James Helfers: We read in many places about the way Shakespeare is now irrelevant or difficult for present-day audiences, but how was he received in his day? He’s now an icon, but what was he at the time?
For anyone who looks at the record, it’s clear that we’d really like to know more about Shakespeare’s life. We don’t have any plays that are for sure in his handwriting or even any samples of his handwriting in poems or letters. All we know he wrote are the six signatures on his will, which are very messy, and lead many people to think he might have been illiterate. We really know very little about him, except that he seems to have been a shrewd businessman and may have had problems with his wife.
But, he wrote these great plays. Did they seem great at the time? All the evidence we have suggests that, no, they weren’t. Public theaters in the time of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign were so disreputable that they had to be located outside the city limits of London.
The Puritan city government thought they were sinful, so they were sited near the brothels and bear-baiting pits. Actors, though they came in contact with nobility and even royalty, were a disreputable lot: One of Shakespeare’s colleagues, Christopher Marlowe, may have been a spy and was stabbed in the head in a tavern brawl (he died). Plays were routinely censored, and playhouses were often closed.
So, at best, Shakespeare and his plays were probably seen a notch below the way we might see the writers of sitcoms today, and his scripts were probably seen as just about as valuable (less so, really, because there was no copyright).
What’s amazing is that this lower-middle class country bumpkin, who wrote light entertainment for whoever could pay a penny (quite a few Londoners), is now the most revered playwright in the English-speaking world, and one of the most important global dramatists. The story of how all that happened is an epic in its own right.
Kary: The person of Shakespeare could use a little spice. Frankly, there isn’t much known about his life, not the type of stuff an audience who is used to the titillation of reality television would find interesting. Whether ill-meaning or no, both scholars and the entertainment industry have gone looking for trouble within the scanty clues left behind these past four hundred years.
Questions about his religion (was he Catholic or Protestant?), his private life (could he have possibly been bisexual?) or even the authorship of his plays (there are several outspoken scholars who pin the works to others, such as the Earl of Oxford), are often bandied about in various circles.
The dangers of these attempts to make Shakespeare more “interesting” are twofold: First, they are immaterial to the plays and, therefore, take away focus from where it belongs, and second, teachers often like to add these anecdotal bits to their lectures without any factual basis, causing students to come away with misinformation that, again, takes away focus from the plays themselves. Calling into question his beliefs, his orientation or whether he’s a fraud or not only serves to relegate him into one group or another, separating him from the rest of us.
On the other hand, there have been several films that look at Shakespeare and his time that cause audiences to see this man, who is often set on a pedestal too high to sustain him, as human. Movies, plays and books intent on themes such as his humanity have the opposite effect of scandalmongering.
Instead of segregating him to a demographic, works like “Shakespeare in Love” (now both a movie and a play) lend a modern audience the opportunity to feel empathy for Shakespeare. The magic of empathy lies in its ability to build relationships, which is our best hope of connecting new audiences to these old works. Still, the question remains: Why read Shakespeare? And how does one go about it when the language can be obscure?
