What’s Wrong with Shakespeare (?)

by Bruce Donehower

If feelings fail you,

Vain will be your course,

And idle what you plan

Unless your art

Springs from the soul

With elemental force.

Goethe, Faust

On this the occasion of the celebration of the 400th anniversary year of William Shakespeare’s death, we will hear many voices praising the Bard’s enduring impact on world literature.

We will not hear many voices complaining that Shakespeare’s influence is overrated and overblown, and that enthusiasm for Shakespeare is naively misplaced. The suggestion of such a contrarian view will, in fact, puzzle or enrage many people - it now being a matter of accepted wisdom that Shakespeare is and was and shall remain the indisputable Genius of Wester Liturature (no one reads Homer anymore, really).

But in fact there are reasons to complain of Shakespeare and to ask: "What's wrong with a world that idolizes this playwright?"

Don't get me wrong! I am a fan of Shakespeare. I thought his plays and poetry enthusiastically as a professor at UC Davis. I championed him in meetings of the Section for Literary Arts and Humanities. I enthusiastically lectured to anthroposophical branches on his seminal importance as a Rosicrucian initiate. (There, I have unfurled my banner!)

But because I am trained in the discipline of the humanities, I take for granted that there are conflicting views. Say one thing is absolutely so, and it is certain that you can make a counterargument that the completely opposite position is in fact the absolutely right way to see the world. Shakespeare, by the way, does this all the time. We call it doubling—saying one thing while implying just the opposite at the same time, so that the poor reader doesn’t know what the heck to believe is True. The plays are rife with examples—and Shakespeare seems to take a devilish delight in the practice. For example, in our recent Section meetings in Fair Oaks we discussed how the “sublime” tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet" is mirrored and parodied by "A Midsummer Night’s Dream". The two plays are really one play turned inside out and outside in. (They were written at the same time.) Are we to weep for the tragic lovers, or die laughing at them? This constant doubling and shifting and unwillingness (no pun intended) to say “Just What We Should Think or Believe” is one reason that some folks find Shakespeare annoying—especially folks who want a story wrapped up with a fine moral and delivered to us with a homily that tells us how to live more meaningful lives. Shakespeare refuses—or, to use a cliché: Shakespeare always hides the cheese.

Imagine yourself a right-thinking Christian of the time, suffering through a raucous performance at the Globe. How confusing, how offensive, how blatantly physical, how maddeningly contra-metaphysical, how impossibly fun and randy and wild and wildly suggestive is the scene! Too much, too much—too natural!—might you cry.

And that, by the way, sums up one good reason to complain. Shakespeare, the so-called poet of Nature (Samuel Johnson started this line of thought), presents the world as it meets us in all its complexity, in all the multifaceted beauty and horror of our human situation, but he doesn’t offer us a summary metanarrative of moral oversight, an ideology, or some sort of narrated metaphysic with which to console us in our experience of our dream or nightmare of life. Characters, for example, like Polonius in Hamlet, may offer such consolation, but not Shakespeare. Shakespeare is never tendentious. For every Hal, there is a Falstaff. For every Romeo, a Bottom. And so on. It can drive you nuts. Those who complained of Shakespeare, and of the theater in Shakespeare’s time— the Puritans, for example—were ceaseless in their fury to close down this riotous, mixed-up scene. And they did, in fact, prevail—eventually succeeding in their quest to institute a cultural revolution that closed down the theaters and rousted out the sort of questionable individuals who make the world wobbly, uncertain, weird.

So there’s One Thing Wrong with Shakespeare: he just won’t say what’s really so; he won’t—shall we paraphrase?—stand his ground.

In more recent times, someone of note who voiced this complaint about Shakespeare, more or less, was Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy launched a salvo against Shakespeare in the later years of his life in which he took the Bard to the mat on a number of issues. His opening words are worth quoting. I don’t think we find a more humorous smack down of a famous author by another famous author outside the gripe that Mark Twain had with James Fennimore Cooper—but that’s another story. Tolstoy writes:

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth, not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the significance which this civilized world attributes to the works of Shakespeare was itself senseless.

Not only is our adulation of Shakespeare and his dramas “senseless,” things get worse. Tolstoy concludes his paragraph in a grand crescendo of moral outrage and calls the adulation of Shakespeare’s “non-existent merits” an “evil.” Once the big E-word gets trotted out—well, you get the picture.

But this essay isn't about Tolstoy. If it were, we could put Goethe on the scales to counterbalance Russian Gravitas. Goethe in his youth had a destiny meeting with Shakespeare. Irresistible attraction, rather than "repulsion", marked the encounter, in Goethe's words:

The first page I read made me a slave to Shakespeare for life. And when I had finished reading the first drama, I stood there like a man blind from birth whom a magic hand has all at once given light. I realized and felt intensely that my life was infinitely expanded. Everything seemed new to me, unfamiliar, and the unaccustomed light hurt my eyes. Gradually I learned to see, and, thanks to my awakened spirit, I still feel intensely what I have gained.

Rudolf Steiner, by the way, underscored the importance of Goethe’s encounter with the Bard and the “deeply significant” influence that Shakespeare had on Goethe—and German literature generally, I might add. Steiner’s remarks about Shakespeare are entirely positive. Most interesting to me, however, is that Steiner appreciated that Shakespeare was a person of the theater—in his bones, an actor. Much that some folks find offensive, morally suspect, and/or wobbly in the Bard derives from this fact, one might argue. But Steiner cites this as a matter to be accepted and praised.

Shakespeare, portrait by William Blake

In other words, the “Play” for Shakespeare was the thing. “The intellect with its explanations, its consistencies and inconsistencies, cannot approach” those dramas, Steiner tells us (Shakespeare and the New Ideals). This, the complex drama of the human character in all our meanness, ridiculousness, sorrow, and sublimity (the list of confusion goes on)—this is what Shakespeare presents upon the stage.

To sum it up, then, “what’s wrong with Shakespeare” is the same as “what’s right.” It comes back to who we are. For those who would witness life through the lens of a metanarrative, finding morals and higher meanings and eschewing “fallen” nature as that which is undeserving of High Artistic Serious Intent—well, then Shakespeare is not your guy. But if we find ourselves outside the consolation of a metanarrative that makes a tidy fable of human life, then we walk in freedom with the Bard. His plays, in all their diversity, are alive, but they confront us with the same bewildering riddle as life. They are eloquent of that mystery, but at the same time, profoundly silent, like the Sphinx. Some can endure the mystery; some cannot.

Bruce Donehower (bdonehower@yahoo.com) is Lecturer in the University Writing Program at the University of California at Davis. He is the author of Miko, Little Hunter of the North, illustrated by Tom Pohrt (1990); The Singing Tree: An Alchymical Fable (2004); Ice: A Novel of Initiation (2004); and SancXtuary: A Novel (2012). He is translator and editor of The Birth of Novalis (2007). Most of his books are available from the Rudolf Steiner Library. He is active in the Literary Arts & Humanities Section of the School for Spiritual Science.