How Shakespeare Changed Everything by Stephen Marche

Author:Stephen Marche
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

Give Me My Robe, Put On My Crown

Shakespeare is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in the world of politics. Four hundred years after his death, his speeches fit the shape of every mouth. Liberals can mumble through “now is the winter of our discontent,” and conservatives can bluster off “the lady doth protest too much.” Anyone with an interest in sounding grandiloquent can cull a telling phrase from one play or another. The greatest practitioner of the Shakespeare quote for political purposes in our times was the late senior Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd, who repeatedly found obscure and beautiful lines from little-known plays such as Henry VIII or King John, and used them on perfectly apposite occasions. In 1994, he managed to quote once from every Shakespeare play on the floor of the Senate. This rare talent, though welcome, didn’t mean that he was one of the great political thinkers of our time. (Then again, he was the longest-serving member of Congress in history.)

Oddly, Shakespeare’s power is hardest to trace in the world of politics. It’s so easy to find the precise confirmation of your own opinions and prejudices in Shakespeare that I hesitate to say he has any politics at all. He was harmless in his own time. After seeing Richard II, Queen Elizabeth I remarked, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” That play came dangerously close to referring to the disastrous war in Ireland and the succession crisis. But if Queen Elizabeth had been genuinely worried about Shakespeare as a political force, she simply would have had him killed.

Knowing Shakespeare doesn’t make you good, that’s for sure. A few months after Hitler became chancellor, the Nazi Party issued a pamphlet entitled Shakespeare—a Germanic Writer, and in 1936, there were more productions of Shakespeare in Germany than in the rest of the world combined. Joseph Goebbels’s favorite professor at Heidelberg was the Jewish Friedrich Gundolf, author of Shakespeare and the German Spirit. The Communists under Stalin elevated Shakespeare to the ranks of the “Great Thinkers of the Age,” which culminated in Lenin and Stalin. During the Stalin era, over five million copies of Shakespeare were published in the twenty-eight languages of the Soviet Union, and thousands of productions of his plays were authorized. (Stalin, however, reportedly frowned on productions of Hamlet, disliking the prince’s indecisiveness. Health-conscious theater directors avoided the Danish prince.)

Shakespeare doesn’t make you bad, either. Even though Shakespeare served the nastiest totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, he also became a tool for resistance against them. Hitler’s Germany loved Shakespeare but also feared him. Ironically, the one play they couldn’t handle was The Merchant of Venice, which languished after 1933. In 1938, Merchant was placed on the blacklist, to be confiscated from libraries. The Nazis and their ministry of propaganda feared two of the play’s most salient features: Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech (and since he has only five appearances in the entire play, it becomes complicated to cut any of his speeches) and his daughter Jessica’s marriage to a non-Jew, which was illegal under Nazi law.

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