To Man From Mankind's Heart
THE STAGE (See Cover)
In a frenzy of transcendental hyperbole, Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: "In climes beyond the solar road, this planet is probably not called Earth, but Shakespeare." Even a simple solar observer could supply Emerson with startling evidence this summer that all the world is, or shortly will be, a Shakespearean stage.
In Scotland, a third witch cackles at NBC's color cameras as TV prop men bring Birnam Wood--root, leaf and branch--to Dunsinane. Along the brooding battlements of Yugoslavia's 12th century Lovrijenac fortress, the ghost of Hamlet's father spurs his son's revenge; deep in Russia, at Tashkent, the jealous Moor strangles the blameless Desdemona. A marble shard's throw from the Parthenon of Sophocles and Euripides, a Greek Shylock pleads, "Hath not a Jew eyes?" --while halfway round the world, black-jeaned Australian troupers tour the outback by bus, with a crown and a sword or two as their props.
The deaf-mute students of Washington, D.C.'s tiny Gallaudet College last year mimed Othello in sign language. Next year tribesmen in Southern Rhodesia will play Macbeth costumed as Zulu warriors in animal tails and feathers. As for his native England, the playwright's blessed plot resounds with Shakespeare, from the Old Vic to Regents Park, where the lyrics of The Tempest boom through stereophonic loudspeakers suspended from the trees.
The Three Shrines. Nine U.S. festivals are tuning up or have already launched their programs. Of the plays done on college campuses last year, Shakespeare topped the list. Actor Arnold Moss, who won raves for his magical Prospero some seasons back, has completed a 7,000-mile barnstorming tour of eleven states with his Shakespeare Festival Players. No breath of Shakespeare stirs at the moment on Broadway, but off-Broadway's Phoenix Theater has just concluded an excellent revival of Henry IV, Parts I and II. John Gielgud's Ages of Man recording, patterned on his brilliant stage readings of last season, has sold 30,000 copies. Macbeth is being taped for NBC.
In the theaters, tents and schoolrooms of every land, wherever the sun sets and curtains rise, Falstaff struts with his gorbellied wit, Bottom bumbles through the woods, and wide-eyed Ophelia trembles before Hamlet's abuse. Malvolio preens like a toad in yellow stockings. Hotspur wells blood. In soliloquy and song, in bantering bawdry and scalp-tingling rhetoric, in the kingliest English and in tender or rough translation, they speak to man from mankind's heart. Never in the nearly 400 years since their creator was born have Shakespeare's characters spoken to so many, or meant so much. Nowhere do they mean more than at the three Stratfords--in England, Canada and the U.S.
P: Stratford-upon-Avon, at the age of 80, is not only the oldest continuing Shakespeare stage, but also a shijne and an industry. A quarter-million tourists a year, 25,000 from the U.S., pour into this medieval town in the green-girt Cotswolds to poke curiously through Anne Hathaway's neighboring cottage and peer reverently at Shakespeare's crypt in Holy Trinity Church. The red brick Stratford Memo rial Theater receives 1,000,000 ticket requests annually, is forced to turn down four out of five. The lucky ducat holders this year will pay $500,000 to sit on three sides of a newly extended apron stage (designed to achieve neo-Elizabethan intimacy), see a forgettable version of Two Gentlemen from Verona mounted on a revolving stage, a tricked-up Twelfth Night, and a fine Taming of the Shrew, starring Peggy Ashcroft. P: Ontario's Stratford, a 1953 offshoot of England's, and heavily Anglicized in cast and directors, was originally housed in a huge tent, eight miles from the town of Shakespeare; the festival moved indoors-in 1957, and its parasol-roofed theater makes Ontario's the only Stratford with true arena staging. More a purist than a tourist mecca, the festival has nonetheless lured nearly 1,000,000 theatergoers, for a box-office gross of $3,000,000. Much of Ontario's pulling power has stemmed from Tyrone Guthrie, perhaps the ablest living Shakespeare director, who likes to take a lesser-known play and tilt it like a kaleidoscope until the characters tumble into new and exciting shapes. Ontario will lead off its season this week with a Byzantine-styled King John, followed by Romeo and Juliet with Julie Harris, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. P: Stratford, Conn, is salad-green in years (1955), in its bucolic setting along the sleepy Housatonic River, and in the juvenile cuteness of most of its productions. The 200,000 ticket-queuers anticipated this season must expect only Jello-weight Shakespeare inside the handsome teakwood playhouse emblazoned with British heraldry and flying pennants. This year's opening Twelfth Night was greeted with morning-after queasiness by the critics: Illyria became a British seaside resort circa 1830, and most of the cast appeared to be on shore leave from H.M.S. Pinafore, including tremolo-prone Katharine Hepburn, an exponent of the Bryn Mawr school of Shakespearean diction. The Connecticut Stratfordians followed up with a becalmed Tempest. Expected later with some foreboding: Movie Actor Robert Ryan's Antony to Katharine Hepburn's Cleopatra.
Two Hours' Traffick. If none of the Stratfords is great--too many gimmicky productions betray the fear that the greatest entertainer in the history of the theater is not entertaining enough--they do have the overriding merit of bringing Shakespeare alive for huge audiences. The actors and directors are not smug; seesawing between Shakespeare straight and Shakespeare as straight-man, they remain as restlessly dissatisfied as their customers are satisfied. Above all. the Stratfords have recaptured some of the fluidity of the Elizabethan theater, in which the "two hours' traffick of our stage" was literally true, since scene followed scene without break, and the scenery might be no more than a placard reading "A Wood Near Athens" (see cut). To judge by the traffick rush to the Stratfords, today's audiences agree with Critic Maurice Morgann, who wrote of Shakespeare in 1774: "It is safer to say that we are possessed by him, than that we possess him."
What possesses the modern playgoer? Above all, it is the chance to get away from modern drama that represents little more than introverted self-communion, from little plays about miserable little people. In Shakespeare, he sees characters probed in Freudian depth, without the jargon. Instead of words that plop over the footlights like dead tennis balls, he hears language that surges like the sea. The modern stage bleats with special pleadings; Shakespeare never sermonizes--his "largesse universal like the sun" showers on saint and sinner, fool and sage, king and commoner. To modern playwrights, man is puny; to Shakespeare, who knew all his faults, he was nevertheless "the paragon of animals." To an Age of Anxiety, he incarnates the courage, humor and fortitude that have always seen men through their dark nights of the soul; to a burnt-out drama he is the ever-renewing fire in the ashes. Immortal, he became a myth; miraculously, he was once a man.
Second-Best Bed. "Shakespeare led a life of allegory," wrote Keats. "His works are the comments on it." The allegory is gap-filled, encouraging the strange game of pseudoscholarship designed to show that Shakespeare did not really write the plays, that he was a front man for Sir Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford,* or Christopher Marlowe or Sir Walter Raleigh or Queen Elizabeth or even the Bard's wife, Anne Hathaway. Amateur cryptographers have thought they found hidden codes in Shakespeare's writing, pointing to the true authors.
Underlying all this is a peculiar kind of snobbery--the notion that a man of simple origins and education could not have been so great a genius. These theories have been refuted in many ways, but the strongest refutation, apart from the historical record, is the plays themselves; the style is the man--the unmistakable code in which life and work meet.
His life was a very Shakespearean mixture of the familiar and the strange, of petty peace and dark tragedy, acted out against the incomparable backdrop of the Elizabethan Age. Young Will had a far better family background, and probably far better schooling, than the anti-Shakespearean theorists usually concede. The Shakespeares were Warwickshire farmers, but Will's father, ambitious John, moved to Stratford and became a glover. He was one of the town's official aletasters, and donned the scarlet robes of high bailiff, or mayor, when Will was four. The boy presumably went to Stratford's King's School --no doubt unwillingly, since the schools of the day consisted of Latin drill, long hours (7 a.m. to 5 p.m., often longer in summer), and Spartan discipline.
Although John Shakespeare applied for a gentleman's coat of arms around 1576, he slipped into money troubles and was dropped from the list of aldermen. Will had not been overly prudent himself. According to parish records, he and Anne Hathaway were married posthaste, without the customary three readings of the banns--Anne was three months pregnant. By Elizabethan standards, Anne's pregnancy was no great scandal, but her age --an antique 26 or so to Will's 18--was. The sole clue as to how they got on together is a rather ambiguous bequest in Shakespeare's will: "Item, I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture." Since Will spent most of his mature years in London, leaving Anne and their children behind in Stratford, it might be argued that she had always had the second-best bed.
Beauty & the Bestial. The swan-dappled Avon may have been the Styx to a London actor, but the best touring companies played in Stratford. Englamoured by them, Shakespeare, some time around 1587, left for the big town and joined an acting company. As actor and playwright, Will was a quick study in success. He wrote speedily--his editors noted that his manuscripts were scarcely ever blotted--and turned out an average of two plays a year. Plots to Shakespeare were like pots to Merlin: any borrowed tub, from Holinshed's Chronicles to Plutarch's Lives, would do to mix the magic in. One of the intellectuals of the day, Robert Greene, addressing his university-trained colleagues, Nashe, Peele and Marlowe, sneered at the "upstart crow, beautified with our feathers." But Londoners worshiped him.
The city whose temper Shakespeare had caught was in a ferment. In the "quick forge and working-house of thought," Elizabethan London was minting a new breed: Renaissance man. Never was the Englishman more Latin; bristling with Spanish pride at personal indignities, Italianate in his boastful womanizing, French in his world-playful wit. After the Spanish Armada went down (1588), England ruled the waves, and no one had ever so masterfully ruled England as Elizabeth I. The Elizabethan was agape at the sheer wonder of himself: "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!"
Dazzled by life, the Elizabethan was nonetheless on familiar terms with death.
Plagues riddled London. The severed heads of criminals rotted in the sun at Tyburn Tree. The acme of the hangman's art was to cut his man down and eviscerate him while still alive; a priest was once heard saying his prayers even as his heart palpitated in the hangman's palm. Ben Jonson killed a man in a duel; "Kit" Marlowe was stabbed to death in a tavern" brawl. The Elizabethans lived dangerously, and while they lived, they were asmile with daring. Shakespeare held a magnifying glass to the spirit of his age, and set the unroofed circle of the Globe's "wood en O" blazing with his Muse of Fire.
Of an afternoon, when the white pennant rippled on the flagstaff of the Globe, signifying the performance of a play, the Thames was a bazaar of haggling, blue-coated boatmen ferrying several thousand eager customers crossriver to the prison district of the Clink, where the playhouses had retreated from puritanical city magistrates. The fops gossiped and smoked onstage. Jostling one another and munching sausages in the penny standing room of the pit were the groundlings and "stinkards," men who had unfurled canvas with Drake, but could not read or write. From next door at the Paris Garden came the snarls of mastiffs as they leaped at the throat of Harry Hunks, a chained bear that snapped at them with his sawed-down teeth and clawed some into bloody silence. This was the competition for Romeo and Juliet. No one sensed the paradox of beauty and the bestial more keenly than Shakespeare:
How with this rage shall beauty hold a
plea, Whose action is no stronger than a
flower?
The Dark Vision. Whatever roles Shakespeare played onstage (some think his favorite part was the ghost in Hamlet), offstage he was a prudent investor and a bit of a snob. He bought a piece of the players' company, a piece of the Globe, and eventually paid -L-60 for New Place, the second grandest house in Stratford. In 1596 his father pushed his long-dormant claim to a coat of arms, and the Shakespeares became gentlemen heralded by a hawk brandishing a spear, and the motto Non sans Droit (Not Without Right), which Ben Jonson promptly parodied as "Not Without Mustard."
That same year, Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son Hamnet died. This was one of three events that probably clouded the sunlit hours of the early comedies and prologued the dark vision of the great tragedies. The second was Shakespeare's-embittered love affair with the unknown "dark lady of the sonnets." Biographers have found traces of this siren's raven hair, pitch-black eyes, jigging walk, panting breath and wanton ways in the characters of Ophelia, Cressida and Cleopatra. The third event was the arrest and imprisonment of Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, for helping Essex plot against the Queen. In combination, these events seem to have left Shakespeare at times with a bleak view of man's fate, and a nausea of sex. No existentialist has found life more meaningless than Shakespeare's "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
The disgust with sex not only inspires one of the finest sonnets ("The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action"), but it erupts with sour rancor in all the major tragedies but Macbeth. With almost prurient relish, Hamlet chides his mother not to let the "bloat king" with his "reechy kisses" tempt her again to bed. The eightyish Lear, who might be presumed past sex obsession, works himself up into a fury on the devil in woman's flesh:
Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiends'. There's Hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding, stench, consumption, fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.
The Revels Ended. Shakespeare's own imagination invariably sweetened itself, for in the long run he never saw only the dark side of man--or woman. He retired to Stratford around 1611, his sense of evil seemingly muted, as is suggested by the enchanted isles, fairy-tale plots, masques and marvels of the last plays. For his final comment on man's existence in The Tempest (1611), Shakespeare returned instinctively to the stage with its quality of make-believe:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air. And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself--Yea, all which it inherit--shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
Shakespeare died five years later, at 52, of unknown causes--though one 17th century chronicler reported that "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted." Anne outlived him by seven years, and asked to be buried in the same grave, but the authorities dared not flout Shakespeare's doggerel epitaph:
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here . .
The Rewriters. The future was less considerate. Relentlessly, the dust has been dug up, the literary remains chopped, scattered, reshaped by each succeeding age according to its own vision. A history of changing Shakespearean fashions, as T.S. Eliot has pointed out, is a history of Western civilization.
When the London theaters reopened in 1660, after having been shuttered by the Puritans for 18 years, the Restoration decided that Shakespeare needed rewriting. Taking its cue from Ben Jonson ("Shakespeare wanted art"), the Restoration and the Age of Reason argued that the Bard was a barbaric child of Nature whose war bled woodnotes wild violated the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. His plots were a confusing mishmash of the tragic and comic. He was vulgar. Samuel Pepys confided to his diary that Hamlet "disgusts this refined age." Dryden called him "divine Shakespeare," but added smugly: "I have refined his language, which before was obsolete." Voltaire may have summed up his era's widespread judgment on the Bard: "A few pearls on a dunghill."
For a century and a half, Shakespeare was vivisected and prettified. The biting vigor of the language was made toothless. In the original, a half-demented Macbeth rounds on a servant with
The devil damn thee black, thou creamed-faced loon! Where got'st thou that goose look?
Rewriter Sir William Davenant, Shakespeare's godson, refined this into: "Now friend, what means thy change of countenance?" Romeo and Juliet stayed alive; "false Cressid" remained true to Troilus; and in the most bizarre happy ending of the lot, King Lear's daughter Cordelia married Edgar, and Lear was offered back his kingdom. Adapter Nahum Tate, who also edited out Lear's Fool (this cut lasted for 157 years), solemnly declared that his only purpose was "making the tale conclude in a success for the innocent distressed persons."
The Blushing Bowdler. "Declamation roar'd, while passion slept," said Dr. Johnson of the ranting style of early 18th century acting. Then David Garrick, who had an indifferent voice and a remarkably expressive face (a deaf-mute was one of his most ardent fans), pioneered a conversational, non-declamatory style. Although he restored some of the verse and affected to play "as written by Shakespeare," Garrick did his own tampering with the text. The gravediggers were missing in his Hamlet, as was Ophelia's funeral, and Laertes had no pact with the King to kill Hamlet. As far as the public was concerned, it was a case of mime over matter; audiences thrilled to volcanic Edmund Kean playing Tate's sugar-coated Lear, and demanded that mesmeric Sarah Siddons ring down Macbeth on the sleepwalking scene in her farewell appearance.
Victorian prudery nice-Nellified 19th century Shakespeare. In 1818 Thomas Bowdler, a retired physician, blue-penciled what he regarded as the Bard's blue lines and produced a Shakespeare without blushes for the family reading hour--doubtless pleasing that Victorian matron who emerged from a performance of Antony and Cleopatra saying, "How strangely different from the home life of our dear Queen." In the U.S. Shakespeare was so passionately popular that a dispute between the fans of rival actors--William Charles Macready and Edwin Forrest led to New York City's famed Astor Place riot, in which 22 people were killed. But in the U.S., too, touring companies were beset by moralizers, and as they played the Bard in gold-rush camps and over billiard rooms, the actors placated indignant religious sectarians by billing Othello as "a moral dialogue depicting the evil effects of jealousy."
The New Players. Except for the lambently poignant Ellen Terry, England suffered an early 20th century eclipse of great Shakespearean acting--performers had their minds on the theater of social significance, and considered Shakespeare the kiss of death.
The turning point came with the emergence of the contrasting twin giants: John Gielgud, whose melodious, grief-numbed Hamlet was this generation's finest, and Laurence Olivier, whose body English makes him Shakespeare's Angry Young Man, forever Hotspur, whether he is a sinuously satanic Richard III, a black-as-thunder Macbeth, or a plangent patriot King, Henry V. Not far behind these triumphs are Maurice Evans' sterling-silver-tongued Richard II, Ralph Richardson's roguishly intelligent Falstaff and Michael Redgrave's mettlesome, love-ravished Antony. They are the leaders of today's functional Shakespeare, in which action flows naturally along the firm riverbed of the verse--making clearer than ever that, while the play's the thing, to prove it the player must be the real thing.
Compared to such models, the American Shakespearean actor is short on breath, long on Method and nil on tradition, despite the dimly remembered glories of Booth and Barrymore. Too many U.S. actors either singsong like walking metronomes or chop up the lines and speak blank prose. As for acting, Method-mad U.S. actors swallow a character like medicine and then release him through their pores in involuntary shudders. They are nonetheless eager to try the roles that all agree are the touchstones of an actor's skill and imagination. What is needed is the continuity of acting tradition that comes mainly through repertory groups such as England's Old Vic; Director Tyrone Guthrie has just received a $400,000 foundation grant to start such a group in Minneapolis.
The New Bard. All the actors, British and American, like their predecessors, are involved in the attempts of their age to press Shakespeare into a contemporary mold. Orson Welles dressed his Caesar in quasi-Fascist uniform, and Olivier's mother-possessed, mob-envenomed Coriolanus ended hanging head downward, like the dead, degraded Mussolini. Moscow has staged Hamlet as an army plot against the King, with Ophelia a court whore who played the mad scene drunk. In Manhattan a group of feminists staged an all-female Lear, and a Polish actor played Shylock as a fat, wisecracking Broadway type. At Stratford, Ont., Tyrone Guthrie mounted a brilliant, modern-dress All's Well That Ends Well in which the almost Ibsenite heroine became a waifish debutante and the play's "Florentine widow" turned into a wonderful old madam catering to occupation troops.
Some of the gimmick productions are offensive, but they do not necessarily violate the author's spirit. They are possible only because Shakespeare is timeless. He says everything. Protestants, Catholics and agnostics claim him. So do aristocrats and egalitarians, optimists and pessimists. He is loved by the pure in heart, and delights those who feel that "a dirty mind is a continual feast." The modern critics of Shakespeare argue that he lacks a point of view. T. S. Eliot charges that his philosophy was "inferior" to Dante's; G. B. Shaw finds that he offers no message of social uplift, and ranks him below G. B. Shaw.
No one has been more explosively anti-Bard than Shaw: "What a crew they are--these Saturday-to-Monday athletic stockbroker Orlandos, these villains, fools, clowns, drunkards, cowards, intriguers, fighters, lovers, patriots, hypochondriacs who mistake themselves (and are mistaken by the author) for philosophers and princes." And yet, like most other critics, Shaw had to concede: "I am bound to add I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespeare . . . The imaginary scenes and people he has created become more real for us than our actual life."
No single philosophy dominates the plays. The closest thing to it may be Shakespeare's conviction that the social order must be restored--a kind of Fortinbras complex ("The election lights on Fortinbras") in which the corpse-encumbered stage is tidied up in Act V, Scene 5. In terms of the intriguing concept developed in Sir Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox ("The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing"), William Shakespeare is the prince of foxes. The hedgehogs are the great systematic thinkers, and, since life is not systematic, they are also the great excluders. The great men of feeling, of whom Shakespeare was the greatest, are the great includers. That may be why men turn to Shakespeare, as they seem to. in especially troubled times.
Life Is Time's Fool. There is a rough parallel between Shakespeare's day and the present. The Elizabethan view of man was being threatened by a triple revolution. Copernicus had challenged the earth-centered universe, Montaigne had skeptically consigned man to the lowest rung of the animal kingdom, and Machiavelli had argued that statecraft was a matter of the basest self-interest, devoid of moral principle. Modern man has seen Einstein throw a curve into the cosmos, Freud lift the lid on the cauldron of the unconscious, and Marx upturn continents with the doctrine of dialectical material ism in which the end justifies the means.
What does Shakespeare say to an era that feels that the times are out of joint? He does not renounce the world or wallow in self-pity. He is the poet of this-worldliness; he celebrates love, food, drink, music, friendship, conversation, and the changing, changeless beauties of Nature. Though life is time's fool, Shakespeare posits the ideal of the mature man ("Ripeness is all") who distills his experiences into common sense and uncommon wisdom.
Yet man is also a "quintessence of dust," and "men must endure their going forth even as their coming hither." Shakespeare's tragic hero is called upon to face the unfaceable. Critic Walter Kaufmann has noted that the tragic hero, as Shakespeare conceived him, fits Aristotle's description of the "great-souled man" ("He claims much and deserves much"). One reason why the Willy Lomans, the Blanche DuBoises and the poor, driven people of O'Neill are pseudo-tragic and fail to exalt an audience is because they are small-souled. They claim little and deserve little. They cannot fall because they are already down.
Shakespeare's tragic hero dies with no hope of reward. As he meets his fate, the audience feels: "There, but for the grace of God, goes a better man than I." What links the audience movingly with the tragic hero is the quality that essentially separates them: nobility.
World to Self. That nobility often rests on the splendor of the language, but beautiful lines alone may reach no farther than the ear. Shakespeare speaks to the soul. He speaks in metaphor, which relates world to self, thing to thing, in the endless chain of being. Shakespeare could do anything he wanted with language; the way he talks of a thing conjures up the thing itself. The lines, "Not poppy nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou owedst yesterday," hypnotize with their own heavy-lidded evocation of sleep. He packed worlds into monosyllables. "To be or not to be" is man's largest question put in man's smallest and simplest words. Once uttered, they expand to fill all the space in the human mind.
Shakespeare's breathtaking change of pace carries a man to the brink of eternity and then restores him to common humanity. On seeing Cordelia's body, the grief-stricken Lear cries: "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?" In the extremity of human despair ("Thou'lt come no more") he utters his towering, fivefold "Never, never, never, never, never!" Then the dam of his unbearable anguish breaks with the homely request, "Pray you undo this button." No one but Shakespeare would have dared put those two lines together; no one but Shakespeare could.
The Hamlet Puzzle. Shakespeare survives because the next to the last word can be said about him--but not the last word. His creations are as opaque as life's; his characters remain inexhaustibly baffling. Next to Jesus, Napoleon, and Shakespeare himself, more may have been written about Hamlet than any other subject. The problem seems simple: Why does Hamlet take so long to kill the King? Goethe's answer was that Hamlet was an intellectual whose habit of "thinking too precisely on the event" sapped his will. Subsequently, Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones fashioned a Hamlet with an Oedipus complex whose dilemma was amusingly compounded because he somehow knew he had an Oedipus complex. Recently Rebecca West produced the dissenting or beatnik Hamlet who has the strength to kill the King but refuses to enter the corrupting cycles of social depravity and power politics. There has even been Olivier's so-active, thought-free prince, who proved to one critic's ironic satisfaction that Hamlet "was too busy to kill the King."
On grounds as relative as these, there has been and will be a spate of other Hamlets. For Hamlet and Shakespeare's other great characters are so rich in possible meanings because they are fashioned on the essentially human principle of both/and rather than either/or. Hamlet is more than the sum of his paradoxes; he is the paradox of man seen whole. All one knows for certain is that being Hamlet is Hamlet's tragedy--as being himself is everyman's.
Paraphrasing Keats, it might be said that Shakespeare's plays lead a life of allegory, and human existence is the commentary upon them. Every age and every man, in his seven ages, finds a reflection in Shakespeare's universal mirror. The passion and the poetry echo in the corridors of the mind, and truer than "the infancy of truth" will go on echoing to the last of time.
* The first to set the Bacon thesis really sizzling was an Ohio-born schoolteacher named Delia Bacon, no kin. Bent on digging up the Bard, she invaded Holy Trinity Church, lantern in hand, one night in 1856, only to be appalled by the question of whether she should dig up Raleigh or Bacon instead. Unhinged by this quandary, she died hopelessly insane three years later. In 1888 Ignatius Donnelly, a onetime Congressman from Minnesota, uncorked the following numbers game: on page 53 of the histories in the first Folio he found the word Bacon ("I have a gammon of Bacon"), which, counting downward, proved to be the 371st spoken word on the page ("I then divided that number, 371, by 53, the number of the page, and the quotient was seven!"). According to the Donnelly lucky-seven countdown, it turned out that Bacon wrote not only Shakespeare, but all of Marlowe, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Montaigne's Essays. The Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford boom was drummed up in 1920 by a Gateshead schoolmaster named J. Thomas Looney, a proper foil for the Baconian camp's George M. Battey. The fact that De Vere died in 1604, and The Tempest, for example, contains allusions to events after 1604, puts a crimp in the thesis--but to a cultist, what's in a crimp?
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.