Shakespeare is again almost daily cultural news. In the last couple of years, books, productions and films have been coming out at a rapid pace. This flurry makes a statement: Shakespeare is relevant for our time; he matters to us now.
Some of the books I found concerned performing Shakespeare for the 21st-century stage, such as Wesley Van Tassel's superbly professional Clues to Acting Shakespeare (Allworth Press, 208 pages, $16.95).
Others attempted biography, despite the continuing scarcity of solid facts, such as Garry O'Connor's William Shakespeare: A Popular Life (Applause Books, 320 pages, $27.95), or assessed the impact of Shakespeare on film, Douglas Brode's updated Shakespeare in the Movies: From the Silent Era to Today (Berkley Boulevard, 272 pages, $14).
Still others recorded their author's personal love and hate affairs with the bard, such as Herman Gollob's Me and Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard (Doubleday, 432 pages, $26), or Frank Kermode's idiosyncratic and highly readable take on Shakespeare's Language (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $30). Another noted what Shakespeare has to say to men and women in business, John O. Whitney and Tina Packer's Power Plays: Shakespeare's Lessons in Leadership and Management (Simon & Schuster, 316 pages, $26).
Why this rash of books on Shakespeare? Why today, almost 400 years after his last play, are we still reading him? What has he got to say to us in this post 9 / 11 age?
Last year, I had the opportunity to direct Macbeth at a Philadelphia theater. Here was a semi-historical tragedy recounting the adventures of a despot who lived in Scotland during the middle ages. In directing this play, was I just going through an exercise in literary nostalgia?
As I was working with a non-equity group of actors, I took two weeks of our rehearsal time for the actors to learn the meaning of the lines. So often, I had noticed that particularly American actors mouth Shakespeare without understanding him. Almost miraculously, as the actors fully understood the lines, they found they could properly articulate them. Form and substance coalesced.
The next couple of weeks on meter and ellipses went easily, as if the very weight of the meaning of the words seemed to determine their proper delivery. In addition, we all relearned something of vital importance, that periodically we need Shakespeare to teach us just what a great resource our language is, how subtle, forceful, diverse and in the end, adequate to explain and give voice to the full range of our experience.
During this first phase of rehearsals, I met with the costumer and set designer, and, without giving the matter too much thought, decided on atemporal costumes and sets, which would resist any attempt to date the play. I also selected modern, atonal, disjunctive music, Pendericki, Gubaiduluna and Rihm.
Finally, I put the witches almost continuously on stage to emphasize the constant disruptive, chaotic atmosphere of the play. Instinctively, I was saying to myself and the audience, "This is real, this is now. This isn't an historical reconstruction of a play, but a living, contemporary drama."
As I got into the play, I began to realize why I had done this. Macbeth was a figure plucked right out of today's newspapers -- he was Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian dictator, presently on trial for genocide at the Hague.
As I watched Thomas Bazar's brilliant portrayal of Macbeth in rehearsal, I realized that Shakespeare was telling me how such a figure is created, how he somehow can morally burn his bridges, become "so steeped in blood" he cannot return, how his moral sensibilities can be numbed and his heart hardened so that he becomes not just one who kills, but a killer.
I learned how others, like his wife, played exquisitely in the Philadelphia production by Cyndi Jansen, can equally take the route of insanity and suicide, while Macbeth grits his teeth and murders until it becomes his nature. I also began to understand how others, still guided by conventional moral principles, can look upon such a figure with utter incomprehension, and put him out of the natural world, while Shakespeare is telling us just how nature and history can conspire to create him.
I saw how in a time of uncertainty -- in Shakespeare's time the close of the stable middle ages and the opening of a still uncharted modern world -- apprehension and anxiety could take the form of witches who literally come out of the ground, who combine violence and sensuality just like modern rock singers.
How like his world is ours with globalization -- the discoveries of the new world; terrorism -- England's wars with Spain; AIDS -- and the plague that was decimating Shakespeare's world. How disruptive information, delivered in Shakespeare's play by a constant flow messengers and in our world by TV and the Net, can scramble our attention, and drive us to despair that we ever will achieve a unified purpose.
How we must fight for concentration, and when we achieve it, be careful we have not discarded every other human intention so that we become like the enemies we are fighting.
Does it matter today that Macbeth was historically a far more benign character than Shakespeare portrays him? Again, Shakespeare seems so up-to-date. No, he says, as if he were Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault -- it doesn't matter what he was historically, he matters what he is to us. Just as today it matters little to us that Mark Anthony was a mafia hood who hired Cicero's killers; he is for us, and probably forever, thanks to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a model of young, idealistic, civic virtue.
How much we can learn from this timeless sage. How much better we will understand crimes of passion because of Othello, or the bitterness of ego-fighting-age, as in King Lear, or the diversions of purpose which surround too much thought, as in Hamlet. Or the war of the sexes as in The Taming of the Shrew, or the frailty of the military ego as in Coriolanus, or the shifting realities of the world, as in Midsummer's Night Dream. And finally, only Sophocles perhaps in Oedipus at Colonus has given us a glimpse as profound as Shakespeare does, in his The Tempest, of the final outcome of life -- the redemption by grace from our frustrations and pain, in his portrait of Prospero.
Here indeed is a poet for the ages, and one who, in his plays and sonnets, gave us language which like the arrows of cupid, strike our hearts and wound us eternally. Will we ever come up with better lines than "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" or "When in despair with fortune or men's eyes?" We can imagine our poets and novelists for a thousand years dipping into this rich treasure and taking its measure for their time.
Why should it matter so much to us that someone 400 years ago wrote so well? Even discounting the particularities of our age, which has once again promoted this rash of books on Shakespeare, we know we will be reading him as long as we speak English, as long as we have books and plays at all, and are literate, because he has given us an example of what our language can do, how it can depict the workings of our nature, and of the frustrations and possibilities of civilized life.
Craig Eisendrath is the former director of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. His The Angel of History, co-written with his wife, Roberta Spivek, was recently performed at Hedgerow Theatre outside Philadelphia. His latest novel, Crisis Game, appeared this year. His intellectual history of the West, Beyond Permanence, will be released at the end of 2002.