If you are worrying that Britain is falling apart, getting more unequal, turning its back on the world or losing its humanity — and there are plenty of good reasons to be concerned about all these things at the moment — then my advice on this 400th anniversary of his death is to stop worrying for a while and think about William Shakespeare.
That’s because, in addition to his other talents, Shakespeare is a great provider of perspective. This does not mean that Shakespeare can tell us how to rein in the fat cats, to govern fairly or which way to vote on Europe. But it does mean he has thought about greed, stable government and sovereignty. If power’s your game, Shakespeare’s your man.
He is also, quite simply, the best thing that ever happened to Britain as a people. If you are tempted to castigate the institutions of modern Britain, it is surely reassuring that its greatest compatriot, the country’s ultimate gift to the world, was not a monarch, an aristocrat, a general, a conqueror or a politician, but a writer who lived in the wings of great events, rather than strutting upon the public stage.
As you would expect, there is a statue of Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. There’s another in London’s Leicester Square. But the truth is that we need no public memorials to Shakespeare.
That’s because Shakespeare’s real monument is inside us. It is in the language one uses, the phrases one utters, the conversations they conduct, the jokes they make, the lines that make them suddenly serious, and in the images and references they reach for in order to express themselves and to imagine the country, its history and its future.
Last week, however, a couple of anniversary-related surveys seemed to challenge that kind of warm confidence.
In one, the British Council found that Shakespeare is more popular outside the United Kingdom than he is there in his own country. In the other, it turns out that more 18-to 25-year-olds are likely to recognise the lyrics of Justin Bieber than to identify a line by Shakespeare. This is water off a duck’s back. For it is no part of the case for Shakespeare to pretend, in defiance of so much evidence to the contrary, that he transcends the pernicious class divisions of the British education system or the generational patterns of cultural consumption. He obviously does not. Although Shakespeare is by a long way the closest thing that England or Britain has to a national poet, neither England nor Britain can be said to possess a common culture.
Fortunately, however, popularity and knowledge are not the right tests to apply; for an important part of Shakespeare’s great achievement is that he has got inside our heads without our even realising it.
One way of demonstrating this is to remember that Shakespeare alone contributed about 2,000 words to the English language that it had not contained before. Among these words, as listed by Bill Bryson’s book Mother Tongue, are: barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful, hint, hurry, lonely, summit and pedant. How would speakers of English of all generations, manage without them? Some of them have indeed already done service earlier in this piece.
Then there are the phrases that Shakespeare conferred on us while we weren’t looking. Bryson lists some of these too: one fell swoop, in my mind’s eye, more in sorrow than in anger, to be in a pickle, vanish into thin air, play fast and loose, the sound and the fury, cold comfort, to beggar all description, salad days, flesh and blood, tower of strength and many, many more.
Such was Shakespeare’s bounty that, early on in Hamlet, he managed to bequeath us two familiar catchphrases in a single sentence: “Though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance,” says the Danish prince. Respondents to surveys may assure researchers they are unable to identify lines from Shakespeare, but the likelihood is that many of them often quote Shakespeare without even knowing it.
But it is not just the words and the phrases. Don’t forget Shakespeare’s characters. The regulars may not be discussing the finer points of The Winter’s Tale in the Dog and Duck every night, but in the shape of characters such as Hamlet, Romeo, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Falstaff and Shylock — to name only six of the more obvious ones — Shakespeare has already given us more archetypes than anyone else in the culture.
And so many little things too. Was there ever a writer who peopled his work with more memorable minor characters? They are a constant joy. Shakespeare created an array of gardeners, gaolers, grooms, knights, heralds, sailors, scriveners, messengers and ladies in waiting, as well as four men called Balthazar. And what lines he could bestow. Has a murderer ever been gifted such poetry as the one in Macbeth who observes, as he waits to kill Banquo: “The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day: / Now spurs the lated traveller apace / To gain the timely inn.”
Columnists should know their limitations. I am no Shakespeare expert. I could never write one of those brilliant scholarly pieces about Shakespeare’s late plays, his treatment of families, his understanding of love, or the books he read that have been appearing elsewhere in the Guardian this week.
Nevertheless the coffee mug on my desk has the names of 38 Shakespeare plays printed on it. I have now seen 37 of them — the exception is The Two Noble Kinsmen , since you ask — many of them several times. I’ve seen Richard III in Georgian, Pericles in Japanese, Coriolanus in German and a hip-hop Comedy of Errors. I’ve seen Olivier as Othello, Gielgud as Prospero, Fiona Shaw as Richard II and Judi Dench in almost everything. And I still get a tingle from the mere thought of As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV Part I, Twelfth Night and The Tempest.
And I do know this. To belong to Shakespeare’s country and to think and speak in Shakespeare’s language is possibly the best break the inhabitants of Britain ever got.
To be rich in corn, fish, steel or oil is useful. Never knock material prosperity. But the ability to commune with the world’s most enduringly fecund poet and playwright in his own tongue opens up the world of the imagination, the mind and the senses in ways that are a privilege to share, and a deep responsibility to pass on.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Martin Kettle is an associate editor of the Guardian and writes on British, European and American politics, as well as the media, law and music.
