Echoes of Eden

Reflections on Christianity, Literature, and the Arts

Jerram Barrs

• Editore: Crossway
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781433536007
• Argomento: Theologie & Religion
• Categoria: Literatur & Kunst im Christentum

From comic books to summer blockbusters, all people enjoy art in some form or another. However, few of us can effectively explain why certain books, movies, and songs resonate so profoundly within us. In Echoes of Eden, Jerram Barrs helps us identify the significance of artistic expression as it reflects the extraordinary creativity and unmatched beauty of the Creator God. Additionally, Barrs provides the key elements for evaluating and defining great art: (1) The glory of the original creation; (2) The tragedy of the curse of sin; (3) The hope of final redemption and renewal. These three qualifiers are then put to the test as Barrs investigates five of the world's most influential authors who serve as ideal case studies in the exploration of the foundations and significance of great art.

9

Shakespeare and a Christian Worldview

Judged by the perennial popularity of his plays, William Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist and one of the finest poets to have written in any language. One mark of this greatness is the way characters come alive and make believable speeches representing extraordinarily diverse views about life in this world. This variety of ways of seeing the human situation can make it difficult to discern Shakespeare’s own understanding of the human condition. However, I believe that at a deeper level than the notions of particular characters in his plays, we will find an underlying worldview that is thoroughly Christian.

Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616. Yet, when people were surveyed in the year 2000, he ranked far ahead of anyone else as the person of the last millennium, and these were surveys that included thinkers such as Marx, who had a very profound impact on vast sections of the world; other political leaders, like Roosevelt or Churchill, Hitler or Stalin; and religious figures like Luther, Mother Teresa, or particular popes. But no one came even close to Shakespeare, in terms of either his popularity or his impact upon the world; he stood head and shoulders above everyone else. What accounts for this enduring and profound impact on people, not only in the English-speaking world but also around the globe?

Many of us will have seen his plays (in English or in translation) on the stage. I will never forget my own stage introduction to Shakespeare. When I was twelve our English teacher arranged for our class to go and see Romeo and Juliet at the Old Vic Theatre in London. Dame Judi Dench, a young actress at that time just beginning her career, was playing Juliet. I was entranced by her, by the play, by the theater, by Shakespeare—and I have been ever since. Where we live in St. Louis there are free performances of Shakespeare’s plays in Forest Park each summer. They are well done and very popular. One of our sons lives in St. Louis, and he and our daughter-in-law began to take their two sons, our grandsons, when they were little. I remember the boys, one four years old and the other two, staying awake till almost 11:00 p.m., watching The Tempest—not the easiest play, one would have thought, for small children, but they enjoyed it thoroughly.

Of course, not all theater experiences are so pleasurable. My wife and I took my mother to see a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon. It was to be a special treat for her as she had not been able to go for many years. I telephoned at the time I was booking the tickets and asked whether the play was suitable for children (not because any of us were children, but because I am aware how directors can take appalling license with their productions of a play). I was assured that it was fine and was told that that particular afternoon there would be several parties of school children attending. With eager anticipation, for my mother especially, we drove up to Stratford full of excitement. However, the production was anything but fine!

Shakespeare’s magical play set in the enchanted woods had been turned into something very different. The first sign of trouble (and of the problems with the director’s vision of the play) was that the people of Athens were dressed as puritans (I assume that was the intention) in stark black and white. They stood rigidly still around the circumference of the stage and spoke their lines in monotones. I thought that maybe, like Rousseau, this director believed that civilization inhibits personal freedom: “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” In contrast to the rigid constraint of life in Athens, the forest was a scene of complete lack of inhibitions. The fairies behaved as if they were nymphomaniacs, as if they were crazed for sex, and entirely without inhibition in their dress or actions. The encounter between Bottom and Titania was turned into a scene of horribly explicit bestiality.

By this time several of the school groups had already got up and left the theater. My mother, who is not prudish or puritanical, was shocked to the core. The three of us were speechless. This is the worst example I have ever seen of a stage or film director completely ignoring the intentions of the artist.

Thankfully this kind of outrageous foolishness is rare, so I would encourage readers not to assume that such violence to the intent of the author is regularly done in productions of Shakespeare’s plays. Sometimes one may have questions about the director’s interpretation of particular characters or aspects of a play, but the problems are very rarely this severe.

I am sure that most readers of this will have seen some of the recent film versions of Shakespeare’s plays, for many of these have been extraordinarily well done and have become very popular. Some of the best have been Kenneth Branagh’s productions of Henry V, Much Ado about Nothing, and Hamlet. Also there are outstanding versions of Twelfth Night with Imogen Stubbs as Viola, The Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino as Shylock, Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo, and Othello with Kenneth Branagh as Iago and Lawrence Fishburne as Othello. These are just a few of the excellent films of Shakespeare’s plays made over the past twenty years. There is also a complete cycle of the plays done for BBC television in the 1970s and 1980s, and almost all of these were very fine. I remember, in particular, As You Like It with Helen Mirren playing the part of Rosalind.

I mention these as an encouragement to readers to develop their own lists of favorite productions, and also to persevere if their introduction to Shakespeare on stage is similar to our appalling experience of expecting to watch A Midsummer Night’s Dream and having to view another play entirely.

What about William Shakespeare the man? There is not much that can be said with confidence, for Shakespeare was a very private man about whose personal life we know very little. What can we say? We know a bit about the family he was born into in Stratford, a line of information about his childhood and education, maybe three or four lines about his marriage and family, a paragraph about his personal life in London while he worked in the theater, and another very brief paragraph about his few years in Stratford after his retirement, when he worked on final manuscript versions of his plays.

This paucity of information has given rise to endless speculation, some of it book-length or series-length on television. Some of the recreations of his life are fascinating, but almost all of them are entirely speculative. So little is known about him that several scholars have tried to make their reputations, and their fortunes, by proposing that someone else must have written the plays, someone more formally educated, someone better known. The suggestions range from royalty, to nobility, to other famous dramatists, to men of letters—even to a syndicate of writers. This, however, is all nonsense.

We can speak with more confidence about Shakespeare’s career in the theater. He was an actor, a member of a troupe of actors numbering about seven or eight men and a couple of boys (for the women’s parts). This meant that Shakespeare would regularly take part in the plays that were being performed (he played the ghost in Hamlet, for example) while also writing new plays. He was a part-owner of a theater company, together with his fellow actors. This company built its own theater. It also put on plays each season before the royal court; for example, Twelfth Night was shown during the period after Christmas. The royal season lasted about two weeks, beginning on December 26, and four or five plays were performed during that time; there was another brief royal season at Lent with two or three plays performed.

The main work of the company was the two London seasons held each year, one in spring and the other in autumn. The company’s practice was to present a different production each weekday afternoon and then to introduce a new play into their repertory every two weeks. This meant a vast amount of hard work for the actors, who were constantly learning new parts and playing several different roles at the same time. Shakespeare himself was always writing new plays at the same time as helping with the current productions. These plays and their stage presentations had to be of good quality, for at that time about one third of the population in London attended the theaters. This was perhaps the best theater-educated audience that any group of actors has ever had to play before. They also had to be quality plays and presentations as there were several other competing companies offering their productions to this very discerning population. In addition to these seasons in London and at the royal court, the company traveled around the country during the summer, putting on their plays in rural cities.

Glorious Poetry

Shakespeare was a poet, one of the greatest to write verse in English, or in any language. I will include just two examples of his glorious poetry. The first is from Antony and Cleopatra. This is taken from a scene where Antony’s general Enobarbus is telling Agrippa why Antony will never desert Cleopatra, even though Antony has just agreed to mar...