From across the centuries

A great thing about Shake­speare –what I love most about his work– is how his char­ac­ters speak for them­selves while show­ing a uni­ver­sal state of mind. His fic­tion seems real de­spite the fact we are read­ing or hear­ing his words hun­dreds of years after he wrote them.

In Ham­let, the title char­ac­ter, the Prince of Den­mark, is de­pressed. His fa­ther has been mur­dered by an uncle and his mother has quickly re­mar­ried. Ham­let feels com­pelled to re­venge his fa­ther death but his new iso­la­tion and sad­ness drive him to the point of sui­cide:“I have of late—but where­fore I know not—lost all my mirth, for­gone all cus­tom of ex­er­cises, and in­deed it goes so heav­ily with my dis­po­si­tion that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a ster­ile promon­tory; this most ex­cel­lent canopy, the air—look you, this brave o'er­hang­ing fir­ma­ment, this ma­jes­ti­cal roof fret­ted with golden fire—why, it ap­pears no other thing to me than a foul and pesti­lent con­gre­ga­tion of va­pors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in rea­son, how in­fi­nite in fac­ulty! In form and mov­ing how ex­press and ad­mirable! ...The beauty of the world. The paragon of an­i­mals. And yet, to me, what is this quin­tes­sence of dust? Man de­lights not me. No, nor woman nei­ther.”

To me this is one of Shake­speare's most mov­ing pas­sages. I first heard it per­formed by Richard E. Grant, play­ing an un­em­ployed actor at the end of the su­perb film, “With­nail and I.” The char­ac­ter is mak­ing a bal­anc­ing act in his mind, weigh­ing up the good and bad of his species and the uni­verse. His judge­ment is a heavy one: mankind does not merit a place in the cos­mos. Or is Ham­let just speak­ing for him­self? That is one beauty of Shake­speare's writ­ing; he is a poet and one of the great­est in the his­tory of the Eng­lish lan­guage. His words are open to in­ter­pre­ta­tion still (even after thou­sands of aca­d­e­mics have picked them apart) and this pli­a­bil­ity gives his ideas a per­sis­tant fresh­ness.

As a word­smith and cre­ator of Eng­lish, it's also gen­er­ally ac­cepted that no one com­pares with Shake­speare. When he couldn't find a word for the job, he sim­ply in­vented a new one and many of these words live on in the lan­guage today. His writ­ing ben­e­fited from his sta­tus as an actor. He knew how to de­liver lines and had an ex­tra­or­di­nary ear for how their rhythm would be heard by au­di­ences.

Sadly, many peo­ple's ex­pe­ri­ence of the Bard (as he is often called) was hav­ing his some­times ar­chaic lan­guage drummed into them by teach­ers who knew only tra­di­tional meth­ods. I was one of those vic­tims and didn't re­dis­cover the glo­ries of Shake­speare's work until into my twen­ties. Then I found that I too had to teach his plays. It was not easy but, sur­pris­ingly, I found my Cata­lan stu­dents were much more re­cep­tive to him than those kids I'd tried to teach Shake­speare to in Aus­tralia or Eng­land. Cata­lan stu­dents had the ad­van­tage of being bilin­gual and Eliz­a­bethan-era Eng­lish was just an­other chal­lenge. Shake­speare's time­less themes will con­tinue to reach out across the years, “to-mor­row, and to-mor­row, and to-mor­row.”