Review
of Robert McCrum, Shakespearean: On Life and Language in Times of Disruption
Jay
Parisi, Daily
Beast
September 26, 2o21
In My
Year Off,
Robert McCrum wrote in absorbing detail about the consequences of a
massive stroke that left him paralyzed on the left side at the age of
42. This acclaimed memoir was followed by a mix of novels and
nonfiction, including a magisterial and entertaining life of P.G.
Wodehouse. Now, in the wake of a tumultuous time (Brexit, Trump,
pandemic) comes Shakespearean,
a deeply personal look at the most admired playwright and poet in
history, one who paid “fierce attention to the anxieties of his
public,” a supremely gifted author who somehow, during a
dangerously fraught era of political intrigue and plague, “mastered
the art of dissimulation to shelter his creative privacy.” McCrum
argues that today, in the wake of massive disruption, “we are
closer than ever to Shakespeare and his world.”
No
writer attracts more attention (or more deservedly) than Shakespeare,
who showed us more than anyone else how language itself both informs
and disrupts reality. His name alone conjures, as McCrum notes, “a
universe of characters, poetry, and scenes and ideas undergoing
constant reinterpretation by audiences, actors, and artists across
the world.” I doubt that anyone reading this will not have seen a
few of his plays—Hamlet,
Othello,
King
Lear,
Twelfth
Night,
The
Tempest,
Romeo
and Juliet.
For me, his sonnets have become part of my mental furniture, recited
in the wee sleepless hours for consolation.
I
suspect most of us have a treasure house of memories related to
Shakespeare. Once, for instance, I played Marc Antony in Julius
Caesar in
the ninth grade in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and I still utter certain
lines in my dreams: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your
ears; / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” In 1970, I
watched a staggering performance of Macbeth set
in Vietnam during the war. Twenty-odd years ago, I directed an
idiosyncratic but lively production of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream at
my oldest son’s elementary school—all of the actors were 10 or
11. Once in Rome during the heyday of Silvio Berlusconi, I attended a
shockingly apt performance of Henry
IV, part 2,
where we heard declaimed: “At a time of night when most of his
subjects are asleep, / The king is up and busy about his affairs.”
The crowd of English-speaking Italians laughed and cheered.
It
seems that Shakespeare is always present, ever relevant to current
circumstances, both trenchant and reassuring. For all this, it’s
impossible to take in the scope and depth of his work in one fell
swoop—that phrase itself originating in Macbeth!
It’s no wonder many readers over the years have wondered if,
indeed, a glove maker’s son from Stratford called Will Shakespeare
could have written these brilliant plays. (McCrum dismisses the
anti-Stratford crowd with a bold sweep of the hand!)
The
goal of Shakespearean—an
immensely stylish, entertaining, and informative book—is to connect
the plays with audiences old and new, exploring the “secrets of
literary inspiration, the magic of creativity itself,” and to
vindicate the claim that “Shakespeare’s words and ideas are part
of our shared humanity.” Few critics in universities would attempt
such a project, and this leaves a broad expanse open for McCrum, who
roams freely in the language of the plays, in history itself, making
sharp judgments of value. He notes, toward the end of this book, that
Harold Pinter (whom he knew well as editor and friend) used to whip
off his glasses at the conclusion of any new play and ask, “Does it
remain?”
Well,
Shakespeare remains. McCrum is sure of this!
He
recalls that, after his stroke, the Complete
Works of
Shakespeare became his “book of life,” and that “almost the
only words that made sense were snatches of Shakespeare.”
Fortunately, he had already metabolized many of these words, seeing
countless productions from schoolboy days onward. Living in London,
with its abundant theatrical life, he joined a circle of passionate
friends dedicated to seeing new productions of the Bard’s work—and
20 years of dedicated viewing of these plays informs this book. He
recalls that “several starry highlights live on in my memory: Derek
Jacobi’s Lear, Harriet Walter’s Brutus, Andrew Scott’s Hamlet,
Vanessa Redgrave’s Volumnia…” A well-turned line in a
performance can suddenly “become a revelation” and “sponsor a
new interpretation.”
In
300 or so elegantly written pages, McCrum roams through the life and
work, examining the impact of Shakespeare’s plays over many
centuries. In every time and place, he suggests, the play at hand
could address national dilemmas. The Bard’s plays repeatedly face
into crisis, even calamity, which is really nothing more than the
human condition. Shakespeare never shrank from trouble, showing
immense courage in his way, as when he opted to compose Macbeth in
the wake of plots against the Stuart crown. “He would be at his
most Shakespearean when choosing to write—for a Scottish king who
lived in dread of assassination, and was obsessed with witchcraft—a
new play about dynastic succession in which the protagonist, a
psychopathic Scottish regicide, makes rendezvous with witches and
himself invokes the supernational in a satanic rhapsody:
Stars,
hide your fires,
Let
not light see my black and deep desire;
The
eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which
the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
As
ever, Shakespeare illumines his dramatic subject by “exploiting to
the limit his penchant for dramatic antitheses.”
McCrum’s
reflections on the American reception of Shakespeare are engrossing,
and he observes that his “lines were often consoling but also
provocative” for the original settlers in New England in the 17th
century, who confronted a vast and threatening situation. They turned
to Shakespeare as well as the Bible for assurance and wisdom.
Lincoln, of course, famously alluded to Othello in
his First Inaugural. And Lincoln’s opposite, the Confederate
commander Jefferson Davis, urged his troops forward by
quoting Richard
III,
inviting them to imagine a time when “grim-visaged war would smooth
a wrinkled front.” From Mark Twain to Malcolm X and Homer Simpson,
the words of Shakespeare burst forth, often in garbled versions, to
explain a situation or arouse empathy or understanding. It was,
perhaps, Emerson, the father of Transcendentalist thought, who put it
most succinctly when he suggested that Shakespeare was a writer who
“dwarfs all writers without a solitary exception.”
The
question remains: How did Shakespeare create the Shakespearean
universe? McCrum offers tantalizing hints throughout, but he’s not
able to explain the genius. Nobody is. Indeed, “the ambiguities of
Shakespeare’s life and work never fade.” On the other hand, this
is part of the fun: trying to comprehend this unending and always
various universe of language, thought, and meaning. Time and again,
the Bard “doubled down on his lifelong instincts as a playwright,”
which in McCrum’s eloquent formulation means “to engage his
curiosity to the full, to locate his drama at the crossroads of
maximum danger.”
It’s
left to a novelist, Anthony Burgess—nicely quoted by McCrum—to
suggest where we might look for an answer to the large question of
how the playwright managed this conjuring trick that has entranced us
for some four centuries. Shakespeare, says Burgess, “is ourselves,
ordinary suffering humanity, fired by moderate ambitions, concerned
with money, the victim of desire, all too mortal… We are all Will.
Shakespeare is the name of one of our redeemers.”
