#272.  MORE ON SHAKESPEARE.  Shakespeare is a possession, in almost any sense you want to give the word.  For Brits, he is a national possession: a secondhand bookshop in Stratford I once visited had a large corner display of Shakespeare and a small sign that said proudly: “Local author.”  For theatre people especially, booksellers, professors of literature, he is a professional, a vocational possession.  Stephen Greenblatt has written of “the special delight that Shakespeare bestows on everything,” and there is a special delight in hearing actors (actors especially) and others talk for whom Shakespeare has been a lifelong personal possession—something they have with them.  This delight is an every-page occurrence in Judi Dench’s recent book Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), which evolved out of a series of conversations with her friend and fellow-actor/director Brendon O’Hea, recorded over a period of four years, and originally intended for the archives of the Globe.  O’Hea wondered if the conversations “might have a wider appeal.”  I should say they do.  

     I assumed the appeal would be anecdotal—what stories are more fun than theatre stories?  Dench talks with endless enthusiasm about working as part of a troupe, working with specific actors and playing to each night’s audience; she plainly loves the unpredictability, the crazies, of the stage-actor’s experience.  (O’Hea calls her an adrenalin junkie.)  She’s not mad for directing, as opposed to acting; directing puts her in charge and keeps her a bit out of the communal fray.  She is—and this is so especially appropriate in talking about Shakespeare—the least dogmatic of teachers.   She talks about how much the manner of speaking the verse has changed: listen to the early films of the plays, or older recordings, and it’s remarkable to hear how, for instance, what women’s voices were intended or allowed to sound like—those reedy older recordings seem centuries away from the newer, more naturalistic recordings.  She’s worked with the legends—Peter Hall and John Barton and Trevor Nunn—and yet in the last chapter, “Advice,” she says simply, “The next generation will decide what’s useful, and you have no control over that, and nor should you….I wouldn’t trust anybody who tells you they have all the answers.”

      The further, deeper appeal, though, was: damn, this woman knows her stuff.  I don’t know why that should have surprised me; she’s been doing this for sixty-plus years, but I’d expected to be entertained and ended up being deeply impressed.  Each chapter deals with a specific play and the roles Dench acted, and she is a trove of instruction, of practical knowledge, on how the characters are constructed, how they can be acted, how each production met the possibilities of the plays.  In one, The Winter’s Tale, she has played four different roles, in one production actually doubling Hermione and Perdita.  She speaks freely of the plays as a long-time familiar, loving but uncowed: she admits, for instance, that she finds the play and the characters of The Merchant of Venice repugnant. And there are innumerable small asides and annotations.  In the beautiful verse “Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun,” from Cymbeline, there are the lines “Golden lads and girls all must / Like chimney sweepers, come to dust.”  I’ve loved (and recited to myself) those lines for more than fifty years, without knowing that “chimney-sweeps” were a Warwickshire word for dandelions’ puff-heads. (Further reading told me “golden lads” referred to the dandelions’ yellow blooms.)  Those brief lines, after all these decades, still had more to tell me.  I thought of Hayden Carruth’s lines about “Having placed the sparkle of knowledge in my mind like a jewel on a dark velvet ground.”  Exactly.

      O’Hea speaks with some awe of Dench’s “phenomenal memory,” able to recite entire scenes from the plays, and it’s her instant recall—along with her wit, her slang, and her easy good humor—that makes the whole book so freshly, spontaneously possible.  She says, “Because those lines that he wrote—they have to be good for your brain, don’t they?” and we can only agree.  But the clincher is in what follows, when she says: “Just whispering them quietly to myself can give me an endorphin rush.”  “When I was at my lowest during the pandemic I kept thinking of Richard II’s line: ‘I wasted time, now doth Time waste me.’  Shakespeare has examined every single emotion.  His writing has the capacity to make us feel less alone.”  And again, we can only agree.

     And then there’s Shakespeare as a specifically American possession.  As as a confessed Bardolator, I find it immensely satisfying that James Shapiro has gotten Shakespeare horned into the prestigious Library of America series with a volume called Shakespeare in America, an anthology of Americans’ encounters with the Bard.  And in his volume Shakespeare in a Divided America, he writes that in the earlier years of the States, when personal libraries were not a common thing, if a household had only two books, they were most likely a Bible and a Shakespeare.  De Tocqueville, in 1831, wrote that there “is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.”  Performances of the plays were standard fare, and by the nineteenth century Americans started billing themselves as the true and natural inheritors of Shakespeare’s work, as a second and new race of English-speakers.  Presidents as educated men were enthusiasts: Bill Clinton wrote the very intelligent preface to Shakespeare in America, and Lincoln, whose official education was so limited, was prone to great bouts of recitation, often to his guests’ exhaustion.  Whether all this will survive the American twenty-first century’s failures in education remains to be seen.

      The title of Shakespeare in a Divided America suggests our current days, when everyone’s mad at everyone else and the copies of the social contract seem to be especially flammable.  He prefaces the book with an account of Oskar Eustis’s 2016 production of Julius Caesar, which involved the assassination of Gregg Henry’s Caesar, whose “gait, intonation and swagger” very nicely mimicked Donald Trump. (Anticipating the response, Eustis seeded the audience with actors who got up and left the theatre in mock outrage.)  But Shapiro pulls us back in time to focus on earlier divisions in the country, and how the issues were reflected in the staging of Shakespeare’s plays.  I was a bit skeptical of this approach to begin with, but Shapiro really does pull it off.  He begins with the arguments about miscegenation, mirrored in productions of Othello; he goes on to manifest destiny, with its amusing news that Ulysses S. Grant, apparently in his youth a lissome lad, was once cast as Desdemona.  A chapter on class warfare brings up the astonishing Astor Place riot, involving “somewhere between 10,000 and 24,000” people, all of which was based on a feud between British actor William Macready and American actor Edwin Forrest and their respective Macbeths.  And so on, to the film Shakespeare in Love, which opens up questions in a dozen different directions, and back finally to Eustis’s Julius Caesar.  The constant in all these times and issues is that in each case the intent of the play opens up the questions more than it sews up any answers; no play of Shakespeare is ever an open-and-shut case, and Shapiro sees this as the quicksilver which keeps the plays alive and (to use that dismal term) relevant, for a little while longer at least.