Shakespeare Would Hate Us

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was thinking of auditioning for The Wooden O this year, since for the first time in a years I won’t be on vacation during their run.  My buddy, who happens to be a Seattle firefighter, but whose wife acts with the O on occasion, trotted out a taunt he likes to tweak me with: “But Paul, you hate Shakespeare.”

He bases this facetious conclusion on a challenge I proposed some years back calling on all Seattle  theatres to self-impose a Shakespeare hiatus for one year.  Brendan Kiley, Arts Editor for The Stranger, picked the idea up and wrote about it here.  I still genuinely believe this would be a grand and beneficial experiment, but not because I hate Shakespeare—quite the opposite.  As a playwright I flatter myself that I understand the man’s genius better than most of the directors and actors who worship so sycophantically at his altar for all the wrong reasons. 

“It’s the language that makes his plays so exquisite.”

“No, it’s his sumptious, multifaceted characters.”

“No, no, it’s the tradition, the chance to etch one’s mark on the living canon of performance.”

It’s all bullshit.  Shakespeare was a great—yes, even the greatest—playwright for one and only one simple reason: he wrought great plays.  All the rest is just so much makings.  You might praise a chef for her choice of ingredients, but you wouldn’t claim them as the reason for her genius.  A year without Shakespeare would help us gain some much needed clarity and distance from the material.  We would come back to it ready to attack with refreshed hearts.  And it would also get us off his cash-cow tit for long enough to taste a little bona fide self-sufficiency.  Hell, we might actually miss Shakespeare.  That currently unfathomable notion alone would make a break worth it, wouldn’t it?

Never mind.  I already know the answer.  It was shouted at me and Kiley at the Seattle Theatre ShitStorm back in 2008.  And it has been shouted just as fiercely upon every subsequent mention.  “Never!  We will NEVER stop staging Shakespeare. Not for a year.  Not for a month.  How dare you!?  You and the rest of your modern playwright ilk are not fit to wipe the soles of his pointy shoes.”  The level of vituperation one encounters upon even suggesting a breather from the bard naturally calls a paraphrase of one of his more famous lines to mind, “Methinks the status quo doth protest too much.”

Yes, American Theatre literally worships Shakespeare.  And I have to laugh, because I am pretty sure he would have hated us.

Shakespeare was a playwright, poet, player and proprietor, in equal measure, despite our hindsighted emphasis on the first of those four.  He made plays to make money and he made a lot of both. He would hate our precious process of endless workshopping plays to an early death on dusty shelves.  At the Globe you worked the problems of a play in performance. 

He would hate that people more often read his plays than see them.

He would hate, or not have been even able to comprehend, a system in which playwrights make plays for performance in cities far from where they live, for less than it costs them to create, for the narrowest sliver of society.

He would hate that so many modern American playwrights have never acted and never produced, have never done anything in a theatre except watch silently from dark seats.

Since he shared them, he would sympathize with the milquetoast middle class aspirations of most American playwrights—“I just want to have a house and a family and make the same kind of money as my friends I went to college with”— but he would grow to hate them eventually.  Shakespeare may have envied his social superiors, but he also knew at his core he was better than them.

He would not hate that we kiss the asses of our benefactors and patrons, but he would hate how poorly and surreptitiously and self-loathingly we do it; almost never managing, as he did, to flatter and skewer with the same loaded lines: floating sublimely above, then suddenly crawling at them from beneath, being everyone and no one at the same time with such stunning success that even today reasonably sane and educated people entertain themselves with the pseudo-intellectual dalliance that he did not even write the plays which he so clearly did.

He would have hated the MFA system for generating new viral spores of actors, playwrights and directors when there isn’t enough work for the ones already in the system.

He would have hated the advent of the auteur director, smothering the natural brilliance of his plays with their dense cloying concepts.

He would hate that artistic administrators make the decisions about which plays get done, instead of a consensus of proprietor/players, all sharing the ownership of the theatre, and thus the risks and rewards.

And most of all, he would hate our necrophilic prejudice for his plays, even the poor ones, over anything new, even the good ones.  As the consummate playwright, he would want us to love the living writers as much or more than the dead.

So, yeah, I’m pretty sure if Shakespeare were alive today he would hate us.

And he’d be writing for television.

Comments

[Paul Mullin]

Oh, and he would hate our precious gutless aversion to competition, too.

[isaac]

don't you think it's a bit odd to try to speak for someone we know next to nothing about? we have no images of shakespeare's plays, no private writings other than the sonnets, no record of vast swaths of his life. we know next to nothing about him. we don't know what he would've made of the American Theatre system, because we have no idea what he made of his own theatre system (other than money).

I think you and I share the same biases and ideological positions w/r/t much of the LORT system, I just think it's astrange exercise to say, essentially, "Shakespeare would agree with me." That's like people claiming that Jesus would support their particular political cause.

[Paul Mullin]

Isaac, you're right. It's exactly like saying I know what Jesus would think about a political cause. My tongue was nowhere near my cheek while writing this. My points about modern theatre separate from what Shakes would've thought of them (an obviously impossible notion) have no standing on their own. And we can surmise nothing about Shakespeare using the same historical techniques we use to surmise biographical understandings about other persons, because he is somehow magically mysterious.

Will in the World by Stephan Greenblatt, I heartily recommend it, along with a sense of irony.

[isaac]

Paul,

Wow, you're a dick to me in your comments AND facebook friend request me on the same day, I'm touched!

Stephen Greenblatt's WIll In The World is a wonderful work of entertaining speculative history, but it's just that... entertaining and speculative. Some variation of perhaps/may have/possibly etc. appears on just about every page. An important qualifier entirely missing from this post.

For example: we have no idea whether or not Shakespeare actually liked the theatre system of his day. You could certainly point to his early retirement and refusal to write anything after that retirement as a pretty good sign that he didn't approve of it, if you wanted to. It's all open to all sorts of interpretations. WILL IN THE WORLD is one of those interpretations, and golly I enjoy it, but it's not really a work of scholarship in any meaningful sense. I don't mean that as a put down. That's not what Greenblatt is trying to achieve with that book, he's trying to use his imagination and what he knows/thinks about the time to fill in the considerable lacunae in Shakespeare's biography. And in fact, the speculative moments are probably the most enjoyable, particularly the theory that Shakespeare-- as a secret catholic living undercover in someone's house-- may have met and studied with Edmund Campion. There's not a shred of evidence that anything in that sentence is true (other than pere Shakespeare's sometime Catholicism), but it allows Greenblatt to discuss issues of Catholicism and the life of Edmund Campion, so it goes in. I love that book, but it's purpose is not really history or biography. It's like an issue of Marvels' "What If..." series.

You may have been being ironic and your tongue may have been planted firmly in your cheek, but there's enough sincere versions of this kind of stuff floating around the internet (and barroom conversations about theatre) that I think mistakenly confusing this for one is, well, understandable. Shakespeare gets used as a prop so often for all sides of pretty much every debate having to do with theatre (or literature) that it's become a particular nerve on my part.

[Paul Mullin]

Thanks, Isaac.

Ask around, seeming like a dick is my standard MO of initiating friendship. Must mean I like you!

I appreciate you trying to keep me honest, or earnest, or whatever it is you prefer I was more of.

And while using Shakespeare as a Straw Man, or Whipping Boy, or Stalking Horse, or whatever I'm doing, may be old hat inside theatre circles; I think you'll find that outside our bubble few people could give a shit one way or another.

I'd have to say my pet peeve (or one of my many) about theatre discussions is how often and quickly we get all academic and clubby, while glibly forgetting that the very people we should be trying to reach really don't care about our post-graduate theses on how to fix things.

Frankly, they don't care if we fix it or not.

So if I seemed dickish, first let me say, that I AM kind of dickish, but with a heart of gold.

And second, niggling about details of Shakespeare's putative biographical details puts people to sleep just when we ought to be waking them up. I'd openly avow that Shakespeare wore a purple penis as a bow tie if I thought it might put butts in seats. Nobody cares how smart we show people are. Well, nobody but other show people who spent a butt-load of money going to school to learn how to seem smart.

Shakespeare would hate that.

[Kymberlee]

I dated a guy who was really into Shakespeare for a couple of months. He was offended when I said, "Fuck Shakespeare," as though it was some kind of blasphemy. Too bad. I said what I said not to the Bard but to all his pretentious followers for all the reasons you state.

He was brilliant. No doubt. It's also true that brilliance still exists and that new stories NEED to be told and there is little room for them when everyone is theeing and thouing so they can feel smart and important because they, you know, have an MFA in Theater (that last word said with a nice Transatlantic accent, of course).

I like it much better to imagine that Shakes is flipping US the finger while also psychically challenging us to write our own fucking stories and find ways to get paid for doing so.

Thank you writing this, Paul. I appreciate how often you are willing to stick your neck out there and support your ideas. Egads, but the world needs more of this.

Also, you've never been a dick to me. Does that mean you don't like me? ;-)

[Paul Mullin]

Thanks, Kymberlee!

I should've probably been more specific. If you DESERVE me being a dick to you, and I'm a dick to you, then it probably means I like you. If I flat out ignore you, it probably means that you ain't worth the time.

You, however, are in a lofty class all your own. :-)

[Kymberlee]

Thanks, Paul! You make me smile. I'm happy that our circles have overlapped. I learn from you and I like that. :-)