Shakespeare for All Time

I recently wrote a short blog post titled  A Shakespeare Motto for the Occupy Wall Street Crowd?

A Twitter friend of mine named Dave Paxton also noticed a connection between Shakespeare and the Occupy Wall Street movement and wrote about in a post titled Occupy: What would Shakespeare do? 

With Dave’s permission, here is the entire post:

Occupy: What would Shakespeare do?

‘Fortune, that arrant whore, / Ne’er turns the key to th’ poor.’

What would Shakespeare do, confronted by, as Erich Heller once put it in another context, ‘the amazing scene upon which we now move in sad, pathetic, heroic, stoic, or ludicrous bewilderment’?

What would Shakespeare think of the uses and abuses of power in the modern world? Would protest movements such as Occupy gain his support, contempt, ambivalence or indifference?

Well, how do the plays themselves present power and protest?

There is a weird tendency, when the issue of Shakespeare’s politics is brought up, for people to turn their attention immediately to the History plays (i.e. Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, et al.). It is weird because Shakespeare’s Utopian political imagination is unleashed most magnificently when it is not bound by the necessity of having to chart specific stretches of British history that were still comparatively fresh in the popular consciousness of Shakespeare’s day. In the Utopian sense, Shakespeare’s most political drama is also his most ambitious and important tragedy.

King Lear is a play about a king who loses all of his power, and learns to feel what it is like to be a beggar. More than that: it is a play in which a group of rich and powerful men are wrenched from the corridors of power, dressed in rags, and forced to live outside in the cold. All of these men individually, enduring what they do, come to a new understanding of power, of justice, and of the plight of the poor.

The king himself, who begins the play laying down the law with anger and inflexibility, and denying civil rights to anyone who objects to it – ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath’ – is robbed of his power and kicked out into the night; and he reaches his moment of deep insight in Act III, in one of the most heartfelt prayers in the English language:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed side,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

Lear’s new understanding of the plight of the poor is moving in itself, but what makes the prayer so extraordinary is that it ends, not with a simple call for compassion, but rather with a demand for economic change, for the ‘superflux’ (i.e. private capital) to be spread around more fairly. The problem of the poor is the problem of the social system itself, and it is the latter that needs to be re-thought and re-constituted.

The Duke of Gloucester, who is also abused and kicked out of his home, has exactly the same moment of insight. He cries up to the darkening skies:

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he does not feel, feel your pow’r quickly,
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.

Just as Lear wishes for the powerful to ‘feel what wretches feel’, so too Gloucester wants them to experience hardship, in order that they might learn compassion. On top of this, once again, an urgent economic demand is presented: private capital should be redistributed, so as to ‘undo excess’ and allow everyone their fair share.

These are just two central examples of an intense focus – on class politics, economic justice and human solidarity – that runs through the entire play. Edgar is heir to the throne, but circumstances force him to dress up as ‘A poor unfortunate beggar’ and so, ‘by the art of known and feeling sorrows’, he is made ‘pregnant to good pity.’ The play uses words like ‘feeling’ obsessively – ‘feel what wretches feel’, ‘feel your pow’r quickly’, ‘feeling sorrows’ – to emphasise the point that rational argumentation can only take us so far. When issues like poverty are at stake, Shakespeare feels, the best education is pain and suffering.

Lear, Gloucester and Edgar learn from their pain, and Shakespeare hopes that his audience-members, through their experience of the play, will learn in a similar way – for this is one of the most excruciatingly painful artworks in the Western tradition.

Shakespeare’s claim, in King Lear, is that, until systemic injustices are eradicated, no other sort of justice is possible. The mad king, wandering on the heath in Act IV, utters the supreme challenge: ‘see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change place, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’ Judge and criminal become interchangeable from the perspective forged by Shakespeare’s radical political imagination: both are enmeshed in the network of culpability, because both operate within a system that is itself unjust.

The old king himself, vouchsafed by his suffering a shattering insight into the nature of economic injustice and class-oppression, delivers these extraordinary lines: ‘Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?… There though mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.’

To counteract the omnipresent pain, Shakespeare embodies his Utopian, egalitarian ideal in the king’s daughter Cordelia, who is ‘like a better way’; who is ‘most rich being poor,/Most choice forsaken, and most loved despised.’ But this queen of the poor, disenfranchised and excluded is brutally hanged at the play’s conclusion, the victim of a cruel political system in which ‘all’s cheerless, dark and deadly.’

The Occupy movement would strengthen itself if it realised that its concerns were shared by Shakespeare (along with many other great artists and philosophers of the tradition), and if it looked for ways of using this state of affairs to its advantage. Public readings of Shakespeare plays could be organised within Occupy camps, for example, and protestors could make contact with people at theatres, and at Shakespearean institutions, to see if links could be forged.

This economic and political movement would benefit from forging for itself a strong artistic and dramatic front, and an engagement with Shakespeare would not be a bad place to start…

To get to grips further with Shakespeare’s Utopian political imagination, cf. Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare (2002) and Shakespeare’s Comedies (2009).