Shakespeare’s haters are gonna hate
The Bard has had his fair share of detractors
The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death is being observed in ways that have themselves become grand traditions of the Englishspeaking world. One of these is the eternal question: “How much of this is an elite academic put-on?” Are the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare really so superior to all other imaginative material written in English? Could things have worked out such that Shakespeare was relatively forgotten, and schoolchildren of all nations would instead be inducted into the cult of Luis de Camoens or Joost van den Vondel?
Some very clever people, notably Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw, have been detractors of Shakespeare. Tolstoy complained that no educated person in Christendom was capable of approaching the pages of Shakespeare with an unprejudiced mind, suggesting that his veneration was merely a sort of pathogen that had spread through- out the world on the back of other chauvinistic English ideas. Just to drive home his point, Tolstoy mentioned another fleeting anglophile intellectual mania that seemed to be dying out in 1903: the popular passion for the ideas of Charles Darwin. Shakespeare, the great novelist argued, was sure to eventually fall out of fashion, just like the inutile, corrupt theory of evolution.
Shakespeare entered my life very early, the way he must infiltrate those of others: my family’s book collection contained a small hardbound edition of Hamlet that became a totem to me. The book might have been a relic of my father’s education, of which he hated every second, even though books are precious to him (I think it was mostly the fact that he was kept indoors during the daytime that caused him to dislike school so much). What first attracted me to the book was the sense of it being a puzzle or a code, complete with an unfamiliar apparatus of scholarly clues. A play, and in particular a Shakespeare play, resembles no other book; its sacred nature is signalled by everything from the typography to the little curlicues of Latinity (“dramatis personae,” “exeunt”).
A child can make out the action of Hamlet easily enough, and it culminates in violence at which a Hollywood writer would still balk. (When haters criticize Shakespeare for artificiality, some of them have to be thinking of Act V of Hamlet: “Swords AND poison? Really?”) But Shakespeare’s three-quarters-familiar English, with its cryptic remarks about “the mutines in the bilboes,” also has an attraction all its own. It is sometimes thought to be part of the problem in teaching Shakespeare, but for some of us it creates an environment of mystery and of friendly intellectual struggle.
Thanks to this childhood exposure, I can probably recite fairly sizable bits of Hamlet by heart. I am much too lazy to have done this with any piece of literature, however cherished, that I encountered as an adoles- cent or as an adult. And this is ostensibly a point in Tolstoy’s favour. Hamlet was present in our household because it was a holy object of the same imperial cult that had spewed my people out of Britain onto the opposite face of the planet.
One might reasonably regard this as a point in favour of Shakespeare’s specialness: there is a chicken-andegg issue here. The truth, as deeper study discloses, is that Shakespeare might have remained the property of Britain’s theatrical cognoscenti if it were not for other Europeans, particularly Germans, who became more militantly Shakespearean than the British ever had been. That Star Trek joke about The Bard being best “in the original Klingon” expresses a great truth. The British Empire was, viewed a certain way, just an ephemeral historical device for discovering how easily Shakespeare is appropriated, no matter where you take him.
The Tolstoys and the Shaws castigate Shakespeare as unrealistic and untutored, forgetting that blank verse on the stage was all of about 30 years old in English when it fell into his hands. The formal theatre was still so new that the young Shakespeare performed and debuted plays in a building just called “The Theatre,” and not ironically. Actually reading Shakespeare’s twodimensional contemporaries drives home the point like nothing else: he has no possible equal, and they were conscious of this, and resentful of it. He was an experimenter of the type of Bob Dylan or Picasso, driving a new medium to near-psychedelic outer edges of expressive capability.
Eighteenth- and 19thcentury Romantics perceived that Shakespeare was a bridge linking the public, ritual world of ancient drama to their own inwardlooking, individualistic artwork. They felt he was one of them, somehow set adrift in the past; and they still seem to have been onto something. In the hands of the more effusive critics, the cosmic verbiage about Shakespeare borders on the absurd. Harold Bloom is all but explicit about wanting to replace Jesus Christ with Shakespeare.
In person and circumstances, the real Shakespeare must have been a lot more like a modern latenight talk-show writer than a God. If he had stood out from the others as a man, we would possess more than a bare paragraph of information about him. But the human race really cannot seem to help regarding him as a sort of adult amid a species of children, a heavensent wonder-worker. He is proof of the thing that Tolstoy really wanted to deny — the existence of such a thing as genius.
THE REAL SHAKESPEARE MUST HAVE BEEN A LOT MORE LIKE A MODERN LATE-NIGHT TALK-SHOW WRITER THAN A GOD. — COLUMNIST COLBY COSH A CHILD CAN MAKE OUT THE ACTION OF HAMLET EASILY ENOUGH, AND IT CULMINATES IN VIOLENCE AT WHICH A HOLLYWOOD WRITER WOULD STILL BALK.