The Contemporary Bard

By Stefan Kanfer

"Why, what an intricate impeach is this!" --Comedy of Errors

"Well, he in time may come to clear himself... he with his oath ... will make up full clear, whensoever he is convented." --Measure for Measure

"Your Grace has given a president of wisdom above all princes..." --Henry VIII

Bardsmanship is a game with no losers. As the new, computerized Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare proves, every critic and defender of the Nixon Administration can find barbs and shields in the blank verse. The playwright has some thing for everyone: politics and religion, sin and redemption--if it is in the human condition, it is in the Shakespearean canon. Most of the year, Shakespeare resides quietly in the volumes of his work. But each summer he thunders and chuckles in festivals from the Spokane Expo to Central Park. For those sun-flooded weeks, the Swan of Avon returns to the group for whom he really wrote -- the audience. This year, as in the 370-odd before, that audience will find whatever it seeks in the ceaselessly contemporary productions.

Indeed, Shakespeare's themes remain as valid in the epoch of Henry K. as they were in that of Henry V. The vanished English world, like this one, was beset with crises. Scientists had just proved that the sun no longer orbited the earth; skepticism had been imported wholesale from Montaigne's France; religious wars had undermined faith.

The Shakespearean stage, like our own, was cankered with financial woes and preoccupied with sex. Shakespeare produced more dubious double entendres than anyone before or since. Some are readily perceived: Hamlet's announcement, "Then came each actor on his ass," meant then what it does now. In the first Elizabethan world -- when there were some 40 euphemisms for sexual organs (including will, dial and den)--almost every passage twinkled with lewdness. Like today's cheerless smut, the Elizabethan bawdiness was both deplored and exploited. The nonsexual slang has traveled with greater success: here are the witches in Macbeth, telling each other to "cool it"; here is Anthony in Julius Caesar: "I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,/ Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,/ To stir men's blood. I only speak right on ..."

Yet it is not the glistening language that keeps the plays fresh; it is their powerful moral undertow. The characters may be caparisoned in quattrocento raiment, but they speak to eternal situations. When Othello says, "I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation/ That chamberers have," he escapes temporal boundaries and becomes the chorus of the ghetto. Similarly, Shylock cries, "... Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" The tone of the merchant's queries seems lifted not from ancient Venice but from some current Security Council dispute.

The responsibility of power is no less an obsession with Shakespeare than with today's investigators. In his plays chaos always ensues when violence is done to a leader, but Shakespeare also sensed the perils of unquestioning obedience. Says a soldier in Henry V: "If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us." But his compatriot is not so sure: "if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all 'We died at such a place.' " Four centuries look down; the abuses of power have altered in style but not in consequence.

Throughout each work, there are similar reminders of headlines:

Bolingbroke: Are you contented to resign the crown?

King Richard: Aye, no--no, aye, for I must nothing be,/ Therefore no no, for [if] I resign to thee/ ... What more remains?

Northumberland: No more, but that you read/ These accusations and these grievous crimes/ Committed by your person .../ Against the state of profit of this land.

Unhappily, Shakespeare, like other natural resources, has suffered from erosion. Many of his phrases have been forced down the throats of schoolchildren for generations, until at last they have become weary commonplaces of the English tongue. From star-cross'd lovers to the rose that by any name would smell as sweet --all these have become bromides. One can sometimes sympathize with the tired businessman who refuses to see any more Shakespearean productions because they are too full of quotations.

Yet somehow the personae who speak those quotations have not staled. Caliban may be an imaginary primitive, but he has been legitimately interpreted as the Colonial Victim violated by Western Man. Kate, of The Taming of the Shrew, may succumb to Petruchio, but not before declaring herself the most eloquent women's liberationist. There is no father who can look upon Lear and Cordelia without pangs, and as for Hamlet, he is so real that he has been psychoanalyzed (and found Oedipal) by Freud's disciple, Ernest Jones.

It would appear, that Shakespeare's universal mirror reflects every social being. In other authors this capacity might properly have been termed vacillation. With Shakespeare, it is universality. In that most universal play The Tempest, a magician recites his--and his author's--wistful valedictory:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air. And, like the baseless

fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces...

Yea, all which it inherit--shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.

Shakespeare's instincts played him false. For his pageant is more solid than flesh. It has not faded; the works seem to grow more substantial each year. In the summer of '74, beyond the gilt-edge bindings and Variorum editions, Shakespeare lives in his favorite place--onstage.

sbStefan Kanfer

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