Making Shakespeare Contemporary

December 30, 2004

I’ve always loved Shakespeare. It’s his plays I dislike.

The older I get, the less I enjoy seeing those plays performed.

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I’m not sure whether I want to see the new film of The Merchant of Venice, with Al Pacino as Shylock. Nearly all modern productions of this comedy are to some extent ruined by confusion: They tend to import recent ideas about anti-Semitism that have little or nothing to do with Shakespeare’s Jewish villain.

He’s a fascinating character, to be sure, but he is, after all, the villain. What makes him a great villain is that his creator gives him human motives and the eloquence to disturb us. He does evil to avenge evils he has suffered himself. Still, he’s an evildoer. To highlight his victimhood is to distort the play with facile analogies to recent history.

In order to enjoy Shakespeare properly, we have to accept his values as postulates, resisting the temptation to impose modern values on them, just as we have to understand that the words he uses often meant something different in his time from what they mean in ours. The world Shylock lives in may be as imaginary, to us, as Shylock himself. But the story demands that we accept that world as the premise of the story.

Modern productions of Richard III often portray Richard as a proto-fascist, seizing on a few feeble analogies between him and modern dictators. But again, this distorts the rest of the play, which is set in a feudal world of hereditary rank — most unlike the social fluidity that gave rise to fascist regimes. Richard, a pre-industrial sort of fellow, has no interest in changing the social order of England; he merely wants to sit on the throne. His methods are cruel, but his ambitions, by our standards, are modest. To enjoy the play properly, we have to accept its premises, not substitute others — our own — that are quite alien to it.

[Breaker quote: Big mistake]

Hamlet is another Shakespeare play that is particularly apt to suffer from this sort of anachronism. Laurence Olivier, following the Freudian theories so popular in his day, burdened Hamlet with an Oedipus complex, which was supposed to explain his delay in avenging his father’s murder by his uncle. This had absolutely nothing to do with the play’s words — and in Shakespeare, the words are everything.

To understand Hamlet properly, you have to forget Freud and remember the religious questions of Shakespeare’s age, many of which are still with us. Some of these concern the state of the soul at death. Hamlet’s father’s ghost complains that he has died without the sacraments and is suffering in Purgatory; Hamlet passes up the chance to kill his uncle at prayer, for fear of sending his soul to heaven; Hamlet sends two former schoolmates to death without allowing them time for confession; Ophelia is denied a full Christian funeral because she has committed suicide; and so forth. So even if you’re not a Christian, you have to posit a Christian world in order to grasp the play’s meaning.

Contemporary political views — racial, Marxian, feminist, and anti-imperialist — likewise bedevil productions of the plays. The issue is not whether these views have validity, but simply whether they fit plays written four centuries ago. Laurence Olivier made his lovely film of Henry V to boost English morale during World War II. But this patriotic purpose required him to cut or play down passages showing Henry in, by modern standards, a very unheroic light. Shakespeare’s quiet ironies were sacrificed to wartime jingoism.

I don’t quite understand the perennial urge to make Shakespeare contemporary. In fact, there was a famous book in the 1960s called exactly that — Shakespeare Our Contemporary. It argued that Shakespeare was an existentialist ahead of his time, as if this were quite a compliment. Well, today existentialism is gone, and Shakespeare survives.

Much of the pleasure of reading Shakespeare comes from the sense of entering another world and accepting its imaginative demands. To try to turn his world into our world is to flatten it out, losing both meaning and enchantment.

For some reason, we don’t often make this mistake with other authors. We all understand that if you want to read, say, Homer, you have to take his world as it is, quarreling gods and all. We might enjoy Shakespeare more properly if we treated him not as a contemporary, but as an ancient.

Joseph Sobran

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