BY TOM ROBOTHAM
I don’t know what it means and I don’t care because it’s Shakespeare and it’s like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words. ― Frank McCourt.
First off, I must make a confession: There was a time when I hated Shakespeare. I can recall, in particular, the dreary experience of sitting in high school English class as my teacher endeavored to walk us through Macbeth in a monotone voice that revealed not a hint of passion. He might as well have said, “Look, I don’t like this anymore than you do, but Shakespeare is considered important, so bear with me.”
Perhaps you had a similar experience. And as Hamlet said, there’s the rub.
Four hundred years after his death, Shakespeare remains the most important writer who ever lived—all literature that came after him resides in the shadows of his plays. And yet, for many people he remains mystifying, if not wholly incomprehensible.
Why?
I blame it on poor teaching—an approach to Shakespeare that is all too perfunctory, and thus overlooks the humor, the psychological depths and the richness of his language.
Thankfully, when I got to college, I had a different experience. My professor—a gentle soul named John Shout—helped me understand first and foremost that the beauty of Shakespeare begins with the beauty of the sound of his language.
I can think of no better place to pause and consider this point than with the most famous soliloquy in his entire body of work—Hamlet’s reflection on the ultimate human dilemma.
Try this out: With no effort whatsoever to grasp the meaning, read it aloud.
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.–Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.
From beginning to end, it sings, albeit in mournful tones. Pay attention to those tones and the soliloquy’s rhythm, and you will recognize it as music, as beautiful as anything written by Mozart.
Fueled by the energy of such pleasures, we find ourselves in a better position to begin to explore the meaning of the words—and the greatness of Shakespeare in general, beyond the lyricism of his writing. As this and countless other passages exemplify, Shakespeare’s plays explore the human condition more thoroughly by far than any other writer before or since.
In the aforementioned soliloquy, the focus is on the fundamental questions that every thinking person asks him or herself at one time or another—what’s the point? Why go on living in a world in which we must so often suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Would it not be better to end the pain? Does it even matter one way or another?
As Hamlet stares into the abyss he considers plunging a knife into his heart. But what will follow? What if anything lies beyond the grave?
This sort of existential angst echoes across the landscape of his tragedies. Macbeth, for example, ruminates that life is “but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage /And then is heard no more: it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”
We tend to associate such anxieties with Modernism, so it’s really quite astonishing that Shakespeare pre-dated that era by more than 300 years. But this is the point: While it’s useful, I suppose, to study Shakespeare in the socio-political context of his times, his greatness lies in the fact that he transcended his own era and all others. He did so not only with bleak musings, but with timeless and universal observations of all kinds—often with rapier wit, and very often sexual in nature. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, Oberon envisions Cupid loosing his “love-shaft” and quenching it “in the chaste beams of the watery moon.”
Because his plays deal with so many fundamentals common to all of us—lust, love, jealousy, anger, manipulation, courage, indecision, ambition, and grief, just to name a few—they were accessible to people from all walks of life in his own era. And that remains true today, though the uninitiated have to work a little harder to catch the fleeting insights and witticisms amidst the torrents of words. But a little concentration pays off.
As Stephen Greenblatt writes in his superb book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, the Bard “makes his audiences laugh and cry; he turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning with philosophical subtlety. He grasps with equal penetration the intimate lives of kings and beggars; he seems at one moment to have studied law, at another theology, at another ancient history, while at the same time he effortlessly mimes the accents of country bumpkins and takes delight in old wives’ tales.”
In recognition of all this, Old Dominion University will be hosting a weeklong celebration next month (April 13-20) exploring Shakespeare from a wide variety of perspectives. Among the activities will be a conference featuring scholars from around the world; performances of four plays; a documentary about Hampton Roads’ connection to Elizabethan England; historical exhibits, and presentations of related art and music.
It will be interesting to hear the academic perspectives. For three or four decades, there has been a tendency among many scholars to look at Shakespeare through the lens of modern ideas about feminism, colonialism, racism and other social concerns.
Feminist critics, noted Richard Bernstein in a New York Times article in 1990, “share common ground in the belief that literature cannot help but reflect the oppression of women in a world dominated by men, even if the characters in a work, and sometimes even the authors, are not conscious of that fact.”
I’ve always had mixed feelings about this approach. On the one hand, I recognize the importance of exploring the literary canon for insights into how our attitudes have been shaped in very subtle ways. And since Shakespeare is at the very center of the canon, as critic Harold Bloom has noted, I suppose it’s important to look at his works through this kind of lens.
On the other hand, I sometimes feel that this sort of socio-political approach saps the life out of literature. Many traditional critics have agreed. In his Times article, for instance, Bernstein writes about a scholarly paper by Richard Levin, and the feminist backlash that followed. Levin argued that exploring the plays through a modern political lens obscures the fact that they are fundamentally about individuals who make fateful and fatal errors as they confront timeless aspects of the human condition.
Shakespeare’s plays, to my mind, are best read, heard and seen for their timelessness. Just as I do not listen to Beethoven’s Third Symphony with Napoleonic politics in mind (Beethoven initially dedicated the work to Napoleon, then erased the dedication) I generally do not care to read Shakespeare’s works for what they might have to say about feminism or colonialism. Their beauty and universality transcend all of that.
The good news, based on what I’ve been told, is that the festival will present a balanced approach.
“Shakespeare’s words are timeless poetry, but there is even more to uncover in this gift he left for the world,” noted Kelsey Vint, an ODU graduate student and assistant to the festival’s director. “Investigating the cultural forces that led to the creation of his plays provides us with even greater insight into how pervasive Elizabethan influences are in twenty-first century America, particularly in Hampton Roads. We can appreciate The Tempest, for example, for its lyricism and magic, but I think we’d be remiss if we did not also consider that this play is also concerned with the exploration and exploitation that was occurring in our own region of Virginia precisely four hundred years ago. Shakespeare worked through the anxieties of his world and time—a ‘new’ world and all of its unknowns.”
Vint went on to reiterate that the festival will offer a rare opportunity to explore Shakespeare’s world through his plays, through the music of his time, and through exhibits throughout the region. In the process, she said, festival goers will come away with a clearer understanding of “the far-reaching and ever-present effects his world has on our own.”
400th anniversary Events
Old Dominion University
Shakespeare: 400 Years After
April 13-20, week-long events
April 14-16, Shakespeare and Out Times Conference
Shakespeare’s world is indelibly etched in the historically rich area of south-eastern Virginia. For this occasion Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia has organized a week-long campus-wide, city-wide, multi-faceted event on the idea of “Shakespeare 400 Years After.” The object of the event would be to host a rich exploration of the varied contradictory meanings of a pervasive cultural icon in the material practices of contemporary life.
The schedule of stage performances, the “Much Ado Festival,” at the Goode Theatre, 4600 Monarch Way in Norfolk:
Thursday, April 14
7:30-9:30 p.m. – “Titus Andronicus“
Friday, April 15
4:00-6:00 p.m. – “Titus Andronicus,” Warehouse of Theatre/ODU Rep, directed by Lee Smith and Katherine Hammond.
7:30-9:30 p.m. – “As We Like It: Music Inspired by Shakespeare,” ODU Opera, directed by Brian Nedvin
10:30-midnight – “Macbeth,” CORE Theatre Ensemble, directed by Edwin Castillo
Saturday, April 16
4:00-6:00 p.m. – “As We Like It: Music Inspired by Shakespeare,” ODU Opera, directed by Brian Nedvin
7:30-9:00 p.m. – “Macbeth,” CORE Theatre Ensemble, directed by Edwin Castillo
10:30-midnight – “Henry V,” Hampton Roads Summer Theatre, directed by Justin McLawhorn
Sunday, April 17
1:00-3:00 p.m. – “As We Like It: Music Inspired by Shakespeare,” ODU Opera, directed by Brian Nedvin
4:00-6:00 p.m. – “Henry V,” Hampton Roads Summer Theatre, directed by Justin McLawhorn
7:30-9:30 p.m. – “Titus Andronicus,” Warehouse of Theatre/ODU Rep, directed by Lee Smith and Katherine Hammond
All tickets are $15 through ODUArtsTix.com or 683-5305.
Free events include:
“The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” by the Governor’s School for the Arts, directed by Ricardo Melendez, on Brock Commons;
Pop-Up Mini-Performances: “Romeo and Juliet,” “Titus Andronicus,” Combat Exhibition, and “As We Like It;”
Performance Workshops by the American Shakespeare Center of Staunton, Virginia;
“Reimagining Shakespeare,” poets reading Shakespeare’s works and their responses
ODU Madrigal Singers
ODU Sacbut Consort
“Shakespeare in the Americas” at the Baron and Ellin Gordon Art Galleries Self-Taught Gallery;
“Still Dreaming,” a documentary film about elderly actors as they produce ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’;
The academic conference “Shakespeare and Our Times” takes place April 14-16 at Webb University Center.
Virginia Arts Festival
The Tempest
April 16-17
Chrysler Hall
No reading of The Tempest can do it justice. Shakespeare’s tale of Prospero’s island is inherently theatrical, unfolding in a series of spectacles, and was created by Shakespeare as a multi-sensory theater experience of sight and sound. The richness of The Tempest as theater is matched by the extraordinary thematic complexity of its text, which plays on the polarities of reality and illusion, nature and civilization, revenge and forgiveness. This fully staged new theatrical production features incidental music by Sibelius that is considered by many to be one of his greatest achievements.
Co-presented with Virginia Stage Company and Virginia Symphony Orchestra.
