The Bard Still Speaks

Not long ago, according to historian Michael Beschloss, archivists discovered a high school essay written by a 16-year-old Harry Truman on "The Merchant of Venice." As a student in Miss Brown's English class, Truman argued that after 2,000 years, the Jews were "a nation apart from nations . . . persecuted for their religion" and still "waiting for a leader" to gather their "scattered people." Many decades later, President Truman took a grave and controversial risk by recognizing the state of Israel -- an issue he had first considered as a teenager at Independence High School reading William Shakespeare.
Yet Shakespeare's influence is not primarily ideological or even religious; his views on these topics are cloaked and obscure. He does not attempt to explain history or the gods to men but rather to explain men and women to themselves. His narrow topic is humanity, and it is immense: everything from stalking guilt to bawdy humor, from insanity to jokes about passing gas, from love to death to those moments when they are inseparable.
In a time deluged by ideology -- when everyone is urged to take a side and join the political battle -- Shakespeare offers a different message: that the most important and dramatic choices are made in the human soul. Some steps, once taken, cannot be retraced. Some appetites, once freed, become a prison.
But the plays are not simple sermons. Fate can be indifferent to our best intentions. Even the purest love can lead to disaster. All our explanations of suffering are incomplete.
We watch the struggling souls in Shakespeare's plays with uncomfortable self-recognition. In their raw honesty we see our own nature, even those parts that are despairing and lawless. And as these characters are transformed, we see ourselves differently as well.
And so we enter a dark theater (or green or beach or riverside) and escape to what is most real.