The Bard

The First Folio at 400

White people did not properly exist as a category until Shakespeare called them into being. That, at least, is the claim made in a new collection of essays, White People in Shakespeare.

Ari Blaff

Well, of course it is. Every generation finds its values eerily anticipated in the corpus. Because our contemporary obsession is with race, we see race in every play. Not just the plays with non-white characters: Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and (if you treat Caliban as a representative of colonized peoples) The Tempest. No, all the plays are supposedly about race and racism.

The essays’ authors, many of them academics in the field of racial literary analysis, are swimming with the intellectual current. London’s Globe Theatre, for example, has attached a trigger warning to its current production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You might think that pastoral play (the only one, as far as I can work out, whose plot Shakespeare did not borrow) is about woods and lovers and capricious fairies.

But the Globe, whose recent “Anti-Racist Shakespeare” seminars have included claims that Hamlet is “wrestling with ideas of blackness” and that King Lear is about “kingship and whiteness,” sees things differently. Its website carries the following warning: “Content guidance: The play contains language of violence, sexual references, misogyny and racism.”

Let’s leave aside, for a moment, whether lines like “Now, fair Hippolyta” (the words with which the play opens) disparage people with dark skins. What is more immediately striking is that neither the essay writers nor the Globe wokesters (Globalists, if you will) are exaggerating for effect. They plainly believe what they are saying. Shakespeare’s oeuvre really is, for them, all about racism.

Here we find the magic of the plays. As the late Harold Bloom once put it, “you can bring absolutely anything to Shakespeare and the plays will light it up, far more than what you bring will illuminate the plays.” Whenever we read Shakespeare’s words, they seem narrowly aimed at us, amplifying whatever mood we are in. Indeed, the same passages can speak to us in contradictory ways at different moments in our lives. If you’re familiar with the canon, you’ll know what I mean.

People whose chief preoccupation is with imagined racial hierarchies will find them in Shakespeare. Not only that, but they will find them more subtly and powerfully drawn there than anywhere else.

It is not so very different from, say, G. K. Chesterton’s being convinced that Shakespeare was a fellow Catholic, or the German Romantics’ argument that he was, in August Wilhelm Schlegel’s phrase, “ganz unser” — entirely ours.

“Of course he was a black woman,” Maya Angelou once wrote. “I understand that. Nobody else understands it, but I know that William Shakespeare was a black woman.”

And, in a sense, they are all right. Or, more precisely, as T. S. Eliot put it, “the most anyone can hope for is to be wrong about Shakespeare in a new way.”

How does it work, this sorcery? Part of the answer is that we know a lot about Shakespeare as a writer, but almost nothing about him as a man. We have no idea of whether he believed in God and, if so, whose God. We have no idea whether he upheld the autocratic monarchy depicted in his history plays, or admired the republican virtue lauded in his Roman works. He is endlessly dappled, infinitely nuanced, arguing both sides of a case better than their actual partisans.

Yet, in doing so, he somehow seems to come down on our side. A pacifist sees Henry V as a prolonged study of the evils of war. An English patriot sees it as a celebration of his drunken, brave, quarrelsome countrymen and thrills to the king’s calls to arms. A foreign theatergoer might be forgiven for thinking: “That’s the English for you: hooligans in every age.” All will struggle to understand how anyone could draw a different interpretation. Who is right? It’s a meaningless question.

Why do we know so much about Shakespeare as a writer? Largely because of a heroic act of posthumous printing that happened precisely 400 years ago.

In 1623, two of Shakespeare’s former theatrical colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell, produced what is surely the greatest compilation in human history. They gathered together all the material they had — copies of plays held by their troupe, prompt books, notes by Shakespeare himself, and, one assumes, their own recollections — and molded them into a complete record of his dramatic works.

They called their collection “Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies”; but the world knows it as the “First Folio.” It contained 36 of his 39 plays. Half of them had already been produced in quarto form — that is, printed on large pieces of paper that had been folded and refolded into eight-page booklets, though often with corrupted text. But no fewer than 18 were, as far as we can tell, published for the first time: All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Henry VI (Part I), Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Winter’s Tale.

Without Heminges and Condell, we would almost certainly not know those plays. The scheming Lady Macbeth, the moony Orsino, the gullible Brutus — all would be strangers to us. Cleopatra, the original celeb, forerunner to every Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian for whom fame is accomplishment enough, would exist only as a historical figure. No squeaking Cleopatra would boy her greatness i’ th’ posture of a whore. We would have lost, in her, one of the four Shakespearean characters whom the great Edwardian scholar A. C. Bradley considered “inexhaustible” (the others being Falstaff, Hamlet, and Iago).

The phrases that have slid from those 18 works into everyday English — “love is blind,” “salad days,” “strange bedfellows,” “at one fell swoop,” “faint-hearted,” “for goodness’ sake,” “neither rhyme nor reason,” “sea change,” “too much of a good thing,” and many more — would have been lost. For Shakespeare, as we know, invented countless fashionable phrases and words — including “countless” and “fashionable.”

Out of perhaps 750 First Folios, 235 are still with us. Some are in libraries and archives, some in private collections. Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, UCLA, and Berkeley are among the 31 American universities that own at least one copy. By far the greatest trove is at the Folger Shakespeare Library, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. It contains 82, more than a third of all surviving copies. They look cheap and are poorly printed, and, remarkably, no two are the same. They contain typesetting errors and dodgy spelling, and sometimes contradict one another in ways that materially alter the meaning of the drama. Yet none of that matters. For here, with all its imperfections, is the finest collection of words in this or any other language. The First Folio is the Torah of the English-speaking peoples — a text at once peculiar to us and universal in its application.

Heminges and Condell’s extraordinary act of salvage left us with the imbalance that lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s mystique. We have nearly a million words by the great man, but hardly any about him. It is sometimes said that his life was unusually opaque, but in truth we know as much about Shakespeare as about most of his contemporaries. That is to say, we have the basic facts of his life as set down in baptismal records, court proceedings, wills, and little else.

We don’t even have a clear idea of what he looked like. The First Folio gave us the image that most of us call to mind when we think of Shakespeare. On its cover is Martin Droeshout’s copperplate engraving of a man with a bulbous forehead, wisps of hair around his lips, and mismatched eyes that rest diffidently on us. It is a poor piece of work — the head and the body seem not to connect at all — and it was made seven years after its subject had died. But, as with so many aspects of Shakespeare’s life, it is all we have to go on.

Naturally, we fill the emptiness with ourselves. Bloom made the ambitious claim that Shakespeare had invented us, at least in the sense of defining how our individual characters and inner lives find expression. The more I watch and read the plays, the more I think Bloom was right. Shakespeare’s characters are so complete that they can seem more vivid than flesh-and-blood people.

This is perhaps most easily demonstrated when they represent historical figures. The actual Prince Hal, the future Henry V, was rather a pious young man who fought bravely in his father’s Welsh wars. But is there anyone who thinks of that version rather than the scapegrace princeling who teases Falstaff in the Boar’s Head? Which Prince Hal, to all intents and purposes, is the real one?

“Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities,” wrote Bloom, “we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater of what might be called the colors of the spirit.”

This is the context, by the way, in which the editor’s introduction to White People in Shakespeare talks of the invention of whiteness:

If Shakespeare more than any other writer may be said to have stretched and shaped the possibilities of language to give us us, the modern human, the human, by expanding the poetic range of the English language itself, then Shakespeare remains key to any study of the further emergence of a “white people” in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. 

This is about the author, remember, whom Angelou encountered at school and became “convinced” was “a little black girl.” She did not believe that anyone could have written Sonnet 29 without knowing what it meant to be a victim of racism and abuse:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope . . . 

Was Angelou right that Shakespeare was black? Or are the volume’s authors right that, through the way he used “fair” and “dark,” he elevated whiteness as a category? Or both? Again, it is a meaningless question.

I can think of three black characters in the plays. Aaron the Moor, the villain in Titus Andronicus, is a cartoonish bad guy. Then again, that play, perhaps the first that Shakespeare wrote, is a macabre pastiche, an essentially comic work whose humor lies, Tarantino-like, in the juxtaposition of banality and brutality. Shakespeare got better with age, and his other two non-white characters, the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice and, of course, Othello, are sympathetically drawn.

Indeed, it is unimaginable that in any other European play at that time a Muslim could have been so warmly portrayed as was Othello. Christendom at the end of the 16th century was threatened by Turkish expansion. But Elizabethan England, which had its own reasons for being Euroskeptic, reached out to the Ottoman sultan and the Persian shah and went so far as to join Morocco in a formal military alliance against Spain. Perhaps this was why Shakespeare was able to portray the Moor as a victim of Italian prejudice.

But there I go, making the mistake of attempting to root Shakespeare in a particular time and place. In truth, his is far too large an imagination to be “cabin’d, cribb’d, confined.” Try to recruit him to your cause and you end up diminishing both the cause and yourself.

It is, for example, currently fashionable to play The Tempest as a meditation on colonialism. Shakespeare was inspired by descriptions of Bermuda, and numerous modern academics have leapt on the line that Prospero uses to describe his brutish slave, Caliban: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” To a lecturer schooled in the disciplines of anti-imperialism and grievance, there is only one possible way to interpret those seven words, namely as the racial condescension of the colonizer toward the colonized.

Yet the left-wing British playwright David Hare heard them in a very different way. In his play South Downs, a semi-autobiographical recollection of his time at an Anglo-Catholic boarding school, he has a teacher dwell on that line: “It was the most Christian thing I’d ever heard. Because he wasn’t really talking about the slave. He was talking about himself.”

Again, we see the magic at work, the way different people hear the same line in different ways, yet always find it perfectly matched to their circumstances.

I once saw a copy of the complete works that had been smuggled into the prison at Robben Island during South Africa’s apartheid years, disguised as a garish pink-and-gold Hindu devotional text. Each of the prisoners had marked his favorite passage, and Nelson Mandela had chosen two lines from Julius Caesar:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.

It seemed an odd choice. On stage, those words are spoken by Caesar at his most pompous and vainglorious, addressing his wife as if she were a public meeting. Yet, to Mandela, they encapsulated his struggle for justice.

Much of the power lies in language. Shakespeare is both unmistakable and inimitable. Several of the plays have come down to us in corrupted form, reconstituted from actors’ crib sheets or mistranscribed. One such is Timon of Athens, which, consequently, is very rarely staged. Ten years ago, I watched the brilliant Simon Russell Beale in the title role, in a production by Nicholas Hytner at the Olivier Theatre. Every now and then, an obviously authentic line would come tolling up, like the church bell of some sea-drowned village. “Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat / Thy gravestone daily . . .” Only one man would have chosen that word, “beat.”

In the cleaner plays, the plays of more certain authorship, even the most throwaway fragments of dialogue work as poetry. Listen to some of the random lines from, say, Henry V: “Unwind your bloody flag.” “The sun doth gild our armor. Up, my lords!” “You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate.” Such passages, in the mouths of actors who appreciate cadence, are like words of power, incantations.

Not always benign incantations, alas. Twenty years ago, a British barrister, Anthony Julius, best known as the lawyer who had represented Diana, Princess of Wales, advanced the startling thesis that English antisemitism was more dangerous and insidious than the Continental variety. On one level, this was an idiotic thing to argue. Paul Johnson showed convincingly in his History of the Jews that, prior to the settlement of America, there was no better country on earth in which to be Jewish.

But Julius averred that the power of the two great Jewish archetypes in English literature, Dickens’s Fagin and, even more, Shakespeare’s Shylock, gave Anglophone antisemitism a peculiar nastiness. For what it’s worth, I still don’t think that’s true. All he is really saying is that Shakespeare is a better writer than anyone else.

Nonetheless, if The Merchant of Venice were by any other author, it would no longer be staged. Shylock isn’t a nasty piece of work who happens to be Jewish. He is what the most vicious antisemites in history have imagined Jews to be: greedy, legalistic, and predatory toward his Christian neighbors. Small wonder the play was so popular in fascist Europe during the 1930s.

Worse, Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, makes Shylock plausible. No one remembers Barabas, the villain of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. Barabas is a pantomime caricature: “I walk abroad a-nights / And kill sick people groaning under walls.” But Shylock is given enough of a motive to make his malevolence understandable. We see him scorned and despised. We later hear him justifying his vindictiveness with reference to the cruel treatment we have seen the Christians meting out: “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

Almost every Shylock I have watched on stage or screen, from Dustin Hoffman to F. Murray Abraham, softened the role, giving it more warmth than a bare reading of the text might suggest. Modern sensibilities demand such a gloss.

This is especially true of the trial scene, which strikes me as a more lethally antisemitic text than the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Repeatedly offered the chance to move from justice to mercy — from the Old Testament to the New — Shylock stands by the literal letter of the law and so condemns himself, precisely as his people had supposedly condemned themselves by failing to demand mercy for Jesus.

I find that scene almost unbearable to sit through. But the novelist and TV personality Howard Jacobson once upbraided me for my squeamishness. Shylock, in his view, was the hero all the way through, maintaining his dignity in almost impossible circumstances. There was that magic at work again.

An Israeli friend, an attaché at the embassy, happened to see my discussion with Jacobson, which was televised by the BBC, and rang me afterward. “Daniel, you know about Shakespeare, I need to ask you something. There were no Jews in England when he was writing, yes? So how did he have so well our way of talking? You ask Shylock a question, he answers with a question. How did Shakespeare know?”

“I don’t know, Ari. How did he know to call it ‘tawny Spain’ when he’d never been there? It’s the perfect one-word description of that country. The man was some kind of sodding wizard.”

And “wizardry” really is the word. There is almost no situation for which Shakespeare did not provide some uncannily apt line. Perhaps the only truly popular festival in England falls on November 5, when, every year, people gather around bonfires and burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, who attempted to blow up Parliament in 1605. The Gunpowder Plot was masterminded by a man called Catesby, who intended to kill James I and all his MPs and install a new government. Oddly enough, Catesby turns out to have been a distant relative by marriage of Shakespeare’s, though there is no evidence that they ever met. Anyway, here is Shakespeare in Richard III, written ten years before, and with a different Catesby:

Come hither, Catesby.
Thou art sworn as deeply to effect what we intend
As closely to conceal what we impart. 

How the blithering flip did he come to write that? And how, 15 years before Galileo, did he have Hamlet write to Ophelia, “Doubt thou the stars are fire, / Doubt that the sun doth move”? An odd metaphor to pick, however poetic he was being, no? I can’t improve on the answer that I gave my Israeli friend: The man was some kind of sodding wizard.

His ability to ensorcel has made people determined to infer details of his life from the plays. For example, for a man from a landlocked county, Shakespeare writes a lot about the sea. Each of the 39 plays has at least one oceanic metaphor. Does that mean that he traveled overseas? Maybe. Then again, most of the allusions are negative. Shakespeare’s sea is a place of drownings and shipwrecks, a place where barges are tempest-tossed and where dead men at full fathom five have pearls for eyes. Better, surely, to assume that he was writing for the purpose of pleasing his audience.

In the same vein, Chesterton’s conviction that Shakespeare was an orthodox Catholic leans heavily on Hamlet’s readiness to be ruled by his faith: “Early he protests against a law that he recognizes: ‘O that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon ’gainst self-slaughter.’ Before the end he declares that our clumsy management will be turned to something, ‘rough-hew it how we will.’”

But Shakespeare was conscious of having set Hamlet in a Christian country. His Roman plays work according to very different moral codes. In them, there is no canon ’gainst self-slaughter. On the contrary, suicide is presented as honorable, even noble. We should always assume that the Bard knew what he was doing as a dramatist.

Attempts to extrapolate Shakespeare’s opinions from the Folio are, as the man himself might put it, bootless. In his introduction to an edition of the sonnets, W. H. Auden made the point powerfully:

Though it seems to me rather silly to spend much time on conjectures which cannot be proved true or false, that is not my real objection to their efforts. What I really object to is their illusion that, if they were successful, if the identity of the Friend, the Dark Lady, the Rival Poet, etc., could be established beyond doubt, this would in any way illuminate our understanding of the sonnets themselves. 

Quite. By the same token, if some new evidence turned up that definitively proved that Shakespeare was Catholic or gay or one-legged, so what? The plays have created their own universe, a universe more intense, in many ways, than ours.

John the Savage, the Shakespeare-obsessed and unfortunate hero of Huxley’s Brave New World, calls the plays “that other world of truer-than-truth.” (The title of Huxley’s novel, like so much else, comes from the First Folio.) To see them primarily as a way to reverse-engineer knowledge about their author is both petty and pointless. The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

Even more bizarre is the determination of various fanatics to show that Shakespeare was in fact someone else. Often, this reflects a perhaps understandable difficulty in accepting that an author who speaks so intimately to you could have emerged from a different culture. Thus, for example, an Italian professor argued some years ago that the language and setting of the plays clearly identified Shakespeare as a Sicilian, and that he had been born in Messina as Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza or Scrollalanza (a surname that roughly translates as “shake spear”).

When I recounted this theory to a friend from Glasgow, he unhesitatingly replied that Shakespeare was in fact Scottish.

“And what’s the evidence for that, Andrew?”

“Why, the ability of the man!”

Most of the claims that the plays were authored by someone else — Marlowe or Bacon or Oxford — come down to a refusal to believe that a grammar-school boy with a provincial upbringing could have produced something so far at the edge of human accomplishment. But all that the conspiracy theorists are doing is shifting the problem. Why should an earl have been any more capable of doing so? Why should anyone?

Shakespeare happened to possess the fullest and liveliest intellect our species has produced. But he was, in the end, a jobbing writer who got better at what he did by practicing and by learning new literary techniques.

We know this because we can often see which sources he was using and how he adapted them. He based Antony and Cleopatra not directly on Plutarch’s account but on Thomas North’s 1579 translation of that primary source. (Although he could read Latin and Greek, he was lazy and preferred to use an English translation whenever one was available.)

It is worth taking a moment to contrast North’s prose with Shakespeare’s verse, for the amendments are the closest we can come to seeing that ingenious mind at work.

Here is North describing how Cleopatra arrived by river:

She disdained to set forward otherwise but to take her barge in the river Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played up in the barge. 

Now here is the Swan of Avon:

The barge she sat in like a burnished throne
Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them. The oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. 

I think we can all agree that Shakespeare had a copy of North in front of him when he was composing that passage. But look at what he did with it. His techniques were as simple as you could ask. He turned the prose into iambic pentameter, and then he sprinkled about some alliteration. He liked the “b” in barge, so he added a “burnished throne” that “burned” and then threw in a “beaten.” Then he took “poop” and “purple” and stretched them to “perfumed.” And so on.

When you look at it like that, it seems almost facile. Alliteration is the most basic of all literary devices, one that any ten-year-old can learn. But read that passage aloud, and then tell me who else could have written it. As Robert Graves once deliciously put it, “the remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.”

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine writer, once gave an interview to Bill Buckley in which he explained why the English language is superior to his own. In one of his short stories, Borges went so far as to call Shakespeare divine, imagining the great playwright meeting the Almighty after death and being greeted as an equal, a generator of worlds.

What can the rest of us presume to know about our second Creator? Is there anything we can deduce about the man from the First Folio?

Bloom, after a lifetime of studying and teaching the plays, concluded only that “by reading Shakespeare, I can gather that he did not like lawyers, preferred drinking to eating, and evidently lusted after both genders.” To that list, I would tentatively add that he distrusted crowds, had suffered a painful betrayal, and (the only one I feel certain about) hated hedgehogs.

Toward the end of his life, Goethe, who as a young man had admired Shakespeare for his earthy realism, came to love him from the opposite perspective. Eventually, he ruled that the plays were so pure, so numinous, that they could not be staged without desecration. They should, Goethe believed, be read as poetry.

Most of us have experienced something similar — the way the same line can pop into our heads in utterly contradictory ways, yet always seem true. I still can’t explain how it happens: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But not a day goes by without my being grateful that Shakespeare speaks to me in my own language.

— This essay is sponsored by National Review Institute.