March 1964 — VOL. 45, No. 3 —
Shakespeare After
400 Years
Download
PDF version
Shakespeare is not a dead poet who lived
long ago, but a breathing spirit thrusting himself into our
everyday lives. In all countries of the world, in all languages,
Shakespeare continues to speak profoundly to mankind.
His poems and plays have made him an immortal in literature,
but not because they are scholarly. He knew human life and
human passion intimately, and told about them in a sensitive,
lively and intelligible way.
Shakespeare, like us, lived in troubled years. Between 1564
and 1616 much of Europe was ravaged by war, cruelty, self—seeking,
loneliness and thoughts too strong to be expressed by ordinary
people.
He could not have chosen a more exciting or inspiring time
to arrive in London. The whole country was in a state of transition,
in a fever of nationalism. The people loved and were loved
by their unparalleled Queen, Elizabeth, their seamen had sailed
strange seas, showing the flag in parts of the world till
then not known, education was spreading through newly established
schools, and there was sprouting a new civic conscience about
the needs of the poor. The middle class was emerging, capitalism
was trying its wings, and every week brought changes and discoveries.
Shakespeare came upon the stage at a time when a blending
force was needed. Eight of his ten history plays present a
sequence of wars in Europe and the civil war at home, covering
a century of intrigue and armed rebellion. These hearty tales
of adventure and glory were calculated to inspire Elizabeth's
people in their new role as a world nation.
Life and thought were speeding up among the generality of
the people. There were essayists, even as today, holding forth
against tobacco, alcohol, the habits of young people and the
dress and primping of women. Control of traffic on the streets
was a problem: a writer of that time said "In every street,
carts and coaches make such a thundering as if the world ran
upon wheels." Men, women and children crowded the streets
so that owners had to strengthen their houses to keep them
from being pushed down.
Physical glories were relatively rare, but the spirit of
art and of language was fertile. It was an age when Titian
was painting his "Entombment", Veronese his "Calvary", Tintoretto
his "Paradise", Caracci his "Fishing", and Rubens, Van Dyck
and El Greco were painting their incomparable works.
It was Shakespeare who put into words, in dramatized form,
the feelings, hopes, fears, frustrations and triumphs of the
people of that Age.
What was going on
We of the twentieth century believe that we are living through
a more tempestuous era than ever afflicted the world before,
but let us set against our experiences those spanned by the
half century of Shakespeare's life, and we cannot be so sure.
Look at these great events:
War: The Wars of the Huguenots; England lost Calais
to France; Ivan the Terrible ravaged Russia; the Turks besieged
Malta; war of liberation in the Netherlands; Pope Pius V organized
a Holy League against the Turks; the Turks were defeated at
the battle of Lepanto, the greatest naval battle since the
fleet of Antony and Cleopatra was beaten by Octavian 1,600
years before; the massacre of St. Bartholomew; Netherlands
provinces joined together to drive out the Spanish; the Moors
defeated the Portuguese in the Battle of the Three Kings;
the Spaniards invaded Portugal; the Spanish Armada was defeated
and scattered by the English fleet; the Edict of Nantes ended
the French civil wars of religion; the Japanese invaded Korea;
the Irish rebelled under Hugh O'Neill; Polish troops intervened
in Russia's "time of troubles" and were thrown out after three
years.
Exploration and colonization: Manila, Philippine
Islands, founded by the Spanish; Martin Frobisher sailed in
search of the Northwest Passage; Sir Francis Drake sailed
around the world; Sir Humphrey Gilbert took possession of
Newfoundland in the name of Queen Elizabeth; Sir Walter Raleigh
claimed Virginia for the Queen; Virginia Dare, the first white
child born in America; the Marquis de la Roche obtained from
Henry IV of France a commission to conquer Canada; Samuel
de Champlain sailed up the St. Lawrence as far as La Chine
Rapids, discovered the St. John River and Lake Champlain,
and brought a colony to settle and found Quebec; Port Royal
founded in Nova Scotia by the French; first schools in Canada
founded, at Trois—Rivi~res and Tadoussac.
Rulers and dynasties: Mary, Queen of Scots, married
Darnley; Darnley caused Rizzio, favourite of Mary, to be murdered,
and was himself murdered by Bothwell; Mary married Bothwell;
Mary abdicated infavour of her son, James IV; Mary, convicted
of participating in a plot against Queen Elizabeth, was executed;
Suleiman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire killed in battle;
Catherine de Medici died; Oliver Cromwell born; revolt and
execution of the Earl of Essex; Queen Elizabeth died and was
succeeded by James VI of Scotland as James I of England; Sir
Walter Raleigh convicted of plotting to dethrone James and
imprisoned for 13 years; commission appointed to investigate
union of England and Scotland; Guy Fawkes' plot to blow up
the Houses of Parliament; plantation of Ulster, forefeited
to the Crown by the rebellion of Tyrone; beginning of the
Romanov Dynasty which was to rule Russia until the 1917 Revolution.
Science and invention: Invention of the screw lathe,
the lead pencil, the decimal system, the knitting frame, the
wind turbine, and the revolving stage; discovery of dibbling
wheat to increase yield; Galileo's treatise on terrestrial
magnetism and electricity; Galileo expounded the principle
of the pendulum and the first law of motion; the telescope
made; Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter; discovery of
logarithms by Napier; use of triangulation system in surveying;
William Harvey expounded his theory of the circulation of
the blood; Galileo was directed not to hold or teach the Copernican
system.
Art and literature: Michaelangelo died; Montaigne
published his essays; Spenser's "Faerie Queene" published;
authorized version of the Bible; Don Quixote, satirical romance
by Cervantes, published; Bacon's Essays published; John Milton
born.
Expanding ideas: Poland changed from hereditary
to elective monarchy; public debates on religion thrown open
to all faiths in India; reform of the calendar by Pope Gregory
XIII; all Japan became politically united; Akbar the Great
of India instituted reforms in administration and introduced
universal religious toleration; plan proposed to establish
a universal Christian republic in Europe; Elizabethan Poor
Law, charging the parishes with care of needy persons; Treaty
of Vienna gave equal status to Protestants and Roman Catholics;
a royal charter granted certain religious freedom in Germany.
Scanning this brief sample of the events in Shakespeare's
turbulent and yet progressive age we no longer wonder at the
fact that what he wrote is relevant today.
A man of his age
Shakespeare was a practising theatre craftsman, a busy actor
and author, and a shrewd business man. Just like most writers
in our own day, he was not writing for posterity but for people
of his time, to make a living, and to meet a deadline. Ford
Madox Ford remarks in The March of Literature (Dial
Press, New York, 1938): "Only two writers, Virgil and Shakespeare,
in a millennium and a half, can be noted as having made large
fortunes. Virgil acquired his by way of gifts. Shakespeare,
by exploiting his own gifts as a theatrical producer, stands
before us not merely as the greatest of poet—playwrights
but as the first Anglo—Saxon big business man."
Some people think that it remained for our enlightened age
to give Shakespeare due recognition, but that is not so. In
addition to great popular favour and the applause of the court
he had the satisfaction of seeing nearly half his plays done
into print. Hamlet was a best seller, published at
least five times during the poet's lifetime. In 1623, seven
years after his death, the first complete edition of his plays
was published. This, called the most important secular book
in English literature, was issued by his fellow—actors.
Shakespeare's works quickly crossed the frontiers of countries
and the boundaries of language. A great poem by Shakespeare
remains a great poem in whatever language it is printed.
This is not to say that Shakespeare has been without detractors.
Count Leo Tolstoy, a great Russian writer and thinker, said
that Shakespeare "is not merely no genius but is not even
'an average author'." George Bernard Shaw's sharp tongue said:
"With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer,
not even Sir Waiter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely
as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his".
Dr. Thomas Bowdler issued an expurgated Shakespeare which
met with no acceptance but did give rise to the expression
"to bowdlerize" as a term of ridicule of censors and improvers.
A master of words
Those who care most for Shakespeare value him in the first
place for his use of language, his verbal music.
Shakespeare was a master of all moods. He could thunder
like the guns on D Day, and then in a twinkle he could turn
to words so soft that they would not break a soap bubble.
But in the proud full sail of his great verse he moved with
the stream of common speech. He did not drag in unusual words
like peacock's feathers to decorate a fowl's tail. There is
no sign of strain or out—of—character acting when
his players speak in great poetry. As Dryden wrote of him:
"All the images of Nature were still present to him, and he
drew them, not laboriously, but luckily; when he describes
anything you more than see it, you feel it too."
Shakespeare found the words to express our deepest secrets.
His skill in placing one syllable beside another gives us
acute pleasure. He put life into his plays not only with the
magic of words but of thought, with an ear to the appeal of
ideas as well as to the sounds of things.
Some present day script writers strive to achieve that which
arouses fear, and produce only what is monstrous. When Shakespeare
indulged in monstrosities it was not for the sake of their
monstrosity but for their contribution to the story. When
he calls up the three witches or a deformed creature like
Caliban he convinces us that if there were such beings they
would so conduct themselves.
His skill in transforming human character and action into
art created a world of unforgettable people and phrases.
Human activities are not mere ant—like rushings to
and fro. The characters are motivated by passion, reason,
interest and habit, and we are made to acknowledge that their
actions and sentiments are, from those motives, the necessary
result. Often, like Oedipus, they do not know their own promptings,
but stumble toward their fate unconsciously. Yet they are
revealed to the audience by what they say, by their manner
of saying it, by their silences, by their actions and by what
others say about them.
A vigorous author
Shakespeare wrote vigorously without letting the effort
show. He scattered the seeds of things, the principles of
character and action, with a cunning hand, yet with a careless
air. He rolled the genuine passions of nature on his tongue,
and put them into sentences carved with powerful wit. But
he was a realist, too. He tidied up. Life is not all pure
drama.
Shakespeare was not a great original thinker. Few poets
are ( that is not their business. What he did was to give
point to the things inside people and bring them out into
the open. Someone has said that "Shakespeare initiated nothing,
but he brought all the abortive beginnings of others to a
triumphant conclusion."
To all his magpie appropriations he added from his own experiences
and the tales of wonder of the brave new worlds which Elizabethan
sea—dogs were discovering.
One source must be mentioned: Montaigne's Essays, which
seem to have suggested the character of Caliban and Gonzalo's
description of an ideal commonwealth used by Shakespeare in
The Tempest. It was Montaigne himself who wrote in
one of his essays: "I gather the flowers by the wayside, by
the brooks and in the meadows, and only the string with which
I bind them together is my own."
The Sonnets, the most disputed of all collections of poetry
in the English language, have given sleuths and biographers
years of puzzlement. No ordinary sensitive reader can doubt
that these sonnets have roots in a real and painful experience,
with their references to the "dark lady", a disdainful brunette,
but their biographical content is immaterial. They are to
be judged by their poetic value.
Judgment is given by the Harmsworth Encyclopedia in
these words: "in the estimation of the majority of competent
judges they constitute the highest achievement of the human
mind in the region of pure poetry."
A man for our age
In a period when the most urgent need is the need to get
to know ourselves and the other people of the world, Shakespeare
can help.
He does not give absolute rules of conduct which we can
apply as cure—alls, but his principles stand and his
characters speak to us. Johann W. von Goethe, the eminent
German dramatist, paid him this striking tribute: "All the
anticipations I have ever had regarding man and his destiny,
which have accompanied me from youth upward often unobserved
by myself, I find developed and fulfilled in Shakespeare's
writings. It seems as if he cleared up every one of our enigmas
to us, though we cannot say: Here or there is the word of
solution."
Though we have progressed in science and invention, in speed
of communication and in ease of life, human nature is much
what it was. The aristocrats, tycoons, soldiers and common
people are of the same sort today as then. We still struggle
against tides of we know not what strength and violence. We
still seek the national stability that will enable us to prosper
physically and expand mentally and achieve morally. The way
to success is foreshadowed for any nation in Hastings' lines
on England in Henry VI."
"... knows not Montague that of itself England is safe,
if true within itself?"
About reading Shakespeare
New entertainment, new instruction, new illumination; the
quaint, the curious and the unexpected: all these leap up
at you from nearly every page of a Shakespeare play. Even
if you are not looking for anything particular in Shakespeare
you will find something.
One does not need a specialist's knowledge of the plays
or of the Elizabethan Age to enjoy Shakespeare. If an occasional
word or allusion is lost, and a particular bit of poetical
dialogue remains obscure, the reader may still get the cream
of the play by reading it for no other purpose than to take
pleasure in it.
One thing keeping people away from his works is that they
have been lectured and expounded almost to death. William
Hazlitt, the nineteenth century essayist, remarked: "If we
wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare.
If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we
may study his commentators."
When we read a play by Shakespeare effectively we stage
it on the platform of our imagination. We can do so because
he takes us so completely into his confidence. The characters
may be puzzled and fooled, but the members of the audience
never are.
A particular device which Shakespeare uses to keep the audience
a step ahead of the procession of the play is the soliloquy,
a speech by a person quite alone, who weighs rationally, yet
with passion, opposing values and drastic alternatives.
Hamlet's soliloquy that starts "To be or not to be" is the
most famous speech in modern literature, with an appeal that
neither repetition nor parody can destroy. "Because," says
H. Peterson in The Lonely Debate (Reynal and Hitchcock,
New York, 1938) "it dramatizes for each one of us the baffled
individual in the agony of indecision."
How important the soliloquy is to the success of Hamlet
is indicated by the fact that Christopher Plummer, playing
the part in the BBC production in the old castle at Elsinore
in 1963, worked on it continuously for twelve hours.
A man to quote
The ultimate test of literary merit is survival, which is
the index to majority opinion. While the great military conquerors
are but ashes in an urn, Shakespeare is still moving and breathing
in his writings, in our everyday talk, and in the life of
the world.
It is not easy to go for a day without quoting him, because
there are not many subjects of importance that he does not
touch upon in glowing phrases.
Hamlet gave us: flaming youth, in my mind's eye,
to the manner born, the primrose path, it smells to heaven,
there's the rub, method in his madness, brevity is the soul
of wit, cudgel thy brains, more matter and less art, neither
a borrower nor a lender be, this mortal coil, yeoman's service.
"Pomp and circumstance" came from Othello, with a
dozen more; "the dogs of war" from Julius Caesar; "hearts
of gold, give the devil his due," and "he has eaten me out
of house and home" are from Henry IV; "make assurance
doubly sure" and "the milk of human kindness" came from Macbeth;
and so on through the other plays: merry as the day is long,
laid on with a trowel, an ill—favoured thing, but mine
own, what's in a name? a fool's paradise, elbow room, every
inch a king, the wheel is come full circle, throw cold water
on it, play fast and loose, the main chance, a nine days'
wonder, a spotless reputation, something in the wind, one
touch of nature makes the whole world kin; and so on and on.
There are 4,000 quotations and extracts in the Dictionary
of Shakespeare Quotations by D. C. Browning (Everyman's
Reference Library, 1953).
Hundreds of books have taken their titles from Shakespeare:
Crack of Doom, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, All Our Yesterdays,
Brief Candles, The Undiscovered Country, Rosemary for Remembrance,
Dear Brutus, Not in Our Stars, Strange Bedfellows, Brave New
World, The Web of Life, Gaudy Night, The World My Oyster,
Valiant Dust, and so on.
These phrases and titles came from the mint of Shakespeare's
creative genius fresh, entertaining and alive, and they remain
so today.
A man for all ages
Shakespeare's plays were not only for his own age and ours,
not for one nation or language, but for all humanity. He planted
one leg of his compass in the Elizabethan era and then with
the other swept the whole circumference of Time.
His plays will endure because they embody undying states
of mind. They hold before us, now and forever, a conception
of human dignity, a sense of the importance of human passions,
and a vision of the amplitude of human life. All this is embodied
in Hamlet's assertion: "What a piece of work is a man, how
noble in reason, in form and moving how express and admirable,
in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god."
Shakespeare gives us lessons in capsule form applicable
to today's problems. King Lear may be taken as a
tragedy of filial ingratitude, or it may be taken as a lesson
that if you throw away your weapons some less scrupulous person
will pick them up. A new viewpoint about Hamlet is
given in Outlines of Shakespeare's Plays (Barnes
& Noble, Inc., New York, 1945). Three men of different temperaments
are faced with the task of avenging the death of a father.
How will each man solve the problem? Hamlet, the man who thinks
without acting, delays; Laertes, the man who acts without
thinking, plunges; and the two tragic figures perish on the
same poisoned sword, leaving the kingdom to Fortinbras, the
cool—headed, balanced man who plans and acts in due proportion
and at appropriate times.
There are, too, lessons of tolerance. Cymbeline,
A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are comedies
of reconciliation and forgiveness and the restoration of lost
happiness.
The 400th anniversary
This year all England is going Elizabethan in celebration
of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth.
A hundred foreign ambassadors will raise their national
banners at Stratford—upon—Avon on April 23rd in
honour of a poet whose plays are done in scores of languages.
Canada is sending its world renowned Stratford Festival Company
to perform three plays at the Chichester Festival Theatre.
All of this is in honour of a man who found the answers
to questions that other men did not yet know existed, even
to questions being asked four centuries after him. They are
questions about human character and purposes, and he gave
answers vital to know in one of the world's decisive hours.
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
[ Return to RBC Letter
home page ]
|
