In Praise of Shakespeare

The latest challenge for my monthly book group is to talk about someone who has had a profound influence on our lives. It could be someone living or dead, someone we have actually known personally or encountered through another medium such as literature. My book group is currently made up of half a dozen men in their forties or fifties. It includes a couple of doctors, one of whom is Colin, the former vicar of our church mentioned in the previous chapter, an English teacher, an inventor, and my playwright friend Simon who earns his money as an accountant. After considering a whole host of options I decided it had to be Shakespeare for me.

Like everyone, I encountered Shakespeare at school and then later, when I went to Drama College, I acted in one of his comedies and also a tragedy as part of my training. However, it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I first came under his spell. The autumn of 1988 was the low point of my life. My older brother, Adam, had died the summer before, the victim of a brutal mugging by Ladbroke Grove Canal in London. I was an out of work actor then with not much to shout about in my first few years in the business and I was back living with my mother in her small basement flat off the Portobello Road. We had begun to go to the Anglican Church around the corner on Sundays. Adam had been a regular attendee there and it felt the right thing to do though I had long since stopped going to Church after too much compulsory Chapel at Boarding school and the sort of wayward lifestyle in my late teens and twenties which had left me ‘far from home.’ The vicar of St. Peter’s, Bruce, immediately befriended us and one day when he came to visit, suggested I might like to use the beautiful neo-classical Church to put on a play. I assumed he meant with members of the congregation and vaguely imagined something about Noah’s Ark or a Passion play, but he was happy for me to involve whoever I wanted and to do pretty much whatever I liked. I had many actor-friends scattered around London who were ‘resting’ and desperate to be doing something creative regardless of whether I could pay them. I had got to know Twelfth Night at college and realized there were excellent parts for all my friends in this play. I decided I would direct the play as a memorial for Adam and this idea caused such a stir that even the BBC pitched up a few days before opening night to cover the story on their local news programme. The interviewer wondered whether a comedy was quite the right thing to remember the victim of such a brutal death by and I think I said something about Adam having a great sense of humour and of the ridiculous, just like the play. I know he would have found Malvolio’s absurd wooing of Olivia in his yellow stockings a joy! Looking back I think it was an inspired choice. Among its many themes it explores loss and grief and our capacity to overcome them which couldn’t have been more appropriate in the circumstances. However, it’s one thing to have an idea, another to carry it out. I had never directed a play before but frankly the best way to learn is to do it and there is no better material to cut your teeth on than Shakespeare. I remember pouring over my Arden edition of the play sprawled on the shaggy carpet of my mother’s open-plan lounge. I was utterly riveted by the challenge of bringing these words off the page with my cast and I think I said something to her about how I believed I had found my vocation. I wasn’t far wrong. People came from far and near, our past and present to enjoy the play and remember Adam. My father was working at the RSC at the time and brought such stage and screen-luminaries as Brian Glover, Phil Daniels and Colin Welland to see the production. Thanks to an excellent cast culled mainly from my peers at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, along with the glorious setting of the Church and the enthusiastic support of its members it was a great success. It felt like a rite of passage into the profession with my father, mother, and their friends from the business being so affirming and in a different sense a rite of passage into the life of the Church; the Prodigal had returned! Moreover, I had encountered the writer and the man who was to have such an influence on me in the coming years.

I was watching a programme presented by the philosopher and writer Roger Scroton the other day called, “Why Beauty Matters.” He was discussing the importance of the arts in fulfilling the universal thirst for beauty and emphasizing their redemptive nature, therefore, in a world of pain and suffering. I suppose this is what I encountered through Shakespeare some twenty years ago and continue to discover as I work on his plays as a director, teacher and still occasionally as an actor. His plays are indeed sublime and though they show a world of folly, coarseness and extreme cruelty they also reveal its beauty. The moment at the end of Twelfth Night when Viola sees her twin-brother whom she had supposed drowned is as moving as the finest master-piece by Rembrandt or most lyrical score by Mozart. Their moment of reconciliation is an image of the beautiful mystery of providence and resonates with our longing to find again the lost half of our lives devoured by the ‘blind waves and surges’ of the past. Though I had not lost a twin, I had most certainly lost a brother and so much else of my life by this stage seemed swallowed up by what Hamlet describes as ‘the whips and scorns of time.’

But as well as opening my eyes to beauty, Shakespeare has been my mentor and guide in my life as both artist and pilgrim soul as I’ve made my way in the world since the death of my older brother. For Shakespeare these two roles were surely as indivisible as those twins in Twelfth Night. I like to think his plays and his hugely successful life in the theatre were the creative outworking of a faith which he must surely have inherited from his Catholic father and what a legacy he left behind. Shakespeare experienced Elizabethan life in all its complexity, its contradictions, its joy and sorrow, comedy and tragedy. As a father he lost a child, saw his own father fall from grace, endured the scorn and envy of some of his contemporaries as a young playwright, and suffered the hypocrisy and sometimes vicious cruelty of the reformed Protestant Church. However, rather than be left bewildered or defeated by it all he gave shape and meaning to his experience and held up a mirror to nature for us all to contemplate both virtue and vice. His life in the theatre, at least, was surely a profoundly sensitive response to a Divine vocation which he followed to the end. His plays right up to The Tempest, his last full length play, continually reflect a man with great spiritual authority and integrity. He never became a mouth-piece for a movement or an ideology but rather saw the limitations of any single view-point whether political, religious or philosophical. He used his skills as a dramatist and master of rhetoric to explore the problems of life from the perspective of a whole cast of characters and left the audience space to come to their own conclusions at the end of the play. Many a preacher could learn a trick from this and Shakespeare would certainly have little truck with the sort of fundamentalist, dogmatic religion which has become so wearisome to so many today. In my own journey of faith his complex response to morality, to notions of good and evil explored in his drama have left me very wary of the kind of crude black and white thinking which sometimes passes for Christian truth.

I think what I love most about Shakespeare and what I need to learn most of all from his work, however, is his sheer emotional honesty. I have no idea whether this was a feature of his everyday life and I’m not sure it really matters. I find it a bit tedious when people self-righteously point out that writers such as, say, Dickens was actually horrible to his wife or that Shakespeare supposedly had an affair with the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets or with the Earl of Southampton as if these allleged moral failings diminished their voice or even discredited their entire body of work. It may be that to have had a tankard of ale in a Southwark Tavern with the bard might have proved a surprisingly dull affair, but he was an artist and we encounter him most fully therefore through his art; here, nothing is held back. In his plays we encounter Shakespeare’s youthful passion through the characters of Romeo and Juliet, his fury at falsehood and corruption in Hamlet, his vulnerability and anguish through Lear and his broken and contrite heart in Prospero in the final speech of The Tempest. Here the actor stands naked before the audience, still in role as the Duke of Milan who has divested himself of his dark magical powers and yet also as the author himself confessing his weakness and need for absolution at the end of his final play.

Now my charms are all o’er thrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own
Which is most feint: now ‘tis true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not
Since I have my Dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from your hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, Art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Such vulnerability, such raw emotional honesty expressed so eloquently is the hallmark of a great soul. I will forever be in debt, like countless others, to the one who blazed a trail for the artist in every soul from every age.