should not detain you forever. Van Doren begins his book with a chapter on the poems, then has a chapter on each of the plays. I will quote just a little from two of the chapters: on Othello and Antony and Cleopatra. (Those are two of the plays I have a decent knowledge of, and two of the plays I value most.)

Listen to what Van Doren says about one of the characters. “Nothing,” he says,

is more nauseous to lago than nobility. “The Moor,” he admits, “is of a constant, loving, noble nature,” but the admission is tantamount to a slur, for lago is least at home where love and nobility walk together — with, in the bargain, constancy to something other than self-interest.

More about Iago:

He is wickeder than Aaron [from Titus Andronicus] and cleverer than Richard III because his cleverness is his wickedness. It rests upon an absolute cynicism with respect to good men, a cynicism which consists not of denying that good men exist but of saying that better men do also — men who like himself can take the measure of nobility and thereby be above it. Of saying, in other words, that goodness is small enough to see around.

Perfect (and applicable to many).

When I was young, I was sort of embarrassed that Antony and Cleopatra was my favorite play, pretty much. Your favorite play is supposed to be Hamlet or King Lear or Macbeth — you know, one of the gravest and deepest. I had to smile when I read that Antony and Cleopatra was the favorite play of a venerable Shakespeare scholar, Samuel Schoenbaum (1927–96).

In A&C, writes Van Doren, Shakespeare

works freely under a great dome of lighted sky which knows no clouds except an occasional illusory and indistinct one, and which feels no wind beyond the soft one of its own effortless breathing. The world of Antony and Cleopatra is so immense that time yawns in it . . .

If you know the play, you realize: “That is perfect.” So is this (the last of the passages I will quote):

In one sense Antony and Cleopatra is actionless. A world is lost, but it is so well lost that it seems not to have been lost at all; its immensity was not disturbed. The peculiar greatness of this poetry defeats any conceivable dramatic end. Line for line it is perhaps the richest poetry Shakespeare wrote, but the reward it reaps is paradoxical: it builds a universe in which nothing can happen, or at any rate one in which the conflicts and crises of persons cannot be of the first importance. This explains, if it is granted that the gods ordained some sort of greatness for the play, the nakedness of its verbal intensity. The writing has to be wonderful because it is not supported by anything that Aristotle would have called a plot. And it is wonderful.

You bet your . . .

I have come away from Van Doren’s Shakespeare thinking not so much about the greatness of Van Doren as about the greatness of Shakespeare. Van Doren is an appreciator, and he makes you appreciate, too. I love to quote Robert Graves — who said (in essence), “The thing about Shakespeare is, he really is good.”

What a pleasure, what a privilege, to sit in Professor Van Doren’s classroom, remotely, so to speak.

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