Bardbloggery 1
I launch this blog about “Shakespeare” with not just a little trepidation. Let me count some of the ways: an unnatural dread of the whole concept… even the name is distasteful…(whoever invented the word should be hung by the heels from a door-jamb and forced to listen to an ever-repeating sound-loop of the word being spoken)… because one more soapbox for the crazies is just what the world needs…because anyone who stands up and asks to be filleted for his opinions about Shakespeare should have his head examined…because everyone needs yet another open-ended demand on their time…because anyone who assumes that even one more person should be interested in their opinions probably requires therapy, or at least needs to pay for the privilege…because there’s not enough written about Shakespeare already…and there aren’t enough reasons NOT engage in the exercise.
Still…
Why THEATRE at all? We go to the theatre because the participants—actor and audience–are alive in the same place (as opposed to film or television where the story-tellers are not even aware that anyone else is there). Call it “immediacy”. And because we hope to see/hear/recognize ourselves…but better; bigger, stronger, smarter…more successful, more articulate…more devious, more evil…more able to “get away with it.”
Why Shakespeare (above all the others)? Because even though we give all the others a chance; even though the others may hold our interest for a short time; ultimately, by comparison, we are slightly disappointed with them in the end. Only Shakespeare has held our interest through the centuries.
We seem to be so jealous—and at the same time endlessly admiring–of what he accomplished that we continue to argue about whether or not he even existed; or at least, whether or not he wrote his own plays. Apparently, what he accomplished is so wonderous, it’s difficult for us lesser mortals to conceive that the bare facts of his life could possibly explain such invention. In the opinion of some, he invented the human. Some.
Such ambivalence may explain why there is nothing worse than bad Shakespeare; and nothing better than good Shakespeare.
Bardolatry? Perhaps. But, other than the Supreme Being, who else is there? Shakespeare helps us remember who we are; because we so often forget. He asks the hardest questions: Who are we? Why are we here? What happens after we die?
As actors and as audiences, we are so often disappointed in Shakespeare. But perhaps it is we who are more fallible, not him. Only the impossibly arrogant think he is “beneath” him. Only the helplessly unconfident think him impossibly “above” them.
Often, we turn away because he exhausts us. He calls us to an uncomfortable effort, when what we’re pulled to do is stay home and “veg-out” in front of the tube.
What Shakespeare invites us to do is find out who we are today; just as he called on his contemporaries to do. He echoes the ancients when they urged us to the highest calling: To know ourselves. Which includes exercising our power to imagine each other’s lives; to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.
By the way, this space is intended more for practitioners than scholars; more for actors than directors; more for audiences than readers. But, like the theatre itself, it’s for everyone.
Like some of Shakespeare’s, this writing may not be perfect; because we are fallible. We only have the obligation to try. And to ask, in the final sentence, “What do you think?”