Fragments of Shakespeare are to be found in forgotten
corners of almost everybody’s brains. Even people who don’t like Shakespeare or
think they couldn’t quote any of his lines probably have ‘Wherefore art thou
Romeo?’ or ‘To be or not to be?’ hidden away behind dust covered memories of
school day romances or cobwebbed adolescent existential crises (the latter
possibly precipitated by the former).
Apart from the fact they’re both interrogatives, the two
quotes share several things in common. For one thing, the language of each is
relatively simple, both express profound thoughts condensed into a few words
and both deal with essential elements of the human condition: love and death. Hamlet’s
phrase is so compacted it could be reduced to text speak as ‘2B or not 2B’ and
sounds like a metaphysical equation. Yet while most would struggle to
understand ‘E=MC2’ almost anyone might grasp what the prince was on about.
Relatively few people can have gone through life without having wondered at
least once; a. what is the point of being alive? b. what happens when you’re
dead? and c. what the bloody hell is
going on?
Of the quotations, it’s more surprising that Juliet’s
should be so widely remembered since two of the four words are archaic and ‘Wherefore’
is frequently understood as meaning ‘Where are you?’ rather than ‘Why are you
called by the name you are?’ In brief, her words are generally understood to
mean ‘Where are you Romeo?’ but this doesn’t matter. What people respond to is
the anguish behind what she says. If the majority of us have occasionally
wondered if being alive is such a great deal, most will also have been
infatuated at one time or another and found the experience as much full of
despair as exhilaration. Love is a bumpy ride.
That the words are phrased as questions is perhaps key to
their punch. Had Hamlet and Juliet simply stated how they were feeling, along
the lines of ‘I don’t know whether to kill myself or not’ or ‘I’m so upset
Romeo is a Montague’ they might have elicited sympathy, but not drawn us into
their psychic drama. For while statements close the issue (‘This is how I’m
feeling at the moment’) posing the thoughts as questions universalize them.
‘Should I kill myself?’ or ‘Why is he a Montague?’ invite a response. As members of the audience, we are asked to
consider the problems and in contemplating them we automatically draw on our
own lives. We too have known the tough moments.
Not all the bits of Shakespeare that stick are especially
profound or even beautiful. One line that rattles round my head is Titania’s
exclamation when she discovers she has spent the night with Bottom, ‘O, how mine
eyes do loathe his visage now!’ It is the aghast tone of anyone who ever got
drunk at the office party and woken up next morning with the odd looking one from Accounts.
Titania’s clipped expression of horror is in wonderful
contrast to Bottom’s idiotic remembrance, ‘I have had a most rare vision. I
have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was… The eye of man
hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste,
his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was…’ He is the
frog who marries the princess, the loser who wins the lottery. He is all of us
who ever got lucky, if only for a midsummer’s night.
Since almost everything has been given a name by somebody
who probably didn’t have enough to do, ‘earworms’ is the term denominating the
snatches of music that get stuck in one’s brain and won’t dislodge for days on
end. They irritate with repetition but typically were irritating to begin with;
for some reason one tends not to download anything actually enjoyable. And
earworms tend to be short, one or two bars of chorus rather than a whole song.
Shakespeareworms (apologies, I’ve just discovered I don’t
have enough to do) are different in that the pieces seem not to be tiresome,
but similar in their brevity. They are more likely to be Titania’s exclamation
than Bottom’s rapture.
Working on Macbeth,
I find the line that insinuates itself is not a part of his troubled
soliloquizings but Lady Macbeth’s ‘When all’s done/You look but on a stool.’
Unremarkable in its way, it yet shows Shakespeare’s seemingly effortless
ability to nail personality. Hers is the exasperated voice of all strong women
married to feckless men who have just lost the week’s rent on a horse that came
in last at Kempton Park or who slept with the odd looking one from Accounts at
the office party or who failed in any one of a million other ways.
Why that line chose to stick will remain confidential between me and my psychotherapist. But it’s not the one that is most insistent.
That is Lear’s cry on the heath, ‘O, I have ta’en/Too little care of this.’ It
is his appalled realisation that throughout his long reign he had neglected the
‘poor naked wretches’ with ‘houseless heads and unfed sides.’
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the utterance is
his use of the first person pronoun. For while in Act 1 Lear employs the royal
‘we’, by the time he finds himself in the storm with Kent and the Fool he has
been stripped of the comfortingly impersonal plural form along with all his
other kingly appurtenances. He knows that it is not ‘we’ as an expression of
monarchical office or the embodiment of a social order that is responsible for
the injustice, but ‘I’. He has failed
the neediest of his subjects. The blame cannot be shuffled off.
Had Lear retained ‘we’ it might in some senses have
implicated everyone in the play as well as those watching it. We as an audience
would have been complicit in his guilt; but by definition that guiltiness would
have been diffused, shared with everyone else. ‘I’ challenges us to examine our
personal responsibility for the injustices around us. And every one of us is at
fault.
Oxfam recently announced statistics to show that the
share of the world’s wealth owned by the richest 1% has increased from 44% in
2009 to 48% in 2014, while the poorest 80% own just 5.5%. On current trends it is
claimed that the richest 1% will own more than 50% of the planet’s wealth by
2016.
I have no idea how these figures are calculated, but it
is obvious there are huge structural imbalances. And it is equally obvious that
we can’t take refuge in the fact that we are not part of the super-rich club. Even if we don’t own yachts or private jets,
pretty much everyone in the West is a pampered aristocrat compared to those in
most of Africa or Asia. Our privilege is at their cost.
We are aware that our cheap clothes were produced by
sweated labour in Bangladesh, that our smart new trainers were made by children
in the Philippines and that our demand for oil has led to the devastation of the Ogoniland coast. If we watch the News at all, we must also be aware that
millions of refugees are streaming from Syria into Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon;
that around the world tens of millions of slum dwellers live in unimaginable
squalor near to gated communities of the elite and that homeless people sleep
rough in all our major cities. Yet what do we do about it?
More to the point, what do I do about it? How much care have I taken? The answer is not much.
With my wife I have a monthly standing order payment to Oxfam,
contribute to the Disasters Emergency Committee more often than not, sometimes
buy The Big Issue and occasionally give money to down and outs. I once also
protested outside a Shell filling station after the hanging of Ogoni
environmental activist Ken Saro Wiwa in 1995. In other words, very little.
Enough to make me feel I’ve helped out, but not sufficient to cause
inconvenience. Along with almost everybody else, I have taken too little care.
Yet what’s to be done? Mounting the barricades and
throwing cobble stones at policemen has been tried and appears not to work.
Voting at elections seems almost as pointless as joining a political party. And
Shakespeare doesn’t offer any clues. Being a genius didn’t give him all the
answers and in everyday life he was almost certainly the sort of man to hide
his silver spoons in the thatch and agree with whoever knocked on his door in
turbulent times.
In that respect he was like pretty much all the rest of
us. If it’s possible to draw conclusions about him from his work, then it would
seem he favoured love over hate and order over anarchy. Again, pretty much like
most of us.
He doesn’t preach, but shows us ourselves through
Hamlet’s doubt, Juliet’s love, Bottom’s rapture, Lear’s madness and more. His
plays present a series of problems to which he provides solutions, some tragic,
others comic. What we should do, he leaves up to us.
