It may seem a wee hubristic for me to assume that
Shakespeare needs defending, given that he's outsold me by about a gazillion to
one, but following a few conversations recently, I feel I need to grab a Stetson,
pull on my boots, and get on my high horse.
I was talking to a relative
this weekend, and as invariably happens when you're a teacher, everyone who
ever went to school* has an opinion with
what's wrong with education, and how it can be fixed. ***
The relative's current bugbear was Shakespeare. For those
not aware, it is legally compulsory to teach Shakespeare in English secondary schools. This was the initial complaint, and it is one
I can somewhat sympathise with. If Shakespeare's works are so good, why do they
have to be compulsory? The sad answer, however, is because Shakespeare is also difficult, and
if it didn't have to be there, it'd be wiped off many a school curriculum
faster than the smile of
Phil Jones's face at the end of the 2011/2012 season.
This semi-reasonable point was swiftly followed by the
unforgivably irrelevant.
'They don't even think Shakespeare wrote his plays, so why
is everyone so Wow! about it?'
Apart from the issues of Who The Fuck Are 'They'? and Who
The Fuck Is 'Everyone', this is a statement which bores to the core of the fabric
of my being. I shit you not.
There are bonds of family and kinship that provoke an
inherent abhorrence against reckless, unbridled violence towards the members of
your nearest and dearest. I was tempted to put them aside.
My main problem with this witless vacuity is that it seems
pretty clear to me that it was rampant class prejudice which lead to this cock-arsed idea that Shakespeare couldn't
have written his plays, because he wasn't spat out of one of England's public
schools, wasn't a member of the nobility. He wasn't, in short, the inbred offspring
of two fat-necked chinless land-owning cousins from the shires, but was,
instead, the son of a glove-maker from
the Midlands.
The other important things about this is that it is matters
even less than William Hague's empty whinges in the vague direction of Putin's embryonic invasion
of Ukraine, while simultaneously the British government aren't prepared to
sacrifice all that lovely Russian loot by imposing any kind of sanction. It doesn't matter who wrote the plays and
poems. When we talk about 'Shakespeare' we're talking about a body of
work, not a body of man. Shakespeare is important in the words that
exist, not in The Life and Times of a Glove-Making Yokel****.
And Shakespeare, the body of work, is brilliant. I fell in
love with Macbeth (the play) at school, when I fell in love with Lady Macbeth (the character, worryingly). Like most snotty reactionaries I then drove
my cultural tanks onto the lawns of The Bard, and started firing rounds of accusation.
Mostly that Shakespeare was a fuck-arse verbose
wanker. I was always charmingly eloquent.
But I refound my love, and now try to pass it on, and to kindle
at least a slice of that love in my young
charges, my Shakespeare padawans.
I gave a slightly less antagonistic version of the above in
response to the unnamed relative. The
next ball in this game of Ignorance Tennis was a cracker:
'I bet if Shakespeare came back he'd be like 'That's not
what I meant' to all these university professors who write about him.'
This is, to me, the equivalent of wearing a t-shirt which
says 'I am a fucking moron, stab me'. No-one
ever says to kids doing doughnuts in a Ford Escort round Aldi carparks, 'That's
not what Henry Ford had in mind.'
In fact, if Shakespeare came back from that undiscover'd
country from which no traveller doth return, and started bitching about how his
writings were being misinterpreted, I'd tell him to sling his hook, encounter
the darkness as a bride, and fuck off back to Deadland. I'm no more interested in what he's got to say
about his writing than wondering whether Yaya's Toure's equaliser in
the Capital One Cup was deliberate or not. It was a thing of beauty. That
is enough.
Shakespeare is divisive. But Shakespeare is complex. For
every over-wrought, long-winded phrase, there's a finely-balanced, killer phrase
which can encapsulate tomes of philosophical
weight in a few words. There are the famous ones: To be or not to be - the futility of existence, and the paradox of
life, in six words. The beautiful ones: A
rose by any other name would still smell as sweet - the arbitrary
relationship between language and existence.
And, of course, the lesser
known gems: It's a game of two halves,
and it's not over till Nasri says it's over.
Well done City, cheers Shakey.
* Everyone **
** Of course, there are people who don't have the luck of
access to education. I don't meet these people, unfortunately.
*** I hate to break this to you, but most of you are wrong.
No offence, that's just the way it is. Live with it.
****Actually, his old man seems to be have been a pretty
well-off small business older. Shakespeare is no more a yokel than Lily Allen,
Damon All-Bran and Jamie Oliver are cockneys.
