let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs: why shakespeare matters
letās talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs: why shakespeare matters
hereās something iāve heard rather a lot in the wake of the news of the bbcās the hollow crown: āshakespeare is boringā, āshakespeare is hardā, and āshakespeare is not for the likes of us.ā and i want to talk about these attitudes, because they are, on the one had, understandable for various education and class-based reasons! (my father, for example, believes all of these things, much to my eternal pain.) but they are, also, entirely wrong.
hey, you can like what you like and iām never going to tell you otherwise! but there is, iāve noticed, a sort of generalised āideaā of what shakespeare plays are about, and what theyāre actually about, and theyāre quite different. hereās what shakespeare isnāt about:
hereās what shakespeare plays are about:
the most exciting fucking stories youāll ever read in your life, and, if staged right, see, too
shakespeare wrote about power, and madness, and death. shakespeare wrote about love, and terror, and murder. shakespeare wrote about the wars that decimated england, dynasty struggles that left nothing but corpses in their wake, about treason and magic and honour. shakespeare wrote plays about almost every imaginable facet of the human experience; about the decisions that men and women make, and the downfalls that await them. shakespeare wrote about heroes and villains and people caught in the middle, in such grey areas that hundreds of years later there are still vicious arguments about whether they are heroes or villains, about whether either of those words even have any meaning at all. shakespeare wrote about what it is to kill, what it is to die, what it is to be a king. shakespeare wrote about what it is to be alive. iāll leave it to will himself, here, actually, because he says it better than i ever could:
For Godās sake, let us sit upon the groundĀ
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;Ā
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,Ā
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;Ā
Some poisonād by their wives: some sleeping killād;Ā
All murderād: for within the hollow crownĀ
That rounds the mortal temples of a kingĀ
if you think shakespeare is boring, jesus christ. what is it that you want?
2. SHAKESPEARE IS HARD & 3. SHAKESPEARE ISNāT FOR āPEOPLE LIKE MEā
well, maybe heās hard, (weāll get there in a second), but heās definitely for people like you. hereās a secret: shakespeare wasnāt supposed to hard, and he wasnāt supposed to be for people who could afford āshakespeare ticketsā. shakespeare himself was not upper-class, but a member of the early modern newly-emerging middle-class. he wrote plays for everyone, from the queen to the people who could only just manage to scrounge up the money to stand in the pit. shakespeare is for everyone because shakespeare has always been for everyone.
the globe wouldnāt have made enough money to stay open without the peasantry, and actors themselves werenāt nobility. the elizabethan theatre was a leveller, an astonishingly influential arena that everybody had the ability to access. shakespeare is the worldās most performedā well, not playwright, but, in fact, writer, of all time, for a reason. the concept of āuniversalā plays is a complex one, but when it comes to shakespeare it appears to be an entirely accurate description. shakespeare had to write plays that could interest everyone, from the king to the orange sellers.
and the idea that heās āhardā? well, to some extent, it is just that, an idea. hereās how it works: a text is dead, but itās only as dead as you let it be. the text is rich and clever and funny, if taught right itās exciting and hilarious and life-changing, if performed right itās exciting and hilarious and revolutionary. you can read all of shakespeare on the internet for free, and access many filmed productions through youtube. if you struggle with the language and context, there are numerous online resources to help you. welcome to the future, where you are no longer constrained by the price of a theatre ticket. (but if youāre a student, or āyoungā, you can often buy theatre tickets for equal to or less than a cinema ticket. obviously many people canāt afford that - i often canāt - but theatre is often a lot cheaper than it is commonly believed to be.)
shakespeare isnāt boring, guys. shakespeare is anything but. donāt believe the people who want to keep it ātheirsā, who think that itās only for āa certain class of peopleā, because will shakespeare? would have laughed in those peopleās faces. and now all you have to do is click that link up there, and change your life. and i say that not out of hyerbole, or a finely-tuned sense of drama, but because he changed mine. iāve never read anything like him, and now? now you can, too.
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