William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is simply the greatest name in English literature. He is remembered above all for his incredible collection of plays. Many were published during his lifetime – the so called “quartos”, and these were collected a few years after his death in the “First Folio”.
In terms of structure they break all the rules – no unities of time, place and action here! The earliest plays are the happiest ones, when he was under the patronage of the Earl of Southampton. The later plays are darker. Racine was tragic, Moliere was comic – but it’s not so easy to categorise a Shakespeare play as purely one or the other. Even King Lear has a fool (although rarely seen in productions).
The most important plays in order are: “Titus Andronicus” (an unbelievably horrific storyline), “Richard III”(turned into a conniving hunchback), “Love’s Labour’s Lost”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “The Merchant of Venice”, “Henry IV” part 1 & 2 (featuring the much-loved invented character of Falstaff, who appears in 4 plays), “Much ado about Nothing”, “Julius Caesar”, “Hamlet” (written around 1600), “Othello”, “All’s Well that Ends Well”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra”.
There was no naturalism at all. The stage was basic and open-air, with no backdrops to delineate different scenes. Authentic performances are fascinating for historical reasons, if one can put up with all the characters being played by men or boys. But we can do better now, both in the theatre, and now above all in film – with the voice-over a perfect vehicle for the soliloquy.
Films
Of the films I’ve seen, my favourites are Polanski’s Macbeth, Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando, A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Michelle Pfeiffer, and of course the series of Laurence Olivier films to William Walton’s background orchestration. His Richard III boasts a whole caste of Shakespeareans including Gielgud. Henry V is presented as a play performed in the Globe. The opening scene of Elizabethan London as we close in on the Globe Theatre is quite remarkable for 1944, and the music is fantastic – the “Suite from Henry V”, which is also performed as a standalone piece in the concert hall. King Lear and Othello (great acting, but Laurence Olivier as a black man is faintly ridiculous) are perhaps not so good. But the supreme film is Hamlet. It’s one of those very few films that seems to cross over into a magical artistic realm – I find it impossible to imagine it being filmed, with the actors chatting between takes. It’s a wonderful tribute to the finest play ever written, even if it’s heavily cut down, and Walton’s soundtrack is superb. The first monologue, set to Walton’s gorgeous score, bowled me over with its poetic power when I first watched it:
Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew…
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world…
‘Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely…
Shakespeare’s language is easy enough to follow without help, but watching films with subtitles can enable you to enjoy it to the fullest. I enjoy watching the films, and then reading through the full text slowly in the “No fear Shakespeare” series, with simple modern English on the right-hand side just in case you want to doublecheck a meaning.
Graphic novels
Plays are ideal material for the “graphic novel” format, and Shakespeare works too but only if the original language is preserved. There’s a great series by Graffex (a series created by David Salariya) which deals with several of the major plays and include direct quotations.
Books on Shakespeare
Of studies about the plays, one of my favourite smaller books is Fintan O’Toole’s “Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life”, an illuminating interpretation of four of the great tragedies. He dismisses the clichés about Shakespeare’s plays and especially the theory of fitting the plays into the straightjacket of what a tragedy was meant to be – largely a nineteenth century invention – with their tragic flaws and moral messages. One should not look for moral messages, and he explains the point as follows:
“The message of Macbeth is that it’s a bad idea to kill kings. The message of Hamlet is that Hamlet should have killed the King sooner. Othello is doomed because he is too jealous of what he has. Lear is doomed because he is not jealous enough and wants to give away what he has. If this is what Shakespeare is about, then he’s clearly not very good at it”.
Shakespeare’s view of tragedy was something to do with getting caught between two world views: the feudal hierarchical primitive medieval mindset, with its superstitions, alchemy, astrology, witchcraft and ghosts on the one hand, and the modern scientific capitalist view where you are rational and self-made on the other. Shakespeare captured this moment between these two worlds perfectly.
Shakespeare’s recipe
What is the secret of the greatest dramatist who ever lived? Like all great art there is obviously no formula, but consider the following:
- ideas don’t matter – and the story itself is not so important, it’s all about how it’s told
- complexity – multiple subplots and ambiguous statements admitting multiple meanings. This complexity invites interpretations from all perspectives, from Marxist to Feminist. Any theory can be drawn up on friendship, honour, romance or anything else. Peter Ustinov put this well in a French radio interview: “I find that Shakespeare is a dramatist that one can never judge, he’s like a bar of soap in the bath that escapes from your grasp all the time, because he always says something that contradicts what he has said before” (my translation). Incidentally, the multiple subplots and digressions also mean that large sections can be cut without ruining the integrity of the whole.
- amoral – Shakespeare is not interested in simple morality or likeable characters. Hamlet is beyond good and bad. It’s really not even the point whether he is moral or not. He is responsible for countless deaths around him, he has no sympathy when his mother dies (“wretched queen, adieu!”) and yet he fascinates us.
- appeals to everyone – from the “groundlings” in the yard below the stage, to the university wits, up to the nobility in the gods
- language – a strong verbal gift was a necessity given the simple open-air setting of Shakespeare’s theatre. His language was influenced by the Bible (a version called the Bishops’ Bible) and the Prayer Book. Shakespeare possessed an incredibly memorable, concise and unique way of making statements and describing situations. This gift of language is the greatest thing we have, all the more incredible for the fact he seems to have written rapidly with few revisions. Let’s take the line from Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet”. So perfect, so quick to the point, so elegant. This is why translating Shakespeare is an impossible task. Our language is now peppered with Shakespearisms. To make a full list would be a book in itself, but such common phrases we never think twice about include “in my heart of hearts”, “seen better days”, “into thin air” and “I won’t budge an inch”. Almost any line of Shakespeare can be taken up as the name of a book or a film! As Harold Bloom explains in “Genius”: “about eighteen hundred words of the twenty-one thousand he employed were his own coinage, and I cannot pick up a newspaper without finding Shakespeare turns of phrase scattered through it, frequently without intention”. This number of words Shakespeare employed is truly incredible, and is frequently compared with Racine at the other end of the scale who used but 2000.
Perhaps for the reasons above, Shakespeare is universal and will never go out of date. As his friend Ben Jonson said, he is “not for an age, but for all time”.