It's past the size of dreaming
Antony and Cleopatra
I hesitated to originally write this piece because it addresses a topic that really stands perfectly fine alone: William Shakespeare’s legacy. A month or four ago, I don’t care when actually, public radio’s most recognizable name took to Twitter casting doubt on the legitimacy of the coronation of the King Bard, the number one draft pick of poets (sorry Tip, but you’re still only number 7), writing that he is "unrelatable" and "unemotional." In his two microtweets, Glass praised the actors but not the playwright, wedging his criticism between the actors performance and the impetus. With one sycophantic and obsequiously lauded tweet, Ira brought into question his intellectual authority on quite a bit. His pessimistic, probably wine cooler induced critique availed us of this side of the publically apotheosized journalist: the uninformed, whimsical and rash commentator he may be in his absolute worst hour.
Since my undergraduate days in the muggy backwater Garden of Eden paradise that is Southern Illinois, I’ve never been able to comfortably stomach Ira’s voice on a cosmetic level, but I don’t want that to be at issue here, just a petty aside that I can usually table: the issue is people in the public at large claiming that Willy Shakes isn’t worth his weight in gold---and the unwritten statute that they have to be brought to task. (although, his querulously toned draw and liberal leanings make the thrill of the kill all the better) I’m no liberal or conservative generally, so I’m constantly amused by the air of superiority NPR affiliates exude when they broach regionally specific or national news coverage with this presupposed fairness and unfiltered “journalism”.That’s not to say that it’s in any way as ignorant or as lopsided as say Fox News or any of its demon acolyte offspring, but since it’s less egregious in its outright lying and dishonesty, we’re prone, as rational and reason seeking primates, to let the libs slide more often than the irrational, clearly psychotic conservatives. I’ll even admit it, I am not as critical of NPR and Ira Glass as I might be of Fox and Sean Hannity or Bill O’Louffah O'Reilly. It’s a visceral and probably genetic reaction for me.
Simply put, there’s no doubt that big loud, obnoxious bigots are just easier to hate. But the flame must be applied equally to all who offend. What separates a thinker, a modern user of organic, sweet white-mattered brainpower from the the seemingly pervasive sports team tribal-like mindset is his or her’s ultimate and perpetual cognitive mutability. To not stick to ideas as if they are sacred team maxims or unassailable truths; to allow the passage of new revelation to go unimpeded into their mental set. We hold this truth to be the only holy truth: That the circle may always be outdrawn.
Like everything ever, this has been thought, debated and said before. Glass isn’t the first to have cast aspersions on the Bard’s status as pre-eminent poet/playwright. Among probably many more than I couldn’t discover with scant internet searches and armchair research, Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Voltaire, Dryden and George Bernard Shaw all thought his work contemptible. Though Glass is a decent journalist, he’s never written a Candide or a War and Peace or a Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It’s fair to say that he would not do well to stand shoulder to shoulder with the literary giants that share in his Shakespearean critique. Not even close. Candle to the Sun.
Up until now, I’ve read a good share of articles both praising Glass for his honesty and deriding him for his naivete, but a dearth explaining why Willy Shakes is the number one poet. Why should we revel in this dead cracker’s yellow papered lines, archaic allusions and incalculable references to death and drink? If you can’t answer this with quick retort or quoted verse, it’s suggestible that you let Ira have his tenuous opinion; though I will attempt to do the antithesis justice here.
When Shakespeare came to the festering urban shithole that was London in the 16th century, the underpinning narratives of many of his plays already existed; done on a weekly scale, in a manner which modern copyright law would never allow. These plot basics, Caesar, Troy, the kings of old, what have you, were sure winners, crowd pleasers that tugged on the drunken heart strings of all plebeian and patrician attendees of the Wooden O; they were also largely common property and tracing their origin is nearly impossible now. It was, in modern parlance, general public domain (for the theatre) and all the canvas he needed to lay out an unlikely corpus of unprecedented work. It also serves as somewhat of an answer to the charge that Shakespeare couldn’t have written on what he didn’t know about; the basic skeletal structure of many of his works had already been assembled before he arrived.
Some four hundred plus years later, it’s easy to take for granted his cognitive originality and magnanimity of thought. But if we read the greats before him impartially, Marlowe, Kyd, etc, it’s evident to any novice reader that his predecessors lack the flow, the communicative ease and linguistic potency that we find comes uninhibited from a Shakespearean monologue or repartee. The universality in his writing, an ability to relate to and feel what the characters are conveying, with relative ease, is something even a bad or mediocre actor can accomplish by simple memorization. It doesn’t take much to notice his distinction from his contemporaries and most the poets even in the history of civilization, saving Milton, Chaucer, Homer and Dante. Soren Kierkegaard once commented:
"The art of writing lines, replies, which express a passion with full tone and complete imaginative intensity, and in which you can none the less catch the resonance of its opposite --this is an art which no poet has practised except the unique poet Shakespeare."
And the jowly, somehow un-wizened Howard Bloom follows:
"How can a poet think their characters into their own freedom? Shakespeare, with little precedent beyond Chaucer, practices an art of surprise, in which characters can be as surprised as we are. When Milton’s God says of Adam and Eve that he made them “sufficient to have stood but free to fall, “ I reflect that, for just once, that irate Schoolmaster of Souls is being Shakespearean. Othello and Macbeth are certainly sufficient to have stood but also more than free to fall. Shakespeare endows his people with the capacity to change, either through the will or with involuntary force. Either way, there is surprise as the selfsame overhears itself and alters irrevocably."
This praise is religiously repeated in most scholarly work from the time of Ralph Emerson to the present day internet-sage scholar. Interestingly, there were few writers before Emerson who really appreciated and took to the bard’s genius before he was apotheosized in the late 19th, early 20th century among scholars and the theatre alike. Emerson had this singular observation, at least for his time:
"Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self,- the subtlest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship ... He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers."
Taking this side in the debate isn’t difficult. It’s actually probably the easiest argument to make and ultimately win. But I am not going to expend effort for the sake of trying to be Wittgenstein or G.B. Shaw. Though, I urge anyone reading this to do more than to watch a movie based on a Shakespearean play. Read the material, rap the poems or listen to the lines read aloud by a good rapper. Christ, get the Cliff Notes if you have to, I did for much of it; and don’t feel bad for looking up the archaic word vomit that appears every line or so. Disagree with me and dismantle everything I have to say. Please, the world is counting on you.
For now, preach on Willy:
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star! My
father compounded with my mother under the
dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa
major; so that it follows, I am rough and
lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,
had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardizing.
Shit.
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