Is Shakespeare Actually Any Good?
"I know just how you feel, Sir. Who steals my purse steals
trash, ‘tis something, nothing, 'twas mine, 'tis his and has been slave to
thousands; but he who filches from me my good name takes from me that which not
enriches him and makes me poor indeed."
"Neat that. Your own?"
"No sir. Shakespeare’s"
"Shakespeare said some rather good things."
"I understand that he has given uniform satisfaction."
Much Obliged, Jeeves.
The reading of Shakespeare is going to be banned. EU inspectors are already
knocking on people’s doors, dragging copies of the complete works from their
shelves; great bonfires are being made of Oxford annotated editions; Kenneth
Brannagh has been taken into custody. My friend says he knows where he can
score an eighth of an ounce of Pericles.
Oh -- sorry -- jumped the gun there. It turns out that there is just a
rumour that in the revised version of the revised version of the National
Curriculum, the study of Shakespeare might cease to be compulsory.
Nevertheless, the lips of our guardians of culture have been flapping out of
control, particularly because (according to one version of the rumour)
Shakespeare’s place on the curriculum might be taken by Web Page Design,
Internet Appreciation and the hated Media Studies. The headmaster of Eton says
that if any other nation spoke the language of Shakespeare then they would
encourage every child to read at least two of his texts; only mad dogs and
Englishmen neglect their heritage in this way. Isn’t it funny the way language
slips around, so that "not compulsory" becomes "banned" and
"compulsory" becomes "encouraged"?
Can anyone tell me what "other nations" do, in fact, do about
teaching literature? Are certain specified texts by Racine compulsory in French
schools? Does every Greek kid have to read Homer? Would American children be
legally required to read great American literature if there were any? I believe
that the Australians and the New Zealanders do speak "the language of
Shakespeare", albeit with funny accents; do those countries legally
enforce -- sorry, encourage -- the study of his plays? Or is England unique in
having enshrined and fetishised the work of a particular author?
I know that in America and France, the teaching of religion is banned in
school, whereas in liberal England it is compulsory. The present government
wants more state-funded religious schools committed to indoctrinating children
into a limited number of government approved religions. It is proposed that
there should be state-funded Moslem schools and Jewish schools, but for some
reason there are no plans for state Pagan schools or state Dianetics schools.
These "faith schools", as they are quaintly called, are more or less
bound by the National Curriculum. Your hypothetical Moslem school is excused
from indoctrinating kids into Christianity, but is still obliged to teach them
the works of William Shakespeare. This is why the Authoritarian Right get so
agitated when anyone suggests that Shakespeare might get taken off the
syllabus. It is tantamount to tearing up the closest thing to Holy Writ which
this rapidly disintegrating nation still possesses.
I happen to think that Shakespeare is rather a good writer. I have just
re-read Lear for maybe the fifth time in my life and I’m still noticing new
things about it. You will recall that, about half way through the play, the
Duke of Gloucester is cruelly blinded by Lear’s wicked daughters. I had never
before spotted that he spends a large proportion of Act I saying things like
"Let me see that letter-- let me see! let me see!" And I had also
never before noticed that he sees the truth that his son Edmund is a traitor in
the very next line after he is blinded. I saw Corialanus for the first time in
my life at the Tobacco Factory, a small theatre in Bristol, last week. It is
now impossible to imagine that there was a time in my life when I didn’t know
the play: it is always going to inform my thinking about family, loyalty, war
and politics. Partly that was down to the exemplary production; mostly it was
down to it being a very, very good play.
One sometimes meets baboons and daleks who say "Shakespeare -- ptah!
dead author with nothing to say about the world we live in." I am stating
the obvious fact that Shakespeare is a Very Good Writer in order to make it
clear that I am neither a dalek nor a baboon.
But.
Shakespeare is not the only Good Writer in English.
English Literature is not necessarily a better thing than, say, Classical
Music, Philosophy or Astronomy -- or even Media Studies.
The Shakespeare who is enshrined as the holy text of the State Religion has
little to do with Shakespeare the Very Good Author.
And, if my biography is anything to go by, the teaching of Shakespeare in
school does not help very much in our understanding of his Very Good Plays.
The State Shakespeare is a symbol of our Heritage and National Identity, and
in particular, a symbol of the superiority of English over all other languages.
The English are funny about heritage. Red Ken, who made such a fuss about being
made Mayor of London, has discovered now he’s Mayor that he doesn’t actually
have very much power. So he has committed himself to the very important task
of, er, getting rid of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Of course, the
Metropolis is up in arms. How can he do this, they say, the pigeons are part of
history! They have always been there. "Always" in this context
meaning "for more than a hundred years." Shakespeare, on this basis,
goes back even further than always. He’s an arbitrary symbol of the Way Things
Have Always Been. Merry England. This Royal Throne of Kings, This Septic Isle.
Falstaff. Teaching the Natives Cricket. He sits on our shelves, looking smug.
He isn’t a collection of long and complex plays, but a poet, who wrote To Be or
Not to Be; Once More Unto the Beach; The Quality of Mercy is Not Strange and
not much else. Like the Bible, he is to be worshipped, but not read.
The State Shakespeare is also a Subject, like French, Cookery and Netball.
He is a verb rather than a noun; after I did my Latin I did my Shakespeare. He
is a sub-category of a bizarre process called "English Literature"
which has little to do with the reading of books, and much to do with the composing
of trite essays on "theme" and "character study."
Granted, I went to school a million years ago in the eighties, when Mrs
Thatcher was a good prime minister and Don’t Ya Want Me Baby was a good song,
so my experience is probably out of date. We studied Richard II, the first play
in the history cycle. (That’s going chronologically; if you prefer publication
order, it comes fifth, after Richard III. Don’t get me started.) We studied
Richard II because we had the most junior English teacher, so by the time she
got to the store cupboard, the head of department and his henchmen had already
bagsied Julius Caesar and Macbeth. (True.)
The one thing I remember from O level is that Richard is a Weak and
Vacillating King. The teacher dictated this after we read the first scene. We
copied her exact words down neatly, and then handed them in and got marks out
of 10 for how well we had copied them. We were expected to reproduce them every
time we did a practice essay on Richard’s character. I subsequently found that
exactly the same words were in Brodies Notes. I figured that anything that Mrs
Lucas and Brody said must be true. If they agreed that Richard Was a Weak And
Vacillating King, then Weak and Vacillating he certainly was.
You will of course recall that the play begins with Henry Bolingbrook
accusing Thomas Mowbray of murdering the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s uncle.
Dukes of Gloucester have a rough time in Shakespeare. The two knights slag each
other off before the king in tripping rhyming couplets:
"Lions make leopards tame"
"Yay but not change their spots, take but my shame
And I resign my gage, my dear dear lord
The purest treasure mortal times afford
Te tum te tum te tum te tum te tum,
De diddly diddly diddly diddly dum."
Since neither side will back down, the King orders a trial by combat. There
is lots of blowing of trumpets and reciting of challenges ("Oh let no
noble eye profane an tear if I be gored by Mowbray’s spear!"), but at the
very last moment, the king changes his mind, and exiles them both. How weak and
vacillating can you get?
Except that during all the weakness and vacillation, the teacher had not
bothered to explain to us the facts that every Elizabethan reader of the play
would have known without being told. We were not made to draw a family tree,
which might have helped us disentangle lines like "Were he my brother nay
my kingdoms heir as he is but my father’s brothers son". It was not
pointed out to us that Richard is the son of the famous super-hero The Black
Prince; or that he was crowned king as an infant. And in particular, it was not
explained that Mowbray had indeed murdered the Duke of Gloucester, but had done
so under the orders of the King, so that when Richard first treats the thing as
a private matter between Bolingbrook and Mowbray, and then uses the trial by
combat as a pretext to get Mowbray out of the country, he is not being weak and
vacillating, but machiavellian, and a complete bastard. In short, we were not
helped to understand the plot; we were only made to memorise such fragments of
it as could be used as the basis for exam essays.
I recall writing a character study of the Queen’s gardener, (go bind thou up
yon dangling apricocks) who gets three lines in act V; "Pick two minor
characters and write garbage about them" was one question that could be
guaranteed to be on every exam paper. Weak and vacillating; weak and
vacillating: no amount of Media Studies could possibly have been a bigger waste
of time.
Aha, you say; but you went on to study English at college; and you now read
Shakespeare by yourself for fun. So obviously it did you some good in the long
term.
Well, maybe. It could be argued that during all those long hours of reading
round the class and memorising bad notes about character and theme, some of the
text went into my brain. Some churches hold a theory of evangelism which says
that you should not try to explain or persuade people into your religious
beliefs; you should just yell out random quotes from the Bible and sing bad
hymns, and the Word of God will do its own work. The worse the hymn singing,
the better it works. If you got together a really good gospel choir that was
really worth hearing then you would be doing it under your strength rather than
having faith in God. Three old ladies with tambourines is much more holy. Maybe
this kind of theory attaches itself to "encouraging" children to love
Shakespeare. Just throw some texts at them and let the Bard shine through.
If you want to go with this minimalist approach -- if you want to say
"well, at least we know that poor kids in houses with no books have been
forced to, I mean, had the opportunity to, listen to at least two of
Shakespeare texts, and some of them will thereby be turned onto him thus
preserving our cultural heritage for another generation" -- then you could
abolish all teaching whatsoever: just strap the little buggers into clockwork
oranges and force-feed them endless tapes of John Gielgud.
My personal theory is that between the ages of about 10 and about 14, you
arbitrarily pick half a dozen things to be interested in, and these stay with
you for life. At 35, you can’t remember why, or indeed if, you like them, but
they are nevertheless part of the fabric of who you are. Irritatingly, I picked
Doctor Who, Spiderman, Tolkien, Shakespeare, Wagner and Dungeons and Dragons.
Why? Well, there was a slightly studious, rather geekish, but popular lad
named Malcolm who had a complete set of Doctor Who paperbacks and I rather
wanted to be like him, so I decided to be a Doctor Who fan before I had even
watched an episode of the programme. My Grandad bought me an issue of Spiderman
at a point when everyone else in my class seemed to be "getting" a
comic every week, so I decided I’d better become a Marvelite. My father had a
great enthusiasm for Shakespeare--he claimed to have seen all 39 plays in
production, even Titus Andronicus -- so I decided to like Shakespeare in order
to please and emulate him. I might just as well have decided to share his
interest in Rugby football, although thank God I didn’t.
It’s probably not insignificant that around that time when I was between age
10 and 15, the BBC were doing TV versions of the Complete Works. My parents had
the good sense to pick out one or two of the lighter ones and "allow"
me to watch them as a bit of a treat. Aha, they would say, --The Tempest--
that’s a Shakespeare play with Wizards and Monsters and sword fighting in it.
Probably a bit hard for you, but if you promise to be quiet, you can stay up
and watch it.… So I had discovered that the plays could be fun and exciting
before the crap teacher had a chance to be weak and vacillating at me.
There was a complete Ring Cycle from Bayeuth on BBC2 at about the same time:
I have memories of a period when one might watch, say Henry VI part 1 on Saturday
evening and Act II of Siegfried on Sunday night. Tom Baker was Doctor Who at
that time. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
If there is any truth in this, then we should be more worried about the
abolition of any serious arts programming on the TV than what is on the
compulsory GCSE syllabus. Anybody -- when did the BBC last commission a new
production of a major Shakespearean work? Bonus marks for Shaw, Chekov, Ibsen
or a serious modern dramatist in the Play for Today mould... No? I thought not.
But there are lots of cool gardening programmes. As a man sows, so shall he
reap.
If what you want to do is encourage people to read the classics, then you
have to make the classics available; whereupon some people will arbitrarily
decide to like them. Making laws about how many texts kids should read is
really neither here nor there. This would involve lots of libraries, preferably
ones which appeared to be cool places with coffee shops and computers where a
young person might be prepared to "hang out"; lots of good arts
programmes on publicly funded TV; and lots of subsidised regional theatres
putting on good plays. Oh, and making sure that people had enough spare time to
actually read in, as opposed to making manifesto commitments to quadruple the
amount of homework children get. This won’t restore Shakespeare’s status as
Holy Writ: some people will find that they prefer Milton, or Dickens, or Isaac
Asimov, but if what we want is the promotion of Appreciation of Good Writing in
the Language Of Shakespeare, then it doesn’t much matter which particular texts
your read. Well, Asimov may be going a bit too far.
If Tony has a scheme under which English Literature will cease to be a
compulsory component of the GCSE exam, then I don’t think that the world will
necessarily come to and end. If all he’s saying is that Shakespeare will not
necessarily be a compulsory text on the English syllabus, then this is even
less of a problem. One could replace him with say Marlowe or Chaucer or
Langland or Malory and still get a fair sampling of Works which have been
Fairly Generally Admired. Does anyone throw up their arms in horror and say
that, if the French spoke the language of Shakespeare then they would insist
that every French child had read at least two books of Paradise Lost or Six of
the Lyrical Ballads?
But if it were genuinely true that even a single person in the department of
education thought that Web Page Appreciation might usefully replace English
Literature because it is the Same Kind of Thing; or, worse, if even a single
person in the department of education thought that Web Page Appreciation was
better than Shakespeare because the one was Modern and Relevant and the other
was Old Fashioned -- or, worst of all if Web Page Appreciation was favoured
over Shakespeare because Factual, Useful, Things Which Get You a Job are always
to be valued over things which are subjective, emotional and to do with values,
then we would, indeed, be being ruled by daleks or baboons.
But in all probability, Tony has said no such thing. He’s just leaked an idea about media studies in order to seem cool and modern. Tomorrow, he will leak an idea about more traditional English literature in order to seem patriotic and wise. After the election, he’ll come up with six new hair brained schemes, none of which will ever be implemented. I know a weak and vacillating prime minister when I see one.