John Berryman's 'Shakespeare at Thirty' Lecture Made His Name

In March 1951, the thirty-six-year-old poet John Berryman delivered a Princeton lecture titled "Shakespeare at Thirty" that, by his wife Eileen's account, "made John's reputation as a lecturer" and "convinced him he was good at it." The lecture, now examined in Rory Loughnane's book Shakespeare at Thirty (Princeton University Press, 2026), marked the moment an unproven Midwestern writer without a Ph.D. announced himself to the Ivy League elite.

Berryman arrived at the fellowship under strain. He had just won the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, but his first marriage was falling apart, and the couple had returned east after three unsuccessful months at the University of Washington, where, Eileen recorded, John had "constantly made and broken resolutions to cut down on drinking and smoking." The fellowship required four public lectures and anchored a planned book on Shakespeare — a book that never came to fruition.

Why did the lecture matter so much?

Berryman was a nervous speaker whose "telltale trembling of the hands" and "sweat-drenched shirts" revealed his fear. Princeton faculty, many of whom "questioned the credentials of a man without a Ph.D. to take on so hallowed a subject," filled the room. Dressed in a "grey flannel suit and shirt with button down collar," Berryman asked his audience to imagine Shakespeare on his thirtieth birthday, about April 22, 1594, alone and "highlone in thought" — a man whose "intellectual and physical presence" was "not as yet visible to us although we know its name."

The identification was barely disguised. Berryman, born and raised in rural Oklahoma, was himself a presence not yet visible to the literary world. His long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, completed in those same months, would soon make his name.

The lecture, per biographers including Eileen, "held his audience spellbound." Professors recognized him as "a serious scholar who knew his stuff." His second lecture, on Macbeth, was filled beyond capacity. The Princeton appearances led to his appointment as Elliston Chair of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, where he reprised "Shakespeare at Thirty" as his inaugural lecture and where, Eileen writes, "Berrymania" took hold among the literati. Even Eileen, who had been considering leaving John, became reconciled to him.

What did Berryman get wrong about 1594?

Loughnane's account shows that Shakespeare's actual situation in April 1594 was bleaker than Berryman's optimistic reading. Plague had ravaged London since summer 1592. At least fifteen thousand Londoners — roughly 10 percent of the city's population — died over a twenty-four-month period. The playhouses stayed closed for twenty of twenty-two months. For an emerging actor-dramatist with a young family, the closures meant, in Loughnane's words, "zero income and zero prospects."

A socially distanced Londoner in 1592 would likely have named Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, John Lyly or Christopher Marlowe as the leading dramatists of the day. Shakespeare was a minor presence, mocked in print as an "upstart crow" and "Shake-scene." Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Webster would have drawn blank stares.

Berryman, by contrast, stressed how in 1594 "Shakespeare's path has strangely cleared," noting the deaths and retirements of Lyly, Kyd and Marlowe, and pointing forward to six years that would produce Richard II, both Henry IV plays, Henry V, Much Ado, As You Like It, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar — with the "big four" tragedies still to come.

What does hindsight conceal?

Loughnane warns against the biographical temptation of inevitability. Nothing about Shakespeare's ascent was guaranteed in 1594; nor was Berryman's. Berryman would win the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs, then the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1969 for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. But his career was pock-marked by substance abuse and three marriages, and he took his own life in January 1972, jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, aged fifty-seven.

The published lecture, Loughnane argues, remains "an electrifying account of the best of mid-twentieth-century criticism" about Shakespeare's early working life, inflected by Berryman's intuitions about a fellow poet. The book-length study it was meant to anchor never appeared, but generations of scholarship since have filled in the picture: Shakespeare's birth in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, his marriage to Anne Hathaway at eighteen, his 1594 entry into the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and much else Berryman could only sketch.