A Lecture

Of the few people that I have mentioned this project to (reading every play), a significant number of them have asked the same simple question: Why? At first, this question caught me off guard a bit. It’s just something you should do, right? A decent idea. Why not? This reason seemed deficient when I first used it, and for good reason…because it is. Nobody seemed to buy it, including myself, so I thought about it some more, and continue to do so. It’s a damn good question, so I think it deserves a damn good answer (or at least a damn good attempt at a damn good answer). At the risk of sounding like a pretentious bore here, I would like to write a little bit about where I am on this question then, this question of “why,” because it’s fun, because it seems worthwhile, and, well, because it’s my blog and I say so. So bear with me.

A Shakespeare lecture I recently attended has helped me to develop the following theory: reading Shakespeare confirms our humanity and, by doing so, brings us together and in turn elevates us to something greater. The Shakespeare canon contains the full range of human experience and can serve to affirm and strengthen our shared human condition. It is of us and in us, made for us and by us. It is US, we, the human, perfectly expressed, and thus inherently valuable as a roadmap to real meaning. This notion, if you think about it, is powerful, perhaps all-powerful, and really has legs if you get into it (again, bear with me).

Check this out: The lecture the other day partly focused on Shakespeare as a redemptive force. There is some energy these days behind this idea, with many examples of good people trying to use Shakespeare’s plays as therapy, as an uplifting experience, as a path to freedom from evil. For example, one could cast and direct a play at a troubled intercity school, or perhaps stage a play at a prison, using convicts as actors. Simply stated, the idea is that we can help someone be better through the words of the Bard.

I like this, and hope for its truth, but, interestingly, the lecture actually spent more time analyzing not how this can be done but rather what it means to put forth this idea in the first place. Why would this be true, Shakespeare as a redemptive force? How could this work? What are these plays actually doing that heals? Is the text itself redemptive? Or, is it what we bring to the text that makes it powerful (probably). So who is doing the work then? If a convicted murderer reads the passage from Hamlet where Claudio prays to God for forgiveness, what can that do for the murderer/actor? Can it help them? Why? Most interestingly, the idea that this is perhaps a misreading of the Bard was explored in the seminar (an idea I am still working out), with us readers imposing all sorts of meaning on the text so as to get to where we want (need?) to be. As such, are we then hijacking Shakespeare?

Sorry for all the questions (and sorry if this is trite, obvious, boring, or otherwise unbearable; like I said, it’s my party and I can do what I want to), but I like these ideas, especially since it dovetails nicely with something I have been turning over in my mind for a while now, namely, the assertion that literature is perhaps the greatest form of art because it helps us share our world, most notably our inner world, with greater force and fluency than any other form. This inner world (soul?) is us, our being, making a great bit of writing a form of “worship” perhaps (never have quotes been more useful around a word), an aid in transcendence from the physical to the spiritual. If indeed “we are islands to each other” (to quote a favorite artist of mine), bridging that gap is maybe then the most important and worthy goal of any artist, and books do it best. Again, simply put, when we link together, really link together, the world is a better place. Shakespeare facilitates this as well (better?) than anyone or anything, helping to reveal this inner world in all it glorious facets and helping to close the gap of singular self-consciousness. So that’s why I’m reading the guy (for those reasons, and for all the jokes of course). Seems like a good reason to me.

(There’s something else we touched on in the lecture that I found very interesting: the idea that there is something else going on here besides simply the words, namely, that there is a rhythm to the text, an iambic pentameter, a music in these lines, and that is perhaps moving us as much as anything. When you pull the car over and lift up the hood, is the poetry the engine, is that doing the work? One of my favorite writers once said (I’m paraphrasing big time here) that, although a firm and deeply convinced humanist/atheist, the only times he ever questioned this was when he heard some really great music. Indeed. Notice how I said earlier that literature is perhaps the greatest form of art? Is it music? Or, is it all one and the same, as we see in Shakespeare, and ourselves)?