Beholden to the Bard

Many writers who came after Shakespeare felt, understandably enough, that there was nothing left to write or say: "Why should anyone else attempt to write?" moaned Virginia Woolf, while Keats sighed "he has left nothing to say about nothing or anything".

When writers try to do the same thing as Shakespeare the results can be dreadful: the stodgy tragedies of the Romantic poets Byron and Shelley miss the point and the fun of Shakespeare as often as they manglingly almost quote him. The many adaptations of his plays in the Restoration usually manage to cut out all the shafts of humour and unpredictability which make him brilliant: Nahum Tate recognised that audiences could hardly bear the tragic ending of King Lear, and so has the King live on, while Cordelia and Edgar marry and rule the nation. Shakespeare has spawned so much painfully bad writing that it is extremely hard to imagine a really good anthology of pieces which he has inspired.

And yet John Gross has done it. Every passage in this quite wonderful anthology has a sparkle of something, be it malice, humour, passion, parody, critical insight, or wrong-headedness so radical that it becomes illuminating.

He has done it by avoiding anything which is excessively reverent or servile to Shakespeare. This means that none of the Restoration adaptations or the Romantic rewrites of the plays find any space in his collection, and that the only place in it for anything remotely academic is a parody of a footnote from an Arden edition (mind you, it looked like a pretty good footnote to me, but then I am an annotator of Shakespeare and a don.

He has gone for passages from poems, plays, diaries, letters and novels by writers who have absorbed Shakespeare into their systems so fully that he is a part of what they write. There are some gloriously improbable biographical fantasies here too: Kipling's "Proofs of Holy Writ" has Shakespeare and Ben Jonson "correct-ing" (which here means rewriting) the proofs of the Authorised Version in order to make it become the text as we know it today.

A really good anthology will give you all the obvious things as well as a clutch of the unlikely and obscure. Among the necessary marvels included here are Borges's mind-bending short story about a Shakespearean scholar who acquires Shakespeare's memory (which does not at all tell him what he hopes to learn in order to write a biography of the Bard) and the great Shakespearean parody from Beyond the Fringe ("O saucy Worcester, dost thou lie so low?"), as well as a line or two from Shakespeare in Love, and some fine passages describing Verdi's and Britten's Shakespearean operas. Its lesser-known gems include Gladstone's marvellously improbable reason for feeling disturbed after a performance of King Lear: far from being overwhelmed with sadness at the death of Cordelia and Lear, he objected to the play because it was "unpatriotic" to take aid from the French (who help Cordelia at the end).

This is no catalogue of eulogies of the Bard: there is space for Lawrence's almost not entirely stupid claim that Hamlet is "a creeping, unclean thing" who lacks the sense of Life which Lawrence valued so highly, and for David Hume's lordly remark that Shakespeare shows "total ignorance of all theatrical art". Apart from that last comment, perhaps, everything included here is worth reading, and almost everything makes you rethink Shakespeare as you read it. Even its passages of outright insanity aren't just laughable, but thought-provokingly laughable: Victor Hugo heard the voice of Shakespeare at séances, and, naturellement, the English poet spoke to him in French; poor John Ruskin was so obsessed by Ophelia during his period of insanity that he produced his own Shakespearean mixture of reason and madness in his diary.

Really great anthologies don't have arguments, but they might let something like a point of view emerge from the ways in which they select and sequence their material. This, as a really great anthology, is deliciously light-handed in the way it debunks some of the more pretentious pronouncements by critics of Shakespeare through the ages. So Virginia Woolf 's skit about Shake-speare's fictitious sister Judith, who leaves Stratford, gets pregnant by a theatrical impresario in London, then kills herself, and is buried "where the omnibuses now stop, outside the Elephant and Castle", is ever so lightly deflated by being followed by a dry, factual account of Shakespeare's actual sister, Joan, who lived happily to a ripe old age in Stratford.

A string of political responses to Shakespeare is concluded by DJ Enright's tongue-in-cheek poem, Shakespeare Unmaske d , which says that since Shakespeare didn't like Jews, blacks and women, "Plainly he'll have to go". Gross clearly thinks with Melville that Shakespeare is full of "short quick probings at the very axis of reality", and should quite definitely stay with us for good.

Inevitably, a few old friends are absent. Surely we should have been given the moment when Tom Jones's foolish travelling companion, Partridge, in Fielding's novel, sees Garrick's Hamlet meet the ghost, and persuades himself not to tremble by saying "if it was really a ghost, it could do one no harm at such a distance, and in so much company". Perhaps, too, we needed a reminder of TS Eliot's pastiche of Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra ("The barge she sat in like a burnished throne | Burned on the water") in The Waste Land ("The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, | Glowed on the marble"). If including these had meant having a bit less of Ben Okri, banging on for rather too long about Othello, I for one would not have wept.