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WILLIAM BLOODY SHAKESPEARE

STEPHEN HUGH-JONES | ON LANGUAGE AND LIFE | January 4th 2008

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William Shakespeare was "a decent jobbing wordsmith", ventures the London Times. Whether you like him or not, he was a great deal more than that, thunders Stephen Hugh-Jones ...

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So "William bloody Shakespeare" was no more than "a decent jobbing wordsmith", "churning out" (or paying someone to churn out) "endless neo-Tudor histrionics". Incomprehensible histrionics too. Well, indeed. That was the gist of a piece by Giles Whittell in the London Times in December. Last week, while praising the same newspaper's Matthew Parris for the best article in my 12 months' reading, I promised some light New Year relief from the silliest. So here it is.

Anyone has a right to be switched off by Shakespeare. Whittell is, and how. His philippic was amusingly written, but without a hint of tongue-in-cheek. You might suspect his real purpose was just to get a rise out of the boring old Bard-farts, but I think not: his own histrionics suggest he truly believes what he says. Which would be a pity, for a serious journo, since most of his arguments were garbage.

Fair enough if he'd stuck to condemning, as he did, the obscurity of Shakespeare's plots--a few do have that quality--or the "sheer opacity" of his language. Opaque it can be when first you meet it, let alone as delivered at Stratford speed, or indeed later. He might have added, as he didn't, that Shakespeare's humour is often leaden to modern ears. Or said of more than one of the historical plays, as Samuel Johnson did of "Paradise Lost", that "no one ever wished it longer." Or even, however questionably, that it was all the work of Bacon/the Earl of Oxford/nay, Queen Victoria (as Monsignor Ronald Knox could no doubt have proved) anyway. Alas, Whittell went much further.

He damned

the orgiastic group-think dripping from every one of [the plays]; the industrialised, irresistible consensus; the greatness thrust upon them by brainwashed English teachers ... mindlessly reaffirmed by every A-level English examiner, and worshipped with world-class awestruck claptrap by academics and directors from Stanford to Irkutsk.

Nicely put, but easily shortened: what Whittell thinks, an awful lot of people don't.

What an army of robotic teachers and encephalitic examiners! What fools all these theatre directors: no understanding of drama, nor even of commerce--they must want to see their companies playing to empty houses. Except, bizarrely, that the houses aren't empty, they're full. So it's the audiences who are fools? Clever people, dim people, rich ones, poorer ones, students, salesmen, people speaking fifty languages from Tierra del Fuego via Jakarta to Spitsbergen; people like me, who had barely thought about Shakespeare, or been invited to, until first I met "King Lear" and was thunderstruck: what a bunch of led-by-the-nose ninnies we are.

But Whittell knows why Shakespeare "has acquired immunity from the big, loud puncturing he deserves." First, he's out of copyright--

perfect for schools and am-dram, but also professional theatre companies and movie studios ... without paying anyone or tangling with the strike-prone Writers' Guild of America.

Ah, so that's why schools and amateur companies line up to put on "Henry IV, Part 2" rather than "The Mousetrap" (or, back in the real world, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" instead of "Mourning Becomes Electra"). That's why every tenth Hollywood film credits the screenplay to one W. Shakespeare.

Second, "the academic compulsion to fill the literary-historical void between Chaucer and the truly protean genius of Dickens." And, third, "the post-industrial bourgeoisie needed a canon of secular scripture whose base obsessions they shared."

This is seriously weird. It reads as if Shakespeare floruit about 1950, and one G. Whittell was born 40 years after that. The boring old reality is that Shakespeare's reputation was already high some 400 years ago: 250 or so years before any academic laid quill pen upon it--and had none of them heard of Donne, Milton, Pope, Sheridan, Jane Austen, Shelley, Byron ... flourishing in the meantime? Yes, and around 380 years before there was a post-industrial bourgeoisie.

Still, Shakespeare's "defenders say he repays study". As does Britain's Highway Code, Whittell adds mockingly. Really? "What d'you think of Marx, Comrade Lenin?" "Oh, he repays study". "And the New Testament, you born-again Christian?" "Well, it's worth reading." What admirer of Shakepeare ever defended him with such faint praise?

"They also say that Shakespeare, not Dickens, was the true genius." Do they? Which defenders, exactly? Of many thousands, name us five who have ever sought to praise Shakespeare by decrying Dickens.

Anyway, "he filched most of his stories from the ancients and English history." Untrue. Neither source inspired "Hamlet", "Lear", "Othello"--need I go on?--or most of the comedies. But let that pass, let's agree that Shakespeare borrowed from all over the place. The real absurdity follows: "That took care of content." Did it indeed? Has Whittell never written a book? (He has.) Countless novels, plays, even poems are inspired by the ideas or experience of others. Does that take care of their content? Historians indeed are not just inspired by historical fact but dependent on it. Does that take care of content, even for them?

On top, there's Shakespeare's "soporific" (and "borrowed") "dum-de-dum-de-dum." Like the same iambics, except six to the line instead of five, with which those other notorious mogadonkeys (and plot-filchers) from the Writers' Guild of Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, sent their audiences to sleep? Phaedra to that.

Still, even Whittell admits one small silver lining. Very small. "With so many of a writer's decisions made for him, it would have been bizarre if he hadn't turned a florid phrase or two." A phrase or two? Like Bill Gates has made a dollar or two? Florid, if you choose to think so, though most of us, most often, wouldn't. But are all those umpteen pages in any book of quotations just a mistake?

In sum, Shakespeare "was a decent jobbing wordsmith." So now we know. For four centuries, Britain's and later the world's finest actors and directors, its subtlest critics, its other playwrights, its audiences have all been wrong. Everyone is out of step but our Giles.

At which point, Mr Whittell, enough. You and I are decent jobbing wordsmiths. Shakespeare --OK, or "Shakespeare"--was, like Dickens, a genius.