The Great Ventriloquist
Like
distant conversation, we hear his colleagues commenting on his pleasant nature,
his industriousness, his avoidance of debauchery, his ability to write so
fluently that he hardly ever had to make a correction. For someone living
before diaries and journalism, Shakespeare as a man is reasonably well
documented; though it’s also true that however much we find out about him, it
will never be enough.
He
was a country grammar-school boy, the son of barely literate parents, and he
irritated the hell out of the university-trained writers he swiftly proceeded
to eclipse in the
So
this was a genius who minded his own business; or as he put it better, one who
felt that his own nature had almost become “subdued/To what it works in, like
the dyer’s hand”. It’s a modest enough description for the flood-tide of
language that came out of him, as if in tongues: rapturous, turbulent,
riotously funny and disarmingly simple. It trumpets and insinuates comforts and
provokes, and we all have our favourites. It’s an equally modest way to account
for these archetypal stories that we return to again and again in the theatre
because the great struggles within them remind us of a hundred difficulties of
our own, and because we see that he was familiar with psychological positions
we though only Freud had uncovered.
Audiences
want to see the best actors wrestle down the great parts, and compare their
talents. But perhaps even more than that, we want to be part of the argument.
Nowadays the body politic can be as engrossing a subject to us as the hero.
There are passages in the history plays so shockingly topical – often on the
subject of foreign policy – that audiences laugh bitterly aloud.
We
specially love the subversion, when the tragic hero is tripped up by an
ordinary someone going about their daily business, a Player, a Gravedigger or a
Fool: or when the courtly Touchstone is put to shame by a working man whose
great pride is to see “my ewes graze and my lambs suck”. We are more alert tan
we were to the odd mixture of independence and tactical acquiescence in his
women, and notice how they don’t become tragic icons with quite the same noisy
regularity as the men, being less like fools. Becoming a tragic hero seems to
involve behaving very stupidly at some point, and Shakespeare seems to see this
as a male prerogative.
He
could do the same thing in many different ways, as if he were trying to get at
the truth from any number of angles. Within a year or so he wrote the
heartbreaking farewells of Romeo and Juliet and what, oddly enough, can be
equally moving for a moment, the lament of Flute as Thisbe in ‘A Midsummer
Night’s Dream’, whose lover’s eyes were “green as leeks”. Rosalind finds a
sunny love within her, but we become just as involved with the murky affections
of Angelo, and Benedick’s foolish concern for his bachelorhood.
Above
all, it’s impossible to escape from people who speak so directly to us. Shakespeare
didn’t invent soliloquy, but he transformed its use, so that drama could never
be hermetic again. It is his great means of implication: when the stage clears
and a single figure turns to us – “Now I am alone” – we are forced into a
contract that includes sympathy for the devil; for Macbeth, who unseams his
enemies from the nave to the chaps, but can’t cope with the consequences of the
one murder he really wanted to do: for Richard III, who by contrast finds it
only too easy to. It’s the transgressors who share these confidences, not their
victims: Iago, not Othello, who compulsively talks to the audience.
The
characters’ debate with us and with each other is constant and transfixing. However
beautiful the utterance, almost every line in Shakespeare is part of an ongoing
argument. What shall I so now? Did you see that? How can I have let this
happen? Introversion and secrecy come in later forms of theatre – Hamlet and
Bottom share their intimate anxieties with disarming candour. Underneath, the
bigger questions rumble. Is it possible to be a good leader and a good man? What
are the human limits? Do the ends justify the shadowy means?
In
this urgent conversation, we are encouraged to change sides as often as
possible, but we are never allowed to sit on the fence. What there is almost
nothing of is silence. Deep inside Hamlet’s famous line is a joke, since “rest”
and “silence” are the last things we expect of him. A Shakespeare character who
refuses to contribute to the clamour is as dead as someone in a radio
discussion who can’t get a word in. When, at the end of Coriolanus, the hero is
asked in a specific stage direction to hold his mother “by the hand, silent”,
the effect is as startling as if an orchestral conductor suddenly lowered his
baton in mid-bar. These men and women have to speak to find out what they feel:
when they open their mouths, they are gifted with their author’s fluency and
precision, and everything they stand for is out there to be debated.
We
say Shakespeare is universal, but really that’s a figure of speech: to a large part
of the world is as unlikely as a square meal. We say he is the great humanist,
but he isn’t really that either: injustice is rampart in the plays, and dozens
of characters go to undeserved deaths for theatrical effect without a trace of
authorial regret. We say he understands the human condition; perhaps, but to
many people his words must seem as irrelevant as those of some visiting
statesman.
But
in any community with the leisure or determination to clear a space in its
midst for storytelling, Shakespeare, an ordinary man and not an intellectual,
buttonholes is continually about what matters and what doesn’t. On a good night
an audience leaves the din of opinion, appeasement, protest and reconciliation in
an exhilarated state – alive, hugely entertained, ready for more healthy
argument, more tolerant, less easily deceived. In the face of such benefits, it
hardly matters that the expression of the man in the portrait remains blank. His
work is an astonishing act of self-concealment that leaves the world more
vibrant; we still don’t know a single one of his opinions, but he is present as
white noise.