Shakespeare - The Human Condition

 I am rading up on Christopher Marlowe (when I am not on here or trying to get my own stories written), and Shakespeare is in there, too. It is like they circle one another.

Does Shakespeare still have power and effect nowadays, or is it just a form of culteral autopilot?

How Performances of Othello Can Spotlight White Supremacy, Past and Present by Farah Karim-Cooper suggests, I think, there is power and effect, if not what old white guys like me might suppose.

Othello is a painful play, as Cobb’s emotional journey through it makes clear. Many Black actors who perform the role feel traumatized during the production and even for a while afterwards. In a festival on Shakespeare and Race I curated in 2018, I gathered together a panel of four actors who had played the part to speak about their experiences.The word “trauma” was used often throughout the conversation. But why is this? The Nigerian poet Ben Okri reflected upon what it feels like to watch the tragedy unfold from his perspective. Race becomes inescapable even if it isn’t for the white spectators: the “black person’s response to Othello is more secret, and much more anguished, than can be imagined. It makes you unbearably lonely to know that you can empathize with them [whites], but they will rarely empathize with you. It hurts to watch Othello.” Cobb corroborates this view in his play as he describes how it feels to be locked into that role as a Black man.....

Meanwhile, over at the Time, he also wrote It’s Not Time to Give Up on Shakespeare—Yet:

The truth is that there are really two Shakespeares. The first is the real Shakespeare of 16th century London, a a commercially-minded, jobbing playwright who worked closely with a company of actors. Simply put, they needed his work to be popular and marketable. The collected works of Shakespeare, his First Folio, was not published until seven years after he died, which means he was not part of an esteemed literary canon when he was alive. Playwrighting was scrappy back then, the texts fragmented, messy, showing signs of collaboration and intervention, sometimes by royal censors. What emerged though are glorious stories, sublime poetry, and characters that are miraculously true to life—once the plays were gathered and sold as works, Shakespeare started to gain traction as a literary giant. By the end of the 18th century, he was properly deified.

The second Shakespeare was the 18th century mascot for English white supremacy. He is also the Shakespeare that is still with us. This is why teachers are struggling to sell him to an increasingly fed-up student body—the traditional curriculum doesn’t allow for much deviation from bardoltry. As Director of Education & Research at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, I am sometimes asked why we still “push” Shakespeare on to young people and university students when he is "no longer relevant." What on earth could a 400-year-old author possibly have to say to a 21st-century teenager?

Quite a lot.

Shakespeare hailed from the early modern era, when many of the ideologies, political, and social systems we are familiar with in the modern world were forming, including ideas about nature, race, gender, and class. The plays express concern for the destruction of the natural world at the cost of human life. Shakespeare writes with unimpeded curiosity and imagination about people who are “othered” in society, about Black, indigenous, and Jewish lives. For example, his first Black character, Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus who appears a few years before Othello, speaks boldly in defence of Blackness: “Coal-black is better than another hue/In that it scorns to bear another hue.” Yet we must contend with moments in his comedies of racist humour (“She’s too brown for a fair praise,” for instance, in Much Ado About Nothing) and misogyny (The Taming of the Shrew).

Is it Shakespeare or simply his era that offends? His female characters are not one-dimensional dolls though, but complex women, sometimes complex women of color, like the “tawny Queen” Cleopatra. Yet, at the time, professional theatre companies did not cast any women; instead, young male actors performed the female parts, making cross-dressing a crucial feature of theatre and tantalizing the imagination with queer identities and actors in drag. As a result, the plays raise questions about the very instability of gender identity and the glory of its performance.

 I have long thought the teachers and professors have made Shakespeare a dull fellow, which Farah Karim-Cooper does not. 

Do we recognize our humanity in Shakespeare? When that ends, he now longer has any power or effect in our lives.

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