In Defence of Shakespeare

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.