Shards of the Bard

Thoughts on Shakespeare: How Shakespeare Changed Everything
The National Post

The humble starling is a major blight on North America, a brightly coloured pest that ruins crops, spreads disease and breeds at an unstoppable rate. And it's Shakespeare's fault.

This is one of the fascinating facts I learned from Stephen Marche's How Shakespeare Changed Everything. It seems that in the 19th century, Eugene Schiffelin, a New York pharmaceutical magnate devoted equally to Shakespeare and to birds, conceived the idea of introducing into America specimens of every fowl mentioned in the complete works. Shakespeare mentions starlings just once; indeed he seems to have been the first writer ever to mention them, as is detailed in another essay in the book, one devoted to the unparalleled number of words the English language owes to its greatest writer. ("Unparalleled," by the way, is another of them.) The starling turns up in Henry IV Part I, in a speech that Marche calls "forgettable," though I think it's pretty memorable; it's the one in which Hotspur threatens to train a starling to say "nothing but Mortimer" to a king who has good reason to fear the name. Anyway, in 1860 Schiffelin released 60 starlings into Central Park, and since then there's been no stopping them.

This is the clearest case of cause and effect that Marche adduces in a sprightly, erudite sampling of Shakespeare's influence on absolutely everything. Others have to be more speculative. Even the book's initial statement -"William Shakespeare was the most influential person who ever lived" -is open to question. Has he really been more influential than Jesus or Muhammad? Grant, though, that he's the most influential writer who's ever lived, worldwide, and that the influence, once past a certain point, has become a self-perpetuating mechanism. An actor wants to play Hamlet because every other actor has played Hamlet. Shakespeare gets quoted (and misquoted) all the time, even by people who've never read him, and that omnipresence affects the way we think, speak, behave and see one another. "There would be no Obama," Marche writes, "if there were not first Othello, just as there would be no Leonardo DiCaprio if there were not first Romeo."

I wonder. Marche is probably right to say Shakespeare "invented teenagers as we know them today"; the same point was made by Marjorie Garber in Shakespeare and Modern Culture, a book similar to Marche's in its arguments, though perhaps because it's the work of a professional academic, more strait-jacketed by them.

DiCaprio's career was certainly jump-started by his playing Romeo, though of course it's perfectly possible he would have been a movie heartthrob if neither Shakespeare nor Romeo had ever existed; after all, the role didn't do much for Leonard Whiting (the previous film Romeo, if anyone remembers). Really, it's unknowable. Still, I'll give Marche DiCaprio. I'm far more skeptical about Obama. The thesis here, advanced in the book's first and flagship chapter, is that Shakespeare's black general eventually paved the way for a black president. The linchpin figure is Paul Robeson, whose successive and increasingly confident appearances as the Moor established him as an American culture hero. But there was far more than that to the Civil Rights movement, of which Obama is to date the ultimate beneficiary and the ultimate symbol. The canonical writer who did most to make him possible was probably not Shakespeare but Harriet Beecher Stowe. (Which doesn't make Obama an Uncle Tom, any more than he's an Othello.)

Marche complicates his argument by getting the play wrong. He says it's racist: "In the play's opening scene . Iago whips the city of Venice into a fury over Othello's elopement with Desdemona." No, he doesn't. The only person he whips up is Desdemona's father who, until his paternal pride was challenged, liked and respected Othello. As does everyone else in the play. When Lodovico, in the last speech, says, "The object poisons sight," he isn't, as Marche claims, referring to the spectacle of a (dead) black man embracing a (dead) white woman, he's describing three dead bodies on a bed, all of them the victims of Iago's villainy. Far from being racist, the play places racism as the refuge of people with their own agenda. The play Marche describes might have been written by Iago. Nor do I buy the idea that, according to Shakespeare, "Othello is a man whose inherent barbarism undoes his civilization." When Laurence Olivier played the role, he marked the moment of Othello's fall by tearing off the crucifix that he'd previously worn around his neck. It was a powerful moment, but there's absolutely no cue for it in the text. You might as well blame Leontes' jealousy in The Winter's Tale on his being Sicilian. (The Merchant of Venice is a more problematic case. Marche mostly avoids it, though he does bring forward two fascinating facts: The play, contrary to what you might expect, was banned in Nazi Germany; and it's always been very popular in Israel.)

Marche on Othello is doing what he, like Garber before him, recognizes has always been done with Shakespeare: quoting out of context for moral effect. He acknowledges that in Shakespeare "everybody finds what he or she is looking for, and I'm no exception." Not everybody is so frank. Just recently a columnist in this very newspaper quoted some lines from Julius Caesar that sound very noble and reflective in isolation, but are actually part of an incitement to mob violence. Even more amusingly, he attributed them to Macbeth. Not that Shakespeare's the only writer who can be misused in this way. Marche himself writes that George Orwell's vision of the future was "a boot stamping on a human face over and over." But that isn't Orwell speaking; it's his character O'Brien in 1984. Orwell crops up again, though less prominently than he should, in a chapter on Tolstoy's hatred of Shakespeare in general and King Lear in particular. Marche has little to add to Orwell's classic essay on the subject, but the chapter does occasion one of his happiest phrases, on Shakespeare's ability to cross borders: "He's better in English, but he's willing to negotiate."

And so it goes: rash generalizations balanced by elegant insights. Rightly, he links Shakespeare's frankness about sex to our own; wrongly, he asserts that all love poetry before Shakespearean had been Petrarchan idealism. In fact, Shakespeare's cheerful obscenity is also typical of his fellow playwrights, of his near- contemporary John Donne, and even of a gentle sonneteering predecessor like Sir Thomas Wyatt. And besides, the Shakespeare sonnet he actually quotes ("the expense of spirit in a waste of shame"), though certainly frank, is anything but celebratory. On the other hand, he can cut to the heart of what makes Shakespeare supreme: his "preternatural ability to match the sound of a word to its sense"; that "no one produces characters with more individuality of language than Shakespeare"; that he "violates the idea that life can be fully understood." And I could forgive anything for Marche's summary of Shakespeare the working playwright, indifferent to the printing of Hamlet: "He wasn't going to get paid whether it was good or bad, and besides he was in the middle of writing Macbeth."