Why Shakespeare?

Catherine Belsey

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781403993205
• eBook ISBN: 9781350316645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Why is Shakespeare as highly regarded now as he ever has been? This book's answer to this question counters claims that Shakespeare's iconic status is no more than an accident of history. The plays, Belsey argues, entice us into a world we recognize by retelling traditional fairy tales with a difference, each chapter providing a detailed reading.

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Shakespeare’s Singularity

Survival

Let me begin with a question. What do the following expressions have in common: ‘high and mighty’; ‘every inch a king’; ‘the be-all and the end-all’; ‘make short work’; ‘the primrose path’; ‘the green-eyed monster’; ‘suit the action to the word’; ‘more in sorrow than in anger’; ‘poisoned chalice’; ‘sea-change’; ‘mind’s eye’; ‘tower of strength’; ‘the milk of human kindness’; and ‘the crack of doom’? They all sound proverbial. More precisely, however, they are all drawn from Shakespeare.1 In some ways these two observations amount to the same thing: Shakespeare is part and parcel of English-speaking culture, and not only high culture. In Britain now, phrases from the plays are still current, woven into the fabric of everyday life four hundred years after they were spoken on the early modern stage.

Like the Bible, Shakespeare is full of quotations. He also offers an endless supply of titles: Pomp and Circumstance, Brave New World, Salad Days, Perchance to Dream, Look to the Lady, Cakes and Ale, Present Laughter, Sad Cypress, Band of Brothers, This Happy Breed, The Weaker Vessel, The Dogs of War. On in London for decades in Agatha Christie’s version, The Mousetrap originally ran for one night in Hamlet.2

Meanwhile, Shakespeare has proved nearly as influential in other countries. Many Germans feel, not entirely without justification, that Shakespeare belongs to them. Slogans from Shakespeare were used to inspire soldiers in the trenches on both sides in the First World War.3 The old Soviet Union made films of Shakespeare that cast the plays in a new light: in 1971 Grigori Kozintsev’s version of King Lear brought out its concern with the link between property and power. In Japan Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1984) drew on the Noh tradition to foreground the element in Lear that links power to performance.4 Shakespeare is also well known in India, although his reputation there suffers from his appropriation for colonial education in the mission schools.

Cinema’s love of Shakespeare has reinforced his international currency. Early films included a trailer for Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s King John in 1899, and an extract from Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet made in 1900. Any number of silent renderings followed. In 1929 D. W. Griffith made The Taming of the Shrew, ‘with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor’. There have been at least nine mainstream English-language Hamlets since the Second World War, while Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet broke records in 1996. Surely, no other dramatist quite possesses this continuing status, for better or worse? Would Aeschylus in Love have had the same box-office appeal, I wonder?

If not, why not? What is it that differentiates Shakespeare from other writers? One consensual answer has been the endless adaptability of his work. Modern directors reset the plays in a contemporary world and discover new meanings. But then, every generation notoriously perceives its own preoccupations in Shakespeare. He has also regularly invaded other genres: retold for children as Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb in 1807, the plays also threaded their way through a number of classic novels and a great many Victorian paintings;5 nineteenth-century composers made music out of them. In these instances, as always, appropriation necessarily reworks what it borrows, testifying in the process to a vitality that is open to repeated reinscription.

Besides filming the plays, Hollywood has also adapted Shakespeare with enthusiasm, often on the basis of successful Broadway musicals. In The Boys from Syracuse the music of Richard Rodgers and the lyrics of Lorenz Hart re-energized the plot of The Comedy of Errors (Jules Levey, 1940), while Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate reframed The Taming of the Shrew (Jack Cummings, 1953). The Tempest surfaced anew as Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956) and West Side Story updated Romeo and Juliet with music by Leonard Bernstein (Robert Wise, 1961). No doubt taking its cue from the success of 10 Things I Hate About You, based on The Taming of the Shrew (Gil Junger, 1999), and O, which rewrote Othello to centre on a basketball player (Tim Blake Nelson, 2001), She’s the Man set the plot of Twelfth Night in a school called Illyria (Andy Fickman, 2006). This teen flick shows Viola disguised as Sebastian in order to join a soccer team captained by Duke Orsino. Malvolio, meanwhile, turns out to be a tarantula.

Somehow, the stories stick, even when all about them changes. In 2005 the BBC rewrote Shakespeare. Preserving the names but very few of the words, four new plays took Shakespeare’s titles and relocated them to our own era. Much Ado About Nothing made a plausible romantic comedy, set in a regional newsroom and played out between two presenters. Hero did the weather. The Shrew was a Conservative Party candidate; Macbeth was a successful chef. These plays were highly watchable, and more immediately accessible, of course, than the originals. What they demonstrated beyond doubt was that Shakespeare tells a good story. It seems that his plots include a degree of irony and a measure of suspense that has lasted into the twenty-first century. They have also generated modern spin-off novels by well-known authors, including Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991), Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1992), and John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (2000).

A black hole

How can we account for this pervasive power? What singles out Shakespeare for such continuing attention? The Victorians had an answer. Shakespeare was a genius; his plays depicted human nature in universal situations; and he inscribed timeless moral truths in immortal poetry.

Possibly. A century later, however, a sceptical academy developed radical doubts about this view. We were deluding ourselves, so the story went, misled by the Shakespeare industry, which had editions to sell and souvenirs to market. Theatres needed audiences: it was in their interest to promote Shakespeare as a reliable source of revenue. Hollywood itself was also party to this deception, it appeared, and with the same motive. The construction of Shakespeare as icon went back a long way: Britain needed a national poet – and Shakespeare represented the obvious candidate. Generations of critics, it was urged, had not only made careers out of interpreting Shakespeare; they had also created the extraordinary dramatist they presented as no more than an object of knowledge. To Gary Taylor, for example, no less a figure than one of the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare, there is nothing exceptional about the plays. Shakespeare was never special, or not in the way his admirers imagine. Taylor puts it so vividly that the passage is well worth quoting:

If Shakespeare has a singularity, it is because he has become a black hole. Light, insight, intelligence, matter – all pour ceaselessly into him, as critics are drawn into the densening vortex of his reputation; they add their own weight to his increasing mass …

But Shakespeare himself no longer transmits visible light; his stellar energies have been trapped within the gravity well of his own reputation. We find in Shakespeare only what we bring to him or what others have left behind; he gives us back our own values …

Before he became a black hole, Shakespeare was a star – but never the only one in our galaxy. He was unusually but not uniquely talented … He was no less and no … more singular than anyone else.6

Cultural materialism

In this challenge to the Victorian veneration of the dramatist, Gary Taylor makes two related points. First, he denies Shakespeare’s singularity; and second, he maintains that the plays have disappeared behind centuries of interpretation. All we can see in Shakespeare is our own image of him, he argues, and this in turn is the cumulative effect of successive rereadings. If Taylor is right, the answer to the question, ‘why Shakespeare?’, is to be found not in the works but in the history of their reception.

How has it come to this? The answer requires a brief excursion into recent critical debates, and readers who have no interest in the story of competing approaches to Shakespeare are invited to proceed directly to the section on ‘The plays’. For the rest of us, it is worth emphasizing that Taylor’s is by no means an isolated voice. Shakespeare has been relativized. In English departments on both sides of the Atlantic a concern with historical difference has called into question traditional beliefs in human nature, universal situations, and timeless truths.

While new historicism (mostly American) has been busy pushing Shakespeare firmly back into his own period, cultural materialism (often British) has concentrated on the way the plays have been put to work since then, and enlisted or appropriated in support of specific causes. Shakespeare has been invoked to defend political passivity (Julius Caesar can be played to show resistance as hopeless), as well as imperialism (Prospero, the colonial oppressor, has been held up for admiration), in addition to Nazism (Coriolanus was a favourite in Germany between the wars). Cultural materialists have also scrutinized the education system to discover that Shakespeare has been interpreted on behalf of right-wing individualism and a divisive class structure, not to mention racism and sexism. The case is now incontrovertible: in the course of time Shakespeare has been made to speak from a range of positions, some more appalling than others, and each masquerading in its day as the truth about Eternal Man.

Roland Barthes in Mythologies had already removed the mask from the face of Eternal Man to reveal the history beneath it. Timeless human nature, Barthes affirmed, is an illusion societies foster to prove their own specific values and practices inevitable, or natural. The social arrangements that currently prevail in the West, he indicated, are one way of organizing the world; they have come into being historically, not naturally; and the attitudes they encourage are as much their consequence as their cause. The myths we live by transform history into nature in order to legitimize and perpetuate existing social practices.7 Wherever ‘human nature’ makes its appearance, it is likely that change is being held at bay.

A historicized Shakespeare is no longer widely credited with enshrining human nature. But the evidence that the works can be so radically reread has generated not only a healthy scepticism towards any interpretation that proclaims itself definitive, but also, in extreme instances, a relativism so severe that it effectively erases Shakespeare’s own writing. If the plays can be invested with such different meanings, we have no access, purists urge, to Shakespeare, but only to what has been made of Shakespeare; there are no texts, they insist, only readings. The playwright whose meanings are reducible to existing interpretations is the Shakespeare who no longer transmits visible light, but is lost in the black hole of his own reputation.

We find in Shakespeare no more than we bring to him, Taylor asserts. I have never been able to see the force of this argument. Texts exist in their difference as the material inscription of meanings. Our interpretations are the effect of an interplay between what we bring and what we find. The sense we make of Shakespeare will not be exhaustive or final; it will be made in the present and in the light of current knowledges; but the process of making sense does not come to an end because a succession of editors, directors, critics, or examiners have previously made other senses of the same works. Whenever it pronounces the plays inaccessible behind their own celebrity, cultural materialism closes off the question why it should be Shakespeare who is so repeatedly adapted and enlisted, and excludes the possibility that some aspect of the plays facilitates such appropriation.

Performance criticism

Meanwhile, other voices were announcing the disappearance of the texts from a quite different angle. Shakespeare works wonderfully in the theatre. From the gallery at the Old Vic I craned forward as a schoolgirl to catch every detail of the unfolding action. (In retrospect, I am not entirely sure in my own mind whether the primary lure was Shakespeare or Richard Burton, who played most of the star roles at that time.) Although I knew almost none of the plays in advance, I had no sense that I needed to read a synopsis, and no difficulty in following the course of events. It is on the stage that the plays come alive.

But their meanings have been ruled inaccessible, ironically, by the redefinition of the texts as no more than scripts for performance. While the cultural materialists were developing their case, a generation of theatre historians were arguing that the real Shakespeare existed only on the stage. The surviving texts were merely spectral pointers to possible productions. A play that lives only in the theatre lives in one particular incarnation at a time, and is subject to perpetual revision. According to the strong form of this view, then, there are no texts, but only successive productions, and if we want to understand Shakespeare’s continuing pre-eminence, we should look to the theatrical record.

Once again, this deflects any appeal to the plays for an answer to the question, ‘why Shakespeare?’ Although I have no quarrel with performance criticism, it does not, in my view, tell the whole story. The materiality of the texts is reaffirmed, however, perhaps surprisingly, by the proposition that versions of the plays printed in the dramatist’s own lifetime were designed for reading. In Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist Lukas Erne makes the detailed case that the texts originally led a double life – as scripts for performance on the one hand, and as reading matter for an increasingly literate public on the other.

Although it may not have been Erne’s primary project, the effect of his argument is to undermine the view that the plays have no meaning outside individual productions, and can do no more than reflect the values of any moment at which they happen to be performed. If we concede that the plays also once made at least a degree of sense on the page, we reassert their intelligibility as texts, and confirm in the process that meaning depends on what we find there, although always in conjunction with what we bring to the task of interpretation.

The plays

Shakespeare does more, in my view, than give us back our own values. The works exist in their material inscription, and therefore in their difference from subsequent cultural norms, as well as in their resemblance to them. We can recognize the undoubted adaptability of Shakespeare, and the range of possible interpretations, without giving up on the plays, or declaring them dead and buried under the weight of their own fame. Moreover, I believe the time has come to assess whether there is something in these works that makes them especially susceptible to appropriation. In the end, we do not have to choose. Of course ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Shakespeare’s Singularity
• 2 As You Like It and ‘The Golden Goose’
• 3 King Lear and the Missing Salt
• 4 The Exiled Princess in The Winter’s Tale
• 5 Fairy Tales for Grown-ups in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• 6 Hamlet and the Reluctant Hero
• 7 Twelfth Night and the Riddle of Gender
• 8 Cultural Difference as Conundrum in The Merchant of Venice
• Postscript
• Further Reading
• Abbreviations and References
• Notes
• Index