Shakespeare’s plays, especially the tragedies, are no longer simply a dusty academic exercise in literature or a brave attempt at something serious by community theatre groups. Shakespeare’s plays are alive and well and in the news.
If U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House has accomplished anything on behalf of education, it might be a renaissance of interest in the modern relevance of Shakespeare’s great plays and in their recurring themes and lessons.
The remarkably insightful late-16th-century playwright constructed each one of his main semi-fictional but historically inspired protagonists with a crippling defect in their personalities. Most commonly, it was the absence of normal human emotion and empathy or, taken to its extreme, a ruthless instinct to destroy any opposition from those around him or her.
It’s true that while each tragic character had some measure of a redeeming trait — Macbeth’s bravery in battle, Hamlet’s devotion to his dead father, Lear’s twisted love of his daughters — each was dominated by a fatal flaw that shone a light, not only on the individual’s inevitable demise, but also on some of the darker and less worthy characteristics of our own imperfect humanity.
Lies and slander always played a part in plot and character development. Conflict between appearance and reality, disorder and unpredictable change, racism and self-deception, treason and conspiracies all knitted even the unlikeliest the plot together.
And always there was a nod to violence, either admired or enacted.
There was great Caesar, distrustful of those around him, even his closest advisers: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”
There was the naiveté and treachery of Macbeth, so easily influenced by the lies of the three witches who had peered into his soul and found his murderous fatal weakness — “vaulting ambition.”
There was the aging King Lear, raging into the storm because his youngest daughter refused to pledge unmitigated love for and loyalty to him.
In the 16th century, people crowded into the Globe Theatre in London to be entertained and temporarily released from the humdrum realities of their existence by the latest Shakespearean play.
It was all there in the stories about the machinations, disloyalties, treacheries, hubris and inevitable downfalls of “those above.”
Tales of treason, betrayal and duplicity at the highest and most inaccessible levels of the ruling class reassured the people in 1599, that although they were largely illiterate, the ruling class was no better, and in some cases much worse morally, ethically and in every other way, than themselves.
And now, today, it is all there again — not on a stage this time but there, unavoidably, 24/7 on CNN, MSNBC and most news services.
Like Shakespeare’s audience in 1599, we can’t get enough of the day-by-day playing-out of a modern political tragedy and the diverse cast of dubious, untrustworthy and even vulgar characters who colour the story with their own demise. Same characters, same plots, same outcomes, but every day now.
The audience at the Globe knew, or hoped, that somehow, moral justice would eventually prevail — but how and at what cost to the other characters, the common folk who had no influence but who sometimes provided comic relief?
Shakespeare had an unerring feel for what the crowd wanted to see and hear, especially when it led to the downfall of those who had held themselves separate and above the laws that governed the rest.
The notion that many of Shakespeare’s plays are modern metaphors is neither unique nor original, but never before has there been such an uncanny parallel between semi-fiction and reality in terms of the daily reports of the fall from grace of those entrusted with responsibility for the welfare of entire nations.
Perhaps it was a prescient warning to future generations that when the First Folio of Shakespeare’s work was published in 1623, seven years after his death, Ben Jonson, who was a contemporary and fellow writer, noted that Shakespeare was “not of an age, but for all time.”
Certainly for our time.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
