On the name of Shakespeare

(Notes for Year 10) 

Education cannot produce a Shakespeare, it cannot create genius, but it can give genius that chance in early elementary training without which even the most adaptive minds lose their direction.

--Charles G. Harper

     

      The name of Shakespeare was not in olden times a respectable one. It signified originally one who wielded a spear; nor a chivalric and romantic knight warring with the infidel in Palestine, or jousting to uphold the claims to beauty of his chosen lady, but a common soldier, a rough man-at-war.

     (Spoiler 1) The first Shakespeare of whom we have any notice in Stratford-upon-Avon was a John of that name. He was hanged punished for robbery, and perhaps he was one of those very many unfortunate persons who have been in all ages wrongly convicted.   

     (Spoiler 2) One Shakespeare before the dramatist’s time had reached some kind of local eminence. This was Isabel Shakespeare, who became Prioress of the Priory of Baddesley Clinton.
     (Spoiler 3) Warwickshire was, in fact very rich in Shakespeares. They grew in every hedgerow, and very many of them owned the Christian name of William, but they spelled their patronymic in an amazing number of ways as a matter of taste and fancy. We will forbear the most of these. “Shaxpeare” and “Shagspeare” are the commonest forms.
      Sure and certain foothold upon genealogical fact is only reached with William Shakepspeare’s father, who established himself at Stratford-upon-Avon about 1551. John Shakespeare was a rising tradesman and became a member of the town council.  

 

School Theatre Goes all Shakespearean

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.