For a couple of months, my younger brother and I have been having a discussion about Shakespeare. It is not acrimonious, but there is some increasing frustration on both sides. On my side–well, Shakespeare is not my favorite writer, but he’s right up there, and I enjoy his work and particularly enjoy it because, in the course of my education, I learned something of the world in which it was written–his influences, his commercial competitors, the world in which he was writing. Also: I’m a big nerd, and knowing this stuff makes me happy.
My brother–at the age of 68–is wrestling with Shakespeare, and seems to be increasingly frustrated, maybe even irritated, that he’s not getting it. “Why does he have to write like that? It’s incomprehensible!” My brother is a smart guy. He’s also the kind of guy who reads the Bible for fun, and he does not shy away from archaic language (for my money I’d rather read Shakespeare–the plots make more sense). But he seems to run aground with William S.
I’m visiting my brother and his wife, and last night coming back from a very nice joint birthday dinner–we’re both December babies–the subject of Shakespeare came up. “Well, why the hell did he write in verse? People don’t speak like that.” “I just don’t get the language.” “It’s just incomprehensible!!!” The more we talked, the more frustrated we both got. I pointed out to him that Shakespeare may not be his cup of tea, and there’s no dishonor in that. He counters with the fact–which I don’t deny–that thousands of people over more than 400 years have found Shakespeare’s plays, and his poetry, compelling. So why doesn’t he? “What am I not getting!”
The problem, as I see it, is that my brother wants Shakespeare to write differently, in order to be more accessible to him. Shakespeare, having been dead for more than 400 years, is unlikely to do this.
Shakespeare was writing for an audience that expected plays to be in verse. He was writing for an audience that shared what my husband calls CBK: common body of knowledge. He was writing in a unique political and social time (writing, say, the Henry tetralogy–Richard II, Henry IV parts one and two, and Henry V–took some fancy dancing, because any part of it could have been taken as a criticism of the reigning queen, Elizabeth, who necessarily took a dim view of stories about nobles usurping power from monarchs to become monarchs themselves. Criticism of the reigning queen could be terminally hazardous to your health). He was writing in dialogue with his contemporaries, particularly with Kit Marlowe. He was writing for an audience that was a mix of upper and lower class, educated and not so educated, and so he mixed up the high and low in all of his plays. He was writing for a culture that–while largely non-literate–enjoyed getting punch-drunk on words as well as plot, and admired a well-turned phrase. He was not writing plays he expected to outlive him, certainly not to become part of the spine of English literature. And I suspect that, if Shakespeare could put his prickly writer’s ego aside (we all have them, honestly) he might have told my brother “not everyone is gonna like everything I write, and that’s cool.” (Though he doubtless would have said it better).
If my brother is unwilling or unable, for whatever reason, to become or pretend to be part of one of those constituencies, then maybe Shakespeare really is not for him, and not all his “but I should understand” protestations will change that. Thinking of this last night after our conversation, I realized that he reminded me of a woman I roomed with in Paris on my first visit abroad. A middle-aged teacher from Ohio, she had very adventurously decided to come to Europe on her own, and she was very excited to be there. But every night, for the three nights I shared a room with her, she complained about the French. No one was speaking English. “I know they know how. At least some of them must. But no one even tries.” I attempted to point out that it was their country, English was not their language, and it was… odd to expect that they would speak it to her regardless. Even odder to feel that the French were deliberately being difficult in not doing so.* Increasingly, my brother sounds like he feels that Shakespeare was deliberately being difficult by being, well, Shakespeare.
I don’t think there’s any way I can help him with that.
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* I found, on that trip and subsequent trips, that if I made a good faith effort to speak at least a little of the language of a country I was visiting, it engendered a great amount of goodwill (the Greeks positively glowed when I tried out my 10-15 phrases in Greek when I was there). This includes the French, who have always suffered my attempts to speak their language with patience and good humor.