speciesforhire: shakespeare

Considering that he is regarded as the greatest writer in the English language, very little is actually known about William Shakespeare. He was baptised in Stratford-Upon-Avon on 26 April 1564 and died 23 April 1616. We was married to Anne Hathaway aged 18, and had three children before moving to London in 1585, where he enjoyed a successful career as an actor.

As Bill Bryson pointed out in his book titled Shakespeare, “there is nothing (in the records of history) that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person. We can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it.”

His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets and two narrative poems, staggering when you consider that he is thought to have produced this between 1589 and 1613; a mere 24 years (if he was working as a sole author, this would mean he wrote almost two plays every year and two sonnets a month for 24 years. This would not be half as astounding if it were not for the quality of his work.)

It is a matter of controversy as to whether or not Shakespeare did write all of the works attributed to his name in the First Folio (published in 1623 this was the first collection of all but two of the plays now attributed to Shakespeare), but it is not even clear how he spelled his name. Although he left nearly a million words of text, we have only 14 in his hand – he his name signed differently 6 times. But as Bryson points out, curiously, one spelling he did not use was the one now bound to his plays.

I didn’t always love Shakespeare as I do now. Like most students at GCSE level I approached Shakespeare with dread; I actually thought it was written in another language, not from another time. Thankfully, I had an English teacher who knew how to teach.

“Shakespeare”, I remember him clearly telling me, “was never written to be read: it was written to be watched. If you want to read Shakespeare, become an academic or an actor. If you want to see Shakespeare’s work how Shakespeare intended, got to the theatre.”

He organised a trip for the class to see A Midsummer Nights Dream, and from the moment the play began I understood clearly what he meant. I was hooked, and I have been ever since. I find it very difficult to express how the language of Shakespeare moves me; his works leave me wordless in awe.

It did not matter to me that I did not understand some of the words or wider references at first, it just made the experience all the more mystical. But Shakespeare also added 1700 words to the English language still in common use today, among them are accommodation, amazement, critical, and generous (so it would seem everyone has something to thank him for).

I do see how modern audiences can feel out of touch with Shakespeare, (a bridge that Baz Luhrmann crossed very successfully in his 1996 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet), as there is no avoiding the academic stigma that the general public uses as an excuse to back away from the bard. Although Shakespeare was respected in his day, it was the Romantics and the Victorians that exalted the Bard to the ranks of genius, the latter worshipping Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called bardolatry.

Our tastes as audiences have changed, the cinema experience has moved importance from the narrative (in cases of blockbusters, certainly) and given the drama over to the special effects department; CGI swords have slashed the pens until the ink ran out in 3D.We all carry expectations into the cinema, lifted by promotional posters that brag about the realism of their illusionary worlds, on the brink of apocalyptic space invasion or trolls attacking keeps. The text seems to take secondary importance (unless it is adapted, such as Lord of the Rings) to the emersion of the audience in the spectacle. Certainly this is true in the relatively new phenomenon of 3D cinema’s and televisions and the soaring success of the IMAX cinema.

How can the delicacy of a play, such as Much Ado About Nothing, compete in such a full throttle environment?

It doesn’t. This is a greater tragedy than Shakespeare could ever have conceived. I am by no means a Shakespeare pusher, and certainly would never encourage anyone to read his work under the assumption that it is somehow ‘cultured.’ As I mentioned briefly above, Shakespeare was only ever considered “high art” after Keats, Coleridge and other writers of the Romantic era referred to him as the “god of their idolatry. Samuel Johnson referred to his works as the “map of life.”

What I find sad is that the same audiences who are lining up outside cinema’s awaiting entry to the latest Cameron blockbuster (because Shakespeare is boring), would have filled the same demographic as those who were queuing outside the Rose or Globe 320 (or so) years ago to see Hamlet for the first time (if I had a time machine, that is exactly where I would go).

Theatres were not respectable houses in Shakespeare’s day, and audiences were hardly the obedient middle class crowds that politely file into and take their seats in auditoriums these days. Shakespeare did not write to seek approval from the ‘cultured” few; he wrote for the people. Now it seems the people don’t care.

Let’s hope it this too shall pass…

This blog is too short to give examples of all the pearls of wisdom this person/people we now refer to as Shakespeare bestowed on humankind. So I’ll leave you with my favorite piece of writing, ever…

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this and all is mended,

That you have but slumber'd here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend:

If you pardon, we will mend.

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearned luck

Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,

We will make amends ere long;