比较文化与文学研究中心特邀俄国权威文学研究杂志主编沙伊塔诺夫来我院举行学术讲座，欢迎老师和同学们参加。
讲座人： 沙伊塔诺夫教授
讲座题目：《莎士比亚是否是我们的同时代人？》（Is Shakespeare our contemporary?），英文报告，论述莎士比亚在20世纪文学和文化中的作用及其现代性价值
讲座时间： 2014年12月26日（周五）下午15:30--17:30
讲座地点： 科技楼南楼308会议室
沙伊塔诺夫教授简介：
伊戈尔·奥列格维奇·沙伊塔诺夫Igor Olegovich Shaytanov, 1947— )，毕业于国立莫斯科大学语言文学系，语文学博士（1989年），教授（1991年），当代俄罗斯著名文学批评家、人文学者和社会活动家，权威文学研究杂志《文学问题》主编，著名俄罗斯独立文学奖项“俄语布克奖”评委秘书，国立俄罗斯人文大学语文与历史学院历史语文系比较文学史教研室主任，俄罗斯人文大学语文学方向学位委员会成员。主要专业领域为英国文学和比较文学研究，研究方向为：英国文学史、俄英文学关系、诗歌史、体裁理论、俄罗斯文化中的神话创作；先后发表500余篇论文和文章，著有十余部学术著作，诸如《巨星联合：尼古拉·阿谢耶夫的诗歌》，《思考的缪斯：18世纪诗歌中的“自然呈现”》，《费·伊·丘特切夫：诗意的自然呈现》，《外国文学史：文艺复兴时代》，《趣味之思：关于当代诗歌之书》，《比较文学和/或诗学：历史诗学视野中的英国文学》、《莎士比亚》（“名人传记系列”之一）。
IS SHAKESPEARE OUR CONTEMPORARY?
The subject of my talk needs an introductory comment. For over two centuries, first in Britain and then all over the world, Shakespeare’s jubilees have grown into more than ceremonial festivals. They have become landmarks in culture, turning points, or, at least, happy occasions to look back and ahead in order to appraise cultural perspectives. It was so 50 years ago when Shakespeare’s centenary – 400 years since his birthday – was celebrated. 2014 was another jubilee – 450, but a greater one will be held in 2016 – 400 since his death. Exact dates seem preferable to jubilators no matter whether they refer to birth or death.
Fifty years ago a slogan that directed the collective mind corresponded to the general atmosphere in 1960ies when historical optimism prevailed and people believed that the present time, no matter how dangerous, was that of progress. The demand on the past was to open up its contemporaneity, and the slogan of the jubilee was ‘Shakespeare is our contemporary’. Two influential books varied this formula: one written by the famous Russian film director Grigory Kozintsev (by that time he had filmed his world-wide popular version of Hamlet), another by a Polish scholar Ian Kott. Both were translated into English.
Both manifested an intention to wipe off the sense of traditional reverence towards a classical writer and approach him with a fresh view that would mean discovering new significance in his writings.
Now, 50 years since, we address Shakespeare from a different time with changing expectations. The inertia from 1960ies still persists but its results seem more and more dubious, or ambivalent. Shakespeare could not escape postmodernist interpretations in theatre and cinema. His texts are deformed, almost unrecognizable in fragments, translated into contemporary slang to prove that he is our contemporary. It is believed that if we adapt his language, archaic and boring in itself, Shakespeare may be a jolly good fellow, a partner at the discothèque.
I have a short memoir to illustrate this sort of Shakespeare’s actuality. Every year with my students at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow we begin the study of English Renaissance reading and partly learning by heart chronologically the first great soliloquy (monologue) in Shakespeare – the opening speech of Richard, duke of Gloucester, future Richard III in the play that bears his name: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York…”
Richard announces that in the long Wars of the Roses the dukes of York were victorious, and one of them (Richard’s elder brother Edward) ascended the throne. My students learned the soliloquy, commented and recited it. Some were happy, others left no choice. But one day they came absolutely hilarious and triumphant, all of them. When asked why, they told me how on the previous night they could appreciate that their Shakespearean effort was not completely wasted when in a dance hall they saw a poster and understood a joke: “Now is the winter of our discothèque”.
The word ‘discontent’ which means ‘restless unhappiness” was changed to ‘discothèque’. This is a simple way to make Shakespeare our contemporary. But in the English-speaking world his contemporaneity is first of all of a linguistic nature. There is a joke about an Englishman who somehow failed to read Shakespeare and in his middle age was at last persuaded to open the bard. Asked about his impression he was rather dry: “Well, a collection of widely known quotations’.
In the English language Shakespeare is an important part of national mentality. His quotations have grown to be speech idioms that do not need attribution. In culture and literature he is a source for quotations and ideas. The above quoted ‘winter of our discontent’ is a title of the famous American novel by John Steinbeck.
In all the world the circulation of his works is so high that he occupies the second position – one step below the Bible, and one step above Agatha Christie, a link between wisdom and entertainment.
So Shakespeare ‘is our contemporary’, there is no doubt, and the truth of this fact extends far beyond postmodernist transformations and adaptations. Postmodernist deformation prompts another cultural demand – to come back to Shakespeare and to feel that we are his contemporaries in a sense that he was the first to stumble on our problems when our time just came into being. We are of the same epoch with him, the epoch he witnessed at its birth, and we are, probably, those who draw the curtain. In this case the similarity of our positions was formulated by Hamlet who felt that ‘the time is out of joint’.
What I propose in my lecture is to glance at Shakespeare in order to trace how and when our issues cropped up in his work. Some of them, at least.
Problems with Shakespeare begin with the first date – that of his birth. We celebrate it on the 23d of April but it is no more than a reconstruction. In the parish book at the Trinity Church in Stratford there is only the date when a newborn was christened – on the 26th April 1564. Usually the ritual took place 2-3 days after birth, and so since the 18th century it has been agreed that 23d is the most likely date as it is the day of England’s holy patron – St George. It is a very good coincidence for the national genius to be born on this particular day.
We do not have documentary material on William’s life in Stratford-on-Avon, though we have much evidence on his father’s activities who was a well-off tradesman and an important figure in this rather small community. One year he was elected to be a bailiff, i.e. a mayor. Can we imagine that the elder son of such a man did not attend a grammar school? No, we cannot, though the list of the pupils for those years is lost. But did he finish his study? We believe that he did not because his farther due to some unknown circumstances at some point began to lose money instead of making them.
So what documented facts do we have to begin Shakespeare’s biography? A boy from a provincial city, not of a low birth (his mother Mary Arden had noble ancestry, though belonged to an impoverished branch of the family) but, certainly, a boy brought up in the situation with not many cultural opportunities… These are the first arguments for those who believe that the man from Stratford could not write all those works known under the name of Shakespeare. These heretics are called anti-stratfordians. Most of their effort has been spent on fantastic versions but sometimes they managed to dig up valuable information that allows considering them in relation to Shakespeare’s biography as useful as alchemists were for the future progress in chemistry.
There were not a few witnesses among Shakespeare’s contemporaries who knew that his birthplace was Stratford-on-Avon, his rival playwright Ben Jonson, for example, who in his poem dedicated to Shakespeare’s memory called him ‘Sweet swan of Avon’. There are some less illustrious but not less reliable witnesses – Leonard Digges among them. A well known man of letters, an expert on the Spanish language and literature, he wrote two poems to Shakespeare’s memory – a great poet who must ‘crown’d with laurel, live eternally’.
In short there is enough evidence to prove that the boy from Stratford became English greatest poet. Those who doubt the fact, before they build up their fantastic castles, should know what to do with this evidence if they do not just discard it. In my life of Shakespeare I express a strong belief in Shakespeare the author and try to motivate my position in detail.
This does not mean that Shakespeare’s authorship is no problem at all. It is but in a different sense than most anti-stratfordians believe. If in our days this is a catchword to say ‘the author is dead’, in Shakespeare’s time and especially in the elizabethan (after the name of queen Elizabeth) theatre the author was newborn. Much of dramatic production came out anonymously and one of the reasons for this was collective writing. Shakespeare began as a co-author and when he made his first step out of the anonymity he was accused, presumably by his former co-authors, of theft, plagiarism.
The first almost universally acknowledged reference to Shakespeare, known to us, is a bitter opinion expressed by the fellow playwright Robert Greene in his autobiographical Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance. He published at his dyeing request to friends not be as bohemian and careless as he used to be. Greene died on 3 September 1592. In the introductory epistle, addressed to his friends, among others he mentioned
an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit that onely Shake-scene in a countrey.
At least two references make Shakespeare recognizable:
a pun on his name – Shake-scene;
and a transformed quotation from his play (now known as Henry VI. Part III): ‘Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde’. In the play it sounded to blame queen Isabella for cruelty: ‘Tygers heart wrapt in a woman’s hyde’.
Someone Shake-scene is also accused of cruelty and dishonesty – “vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers”. Crow is a bird famous for stealing; this one seems to have stolen feathers to beautify herself with.
So Shakespeare is accused to have stolen something from ‘us’, a group of playwrights known as ‘university wits’, who despised anyone without university background, Shakespeare among them.
The most likely motive for this accusation might have been Shakespeare’s early co-authorship with university wits, probably, on what will later come to be known as Henry VI. Part I. The play might have been the first remarkable success in a new genre – history play or chronicle. Its material was national history: victories and defeats, conspiracies and outbreaks. They had new attraction with the present day historical events as their background.
Shakespeare, if we use an expression from the 20th century, belonged to a war generation. For decades protestant England had been troubled by the threat of catholic invasion from Spain. In 1588 Spanish navy was ready to raise a formidable Spanish army and to make British territory its battlefield. But the Invincible Armada was defeated and the threat, if not eliminated altogether, postponed. British people were triumphant with the sense of an almost unbelievable victory. Patriotic enthusiasm over flooded the country, but from the stage they heard a warning – a reminder how two centuries earlier another victory – over France – was lost because of the disagreement and enmity at home.
This reminder came from Henry VI, and was a success, which in all likelihood Shakespeare decided to continue alone, without former co-authors, and was enviously blamed by one of them when he continued a play on the life of this unlucky king.
In his first history play Shakespeare had demonstrated an acute sense of the past history in its ability to comment on the present day and its political issues. It was at the end of Renaissance that classical education based on the knowledge of ancient history gave birth to a new political theory, widely discussed in Europe as mackiavellism – from the name of the Italian scholar Niccolo Machiavelli.
Up to now Machiavelli has a bad moral reputation, on the one hand, and on the other is well remembered as a great historian, one of the forefathers of contemporary historical thought.
Machiavelli taught that the great end justifies the means, that politics is divorced from morality and, therefore, a good man cannot be a good politician. Shakespeare would not accept this wisdom and demonstrated in Richard III that a villain even if he could reach the crown should not hold it in his blood stained hands.
In his later years Shakespeare would not change his moral position but more and more attracted attention to the fact that reality was not ready for its best heroes, and in fight for political success – no matter whether justified – all means were actually used. Machiavelli demonstrated how people acted, Shakespeare addressing not his own time only but future generations sent a warning not to believe in success if it was divorced from morality.
Now to sum up Shakespeare’s early achievement I will turn back again to Robert Green’s opinion of him. Critical minds are often more penetrating than those who praise.
According to Green Shake-scene ‘supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you’. In other words Shake-scene thought that he was as good a master of dramatic form introduced by the university wits in blank (unrhymed) verse.
But what does ‘bombast’ mean? Green used the word to characterize the new form. Let us look up the word in OED.
As a noun – in the meaning that suits our purpose – bombast is ‘inflated or turgid language; high-sounding language on a trivial or commonplace subject; fustian; tall talk.
As a verb ‘bombast’ means to speak this high-sounding language or rhetoric.
It may seem strange that Green used the word not to criticize but to characterize a modern style of dramatic speech which Shakespeare had learned to imitate so perfectly. Green was right: university wits had introduced on the elizabethan stage a high-sounding rhetoric. Christopher Marlowe (the first who had adapted Doctor Faust plot for world literature) was the leader of the group and the best master of bombast. Marlowe and Shakespeare were of the same age, but when Shakespeare made his first steps on London stage Marlowe was triumphant there. By the time Marlowe was killed at the age of 29 in May 1593 Shakespeare had grown to become his rival and was at work on Richard III, a play where his rhetoric is no longer a bombast. He had mastered a much more versatile dramatic speech, and, at least, one of the reasons that made this evolution possible was the fact that he became a lyrical poet.
A very important thing we need to understand about Shakespeare’s genius is that he was both a great poet and a great playwright. In his case one would not be possible without the other. Much of his dramatic speech was in verse, and he moved from bombast of his predecessors to versatility of his own great dramas, where rhetoric does not rule out lyrical depth, and emotion finds an expression so perfect that the words of his heroes still serve for those in love to tell what they feel.
Shakespeare never made his audience baffled by the complexities of style and thought that would go beyond their grasp. He was a playwright that worked for the theatre, which became a very good business. Shakespeare knew how to provide a product to suit the demand, no matter how various this demand might have been from the ‘yard’, overcrowded by London apprentices, and from the boxes where young aristocrats and law students expected an intellectual treat.
Shakespeare began in two genres in mode – a history play and tragedy of revenge. Both appealed to the common taste by its bombast and blood lavishly spilled in a cruel action. In Richard III he demonstrated a much more elaborate speech and intellectual depth. By that time he had several years of experience in the theatre and made new acquaintances among young aristocratic elite. There he found a patron to whom he dedicated his two poems and who most likely must have been the addressee of his sonnets.
In his sonnets Shakespeare created an outstanding love lyric in the English language. For his own evolution sonnets were a turning point in dramatic speech, since then much better suited to an expression of profound emotions and elaborate reflection. Sonnets as a genre was reflective in its nature and, therefore, able to promote this quality of the modern mind.
Does not it seem strange that a very conventional poetic form with obligatory 14 lines and a changing order of rhyme had for three centuries remained the most popular lyric in Europe? More than that it was related to the birth of the modern reflection, as an American scholar Paul Oppenheimer prompted in the ambitious title of his book on Renaissance sonnet: The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness and the Invention of the Sonnet (N.Y., Oxford, 1989).
Oppenheimer connects a lasting fashion for sonneteering in Europe with the fact that it was the first lyrical genre after antiquity written not to be sung and therefore not to the rhythm of music but to that of an inner reflection – «to echo the melodies ‘unheard’ of the human soul» (P.3):
The invention of the sonnet did not, of course, “create” self-consciousness. Appearing as it did at the court of Frederick II, it lead to a fashion in self-conscious, silent and meditative literature that continues into our own day. It led to a fashion in a new sort of imaginative literature as well, the literature in which concrete images would replace allegorical personifications, thereby promoting a new method of symbolism with more direct and clear connections to the subconscious (P.27).
Oppenheimer here does not name directly what is substituted in the sonnet for ‘allegorical personifications’, a trope domineering the medieval mind, but this new trope is well known – it is a METAPHOR, an instrument of new reflection capable to unite heaven and earth, to bring together in one act of comprehension distant objects and notions.
Shakespeare must have started to write sonnets when many elizabethans did – after a posthumous publication of a sequence by Philip Sidney Astroplil and Stella (1591). The sonnet was known in England for over half a century, but it was Sidney’s sequence that set up a mode for sonneteering.
For Shakespeare this mode arrived in good time. In June 1592 (just when Shakespeare enjoyed his first individual success on stage) London theatres were closed because of the plague. The plague came and went every 3-4 years, but this time it stayed unusually long – for 2 years. Shakespeare was a professional man of the theatre which meant that lived off his profession and had a family in Stratford to provide for – wife and three children. When theatres were closed he had to find another source of income. By that time his reputation must have been established, his plays attracted young intellectuals and among them earl of Southampton. The earl was not of age then (under 21), but his ward and family made a choice for the earl to marry.
Southampton refused to obey his elders, and this event might have been the occasion for Shakespeare to be commissioned to write sonnets persuading the earl. The idea was simple: the young man is fond of poetry; if he does not listen to the arguments in prose, probably, he will be more responsive to the logic in verse?
The first 17 sonnets are usually called ‘sonnets of succession’. The author addresses the beautiful young man to remind him that his beauty will fade away with age, but it may be passed on to eternity if the earl takes care to continue his beauty in his son. Sonnet moves on from one metaphor to another building up a rhetorical proof. Among this first group of more or less formal poems there springs up the first personal feeling when the poet realizes that, besides succession and marriage, eternity may be obtained for his young friend by poetic means – in his own verse.
Sonnet 15 is the first among Shakespeare’s great lyrics. It is no longer a formal argument it is a poetic reflection on life and death, on beauty and poetry. Poetic reflection follows rhetorical rules of persuasion but its logic is deeply personal and metaphors come as an afterthought, as a shorthand of a new love looking for words and promising that in love beauty will always grow green:
Three quatrains are presented as three stages in the process of perception:
When I consider…
When I perceive…
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay…
The poet climbs up, and makes the reader follow, from one metaphor to another. First comes a general thought about ‘every thing that grows’, which then is specified, as related towards a human being, in a well-known metaphor of ‘the world is a stage’.
When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
The whole of the second quatrain is a comeback to the metaphor of the opening line elaborated in comparison – ‘men as plants increase’, and as plants they wither away with the age:
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and chequed even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
The third quatrain comes as a summary of the extensive metaphor (defined as ‘conceit’) of ‘this inconstant stay’ in the direct thought of the young man’s inevitable death.
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,
To change your day of youth to sullied night;
The rhymed couplet finalizes poetry’s victory over Time.
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
The poet promises his friend an eternal new life in the act of metaphorical engrafting– in verse, as a gardener does to a tree when he inserts a scion/new branch of one tree to or upon another. The idea of an everlasting youth and renovation is emphasized in the rhyme where the two notions are bound together: you – new. And the sound is repeated, reverberating through the two final lines: you – you – you – new.
This lyrical versatility of argument Shakespeare engrafted (to use his own metaphor) to dr, amatic speech when London theatres were opened again after the two-year plague in summer 1594. Next year is not documented in his biography, but we know that around this time three plays were written by Shakespeare in three major genres: a tragedy Romeo and Juliet, a comedy Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, a chronicle Richard II. Shakespeare had reached his creative maturity. From now on he is a playwright for the company he will stay with till the end of his theatrical career – the Lord Chamberlain’s men.
Shakespeare’s lyrical experience, engrafted to dramatic genres, one can plainly see in his most sonneteering tragedy – Romeo and Juliet. Sonnets emerge in the flow of speech. Romeo is most addicted to the conventional style, and he will have to learn how to speak love without overstatement. But the tragedy itself will have to learn a similar lesson with one exception: Romeo enters the tragedy full of conventional love rhetoric, and the tragedy itself feels at first rather awkward when it tries to absorb the form of the sonnet in the first prologue spoken by the Chorus. It has 14 lines but intonationally has nothing to do with a sonnet:
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
Next time when Chorus comes on the stage before act II we are to realize two things:
14 lines were not accidental because Chorus aims at the sonnet and repeats his attempt in the same number of lines;
If in his first appearance Chorus misses the target after the first act he can imitate this lyrical genre quite plausibly:
Now old desire doth in his death-bed lie,
And young affection gapes to be his heir;
That fair for which love groan’d for and would die,
With tender Juliet match’d, is now not fair.
Intonation is easy flowing and the use of words much more like lyrical vocabulary with ‘fair’ as its key word, repeated with a due significance.
For Romeo there is a different line of speech evolution to follow. He has to part with a convention of love acquired from the book. Juliet as good as tells him so when they first meet and he insists on kissing her lips. Her reaction to his kiss is ‘You kiss by the book’.
Before Romeo met and loved Juliet he loved a girl who never appears in the play – Rosaline. It was a bookish love with a bookish melancholy put on by Romeo for his first appearance:
BENVOLIO: Good-morrow, cousin.
ROMEO: Is the day so young?
BENVOLIO: But new struck nine.
ROMEO: Ay me! sad hours seem long…
BENVOLIO: It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo’s
hours?
ROMEO: Not having that, which, having, makes them
short.
BENVOLIO: In love?
ROMEO: Out—
BENVOLIO: Of love?
ROMEO: Out of her favor, where I am in love.
Through a theatrical melancholy we can feel a character and wit demonstrated by Romeo later on in the tragedy. And we can hear that Shakespeare’s tragedy is no longer a bombast but a complex speech structure meant for very sensitive actors. This is wholly true for the great scene in act II – the balcony scene. Romeo is standing in the garden of Capulet’s house looking at Juliet’s window above. He feels love’s ecstasy which reaches its climax when Juliet comes out on the balcony and, thinking she is alone, tells her love – to Romeo.
The first sound of her voice nearly drives him mad:
She speaks:
O, speak again, bright angel! for thou art
As glorious to this night…
In contrast to this bookish ecstasy Juliet’s speech of love strikes one by its calm sincerity. When they start their dialogue speech contrast is absolutely evident. Romeo is comic in his juvenile outburst, and 14-year old Juliet clever and dignified. Romeo is aware that in books – novels and sonnets he read – to speak love meant to swear and he is ready to follow this convention:
ROMEO. Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops—
JULIET: O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
ROMEO: What shall I swear by?
JULIET: Do not swear at all;
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I’ll believe thee.
ROMEO: If my heart’s dear love—
JULIET: Well, do not swear…
For his contemporaries Shakespeare was known in the first place as English Ovid, Roman poet famous for his Ars Amatoria (Art of love). Shakespeare was called sweet and gentle, and the first known characteristic of his sonnets was – sugar’d.
Actually they were not ‘sugar’d’. Shakespeare very economically distributed sweetness in his love poetry. And again to find a better word to characterize him as a poet of love we shall stumble on the word ‘reflection’. He was reflective because he kept distance with the standard language of love, its genre, and its manifestation. He made his best heroes ponder on the essence of this feeling and what it meant, as in the same balcony scene he makes Juliet pronounce a monologue reflecting on the relation between the feeling and the words one uses.
Montague is the name of a deadly enemy to her house of Capulet. But what does a name mean?
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm,
nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.
In this linguistic reflection Juliet shows herself a philosopher who anticipates linguistic theories of the 20th century concerning a signifier and signified.
But could Shakespeare’s audience follow him to this depth of meaning? Not everyone, of course. And even not the majority of those who came to the theatre. We know that Hamlet is a great philosophical tragedy, but is it not a real question to answer – how could this great piece of thought and poetry compete with the most popular entertainments such as bear-baiting or cock-fights? But it did as well as theatre in general. Queen Elizabeth, a great admirer both of plays and bear-baiting, aware that theatre proved more successful ordered to leave some days during the week for a cruder sport.
Were London apprentices carried away by the problem of what makes Hamlet tarry, or other moral issues? It seems more likely that they crowded not for a philosophical tragedy but for a sort of blockbuster whose hero knows how to strew dead bodies on his way to revenge.
I think we enjoy an opportunity to compare what Shakespeare wrote with the perception of the majority in his audience when we read one of Hamlet’s soliloquies in the so called ‘bad’ quarto and its good version. By ‘bad’ texts we mean those editions of Shakespeare’s plays that, presumably, were brought out against his or his company’s will. The theory stands that ‘bad’ texts were taken down from memory by one of the actors invited by Lord Chamberlain’s men to play a minor part. He must have been tempted by money from a corrupt printer. A pirate (this is a name for an actor who made a memorial reconstruction) remembered his part perfectly well but had difficulties with more complex speech patterns as it happened with Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’.
The famous text (in Quarto2 or Folio1) begins:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub…
The reported text sounds naïve and with an almost visible/audible effort to catch up with the thought which eludes the speaker:
To be or not to be, ay there is the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? Ay all:
No, to sleep, to dream, ay marry there it goes,
For in that dream of death, when we awake...
A greater part of the soliloquy is completely lost by a pirate and the rest has been muddled beyond recognition or, at least, perception. The reporter loses what will be appreciated most of all – Hamlet’s reflection, vocabulary and metaphoric wit.
Why Hamlet is great and so much appreciated in later centuries and up to our own time? The foremost Russian Shakespeare scholar Leonid Pinsky wrote that Hamlet is the first reflective hero in world literature. All heroes before him were epic because of their deeds and he is great because he made a pause before action – to think. Hamlet knew this difference and was ready to regret the fact that he was slow to act:
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
…….
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
Shakespeare in England and Servantes in Spain are believed to have written a tragic epilogue to the greatest period in European culture known as Renaissance. Our own attitude to Renaissance, – more than ever before – is double visioned. In the 20th century renaissance humanistic utopia was found guilty in many tragic circumstances of world history, and the very idea of humanism came to be undermined by new doubts in the moral dignity of man.
But Shakespeare is among the first to send a warning when witches in Macbeth anticipate the entrance of Shakespeare’s greatest hero with a refrain: ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’. Macbeth echoes it in his first words: ‘So fair and foul a day I have not seen’.
Five years earlier Hamlet admitted ‘Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither’. And he was ready to associate the word ‘man’ with an ideal only when he referred it to someone in the past as he does when Horatio, asked whether he remembered Hamlet’s father, answered: “I saw him once; he was a goodly king”. Hamlet corrects his friend:
He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.
I remind you of these famous lines now to come back to the title question: ‘Is Shakespeare our contemporary?’
Shakespeare’s vision of his time was by no means less penetrating then our concept of Renaissance four centuries since his death. Speaking of his own time, as we now understand, Shakespeare gave a warning to future generations – not to be blinded with ideals. Shakespeare was able to present any picture in full scope with all its extremes and to stay in between, in a position not to reject or adore, but to reflect. He was reflecting on the ideas current among his contemporaries and passed them on to develop in future. Shakespeare was fantastically reflective on the conventions of his own art which he knew how to make seemingly familiar to those in his audience who would not have anything changed, and he stood out innovative to those who asked for novelty. So his tragedy of prince Hamlet, where he drew a portrait of a man for the times to come, was framed up as a traditional tragedy of revenge.
Shakespeare, the thinker, the title of one of the best books written on him in the 21st century (by A.D. Nuttal, 2007), is of a growing importance for us in this quality. We keep recognizing that our ideas were his, and we have to learn much from him as a thinker. But not the ideas alone but Shakespeare’s ways with ideas attract our attention and remind us that at the beginning of our time and culture there stood a man willing and capable to reflect before he recommended to act.
