Unlocking Shakespeare

All paths lead to the mountaintop, and every teacher has his or her way of teaching his plays. May I suggest that the best way to read them is to bypass the editor’s Introduction and start reading the play itself.

Don’t let the editor or anyone else tell you what the play is about. Find out for yourself on the basis of your own encounter. “Trust your own judgment and think for yourself!” Let this be your Declaration of Independence from Groupthink. Anything else is building on sand in a world only too willing to tell you what to think or to follow the crowd by not thinking at all.

If you want to read Introductions to Shakespeare’s plays or to any book, it’s always better to read them last or, better still, not at all for one simple reason. They subtly convey the subliminal message that you shouldn’t take your own views seriously, but listen to authorities, for once you do this, the poison has already entered your system. You begin to devalue your own opinions, distrust your own judgment, and no longer dare to think for yourself.

It’s important to be your own person when young, because by relying on the judgment of others you’ll undermine your belief in yourself and, before long, cease to be an independent person at all. When you believe in yourself, you become transformed. Take control of your life, and your grades will take care of themselves. And, by the way, don’t believe one word I say in this series of talks. Simply give them a hearing and, only after critically thinking them through, accept or reject them because then you will be thinking for yourself.

Some Themes of Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s plays take you out of the comfort zone of 21st-century America and set you down in different times and places, where different values and worldviews prevail. This exposure to worlds outside the box of your own culture gives you a broader, more cosmopolitan sense of life’s many possibilities, of relishing the world with its dazzling profusion of human dramas, and of the different ways of being human in addition to the American way.

Facing one’s demons, art’s healing power, insight through suffering, the destructive and redemptive power of love, meaninglessness and alienation as ways to finding yourself, the danger of fame, the loneliness of power, ambition’s collateral damage, becoming human through compassion, the fragility of human existence, and life without morals are but a few of the themes that make up the complex yet fascinating world of Shakespeare.

His plays are a series of meditations on the human condition that reveal the rich expanse of human nature in its emotional depths, psychological complexity, philosophical diversity, and moral ambiguities. Reading him will broaden your humanity and appreciation of the different motives of a vast array of dissimilar characters in widely divergent conditions and circumstances — an education of the mind and spirit that will prepare you for life.

Ask General Questions about the Play

After you’ve finished reading the play, ask yourself what you think Shakespeare is saying? Do you agree with him? Did the play teach you anything new about yourself, others, or life? Were there any lines that especially spoke to you? Were questions raised and left for you to resolve for yourself? Should a play only raise questions or attempt to resolve them, or is resolving them insulting the reader?

Is Shakespeare supporting or challenging the beliefs and values expressed in the play, or simply exploring them? Does he identify with any one character, none of them, or all of them? When his characters express their thoughts or convictions, is he affirming or debunking them, or asking you to decide? Is he judging them or trying to understand them as they stumble their way through life? Is he a moralist or a psychologist? Should a playwright be one or the other?

When characters are speaking, are they telling the truth or lying? Are they trying to convince those present or themselves? Are they rationalizing what they are doing to hide their real motives? Are they sincere, but, unbe-knownst to themselves, idealizing what they’re explaining? Or is this reading too much into what a character is saying, or should one take what is said at face value, or with a grain of salt? Does their speech reveal or conceal who there are?

These are some of the many questions you might consider when reading his plays, but the most important ones are those you yourself ask. And can any of these questions be applied to real life?

Find Your Own Meaning in the Play

A play may have many meanings, but it’s the meaning that you yourself find that matters, the one that speaks to you as a person and gives you new eyes with which to see the world. This meaning will mean more to you in the long run than the editor’s meaning, which may even get in the way of your ever finding your meaning. Be attentive while reading, as though Shakespeare or his characters were speaking to you alone. This will bring you closer to the play and yourself.

Jason in his search for the Golden Fleece and Galahad for the Holy Grail are mythological depictions of archetypal heroes on their inward journey toward self-discovery as they struggle to find life’s meaning for themselves, only to find themselves transformed in the process. See yourself as that hero or heroine who has also embarked on your journey of self-discovery as you realize aspects about yourself as you undergo the inner transformation you experience as you engage with great art.

His plays are mirrors in which are reflected both what you are now as a person and what you aspire to become. Or they may reveal entirely new insights about yourself whether positive or not. Learn to value your own reactions to the play and to everything in life because those reactions are yours and you would want to take them seriously, reactions that will keep you grounded in yourself as the only sure foundation in life.

Read the Introduction Last

After you’ve considered the issues raised in the play, then you’re ready to read the Introduction with profit, because now you can judge for yourself whether it’s true to the play, rather than simply accepting its views uncritically as you might have done if you hadn’t first read the play. Maybe the editor is right, maybe he or she isn’t, but don’t let them distract you from experiencing the play for yourself by reading it through their eyes.

There are three basic reasons for reading the Introduction last. First, it’s possible that the editor misunderstood the play, and that the Introduction wouldn’t reflect Shakespeare’s intentions at all, but merely those of the editor, who knowingly or unknowingly read his own view into the play. If you read the Introduction first, you would then proceed to read the play influenced by the editor’s unwitting misrepresentation of what the play was about. Had you read the play first, however, you would already have formed your own opinion and be more likely to dismiss the Introduction as nonsense.

Second, the editor might be espousing a subjective, idiosyncratic, or ideological view of the play, thereby giving the false impression that this was the traditional interpretation of the play’s meaning. Again, by first reading the Introduction, you would then read the play through the lens of the editor’s bias and never experience your own personal reaction to the play.

Third, if the editor, on the other hand, had made it clear at the outset that what he or she was doing was offering his own interpretation after having first reviewed some of the play’s traditional interpretations, that would be a justifiable way of proceeding. You would have been given an overall context within which to understand the editor’s view, rather than being misled by assuming that the interpretation you were receiving was the accepted view.

But even this would be a problem, because you would have been distracted from the play itself by theories and interpretations, instead of focusing on the play itself. It’s important to simply live with these plays themselves and understand them on the basis of your own humanity and life experience. Later, if you wish, you can move on to editors’ Introductions, theories, and secondary literature, which are far less important than the plays themselves.

However, there are some who are more concerned about knowing the many theories about a great work of literature than with that great work itself and living with its mystery because the mystery is where the nourishment is.

Entire generations grew up with Shakespeare’s plays by watching them performed on stage. Only later were they printed with editors presuming to tell readers what these plays meant. Other read and reread these plays, and the older they became, the more deeply did they understand them because of the maturing process of life itself. This was how they formed a personal bond with these works by constantly ruminating about them over a lifetime, as well as seeing them performed.

Lincoln, for instance, was an avid reader of Shakespeare, but rarely, if ever, consulted any “authority,” but depended solely on his own life experience, his continual reading and rereading of these plays over a lifetime, and his discussions with contemporaries.

Shakespeare is Not about Answers

Just as athletes briefly commune with themselves before an event to focus on what they’re about to do, so should we also compose ourselves for a few moments before reading Shakespeare. Find a quiet place at home and clear your mind of all distractions. Take leave of the workaday world for a few hours. It got on quite well without us before we were born and will continue to do so long after we’re gone.

There’s an old saying that the best preparation for life is reading three books — the Greeks, the Bible, and Shakespeare, not so much for the answers they give but for the questions they raise. Shakespeare won’t give us answers, but he will give us questions, so many, in fact, that it’s in struggling to find those answers that we grow both as students and persons with insights about life well beyond our years.

Begin to adopt the longer and broader view about everything, keeping the big picture about everything always in mind. If, for instance, you’re ever tempted to do or say something you might later regret, ask yourself how this could affect the rest of your life. Always ponder the consequences of your words and actions. In a word, be cautious.

Reading Shakespeare is also the best kind of vocational training for those who want a vocation that is second to none, one that will take up all of your time and engage all of your powers: the vocation of being an insightful, well-rounded human being. Moreover, if you aspire toward excellence, read everything you can get your hands on in history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, art, music, and, of course, the classics of every age and culture. And learn to correlate everything into one synthetic whole.

Read for the Main Ideas

An initial reading of an Act from one of Shakespeare’s plays is like playing a new piece of music on a musical instrument. It’s simply a run-through to get a feeling for the general shape and mood of the piece. Always read for the main ideas, using only your humanity and life-experience to figure things out. That’s really all you need when learning anything.

You never understand anything completely the first time around. You do things first and then only later do you begin to understand what it meant. The more questions you have during this initial reading, the better it is because it shows that you’ve been alert to the challenge of reading any great author. Something new always takes time to come into focus. When you read it a second time, read it more slowly and carefully. You’ll fare much better since you already have a sense of the whole.

Knowing the Meaning of Words Not Enough

Reading Shakespeare entails understanding not only the meaning of words, but also the life-experiences conveyed by those words. You may know a word’s meaning, but not grasp the overall point that a series of those words is meant to convey.

A classic example is Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy (III. 1. 56–88). Its lines are honeycombed with the anguish of a deeply-lived life, expressed with examples of suffering, especially in lines 68–76:

There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

Many high-school seniors don’t understand these lines. Although they may understand the individual words, they don’t understand the entire passage because of the highly-compressed language, but most of all the poignant life-experiences described by these words. But, then again, how could any high-school senior possibly understand them, when they’d have to be in the second half of life to have experienced what those words are describing?

Teachers will therefore talk students through the entire soliloquy, line-by-line, especially the ten lines featured above by describing with examples what these lines are about and how all the parts relate to each other. This takes about 10 minutes, and students could then have a wide-ranging discussion on the implications about how this soliloquy relates to Hamlet’s immediate situation.

In elegant shorthand, Hamlet distills the essence of one of life’s archetypal dilemmas. As philosophy, the soliloquy is incomparable in its rhetorical sweep; as rhetoric, breathtaking in its philosophical power, capturing as it does all the grit and nuance that could possibly be said about the psychology of someone impaled on this problem.

Lingering with Hamlet as he gazes into this abyss and imagining what he is thinking is an unforgettable emotional experience Try not to read just with your eyes, then, but also with your soul. Become what you read by becoming all of the characters: commoners and nobles, heroes and villains, soldiers and merchants, kings and queens. Enter into their world, their station in life, their interests and loyalties to help explain what they’re saying.

The Chameleon Reader

Keats in his letter of October 27, 1818 to Richard Woodhouse speaks of “the chameleon poet,” who has no self or individual identity, but can identify with all of creation — a state of being also suited to “the chameleon reader,” who also strives to inhabit all of the characters to understand who they are and what they’re about. Seeing the world through their eyes lets us become one with them, sharing their outlooks, motives, and states of mind, many of which may be universes away from our own.

Empathy is at the heart of doing this, as it also is of a humanistic education, and, if we let it, empathy will deepen our humanity by teaching us to understand others who may see and react to the world far differently from the way we do.

The ability to do this is the stock-in-trade of every young drama student who must learn to understand others from within, almost as well as they understand themselves. If you want rare psychological insight, go to the actors to explain motivation. They interpret the world for us, and to do this they must have an uncommon understanding of human nature.

This is why you will always find actors observing people and also reading to understand them. As the old Latin proverb says: “Totum mundum agit histrio” or “The actor portrays the entire world. They have to be able to do this if they want to do justice to their characters and deliver a true-to-life performance. This ability to understand the inner life of our fellow human beings is the rarest of gifts that lets us see others as they see themselves and ourselves as others may see us.

Slowly, we begin to see ourselves with a newfound sense of our own insignificance, here today and gone tomorrow; and that we and our own generation will one day be gone to make room for the next, who will make the same kinds of discoveries as we did about the enigma of human existence.

The Play Needs a Reader to Bring it to Life

Take any play of Shakespeare and whatever is on the page, no matter how fascinating, will lie irretrievably dead unless we can make it our own by imagining the characters speaking the verse, hearing the cadence and timbre of their voices, visualizing their gestures, the glint in their eye, and sensing the mood of the moment.

It is this empathic response that will open for us the heart of the play, which always needs a reader who can breathe life into its characters to make them come alive. We must reach out to them to be able to receive what they can give us. We must co-create them; meet them half way, no matter who they may be, of whatever age or gender, be they rich or poor, high-born or lowly, for in giving them life, we ourselves come alive in a new way.

All of life is in Shakespeare — those devoured by envy, immersed in deceit, unhinged by ambition, broken by madness, plotting the downfall of others, suffering from love’s delirium or whatever passion consumes their heart. We give all of them life, and they return that life to us many times over in broadening our understanding of and sympathy for our fellow human beings. Within his plays there is enough to sustain us a lifetime, as we return to this great feast again and again, neither surfeited nor satisfied with life’s infinite variety.

A Book is a Mirror

A book is a mirror that will reflect only what we bring to it. If we are much, we will see much. The more insight we have, the more Shakespeare will give us. We only see what we’re ready to see — even when it’s staring us right in the face. The secret of reading and of all education is wanting to outgrow our limitations. If we’re struggling for insight, we’ll hear it spoken or implied by one of the characters.

Art rarely reveals what we unconsciously don’t already sense. No author, no matter how brilliant, can affect the reader unless that reader is ready for it. It takes a wise man to know a wise man. Even Shakespeare is helpless when someone reads him too early in life. But those who are struggling are already half-way there. This is why reading nourishes only those who hunger for insight, and it’s this hunger that counts, not only about this, but about everything else in life as well.

Students with this hunger already have an intuitive grasp of life’s innermost secrets well and fall in love with reading to have these insights confirmed. Reading is their sanctuary, their Holy of Holies, and when they are reading, they are on holy ground. Reading is their inspiration, their sacrament, their solace and bliss. A deeply-lived life will give them more out of reading, and a deeply-read one will give them more out of life.

Shakespeare & the Loss of Meaning

The initial strangeness you may encounter in reading Shakespeare is simply the play’s way of telling you that you’ve entered another world, which is, after all, why you’re reading his plays in the first place. You’re already familiar with the workaday world from which you’ve absented yourself for a few hours to enjoy the heightened experience of another.

So, it’s only natural that its setting, mood, and language will be different, for it’s precisely this difference that someone in search of the new would both expect and welcome. This sense of strangeness is alerting you that not only are you entering an alternative universe with its own unique landscape, but that you should also expect the unexpected as well as a different state of mind.

If you’ve ever been to a foreign country, you may have felt much the same feeling where everything seems surreal as people rapidly talk to each other in a foreign tongue, while you marvel at how they could possibly under-stand one another, and that an entire culture could function quite well without speaking English.

Welcome to the esoteric delights of culture shock, which teaches you to listen and focus as never before. However, when you’re young, immortal, and in love with risk-taking, you simply plunge in, drinking deep from life’s great cup of wonder.

It’s much the same with Shakespeare’s Elizabethan language, which will slowly succeed in winning you over. The meaning of these quaint-sounding phrases you’ll often sense from the context or by briefly glancing at the marginal notes. Beneath the exotic words, the colorful costumes, and the different customs, you’ll catch the beatings of the same human heart as it grapples with the perennial problems of human existence.

This is not to suggest that the characters are disguised Americans transported to a different time and place. These characters are different, very different, but this difference is well worth the price of admission.

We Are All Creatures of Our Own Time and Place

You may have heard the saying: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Not only do foreign countries have their own different languages, values, and outlooks, but so, too, does the past with its own different ways of viewing the world and different notions about everything that you might have thought were universally shared.

As you become more familiar with Shakespeare’s plays, you’ll be struck by how his characters lived out their lives in decidedly different historical worlds. Whether it’s Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, Lear, Julius Caesar, Henry V, Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra, or Romeo and Juliet, you’ll also realize that had you been one of their contemporaries of the same social class, you too would have shared their same values and outlook, so different from those of our modern world.

Moreover, as these characters are swept up by the enthusiasms of their time and place, so you, too, would have also been borne along in much the same fashion. Whether in ancient Britain, classical Rome, medieval Scotland or England, Renaissance Italy or Denmark, they were all one in being stamped with the same indelible imprint of their age as everyone in their class during those times.

At the same time, you might also realize that you, too, are a creature of your time and place in 21st-century America, which has also shaped your beliefs, behavior, and outlook. Don’t many young people today think the same way, have the same values, want the same things, spend their leisure time on the same pursuits, and feel pressured to conform to the same peer expectations?

Despite what we would like to think, are we really free agents, but rather creatures molded by our time and place that determine everything about us? Are we puppets actuated by conditioning factors about which we are blissfully ignorant yet, at the same time, fancy ourselves the masters of our fate and captains of our soul? We are all products of the same social conditioning.

The Role of Chance in Our Lives

However, there is yet another unknown agent that shapes who we are. Consider the sovereign role that Chance plays in our lives. What if we were born of different parents on the other side of the world, speaking a different language, in a different century, of a different race, religion, and social class, poor instead of rich, rich instead of poor or middle class, barely or highly educated, in good or bad health, raised by horrible, wonderful, or no parents at all?

What would we be like as persons, and how would we view the world and ourselves with whatever new and different meaning and purpose we had for our lives? We certainly wouldn’t be the same as we are now, but someone totally different.

Or is this realization even worth pondering, or is it too unsettling? Or, depending on our present situation, should we count ourselves fortunate and grateful, or unlucky, as the case may be? We can choose none of these conditioning factors, but are helplessly born into them and not even aware of them unless it is pointed out to us.

That being said, isn’t it only natural that those in Shakespeare’s plays see the world as they do, for wouldn’t we also share their same outlook had we been born in their world that would seem just as normal as the world we live in today? When you consider this train of thought, would you be more tolerant of others from other cultures, since it’s all a matter of Chance where and when we are born?

Would intolerance toward those from other cultures make any sense? Do people mistake the little patch of ground on which they happen to be born as the center of the universe and sanctify the views of their tribe as Truth from on high?

Given the Chance-ridden nature of our lives, how seriously then should be take the ideas we grow up with, especially if they cause us to be suspicious of those who are different, since we, too, could have been born in their culture? This is another of the many insights you might have while watching or reading Shakespeare.

We cannot choose the particular stage set into which we are born, one set among thousands of others, each with its own truths and reality, yet all of them different, and yet we think that our own set is the only real one, when it’s all a matter of Chance.

The Loss of Meaning

Immersing ourselves in Shakespeare’s world, we sense the silence and mystery that surround human existence. This is especially striking when we observe how his characters react to the ominous forebodings that play upon their imagination.

Beleaguered on all sides by confusion and self-doubt, they struggle to hold onto the meaning they somehow are losing, a meaning that once sustained them, gave them peace of mind and the strength to endure whatever trials beset them. We do not live by bread alone; we also need meaning and purpose, without which we perish.

However, what is the nature of this magical substance, the loss of which explains the tragedies that suddenly befall these tragic figures who want nothing more than to renew their faith and trust in life in the face of the calamity that has been visited upon them?

Is it something that has shaken their faith in themselves or in life that they may not be living in a rational universe governed by Providence, but a nightmare world where there is perhaps no meaning or purpose at all? That they are perhaps but helpless playthings in the hands of angry, irrational forces or indifferent gods, or of no gods at all, in which case there may be no rhyme or reason to anything in the universe, but only Chance?

What of Hamlet and the sudden and mysterious death of his father that now plunges him into the depths of a paralyzing despair? What of King Lear and the menacing universe that now threatens to rob him of his last shred of sanity at the death of his beloved daughter, Cordelia?

Or Othello torn apart by his soul-destroying suspicions about Desdemona, up to now the only solace of this ultimate outsider’s utterly lonely existence?

Or Macbeth haunted by the dead and supernatural apparitions unleashed from Hell to drive him into madness?

Or Richard III who walks in the blood of even innocent children on his way to the crown, which he must possess at any price, yet at the same time somehow seems to revel in the universal misery he unleashes?

Or Shylock, the object of a lifetime of persecution and bigotry, finally losing his mind, his humanity, his wealth, his daughter and then forced to convert to a religion he holds in abhorrence as responsible for decades of religious persecution?

As we behold this unraveling of inherited meaning in all of their lives, we perhaps wonder about what is the ultimate meaning that sustains us and our lives? Do we, too, take it for granted instead of taking steps to ensure that we never lose this priceless possession? Is this sustaining force a part of some higher meaning in the universe, of some universal design whose nature is unknown to us?

Is there an objective, eternal moral order that gives our life meaning which we must accept, or is but a fable, for is there only one meaning — the one we choose to give it and, unaccountably, we find ourselves losing through no fault of our own at the death of a loved one or a life-threatening condition we have inherited, or being “downsized” when older with no future prospect of employment? Or the meaning of the Jewish Holocaust? How is it possible that something this horrible was allowed to happen by a good and merciful God?

Welcome to the human condition, the world of nihilism, doubt, uncertainty, disbelief, the breakdown of traditional belief and values, T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland, and the no-man’s-land of the modern apocalypse with its Hour Horsemen: Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Much of their anguish is already suggested in Shakespeare:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing Macbeth V, v

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods

They kill us for their sport King Lear IV, i.

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem

To me all the uses of this world Hamlet I. i

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking

Makes it so (Hamlet, II, ii)

Is Meaning Discovered or Invented?

Is the meaning we create for ourselves that gives our life purpose and direction — living for our loved ones to whom we devote our life or to some grand design, a purely subjective, self-administered personal meaning in getting us through a meaningless universe? Or is the living of life the only real meaning there is?

Do we ourselves have no more meaning or value than clams on a beach? Or is this a tragic misunderstanding of the nature of meaning? That we don’t need something or Someone outside of ourselves that gives our life meaning, but that we bestow our meaning upon ourselves?

Or do we play out our life’s dramas before some unseen Presence for cosmic validation, which might only be a mind game we play on ourselves, or do we enact our life’s drama before an empty theater of an indifferent, inscrutable universe all the validation we need because we are alone in this universe, the view of many modernists like Beckett, Sartre, and Camus?

Or is the only Presence we need the love of our Beloved? Or if death ends all, did our life have any meaning, or is the personal meaning we gave it while living all the meaning we need?

Or is this search for meaning itself a form of neurotic sickness that would cure itself if we but turned our mind to more practical endeavors? Or is the only true and objective meaning we can be sure of simply living our life intensely because there is no other meaning because if we haven’t really lived our life, our life with the personal meaning we ourselves give it, we’ve missed out on the only meaning there is?

These are but a few of the many questions that flit through our mind as we sit in a darkened theater and follow the fate of Shakespeare’s characters. or read his plays alone in the privacy of our room. You won’t find these sorts of questions explicitly asked or discussed by his characters or that appear in flashing red lights, but insinuated gently between the lines as we mull over the implications that might occur to anyone caught up in these questions. Is the only answer to these questions that there is no answer?

There is so much mystery about ourselves that, probe as we will, we shall always be left with the Unknown for the simple reason that we cannot get outside of ourselves with sufficient detachment, but must content ourselves with theories, which some who crave certainty on such questions mistakenly take for facts.

Coping with Life’s Tragedies

Reading Shakespeare’s plays is more than knowing the plots, characters, themes, and quotations. It is being plunged into a nightmare world that the heroes or heroines must endure, and observe how they cope with the soul-destroying catastrophes that are visited upon them.

You ask yourself, why did Shakespeare choose to write about such horrendous events in the lives of these unfortunate creatures? Did they bring it on themselves, or were they innocent bystanders victimized by inscrutable forces that care little for those they choose as their prey?

How would we ourselves cope with such misery without in the process coming undone? Where would we get the strength to endure these ordeals? Are his plays dress rehearsals of how we should or shouldn’t act in confronting the tragedies that may await us later in life?

Would philosophy, religion, art, or therapy help us, or is the only reason we prevail that we have no other choice because we already have the strength within us if we’re only willing to confront ourselves. Why have such tragic plays always been popular for centuries?

Do they purge the soul of toxins and restore us to health by making us identify with the plight of these tragic heroes, feel compassion for them, and by overcoming our fear of their plight, leave us reborn as a new and stronger person, as Aristotle suggested?

Shakespeare More about Questions than Answers

Shakespeare sets us to dreaming by creating a mood whence questions arise, yet remains silent in answering them. These are questions that are seldom asked in our consumer culture, which lives only for today on the surface of things, taking no thought for tomorrow, obsessed with nothing but quarterly dividends and the bottom line.

Some claim that Shakespeare offers no answers to these Big Questions, for his plays were never meant as a Catechism designed to answer the riddles of life. Others believe that we must find our own answers, and if we can’t, then perhaps pondering these answerless questions is enough to remind us that there is more to life than creature comforts or, as the Bard himself so majestically put it: What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more (IV, iv).

When we are young, we believe that every question must have an answer, but as we age, we may no longer be sure. As we outgrow the certainties of youth, we wonder whether Shakespeare is about answers at all, but more about questions posed in unforgettable ways.

His plays seem more about probing the mysterious depths of human existence, as they take soundings of human nature to determine just how bottomless the soul may reach.

We never know what may happen when approaching great art. We can only hold ourselves in readiness to what may occur. Being willing to be puzzled, mystified, baffled, even turned inside out by what great art may tell us is the only preparation. And if we are so fortunate that it should speak to us, we need only be silent — and grateful if moved by its power.

Shakespeare & Role Play

There are several ways of reading. We can read to escape or to be entertained; to be confirmed or challenged; to be inspired or to attack; to judge or condemn; to defend and exonerate; to critically evaluate; or simply to listen and understand. It is this last way of reading to understand the human heart in its many permutations that interests us here.

We are always judging and evaluating people’s words and actions, but judging can sometimes be a form of aggression that makes it impossible to listen at all. While reading Shakespeare, try not to judge his characters, even the villains, but only to listen and understand them, opening yourself up to them as human beings and their view of themselves. Listen intently, non-judgmentally, as they tell their story.

Beware the Moralist

Try not to be a moralist, who wants to know whether characters are good or bad, worthy of your praise or censure. Be silent, listen, and don’t interrupt them. If you do want to be someone, be a psychologist, who simply wants to understand why they are saying what they’re saying or behave as they do.

Learn to look at the world through their eyes, rather than your own. Let them tell you how they see themselves and the world in a way that makes sense to them, although not to you. Forget yourself, and just listen as if you were their friend.

If they’re different, strange, or even repellant, or if you wonder how they could possibly have become this way, respect what they’re saying and let them make a case for themselves. Never listen as an inquisitor, who wants to condemn them for whatever they say. Rather, just listen as their defense attorney, and let them tell you their story in their own unique way.

Love Begets Understanding

“Man lernt nichts kennen, als was man liebt,” said the German poet Goethe. “You don’t learn to understand anything unless you love it.” If you tend to be judgmental, try to check this tendency about yourself while listening to every character. Be as fair with them as you would with yourself, giving them the benefit of every doubt and taking into account every extenuating circumstance.

Ask yourself how their past might explain what they’re saying or doing. More importantly, don’t condemn them, but view them with compassion and empathy. Set aside whatever bias you may have and enter into their vision of things to become their explainer and advocate.

If you do feel the need to judge or condemn a play’s characters or whatever you’re reading, you’ll never derive any benefit from reading, but simply have your own views confirmed by choosing only those books which you already know agree with you.

Ask yourself why you can’t calmly listen to others and remain silent. Are you threatened by them in some way? By their views, personality, or character? Do you see an aspect about yourself in them? Perhaps an unconscious quality about yourself that you’re projecting onto them?

Not judging others is a big step toward maturity that frees us from the prison of yourself. If you feel that you can’t, you’ll have learned an invaluable lesson about yourself and may want to confront yourself about this inability or unwillingness for its tentacles may extend everywhere.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Take Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s boyhood friends, for instance. They are usually portrayed as villains, who opportunistically betray Hamlet to gain favor with King Claudius. They spy on Hamlet and routinely report back to the King about what they’ve learned about him. Students loathe these two young men for selling out their friend to advance their own interests. When they’re later executed in England, they feel that they’ve only received their just desserts.

This, of course, is the way they’re usually portrayed, which reflects the director’s judgment about what odious hypocrites they are; yet there is nothing in the text that supports this view, but this is how Hamlet sees them and the director works within his perception of them, even though Hamlet is wrong.

What readers forget is that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern haven’t read the play and don’t know what the readers know about King Claudius, who has, indeed, summoned them to court to spy on Hamlet, but this is not what he tells them. He says that he and the Queen are concerned about Hamlet’s strange behavior owing to the sudden death of his father.

While this reason is doubtless true for the Queen, it is not for the King, who wants to ferret out whether Hamlet suspects him of foul play in the death of his father. He also wants to keep him under surveillance lest he leave Elsinore and return with an army to dethrone Claudius.

Seeing Elsinore through Their Eyes

Imagine yourself as either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, and ask yourself what you would have done differently. The King and Queen, Hamlet’s own mother, have summoned you to court and entrusted you with the delicate mission of finding out what might be troubling Hamlet since his father’s death. You’ve been his friend since boyhood, and you too are naturally concerned about him. You trust King Claudius and especially Hamlet’s own mother about what they’re telling you, and why wouldn’t you?

So, you enter upon your new duties, visit Hamlet, and discover that he is, indeed, acting strangely. As time passes, he even disdains and insults you. You have no idea about the King’s sinister motives, or about how you’re being used as a spy, and in time you find yourself caught up in a situation beyond your control and understanding.

Hamlet never takes you into his confidence about the apparition of his dead father, whom the King has murdered, and never hints that the King and Queen’s story isn’t true. In fact, his behavior seems to confirm everything you’ve been told by the King and Queen.

All you’ve done is to obey the King since your arrival and now you find yourself escorting Hamlet to England, where the change of scene may restore him to a measure of sanity after his accidental killing of Polonius. You have no idea of what is in the sealed letter you’re carrying that called for Hamlet’s execution and, now, for your own. Do you see how different the story looks when seen through their eyes?

The Enigma of Hamlet

You may recall that Hamlet feels badgered by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and unleashes upon them a torrent of sarcasm for trying to “pluck out the heart” of his mystery by intruding too closely upon his soul.

For centuries, Western tradition has accepted Hamlet’s misunderstanding of his two boyhood friends by denying the integrity of these two innocents, who are beheaded for their devoted friendship with him and for helping the King and Queen find a cure for his madness.

Hamlet, for all his vaunted genius, simply has them murdered because he fails to see events through their eyes. He never questions his view of them, but simply assumes that they have been disloyal because he is unable to get outside of his own mind.

What must have been their reaction when they found themselves before the English axman? They have done their best by Hamlet and this is how their lives end. Given their situation, they are helpless to plead their case. How many generations have been led astray by Hamlet?

Even we who have read the play aren’t quite sure of Hamlet’s sanity. Is he mad to begin with and only believes himself sane, and then, ironically, decides to act mad by wandering insanely about the court to gather information about his father’s murder?

He seems so pathologically self-obsessed that, as brilliant as he may be, he seems incapable of seeing the events as others might view them, or to recognize the human devastation he leaves in his wake by accidentally killing Polonius, while showing no remorse about what he has done. His heartless treatment of Ophelia, whom he brutally rejects but later confesses was the love of his life! Finally, his exultation in sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to early graves?

Or was he sane and then driven mad by the mysterious death of his father; his mother’s hasty remarriage, which he sees as unseemly and vile; the apparition of his father’s ghost, whose shattering revelations about the King’s murder of his father and his mother’s infidelity plunge him into rage and depression; and Ophelia’s rejection of his love that leaves him heartbroken?

Was all this too much for him to bear? We can only sympathize with his disillusionment as his world comes crashing down upon him as he lashes out at those nearest to him. Seen in this light, we find ourselves asking, have we been too harsh in judging him? Have we been guilty of rash-judging him by being unable to get out of our minds and being unfair to him?

No one has ever unraveled the enigma of Hamlet, and it is precisely this mystery that is the source of the perennial fascination about both him and the play. Shakespeare doesn’t explain him, or judge him, or condemn him, but simply presents him to us. This is why the play is so modern, resisting explanations and theories, although critics for generations have gerrymandered “evidence” to support their claims.

Finally, Letting Things Be

While we’re young and still open to the world’s enchantments, we hope that great literature is preparing us for life by bestowing upon us a self-awareness beyond our years in enabling us to peer behind the veil of appearance to the hidden significance of things. Literature portrays a host of persons and problems and offers timeless lessons for our dealing with life’s perplexities.

One of the many lessons that Shakespeare may teach us is listening to the mystery of things by becoming silent like the universe which never judges, but allows the world and everything in it to be what they are with no need on our part to encroach upon their mystery.

Are we willing to suspend judgment about people and what they are about, and simply let them be who they are with no desire to intrude upon their privacy which everyone deserves? Or are we temperamentally unable to deal with open-endedness and need closure and finality to rest content.

Shakespeare’s plays invite us to look upon all of Creation with a sympathetic eye like the Creator Himself Who “causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous,” as well as on those who through no fault of their own are surrounded by impenetrable darkness, yet keep heroically struggling toward the light.

Might this also include Hamlet whose spirit may hopefully have found a final and lasting peace?

Shakespeare: Must-Reading for Politicians

As impressed as we may be when reading Shakespeare when young, we shouldn’t think that we have plumbed the depths of his plays’ meaning. As we mature, our understanding of his plays will also mature as the misfortunes of life teach us more about life than we might care to know in our teens and twenties. This school of adversity may even bestow on us a Ph.D. in life’s three great lessons: acceptance, endurance, and doing without.

As we absorb these lessons from that master professor called Life, new layers of meaning will open to us, since the best preparation for understanding his plays is a deeply lived life. Schopenhauer put it this way: “The first forty years of our life provide the text, the next thirty the commentary.”

We can’t understand what we’re going through while we’re still going through it. We need time and perspective, distance and detachment. It’s the same with reading Shakespeare. So, keep reading! He gets better, the older we get.

Books Have Different Fates Depending on the Reader

At 12, we read Gulliver’s Travels as an exciting tale of adventure but, at 30, an attack on small-minded bigotry, or Robinson Crusoe as a survival story but, later, as a metaphor on the human condition. The words stay the same, but we keep changing. “Books have different fates, depending on the depth of their reader,” goes an old Latin adage.

Whenever asking someone about a book, remember that it will affect different readers differently or tell us more about the reader than about the book. Some may be bored with it, others overwhelmed, and still others may not understand it because they’re not yet ready for it. Don’t judge a book by its reader. A book is a mirror and only reflects who looks into it. Books aren’t responsible for their readers.

As mentioned before, reading Shakespeare entails understanding not only the meaning of words, but also the experiences conveyed by those words. Unless you’ve undergone those experiences yourself and understand what they can do to a person, you won’t understand the passage in question since understanding something intellectually and emotionally are two different things. Intellectual understanding is grasping ideas; emotional understanding is having been there and returning transformed.

Emotional understanding is the open sesame to Shakespeare or other great authors. When you read them at 15, and again at 30, 50, or 70, you understand them as well as someone could possibly understand them at that time of life, but you shouldn’t equate that understanding with all that there is. Remember the mirror.

Reading Shakespeare at Different Levels

Reading Shakespeare is more than knowing the characters, themes, and summary of his plays. It would be like reading a movie review and thinking that you’ve just seen the movie. There is nothing like reading the play itself. Read not with your eyes but only your soul.

There are students who come to Shakespeare from exceptional backgrounds: parents who continually explain the world to them, with many rich and varied cultural- and life-experiences, precocious intellectual endowment, widely read with the perceptiveness of someone twice their age who has taken the world’s measure.

Others read him as their Bible, visiting his pages again and again, meditating upon them as others prayerfully steep themselves in the Torah, the Gospels, the Koran, or the Vedas. Their hours with him are a transporting elixir to a transfigured, enriched, more clarified world.

Personal Epiphanies

There may be moments when you’re suddenly overcome by a flash of insight, an “epiphany,” a Damascus experience that revolutionizes your understanding of the world so that you inhabit a different universe. You cannot predict these thunderbolt moments; they come unbidden, and the more unexpected, the more compelling their transformative power.

These sorts of breakthroughs are manna from heaven, causing the academic and personal life to merge so that continual reading and meditation become an all-consuming addiction.

Great art often has this effect on readers, viewers, and listeners, and great literature is one of the reasons why reading has always been cultivated down through the ages but, unfortunately, only for the few who were fortunate enough to be taught how to read.

The Poor Forbidden to Read

Most of mankind was forbidden to learn this highly-coveted and closely-guarded skill lest they begin to entertain notions “above their station,” thereby threatening the established order. It was an activity deemed too dangerous because reading had the power to change you forever.

You’re in a continual state of agitation that affects the digestion with troubling questions and sustained anger because the many have so little and the few so much. Even more alarming was the possibility that the poor might rise up to sweep aside the old order, while one’s “betters” thought only of keeping the poor illiterate, exhausted, but longing for only a good night’s sleep.

Especially tragic was the curse of Child Labor that had its roots in these centuries which stunted the growth of the young by denying them a childhood during what should have been their magical years. They never wanted to teach children to read, because reading leads to thinking, and thinking to questioning, and questioning can inflame the imagination that leads to explosive social unrest, and phrases like “social injustice” and “oppression of the poor” ignite revolutions.

For those few, however, who secretly struggled to teach themselves reading and who burned with outrage against the unfairness of a social system into which they were born, reading became an inner conflagration that set them aflame to create a better world for them and their children from a tyranny lest it blight their mind and extinguish their soul.

Do you understand why even now in twenty-first century America why these book banners and burners are so threatened and bring the power of the State and the Rich Man’s Law to enforce their frantic prohibition lest they finally be driven from power by the votes of the many.

The Power of Shakespeare

This explosive, indeed, revolutionary potential was also Shakespeare’s effect upon his contemporaries, many of whom couldn’t read, but could watch and listen to his plays and be caught up in their sublime poetry to find themselves transformed by its incandescent language that drew them into his liberating vision of mankind.

If you thought that life was a prison, “in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons,” it could also be a cry to “take up the sword” to challenge the way things were rather than fatalistically accepting them as divinely ordained.

You would suddenly realize that “reality” was nothing more than a network of beliefs binding a society together, and that the settled political order was nothing but a fiction of the imagination, that magical “stuff that dreams are made of.”

How delicate and gossamer was this thing called “reality,” if English kings could be dethroned on stage as the “groundlings” looked on electrified, galvanized, and radicalized with this intoxicating new brew of political possibility.

Government officials were well aware of the excitement his plays aroused and were naturally subjected to censorship when sensitive passages would have to be deleted or softened.

What might have been going through the minds of the audience enthralled by these performances? Obeying legally constituted authority was always preached as the safe way to heaven in this Christian nation for centuries but, by a curious coincidence, it was also the way to perpetuate your own exploitation even though you were supposedly doing “God’s will,” or so you were taught by your “betters.”

Yet feasting upon a steady diet of Shakespeare’s history plays might induce an opposite reaction. The theater became the yeast that raised the political consciousness of the plight of England’s playgoing public, many of whom were the poor. One thinks of Jack Cade’s rebellion in Henry VI, Part II that occurred about 150 years before the play was written that was still a part of the national memory as the American Civil War is of ours.

More precariously still were the iconoclastic implications that what was preached as God’s will to justify the hierarchical arrangement of society might simply be the propaganda of the privileged who only claimed that the way things were was divinely ordained.

But what if this, too, were only intimidation to instill fear in the masses because they were also told that God wanted them to suffer because suffering was good for the soul and salvation?

What began, then, as status quo theology that kept the masses submissive, was gradually seen as the propaganda of the rich and powerful. Establish-ment theology as weapon against the poor!

It was also difficult for audiences to continue believing in the Divine Right of Kings after seeing Shakespeare’s history plays and how “God’s anointed” actually did come to power by wading through rivers of blood, and to what even more sanguinary lengths they would go to hold onto their newly acquired crowns.

If you saw how Shakespeare spun these historical tales, you would be shocked to discover that it wasn’t God’s will at all, but the iron fist, political cunning, and outright murder that propped up these kings with generous dollops of court ritual to sweeten the air after the butchery. If you saw all the Henry and Richard plays, as well as Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear, the scales of illusion would also have fall from your eyes.

Deliverance from such theological fairy tales was one of Shakespeare’s Promethean gifts of enlightenment to mankind akin to that aboriginal fire stolen from heaven as a gift to warm a struggling humanity in an eternal night of unendurable hardship. It’s what the masses are taught to believe is true that counts, not what is true.

Democracy, freedom, critical thinking, asking questions — the rich and powerful have always loathed these “pernicious” ideas and are against public schools that celebrate these liberating doctrines and want to replace them with charters.

And this is why only a few of the people were allowed to read, think, and be educated, for education encourages one to question the unfair way society is set up; that people are not being paid a living wage, but robbed by the rich by an unjust tax system while the rich pay nothing; and that the poor suffer more than they have to thanks to a government that refuses to spend those taxes on the 90 percent to give tax breaks to the wealthy!

Once the people realized what had been going on for centuries, they began to protest, became hard to control, and finally revolted. And what had opened their eyes? Education and reading!

Education can turn a nation upside down as witnessed by the Puritan, French, Russian, and the American Revolutions. However, when schools were later introduced for “commoners” who were taught to read, governments made sure to give children sanitized material that would reinforce, rather than challenge, the status quo. Frederick the Great summed it up nicely, Ein unterrichtetes Volk lässt sich leicht regieren (An educated people is easily governed). Propaganda as education!

This is why kings and queens always controlled information, censored books, and forbade “heretical” viewpoints from being published because the status quo was so precariously poised on the razor’s edge of maintaining conditions as they were.

“Thou shalt not read or think” now became “Thou shalt read and think only what we tell you.” This Commandment became more important than the other Ten because if you indoctrinate the young from birth with this Commandment, you will have them for life, and the rich will sleep soundly in their beds.

Why Shakespeare Was So Dangerous

It became more difficult not to blame the English kings or future governments anywhere for failing to care for the weak and vulnerable of their kingdoms when audiences were transfixed by those inexpressibly moving scenes on the heath as King Lear, amidst the raging storm, could not believe what appalling conditions his people had been enduring for centuries while royalty feasted and did nothing to lighten their burden.

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
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. (III. iv. 28–36)

Someone at long last had understood the plight of the “wretched of the earth” and was pleading their cause by bearing public witness to their misery from the all-powerful judgment seat of the stage. Never again could the kings of England excuse their ignorance by proclaiming: “We did not know!” It was a tectonic shift in the political landscape of Western civilization.

A desperate cry for humanity, decency, and social justice had rung forth in the night, and from that moment onward every nation that dared call itself “civilized” with overwhelming numbers of the starving among its population has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

In Washington, every new Administration, every new president, along with every member of Congress and the Supreme Court would do well to attend this play together to remind them about why they are in government — not to amass power and riches by selling their souls to powerful corporations to obstruct the will of their suffering people, but to do everything in their power to alleviate their misery, not increase it by conspiring against them.

Frank Breslin is a retired high-school teacher in the New Jersey public school system.