Following the Action: Some Thoughts on Shakespeare and Politics
Note: This is lightly adapted — cleaned up really — from remarks given at “Shakespeare and Politics” a panel discussion at the Matthew J. Ryan Center at Villanova University, co-sponsored by the Villanova Center for Liberal Education, on 1/22/2020.
Thank you so much for that welcome, and thank you to Villanova for putting on this panel. If you don’t know me, my name is Isaac Butler. I am a theatre director and critic and I hosted Lend Me Your Ears , a podcast about Shakespeare and Politics for Slate dot com. So, you know, I am here as a kind of lay enthusiast on a panel with distinguished and impressive scholars, which, if you’re wondering feels a little bit like how the Monkees must have felt that time they played a concert with Jimi Hendrix.
But we aren’t here to discuss obscure pairings in rock history… we’re here to talk about Shakespeare and Politics. Yet I struggle to do this directly without first talking about how I read Shakespeare, and how working in the theatre informs that process. As much as I might like to, I can’t escape thinking like a theatre maker. I’ve been working professionally in the theatre since I was 12. It is, on some level, who I am.
And because of that, when I look at a Shakespeare play, I am not looking at it as a work of literature, but as a work of drama, which is to say, a work that creates meaning, not through language, but through dramatic action, of which language is a part.
When a character speaks, I ask “what is this character doing with this speech act?” I ask what is this scene doing? Or even what is this play doing? Not saying. But doing. And, while I look at speeches and individual moments, and I love good a granular dissection of a specific word choice, I’m always trying to think about them in the broader context of the play itself and its journey.
Now, before I go further, I want to confess that there’s two major problems with my approach. The first is that theatre works through dramatic action, and language is a part of dramatic action, but on the page plays — particularly the plays of Shakespeare — they’re not action! They’re just language! The very thing I just said is inadequate on its own to creating and determine meaning! So we must use language as our guide for finding the action, because the action itself isn’t there. As Hamlet reminds us again and again, action must be acted by actors.
The second problem — and this one is a doozy — is that dramatic action is a term with no consensus definition. And I wish I could tell you that I’m going to fix that problem tonight, or even offer a definition of my own, but I’m not. Aristotle never defined dramatic action. There’s been debates and symposia and panels on what the term might mean for hundreds of years. If you read, say, the great drama critic Eric Bentley’s essay on dramatic action, you can actually watch his brain melt out of his ears in real time as he tries to figure it out. And all of this is because, as Francis Fergusson argues in his brilliant The Idea of a Theater, dramatic action is not abstractly definable. Specific actions can be named, and the action of a play can be described, but the term cannot be nailed down outside of its context.
To explain by example: one thing you see often in Shakespeare is that the action of his plays proceeds by analogy. The same situation develops in many different forms, which all reflect and refract each other. So Hamlet’s loss of his father and pursuit of justice is mirrored in the Player King and in Laertes. Usurpation in The Tempest plays out against Prospero by his brother Antonio, against Caliban by Prospero, against the King Alonso by Antonio and Sebastian, and, in a parody of all of these, against Prospero by Caliban and Trinculo and Stefano. Even a relatively subplot-free play like Richard II has its analogies in the Gardner scene and in its conclusion, in which Henry secures his place on the throne via the exact same legitimacy-destroying means by which Richard lost it. And proceeding via analogy isn’t self-contained, either. Likely due to Shakespeare’s shocking pace of output, an idea or dramatic situation or thematic beat in one play often winds up in another, so that plays across the canon become analogous for one another.
Shakespeare in some ways is mirroring his beloved Montaigne by essaying his subjects from as many angles as possible and coming, at times, especially in the great tragedies, to unstable or impossible to nail down results. Shakespeare also develops his themes oppositionally. His plays contain truth, and sometimes even fixed meanings, but those meanings and truths are revealed dialectically. If you’re looking for a comforting straightforward approach to life and its myriad problems, Shakespeare is not, actually, the playwright for you, as much as our greeting card industry might wish otherwise.
Another key aspect of the theatre maker approach is a kind of triangulation that occurs when you look at a non-contemporary play. All plays take place in three eras, three contexts: There’s the era and context internal to the play itself. There’s the era and context in which the play was written. And there’s the era and context in which the play is being performed — or read — which is to say, our era, our context.
It was this triangulation that was most important for me in making Lend Me Your Ears. That podcast really grew out of a failure on my part. I was teaching Shakespeare the day after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. And it was, for me and my students, a kind of traumatic event. We thought the world was headed in one direction, and it instead was headed in another, far more dangerous one, one we probably should have seen coming. This is the kind of event that Shakespeare wrote about all the time, of course. And yet that day, as I tried to talk to my students, I had nothing of Shakespeare’s to give them. I had no idea what to say.
And I realized in that moment that the reason why I couldn’t really relate Shakespeare into that moment was that I did not at that time know enough. I knew plenty about our own time and politics, but I really actually knew very little about Shakespeare’s. I was insufficiently versed — sorry — in the political tides that were buffeting him while he wrote. In part this was because direct commentary on politics was essentially illegal in Shakespeare’s theater, and all of his plays had to make it through an official censorship regime. But it was also because I had mostly been trained by new criticism-school close readers, where the author wasn’t exactly dead per se, but maybe in a coma in the next room.
But those matters external to the text are absolutely vital for figuring out what the text is doing, particularly if we want to control for our own biases and assumptions. To truly confront Shakespeare, I needed to know what he himself was likely confronting, be it the succession crisis that so clearly fuels many of his plays in the 1590s to England’s encounters with the Muslim world that may have helped shape Othello.
When I put all of this together, I found the plays to be if anything *more* bewilderingly complex and contradictory than before! And I often found political ideas that were extremely troubling and challenging, particularly because Shakespeare is writing prior to the enlightenment, which means, in our context, his plays often appear to be critiquing, or at times outright rejecting our post-enlightenment values. If you’re someone who believes in representative democracy, or the power of reason, for example, you can’t help but be troubled by Julius Caesar. And if you want to sleep well at night secure in the belief that you know yourself, probably best to leave that copy of Othello on your night stand unopened.
I also found how seldom any moment in a Shakespeare play is really self-contained. Take King Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day speech. It’s a stirring piece of inspirational rhetoric, right? You can just close your eyes and see Kenneth Branagh or Olivier rousing the troops with it.. but following the action of the Henriad, in which Henry learns how to perform as a king and weaponize language and ideas of honor in Henry IV part 1, and is then explicitly instructed by his dying father to gin up a foreign war in order to secure his power in Henry IV part 2, it’s hard to see the speech as anything but an act of propaganda.
There are also major shifts that happen in the way Shakespeare’s plays talk and think about some ideas. There’s a rising disgust in his plays at sex, for example, which has led to all sorts of speculative scholarship about whether or not Shakespeare may have had syphilis. And I think you can you see a shift in how Shakespeare imagines The People and their ability to steer a state between Julius Caesar and Coriolanus.
But there’s other subjects on which his plays are remarkably consistent, and I’d like to mention one of them: Shakespeare’s plays are deeply skeptical of both the efficacy and virtue of violence. In Julius Caesar, resorting to political violence permanently destroys the very republic that the conspirators were trying to preserve. Henry IV punctures the balloon of Hotspur’s beloved honor by Falstaff’s famous assertion that the only man that has it is he that died o’ Wednesday. There’s little justice to be found in the bloodshed of Hamlet. Violence is a form of failure in Shakespeare’s plays, or it is a force cynically used by those that hunger for power to secure their status.
Today it is Wendnesday, January 22nd, 2020. I am 40 years old, and we have been at war since six months after I left college. This war is one, we now know, the Pentagon itself felt was unwinnable and quite possibly counterproductive as early as 2005. Yet we are still fighting it. Less than a month ago it looked like we were going to expand this war into Iran, for reasons that made little sense, and were likely based on falsehoods.
This is the kind of cynical, cyclical failure that Shakespeare imagined again and again, but he struggled mightily to imagine how to make it stop. In his later plays, the Romances, we see forgiveness enter into the dramatic action, but forgiveness in Shakespeare’s plays is a form of magic, it can neither be controlled nor understood. A wife forgiving her husband and a statue coming to life are, on some cosmic level, the same. And the dead child she must forgive him for can never be resurrected. Prospero can forgive, but the act leaves him despairing, and thinking every third thought on his grave.
It seems there were limits to even Shakespeare’s imagination, but, by entering into and thinking through the social problems he dramatized, perhaps we can imagine something different, or, at least through his contradictions, understand ourselves and our own contradictions a little bit better. Thank you.
