Knowing Shakespeare by his words

“We all know Shakespeare occupies a paradoxical place in contemporary culture,” Emma Smith writes in This Is Shakespeare (Pantheon, $28.95).

“On the one hand, his work is revered: quoted, performed, graded, subsidized, parodied. Shakespeare! On the other — cue yawns and eye rolls, or fear of personal intellectual failure — Shakespeare can be an obligation … inducing a terrible and particular weariness that can strike us sitting in the theater at around 9:30 p.m. when we are becalmed in Act 4 and there is still an hour to go … Shakespeare is a cultural gatekeeper, politely honored rather than robustly challenged. Does anyone actually like reading this stuff?”

“Yes,” Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford, answers,

before launching into 20 breezy, irreverent, funny and accessible lectures (based on episodes of her Approaching Shakespeare podcast) on 20 plays, raising interesting questions with special consideration to what he has left out. Obviously, she likes reading Shakespeare, though she’s the kind of Shakespeare fan who insists the play’s the thing and that no one except actors charged with learning lines should bother to read him.

That’s an actor’s perspective and a relatively modern one.

“To see Lear acted,” Charles Lamb wrote in 1807, is “to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him … while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear — we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of his daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning …”

Shakespeare is not as widely read today as he once was. A 2007 study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni surveyed English departments at 70 universities — among them the top 25 national universities and liberal arts colleges as identified by U.S. News and World Report and “the Big 10 select public universities in New York and California, and schools in and around the nation’s capital” — and found that only 15 of them required their English majors to take a course in Shakespeare.

Still, there’s no danger of Shakespeare’s influence disappearing, even if fewer and fewer of us can be bothered to actually read him.

“Lots of what we trot out about Shakespeare and iambic pentameter and the divine right of kings and ‘Merrie England’ and his enormous vocabulary blah blah blah is just not true, and just not important,” she writes. “They are the critical equivalent of ‘dead-catting’ in a meeting or negotiation (placing a dead cat on the table to divert attention from more tricky or substantive issues). They deflect us from investigating the artistic and ideological implications of Shakespeare’s silences, inconsistencies and, above all, the sheer and permissive gappiness of his drama.”

We need know nothing more about Shakespeare than his words, she argues.

Shakespeare was a magpie artist; it can be argued he cribbed from the popular successes of contemporaries such as Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, carefully finessing such topical issues as succession politics and religious controversies, and leavening his plots with jokes and moments of comic relief. (Smith at one point compares Falstaff to Homer Simpson, and it’s not a stretch.)

Shakespeare played a major role in devising the notion of self-consciousness and the idea of individual identity. In his 1999 book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, the late Harold Bloom went further, insisting that humanity itself — our human nature — was “invented” by William Shakespeare.

That’s an intriguing idea with no practical application. Shakespeare invented literary character as we know it, and infected the psychology, if not the chemistry, of the mind. He created the templates to which even those of us who aren’t familiar with his work unthinkingly subscribe. Shakespeare is a ghost who haunts us, even if we don’t recognize the face there’s something eerily familiar in those clanking chains.

For better or worse, Shakespeare’s work is completely adaptable; it can be transposed in time and space. (As the 1956 film Forbidden Planet ably demonstrated.) Hardly a year goes by that a handful of his plays aren’t translated to the screen — every actor, every director wants to give Shakespeare a go.

To really understand Star Trek, you need to know a little Shakespeare. To really understand Deadwood, you need to know a little Shakespeare. To really understand Elvis Costello or Radiohead or almost any artist who communicates in English or means to attract a Western audience, you need to know a little Shakespeare.

And Smith’s book can help you with that.