PROLOGUE.
Great tensions
produce great art. 1606, the year the Gunpowder Plot produced,
besides Macbeth (an allegory of the Descent into hell), also King
Lear (sacrificial, all-forgiving death) and Antony and Cleopatra (an
allegory of the Resurrection). The
transition from the Roman Catholic Church to Protestant Reformation
profoundly influenced Shakespeare’s work. By
the time he began writing plays himself, dramatization organized by the gilds was dead and buried...
ACT I
[Enter
School teacher]
SCHOOL
TEACHER. Shakespeare was a protest
playwright who portrayed the world with
expressiveness and dignity and the size of the plays in
the biggest possible terms and pictures. Now, can I paint two
little pictures for you? And you promise not to snigger. Can we do
that? I am going to be very monosyllabic indeed. OK…
CHORUS I.
Shakespeare was perfectly aware where the revolution ended / Inducing paranoia and suspicions / To an unparalleled degree / – In
hell, / Where the ghost of Hamlet’s
father came from. (Fig. 1)
CHORUS II. To be or not to be: / Is it better to live or die? / In a world that feels so 'weary, state, and unprofitable'.
(Fig. 2)
SCHOOL
TEACHER. But while great art can mirror great tensions, it
cannot disperse them: from this time English society became
increasingly polarized between Catholics and Protestants, loyalists
and revolutionaries, old feudal ways and new bourgeois ambitions.
ACT II
[Enter
King, Queen, Polonious, School teacher]
SCHOOL
TEACHER. We may suppose that
Shakespeare felt the tug of revolutionary tendencies and to some
extent sympathized with them. Thus there is real passion in Hamlet’s
attempt to cast the light on the false King
Claudius. And so the scene was set for the English revolution:
HAMLET. What,
frighted with false fire!
QUEEN. How fares my
lord?
POLONIOUS. Give o’er
the play.
KING. Give me some
light. Away.
POLONIOUS. Lights,
lights, lights!
CHORUS
1, CHORUS 2.
But
man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little
brief authority.
Most ignorant of what
he’s most assur’d –
His glassy essence –
like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic
tricks before high heaven
As makes the angles
weep:
Who, with our
spleens.
Would all themselves
laugh mortal.
EPILOGUE
Shakespeare was not alive
to witness the final closing down of the theatre in 1642. The whole
of this solid Globe came to great crisis of
morals, religion and government and the sprawling of the egalitarian
and liberal bawdy culture in the modern world.
