h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

King Lear 2009 filmed play with Ian McKellen

When I planned this set of journals I selected various items partly because I wanted to watch them, and partly because I had an idea of the theme for my response to them. Not fully worked of course, just the idea, ‘Dr Faustus’ I could write about Marlowe, Henry V I could write about Sam Wanamaker and the new Globe, that sort of level.

Day fourteen and King Lear. I do so enjoy watching this play and never tire despite virtually knowing it by heart. A slight exaggeration there but you know what I mean. Trouble is I added it to the list more because I wanted to see it again than for any theme it suggested to me. It is a great play I thought, something will pop into my head.

I could just talk about the play but generally I am trying to take a step aside and talk about what ideas or thoughts or related bits and pieces spring to mind. So far what sprang to mind is:

“Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd 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.”

Was Shakespeare a Socialist? Hardly. It is a mistake often made by modern folk when looking back on earlier days to apply the ideas and psychology that they have been brought up with. When people started suggesting alternate authors for the Works, as there was a total lack of evidence suggesting anyone but Will, they were forced to turn to the writings themselves for clues.

And there’s the problem. Reading pre 17th century texts in the light of the 19th century Romantics is a mistake. For the Romantics great art was created by great artists, usually working alone, and drawing out of their experiences for their creations.

This was not so in Elizabethan England. Obviously some part of any writer must appear in their work but to suggest that Shakespeare’s writing is somehow linked to his life is a mistake. He wrote in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ “the poet, the lover and the lunatic are of imagination all compact”. That was his true greatness, his imagination.

Working in drama should also make us pause. If Shakespeare is in the plays, which character is he? Hamlet? Falstaff? Othello? He cannot be all and yet people do try to assign the characters that most suggest the Shakespeare that they wish to create, whether it be a real Shakespeare or a counterfeit Oxford or Marlowe.

And so to his political beliefs. The plays usually tell stories of Kings and Princes, Courts and Aristocrats. But then that’s what most of the plays at the end of the century did. It was only in the 1600’s that the sorts of plays called ‘city comedies’ became popular. Somehow these didn’t fit with Will’s style.

‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ , unique in Will’s works for being a plot that he didn’t find in a book, is set in England in his own time, and deals almost exclusively with the middling class of people he would have been most familiar with at home in Stratford. Perhaps although he spent a great deal of his time in London, not being brought up there he found it difficult to get into the milieu in the way that locals like Ben Johnson or Thomas Middleton could.

Will’s plays also contain lower class, common folk, but how much Shakespeare identifies and sympathises is a matter for debate. That’s half the fun of course. Did Will feel the same about Falstaff as most playgoers did and still do? What fun to watch, and sympathise with, but would you really seek out the company of a coward and a con man and an abuser of friendship in reality?

The picture we have of Will from the hard evidence is that he was a careful man in business and would chase someone through the courts for a return on a fifteen shilling loan. He also avoided paying taxes whenever he could, like any good Conservative politician. Yet as the extract from Lear, and there a number of others of similar vein scattered through the plays, he can see the inequalities of his world.

But seeing them and actively engaging in them are different things. Will was an aspiring upwardly mobile middling class man. He was also a product of his age. An age when the class system was just beginning to creak but was still solidly in place. The English have always been rather good at class. In Elizabethan times, even the types of material you could clothe yourself in depended on your rank. Elizabethan sumptuary laws laid down the clothes, furs, materials, even colours that were appropriate to each station in life. Only a gentleman or above might carry a sword in public. One of the reasons some people objected to plays and players was the costumes worn on stage subverted the laws and distinctions. Not to mention the whores and the beer and the fact that the labouring classes were having a good time as well. That and the new Puritan ideals that suggested that if you can be as miserable as possible in this world you will enjoy the next one even more. Not that the working classes were going to be let in.

That was a fairly unconnected and wayward ramble; hopefully I will get on to a surer track tomorrow. What would Shakespeare be today? I like to think he would be knocking out great pamphlets for the Socialist Workers Party but in truth I see him voting Conservative. Although, returning for a moment to read again the Lear extract, he might feel rather embarrassed by David Cameron.

Deb

[Amy P]

A third party man, a libertarian, our Will? Only if he were free of the whole notion of patronage. Aristocracy was the thick exoskeleton of European civilization, and you were where you were because of who you knew.

But this -- "Smite flat the thick rotundity of the world!" -- even sounds like lightning striking.

And I always interpreted that quote as a reference to stupid fat bankers. Will, for all time , and in my case all IQ's