All The World's a Stage - Day 265 - 366 Days of Resilience
This week sees the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, who was born and died just a stone’s throw from where I currently live. The resilience of the bard’s oeuvre is beyond doubt and the fact that his plays are continuously performed at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, in Stratford-upon-Avon to great acclaim is testament to the genius of his writing.
The degree to which old Bill’s work is still held in high regard has everything to do with his ability to find a way to the heart of the human condition and to rip it out and lay it bare for all to see as a reflection of both the glory and the absurdity of our lives.
He takes the pomposity of great men and uses it to reduce them to being seen as worthless fools. He takes the raw emotions that we are all only too familiar with and shows how we are slaves to those feelings and how they can tear us apart.
My own favourites in terms of a comedy, a tragedy and a history are the Merchant of Venice, Macbeth and Henry V, although my daughter’s rendition of Hamlet has me struggling to leave that one off the top spot as my favourite tragedy. In choosing those three I am conscious that I am also leaving out Romeo and Juliet, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard III, which I might easily have chosen. I appreciate that they are quite obvious choices, but hey, we like what we like.
The Merchant of Venice is my favourite comedy due to the the intelligence of the storytelling both from the point of view of Portia’s handling of the men that she encounters, but also the way in which the issue of Shylock’s otherness is written. For a comedy, Shakespeare can be quite dark at times where Shylock is concerned. Despite their loathing of him as the moneylender who would have his pound of flesh, Shakespeare’s audiences are made only too aware of their own prejudices when he proclaims. ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.’ Prejudice and hatred of difference hasn’t changed very much in 400 years.
I still find it a wonderfully alien experience to arrive at a Shakespeare play, to listen to the language of the day being spoken and for a short while to be completely disorientated by it, until gradually my ear adjusts to the phrasing and the rhythm and it’s as though some sort of spell makes it all intelligible. But perhaps it is Shakespeare’s skilful use of words to portray emotion that is so timeless that makes it so accessible.
It seems strange to be celebrating the anniversary of someone’s death, but I guess it’s the only 400th celebration that we have to work with where Shakespeare is concerned.