It’s dangerous,
playing the expectations game. You rewrite Romeo
& Juliet, you’d best bring something new to the table. You write
about the fall of Jerusalem, there had better be something surprising and
uplifting in that awful story. And if you write a novel about William
Shakespeare, you’d best hope that you don’t get crushed by the weight of
expectations. Especially your own.
That was the
danger I was facing as I sat down to write Her
Majesty’s Will. Even though I knew it would be light-hearted and joyful,
a romp of a spy/buddy/comedy, I was still casting William Shakespeare as my
lead character. William Shakespeare! The man who invented one of every ten
words we use. The man who created more common phrases than we can count. The
man whose only rival in terms of influence is the Bible. William Shakespeare!
That’s the problem,
you see. I love Shakespeare – or rather, I love his plays. I’ve been performing
them professionally for over half my life now. I met my wife doing Shakespeare.
Last summer our six year-old son joined me onstage to do Shakespeare. Of the 36
accepted titles that bear his name, I’ve played roles in 19, so I’m just about
halfway through the canon. Through the plays, I think I’ve got a vague sense of
the man: his values, his mistrusts, his instincts, his loves, his hates, his
sense of humor, his sense of drama.
But almost all
of it is negative space. We don’t have anything even remotely resembling an autobiography,
only lines here and there that we can speculate about – Hamlet’s instructions
to the actors, Jacques’ cynical musings on life, Richard II’s thoughts on
England itself. Any of those might be the playwright’s true voice. Or they
might not. Then there are sonnets, which we might take as his own voice, if we
did not know that many of them were written on commission for other people.
Taken together,
that’s not a lot to go on. So when it came time to craft a tale with young Will
Shakespeare at the center, I had to infer a lot. Fortunately, there are themes
that emerge in his plays time and again, snippets and beats and moments that,
taken together, present a picture.
So what do I see
in Shakespeare’s plays?
– I see mistrust
of power and those who crave it. From Henry IV to Richard III, from Lear to
Macbeth, from Caesar to Antony to Octavian, Shakespeare shows how ambition is
often a snake swallowing its own tail, how desire for power leads men to evil.
How power itself is unfulfilling, yet absolute power corrupts absolutely:
BRUTUS: But 'tis a common proof
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the utmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.
That formula is
as true for the Church and for Government as it is for Mankind. Power is
dangerous, as is ambition. Yet he resolutely holds out hope that man can
transcend this evil. Perhaps my favorite line from Macbeth belongs to Malcolm: Angels
are bright still, though the brightest fell.
Conclusion: Shakespeare mistrusts authority – does that mean
he’s seen the evil of authority up close?
– I see a
longing for justice. It’s in the comeuppance he gives all his evil-doers. From
Richard’s dream to Edmund’s recantation to Iago’s silence to Macbeth’s
sleep-deprived madness, the evils men do return to them. It’s almost a sense of
karma, though if that were the case, then there would not be the harm to the
innocents that also appears – Macduff’s children deserved no karmic suffering,
and poor Cinna the Poet did nothing wrong. No, Shakespeare makes it clear that
there is evil in the world, but also that God or Fate or the nature of evil
itself brings evil back to evil. Blood will have blood, as they say.
This is as true
for the Comedies as for the Tragedies. Malvolio gets a cosmic comeuppance as
he’s made the fool of by those he sought to overmaster. Yet his tormentors go
too far, and he swears he will have his revenge. At that moment, I agree with
him that they deserve it. His crime did not warrant such treatment, and shows
the danger of trying to effect justice outside the law. Shakespeare is no fan
of vigilantism, yet he understands it. And he detests arbitrary justice, as
seen in Justice Shallow in Merry Wives.
Conclusion: Shakespeare
longs for justice – because he has been wronged?
– I see his need
to side with the misunderstood. So many of Shakespeare’s best characters are
outsiders. Othello, Iago, Shylock, Aaron, Edmund, the Bastard Arthur, Richard
(thanks to his deformity) – these men are, every one, outsiders. Yes, the
majority are villains, because that’s what the audience expected, and because
villains are the ones who make a story move. But to a one, Shakespeare gives us
some of the most amazing, heartfelt defenses for who they are:
SHYLOCK: If you prick us, do we
not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not
laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you
wrong us, shall we not
revenge?
EDMUND: Why bastard? wherefore
base?
When my dimensions are as well
compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape
as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why
brand they us
With base? with baseness?
bastardy? base, base?
RICHARD: I, that am curtail'd of
this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling
nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before
my time
Into this breathing world, scarce
half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark
at me as I halt by them.
That is to say
nothing of the women, outsiders in their own right. The life he gives to
Rosalind, Viola, Kate, and Merchant’s Portia is truly astonishing. They are, in
fact, the true leads of their plays, challenging gender roles either by being
shrewish and assertive, or else by donning man’s attire and becoming men
themselves, always proving better and wiser men than the actual men around
them.
Conclusion: Shakespeare
embraces the outsider – because he is one?
– I see him
challenging his audience’s perceptions. There are obvious examples, such as
writing a Comedy and then killing everyone off (Romeo
& Juliet) or rewriting a popular play like The Taming Of A Shrew to make the female the one who “wins”
at the end (and in his version, she’s not whipped and beaten). But the one
that’s been most on my mind lately is the startling nature of his play Julius Caesar. Until 1599, Brutus was
firmly denounced as one of the great betrayers, being eternally chewed by
Lucifer in Hell, second only to Judas in terms of his crime. Shakespeare does
the unimaginable and recasts Brutus as the hero, the man who does a terrible thing
for an excellent reason, raising all sorts of moral questions, while at the
same time redefining Brutus for all time. It may not seem like much to us, but
it was a revolutionary act.
Conclusion:
Shakespeare sees the world differently from other men.
– I see the law
of unintended consequences. Nothing in Shakespeare goes according to plan. From
the death of Caesar failing to restore the Roman Republic to the secret
marriage of Romeo and Juliet failing to solve the feud (well, it does, but not
in the way the Friar intended). Tricking Benedick to fall in love with Beatrice
leads to Benedick challenging one of the tricksters to a duel. Shylock
demanding his pound of flesh ends with him impoverished and a forced convert to
Christianity. Nothing – nothing –
goes according to the plan of men.
Conclusion:
Shakespeare knew that life was unpredictable, and one must think quickly to
survive.
Above all, I see
Shakespeare’s love for the common man – the peons, the rabble, the rank and
file. Oh, as a group he disdains them – he rails at mobs at the top of Caesar, and during Mark Antony’s speech
proves how short their memories are, how quickly they can be swayed. But individually
he loves them. He certainly caters to them, pandering to their tastes with low
humor and bawdy jokes. But he also finds more good in their raw honesty than in
all the upright nobility. It is the rough, the rude, the boisterous that he
admires. Oh, they have faults, but he loves their faults along with their
virtues. Drunkenness, lewdness, cowardice, cheating, lying – these are all
accepted purely as clever means to survive in the world. He gives his greatest
wit to clowns and fools, and makes drunkards the most joyful of his creations.
Conclusion:
Shakespeare accepts and loves low men – because he came from their ranks.
So as I thought
about my Shakespeare – not the real one, but the one being created by my pen – this
is the man I saw. A fellow of common birth and uncommon thoughts. A man who
understood the vagaries of life and yet longed for justice and order. A man who
has played the villain for the best of reasons. A man quick on his feet. A man
mistrustful of authority. A man who craves the approval of his peers, even when
his nature renders him peerless. A man who has always felt on the outside,
misunderstood, different, alone.
Even before I
cracked Stephen Greenblatt’s wonderful Will
In The World, which gave me incredible historical details for
Shakespeare’s origins and contemporaries, the man himself was shaping from the
negative space created by his plays into a positive and (thankfully) very human
character.
I’ve always
maintained that Her Majesty’s Will
isn’t serious, and it’s not. Will Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe running around as
spies for Walsingham, working for the Queen? Ridiculous! I certainly wasn’t
aiming to write a biography or some serious piece of literature. This is farce.
I am the first to acknowledge that.
But just as
Shakespeare gave his best bits of wisdom to his fools and clowns, I hope that,
through my own clowning, I’ve been able to imbue my Shakespeare with something
close to Truth. If this is not who the real Shakespeare was, this is perhaps
who he should have been. A man not
dragged down by the weight of my expectations, but rather raised up by his own.
