London
Four hundred years ago, on April 23, 1616, William Shake-speare, having stayed up late in a “merry meeting” with some old friends, died of a fever. He stayed up late on a damp spring night, caught a chill, and died shortly afterwards. Much has happened in England since then, and since Shakespeare’s 400th birthday in 1964. In the 17th century, Shakespeare was not classical and clever enough; now he is too white and too difficult. Which Shakespeare did we see in this spring’s anniversary festivities? Is our Shakespeare authentic, or is authenticity merely another bit of ideological flotsam.
These questions are sharpened by developments on and off stage. The United Kingdom, an 18th-century polity, is going the way of King Lear and devolving into three kingdoms. The English, who spent centuries defining everybody else, are floundering to define themselves. The Welsh and the Scots now have national assemblies. Northern Ireland has “power-sharing.” But the English, the people who invented parliamentary democracy, have no national chamber.
Beyond the “rocky shore” of the “scepter’d isle,” the European Union has attracted and repulsed the British in equal measures. There is, as Brutus tells Cassius, “a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” The fortune of modern Britain was made by Thatcherite deregulation and the affairs of the City of London, not the regulators of Brussels, who have stranded the eurozone in “shallows [and] miseries.” And on June 23, two months to the day after the Shakespeare anniversary, the British voted to leave the EU.
Shakespeare is central to Englishness. Not just because he was the laureate of the age in which England defined itself as a mercantile Protestant state, at odds with Europe and at large in the Atlantic. Shakespeare is in the fabric of the English language and wove more of it than any other writer—more even than the team of contemporaries who translated the Authorized Version of the Bible. When we speak English, we are quoting Shakespeare, whether or not we “give the devil his due” (Henry IV, Part One).
The image of Shakespeare is made from what is in our minds and reflects what is on our minds. The fact that Shakespeare died on St. George’s Day only became significant in the patriotic 18th century. Before the 1850s, no one believed that Shakespeare had not written the works of Shakespeare. The idea that “Shakespeare” was not a middle-class glover’s son, but a pseu-donym for one blue-blood or another, is a compensatory fantasy from the age of the bourgeois revolution. In our time, the “sound and fury” of the Internet has multiplied the ranks and delusions of the Oxfordians, the champions of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Meanwhile, the age of organic food and period orchestras has produced Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, a modern replica built on the site of the original and dedicated to authentic performances of the plays.
In 1964, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the sixties had hardly got going. Sexual intercourse, Philip Larkin recalled, had only just begun, “Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.” As London was not yet Swinging, most of the birthday celebration took place at Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon. The Royal Shakespeare Company performed the entire cycle of history plays. The Shakespeare Centre, a museum and visitor center, opened to polite applause. The ancillary entertainments included John Dankworth and Cleo Laine’s Shakespeare and All That Jazz and one of Anthony Burgess’s best novels, Nothing Like the Sun. The tone was lowered only by the atrocity that is English folk dancing.
The RSC performed the history cycle for the death-iversary too. This time, though, they warmed up their Richards and Henrys in Stratford, then took them to London, Hong Kong, China, and New York. This year’s hit Shakespeare book, The Year of Lear, was written by James Shapiro of Columbia University. The Globe sent a company on a two-year world tour. After playing Hamlet in almost every country on the planet, they came home for the anniversary weekend.
If the Shakespeare business has become ever more global, in Britain it has become ever more local. London was the center of this year’s festivities, especially if you were a visitor, not a native. In part, this reflects Shakespeare’s life, which only began and ended in Stratford. It is also what happens when an artist belongs to everybody and when a metropolis absorbs the economy of its hinterland, then secedes from the rest of the country. As Noël Coward said, “I don’t know what London’s coming to—the higher the buildings, the lower the morals.”
Given how many London residents and visitors speak English as a second language, the range and quality of London’s Shakespeare400 events were superb. King’s College London coordinated dozens of cultural institutions and a small army of performers, producing a wonderful array of performances, exhibitions, and seminars.
Almost all of the important Shakespearean documents were on show in documentary exhibitions at King’s College, the British Museum, and the Globe Theatre. The unique performances included Henry V at the Middle Temple Hall (where Twelfth Night premiered in 1602) and the first production on Bankside since Shakespeare’s day, a “midnight matinee” of Much Ado About Nothing at the recently excavated site of the Rose Playhouse.
There were concerts and readings, walks and archaeological digs, and an array of conferences. The most interesting of these both concerned the relationship of language to music. At King’s College, Shakespeare’s Musical Brain looked at the aesthetics of performance and neurology. At the Victoria & Albert Museum, a motley collection of writers, musicians, theater technicians, and academics conducted an all-day symposium on The Tempest, the last and most musical of the plays. The speakers included novelist John Lanchester, poets A. E. Stallings and Alice Oswald, and the Oxford professor John Pitcher.
Shakespeare400 culminated on the anniversary weekend of April 23-24 with the conversion of Spenser’s “sweet Thames” into a pop-up cinema. Thirty-seven giant screens, one for each of the plays, showed newly commissioned 10-minute films, which explored the plays in chronological sequence over the two-and-a-half miles from Westminster Bridge to Tower Bridge. Hamlet was filmed in Denmark, Antony and Cleopatra in Egypt, and Romeo and Juliet in Verona.
This is the face that Britain turns outwards to the world. A country with cultural depth, keeping its national poet at the heart of a global city. A country whose sense of itself is so strong that, confident as a Mary Poppins chimney sweep, it can change in order to remain the same. Behind the scenes, however, the performers are not so confident. Back in the heartland at Stratford, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s centerpiece, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, betrayed an uncertainty bordering on panic about the relationship between Shakespeare and the modern English.
The RSC bills their Dream as “A Play for the People.” This evokes the worst of 20th-century manipulations, such as the Great Hall of the People in Beijing or Tony Blair’s rebranding of Diana, Princess of Wales as “The People’s Princess.” Shakespeare wrote for the people: If you miss the classical allusions, there are always the stabbings and jokes. The gap between high culture and ordinary people is not the work of Shakespeare, but the curators of English culture. This patronizing production shows how they created it and how they contrive new ways to widen it.
The “people” that the RSC has in mind are the little people. The Dream production will tour Britain’s provincial cities for the rest of the year. So there are more nonwhite faces than usual—Theo St. Claire gets his big break as First Fairy—and there’s a real dwarf, too, in case the kids get bored. This is the reserve team, steered by a few more experienced hands; but the RSC has depth on the bench, and almost all of the actors understand their lines, which is not always the case with Shakespeare. Mumbai-born Ayesha Dharker, who has played Emilia in Othello for the RSC, excels as Titania, Queen of the Fairies. Chu Omambala, who has played Malcolm in Macbeth at the Globe, is elegantly cruel as King Oberon. The young lovers are good enough, but Shakespeare’s deft, lyrical romance is marred by a crude production.
Shakespeare set the Dream in ancient Athens, by way of the Warwickshire woods where he had sowed his wild oats. This production is set in the trauma that so scarred the young Shakespeare, the Blitz of 1940-41. The disjuncture between the script and the staging is inexplicable—unless the RSC hopes to endow the children of immigrants with the sense of tragic-heroic grievance about the war that is the native Briton’s birthright. As the Falstaffian complaint goes, “Who won the bloody war, anyway?”
The star turn, Lucy Ellinson, follows the Hitlerite theme down the plughole by playing Puck as an irritating composite of Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Worse, the fairies are played not as spirits from a better world but as creatures from the wartime underworld of black marketeers and illegal nightclubs. Fedoras are tipped, jazz hands proffered, and tap dances hoofed. Jazz Shakespeare is not new: Before Dankworth and Laine, there was Duke Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder. This is like watching a high school production of Guys and Dolls. As often happens in cases of anachronistic conceit, the sharpest reflections of contemporaneity are inadvertent and distasteful. The dignified Chu Omambala is obliged to portray Oberon as a drug-dealing pimp. How enlightened of the RSC to take to the inner city a play in which a black man pushes pills into the mouths of his sluttish white molls: “So quick bright things come to confusion.” The director who thought this up is best not named.
She is Erica Whyman. In this production, the real war of the 1940s is the class war against the toffs and the culture snobs. A pianist plays a classical introduction and is lampooned by Puck, playing “Chopsticks.” The Duke of Athens is a cruel and stupid snob, wearing the uniform of the RAF—you know, the stuck-up, stuffed-shirted idiots who beat the Luftwaffe in 1940 and whose all-volunteer bomber crews suffered higher losses than any other service. Yet, as with the anachronism, the inverse snobbery backfires.
At each stop on the RSC’s tour, parties of local schoolchildren play the non-speaking fairies. Local amateur companies play the Mechanicals, the “hempen homespuns” whose “most lamentable comedy” Pyramus and Thisbe is the entertainment at the weddings that consummate the Dream. In keeping with the theme, the Mechanicals are wartime factory workers: Snug the Joiner is a Rosie the Riveter and Peter Quince her pedantic foreman. The idea that amateurs played the Mechanicals in Shakespeare’s time is a modern fiction. Admittedly, the 1930s were the golden age of am-dram, but the assumption that an amateur can best play a half-wit vitiates the point of acting.
At Stratford, the amateurs of the local Bearpit Theatre Company were as good as the professionals. Why cast them as fools? It is not just that Bottom is the comic hinge on which the whole production turns; changing the actor who plays him at each of the tour’s 13 stops will weaken the play’s rhythm. When Puck mimics the Mechanicals’ rehearsal, it looks too much like a professional mocking the little people—a lamentable comedy, which emphasizes the social gap that this production purports to address: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
Bette Midler observed that when it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London. There is a certain truth in the perception that English history comes down to Shakespeare and the Blitz. As Hamlet nearly says, the rest is gravy—all that Magna Carta and Mother of Parliaments stuff. But this Dream is not likely to convince the young to care about English history and English art. If the guardians of culture are so contemptuous of their heritage, you can hardly blame the immigrants and their children for not caring. The Blitz-themed production bombed with the Stratford audience of private schoolchildren and tourists. But when this Dream goes to cash-poor, Muslim-rich Bradford and Nottingham, will Shakespeare inoculate against alienation and radicalization?
Some parts of the plot may strike home. When Hermia refuses the marriage that her father has arranged, she faces the death penalty: a judicial honor killing. When the king and queen of the fairies fall out over who shall enjoy a juvenile slave, the son of an Indian prince, I was reminded of the recent scandal in nearby Rotherham, in which mostly Muslim gangs groomed children in care homes and pimped them across Britain: “What a dream was here!”
Or if you have been warned that the English are godless, drunken fornicators, will the Dream confirm everything your parents have warned you about? James I might have appreciated the homoerotic sadism in Oberon’s control of Puck, but children from traditional-minded families might not. Leaving aside the Dream‘s overt paganism, what about the bestiality, narcotics, and adultery? A man called Bottom, so drugged that he believes he is a donkey, mounts an equally intoxicated married woman while her children are watching. A common enough scene in any English town on a Saturday night, but unlikely to inspire a love of the stage or respect for the society that cherishes such spectacles. If you want to win over the Muslim children in Britain’s cities, The Merchant of Venice or Marlowe’s Jew of Malta might go down better.
Shakespeare could afford to romanticize his provincial youth in the Dream. He had already moved to London and did his best to stay there. Stratford was where he invested his ticket sales, buying property for his retirement. Like the young Bard, we must look to London for a classy production. The Wanamaker Playhouse is the Globe’s winter retreat, an all-wooden replica of a Jacobean theater, with candles for lighting, winches and trapdoors modeled after the originals, and delicate marquetry by Snug the Joiner.
The Wanamaker is named for the American actor and director Sam Wanamaker. In 1949, Wanamaker visited the site of the Globe and was baffled to find only a blackened plaque on the wall of a defunct brewery. Blacklisted in Hollywood, Wanamaker lived on an alien shore, like Prospero expelled from Milan in The Tempest. He worked the magic that raised the money that, four years after his death in 1993, revived the Globe. The Tempest is one-quarter of the Wanamaker Theatre’s offering for this year’s anniversary, along with the other three Last Plays, Cymbeline, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale.
The play is the star in this production. The RSC cast cartoons its characters. The Globe cast, unaided by clever props, lays bare the psychology of ambivalence and ambition. Tim McMullan’s Prospero is anxious and vain, manipulating Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban to stave off mortality. Brendan O’Hea plays Antonio, the brother who disinherited Prospero, as mighty in standing and weak with guilt. As Gonzalo, the courtier who has served both brothers, Joseph Marcell develops the emotional tensions that underpinned his portrayal of Geoffrey the English butler in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
In the Dream, one of Shakespeare’s early plays, the rulers are confident of their power. The dreamers sleep on flowery banks, and the magic for which Puck apologizes is real. In The Tempest, which is probably Shakespeare’s last play, the rulers are unsure of their power. The victims of Ariel’s trickery sleep in an “oozy bed” of wet mud; Prospero’s last speech, in which the magician abjures his “rough magic,” is an admission that art is artifice, a magic of strings and pulley, smoke and mirrors. In both plays, Shakespeare mixes his genres: high tragedy with low comedy, though the Dream has less tragedy and The Tempest less comedy. And both end with a play-within-a-play. In the Dream, it is the low farce of Pyramus and Thisbe; in The Tempest, the highest of Renaissance forms, an extended courtly masque.
This musical of pagan rebirth parallels Prospero’s exchange of rough magic for “heavenly music.” In The Tempest, words become music, music pure sound, and sound the waves that vibrate the tiny wooden theater; like the waves with which Prospero has wrecked Alonso’s ship or the thrown voices with which Ariel leads the shipwrecked usurpers before Prospero—and the audience to a confrontation with the deepest paradoxes of art.
The Tempest is a final accounting, the last marks in a ledger where words shade into silence and the spirits are “melted . . . into thin air.” The “baseless fabric” of illusion seems more real than our own lives: “Yea, all which it inherit—shall dissolve,” Prospero says. “Our music-and-dance spectacle is over.” Like the notations on a page of Bach, this insubstantial rough music of words is a prelude. The great art of the Globe is subsumed into the “great globe” and the music of the spheres.
As The Tempest moves from speech and politics to dance and music, one spell is broken and another spun. It is not easy for a cast to carry the audience from one willing suspension of disbelief to another. You can see that the Globe cast has worked this magic when Ariel appears from a trapdoor in the ceiling. The wires are visible, but as Ariel hovers overhead and sentences Antonio and his accomplices to “lingering perdition,” the upturned faces of the audience are “spell-stopp’d,” rapt and horrified: “We are the stuff as dreams are made of.”
Truly, a play for the nation, and for all nations. Authentic not just to Shakespeare’s words, but to this strange moment in the history of Brexit Britain—a moment when, as in Shakespeare’s time, politics and national identity are in flux: “The isle is full of noises.”
Dominic Green, who teaches politics at Boston College, is the author of The Double Life of Dr. Lopez: Spies, Shakespeare, and the Plot to Poison Elizabeth I.
