Essays in Idleness

As dead white males go, Shakespeare has got to be in the top ten. He has outlasted not only his rivals on the stage, but one after another of subsequent generations, and even in the rain of our own time, he is still running strong. Four hundred years from his death, on his fifty-second birthday, after a drinking bout with old buddies in a Stratford inn, he is perhaps the oldest profane author still widely read. This may be partly because he is still force-fed to the poor young geese in our secondary schools. Most remember him with bitterness, on that account, but a few notice that he is rather good, and peek back when teacher’s eyes are turned. Members of the drama club will be most likely to form a permanent attachment, as Shakespeare was an actor, but more, the playwright who is every actor’s best friend.

This shows through in translations, from what I can see. The poetry, which is often intense, cannot be successfully imitated in any other language; but the theatrical movement can be reproduced. From travelling companies through Germany, in the seventeenth century, to those crossing rural India in the twentieth, the plays have somehow “worked” on audiences that are not only culturally “other,” but don’t speak a word of English. Something seems to be happening, in every Shakespeare play, and even without a drumbeat of preparation, people respond to it. Something of extraordinary power is happening, and they just have to watch.

Which explains, in turn, why “the Bard” (I hate this term) could experiment so wildly with the language in his later plays. The earliest ones are strictly respectful of English syntax, and obedient with English grammar and vocabulary. The later ones break all the rules. Shakespeare knew he could hold an audience spellbound, whether they could follow his verbiage or not. He earned a freedom no subsequent poet in English till the twentieth century would dare to imitate; whenupon, those who tried, failed.

Yet he is a poet, a disciplined poet, and a thinker, too; and was a man of very broad if chaotic reading, as we are still discovering. His Latin was superb (he went to a first-rate grammar school), and what he comprehended from the Roman poets, Ovid especially, was of a higher quality than dribbling academics can imagine. His thefts from Plutarch are always astute, but also from Livy. What he learnt from the ancient comedians, however, was nothing on what he could teach them.

To call him “the Bard” is to subscribe to the common, ignorant view that he was a “noble savage,” an untutored force of nature. The French, in their formality, are mostly responsible for this error of the Enlightenment; it was among the many things Voltaire got wrong, as the insidious depth of the master dramatist undermined his poppet classicism.

Shakespeare meditated deeply on English history, and on history at large. He went beyond presenting it in narrative form. Like a documentary filmmaker, he takes what he needs from the historical record, discards the rest, and changes anything that does not fit his programme. It does not follow that he misunderstood his sources.

This is also his strategy in the Comedies and the Tragedies, never paying for a plot when he can steal one. For the world is full of plots, and one is like another. The world is full of mud and rock, but the master mason can shape and lay them. The master sculptor permits the stone to speak.

He did not have a theory of history, or a theory of anything else — a mediaeval mind does not think in “theories” — but a profound sense of how the world works, and of the contending spirits animating it. He summons spirits, and strange to say they come.

It is a great mystery when a poet or musician or artist, out of nothing we can see, reveals melodies, harmonies, rhythms, patterns, images, that cannot be forgotten. Shakespeare, unusually a poet of both eye and ear, simultaneously operates as painter and composer. Blind or deaf, he will lead us towards the heart of things. For also, in so many passages of his superlative opera of the senses, we touch. There is a delicacy that calls by “the tender inward of thy hand,” to vivid sudden revelations of the horror and beauty in all human scenes. Blindfold, we can trust he knows his way.

He was not of his age but for all ages, as Ben Jonson declared at the head of the First Folio. By this he does not speak of the future alone. Shakespeare is pre-eminently our poet of the past, lingering upon what is lost, or being lost, beyond salvage. He has among English writers the most exquisite knowledge of the transience of life. He is writing in an age, and to a society, swept by an unprecedented revolution. Yet he is not part of it.

For England he is the lingering ghost of the Middle Ages. The failure to see this is wilfully obtuse. His recusant native Arden is evoked, in fine botanical detail, as that lost paradise. It is an older and wiser England — that not of political ardour but of monasteries and quiet — which glows in his nostalgia. Nothing could be more Catholic, for England, than these lines (opening Sonnet 73), in which startled, we realize her banished Church is singing:

That time of yeeare thou maist in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few doe hange
Upon those boughes which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d quiers, where late the sweet birds sang. …