Welcome back to our second session.
I'm going to talk about Shakespeare and Elizabethan theater.
I want to begin with a quotation from a woman named Janet McTeer.
This is from a Chicago magazine that used to exist called City Talk.
It's from May 25, 2001, an article by Jane Wolman-Russoff.
Janet McTeer is an actress appearing in a Shakespeare play in the Chicago area, and in this interview we learn
the actress has never been keen on doing big Hollywood movies, which she says, quote,
all seem to be about making money, and I don't find that terribly interesting.
Today in our world, art has to be commercial. That's a really sad point of view.
If Shakespeare had had to be commercial, he wouldn't have written the things he did.
That's just amazing.
It just shows you how deep ingrained this cultural myth of the isolated artist in our culture is.
Shakespeare was a fully commercial artist working in a fully commercial theater.
And indeed, he's exhibit A for my whole case.
If you want to say that great commercial art is possible, you just have to point to Shakespeare.
Case closed. No way we could all go home right now.
Shakespeare's the greatest writer who ever lived. He's probably the greatest artist who ever lived.
And he worked in a commercial environment.
If that was possible, there can't be anything fundamentally wrong with a commercial basis for art.
So in a way, we could stop here, but let's try to explicate that.
And my aim this afternoon is to show that, yes, Shakespeare operated in a commercial environment,
And I want to show that much of his achievement was because of that and not in spite of that.
That is, you could say, yes, Shakespeare worked in a commercial environment, but he overcame
it.
And in a certain sense, that is true.
And I'm certainly not going to say that a commercial environment produced Shakespeare
because there was only one Shakespeare.
And if you could credit his achievement to commerce, then there should have been a whole
bunch of Shakespeare's running around in his day.
And there were certainly people who were trying to be Shakespeare, who were trying to be great
playwrights at the time, and they didn't quite succeed, or at least didn't succeed the way
Shakespeare did.
So I'm not claiming that the commercial environment was responsible for Shakespeare.
But nevertheless, I want to point to aspects of the theater of his day that were genuinely
commercial and that contributed to his achievement.
And above all, competition. That's one of the principles I want to talk about this whole week.
You could say the dream of artists themselves and much of the left-wing program for art is to shield the artists from competition.
Oh, how horrible the competitive marketplace is. You see, it's the same argument they make in basic economics.
and Economics. Competition is bad. And if we could only eliminate the competitive aspect of culture, we would have so much better a culture.
Well, it is true that nobody likes competition. Even Shakespeare probably got antsy about Marlowe and Ben Johnson at times.
And everyone sort of dreams about eliminating the competition. But the answer is that's not healthy. It's not healthy in basic economics.
Economics. It's not healthy, I'm going to argue, in culture as well. Just as in basic
economics, competition is healthy for culture. It keeps people on their toes. It gets their
best work out of them. And I think the Elizabethan Theater is an excellent example of that.
So let's talk about the cultural environment that Shakespeare worked in.
Renaissance theatre in England, Elizabethan theatre, Jacobean theatre, that's the two
periods under Queen Elizabeth and then under James I.
This is one of the peaks of world drama.
Probably the greatest body of dramatic work ever produced, chiefly because Shakespeare
is working at that time.
And it was a largely commercial operation.
In fact, it's a good example of the fundamental thing
I was talking about this morning, that a certain economic stage
had to be reached as the precondition for the Elizabethan
Theater.
Shakespeare, growing up in Stratford,
seeing strolling players coming through the town,
He might have dreamed of being the world's greatest playwright, but without a theater and an acting company, he wasn't going anywhere, and he was not in a position to fund that himself, to pay for building a theater or hiring an acting company, and thank goodness there was no government-granting agency that was going to assign the money for this, because they probably would not have given it to Shakespeare.
So what he had to approach was an already established commercial theater world in London, which was predicated on the fact that London, by that time, 1580s, was one of the largest cities in Europe, was a great commercial center already,
therefore had generated surplus wealth so that people could spend money on something as frivolous as entertainment.
And again, in Stratford where Shakespeare grew up, people weren't going to spend their hard-earned money on a play,
at least maybe once a year, but in London you had a situation where there was enough economic wealth
So, people could go to the theater regularly. Now, it took entrepreneurs to figure that out.
The government didn't build the theaters, even the aristocrats didn't build the theater theaters.
There had been already a kind of tradition of acting troops appearing at aristocratic houses,
The theater that Shakespeare knew was a commercial theater in London, theaters started to be built, I believe, in the 1560s, maybe a little later, but it was quite an investment, you had to first of all build a theater,
a little later but it was quite an investment you had to first of all build
a theater and some of you may have seen the replica of the globe that we now have
in London these were large theaters they sat not sure between 2,000 maybe 3,000
people including seating and standing the first theater was built by a man
by a man named Burbage, whose son went on to become Shakespeare's leading actor, Richard Burbage.
So it took typically a four-sided entrepreneur to see that there was an economic opportunity here.
That if you invested the money, rather large sums of money in those days,
to build one of these theaters, you could get enough people to come to it to justify your investment.
The greatest expense was in building the theater. The Elizabethan theaters initially were outdoors.
They didn't have scenery in our modern sense. They did have rather elaborate costuming and that cost money,
money, although in many cases, and here an element of aristocratic patronage enters the
picture, the theaters were often connected with a major aristocrat or even eventually
with the royal court, and often as part of that connection, they got kind of cast off
aristocratic outfits so they could dress up in robes and look like kings and queens without
were not really buying the stuff, but they were kind of using hand-me-downs from their aristocratic patrons.
But anyway, it was by Elizabethan standards, by Renaissance standards, the theater business was rather heavily capitalized,
of Major Investments, and in fact, the theater companies were among the first joint stock companies.
They actually had shareholders. Shakespeare eventually became a shareholder in the theater company he was involved in.
So he got a percentage of the gross. He got the really good Hollywood deal on his plays.
So there really was quite an economic underpinning to these theaters. Again, if London hadn't had reached a certain stage of economic prosperity at this point, nothing would have been possible.
and so basically the theaters were commercial operations they were open to the general public and that means basically the middle class and the lower classes we don't have totally accurate records on the people that attended these plays but it does we get indications that professionals like lawyers seem to have gone to the theater a lot then and often provided legal advice
for the theater companies that are often getting in trouble, but a daily working man would go to the theater and I believe the price was about a penny, which was an hour's wage then, and it's kind of curious how the basic entertainment has stayed at about minimum wage.
Think of what a movie ticket costs now. It's roughly one hour's wage and the admission to Shakespeare's theatre was roughly one hour's wage for the average person.
and the theaters, in other words, appeal to a broad spectrum of the populace of London.
They were all built initially outside the city limits of London.
London is this vast sprawling metropolis and now it was then a rather small walled, still medieval city.
It actually corresponds to what's called the city in London now.
If you know London geography, it's the financial district,
and what's called the city roughly corresponds.
You can still see the old walls at some points.
And the theaters were built outside the city limits
because the civic authorities were not too thrilled with theater.
Some of the London authorities were relatively middle class, some with puritan sympathies,
and so many of them subscribed to the puritan objections to the theater that involved too much sex,
and it was corrupt and men dressed up as women, and so on.
and so the theaters couldn't get licenses within the city limits of London
and moreover they wanted to build the theaters outside the jurisdiction of the city fathers of London
and they also tended to have some aristocratic protection
and here's where the situation gets a little complicated
you can't call the Elizabethan theater purely commercial because there was an element of patronage
All the theater companies were attached to some prominent aristocrat at court.
For example, Shakespeare's company was originally the Lord Chamberlain's men.
Their representative court was the Lord Chamberlain.
Later, they became the King's men when James I came to the throne in 1604.
So they were the most successful company and they got the highest patronage possible, the royal patronage.
and that I don't want to minimize that, a patronage was still important to them when the civic authorities would threaten to close down the theaters or interfere with them, it was very important to have a patron at court who could defend you,
Appearances at court were very important to Shakespeare's company and the other companies.
That is, yes, they performed in these public theaters and got a substantial portion of the income from that.
But a command performance at the court was still a big deal. It was financially rewarding.
that we can't always separate the world of patronage from the world of the market they often blur together but still fundamentally the plays were oriented towards a commercial theater and we can see that in what Shakespeare appealed to in the plays.
Now, it's interesting just to try to think of the status of the plays and the status of playwriting in general then and of Shakespeare's own status because there's a lot of retrospective, retroactive thinking going on.
We saw that in this quote from this woman saying that Shakespeare wouldn't have written what he did if he was commercial.
Well, now we no longer think of Shakespeare as commercial.
As a matter of fact, he's still quite successful commercially, as a number of movies have shown.
But now, we think of Shakespeare as high art.
And this is a kind of optical illusion, a trick of perspective, and it's something I'll be coming back to again and again.
Now, Shakespeare is one of our quintessential images of high culture.
But he was absolutely the pop culture of his day.
the most popular playwright of his day and no one was standing around the
Elizabethan period saying oh we need to go see Shakespeare that's high culture
that was as low as it got then and what's interesting is if you look at the
contemporary reactions to the plays to the theater in general even to
in Shakespeare, it's that this was vulgar pop culture stuff.
There were tremendous attacks on the theater during Shakespeare's lifetime,
largely coming from the Puritan wing in English Protestantism at the time.
This culminated some 50 years later, the Puritan Revolution, 1640s,
In the 1940s, when the Puritans came to power, one of the first things they did was to shut down the theaters and they were shut for a period of about, I think, 18 years.
They were reopened in 1660.
Essentially one of the first things Charles II did when he came to the throne was reopen the theaters.
So the theater was very contentious and basically you got the complaints about Shakespeare's theater,
In his day that you get about first movies, then television, and now video games.
That is what people said, what they say about any good art form at its beginnings,
that there was too much sex and violence in it, and people mistook illusion for reality.
And they took these plays too seriously. They couldn't distinguish between what they saw on the stage and what was real.
is real. And again, you see this in Plato's Republic in his attack on Athenian drama.
You see it today in attacks on video games. It's one consistent point throughout the history
of culture, that whatever culture is the most popular and has the most impact, there are
people who are going to complain about it. Intellectuals are going to complain about
it and moralists are going to complain about it. And Shakespeare's theater is no example.
Now, I don't want to go too far on this.
There were people that recognized Shakespeare's genius in his day, as Shakespeare began writing
probably in the late 1580s, certainly established by the 1590s.
By 1598, a man named Francis Mears was saying in print that this guy Shakespeare is as good
as the ancients, that his tragedies are as good as the ancient Greek and Roman tragedies,
His comedies are as good as Plowdus and Terence and so on.
So people who were in his day recognized this man's genius.
That doesn't mean, though, that he wasn't severely criticized.
In general, the theory was criticized, and Shakespeare was criticized, sometimes by his
fellow playwrights who complained he wasn't educated.
He was famously called an upstart crow in one contemporary critique because the other
playwrights were jealous of him.
So it's a good example of what happens when we compare the past with the present.
Today, Shakespeare in a way has been tamed for us.
He's become a classic.
He's taught in schools.
There's something almost museum-like in our attitude towards him.
We know he's a great playwright.
We know he's the greatest playwright ever.
So we cut him some slack.
There are many people who, if they saw a Shakespeare play and didn't know Shakespeare written,
it would complain bitterly, again, about the unending dirty jokes in his comedies and sometimes
even in his tragedies as in Hamlet.
and more again, the incredible violence, I mean, what video game has more people shot up at the end than Hamlet, percentage-wise?
And so, you know, basically, we've come to terms with Shakespeare and we accept and we forget that in his own day,
He had a real powerful charge to him that frightened many people and the theater even more generally.
And it's fairly typical if you oversee the whole period of one lesson about the transformation of pop culture into high culture.
The number of plays that have survived from Shakespeare's time is in the hundreds, I believe.
We have 37 or 38 plays by Shakespeare. During his lifetime, about 200 plays total,
including 19 of his that were printed in his lifetime were printed.
Other plays have been found since, I don't know the exact figure, but probably about
200, 250 to 300 plays survived from the whole period, let's say roughly from 1580 to 1630.
That's a lot of plays and very few of them are read today and they unquestionably represent
the tip of an iceberg that most of the plays from the time are as lost as early episodes
of My Three Sons.
When you look at the history of television, it's just staggering how much has been produced
and unfortunately much of it has been preserved and we have to live with it on Nick at Night
and TV land. You know, mercifully most of the plays, probably a majority of the plays have been lost.
They were maybe produced once and then disappeared. This is true of Greek tragedy as well.
I really don't have time to talk much about Greek tragedy, but it's estimated that about a thousand tragedies were produced in Athens
in Athens during roughly that century when Athens was producing drama, of those 1,033 plays have survived,
7 by Aeschylus, 7 by Sophocles and 19 by Euripides.
And, you know, when we look back at Greek drama, we justifiably look at it as one of the peaks of dramatic creation,
I would say the two greatest periods of dramatic creation are 5th century Athens and 16th, 17th century London.
And yet if we had all those, that entire 1000 tragedies from ancient Athens, our view of the theme tragedy would probably be somewhat different.
You know, we have every reason to believe that the best of the Greek dramas are the ones that have survived.
They were survived because they were judged to be the best and people went out of the way to praise them.
But, you know, there was undoubtedly a Quentin Tarantino of Athenian drama.
There was undoubtedly an Oliver Stone of Athenian drama and mercifully we've been spared those works.
But they were there and if we saw them we would probably think less of Greek tragedy or at least have a more balanced view.
With Elizabethan and Jacobean drama we have the advantage that almost all of Shakespeare's plays have been preserved, thank heavens.
There's indications that maybe one or two, especially a play called Cardenio, were lost.
But the world was smart enough to preserve those.
We have wonderful dramas by Christopher Marlowe, by Ben Johnson. You can keep going down the ranks and you get some excellent plays by Thomas Middleton, by Cyril Turner, by John Ford, the Jacobean John Ford, not the filmmaker, though the Jacobean John Ford is much more violent than the guy who made The Searchers.
but you know we it's an impressive body of material but we begin to see the way any real culture is tiered in terms of quality that you know in this case we have the supreme figure of Shakespeare standing above it all then we have some still giant figures like Marlon Johnson and some lesser figures and then it starts it spreads
and there's some pretty bad Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas, comedies that aren't funny, tragedies that are completely wacky, and again we don't have that kind of material for Greek tragedy, but when we look at the drama of Shakespeare it starts to look more like the culture of our time, like the history of cinema for example, where again you have some titanic geniuses in the course of the 20th century,
And then, you know, you get down the ranks and, you know, what I'm getting at is any true culture, a real living culture, is based on a pyramid of garbage.
I mean, basically, a lot of lousy stuff has turned out. The vast proportion, as we can tell in any culture, is lousy.
Lousy stuff is turned out, the vast proportion, as we can tell in any culture, is lousy, and you need that range of work in order to produce the great achievements of any period.
When people complain about commercial culture today, they have plenty of trash to point to.
Thousands of bad movies have been made.
Thousands of bad television shows are being shown at any given moment as you speak.
But there are peaks of quality.
And the problem we have is when people compare the average work of commercial culture today
with the peaks of the past, which are now thought of as non-commercial,
but in fact were part of a vibrant commercial culture in their day.
And I mean, you realize in fact that the same environment that produced Shakespeare in his day, you know, is producing the great movies, the great television shows of our day, that is, you need a very competitive marketplace.
Again, I don't have time to talk about Greek drama, but it is interesting that even though you can't call Athenian theater commercial, but it was competitive.
It was a civic institution and specifically designed as competition.
These great dramas we read today, Aeschylus Aurestaia, Sophocles of Antigone and the Oedipus Tyrannus and so on, these were all part of quite literally a competitive system and so even though that theater wasn't commercial, it had a very strong competitive element built into it and the dramas were written for civic dramatic competitions.
Elizabethan England didn't have quite that system, but it was a very competitive environment.
And what I'm saying is the plays were better for that reason.
That competition spurred innovation, it spurred creativity, it kept people from settling into comfortable ruts.
Now, the reason the Elizabethan theater was so competitive is it was so entrepreneurial.
There was some barrier to entry in that you needed enough money to create, build a theater and outfit it and hire actors and hire playwrights and so on.
But, you know, if you could raise the money, you could enter the business, especially since it was a kind of fringe business.
Again, it was a very unregulated marketplace. They built the theatre specifically outside the city limits so that they were in unregulated zones.
So how commercial the Elizabethan theater was, particularly in the South Bank area where the Globe was eventually built and where Shakespeare spent much of his career.
I mean, that was the center for theaters, bare baiting pits and houses of prostitution in Shakespeare's day.
All the fun activities were concentrated in this one area outside the city.
Ironically, the land was under the control of the Bishop of Winchester, I believe,
and therefore the city couldn't intervene because it was church territory.
But the bear baiting was this wonderful sport, sort of the Elizabethan equivalent of bullfighting.
I think they would tie a bear to a stake and stick dogs on it, and people would bet on who won, the dog or the bears.
I believe Bear Henshaw did a movie of it.
And how's the prostitution, I don't need to explain.
But it is interesting, a number of the theater entrepreneurs doubled.
They ran bordellos and they ran theaters.
Burbage was one example of that.
And I think Philip Henslow also was in the dual business.
Again, this gives some idea of the world and the commercial character of the world Shakespeare operated.
We'll talk about this in a minute, but we're going to show a film tonight.
We're going to show Tom Stoppard's Shakespeare in Love, which I think is a wonderful attempt to capture the very commercial nature of the world Shakespeare dealt in.
So, it was very competitive. There were usually about three major theater companies in England during Shakespeare's lifetime.
And again, they were very competitive. They were always looking for new talent.
And that's one of the keys to Shakespeare's life story and to the story of this whole world.
The theater attracted talent because it was a world that rewarded talent at a time where talent wasn't all that rewarded throughout society.
I mean, Shakespeare's world was emerging from what we call feudalism, an era when most people were born into the station of life that they were going to stay in.
Most people in Shakespeare's lifetime stayed in the social rank, the economic rank they were born in.
If your father was a blacksmith, you became a blacksmith.
That's why we have the name Smith, so confident in our language.
Many of our names are referred to the occupations, the name Cooper, for example, the guy who put wheels together, the name Taylor.
Shakespeare's world was not a world of great economic and social mobility. It was more so than England had been.
But one of the chief routes to upward mobility in his day was the theater. And you can see that because it attracted a lot of people from the universities.
that is now people would go to university and end up unemployable as a result.
Now, in some cases, yeah, you see the Elizabethan age was a great age of doctors, of lawyers.
Shakespeare's plays reflect that. He knows the lingo of doctors. He knows the lingo of lawyers.
Probably met them at the theater, picked up the vocabulary. And yeah, it was already the beginnings
of the modern world of professionalism. People would go get educations and then
maybe work their way up through court and so on. But that was pretty hard work, you
know. That's not like striking it rich in Hollywood. And so indeed what the
Elizabethan theater meant in Shakespeare's day is much what Hollywood
meant through a lot of the 20th century and what television has come to mean. I
I remember I went to Harvard as an undergraduate. I was class of 66.
I remember there was one kid in our class who wanted to go to Hollywood.
And we thought this was the craziest idea we'd heard of.
This is the Kennedy era. You know, you went to Harvard because you wanted to become president or become the advisor president.
But there was this one kid that wanted to become a movie maker.
His name was Tim Hunter, actually, and he went on to make some movies, including a movie called Text and a movie called River's Edge.
But I remember we thought it was the strangest thing. And then I remember I stayed at Harvard. I was a professor there for a while.
And people were, by the 1970s, people were interested in going to television.
And we thought that was the absolutely stupidest idea we'd ever heard of.
What we didn't know was Conan O'Brien was a couple of slots down in the classes that the entire Simpsons group was about to go over and take over television, comedy and so on.
And I remember one of the late 70s, there was a student named Phil Zednik who was writing musical comedy. He went on to write Mulan and some other things for Disney.
And, you know, at any given point, ambitious young people, wanting to rise more, make money,
they look at where's the money coming from and where's it coming from in culture.
You know, today would seem to be to be video games, we'll talk about that at the end of
the week.
But in Shakespeare's day, one of the things you could do to rise in the world was the theater.
And you can see the pattern again and again.
I think Ben Johnson was a Cambridge graduate.
It is interesting that most of the other playwrights in Shakespeare's day were university graduates.
And as I said, they actually seemed to have held it against him that he didn't have a university education.
But, you know, he proved them wrong.
And there's even some indications in his early plays, he was trying to show that he was a university graduate.
He was trying to show off that he actually was well-educated, particularly in Latin.
Among his earlier plays, you've got Comedy of Errors, that's an imitation of Plautus' Latin play, the Manekmai.
You've got Titus Andronicus, which is very much in the mode of a Seneca tragedy.
He's showing that he knows the Latin models and that sort of thing.
I think he was sensitive to the fact that he hadn't gone to university.
But he was pursuing the course that an intelligent young man, in his day, would.
Theater in London then was life in the fast lane, as Hollywood has been for so many people in the 20th century.
And the financial rewards were pretty substantial,
Especially for someone who didn't have connections at court and really didn't have many other opportunities.
The nice thing about the theater was, then as now, it recognized talent.
If you could act well and bring in the audiences, you were in great shape.
If you could write a play that people liked, you were in great shape.
It's hard to translate finances into modern terms,
but I think the figures are roughly like this,
that a playwright could be paid five pounds for writing a play
when you could live for a year on 10 pounds.
In other words, you could get a lot of money in real terms
for writing a play.
Don't quote me exactly on those figures,
But, you know, it would be like getting $50,000 for a script now.
I know it sounds ridiculous because the monetary, the nominal amounts are so low, but we can thank inflation for that.
But the playwrights were well rewarded and, of course, in Shakespeare's case, he became a shareholder in a theater company.
And he was so important to its success that they let him buy into the company itself.
I believe he was the only playwright who was a shareholder in one of the companies.
So he had a real financial stake and he became a very wealthy man.
I mean, basically, he was from a lower middle class family.
The fortunes of his family went up and down.
His father was, in effect, the mayor of Stratford at one point, but then suffered business reverses.
But he made enough money to buy, eventually, the second bickest house in Stratford.
And he owned a lot of land in Stratford.
and he invested in some London property as well so again it's hard to translate this into modern terms but he became he was quite successful financially and every indication is that he wanted wanted to be now to say again it's hard for us to recapture the status of writers in that day because we again we projected back this idea that
Here's this great writer, Shakespeare, and everybody must have been aware of him as a
great writer. But a better way to think about it is that playwrights in Shakespeare's day
had more or less the status of screenwriters today. Most people are unaware of who the
What are the screenwriters of movies are? I mean, most people wouldn't know who the screenwriter of Gone with the Wind was, or the Wizard of Oz, or, you know, Citizen Kane we know was Orson Welles, because he was also the director and so on.
But in most cases, most people are not aware of who the screenwriter is, and you almost never can sell a film on the basis of who the screenwriter is.
The films are very star-oriented. People want to go see the latest Brad Pitt movie or the latest Angelina Jolie movie.
They don't want to see the latest Jo Esther Haas movie, especially after Showgirls.
There was a brief period, for example, when Esther Haas was hot.
and, you know, you'll occasionally see, you know, films are sold on Starz, you'll occasionally see from the producers who brought you American Pie 2,
and I wonder if that ever brings anybody in, you know, maybe Jerry Bruckheimer, they'll try a Jerry Bruckheimer production, but, you know, basically you sell films on the Starz and that probably was true in Shakespeare's day,
That the actors were the most famous. The two most famous serious actors were a man named Edwin Allen, who worked for Marlowe, the company Marlowe was associated with, and Richard Burbridge, who worked for the company Shakespeare was associated with.
There were also some famous comedians, I'll talk about them in a minute. And I think the feeling, we don't know, we really don't know how the plays were advertised, with a few exceptions.
but I have a feeling that people went to see the latest Richard Burbridge production, oh I hear he's in something called Hamlet this year, you know, he was so great as Julius Caesar or Brutus or whatever role he played,
But it is, so people were not aware of even who were writing these plays.
What's interesting is Shakespeare was so good that he seems to have been the first name playwright of the time.
There's an excellent book on the subject, it's the one I recommended.
Lucas Ernst, Shakespeare's Literary Dramatist, really is a breakthrough book in re-understanding what Shakespeare's role was.
And he makes the point and shows you that when Shakespeare's plays were first published, his name didn't even appear on the title page in the early 1590s.
They were just, you know, saying the tragedy of Richard III or whatever.
At a certain point in the 1590s, they start putting his name on the title page as if they realized he's marketable, Shakespeare's marketable.
And it does seem, this book is revolutionary because he argues that Shakespeare's plays were intended to be printed.
You know, the common view is that Shakespeare had no interest in publishing his plays and that, you know,
it's just lucky that we happen to have some texts that were illegally printed and then were published in the first folio in 1623 by his friends.
Ernst says this is just a mistaken assumption. He comes up with a very
elaborate argument that Shakespeare's theater company had a project,
essentially a branding Shakespeare. You know, you could like, Stephen King, you can
sell a movie on the Stephen King name. So it's always Stephen King's whatever,
He argues that you start to see Shakespeare's name appearing as if his company realizes this can help sell the plays.
It's very interesting that the whole notion of the commercial advantage of his name,
It is probably true that by 1600 people were thinking, oh I hear Shakespeare has a new play at the Globe, it's called King Lear, let's go to see it, Othello was so good.
Now again we can't prove this, we don't have contemporary reactions that show that, but a lot of the evidence shows that people were beginning to notice Shakespeare's name in a way that they weren't noticing other names.
with the possible exception of Christopher Marlowe and then Ben Johnson comes along.
He's the first guy who starts definitely printing his own plays and his name is bigger than the title of the play.
And so it's an interesting moment, very important moment in literary history when the author of the play starts to emerge as important.
Because you have to understand that, again, we're very much obsessed with the notion of, again, this single solitary genius, remember, sitting up at the attic, writing the play.
Again, most English Renaissance plays were much more like screenplays in that they had multiple authors.
Shakespeare's unusual in that he seems to have written most of his plays himself, by himself, but they're actually signed, many of them may be, not many, some of them may be collaborations, increasingly people find the hand of Thomas Middleton and Macbeth, and maybe time of Athens, it's always been clear that Shakespeare collaborated with John Fletcher towards the end of his career,
in Korea on a play called Two Noble Kinsmen, which for a long time was not assigned to
Shakespeare's canon because it was clear it wasn't totally by him, but now increasingly
is admitted to complete Shakespeare editions. Fletcher and Shakespeare may have combined
on Henry VIII. This was a more common pattern, just the way there's no movie with a single
screenplay author. And in fact, the names you see up there on the screen are a fraction
and the people who actually wrote the film. In fact, there's a huge deal of negotiations.
Who gets screen credit for a film? And, you know, Casablanca, which maybe we'll talk about
when we get it, you know, roughly nine writers have been identified with that, the creation
of that script, and more people keep coming out of the woodwork, claiming they wrote This
Which is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Well that's the way Shakespeare's theater was.
There's every indication, for example, that Shakespeare's theater had script doctors.
You know, there are people, any Hollywood movie at the minute, they bring in somebody
who's good at endings or good at continuity.
Here's another interesting point about division of labor that enters into culture in ways
you know it's not supposed to.
Again, the image of, I said this morning that the whole of culture would only be possible
because of division of labor.
But even within art, we are so entranced by this theory of the single creator that we
I don't realize that division of labor is a principle in Hollywood there are certain, they know there are certain joke writers and you got a film and you show it in a screening and it's just dying in front of you and the studio decides this needs some jokes and they bring in so-and-so because he's known as a joke writer you wouldn't run him writing the whole film he can't do it but what he's a specialist at is getting just the
You can't write jokes at a certain point, or someone else is perfect at writing endings.
Can't write beginnings or middles, but knows how to end a film.
Writing is a very specialized art in Hollywood.
And again, we don't have the kind of records that would tell us this in detail,
but there seems to be indications that, you know, like with Marlowe's Dr. Faustus,
It's almost certain that that play we have is not completely by Marlowe, and I think some guy was brought in to add jokes to it. Probably a guy named Samuel Rowley.
Every indication we have is that the way these plays were written was more the way films are written than the way we think of plays being written.
You know, when Eugene O'Neill wrote a play, we like to think Eugene O'Neill wrote the
whole play.
I'm not even sure if that's true in many cases.
But in Shakespeare's day, we're seeing a collaborative effort dictated by commercial
needs in the play.
And again, now one view of this would be that this ruined the plays.
that the authentic genius of one author's vision got corrupted.
Now in the case of Marlowe's, Dr. Faust, that seems to be the case.
The comedy scenes do not seem to be written on the level of inspiration as the great tragic
scenes.
But that, on the other hand, may be just the point, that they create a very interesting
counterpoint between comedy and tragedy in a play.
and you can get a great debate about Dr. Faustus, do the comedy scenes ruin it or improve it.
But I want to suggest that you see the two options are there.
Sometimes the collaborative nature of the plays may have messed them up.
Sometimes it may have improved them.
So again, Shakespeare was so talented that it seems that he could get away
with writing pretty much the whole plays themselves. But that was fairly unusual. And many of the
plays we know to be collaborations by two, sometimes three authors. And again, they were
not necessarily the worst for that. Again, Shakespeare's case, you know, King Lear is
pretty somber. We need a few comedy scenes in it. They didn't have to bring in Sammy
I used the analogies to Hollywood so that you can see that this was a more complicated system, this renaissance playwriting and theater in general, and one that could, in many ways, lead to what makes the plays great.
Here's another example of how Shakespeare was working in a kind of active commercial theater environment.
Shakespeare was himself an actor. We know that. He was not the star of the company.
There's no hard evidence, but there are legends that say he played Hamlet's father's ghost,
that he may have played the character, the old servant Adam in As You Like It.
He was a bit player, maybe a character actor, not a star the way Burbage was, but we know
something about his theater company and he worked with it.
A good indication is the matter of comedy.
We know the two principal comedians that Shakespeare worked with.
The first was a man named Wil Kemp and the second was a man named Robert Armand.
Wil Kemp was the comic lead in the first half of Shakespeare's career in the 1590s and probably
created roles like Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, Lancelot, Gobo in Merchant of Venice
and so on. And we can infer from this and from independent evidence that Kemp was good
at dancing. There's something called Kemp's jig became famous. He once danced across half
of England on a publicity stunt. We know he's a good dancer and he evidently did great little
comic dialogues with himself. He could talk to himself. And Shakespeare wrote parts for
for this guy and you can see that the comic parts in his early comedies are written with
Kemp in mind.
Now again, in typical Hollywood fashion, Kemp decided he was too big for Shakespeare's company
and he could go off on his own and start his own company, he was such a big star, he was
the David Caruso on this day, and he actually did okay.
He was then replaced by a man named Robert Armand, who was evidently very funny, but
a different kind of humor. He had a good voice. He could sing. And Shakespeare, middle of
his career shifts from writing parts for clowns to writing parts for fools. Touchstone in
in 12th Night, excuse me, Touchstone as you like it, Feste in 12th Night, and Above All
the Fool in King Lear. And, you know, this is actually a major change in what Shakespeare
is doing dramatically, culminating in one of the most brilliant ideas in all world drama
of Adding the Part of This Comic Fool to the Most Tragic Play Ever Written, King Lear,
and you know, if you were just, if we knew nothing about theater history, we could say,
you know, Shakespeare just did this because he was a genius. But looking at the facts,
you can't help saying that this was an artifact of a change in his theater company, that Robert
Dr. Armin had replaced Will Kemp.
Now it doesn't make Shakespeare less of a genius because, you know, there were other
people in the theater company and they weren't writing King Lear and they weren't coming
up with this brilliant idea of the fool of King Lear.
It still took Shakespeare to do it.
Nevertheless, you can see that he was working as a man in a theater world with certain constraints
just as, you know, John Ford, the 20th century one.
He knew the actors. He had this acting company that John Wayne was going to be in the film, that Ward Bond was going to be in the film.
He had these character actors and he always was creating parts for them. And it's one of the reasons his films are so great,
is that Ford had a great working relationship with his actors and knew he could write parts for them and they'd play them perfectly.
that, you know, when he wanted the sidekick, Andy Devine was waiting there to fill the role.
What I'm saying is Shakespeare was similar in that respect.
And again, the fact that he worked in a commercial theater environment meant that he made certain decisions
not on what we would call purely aesthetic grounds.
He didn't say, I have to have a fool in King Lear, let's go out and hire someone that can do it.
I got Robert Armand here. He was so great in As You Like It. He was so great in Twelfth
Night. What can I do for him? I'm going to write him a part like you've never seen before.
It'll have incredible pathos. And that's a sort of accident of theater history, but
the result is one of the greatest, probably the greatest drama I've ever written and one
One of the greatest strokes of genius in that drama.
So this would be the case where, you know, in the abstract and people who have contempt
for commercial theater would say, what's worse than having the actors you're working with
dictate the kind of parts you write in your plays?
And Shakespeare would say, I know what I'm doing, leave me alone, I can live with this.
And you know, it's interesting, all of this that I'm saying has bearing on the famous question
of Shakespeare's authorship. I hesitate to bring this up, but I'm sure someone will, and
I'll forestall this. You know, there are all these crazy theories that Shakespeare didn't
write his plays, and one of the prominent candidates is that the Earl of Oxford wrote
the Plays, and Joe Sobrant, who's a great friend of the Mises Institute and whom I've
met here. He and I had a very vicious exchange in The Weekly Standard when I did a negative
review of his book in which he, alias Shakespeare, which he claimed that the Earl of Oxford wrote
The Plays. I bring it up because the issue actually reflects this anti-commercial prejudice.
The argument against Shakespeare having written these plays is how could this lower middle
class kid from rural Stratford who never went to a university write these great plays.
It must have been an aristocrat.
I had a great fun with Sovereign accusing me of being a Marxist because this argument was
so class-based that a middle-class figure couldn't have written these plays, only an
aristocrat could have written this well about aristocrats.
And it was interesting, we had actually a pretty civil exchange of letters and then
the miracle of all miracles happened, Charlton Heston came to my defense, wrote a letter
to the Weekly Standard, saying, I don't know much about the real Shakespeare, but I know
one thing, he was an actor. That the man who wrote these plays was an actor. And he really
is a brilliant letter, very learned, scholarly, and really insightful. You know, the whole
charge is how could some ignorant actor have written these plays instead of this well-educated
Errol of Oxford, this aristocrat, and Heston said, you know, the one thing you can tell
from these plays, and he said, having acted in them, is that the guy who wrote these plays
knew something about acting, that if you wanted to choose one profession for the guy who wrote
these plays, and there have been all these theories, he must have been a lawyer, he must
have been a doctor, he must have been this, this and that, you know, Heston really cut
You know what? He must have been an actor. He knows so well how to write parts for actors.
And so Heston had this idea that Shakespeare grew out of a world of the theater, a commercial world.
And it's so interesting to me to see that this prejudice against commercial art even extends to the notion of Shakespeare's origins.
that how can he have been this lower middle class figure, he must have been an aristocrat, only an aristocrat could produce these plays.
Now, you know, my reaction to that is, you know, if we saw that every other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatist was an aristocrat,
and Shakespeare was the one anomaly, we could say maybe we got an argument here.
But every one of these other play, almost every one, let me say that, is from lower middle class origins.
Ben Johnson's father was a bricklayer. Forget what the business, Shakespeare's father was a glove maker.
Marlowe's father was also a tradesman. And what you see generally, the pattern you see is that these playwrights of this time were on the make.
In fact, when you go through the history of art, whether it's painting, music, literature, there are very few aristocrats who've achieved anything in the arts.
Aristocrats don't have to achieve anything. They're born to their wealth and their status. They typically rest on their laurels.
It's precisely people from the middle class who have something to prove.
and almost all the figures you see in the arts are people who have very middle class motivations and therefore you can say commercial motivations.
They want to make money and be successful and make something out of themselves in the classic capitalist rags to riches stories.
And so, again, even I think this great conundrum of Shakespeare's origins and whether he really wrote the plays,
I can actually reinterpret it in light of what I'm saying here, that the logic of the situation indeed dictates that a young kid from Stratford would be likely to produce this phenomenon, someone very ambitious trying to make something of himself in the world.
Now, I don't want to overstress this too much, the positive aspect of the commercial character of Shakespeare's theatre.
So let me qualify it, and again, one of the things I'm doing over today and tomorrow is suggesting how the patronage and commercial systems blend, overlap, sometimes their intentions, sometimes reinforce each other.
There are significant signs that Shakespeare was not entirely comfortable with commercial theater.
You know, in the words of the Godfather, you know, this is the life we chose.
I think he understood that this is what he pursued and he pursued it very successfully.
But I think he had doubts and we see this in many ways.
is for one thing, he did seek out patronage at a number of points in his career, as if
he was just testing the waters for the other course in life. That is, it does appear that
he began in the theater, but plague was a problem in those days, and when plague broke
out in London, they often shut down the theaters, sometimes I believe for as long as a year
And it does seem that in the 1590s, when Shakespeare was not able to write plays because the theaters were shut down, he wrote poetry.
Super elegant, mellifluous Elizabethan poetry. The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, two extremely learned, high culture poems
with references to Ovid and obviously to Roman antiquity.
They were exactly what people thought of as literature in those days.
Plays were not thought of as literature.
Again, they were thought of roughly the way people think of TV scripts now.
They weren't sure who the authors were. They didn't think they'd last.
There's reason to think that Shakespeare worried
that his name would not become immortal if he simply wrote plays.
As I said, when he started writing plays, they didn't even put his name on the play bill.
And they didn't put it on published versions of the play.
So there are signs that he was considering the alternate route.
He was a great poet of writing poetry, and he dedicated it to the Earl of Southampton.
The dedication is fulsome in the way that only renaissance efforts to get patronage can be.
You do not know what sucking up can be until you've read dedication to a renaissance noble.
and, you know, it's obvious Shakespeare was trying to get a position in Southampton's
court.
There's some indication that Southampton did help him out at various points and there
were strange interactions between Shakespeare's company and the career of Southampton and
the career of Essex and so on.
So it does seem that he was keeping his options open or trying to open up new options of getting
patronage from a prominent noble.
And as I said, the career of Shakespeare's company was not entirely divorced from aristocratic
or eventually Royal Patronage and in fact the Globe Theatre was built in 1598-99.
In the early 1600s the company opened up an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars, which had
a more upscale clientele.
They could charge more and generally attracted a more aristocratic audience.
We see this pattern in general in the period that there was not a simple divorce between
the commercial theaters and the kind of aristocrat court.
This is even clearer in Ben Johnson's career, Johnson who worked for time in Shakespeare's
Company, Shakespeare, we do know acted in one of Johnson's plays, their careers intersected at many points, but Johnson eventually made the bulk of his money writing court pageants for James I, and again there was, if you could be successful at court, there was, you got these nice lump sum payments and eventually Johnson got a pension from the king, so again,
Johnson is typical of what was going on that people pursued all their options just as now people will work in the commercial world of art and also seek out government grants if they can get them and sometimes patronage as well.
It's kind of interesting when you look at the careers of some 20th century artists, they'll take money wherever they can get it.
So in Shakespeare's case as well, there seemed to be signs that he was looking to get patronage when he could.
There are signs to me that he was uncomfortable with the world of the theater.
You see it particularly in some late plays.
In Antony and Cleopatra, maybe the last tragedy, Shakespeare wrote, when Cleopatra is horrified at the prospect of being caught by Octavian, she commits suicide saying she doesn't want to be led in triumph to Rome by Octavius and see pageants put on about her career and she says she doesn't want to see someone boy my greatness in the posture of a whore, because again boys played women
in Elizabethan Theater, and so she imagines what's exactly happening for us before our
eyes. Boy actors playing Cleopatra, saying, I don't want to be up on a stage. And of course,
Coriolanus, Shakespeare wrote roughly the same time, 1607, 08, 09, that period. There,
the whole thing is about this hero who's too proud to run an election campaign in Rome
and keeps saying things like, a dull actor, I forgot my part, he just hates the idea of
appearing before a crowd and regards the whole world of the theatre as somehow corrupting
to his soul.
You know, my guess is that Shakespeare was a sensitive guy and, you know, that the world
of commercial theatre was rough on him and that, you know, having to be an actor was
was tough on him and dealing with this whole commercial world was a strain for him. All
the compromises involved, all having to work with other playwrights and with the owners
of the company, well he was a co-owner but the manager of the company and working with
the actors, that this was difficult. And you know the oddest thing about Shakespeare is
In the years he retires, probably 1610, 1611, goes back to Stratford, you know, at the peak of his powers, he's still writing things like The Tempest, there's no sign of any feebleness of his powers, it does seem as if he's salted away enough money and owned enough land, he said, I don't need this anymore.
One personal theory is that he went home to prepare an edition of his plays. This is a
very controversial idea. Again, the most common view is that Shakespeare was utterly indifferent
to the publication of his plays. I cannot believe that. I cannot believe that if I'd
written King Lear, I wouldn't want it to be preserved and in as good a copy as it could
And I'm glad to say finally some scholars are coming around to the same view.
Earn makes the point, Sammy Wells in his book Shakespeare All Time points to some interesting facts that in Shakespeare's will there are three legacies.
One to Richard Burbage, one to John Hemings and one to Henry Condal.
Hebbings and Condell went on to publish Shakespeare's plays in the famous First Folio of 1623.
And we have Shakespeare's plays in rather bad text, but better than we might have hoped.
And my guess is, and other scholars now support this, is that Shakespeare was talking to these friends
about publishing his works and maybe even you know preparing the idea that if he
died they would finish the project. Burbridge died before the first folio
came out, but there are little indications like that. The texts for some
of Shakespeare's plays are extraordinarily good, some are extraordinarily bad, but
Decisions like the Tempest, Coriolanus, Anthony Cleopatra have very good text and my guess is Shakespeare had sat down and started to prepare good text and unfortunately died, he was only 54 when he died, 52, 52, so he could have expected to live long, that was pretty old for his day, but again this suggests that he was not indifferent
So, going back to the point I started to make, if you look at certain signs in Shakespeare's career, he was not entirely comfortable with the world of the commercial theater.
I'm not claiming that. Again, the people that see problems with the commercial character of theater are right.
Undoubtedly, Shakespeare had to do things that he didn't want to.
It's interesting, for example, a couple of his plays have tantalizing titles.
As You Like It, Twelfth Night is subtitled What You Will.
As if Shakespeare is saying to his audience, OK, this is what you want.
Here it is.
He'd written The Merchant of Venice, which is an unusually dark comedy,
An unusually complex one, one which borders on tragedy and some feel has a strong tragic element.
Maybe it didn't do so well, and Shakespeare says the next thing he's writing is,
as you like it, what you will, much ado about nothing, as if he's saying,
you know, my comedy's too serious for you, I can write this trivial stuff for you.
or, you know, Troilus and Cressida, my guess is it bombed. It was some kind of weird experiment
that never succeeded. You know, you look at the conversation between Hamlet and the players,
you see that they're Shakespeare's very into the whole business of theater companies and
and their rivalry, and he must have felt rivalry with first Christopher Marlowe, then with
Ben Johnson. Ben Johnson was always taking pot shots at Shakespeare, claiming his Roman
plays weren't Roman enough, and claiming that he made mistakes in his plays and so on.
And so it was a very competitive environment that Shakespeare operated in, and my guess
says, yes, it was a strain on him, and yes, at times, he felt pressured into doing things
that he might not have wanted to do. You know, there's this famous legend that Queen Elizabeth
liked the character Falstaff so much that she wanted to see him in love, and Shakespeare
Shakespeare had to write the comedy, Mary Wise of Windsor. You know, it's almost like
when poor, Sherlock Holmes was, when Arthur Condor had a kill-off, thought he had a kill-off
Sherlock Holmes so he could go on to write other things and he couldn't, the public forced
him to resurrect Sherlock Holmes. You know, Shakespeare killed off Falstaff in Henry the
and the fifth, maybe felt, thank God I'm done with that guy, don't want to write any more
false set plays and then he gets forced into writing Mary Weiser Windsor. I have no doubt
that he felt the pressures of working in the intensely competitive world of commercial
theatre. But I also think he was a better playwright for it. That he knew the theatre
the company he was writing for and he knew his audience. My guess, he was there every night in the theater, maybe acting in the plays or standing backstage and it meant his play, it's one of the things that gave them life.
Now again, there were probably a hundred other playwrights at the time, and all in the same commercial environment, and all under the same pressures that Shakespeare operated under.
So that doesn't explain his genius. You know, if this explained the genius, then the plays of Thomas Decker ought to be a lot better than they are.
Not that the shoemaker's holiday is all that bad, but again, I'm talking about a necessary,
not a sufficient condition. I do think, however, that the whole world Shakespeare operated
was uplifted by these competitive pressures. You really see what it is to have this city
of London with, you know, at any given moment, probably three major theater companies where
everyone's competing for the public's attention, for the public's money. It energized two or
three generations of writers, and they all lifted each other up, and Shakespeare really
lifted them up. You know, there's a tendency among most lyric professors to study the influence
and the influence of other dramatists on Shakespeare.
Well, it's an even more fascinating question
to raise the question of Shakespeare's influence on his contemporaries,
because, you know, it was like a great Hollywood director.
People see a John Ford western,
and then someone else can do a western much better than he could have
in the example of John Ford, or Hitchcock's influence on thrillers.
One thing that happens in this kind of intense competitive environment is people do imitate
each other, and Shakespeare undoubtedly learned something from Marlowe, for example.
The very sound of his blank verse is inherited from Marlowe, but he went beyond Marlowe.
But in general, when we look at this period, which may be the absolute peak of drama in
the Western tradition, surely one of the highest peaks, it's not because it was non-commercial.
It's not because these playwrights were shielded from competition.
If you look, and again you can't, Shakespeare is such a genius he might have succeeded in
any environment. We'll talk about this when we get to someone like Shostakovich operating
under Stalin in the Soviet regime, that even he is able to achieve great things under the
worst possible conditions. You will see it hinges on a Shakespeare-based opera, he wrote
Lady Macbeth, but in some ways what's interesting is how a commercial environment can lead to
and Lift All Boats, that the richness of this period has to do precisely with the fact that
the exact patterns you get in a commercial theater of people imitating, following leads,
I mean, one of the things that makes Shakespeare's theater look like the modern world of commercial
movies is, for example, sequels. Shakespeare writes Henry IV, part one, and then he writes
And then he writes Henry IV Part II.
Now it's very possible that the two plays, I think they were in fact planned to begin with,
you know, like the three parts of Lord of the Rings or the Pirates of the Caribbean sequence now.
But it is interesting that you find the same phenomenon that one thing succeeds and then everyone starts imitating it.
Hamlet helped kick off a sequence of revenge tragedies in the Jacobian period, which it sort of inaugurates.
These are commercial principles. Something succeeds, other people start imitating it.
Now the imitations of Hamlet are not as good as Hamlet.
There's a play called The Revenger's Tragedy.
The Revenge of Tragedy
about a Rockham Sockham revenge tragedy with everybody dead at the end. That's what whoever
wrote that play saw on Hamlet. And it's a pretty good play. It's actually, if you see
it staged, it's a really exciting play with some great moments, some great dramatic turns.
So this is what I'm talking about when I say that commercial theater is quite viable. Shakespeare
didn't succeed in spite of the commercial world he operated in and he didn't succeed
because of it either because again we're talking about a level of genius here which is actually
unique in the history of the human race but still there are ways in which the very commercial
character of the theater world he operated in fed his creativity.
We will never know you know if he had been on government grants or had taught at a university
where a salary was paid no matter what plays he wrote, whether he would have gone through the effort to churn out two plays a year.
You know, it's very suspicious. People think he had a contract with Lord Chamberlain's men and the King's men, two plays a year,
because that's what you see in a pattern. He's basically producing two plays a year.
Try to think of writing Othello and King Lear in one year. That's quite the way it works out.
I mean that's a staggering achievement and you know if you didn't have a
contract to do it, would you have done it? We'd like to think yes, but you'll see
this in Shakespeare in Love tonight that you know the pressure of the deadline,
the fact that his money depended upon meeting the demands of the company, the
and Demands of the Public. Sometimes you need that. If he'd been a souring professor of
creative writing at Oxford, who knows? He might have said, well, you know, we can wait
a year to produce these works. So I'm not in any way trying to demean Shakespeare by
I'm not in any way trying to demean Shakespeare by suggesting that there was this commercial
aspect to his career. What I'm trying to do is actually uplift the notion of commerce in
our minds that doing something to make money to please the public is not an ignoble activity.
And again, every indication we have is that Shakespeare was a fully commercial artist
And if that's so, it doesn't take Shakespeare down a peg.
It lifts commercial art up in our minds.
And we should understand that if he could grow out
of a commercial atmosphere, then there's
nothing inherently evil or demeaning about commerce
as a motive for art.
So I'll stop here.
And now we've got a couple of minutes.
We can take some questions.
Yes, I mean, it's very operatic, as a matter of fact, and it is interesting that Revenge
is such a motive in Italian opera, and it is...
I've got a question about Karl Marx. I read a letter of review of Karl Marx's reading of what he did in the 60s, and I think it was E. Willow Jones, professor of classical architecture, said Shakespeare was one of his favorite authors.
Shakespeare was extremely famous in Germany in the 19th century and the German translations of Shakespeare by Schlegel and Teague are among the finest translations of anything ever done.
They're simply magnificent. They're accurate and they're beautiful.
and so Shakespeare plays almost as well in German as he does in English. I just saw Macbeth in German in Frankfurt and I can testify to this.
And so there was more Shakespeare scholarship in 19th century Germany than there was in 19th century England.
It was a big deal. Goethe loved Shakespeare. Schiller loved Shakespeare. And so Marx, who very much, Marx to me is a German romantic.
He grew up in the world of German Romanticism, and his vision is utopian in the way that
German Romanticism was. He claimed it was anti-utopian and scientific, but that makes
it all the more utopian. So Marx, you know, he really is the disaffected literary intellectual.
So I mean, you know, one of the good points about him is that he liked Shakespeare, though
often for the wrong reasons, but there's quite a significant body of Marxist scholarship on
Shakespeare, which takes off from the fact that the great man liked Shakespeare and therefore,
even in the Soviet Union, there was actually some very good Marxist criticism of Shakespeare in the
1930s. Yes.
Yeah, it's a complicated point because Ben Johnson, for example, for all his quibbling
about Shakespeare, knew he was a much greater artist, and that's one reason he quibbles
about it.
And then, of course, in the poem that's preparatory to the first folio, he says he was not of
an age but for all time.
I know exactly what you're talking about, and it is important to realize that Shakespeare
Francis Mears was regarded as essentially a pop culture figure, but what's also true is that already in this time people were beginning to realize he was a genius, again this fact that Francis Mears already in 1598 is comparing him to the ancient dramatist, so it's not simple, I mean, you know, his reputation is complex to begin with, but you're right that Beaumont and Fletcher,
the 17th century stage than Shakespeare, Johnson less so than Shakespeare, but rather respected and it is interesting that these playwrights, except for the Puritan interregnum, there's something of a continuity in dramatic production throughout the 17th, 18th century.
in the 18th century. But yes, when Shakespeare, by the end of the 18th century, he's starting
to be held up as this genius who can be totally divorced from his origins above all in a commercial
theater world. People are beginning to forget that that was a commercial theater. He's starting
to be thought of as an elite figure, high culture, and then the romantics, he becomes
a great image of the perfect creator and you know he is I mean he's the greatest
genius I think that ever lived and and again you can see his differences from
the other playwrights that he he really didn't need help in most cases and could
write the plays all aspects of him on his own but he does increasingly get
Package, so that ultimately we can get to that kind of quote I began with that
Shakespeare wouldn't have written the plays he did if he wrote for the
commercial theater and people just completely forget his origins. Yes.
I was going to ask about your opening comments about the typical public response to any really popular art or literature that the elite condemned as lowbrow and the moral condemned as corrupting. The first thing that came to mind was Harry Potter, although I'm sure you could come up with a hundred examples.
I've heard some people say good things about those books, I've heard some people say some
pretty nasty things about them, but I'll say this, from a total external view, it's a phenomenon.
It has some kind of power, what we call legs in the business, and so I assume there must
must be something to it, and my guess is that people condemning it are like me viewing it
from the outside, and that people who actually have contact with it, who read these books
to their children or whatever, talk to their children about them, that there's probably
something there.
Now, it hasn't, well, I guess some people, they must condemn them because of the witchcraft
My very, very distant reaction to it is, this is just the world of an English public school, which is, say, a private school, and that's what looks so weird and exotic to Americans, but as far as I can tell, it's just like any public school environment I've ever seen in England.
I'm talking about something I know nothing about. One more question? Yes.
I was very intrigued about your very brief connection between Shakespeare's sense of nature
and Coriolanus's refusal to toe the line as a traditional politician running for election. Could you elaborate on that?
Well, I mean, you know, I hesitate because this is so speculative. But I will say this. What's so strong in Coriolanus is his contempt for the mob, and the mob is portrayed very much as a theater audience.
And I suspect that Shakespeare has a profound identification with that moment.
Coriolanus' reluctance to expose himself naked to the crowd probably gives us insight into the way Shakespeare felt when he got up on the stage.
I mean, many actors will tell you this, that they are in private, very private people.
Johnny Carson was a classic example of this. He was very shy and retired, but when he was on the screen, he lit up.
And, you know, he was Mr. Congeniality, but it was an act.
This is a great line. Sincerity is the most important thing in show business. If you can fake that, you can fake anything.
Show business involves, you know, acting. And it's a, you know, some people are hams, and they just love getting up in front of audiences.
Other people, you know, have stage fright.
My guess is that Shakespeare was one of these people who wasn't comfortable on stage, but forced himself to do it.
And we see some signs of that in Coriolanus.
And again, you know, what I'm thinking is, you know, here is the greatest human genius who's ever lived.
and he's got to get up in front of this crowd of groundlings and perform for them
knowing that they don't have a clue what his great stuff is about
and yet, you know, this is the life we chose, you know, this is how he earns his money
and he did it, he did it for 20 years and turned out play after play for these people
And by and large they were mostly successful. Walter Kaufman has this great line about Shakespeare.
He knew how to give his pearls the air of the sty before casting them before the swine.
Only a German could say something like that about Shakespeare. And I think it's a real
insight that he knew how to succeed in the commercial theater and yet I suspect there
The Theory of Money and Credit
If you look at the records, there are a lot of things that play Shakespeare in Stratford
during those years, lawsuits, you know, buying a new house, getting it rebuilt and so on.
And his theory is that for Shakespeare, he calls Shakespeare the first commuter artist,
that he needed the sanctuary of Stratford to get away from the London theatre world.
And he even proposes the amazing theory that Shakespeare wrote his plays in Stratford.
He says, how the hell could he have written these plays in the hustle and bustle of London?
He has this theory that says, you know, it's about a four or five day journey from London to Stratford, but he has this idea that Shakespeare needed that retreat, he needed to be able to put distance himself between London and the London theatre world and somehow this private world.
Now, we have no proof for that, but it's a fascinating theory, and again, if you try to get into the mind of this human being, and none of us can, because it's a mind that's so far beyond any of us, it's not even funny.
A man with such sensitivity to human emotion who could feel his way into any human being, it must have been bizarre for him to be among people because he was becoming them all the time, must have been incredible pressure, he needed his space.
I think why he finally said, enough already, I've made enough money, I've written enough great plays, I'm going home to Stratford, I'm going to turn them into books and leave that theater world behind me.
so and again that you know that's just my gut reaction but I think you know if
you look at certain moments you can see it in the sonnets where he's in some ways
so embarrassed to be played before crowds and so on I think you see in
Coriolanus but that is the rank of speculation please I don't I'm not
channeling Shakespeare I'm just just suggesting something so tomorrow we do
painting and music. Now, we're going to show Shakespeare in Love tonight here at 7 o'clock.
It won't be on the final. You don't have to be obliged to come, but if you'd like to,
if you've never seen it, it's a great movie. If, like me, you've seen it but want to see
it again, it's a great opportunity. And we'll talk about it a bit afterwards. We can be
a little more informal. The great Internet audience won't be out there watching us as
as we do it, but I thought we would try to have a movie every night at 7.
Tomorrow night it will be Amadeus, which will fit in with what we're doing on classical music.
And then Wednesday I'm going to show a Shostakovich film that will prepare us for what we're doing on Thursday.
And then Thursday night, the high point, to prepare us for Friday morning's lecture,
we'll watch an episode of The Simpsons and an episode of The X-Files.
And we'll see what truly great commercial art can be.
Thank you very much.