William Shakespeare continues to grow in popularity 400 years after his death. To try and find out why we decided to ask a series of writers. Anthony Gardner, who is the editor of The Royal Society of Literature Review, is also the author of two novels, The Rivers of Heaven and Fox:
Anthony Gardner (Standard British accent): I think the amazing thing about Shakespeare is that whatever situation you find yourself in or think about, Shakespeare has been there before you and he’s thought about it, and he’s written something about it, and it could be a line or a scene or an entire play that sums up your situation; any aspect of the human condition: triumph, disaster, joy, despair, he will have something to say about it. For example, a couple of days ago I had an email exchange with a friend about a series of problems I’d had and he came back instantly with a line from Hamlet, which was: “When our sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions” and that seemed to sum it all up instantly and brilliantly. So when I think of Shakespeare I think of another writer, I think of the 18th century poet Alexander Pope, who had this wonderful phrase, “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,” meaning “Here’s an idea that a lot of people have had through the centuries but no one has managed to put it in words quite so well” and I think that’s true of Shakespeare in countless situations.
the dogs of war
Matt Haig has borrowed Shakespeare in two his novels. The Last Family in England, which was published as The Labrador Pact in the United States, is a modern retelling of Henry IV Part One, but through the eyes of a family’s pet dog. The Dead Fathers Club, on the other hand, is a modern retelling of Hamlet, but through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy. We asked Matt Haig why he liked Shakespeare:
Matt Haig (Standard British/mild northern accent): I think Shakespeare is infinite and I think people will still be arguing and debating Shakespeare in 500 years because you can find exactly what you want to find in Shakespeare. Just as people have been sort of debating the Mona Lisa’s smile for centuries and not knowing what it means, I think, you know, any line of Shakespeare has that sort of beautiful, unknown, ambiguity to it. And he had a way of just making things universal. You don’t have to be a teenager in love to feel empathetic towards Romeo and Juliet, and you don’t have to be like the King of England to feel Henry V. And it’s just beautiful as a writer to have such a rich reserve to dip into, and it’s not always very... fashionable for writers, certainly writers in England, to always sort of talk about Shakespeare, and it’s quite a sort of clichéed thing to talk about, but we owe so much to him, so many literal words, but also so many ideas about story and language we owe to him. So, you know, there’s never been anyone even close to Shakespeare in the English language.
a modern problem
Derek Allen is the author of the book Friendly Shakespeare, which is aimed at Italian readers. He believes that Shakespeare will always be contemporary:
Derek Allen (Standard British accent): Othello has become a kind of a sacred text for those who are fighting on behalf of women who have been mistreated, victims of feminicide. Othello’s tragedy is simply being the fact that he’s unable to see through Iago’s cruel machinations, and simply just losing it, as men sometimes do, as we read in the newspapers every day. Last year I think there were about 130 deaths as a result of this kind of domestic strife and misunderstanding.
timeless
Blair Worden is a historian who has written many books, including The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics and Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England:
Blair Worden (Standard British accent): To me there’s something extraordinary about the power of somebody in a society, a civilization, so remote from our own being able to speak to us across the centuries in ways that matter for our experience now, that enable us to understand ourselves better, or to recognize points about ourselves. If you look at other writers of his time – Ben Jonson, even Marlowe, John Marston, George Chapman, Philip Massinger, say – I mean, they’re remarkable writers and there’s a great deal that we can still respond to, but all the time when we watch them we think this is somebody of the late 16th or early 17th century, and that’s the world from which they speak to us, and we’re interested and we draw what we can from them, but they’re not our contemporary. You remember Jan Kott wrote a book called Shakespeare Our Contemporary – actually, I think not a very good book, but! – because there is that sense that he’s here for us now, and he can, through his speeches, pierce through our defences, our attitudes, and reach our innermost experiences: pain, anxiety, happiness, bliss, love and so on.
