Books
Coronation Street of the soul. Terence Hawkes on how our modern cult of celebrity blights the Shakespeare industry
Published 07 April 2003
Shakespeare's Face
Stephanie Nolen Piatkus, 365pp, £18.99
ISBN 0749923911
There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face, says King Duncan. As Macbeth's first victim, you could say he proved that the hard way. Yet on a spring evening in Canada in 2001, learning that a friend of her family might own a genuine likeness of the Bard, Stephanie Nolen began to find herself increasingly nervous about the prospect of looking at the "face of genius". She needn't have worried. The moment she "gazed into those beguiling eyes" it was wham, bam, alakazam. Cue violins. Break out the bubbly. Begin the beguine. "'He's . . . lovely,' I said." Maybe, as a reporter on the Globe and Mail, she should have made her excuses and left.
The modern compulsion to corral and tame art, to tether it firmly to the material and the recognisable, so rendering it safe for general consumption, has few more powerful manifestations than the search for Shakespeare's likeness. You thought it was the plays that followed you around the room? Forget them. Forget their public, emblematic modes. Forget their complex concern with the issues of nationhood, governance and morality. Welcome to our modern, ingrowing, back-bedroom world, where individual personality and its discontents line up to be furtively probed, picked, squeezed and sniffed.
Here, what you see is what you get: yourself. "Characters" and their "development" rule because, as Nolen confidently announces, the plays are bound to be dealing in "people we recognise as soon as they walk on to a stage". Of course, they are. Isn't that Ariel, sitting this one out with Puck? Oh, and there's the Son That Has Killed His Father, sharing a joke with The Father That Has Killed His Son. Hey, Rumour, baby, give us a kiss (no tongues).
But this replaces the epic sweep of a 400-year-old drama with the comfiness of current soap opera prattle, crossly brushing aside the conventions of any art older than itself, bossily shooing us down that bleak Coronation Street of the soul where Hamlet, Juliet and Othello turn out to be "people just like us" and we are all "as darkly ambitious as Lady Macbeth, as jubilantly lusty as Bottom, as embittered as Iago". Reduce the Bard, reduce his art. Crowbar Shakespeare into the likeness of a curly-haired Jack-the-Lad, quartos already climbing the charts, sonnets in at number one, sharing a joke with Apollo, sitting this one out with Mercury - and the plays will gratifyingly shrink to fit. But when that happens, he'll start to look more like Jerry Springer.
Supposed likenesses of Shakespeare have always been fairly thick on the ground, but only two (both by foreigners) have ever been allowed potential authenticity: the Droeshout engraving, featured in the First Folio, and the Janssen bust, lodged in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. The "recently discovered" portrait - into whose eyes Stephanie Nolen gazed - has in fact been knocking around for more than 90 years. Stored at one time under the bed of its present owner's granny, it has languished in the bosom of the same family, now located in Canada, since 1603. Known as the "Sanders portrait", its history is one of regular failures to make the grade. The art expert Marion Henry Spielmann gave it a careful going-over in 1909. Thumbs down. The redoubtable Aunt Uggie offered it to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington in 1933. No sale. Uggie's sister Alice repeated the offer in 1960. Not today, thank you. Alice's brother Freddie put the picture on display in a Montreal department store in 1964. Zilch. Finally, in 1966, he wrote to the Canadian prime minister hinting that the National Gallery might be interested in its acquisition. Guess what?
Given this, Nolen's brisk notebook-and-trench-coat manner ("I was starting to get that prickle on the back of my neck") seems a touch overexcited. Careful details of the validation of the painting's age may stiffen the sinews, but the occasional bursts of down-home hokum don't really summon up the blood. In fact, the revelation that Lloyd Sullivan, the retired engineer who currently owns the portrait, is "a regular-folks kind of guy" given to calling the likeness "Willy Shake" seems more likely to make the flesh creep.
Undaunted, though by now increasingly in thrall to something that's started to sound like George Clooney in tights ("It was a rogue's face, a charmer's face that looked back at me with a tolerant mischievous, slightly world-weary air"), Nolen wisely goes on to embellish her act with some pondering from a well-chosen array of academics. The professoriate contrive, one after another, to commend the painting for its interest, while withholding final acceptance of its authenticity.
Perhaps Shakespeare is genuinely owed a portrait that does him justice, but this book prompts the thought that in his case mercy might have been more appropriate. Personalisation, the drive to subjugate all things to the vagaries of individual psychology, pushes the project down the slipperiest of slopes. It's a modern tyranny, meaningless in a context that often discouraged playwrights even from putting their names to their own works. Its attraction for us lies in its capacity to generate the bar-room banalities that enable us to sleep at night. In this one-dimensional, broad-brush world, President Bush is really only trying to impress his dad, if Hitler had been a nicer bloke there would have been no Second World War, and all you need is love.
Likenesses of Shakespeare have the same personalising function. They turn him into one of us. His plays start to fit our notions of art more comfortably. Their savageries tamed, their excesses curbed, their disjunctions explained, they are made fit to appear on a syllabus near you. All this serves to take the chill off that scarcely penetrable world of engulfing violence, wholesale insecurity and inexplicably mingled cruelty and sentimentality where our roots disturbingly lie. They hint at some dubious ligament that offers to bind us all permanently together. It's called "human nature" and the Bard is its most potent symbol.
You can learn a great deal about a society from the kind of Shakespeare it sees, or fails to see. When Nolen's first article on the painting appeared in 2001, the letters page of her paper was packed with missives rejoicing in what one of them called the "impish twinkle that suggests wit and wisdom . . . This guy looks like fun." Of course, he does. Globe calls to Globe, after all. Never mind that the same face could as easily fit some talentless screamer in the latest boy-band. Wit, wisdom, fun - isn't that the way it's supposed to be? Roll up! If anyone can still sell this kind of snake-oil, it's good old Willy Shake.
Terence Hawkes's most recent book is Shakespeare in the Present (Routledge)
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
