That next, by him beneath. So every step,
Exampled by the first pace that is sick
Of his superior, grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation.
(Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.127–34)
Or Coriolanus’s refusing to pity the people of Rome:
That we have been familiar,
Ingrate forgetfulness shall poison rather
Than pity note how much.
(Coriolanus, 5.2.85–7)
Moments such as these (and there are many) require intellectual effort and concentration, and yield more to a close private reader than to a theatre audience who only hears them once.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins remarked, in a letter to his brother in 1885, that ‘Shakespeare and all great dramatists have their maximum effect on stage but bear to be or must be studied at home before or after or both’. Shakespeare, he says, is best read as well as performed. It is not a case of either/or: Shakespeare is a thinker and a dramatist; he is a poet and a storyteller. We need to try to make our physical, mental and emotional energies available to these different demands if we are properly to engage with his work. We become, to some extent, what we engage with when we study, read or watch. ‘Perhaps that is the great value of drama of the Shakespearian kind’, writes poet W. H. Auden, ‘that whatever [the spectator] may see taking place on stage, its final effect upon each spectator is a self-revelation’.41
So I arrive at my most honest and direct response to ‘Why Shakespeare?’: because we enjoy his work, and in the ways that mean most to us as individuals. The pursuit of Shakespeare – as of all great literature and art in general – is a justifiable hedonism. Enjoyment is the primary aim, and that enjoyment is justified because it develops within us a deeper understanding of ourselves through a critical perspective. Or, as Keats concludes his sonnet ‘On sitting down to read King Lear once again’:
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumèd in the fire
Give me new phoenix wings to fly at my desire.
‘MACBETH’ REVISITED
The poet Ted Hughes was deeply struck by the mythical qualities in Shakespeare and found within the work an overwhelming poetic vision:
The actors and directors of his plays are fully aware of this. Immersed in the psychological realism of Lear, they know that the tiny, realistic remark “Pray you, undo this button”, has to be placed at the centre of an event somehow as unearthly, awesome, wild, metaphysically grand as Blake’s Prophetic Books and The Book of Job combined. They are aware that when Macbeth stalks out, drugged with his wife’s domestic will, to kill King Duncan, it is a more momentous shifting of Heaven and Hell than when Satan lifts off in Milton’s inferno. Everybody recognizes how all this gigantic accompaniment emerges from something other than realistic characterization.42
No wonder I was bowled over by Macbeth as a fourteen-year-old. And perhaps Hughes’s sense of Shakespeare’s deeply rooted life-force was what was being played out when some years ago I was asked to organise a twenty-five-minute version of Macbeth for some pupils aged between six and ten at St Andrew’s primary school in Shottery, near Stratford-upon-Avon.
The children had never seen live Shakespeare before, but had watched the Animated Tales version of Macbeth. ‘At the moment’, a member of staff told me, ‘they think Shakespeare is a cartoon’. A friend applauded the project, ‘Good idea. Introduce them to Shakespeare before anyone tells them that he’s too difficult for them’. I cut just over four-fifths of the play and the staging was kept to a minimum. We performed it with eight people. Tomato ketchup was used for blood and the bowl of water which the Macbeths used ‘to clear [them] of this deed’ (2.1.65) between the extremely short scenes, doubled as the witches’ cauldron. Macbeth and Macduff had simple, wooden swords for their final confrontation. During the performance, Macbeth’s sword accidentally broke just before he died. A bloodstained bag containing a head-shaped something was held aloft at the end. The crown, which had changed heads twice, was placed on Malcolm.
At the end there were many interested questions from the children who seemed delighted with their first ever live Shakespearian encounter. It was as if the simple, dramatic process which they had just experienced was a kind of magic that they had to understand and explain. One asked ‘What’s in the bag?’ They passed it around excitedly until someone guessed that it was a cabbage. There was a further gasp of revelation when I revealed a cauliflower. One boy asked whether the blood was real and one girl asked, quite vaguely but with her own conviction, ‘How did you set it up?’ The star of the show was, undoubtedly, the dagger, which was very real indeed and still sported some of Macbeth’s blood when I allowed the children to look at it more closely. ‘I’ve got a dagger at home like that’ was one response. The final question was perhaps the most interesting of all. One boy simply asked, ‘Is it true?’ ‘Do you think it’s true?’ I replied. ‘Yes’, he said. ‘Then every word of it is true’. He smiled.
SO WHY SHAKESPEARE, AGAIN?
As those primary-school children recognised, Shakespeare tells a good story. He draws us in emotionally and intellectually. He makes us feel as much as he makes us want to answer, discuss and explain. At an unfathomable level those children were connecting with the mythical qualities of what they saw played out in front of them. The scholar Catherine Belsey has made a fascinating study of the fairytale and folk-tale elements in Shakespeare who, she says, knows:
the power of a well-told tale to capture and hold the attention of an audience. Such narratives offer the best of recreation; at the same time, they come to inhabit our consciousness. In Shakespeare’s case, if I am right, to a degree they are there already, and in the end perhaps that, above all, is why.43
Shakespeare’s stories, his political and emotional realities, help to account for his translatability into other languages. Poetry is lost in translation, but can be re-invented. Shakespeare in translation can often sound in the other language as brightly contemporary as a new playwright. Fresh translations are often commissioned for new productions of a play, and a modern idiom adopted. In English, our reading and performances are blessed by the poetry, but actors and audiences probably have to work harder to produce a relevant and life-giving meaning.
The World Shakespeare Festival in 2012, which formed part of the Cultural Olympiad, gathered and presented 73 productions in many different languages and cultures. Such a happening demonstrated, as Stanley Wells remarks, that ‘both Shakespeare the artist and Shakespeare the catalyst, [is] a writer who, like Falstaff, is not only witty in himself but the cause that wit is in other men, a continuing source of pleasure but also a constant stimulus to critical thought, even to rebellion’.44 Shakespeare has been used as a mouthpiece for the oppressor and his words are quoted during times of national and international crises. But more often he becomes a rallying point for the oppressed and disenfranchised. So the hugely influential African-American liberation poet and writer Maya Angelou (1928–2014), speaking in 1985 to the National Assembly of Local Arts agencies in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, could say of Shakespeare: ‘Of course, he was a black woman. I understood that. Nobody else understood it, but I know Shakespeare was a black woman. That is the role of art in life’.
No one owns Shakespeare, though anyone can experience a sense of ownership of him. The genie escaped from the bottle with the publication of the Folio in 1623. Ever since then, Shakespeare has become a currency through which we can understand ourselves. If this does not make him the greatest of all artists, it certainly makes him among the most powerful, and I have yet to come across another artistic currency comparable to Shakespeare’s. Performance; study; enjoyment; celebration; protest; rebellion; the telling of life-enhancing stories that have a mythical status; a literature which many cultures can appropriate and translate into their own; a black hole with the power to delight children in primary schools, and grown-up c
hildren for the rest of their lives: all this can Shakespeare truly deliver.
FURTHER READING
A good way of getting to know a play well is to read and dip into a variety of different editions of it. The Shakespearian’s bookshelf is multicoloured, bearing as it does the spines of the best editions available across a range of critical series. After editions of plays come Shakespeare Studies more generally, and what follows is a highly selective list of recommendations.
Biographies
Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: the Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (2008): a thematically presented biography of Shakespeare’s intellect.
Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (2012): especially strong on the theatrical context.
S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975): an empirical corrective to return to often. A ‘compact’ version (just as useful) is readily available.
James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare (2005): fresh and intensely contextual.
René Weis, Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography (2007): strong on the Stratford-upon-Avon background, daringly intimate and creative.
Theatre and Performance
John Barton, Playing Shakespeare (1984): actors discuss their approaches to Shakespeare (also a now classic television series available on DVD).
Michael Bogdanov, Shakespeare: The Director’s Cut (2003): essays on the plays by a politically engaged, often controversial director.
Paul Prescott, Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (2013): what is theatre reviewing and how do we do it?
Edwin Wilson, ed., Shaw on Shakespeare (1961): an anthology of one of the funniest and liveliest of all Shakespeare critics.
Stanley Wells, ed., Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism (1997): a source book for some of the best and most useful writing about Shakespeare in performance from 1700 to 1996.
Players of Shakespeare (1988–2007), six volumes (editors include Philip Brockbank, Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood): twelve essays in each by actors from The Royal Shakespeare Company.
www.reviewingshakespeare.com: a free online gathering of reviews of Shakespeare productions around the world made available by The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, University of Warwick and Misfit, inc.
Criticism
Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, eds, The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2001): an essential A–Z of Shakespeare Studies.
Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, eds, The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2010): the latest iteration of a volume of essays about contemporary Shakespearian studies.
Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey, eds, Shakespeare Now! (from 2010): a series of fresh, experimental and original approaches.
Peter Holland, Lena Cowen Orlin and Stanley Wells, eds, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (from 2000): a series of distinguished introductions to different aspects of Shakespearian studies.
Stanley Wells, Shakespeare: For All Time (2002): an illustrated account of Shakespeare’s life, artistry and impact on human creativity over four centuries.
Stanley Wells, Shakespeare & Co. (2006): a groundbreaking account of playwriting, collaboration and influence in Shakespeare’s time.
For Children
The Usborne World of Shakespeare (2001): an illustrated historical and theatrical survey, with plot summaries and a who’s who (8 years upwards).
The Usborne Illustrated Stories from Shakespeare (2010): six plays retold (for children who have just started to read alone).
Nick Walton and Christopher Lloyd, The What on Earth? Wallbook of Shakespeare (2014): the complete plays illustrated in an extraordinary fold-out format with a timeline (8 years and upwards).
NOTES
1.John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 176.
2.This revisionist view is being led by David Fallow of the University of Exeter.
3.Jeanne Jones, Family Life in Shakespeare’s England: Stratford-upon-Avon 1570–1630 (Stroud: The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 1996), p. 90.
4.Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company 1594–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 89 and p. 108.
5.John H. Astington, English Court Theatre: 1558–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 234 ff.
6.Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, p. 115.
7.Astington, English Court Theatre, pp. 234–50.
8.Mairi Macdonald, ‘Not a Memorial to Shakespeare, but a Place for Divine Worship: The Vicars of Stratford-upon-Avon and the Shakespeare Phenomenon, 1616–1964’, Warwickshire History, 11 (2001–2002), pp. 207–26 (p. 207).
9.Stanley Wells, Shakespeare: For All Time (Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan, 2002), pp. 98–9.
10.How Shakespeare’s library has been differently imagined over the centuries is discussed in: Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Reading, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 164–9.
11.Assonance: a repeated vowel sound. Onomatopoeia: the word sounds like the action or thing it is describing. Personification: describing a thing or concept as though it were a person. Adynaton: something that is impossible. Antithesis: one thing contrasts with another. Alliteration: words in a sequence that start with the same letter. Metaphor: connecting through similarities. Hyperbole: exaggeration. Repetition: speaking a word more than once. Synecdoche: a physical part represents the whole. Merism: referring to the constituent parts of something.
12.Levin’s famous sentence begins: ‘if you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me”, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare’, etc. It is easily traceable online and was originally printed in: Bernard Levin, Enthusiasms (London: Coronet Books, 1983), pp. 167–8.
13.Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 234.
14.Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, eds Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 390.
15.Joy Leslie Gibson, Squeaking Cleopatras: The Elizabethan Boy Player (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000), p. 66.
16.John Jowett, ed., Sir Thomas More, The Arden Shakespeare (London: A. & C. Black Publishers, 2011), p. 424.
17.Jowett, Sir Thomas More, p. 440 and p. 437.
18.The term was coined by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, eds, Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See also our free e-book www.shakespearebitesback.com
19.William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, eds Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), p. xiv.
20.Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 110–13.
21.Michael Bogdanov, Shakespeare, The Director’s Cut (Edinburgh: Capercaillie Books Limited, 2003), p. 11.
22.See Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Peter Smith, eds, Reviewing Shakespearean Theatre: The State of the Art, in the journal of The British Shakespeare Association, Shakespeare (2010), pp. 274–401 (p. 391).
23.Margaret Drabble, ‘The Living Drama’ in Shakespeare and Me, ed. Susannah Carson (London: Oneworld, 2013), pp. 412–17, p. 415.
24.Jane Smiley, ‘Odd Man Out’, in Shakespeare and Me, ed. Susannah Carson (London: One World Publications, 2014), pp. 407–11, p. 408.
25.Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs Siddons, 2 vols (1834), vol. 2. pp. 35–36
26.James Shapiro, ed., Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now (New York: The Library of America, 2013), p. xxiv.
27.Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. by Henry Reeves, rev. Francis Bowen, 2 vols (Cambridge: Sever and Francis, 1863), vol. 2, p. 66.
28.Ralph Fiennes, ‘The Question of Coriolanus’, in Shakespeare and Me, pp. 220–27, p. 225.
29.See Stephen Landrigan a
nd Qais Akbar Omar, Shakespeare in Kabul (2012): an account of staging Shakespeare in Afghanistan for the first time (in 2005).
30.Bill Clinton, ‘Foreword’ to Shakespeare in America, p. xvii.
31.Shapiro, Shakespeare in America, p. 197.
32.Gary Taylor, Re-inventing Shakespeare (London: The Hogarth Press, 1989; repr. Vintage, 1991), p. 411.
33.Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’ in: Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Chatto and Windus for The University of Sussex Press, 1976), p. 72.
34.Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 3.
35.I want to add grateful acknowledgement to my teachers: Trish Ellison, Fiona Long and Jenny Wallace, who taught me English at Huntington School, York, from 1988–1992.
36.Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 157.
37.George Bernard Shaw, Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (New York: Applause Books, 1961), p. 3.
38.A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare The Thinker (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 381.
39.John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. by Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 43.
40.Edith Sitwell, A Notebook on William Shakespeare (London: Macmillan & Co, Ltd, 1948), p. 1.
41.W. H. Auden, ‘The Prince’s Dog’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1975; repr. 1987), pp. 182–208 (p. 182).
42.Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber and Faber, 1992; repr. 1993), p. 37.
43.Catherine Belsey, Why Shakespeare? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 170.
44.Stanley Wells, ‘Foreword’ in A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival, eds Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My heartfelt gratitude is due to Paul Prescott and Stanley Wells for their careful reading of my work and for their honest comments and guidance. Their friendship and many kindnesses have been of immeasurable help in the writing of this book. I am grateful, too, to my editor, Michael Bhaskar formerly of Profile Books for all of his support and encouragement.
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