One of the greatest
things about Shakespeare - one of the things I love most about his
writing - is his rare ability to have his characters speak for
themselves but also somehow show a more universal state of mind.
His
fiction is as real as it can get despite the fact that we are reading
his words or hearing them said hundreds of years after he wrote his
works.
In Shakespeare's famous
play Hamlet, the title character, the Prince of Denmark is depressed.
His father has been murdered by an uncle and his mother has quickly
remarried. Hamlet feels compelled to take revenge for his father's
death but his new isolation and sadness cause him to be on the point
of suicide. He says:
"I have of late—but
wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of
exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that
this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this
most excellent canopy, the air—look you, this brave o'erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it
appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation
of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how
infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable!
...The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. No, nor woman
neither."
To me this is one
of the most moving of Shakespeare's passages. I first heard it
performed by Richard E.
Grant, playing an unemployed actor
in the final scene of the superb film, "Withnail
and I."
Here, the character is seemingly
making a balancing act in his mind, weighing up the good and bad of
his species and the universe we inhabit. His judgement is a heavy
one, as if mankind does not merit a place in the cosmos.
Or is Hamlet
just speaking for himself alone? That is another beauty of
Shakespeare's writing. He is a poet and surely the greatest in the
history of the English language. His words are open to many
interpretations still (even after thousands of academics have picked
them apart syllable by syllable) and this pliability gives his ideas
a freshness that never dries up.
As a wordsmith and
creator of English, it's also generally accepted that no-one can be
compared with Shakespeare. When he couldn't find a word to do the job
he wanted he simply invented a new word and many of these words live
on in the language today.
His writing benefited from him also being
an actor. Shakespeare knew how lines could be delivered and had an
extraordinary ear for how their musical rhythm would be heard by
audiences.
Sadly, many people's experience of The Bard (as he
is often called) was having his sometimes archaic language drummed
into them by secondary school teachers who knew no better than the
traditional methods. I was one of these victims and didn't rediscover
the glories of Shakespeare's work until well into my twenties.
Then I
found that I too had to teach his plays. This was
not easy but surprisingly, I learnt that my Catalan students were much
more receptive to him than those kids I'd tried to teach Shakespeare
in Australia or England. Catalan students had the advantage of
already being bilingual and Elizabethan-era English was just another
challenge.
Shakespeare's timeless themes will continue to reach out
across the centuries, "to-morrow, and to-morrow, and
to-morrow."
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2016.]
(The Flower Portrait above was long thought to be a contemporary painting of
the Bard, but a 2004 investigation found it to be a 19th-century
forgery. / Photo: ARCHIVE.)
