Shakespeare at the River’s Side

SHAKESPEARE AT THE RIVER’S SIDE

The other day, while sitting on a river bank and talking with friends, a window of opportunity to enunciate one of the most quoted lines in King Lear opened and I graciously capitulated. Someone had just said something along the lines of: What do they need to do that for? and I jumped in: “Oh, reason not the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous.” The words purled into a cloudy vapor of sorts, as the three on-lookers watched them momentarily glimmer in the winter sun and then disintegrate into the heavy cold air above the Hudson at its wider points near Cold Spring and West Point. A few blinked and maybe one didn’t in mild consideration of those vaunted words that touch the backs of so many unfortunate people in our world. I didn’t want take center stage and I didn’t want to make a point, maybe I just desired a fleeting connection — one oozing the sauce of Shakespeare’s words (and I did think most or all of these three would know that’s whose words burst onto their Saturday scene). Maybe I flung them out to start something or continue it, make a beautiful scene more beautiful with words, though the words were spotted, admonitory — they might not fit the parameters of our present day, as often all but a few parts of Shakespeare (like “To be or not to be”) can’t countenance this digital moment imbricated by screens, too loud speakers, endless videos, and not enough “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (another Learism I’ve often pulled out to impress and press upon).

But why would this be? Can the contemporary moment continually push Shakespeare’s words out of the limelight, while the name and the essence will always remain a totem? It seems plausible, since we scoff at recitations of old poetry, though slam poetry and the like still beat on. I’m sure the import of Romeo and Juliet will keep influencing romantic relations of young persons who read it in high school, with the Leo-marked film a colorful enough sari to wrap their imaginations in. But will people continue to see and read Shakespeare and will they take it inside them and hold its nutrition to use when the time comes or to quell the ever-laden modern anxiety? Using the moment on the riverbank as a litmus and given all the people were in their forties, I might have to say, No, with caveats. We are a changed people. The infection of digitalness and the snipping and bending of time and the dissipation of memory have made too many of us modest savages — drain every moment of its mystery and then try to truck for the viral. One can argue that other times had needed and heeded the call for Shakespeare, especially those writers of the romantic period, in the early 1800’s with Coleridge, Hazlitt, Hegel, Schlegel, Carlyle, and a few others. A clip from Hazlitt illustrates this: “…we pity as much as we despise them; in spite of our disgust we like them, because they like themselves, and because we are made to sympathize with them; and the ligament, fine as it, which links them to humanity, is never broken.” Perhaps we can’t pity because modern characters are created to play to our prejudices, so we only “identify” — and pity is relegated to some backdoor vector of aesthetic appreciation. Human emotions are like tracery now — TikTok videos are mostly made of thought boxes or sound clips from pop culture — capacity for original thought is crumbling. I don’t want to make this into a diatribe against technology — of course Heidegger said “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it,” but if we are losing our humanity, then we are probably less in touch with Shakespeare. One simple reason is that Shakespeare’s characters loomed large over other times because the world wasn’t full of so many others. Even in the 1990s, when poetry and Shakespeare experienced a surge of interest due to Rumi, four poets winning the Nobel Prize, and a plethora of Shakespeare films, the cultural inheritance had seized on certain key phrases of Seinfeld (“master of his domain” and “no soup for you”) as our new shared clipped and very modern argot, by way of shriveled and normally unfunny Raymond Carver language.

A famous sonnet of Milton’s begins “What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones…” Don’t we all need him? Certainly we need to be in conversation with him as Stein, Faulkner, and Beckett were. Maybe I have jammed myself astride an intricate Angel with Horns, as A.P. Rossiter dubbed the Shakespearean experience. I expect too much from society or I expect an unrealistic hors d’oeuvre that I could hardly find at all the recent dinner parties on the Upper West Side. Harold Bloom, George Steiner, and others (not Helen Vendler) are gone, but books go on. I recently read an excellent book on the Bard: Shakespeare Thinking by Philip Davis, with many contentions, chiefly how he uses a forgotten essay by William Hazlitt “An Essay on the Principles of Human Action,” and his other voluminous writing on the Bard to demonstrate how the uncanny act of seeing Shakespeare’s dialogues presents the act of thinking onstage. Davis says, “To Hazlitt, Shakespeare’s plays are not set scripts or finished productions, any more than our own identities are, but creations coming into being through rehearsals of themselves, experiments in human nature, at a deep level prior to conscious plan or concept” and “Sometimes thought in Shakespeare is so powerful in its language that the object of the thought, at a level prior to personality, becomes more present than the person thinking it.” I’ve shared these quotes on twitter to a spattering of applause, but how are they affecting anyone but me? It’s hard to say. Does it raise awareness? Yes. Does it branch out into the greater world? Sometimes. Does it generate more than reading a few lines to or showing my seven-year-old the honeyed lines of flower-strewn dialogue between Perdita and Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale.

Maybe I should be satisfied that I can recite some Bardish words and they can fast flicker in another’s consciousness — and I shouldn’t be attached to what they make of them: did Shakespeare wait to hear an audience’s reaction to his words? Hazlitt conjectured he cared little about their reception: “He wrote for the ‘great vulgar and the small,’ in his time, not for posterity. If Queen Elizabeth and the maids of honour laughed heartily at his worst jokes, and the catcalls in the gallery were silent at his best passages, he went home satisfied, and slept the next night well.”

Some years back an older person said to me, We have to watch the new generation and see what they embrace, what they will create, where they will take us. I didn’t buy this then, but I’m old enough now to see that she was right — and even if the majority is living on screens, there is a silent minority that still longs for an aesthetic experience to move them, to buoy them. Hazlitt writes of tragedy:

It teaches him that there are and have been others like himself, by showing him as in a glass what they have felt, thought, and done. It opens the chambers of the human heart. It leaves nothing indifferent to us that can affect our common nature. It excites our sensibility by exhibiting the passions wound up to the utmost pitch by the power of imagination or the temptation of circumstances; and corrects their fatal excesses in ourselves by pointing to the greater extent of sufferings and of crimes to which they have led others. Tragedy creates a balance of the affections. It makes us thoughtful spectators in the lists of life. It is the refiner of the species; a discipline of humanity.

One can’t control the vast majority, who never gave themselves over to high culture — there has always been a specialty audience. “Tragedy…” Grace Paley wrote, “When will you look it in the face?” Perhaps the ghost of Shakespeare is always there, even for people who never read or see his plays. If he invented the human more than anyone else, as Harold Bloom contended, this is not far off. The feel of not to feel it cannot occur in the human experience. Even the idea of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet can “make us thoughtful spectators in the lists of life.” I had my young daughter read a few pages of The Winter’s Tale as one character and me as the other. Hope is what we can do — believe in the world and make a better world, as Shakespeare did.