Shakespeare

Xerxes is doing you a favor. Courtesy of the GUARDIAN by way of ARTS & LETTERS is this marvelous essay on Shakespeare. No clicking necessary!

Returning from Stratford the other day, still spellbound by the RSC's inspired new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, I found the first 20 titles of the revamped Penguin Shakespeare series lined up for inspection on my desk. Even a veteran of Bard-biz like me couldn't fail to be awed all over again by the magnitude of the mind that hatched plays as diverse as Henry V, Twelfth Night, Hamlet and The Tempest. And I fell to musing on the secret of the plays' enduring power and global appeal four centuries after Shakespeare penned them.
The first to muse on the matter, a mere seven years after Shakespeare's death in 1616, was his fellow dramatist and drinking pal, Ben Jonson. Jonson praised Shakespeare as the epitome of his birthplace and nation, as the "Sweet swan of Avon" and "the wonder of our stage". But he also hailed him as a playwright "to whom all scenes of Europe homage owe", who belongs in the pantheon of the mighty Greek dramatists and their continental heirs, and thus to the world. In the same paradoxical spirit, Jonson immortalised Shakespeare as both the "soul of the age" and "not of an age, but for all time!"
So how did Shakespeare pull it off? Why do these plays, which are steeped in the life and language of Shakespeare's world and time, refuse to stay put in his world and time, and have so much to tell us about our world in our time? The popular consensus is that his drama has defied obsolescence and triumphed in translation all over the globe because it expresses the timeless truths of the universal human condition. It's a view that has secured powerful advocates, from Samuel Johnson in the 18th century to Harold Bloom in the 21st. But it's a view whose platitudinous piety I've never found credible, not least because it's been used so often to buttress the status quo.
In recent years this consensus has come under assault from academics itching to yoke Shakespeare to progressive agendas. The aspiration may be admirable, but the belief that it is best fulfilled by restoring Shakespeare to his historical habitat, by insisting that he's not for all time but of an age, is doomed to enthral only the kind of mind that thrives in the archives. Embedding the plays in the culture that cradled them can teach us all sorts of invaluable things that enhance our understanding of them. But it's hopeless at explaining why the glovemaker's lad from Stratford still captivates audiences on every continent, while the other dazzling dramatists of his day do not.
Coleridge, arguably Shakespeare's greatest critic, came closest to defining the distinctive quality of his vision, when he observed that Shakespeare is as unlike his contemporaries as he is unlike us. In other words, his plays at their most powerful are out of sync with both Shakespeare's epoch and ours, and so can't be explained fully in terms of the past they sprang from or the present in which we encounter them. What drives his drama is the dream of a dispensation whose advent we still await, the prospect of a future free from the division and domination that crippled Shakespeare's world and continues to cripple ours.
None of the plays is more plainly possessed by "the prophetic soul / Of the wide world dreaming on things to come" (Sonnet 107) than King Lear. In his supreme tragedy Shakespeare forces an omnipotent monarch to feel what the "Poor naked wretches" of his kingdom feel, and to realise that beneath his royal robes and a beggar's rags beats the heart of the same "bare, forked animal". Through Lear's traumatic transformation, the play demolishes the assumptions on which hierarchy and inequality rest. It climaxes in a snarl of contempt for those who arrogate to themselves the right to rule others: "There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog's obeyed in office." And in place of the division and domination that destroy its characters, and continue to threaten our kind with destruction at the dawn of the 21st century, King Lear commends economic justice and compassion: "So distribution should undo excess, / And each man have enough."
Shakespeare's drama still thrills us because it allows us to see his world from the standpoint of a world that men and women are still struggling to create. Shakespeare's gift to our time is an extraordinary one: the power to view the past that shaped the present as if we were already citizens of centuries to come.