In a moment of idealism last January, I made a New Year’s resolution to read all 38 of Shakespeare’s plays in 1992. Each week I look forward to my designated Shakespeare evening. I have found the plays to be unfailingly witty and profound, and oddly up-to-date.
In July, with the Democratic National Convention playing softly in the background, I passed the halfway mark and decided to reflect on what I had learned. “Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked twixt son and father.” Those words from King Lear sounded suspiciously like Mario Cuomo’s nominating speech describing the modern U.S. (Too bleak for most generations’ taste, King Lear was performed for centuries in a happy-ending version. Now, as modern sensibilities have caught up with its dark vision, it has become Shakespeare’s most revered play.)
“Each new morn new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows strike heaven on the face.” Was that Macbeth or Jesse Jackson? Shakespeare’s depictions of crime, injustice, war, treachery, and greed demonstrate that, no matter what either political party says, these problems are not mutations in America of the 1990s; they have been around since Eden.
Furred Gowns Hide All
Some major differences between the Elizabethan view of the world and our own stood out as well. Listening to both parties’ political conventions, I got the distinct notion that if we could just get the economy rolling and clean up the drug problem and educate all those misguided kids in gangs—why, then, a golden age would return to America. Social problems (the closest modern equivalent to “evil”) trace back to poverty and lack of education.
Shakespeare would disagree. “They are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing,” observed the maid of an heiress in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare showed genuine respect for the decency of the lower classes. The real villains were rich and powerful, people like Macbeth and Richard III, who had every advantage of education, wealth, and fine breeding.
King Lear states it best: “Through tattered clothes small vices do appear; robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold …” Lear learned this lesson the hard way. Cast out of his own castle by his avaricious daughters, he wandered alone through a terrific rainstorm, finally taking shelter in a cave with a refugee. The experience revealed to him a “theology of reversal,” and for the first time, he understood the plight of the poor and homeless:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’r you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.
It is not the only scene in Lear that rings with overtones of the Incarnation.
Our Hour Upon The Stage
Democrats blame a Republican administration for society’s ills, while Republicans blame a Democratic Congress. Shakespeare’s characters are as likely to implicate God. “Wilt thou, O God, fly from such gentle lambs and throw them in the entrails of the wolf? When didst thou sleep when such a deed was done?” cries one after a murderous crime. “O God, seest Thou this, and bearest so long?” laments another.
These anguished cries ironically reveal a belief in Providence that underlies all of Shakespeare’s plays. You only rail against God if you still believe him active. As seen most clearly in the four-play cycle revolving around Henry VI, history for Shakespeare involved more than the rise and fall of rulers and nations. The turmoil and civil strife in England signified God’s judgment. This is a harsh message, one not reflected in either political party’s analysis of the problems of the U.S.A.
In Shakespeare’s time, people still lived out their days under the shadow of divine reward and punishment, an assumption that tends to put boundaries around evil. In Richard III, an assassin trembles before his assignment, fearing, “Not to kill him, having a warrant, but to be damned for killing him, from the which no warrant can defend me.” And the Earl of Warwick prays, “Ere my knee rise from the earth’s cold face, I throw my hands, mine eyes, my heart to Thee, Thou setter-up and plucker-down of kings.” Our leaders could use a dose of such humility.
One last irony struck me as I pondered the Elizabethan era and our own. Comparing Shakespeare’s characters with modern-day politicians, I could not help thinking how we as men and women have shrunk. The “politics of marginalization” rules in the U.S. Rioters riot because they can’t help it; teens get pregnant because their drives overpower them; “prochoice” women choose abortion because they “have no choice.” The message is clear: We are products of our glands, our families, and our cultures, nothing more.
In contrast, the characters in Shakespeare stride like giants across the stage. I find it wonderfully refreshing to read of these characters who have a sense of personal destiny about them. These are not automatons or victims, but free individuals making choices, some malignant and some noble. As the master playwright insists, they must then live with the consequences. Lady Macbeth hoped otherwise: “A little water clears us of this deed,” she said as she and her husband rinsed their hands of blood. She was tragically mistaken.
Lady Macbeth died haunted by guilt, and her husband mourned her with these eloquent words of despair:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Shakespeare’s plays alone offer enough evidence to refute that nihilism. As the Victorian scholar A. C. Bradley wrote, in words that apply to almost all of Shakespeare’s characters, “No one ever closes a tragedy with the feeling that man is a poor mean creature. He may be wretched and he may be awful but he is not small.” It’s enough to make you nostalgic.
