The epithet “news junkie” implies an unhealthy addiction to information, and I’d always used it ironically until I was caught pouring over campaign memos at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, muttering about post-Super Tuesday shifts in voter preferences. You can easily keep absorbing information for all twenty-four hours of the news cycle, and before you know it, you’re simply too busy taking in material to step back and render any sort of judgment on it. I hit that point on that morning, and my only defense to an understandably amused and irate audience, after the initial flat-out denial, was that “I do other things, too”—including act (poorly) in the wonderful shows put up by the King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe. Yet even that’s a meager excuse, as the deeper you get into the specifics of Shakespeare, the more you realize his work circles back to the political dialogue that permeates our world.
It certainly wasn’t always as easy as it is now to accumulate political information, much less find an outlet in which to synthesize it, given that the concept of “freedom of speech” as we now understand it is less than 50 years old. As a result, we tend to view works from before the eras of, say, Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf, as forever “out of context.” They are, capital letters and all, Masterpieces of Western Literature or Civilization, applicable to You, Dear Reader, in Your Current Affairs, but are often perused for their unfailing general lessons while overlooking their temporal specifics.
So when we watch or read Shakespeare, we’re led to believe that it’s the timeless poetry and prose of four hundred years ago, amazing for its incredibly multi-faceted characters and linguistic leaps of faith that have given us words ranging from “misquote” to “assassination” and phrases as evocative as “the primrose path of dalliance” or as simple as “full circle.” We see Hamlet as a tale of a tormented young idealist, King Lear as the horrifically bleak portrait of an aging patriarch losing his mind, and As You Like It as the clear-eyed exposition of what it really means to be in love beyond empty words. The stories are generally applicable, but the specifics of the world they were written for fall by the wayside.
But the playwright—as our own Professor James Shapiro noted in his book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare—was as interested as any political junkie in what was going on around him, and “drew on hundreds of other works” while creating his own plays. In an era when printing was heavily regulated, “he must have spent a good many hours browsing” wherever he could, in public bookstores or private collections of various patrons. He snatched details from earlier published plays, historical tomes, and screeds signed anonymously, accruing information at an astonishing rate—and his outlets for his newfound knowledge were the plays he wrote and performed.
It’s a testament to Shakespeare’s skills as a dramatist that we continue to be moved by plays like Henry V and Julius Caesar without necessarily feeling the tension that they reflect from the world in which they were composed. But the political concerns of 1599, when the aging and heirless Elizabeth I once again marshaled her armies to pacify Irish revolts, weave their way into Shakespeare’s fictional 1415 on the battlefield in France. When the smooth operator Henry V rallies his war-weary troops, he chooses honeyed words of fraternity: “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” The phrases give Barack Obama’s speechwriters a run for their money, but what’s most telling is Henry’s willingness to switch hats so quickly after his victory, going from king of all his troops to a man concerned with only how many nobles have perished or how quickly he can legitimize his claim to the French throne. The unity and camaraderie (or perhaps even proto-nationalism) on the battlefield fades in the harsh reality of the war itself. As Professor Shapiro says, there’s a “corrosive and unavoidable national cost” in undertaking both the wars of 1415 and 1599 for the people fighting in them, regardless of how “just” a viewer thought those wars to be. Shakespeare weaves the contemporary dread of being used for no gain into a story that remains gripping some 400 years later—synthesizing the political and historical into something “timeless” in its story and very of-its-time in its situational displays.
As Professor Shapiro will tell you if you take his class, the ability to make something both topical for its target audience and appealing 400 years later when we have so much more access to information on both current affairs and historical events is one of the many reasons “why Shakespeare is Shakespeare and you are not.” Studying the politics of today sometimes requires the sort of distance critics apply to Shakespeare’s works. But we would be terribly remiss if we forgot that Shakespeare, like us, was caught up in the affairs of his time as well. Holding up a shield of “timelessness” against attempting to better understand the specifics of anything would only qualify us for King Lear’s command to the blinded Duke of Gloucester: “get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not.”
Chas Carey is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science and American studies. What Where runs alternate Wednesdays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com