Happy Bard Day

Daniel Hannan notes the occasion:

Four-hundred-and-fifty years ago today, in a village in the West Midlands, the greatest imaginative intelligence evolved by our species was born. Lawrence Olivier called Shakespeare “the nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God”. John Dryden wrote that, of all the poets, “he had the largest and most comprehensive soul”. Thomas Carlyle asserted, “I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other man.” For Harold Bloom, “Bardolatry, the worship of Shakespeare, ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is. The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually.”

Bob Duggan traces the spread of bardolatry:

Once the modern taste for the individual took hold … Shakespeare found a home beyond England’s shores. American colonists staged plays by Shakespeare as early as 1750. “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835 in Democracy in America. From the very beginning of the American experiment in democracy, Shakespeare and his individualized characters inspired a government of, by, and for the people, to paraphrase the Gettysburg Address of that notorious Shakespeare lover Abraham Lincoln. As kings fell and democracies rose throughout Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, Shakespeare (often in vernacular translation) showed the way, sometimes in the form of music, as in Giuseppe Verdi’s operas Otello and Falstaff, which provided the popular soundtrack to the political movement by which modern Italy was born.

Noting that Virginia Woolf wrote “man has Shakespeare & women have not” in an early draft of To the Lighthouse, Stefanie Peters considers what the playwright’s works have meant for women:

What has changed in 450 years of performing, reading, writing Shakespeare? The history of women interacting with Shakespeare’s plays is also the history of women’s rights, suffrage, and of the feminist movement. It is a history of women being silenced and of finding ways to speak out anyway. Shakespeare has been, and is, an uneasy ally in this history. He complicates but also enriches our idea of what a woman is. Too often we are still Katherinas, forced to compromise our dignity in order to retain our voice, or else our insistence on speaking is blamed for our tragedies, like Juliet. But the reason why we still read Shakespeare’s women, is that they are women. Goneril, Juliet, and Katherina are finally not ciphers. Whatever else they may be, they are true women, and they have true voices.

Meanwhile, Stephen Marche reflects on the best modern adaptations, Julia Fleischaker assesses booksellers’ recent claims to have discovered a dictionary Shakespeare annotated, and Roy Peter Clark shares the Shakespeare-penned sentence that changed his writing. Zooming out, Claire Hansen remarks on the author’s mystique:

Shakespeare knew very well that the spirit of a man – the reputation and fame that lingers on – jars imperfectly with the physical being of the body. That is what leads to the assassination of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play: his physical limitations, his humanity, cannot match up to the imagined godliness of his mind and spirit.

In celebrating Shakespeare’s birth-date this year, it is well worth distinguishing between man and colossus. The fertile and imaginative potential of Shakespeare’s plays will continue on “so long as men can breathe or eyes can see” (Sonnet 18) – as long as there are hands and minds to enjoy them and to experiment with them, remaking the plays for the times and places of now and the future.

But this is a different phenomenon to Shakespeare the man; and any attempts to reconcile the two will always prove wanting. That, perhaps, explains the ongoing impulse to both worship and to question William Shakespeare.

Previous Dish on Shakespeare here, here, here, and here.