Bob
"C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
[Another view...]
>From The Times
December 8, 2007
Tickets to Othello? Not on your life
My brother writes plays and has begged me not to do this.
But I must. I detest Shakespeare with all my heart
Giles Whittell
One -- no, two! Yea two at once in one/ Great city: titans of the screen who play/ On splint'ry planks, in velvet, hissing spit/ As if time had congealed four centuries past.
What rapture. Two big Shakespeare shows with film stars in them clamour for our attention, and we and our dear readers, and two theatres and several dozen actors and Ticketmaster (most of all) are suddenly like pigs in high-class literary merde. And I cannot stand it.
This is an article that my brother, who writes plays for a living, has begged me not to write. Well, sorry mate. Its time has come.
The gist of it is that nothing -- not spoilt children nor even the staggering hypocrisy of Meredydd Hughes, the 90mph South Yorkshire Chief Constable -- so o'erwhelms my sanity and clouds my better nature with the dark red mist of rage (and poisons what might have been a prose style to call my own) than William bloody Shakespeare.
I have nothing against the man himself, or whomever he hired to sit around churning out endless neo-Tudor histrionics. It was clearly nice work for those who got it. And I bear no grudge against Ewan McGregor (Iago at the Donmar) or Sir Ian McKellen (King Lear at the New London). If they can remember the words and afford the pay-cut, the very best to them.
It's the plays I loathe, and the orgiastic groupthink that drips from every one of them; the industrialised, irresistible consensus; the greatness thrust upon them by brainwashed English teachers, polished with coach vomit and fish-and-chip fat on every school trip to Stratford, mindlessly reaffirmed by every A-level English examiner, and worshipped with world-class, awestruck claptrap by academics and directors from Stanford to Irkutsk.
I have tried, so help me God, to fight through the sheer opacity of Shakespeare's language to establish what in Heaven's name is going on in his damned plays. I think basic plot awareness matters. It brings an entry-level appreciation from which, apparently, bliss follows. But my hopes of keeping up have always been dashed within a scene or two by simple confusion, curdling via frustration, shame and boredom to cold anger by the blessed final curtain.
Actors never help, since their only two options are to be self-consciously Shakespearean or -- even more preposterous -- somehow contemporary, apeing (or being) Kenneth Branagh, as if modern conversational cadences when talking about love and death in iambic pentameter were the most natural thing in the world. They aren't. They are ridiculous. You want contemporary love and death? Try the great Mexican telenovela Los Ricos también lloran.
I believe there are three main reasons why Shakespeare has acquired immunity from the big, loud puncturing he deserves. He is, first, out of copyright -- perfect for schools and am-dram but also professional theatre companies and movie studios wanting to lay spurious claim to a “great script” without paying anyone or tangling with the strike-prone Writers' Guild of America.
The second reason is the academic compulsion to fill the literary- historical void between Cheerful Chaucer and the true, protean genius of Dickens. Shakespeare sticks out, for purple prolixity if nothing else, like an impenetrably forested atoll at the fag end of the 16th century.
Thirdly, the post-industrial bourgeoisie needed a canon of secular scripture whose base obsessions they shared and whose entirely non-prescriptive world view they could agree on. Shakespeare, cloaked in reassuringly antique language, fitted the bill, and loyalty to his greatness became tribal.
His defenders say he repays study. As does the Highway Code, on so many levels. I have no objection to Shakespeare being taught in schools as long as pupils have a statutory right to diss him without being marked down for their dissent.
They also say that Shakespeare, not Dickens, was the true genius. Wrong. He filched most of his stories from the ancients and English history. That took care of content. As for form, he was a dedicated follower of fashion. Everything from the five-act structure of King Lear to the soporific dum-de-dum-de-dum of its monologues was borrowed. With so many of a writer's decisions made for him, it would have been bizarre indeed if he hadn't turned a florid phrase or two.
Shakespeare isn't terrible. He was a decent, jobbing wordsmith chosen by accident of history as a vessel for the projected yearnings, every bit as intense as his own, of succeeding generations. He was literature's Brian (as in Life Of). If he were alive today he'd be a copywriter with a blog.
Robert Wrubel wrote:
> I dont remember the play either, but the lines sound like something
> Claudius would have said of Hamlet. And the first line sounds like
> the sexual puns in the Sonnets. Weird indeed! An eminent modern
> Shakespearean said Shakespeare's language didn't make sense in a
> conventional way at all. He seems to operate in a separate world of
> meaning, as Nureyev seemed to moved outside the laws of gravity.
>
> BobW
>
> Carrol Cox wrote: Shakespeare is weird. I was just
> browsing in the current New Yorker and came across the two lines
> below, quoted from Cymbeline. It's been 54 years since I read that
> play, and therefore the lines are without context for me, just two
> lines hanging in midair:
>
> Your low-laid son our godhead will uplift: His comforts thrive, his
> trials well are spent.
>
> These lines owe _nothing_ to any profundity of content; the content
> would fit a small-town weekly's report on a church bazaar. Yet they
> really are wonderful.
>
> Like I say, Shakespeare is weird. These two lines reflect his
> difference from other poets in English: even when his words aren't
> saying much they somehow stick together so perfectly.
>
> Carrol
>
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