Shakespeare

by Paul Edmondson

  Shakespeare’s popularity by the time Austen was writing Mansfield Park was a result of the rise of popular Shakespearian celebrations. People celebrate Shakespeare because they love him; they want to make him their own. Today, Shakespeare’s birthday is celebrated all over the world in various ways, with special attention usually paid to important anniversary years. Celebration of this kind started in the eighteenth century. Peter Scheemaker’s statue of Shakespeare was installed in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner in 1741 and 1769 saw the actor David Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee. His special celebration marked the first time that Shakespeare broke out on to the streets among the people, free from the mediation of scholars, librarians or theatres. Garrick was invited by the Town Council of Stratford-upon-Avon to host a special Shakespearian pageant and more than exceeded their expectations. It began with the firing of canons at dawn and the young men of the town serenading the young ladies beneath their bedroom windows. A temporary theatre was built, but the proposed procession of Shakespearian characters was rained off, and the Avon flooded. A special rainbow-coloured ribbon was made for people to wear, representing Shakespeare’s inclusivity of all political parties as well as the spectrum of his genius. There was horse racing and country dancing and a fancy-dress ball (to which the writer James Boswell went dressed as a Corsican chief, a political act of solidarity for the island seeking to maintain its independence against the invading French). Not a word of Shakespeare was spoken throughout the whole of the celebrations. But Garrick, wearing a medallion made from the mulberry tree supposed to have been planted by Shakespeare, spoke his influential Shakespeare Ode, some of which was set to music by Thomas Arne, the composer of ‘Rule Britannia’. Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee (which transferred as a successful show in its own right to London) succeeded in popularising Shakespeare for the age, and confirmed for the Kingdom of Great Britain (established by the union of Wales and England with Scotland in 1707) that Shakespeare was its national poet.

  As British nationalism grew to become a dominant political force, Shakespeare was exported and adopted all over the world with the British Empire, along with the English language. Without the British Empire, Shakespeare would not enjoy the great sense of his being a single international currency. What is striking, though, is how Shakespeare remained behind, post-Empire, and became the favoured poet of many world cultures who have made him their own through translation, appropriation and adaptation. Shakespeare had become culturally promiscuous.

  This is especially the case in America where, after the declaration of independence in 1776, Shakespeare started to become popular, a captivating immigrant who spoke to many different kinds of people. When two future presidents, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, visited Shakespeare’s Birthplace in 1786, Jefferson ‘fell upon the ground and kissed it’ while Adams chipped off a piece of wood from what he was told was Shakespeare’s chair.26 Writing about his nine-month journey across America in the 1830s, the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, in his book Democracy in America, observed ‘there is hardly a pioneer hut in which the odd volume of Shakespeare cannot be found. I remember reading the feudal drama Henry V for the first time in a log cabin’.27 But Shakespeare has been – and perhaps still is – just as much a nationalistic cause in the States as anywhere else. It was in New York at the Astor Place Opera House on 10 May 1849 that severe rioting broke out because of objections that the British actor, William Charles Macready, was playing Macbeth against his rival, the American-born Edwin Forest, who was simultaneously performing in the role at the Broadway Theatre. Twenty-two people were killed amidst a mob of fifteen thousand.

  Shakespeare has loomed large in politics ever since his own time. He himself had no choice but to live under an absolutist monarchy, a powerful head of state presiding over a parliament. But as the actor Ralph Fiennes says in light of having directed his own, politically edgy film version of Coriolanus (2011), ‘Shakespeare is always questioning order, especially the right to rule’.28 History proves that Shakespeare has often been used to speak to people living within oppressive regimes, whether that is in apartheid South Africa, where Janet Suzman’s politically charged 1989 production of Othello at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg spoke powerfully to white and black audiences at a time when it seemed most needed, or Corinne Jaber’s brave, 2005 Afghan production of Love’s Labour’s Lost in Kabul, which brought men and women together on stage for the first time in thirty years (and at a great personal cost to the actors who took part).29 Hamlet became (and perhaps still is) the most relevant Shakespeare play for many of the former USSR Eastern-bloc countries, who found in it a parable about how the state can make inert the life of an individual. And Sonnet 66 has been translated many times to speak against political regimes in which ‘art [is] made tongue-tied by authority’ (line 9).

  Shakespeare’s political sensitivity can in part be traced through the history of international state censorship. By the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, Germany had effectively nominated Shakespeare one of its three national poets, along with Johann von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, a cultural outcome of the deep affiliation the German philosophers, playwrights and poets had felt for Shakespeare from the beginnings of German Romanticism half a century earlier. The German Shakespeare Society, founded in 1864 (the tercentenary of his birth) is the oldest such association and the largest in Europe. Knowing the power of Shakespeare among the German people, Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship banned productions of Julius Caesar. No tyrant would ever want to allow the staging of the preeminent play about the democratic assassination of a head of state. Many are the productions of Julius Caesar to have portrayed the eponymous character as Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Castro or another dictator.

  And it was Julius Caesar that the Shakespearian actor John Wilkes Booth had in mind when he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln on 14 April 1865. Another former President, Bill Clinton, writes:

  Abraham Lincoln, with access to so few books as a young man, did have access to Shakespeare, and the results speak for themselves.30

  Clinton does not elaborate on which results he has in mind; Booth, however, had no doubts. In his mind, Lincoln was responsible for the oppressive war against the South and on the day he shot him, Booth wrote a letter by way of explanation, addressed ‘to my countrymen’. He saw himself as a parallel to Shakespeare’s own Brutus in Julius Caesar, ‘I love peace more than life. Have loved the Union beyond expression’, he writes, echoing Brutus saying to his countrymen: ‘not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more’ (3.2.21–2). Booth’s letter ends with him quoting Brutus:

  O, then that we [sic.] could come by Caesar’s spirit,

  And not dismember Caesar! But, alas!

  Caesar must bleed for it!

  (2.1.169–71)31

  It is a chilling but undeniable parallel and acts as a sombre reminder of how often Shakespeare is invoked during times of extreme personal, political or national crises.

  The ways that might lead us into Shakespeare include performance, reading, celebration, nationalism, political activism, rioting, revolution and even assassination. What all of these forces have in common is the shaping of the individual: Shakespeare becomes the most widely understood cultural testing ground in which we can better understand ourselves.

  SHAKESPEARE AS A BLACK HOLE?

  In the final chapter of his 1989 cultural history of Shakespeare from the Restoration to the present, the Shakespeare scholar and textual expert Gary Taylor argues that none of the defences of Shakespeare’s ‘singularity’ ring true. But to my mind, to ask whether Shakespeare really is the greatest is to pose the wrong question, because to assume that he is means that you take on a position impossible to sustain. There are many great writers, artists and musicians. Over the years, I have come not to believe in ‘greatest’ – but I do believe in greatness. Taylor ends his study by using the metaphor of Shakespeare being a ‘black hole’:

  His stellar energies have been
trapped within the gravity of his own reputation. We find in Shakespeare only what we bring to him or what others have left behind; he gives us back our own values. […] His accreting disk will go on spinning, sucking, growing.32

  Certainly, the kinds of cultural endeavours and reactions I have been describing illustrate the popularity and sheer inevitability of Shakespeare, Shakespeare by default, if you will. The conclusions Taylor comes to when thinking about Shakespeare as a ‘black hole’ are similar to the philosophical position adopted by Virginia Woolf who found within any work of art no intrinsic meaning but rather:

  that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.33

  Adopting Woolf’s modernist or Taylor’s postmodernist positions, or both, it seems that what we bring to Shakespeare is the greater part of what we find there. Or, as the Shakespeare critic Terence Hawkes has said, ‘Shakespeare doesn’t mean: we mean by Shakespeare’.34 And, apparently, we can bring anything we like to the works. Shakespeare can and will take it, transform it, and hand it back to us, and hopefully our self-knowledge will be improved, and we will feel cleverer and more alive.

  SHAKESPEARE AND I

  Like many others I got started because of some inspirational schoolteachers.35 My way in was through my comprehensive school, which means I am the product of a state educational system that, from the late 1980s, decided to make Shakespeare compulsory, and still does. As for most of my generation, therefore, I started relatively late, first properly engaging with Shakespeare at the age of fourteen when we studied Macbeth. I found within its language, its story, its performance (in the classroom, on audio recording and film, and in the theatre), its characters and their relationships, its dark imagination – which forces us to think about night, ravens, bloody daggers, murder, blood, tortured consciences, emotional and mental breakdowns, immense personal loss, trauma and a nation torn apart by war – a power so definite and undeniable, so all-embracing of my intellectual and theatrical interests and tastes, that Shakespeare quickly became the most challenging, disturbing and imaginative phenomenon that I had ever encountered. He wasn’t easy. I do not believe he ever has been. But if something within his work can catch you (it might be a phrase, an image, a moment of performance) then Shakespeare can draw you in, and take you through such landscapes and soundscapes, such emotions, dramatic moments, and thoughts, that it becomes clear why he is fully deserving of his reputation.

  Try these few lines from Cymbeline. Princess Innogen has said goodbye to her husband Posthumus, who has been banished. She does not know if she will ever see him again. Her servant Pisanio describes his parting and she responds:

  I would have broke mine eye-strings, cracked them, but

  To look upon him till the diminution

  Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;

  Nay, followed him till he had melted from

  The smallness of a gnat to air, and then

  Have turned my eye and wept.

  (Cymbeline, 1.3.17–22)

  The imagery combines surrealism – the eye-strings stretching the eyeballs out of their sockets and the eye-strings themselves cracking under the strain – with an ordinary, domestic object, ‘a needle’, and a tiny insect, ‘a gnat’. We are shown Posthumus becoming ever smaller on the horizon of Innogen’s mind’s eye. The lyricism of the verse along with its odd line-breaks evokes her out-of-breath emotion, and yet she remains controlled and poised. Had she been there, she says, she would have wept, but she wasn’t. Keats again. The nineteenth-century Shakespeare scholar Charles Cowden Clark relates a story about Keats ‘who as a schoolboy […] was so moved by an image in Cymbeline of the departing Posthumus melting “from The smallness of a gnat to air” that his eyes, like Imogen’s, filled with tears’.36 Keats was responding with an emotional intelligence so finely tuned to Shakespeare that he himself was able to experience something of Innogen’s own response. His reaction arose from how he read, but also because of the qualities of Shakespeare’s writing and imagination.

  His work can shock, amuse, move, comfort, inform, entertain, bore and appal. The novelist Leo Tolstoy is among those who have hated Shakespeare. His Shakespeare and the Drama (1903) criticised Shakespeare’s characterisation for being unconvincing and attacked what he called ‘the play of feeling’, too much showy emotion. George Bernard Shaw, keen to introduce Tolstoy’s work for its 1906 English translation, had a famous love-hate relationship with Shakespeare whom he criticised for his lack of moral philosophy, ‘that his characters have no religion, no politics, no conscience, no hope, no convictions of any sort’.37 But Shakespeare, unlike Shaw, never preaches. That difference between the two of them lies at the heart of Shaw’s frustration. They are worlds apart as playwrights. I have never seen Shakespeare as a ‘moral’ writer; he does not show us how to behave or tell us what we should think. While some of his characters express moral views, he himself steps to one side, holds the situation at arm’s length and allows us to think for ourselves. Shakespeare knows that there is no such thing as perfection, especially when it comes to family life. All families in Shakespeare are dysfunctional. He is never afraid to question, but, as the Shakespeare scholar A. D. Nuttall observes, ‘Shakespeare would not be as impressive as he obviously is if he had done nothing but pose queries. He provides many answers, and sometimes these have more than a local efficacy. […] Shakespeare, the supreme dramatist, is strong both on what would happen and what could happen’.38

  If you think you are certain about your response to a moment, then look again at who is speaking, who else is present on stage, ask yourself why these words are being spoken at this particular time, and the chances are that you will see the moment differently. And don’t be tempted to think that any characters or moments are irrelevant. They all have their part to play in Shakespeare’s overall design. Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, Pompey Bum in Measure for Measure, Trinculo in The Tempest, and Constable Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, for example, all emphasise, comment upon, relieve us from, or reveal to us something more about, the main action.

  Shakespeare can stare life in the face, embrace pain and suffering as a fact, and then show us what life might be like if we hoped and imagined enough (‘Prove true, imagination, O, prove true’ as Viola says in Twelfth Night, or What You Will, 3.4.367). Or, he shows us what might happen if we were to behave too cruelly. The whole of King Lear seems like a warning about the collapse of civilisation. Human beings can all too soon become ‘like monsters of the deep’ and prey upon one another (The History of King Lear, 4.2.49). Shakespeare is open about human desires, whether they are sexual, political, religious, pioneering, ambitious, compassionate or controlling. He presents emotions that he never felt (the guilt after murdering a monarch, for example), and creates space for us to find something of ourselves in them, making them seem real. His words and ideas can shape our world. He provides us with all the material (sometimes too much) to judge for ourselves, and complicates any response that is at risk of being too straightforward. Keats (again!) wrote to his brothers George and Tom Keats in December 1817 about what he calls Shakespeare’s ‘negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.39

  Shakespeare is capable of letting characters express themselves directly. ‘I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?’ says Benedick to Beatrice in emphatic and simple monosyllables in Much Ado About Nothing (4.1.269–70).

  I never wished to see you sorry; now

  I trust I shall.

  (The Winter’s Tale, 2.1.125–6)

  says Hermione to her husband Leontes in The Winter’s Tale when he falsely accuses her of adultery. ‘Bear with my weakness. My old brain is t
roubled’, says Prospero to Miranda and Ferdinand in The Tempest (4.1.159, what we sometimes call having a ‘senior moment’). The effect in all of these examples is to disarm us, to provide us with a flash of insight, to make the moment and the speakers imaginatively real, just like one of us. ‘Shakespeare knew’, writes the poet and essayist Edith Sitwell, ‘that there is no fragment of clay, however little worth, that is not entirely composed of inexplicable qualities’.40 Sitwell reminds us to focus on Shakespeare’s particularising qualities. He names characters we never see and makes them momentarily real, for example ‘Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot’ (The Taming of the Shrew, Induction 2, line 20); Alice Shortcake who borrowed the hapless Abraham Slender’s Book of Riddles (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1.1.186–7); and ‘little John Doit of Staffordshire, and black George Barnes and Francis Pickbone, and Will Squeal, a Cotswold man […] and Samson Stockfish, a fruiterer’ (Henry IV Part Two, 3.1.18–20, 31, and 39). Shakespeare is able to find poetic and dramatic energies as much in the minutiae of the everyday and in simple language as in great historical events, human crises or supernatural moments.

  Shakespeare also presents us with moments of knotty difficulty, when his meaning becomes hard to understand and discern, even though the actual words themselves might not be:

  it is I

  That, lying by the violet in the sun,

  Do, as the carrion does, not as the flower,

  Corrupt with virtuous season.

  (Measure for Measure, 2.2.170–73)

  says Angelo in Measure for Measure. In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses’s densely worded speeches seem only to gesture towards clarity at first sight or hearing:

  And this neglection of degree it is

  That by a pace goes backward in a purpose

  It hath to climb. The general’s disdained

  By him one step below; he, by the next;