Stephen Marche - How Shakespeare Changed Everything

TO SARAH

Contents

William Shakespeare was the most influential person who ever lived. He shaped our world more than any political or religious leader, more than any explorer or engineer. The gifted playwright who moves audiences to laughter and tears has also moved history. Do any other poets even begin to change our behavior or our environment? W. H. Auden once wrote that poetry makes nothing happen. It exists in the valley of its saying where executives would never want to tamper. Shakespeare has wandered away from the valley of his saying and hangs around in the most unlikely places, in 1950s teen rebel movies and in psychoanalysts offices, in nightclubs and in mall food courts, in voting booths in the American South and in the trash of Central Park. The effects of his words on the world have been out of all proportion, monstrous and sublime, vertiginous in their consequences, far beyond anything he could have predicted.

Shakespeares power is evident everywhere if you know where to look. Shakespeare shows up in obvious placeshe remains the dominant influence on Hollywood and Bollywoodbut he also shows up in places you might never expect. The reason there are starlings in North America, the reason there are girls named Jessica, the reason there are skulls on teenagers clothingall Shakespeare. His appearances in American political life are surprising and profound. He was there when John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, and he was also there at the infancy of the civil rights movement. There would be no Obama if there were not first Othello, just as there would be no Leonardo DiCaprio if there were not first Romeo.

Shakespeare has changed your life, even if youve never read him or seen one of his plays. When I was a professor teaching Intro to Shakespeare, I started telling the stories in this book to impress upon students the vital importance of his plays to their lives. To people largely unfamiliar with his genius, the name Shakespeare can produce a vague impression of British stuffiness, of Cambridge dons in tweed and Wednesday matinees attended by school groups in rose gardens. The truth is that he belongs absolutely to our moment, to our experience. The world he created and inhabited is filthy and exalted, cheap and rarefied, gorgeous and vile, full of confusion and sudden epiphany; in short as full and complicated as our own. Nothing in literature captures the surging cacophony of voices and perspectives or the dazzling diversity of present-day cities such as London, New York, or Mumbai more than the plays of Shakespeare. He is more than ever our contemporarya myriad-minded man for a myriad-minded world. When you become familiar with Shakespeare, you see him everywhere. The leaves change in the fall: Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. Madonna is in the news again: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. Chilean miners are stuck half a mile underground: The earth has bubbles as the water has. He is like a witty friend constantly making the perfect aside on whatever action the world is performing.

I came to Shakespeare almost by accident. In 2001, I was beginning my career as a novelist. There are two things an aspiring novelist needs: (1) As much free time as possible, and (2) a professional alibi so that when you attend a family reunion and your aunt asks you what you do, you have a respectable answer. I decided that doing a PhD would fulfill both requirements. But what would I study? I had to pick a subject to research intensely for five full years. I chose Shakespeare because I thought he would never bore me. And I was right. He has never bored me. My dissertation, which I completed at the University of Toronto in 2005, concerned various presentations of dead bodies in the 1540s and their effect on the drama fifty years later, a subject that was literally dry and dusty. But as I studied corpses, I became increasingly fascinated with (and distracted by) Shakespeares weird influence on the living present. In this book, you will see how his influence extended into our bedrooms, into our mouths, into Hitlers Germany and Stalins Russia and Churchills England and the American Senate, and even into the sky. All that wonderful influence derives ultimately from his almost supernatural ability to move audiences. I learned when I was a professor that teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates is one of the easiest gigs in the history of the world. If you cant make a room full of young people care about Shakespeare, then you probably shouldnt be around young people or Shakespeare. He teaches himself. If a kid doesnt care about Hamlet or Macbeth or Othello, he or she is probably never going to care about any character in any book ever.

The breadth and depth of his appeal verges on the bizarre. I remember during one particularly dreary February in Toronto while I was studying for my PhD, locked in the library, I discovered the fascinating way in which the residents of Carriacou in the Grenadines take up Shakespeare. Every year, on Shrove Tuesday, young men, dressed in elaborate Pierrot-style costumes and animal masks topped with crowns of ficus roots, go from crossroads to crossroads, performing passages of Julius Caesar competitively. They call it the Shakespeare Mas. The game goes like this. One team captain shouts out a challenge to a member of the other team to recite a passage. (For example: Will you relate to me Mark Antonys speech over Caesars dead body?) If the competitor gets through the passage without error, he can ask his opponent to recite another passage. The contest is watched over by the huge crowds who scrutinize the speeches for mistakes. Players encourage their teammates with shouts of brave, tell him, go on, and thats right. Anyone who fails to recite the passage correctly or who mixes up the words earns a beating from his opponents. The whips used for these ceremonies are serious business, made from telephone wires. The government had to intervene in the 1950s when the Shakespeare Mas degenerated into a huge battle between the North and South island contingents, fueled by women who supplied the combatants with boiling water and stones. Everyone, throughout the proceedings, is hammered on the local overproof rum, Iron Jack.

When a folklore researcher asked one of the participants why they recited Julius Caesar and nothing else, his answer was simple, but there can be none better: Shakespeare was sweeter. To illustrate his point, he burst into Mark Antonys famous speech: O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth.

Shakespeares multitudinous effects on world history would have boggled his own capacious imagination. Hes been the unwitting founder of intellectual movements he would never have endorsed and the secret presence behind spiritual practices he could never have imagined. He has been used as a crude political instrument by all sides in conflicts of which he could never have conceived. His vision has been assumed by saints and by murderers. At the bottom of all these slippery chains of consequences and perverted manifestations of his talent dwells the unique ability of Shakespeare to place his finger on peoples souls. He has changed aspects of life as fundamental as the way we have sex, the words we use, how we classify youth and age. All that strange power, all his world-shaking, reality-transforming impact begins from a simple but mysterious truth: His stories sound good to everybody.

Othello has taken away from me all kinds of fears, all sense of limitation, and all racial prejudice, Paul Robeson told reporters in London after his opening night performance of the play in 1930. Othello has made me free. How did Shakespeare become a champion of civil rights? How did he prepare the way for an African American president four hundred years after his death?