Arts & Culture
There's no escaping the Warwickshire Lad. There's the T-shirt, the beer, the cigar - Shakespeare is everywhere. Terence Hawkes on the enduring cult of the Superbard
Published 14 October 2002
Shakespeare For All Time
Stanley Wells Macmillan, 442pp, £30
ISBN 0333904990
The bullet and the bayonet have traditionally been the most effective bearers of English-speaking culture, and their connection with the plays of Shakespeare was always a complex, if covert, business. David Garrick's song about the Bard, "Warwickshire Lads", set to music by Charles Dibdin, served as the regimental march of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. The prospect of some young Enoch Powell, newly enlisted in that company, taking the field to the strains of "Our Shakespeare compared is to no man,/Nor Frenchman, nor Grecian nor Roman" retains its capacity to harrow with fear and wonder, though presumably its effect on the enemy, particularly those brought up to think of the Bard as "unser Shakespeare", would be even more dismaying.
There's no escaping the Warwickshire Lad. In fact, his sobriquet has never restricted him to the Midlands and the Bard as quasi-Brummie doesn't bear much thinking about. Stanley Wells's conclusion that, by now, an all-pervading Shakespeare is virtually "in the water supply" is as undeniable as it is apt. The Lad saturates our way of life. His words and phrases echo in our own. His image underwrites banknote and credit card. Streets named after him thread our suburbs and, strolling down them in your Macbeth T-shirt, you can light up a cigar called Hamlet while knocking back a beer called Falstaff. Sometimes it seems almost as if Shakespeare wrote his plays with us specifically in mind; that we, rather than those uncomprehending, T-shirtless rowdies at the original Globe, constitute his ideal audience. And it is this notion, that the plays speak directly to us across a divide of more than 400 years, their art effortlessly vaulting the chasms of history and culture, that proves most durable. In the end, it fosters one of the most treasured figments of the modern imagination: a transcendent Shakespeare, as indelibly stamped on character as on clobber, an artist for all the people, for all seasons, and thus, as his contemporary Ben Jonson piously urged, "not of an age, but for all time".
Various historical accidents have made Jonson's insularity slightly more plausible: the Bard's appropriation by a galloping imperialism, or his witnessing of the beginnings of crucial economic and political upheavals - capitalism, nationalism - whose conclusions we now confront. These undoubtedly promote a vague sense of recognition, if not identity.
But Stanley Wells's new book is far too sophisticated to settle for cloudiness of that sort. Its Shakespeare is a subtly drawn, well-grounded figure; a man of flesh and blood, rooted in time and place. At its core lies an acute and detailed account of his methods of work. Intimate with the material, nuts-and-bolts aspects of the theatre's art, he knows how to deploy each and all of its components - movement, illusion, song, dance - to subtle and devastating emotional effect. He knows his audience. He knows the scope and the limitations of his actors. Brilliantly gifted in his command of words and their rhythms, he knows precisely where to place the apparently simple but effectively shattering phrase: "I do, I will", or "O, she's warm". And, perhaps the most demanding skill of all, he knows when to shut up: how to make use of the barely said, the wordless pause, silence. Anyone can be an author or an actor. Shakespeare was much more than that. In the modern as well as the earlier expanded senses of the word, he was a real "player".
All the facts of his Stratford background, the management of his professional life in London, his private relationships with family and friends, his sexuality, find clear and witty exposition here. Photographs, prints, drawings and colour plates enrich and enliven the text. And when it comes to the growth and changing status of Shakespeare's reputation and influence, Wells's flair for the management of an intricate story proves compelling.
It was a gradual apotheosis. Initially, after his death, the plays seemed old-fashioned and slightly dull. Dryden, never anyone's fool, considered his whole style "as affected as it is obscure". Nor was Samuel Pepys, an inveterate and intelligent playgoer, particularly impressed. He admired Macbeth for, among other things, its "dancing and music" (presumably of the Witches). Struggles to rescue the original texts from their improvers only slowly gathered momentum in the 18th century. Nahum Tate's "happy-ending" version of King Lear notoriously supplanted Shakespeare's play, with popular approval, from 1681 until 1838, while the influence of Colley Cibber's version of Richard III, first presented in 1699, lasted into the 19th century and beyond. That echoes of it permeate even Laurence Olivier's film of 1955 serves to confirm a curious fact: the notion of Shakespeare the consummate artist whose universal genius rises beyond his age to stand "for all time" was a late-developing ideological wheeze, in effect kick-started by the Garrick jubilee - and Garrick's song - at Stratford in 1769.
But once on the march, the Warwickshire Lad never looked back. Burlesques, parodies and travesties, indicators of a growing popularity, began to proliferate. His impact on music and painting grew. When the original Memorial Theatre opened at Stratford in 1879, it quickly embodied a picture gallery. And from the 1890s on, as the plays increasingly took their place on education syllabuses, the process of deification gradually reached its peak. If literacy was to be universal in Britain, then Shakespeare's works would stand shoulder to shoulder with the Bible as material guarantors of the eternal verities. Admirers in the United States concurred. As early as 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson visited Stratford to initiate the traditional New World pastime (later taken up by Henry James and T S Eliot) of solemnly berating the locals for their ignorance of their own heritage.
Nowadays, we have universities and drama schools to do that for us. But whilst the resources of modern academic scholarship have to some extent always looked backward to inform theatrical production (the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington and the rebuilt Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford both opened on Shakespeare's birthday in 1932), the rise of that modern con artist, the director, tends to be aided and abetted more by the new media of film and television. Freed from the antiquarian and scholarly restraints of such as William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker, adventurous spirits like Baz Luhrmann have lately brought a flashier, more coruscating figure to the teeming and benighted young, in a mode that seems finally to fulfil Ben Jonson's monstrous vision: an eternally relevant Shakespeare for all time, bloated by the gassy values he is presumed to endorse, and blandly ballooning above the world's disparate cultures to dispense, as Superbard, some universal, industrial-strength unction for the soul. Love, usually.
From an account of the uses of urine in the Stratford family house to one of a Norwegian production of Macbeth in which the hero is represented by a tomato, Wells's book generously tells us as much about Shakespeare as we wanted to know and perhaps a little bit that we didn't. Scholarly, urbane, rich in anecdotes and marvellously readable, it is a meticulously constructed and authoritative survey with a vast and satisfying scope. This is certainly Shakespeare for our time, the one in our water supply, and, as we can't step outside our politics, the cultural warhead of our liberal-minded, democracy-bibbing, late-capitalist world.
As we are always astonished to discover, there are those who refuse that world's premises and vigorously contest its values. Their water supply, if they have one, is likely to be somewhat dodgier than ours. It will quite possibly be Bard-free. Shakespeare For All Time may offer, by implication, to rise above the coming conflict with such infidels. But perhaps that simply guarantees, in line with the Warwickshire Lad's military inheritance, that it's already in the thick of it.
Terence Hawkes's Shakespeare in the Present is published by Routledge
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