Bottom: On Shakespeare

by Louis Zukofsky, Celia Thaew Zukofsky

Written between 1947 and 1960 and first published in 1963, the prose work in the first of these two volumes reflects Louis Zukofsky's ongoing obsession with Shakespeare - whose plays he had first seen performed in Yiddish - and is central to understanding Zukofsky's work. Tracing the themes of knowledge, love and physical vision ("the eyes have it") through both Shakespeare's plays and the poetry, On Shakespeare is more than a compendious act of homage by one poet to another. In effect, it lays out Zukofsky's poetics and theory of knowledge on a grand scale, tracing his themes through the whole of Western culture, from the Classical Greeks through William Carlos Williams.
The second volume of On Shakespeare consists of Celia Thaew Zukofsky's spare operatic setting of Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a play in which Zukofsky saw Shakespeare rewriting the classic plots and tropes of the Odyssey. The Wesleyan edition features a new foreword by Bob Perelman.

Genres: Poetry, Criticism, Shakespeare, American, Nonfiction

712 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Louis Zukofsky was one of the most important second-generation American modernist poets. He was co-founder and primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and was to be an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.

Reviews

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book about Shakespeare by one of the most brilliant 20th century poets; it functions as both a useful work of scholarship and as an incredible work of art (I've read elsewhere that Zukofsky considers it a prose-poem-- wtf?) Z. studies Shakespeare through the lenses of Aristotle, Spinoza, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, the atom bomb and the underlining in Melville's copy of King Lear. Unlike many works of criticism which seek to explain literature in a simplifying manner, Z. explodes and complicates Shakespeare so wonderfully that I feel I actually understand the Works LESS than I did before-- Bottom is a glimpse into infinity. A very wild book, sometimes it just deteriorates into extensive cut-and-paste Quote Bank Heaven, when Z. traces a theme from the Works (most obsessively, the philosophy of seeing/looking as it relates to definitions of love and reason) simultaneously forwards and backwards in time so that Joyce and Genet brush shoulders with Ovid. Emerson says (and Z. quotes him) "Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakepseare", but I dunno if he's right.

[Kevin Holden · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most interesting book of "criticism" I have ever read.

And/But like Perelman says in the introduction: "FINNEGANS WAKE will be showing on a screen near you much sooner than BOTTOM."

But that is an ok thing and this book is an exploding sun.