http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040301/eagleton
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Company Man
by TERRY EAGLETON
[from the March 1, 2004 issue]
The name Shakespeare in Britain is rather like the names Ford, Disney and
Rockefeller in the United States. He is less an individual than an
institution, less an artist than an apparatus. Shakespeare is a precious
national treasure akin to Stonehenge or North Sea oil. He is to be ranked
alongside King Arthur, Monty Python and the crown jewels as part of the
nation's cherished mythology. In some quarters, indeed, he is almost as
well-known as Billy Connolly. That right-wing troublemaker Prince Charles
brandishes the Bard as a weapon in his campaign to defend the Queen's
English, a language that in his case is literally his mother tongue.
Stratford, Shakespeare's home town, has become a place of pilgrimage only
slightly less sacred than Mecca, with American tourists waddling reverently
around the spectacularly tasteless cathedral of the Shakespeare Memorial
Theatre. An impressionable few of them are even moved to doff their baseball
caps or discard their ice creams. Shakespeare's familiar high-domed head, an
image that is quite possibly not him at all, has adorned everything from TV
beer commercials to the £20 note. He is the presiding genius of the national
spirit, a kind of Churchill in a neck ruff. Without him, industries would
crash and ideologies crumble. It is even rumored that he also wrote plays.
Not all the English have been so admiring. The eighteenth century found his
work rather barbarous, while others have found his jokes dismally unfunny.
Nor is he easy to appropriate as a patriotic Englishman. There is some
swashbuckling chauvinism in his plays, but in King Lear he comes near to
championing some form of socialist redistribution. The beauty of the drama,
however, is that you can read into it pretty much what you will. There are,
for example, times when it is almost impossible to believe that he had not
read Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein. A fellow student of mine at
Cambridge argued with a poker face that Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is
depressed because he is a promiscuous homosexual, basing his theory on
Antonio's line "I have not placed all my treasures in one bottom." ("Bottom"
actually refers to ship's bottoms.) This image was unaccountably passed over
by the American scholar who delivered a paper a few years ago (without a
hint of a poker face) titled "The Anus in Coriolanus."
Because of his totemic status, Shakespeare proved a valuable commodity to
ship out to the colonies. Rather than sweat over textbooks on the English
way of life, Indian or Caribbean school students could simply read Julius
Caesar or A Midsummer Night's Dream. The fact that many of the cultural
references would have been unintelligible to them was less important than
the fact that they were getting a blast of the very essence of Englishness.
At home, Shakespeare was and remains the acme of the humanities. When
unfounded rumors recently spread that one or two English universities had
taken him off their syllabuses, the national outrage was equivalent to the
reaction one might expect if medics were to announce that they no longer
proposed to study the pancreas.
The Age of Shakespeare, Frank Kermode's informative introduction to
Shakespeare and his times, has some incisive comments to make on the plays,
sometimes of an appealingly irreverent kind: The young lovers of A Midsummer
Night's Dream are said to be "hormone-dominated," while Romeo is "in a
melancholy amatory daze about a girl." The book has no particular case to
argue, but it provides us with an elegant, economic survey of the politics
and religion of the age, along with some shrewd speculations on the man
himself. Oddly enough for a fairly low-born seventeenth-century working
scriptwriter from the rural outback, Shakespeare is better known today than
many of his contemporaries. It is true that we cannot be absolutely sure
that the Will Shakespeare who was an actor (probably not very skilled) from
Stratford-upon-Avon was also the William Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet. Some
conspiratorial souls, for whom the Kennedy assassination has nothing on the
Shakespeare conundrum, believe that the real Shakespeare was a nobleman who
stole the name of this country bumpkin. This is because they find it hard to
stomach the suggestion that a clodhopping peasant who couldn't even spell
his own name properly could come to rank alongside Dante and Goethe. One or
two of the writers of his time also viewed him as an upstart, but this was
probably envy: Shakespeare was big in his own day as he is in ours.
A few conspiracy theorists have even proposed the Earl of Oxford as the true
Shakespeare, a claim zealously supported by the present Earl of Oxford, who
could do with a little culture in his family tree. The only drawback to this
eminently plausible case is that there is not a scrap of evidence for it.
But at least Oxford was a nobleman, who could occasionally spell his own
name correctly, and who like Shakespeare's plays would have known a thing or
two about affairs of state. Much ink has been spilled on the question of
Shakespeare's identity, including a somewhat fanciful book by a scholar
named Thomas Looney. Kermode, for his part, takes it pretty much for granted
that the boy who attended Stratford grammar school also later wrote "To be
or not to be." (Shakespeare's work, as someone pointed out, is positively
stuffed with quotations.)
Whoever he may have been, Shakespeare had a nose for business as well as an
eye for metaphor. He was in on the ground floor of the flourishing new
London theaters, won himself one-tenth of the shares in Lord Chamberlain's
drama company (the most important stage company of the day) and ended up as
a prosperous property owner. New Place, the house he bought himself in
Stratford, was the second-largest residence in the town. Because of Lord
Chamberlain's powerful patronage, he was a minor courtier as well as a
commercial entrepreneur, thus combining in his person aspects of the old
feudal England and the rising bourgeoisie.
As Kermode points out in this sparkling little study, Shakespeare was
acquainted with much that went on in social ranks both above and below him
as a result of his own ambiguous social status. It is a complex richness of
experience to which his plays bear eloquent testimony. In fact, it is
eloquence that one associates with him above all, as his characters produce
torrents of unstanchable verbal intricacy just to announce that there is
someone at the door. The butchers and candlestick makers in the pit may not
have followed it all, but they were oral types accustomed to listening to
rhetoric (in church, among other places), as we moderns are not.
It is remarkable how many of the most eminent names of English literature
have been socially ambiguous. Jane Austen was a member of the poorer
gentry--poor enough to be an outside observer of the governing class, yet
genteel enough to know it from the inside. Most of the major
nineteenth-century novelists were from the lower middle class, caught
painfully between rulers and ruled, and so able, like Shakespeare, to look
both ways. The Brontë sisters were the daughters of a down-at-heels
provincial parson; Charles Dickens was the son of a feckless clerk in the
Admiralty; George Eliot's father was a provincial farm steward; Thomas Hardy
was the son of a small-time rural builder and alternated standard English
with the local dialect. D.H. Lawrence's father was a coal miner, while his
mother had genteel proclivities. Virginia Woolf was impeccably upper class,
but as a woman was a misfit in the Establishment and married a Jewish
socialist. All of these men and women knew the tension between aspiration
and bitter reality. And it was partly out of this discrepancy that they
produced such distinguished art.
Shakespeare went even further, caught as he was not just between two social
classes but between two historical modes of production. His Globe theater
was a profitable enterprise, charging only a penny for standing space (a
third of the cost of a pipeful of tobacco), but able to accommodate an
audience of 3,000. Even so, this budding capitalist venture still needed the
protection of the court, and could suffer political censorship at its hands.
Queen Elizabeth, an expert political operator, would have been quick to
score a red line through any script that advocated popular rebellion.
With his usual exquisite sense of timing, Shakespeare managed to get himself
born at exactly the right moment for artistic greatness. Major art often
flourishes on the fault lines between civilizations, fed by complex
cross-currents between one form of life and another. Tragedy in particular
has flared up at these points of turbulent transition. Shakespeare's England
was still a repressive, court-centered monarchy, in which Jesuits could be
torn apart in public as popular entertainment. But Kermode points out that
finance and commodity markets were growing apace, as middle-class
opportunists like the Swan of Avon stealthily accumulated power. It was in
the reign of Elizabeth that the joint-stock company first took off.
As Kermode remarks, in the real world of Elizabethan England, the usurer
Shylock would no doubt "have been an investor in the flourishing
corporations, or in the insurance business." Despite some truly catastrophic
inflation, a minority of the British were thriving on the back of an
expanding empire, enriched by the spoils from plundered Catholic
monasteries. Meanwhile, the common people oscillated between starving and
rebelling, staggering from one gargantuan food shortage to another.
The Age of Shakespeareis particularly informative about the physical aspects
of Elizabethan theater, not just the literary ones. Though the Globe offered
its audiences highly sophisticated stuff, it was surrounded by bearpits and
mimicked them in its physical structure. The Rose Theatre next door was
built on the grounds of a whorehouse. "All around," Kermode comments, "were
cardsharps and dicers, con men and money-lenders, roaring boys and roaring
girls." Shakespeare's fellow dramatist Christopher Marlowe, who may have
been a government spy and closet atheist, was stabbed to death in a nearby
tavern. As a probable homosexual, Marlowe risked execution for sodomy. It is
possible that the man from Stratford had one foot in this raffish world,
while the other foot was firmly planted in the sphere of big business and
the court.
Though Shakespeare wrote prodigiously for his own company, he would no doubt
have been amazed to know that what he was scribbling would later be regarded
as "literature," just as Saint Augustine would have been astounded to be
told that he was living in the Dark Ages. Shakespeare seems to have taken no
trouble to proofread his plays. It has been estimated that some 3,000
theater scripts were produced in England between the 1550s and the 1640s,
many of which, so legend has it, were destroyed by an eighteenth-century
cook who used them to make pies. The story gives new meaning to the notion
of literary taste.
Having made his pile, Shakespeare bought his father a gentleman's coat of
arms, a bogus honor to which the old boy was egregiously unentitled. (There
is some evidence that Shakespeare senior was a closet Catholic, and some
scholars believe that junior was as well. Kermode himself remains
unconvinced that he spent some of his youth in a kind of Catholic
underground.) Shakespeare's steady progress up the social scale wasn't at
all bad for a theatrical profession whose members had been lumped by the law
with whores and vagabonds only a few years earlier, and who could still
suffer the odd cold blast of disfavor from the Puritan city fathers. The
Puritans disliked the theater because they feared that it would spread
immorality, public disorder and sickness. The latter was a real anxiety in
an era of smallpox, malaria, bubonic plague and a positive rash (if that is
the right word) of sexually transmitted diseases. As for immorality, the
sight of beardless boys dressed as women making love to men in public was
not considered especially desirable by the Elizabethan equivalents of Pat
Robertson.
The Age of Shakespeare is a marvelously compact account of the man and his
social context. It packs into its brief compass some astute commentaries on
the plays, and weaves together the theater, London life, high politics and
acting techniques. Kermode writes a supple, lucid prose, with a touch of the
English gentleman; he is good-humored, self-effacing, wears his erudition
with ease and is too courteous to be polemical. The only mildly alarming
feature of the book is that it appears in a series that also includes
Bernard Lewis on the Holy Land. Perhaps the commission for the volume on
democracy will be offered to Saddam Hussein.
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