Art & Soul

A Tribute to the Master Playwright

In this, my last article for Salvo, I wish to speak about the undisputed king of English drama, Shakespeare. I speak not to self-styled experts, but to all readers of Salvo, particularly to teachers, homeschoolers, and young people ill-served by what they have been taught of Shakespeare in schools and colleges.

Text

I’ll begin with the basic consideration, the text. From my nearly 50 years of experience as a student and a professor, I say that the best text, by far, is The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, edited by Sylvan Barnet and published in 1972. It is pleasant to the eye. The full names of the characters are given in capitals: PROSPERO and MIRANDA, not Pros. and Mir. It is hard to underestimate how such a simple thing aids the dramatic imagination as you attempt to see the character in action. Difficult words, phrases, and clauses are glossed at the bottom of each page, keyed to line numbers, without any distractions in the text itself. The pages are large, with double columns, so you have a view of quite a lot of the speech and action at once.

Most illuminating are the general introduction and the introductions to each play by critics of erudition, dramatic sensibility, and poetic understanding—all written before our current strains of political dermatitis and obsession. By contrast, I find that if an edition of a classic text is published after 1985, it is more likely than not that the introduction and the notes will be at least inadequate, possibly misleading, even pernicious.

Now that you have the text, you must keep in mind that Shakespeare intended his lines to make literal and grammatical sense. Occasionally, because of some fault in the first published texts, a line may be corrupt, but the glosses will alert you to that and provide a likely reading. Otherwise, assume that if you do not grasp the literal meaning, you do not grasp anything at all. Be patient. Do not be like too many actors and directors I have seen, who hope that mugging and shouting and wild stage business will compensate for the failure of anyone on stage or in the seats to understand what the lines are saying. Your patience will be rewarded.

Drama

Remember that you are not reading a poem or a short story, but a script. Shakespeare did not write as a poet for other poets to read at leisure while they sip their wine and nibble at their crumpets. He was himself not only a writer (and theater manager, company chief, producer, and director, all in one) but an actor, and doubtless one of great power: we believe, for example, that he himself played the part of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father in Hamlet, a performance upon which the tenor of the tragedy hinges.

Let that same Ghost show what I mean by this alert. How do you play him? Is he prompted by justice or revenge? Does he come from Hell (and of course he would deny it if he did)? Or is he one of the saved, in Purgatory? What does he want? What is he willing to destroy to accomplish it? When he warns Hamlet, “Nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven,” is he animated with genuine care for the woman who may well have conspired with his brother to murder him? Or is he, by indirection, sowing an evil thought in Hamlet’s mind? How shall the actor deliver those lines? When he takes his leave, what does he imply about his state of being? “The glowworm shows the matin to be near,” he says, “And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire.” The adjective is startling. The pale glow of the firefly is as nothing compared with the fires of—which place? Why call attention to the fires? Is it sadness? A felt need to spur Hamlet to act? A sinister desire to infect his imagination, to unseat his reason?

Action

Always try to imagine what the actors are doing. Where are they? Is anyone on the upper level of the stage? If so, why? How are the lines to be delivered? What, if anything, are the silent figures doing while someone else is speaking? I have seen the Earl of Northumberland, in the BBC’s old production of Richard II, undercut the king’s self-pitying abdication speech by one idle motion of a finger, applied between his eye and nose. What does Shylock do when Portia says, “The quality of mercy is not strained”? When she utters that line, does she do it oratorically, or with special emphasis directed at that one man, as if to say, “Sir, you have mistaken the matter. Mercy cannot be compelled. You must free yourself of your attachment only to law and the law’s demands.”

Subtleties

Though Shakespeare never flattered his audience to court popularity, he did aim to please. You may have heard people say he included bawdy material merely for the unsophisticated “groundlings”—those who could not afford a seat, so they stood or sat in the pit before the stage. Don’t believe it. Shakespeare was a genius and could accomplish three or four objectives simultaneously.

The same is true of so-called “comic relief.” Do not fall for that dodge. Of course, since he was a master showman, Shakespeare well knew how to vary the mood of a performance from scene to scene, but you must never suppose that the comedy within a tragedy or a romance is not also there for more profound dramatic, moral, intellectual, and even theological purposes. When the Porter with his bad hangover takes his slow way to open the doors to Macbeth’s castle, we laugh at his bumbling delay and his wit; but pay attention—all that he says about equivocation and self-deceit applies to Macbeth and his fiend-like queen.

When the drunken Caliban conspires with the butler and the jester to kill Prospero and seize the island, we compare what they are planning to what their social superiors have done in Italy, and to what the villainous Antonio and Sebastian are plotting to do now—Sebastian, to murder his brother the king, just as Antonio betrayed and supplanted his own brother, Prospero.

Comedy can tear away the veil from evil that takes itself so seriously. A drunken Porter can sober up as the day advances, but Macbeth will sup with horrors worse and worse as his life hastens to its deserved destruction.

Other Worlds

Once you begin to understand how Shakespeare works, how everything in a play is related to everything else, it will be as if you had awakened into another world, which is somehow your own world, but with colors and lights and shadows and music you had only been vaguely aware of before.

So fascinating is such a world, you will want to find similar networks of meaning in other works of literature. You will find them in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art and literature; in Baroque music; in the novels of such mythmakers and sweeping storytellers as Tolkien, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, and Fielding. Much of the literature of the last hundred years will seem flat by comparison, like unsalted crackers.

Theology & Soul

This difference will strike you the more powerfully, because it springs not only from how Shakespeare composes, but from what he composes about. He is, by far, the most theological of English playwrights and by far the most conversant with Scripture, which he cites and echoes far more frequently than any of his contemporaries.

The Christian faith not only provides him with an angle from which to view his material. It is often itself the constituting power of a play, the soul that brings the work of art into being and life. It is not just that the title Measure for Measure echoes the Sermon on the Mount. The whole play is an examination of justice and mercy, of law and redemption from the bonds of that law, of the right ordering of a society under law, and of clemency for those who fall afoul of the law.

Similarly, it is not just that Shakespeare wrote a play, Cymbeline, about the legendary British king who happened to be on the throne when Christ was born. The whole play is about a light that is to enter a dark world, about rising from sleep and death.

King Lear is set in pagan Britain, before the birth of Christ, but somehow it is also set in a world that is longing for Christ. “O dear father,” says the faithful Cordelia, not knowing whom she anticipates, “it is thy business that I go about.”

Wonder

Most of all, be delighted. Fall in love with Bach, and you love him forever; you will find that he always has more to give, more profound feelings you had not suspected, more intricacies of beauty, more insight into the sacred. It is the same with the art of Michelangelo.

It is the same with Shakespeare. Go forth, then, and be prepared for wonder.