Why Shakespeare Matters Now

Literature's Vital Importance in Revivifying a Decaying Culture

From a personal point of view, it is increasingly frustrating that I labor in a field that pretends that it is dedicated to passing forward the wisdom of the ages to the next generation when it is patently obvious that many of my peers have no knowledge of what that means. It used to be that I was met, from time to time, with a new colleague who seemed a little rusty on the so-called “classics.” I chalked that up to their having come from a weaker program than I; or to the fact that their interests were different than mine. What I have come to understand, however, is that 1). they have never read anything and 2). they refused to read anything with a purpose.

My newest colleagues (not those personally that I know, necessarily) are the Antifa of the Academy and proudly wear their ignorance on their t-shirts, which increasingly announce that they have “Ph.D.s”. They followed the leads of the lesser luminaries of the 1970’s and ‘80’s who ruined the Academy and championed Derrida, non-binary thinking, Marxism, “post-structuralism,” the many tentacled monster known as “inter-sectionalism,” and Foucault—a man who built a career in writing theory that was merely a combination of his hatred for his father and his father’s profession (psychology) and a rationale for paying pre-pubescent boys in Morocco to meet him in cemeteries at midnight so that he could sexually abuse them.

He also advocated in France to do away with sexual consent laws regarding relations with children, but I’ll let you google all that.

Do I make that charge because my problem with Foucauldian theory is based upon a moral problem with a lifestyle that ended because he favored anonymous sex in Bath Houses in San Fransisco during a time when AIDS was raging and he didn’t care from whom he caught it or to whom who he gave it? No. I make the charge because beginning with Derrida—the single most misunderstood theorist of the late twentieth century, I think—(or perhaps De Saussure), Literary Theory itself degenerated into simply making claims and than foisting them upon texts to see what would stick. And a lot stuck to the great detriment, in my view, of culture, the academy, the Law, and humanity. When I was studying at LSU in the mid 1990’s, a friend and I joked after listening to the umpteenth “——ist Reading of (fill in any title here),” “Why don’t they just laminate it?” Meaning that theoretical readings, regardless of their particular foundation, always found precisely what they were looking for in the texts to which they were applied. If it was a Feminist reading of Lysistrata, why then it was proof of the depredations of the Patriarchy; if it was a Marxist reading of 1984, then it was proof that all economic exchanges within Capitalism are exploitative; if it was a Foucaldian reading of anything, then it was evidence of the lopsided power-dynamics involved in whatever relations humans might have; if it was a “Derridian” anything, it was proof “always-already” that there never really is a “there there…”. Indeed, according to this regime, the texts didn’t really ever matter: they all meant the same thing.

My newest colleagues—and the Administrators who run my university and every University in the Western world—have bought into the idea that they are essential in pointing the next generation to its success. And in a kind of ingnorent Hegelianism, the progress toward which they point our students is inevitable; hence, the aim is not so much to teach the next generation so much as to indoctrinate them in the vocabulary of the coming “Synthesis” so that when we sort through the wreckage of the next disaster, they will be able to say they were on the “right side of history” all along.

Enter social media and the Internet. Give it up, Sub-Sub, as Melville would say, those days are over.

There is something to be said for the sheer force of biology. Every generation lives; but every generation also must die. And as each generation ages, it comes closer and closer to making a reckoning with what it thinks it thought was important. It also must come to a reckoning with its own success or failure in the passing of values through time. But it cannot pass along anything without the death-defying-spurt: the mostly blind leap into the future through a physical spasm of life into the unknown and mysterious—an essentially hopeful act performed by the body that in its dying throws makes a hoped for future it cannot control but to which it will bequeath all of its virtue and the residue of its shame: As Faulkner describes in “Barn Burning,” giving to the next generation all of its DNA, the good and the vicious, “bequeathed… willy-nilly, and which had run so long, (and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust)” before we foist it upon them.

Aye—there’s the rub.

Because those who control the levers of power in the now do control the levers of power in the now, it is important that they command the victories and failures of the past as a part of the repository of wisdom they wish to pass to the next generation. After all, the thing they wish to pass forward ought to be a gift; but it is also necessarily a curse.

But if we refuse to learn anything from the past—however much a failure it seems to us to have been—then what we pass to the future is a blank canvas, something to be painted upon by the next generation without context. A creative act that, brilliant though it may be, exercises its genius in a vacuum. Doing so, the danger is it will brilliantly reproduce tragedies it knows nothing of, but rendered in newly crimson and bloody paintings that it takes to be original but which are merely newly smeared re-renderings of tragedies it could have avoided but repeated instead. Our children have never known the past because we have failed to give it to them—so, when they repeat our mistakes, they will repeat them as new, and will celebrate them as original, and take them temporarily as victories merely for their apparent newness, which is the tragedy of a double-lie. Santayana’s famous formula must be altered: Those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it and not even know it. Perhaps Twain’s was better: The past doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

And this is why Shakespeare matters and matters so much. He begins his career thinking about the right things—the beginnings and the ends of things. He spends his career trying to answer one question: What does it mean to be an Englishman? He starts with "The Rape of Lucrece,” which contemplates the beginning of a civilization in incest, rape, murder, and tragedy. He follows early on with what T.S. Eliot called the single “stupidest” play ever written, “Titus Andronicus,” a play about the dissolution of a civilization in incest, rape, murder, and tragedy. And yet, this play, which according to many showed a brilliant young Shakespeare not yet in full possession of his talent or craft, possesses more literary allusions than any play he would ever write. Obviously the young genius was not only enervated but perhaps a little panicked at the alarming changes all around him in the quickening that is Elizabethan England, and his casting for every allusion he could find was a kind of warning to his world that believing in human ingenuity as the means to human perfection was a source for hope but also the foundation for great disaster as well.

Throughout what we get is a contemplation of everything it means to be not only English, but to be human. Had Shakespeare figured out how to fit everything into a single work, he might have turned out to be Herman Melville and given us Moby Dick several hundreds of years before it appeared. Of course, that would have required him to travel into the future to meet a Herman Melville who had already read Shakespeare in order to travel back in time to write his plays so that the future Herman Melville could appreciate what Shakespeare was about…

Pretty sure that happened—but you’ll have to read everything to decide if I’m right.

Shakespeare has already shown you what you are seeing. Bush, Clinton, Obama, Trump? The generational tug of war between the Clintons and the Bushes to decide the final outcome of the battle waged in Vietnam and in the culture wars of the 1960’s? Yeah. It’s all there. But it’s certainly not new.

The fact that these wars turn the next generation into the soil of a victory they cannot ever know? That’s a sicklied hand reaching from the grave to choke you. And now it’s a sicklied hand from a corpse that refuses to die, concocting ever newer ways to perpetuate its doddering decrepitude into a future that rightly belongs to the next generation (Biden?) and who is willing to seduce the next generation into a suicide pact with itself by marketing an individualism so radical that it cannot find value outside of its own preferred pronouns. Has anyone noticed that the most valued cultural and social touchstones of Progressivism are anti-procreative? That C.S. Lewis was right in That Hideous Strength that the perfection of man by man would be a colossal act of suicide? That championing institutions rather than families as the protectors of what is most vital to human being is to replace a biological creation of the future with a mechanical replication of the present as the future? That abortion as a liberating force for the individual in the now is a form of the murder of that self as a suicide that prevents tomorrow? That contraception literally means “against creation,” and itself thereby is a denial of something in our nature as human beings? That sex-for-sex’s sake itself is not a self-affirming but a self-denying act because it refuses to release the vital biological forces contained mysteriously within male and female that combined allow the universe itself to live on?

On the other hand, and this was surely on Shakespeare’s mind, the vegetable inevitability of the force of life represented by the Green Knight in “Sir Gawain,” already well known and remote by the time of Shakespeare, represents something of the terrifying inevitability of life rather than death and already inbuilt in the seemingly unstoppable and ungodly process of a universe that itself might go on without not only humans but without God Himself. And this explains perhaps our recent fascination with the Walking Dead as a symbol of what we most fear; Death literally is to be preferred to Life as a force we cannot control. After all, what is a Walker? It is a lump of biological flesh that refuses to stop living. How do we respond? By setting it on fire. By decapitating it (but the Green Knight showed us this doesn’t work, since the vegetable principal simply treats this as a pruning and, Hydra-like, sprouts more heads…). By stopping it by any means necessary in order to express our absolute control over reality we move to murder life itself and so ascend the throne as the Master of the Universe whose only expression is death.

Aye—there’s the other rub. Our war might have quaintly originated with God, but now it is a war with our own nature. Both halves of which, spiritual and bodily, really are immortal. And that’s what scares us.

Something in Shakespeare’s Comedies—Especially “A Midsommers Night’s Dream” and “The Tempest” holds out for some in-between hero to re-tether the bodily and the spiritual and thereby lead us to a way forward that finally helps us understand the reunification of the spirit with that body; or, as Aquinas would have it more properly, the body in the Spirit. The Fall was not merely a divorce between God and Man; it was between the Body and the Soul. It was a rift between the world we were made to inhabit and the nature by which we were to flourish. After all, the Fall means not merely that we will suffer death, but that we will experience our suffering as being “in” the world but not “of” it. But we were meant to be “of” it, were we not? But we are not “of” it, according to every myth I know as a result of our rejection not really of the world to which we belong, but as a result of our rejection of our nature and our natural place in the order of things: which did not originate with us.

So.

I entitle my missive under the banner of Shakespeare but end it with the curious case of Beowulf—because he bridges a gap and explains much of the weirdness we are experiencing right now. He is the pagan who seems to intuit that the story that is being told does not account for a reality that itself might include him. He’s too big. The problems of Hrothgar are, as it turns out, too small. And Beowulf defeats his enemies too easily. He swims the seas, defeats the monsters, secures Hrothgar’s and his own kingdom, and, what?

There’s something else and he intuits it but he cannot know it. So, unlike Odysseus, who really does go back home again, to be reunited with the very embodiment of the vital center of all meaning, Penelope, Beowulf wishes for one last crusade, one last conquest for glory. Tennyson thought that Homer’s Odysseus might have longed for such a final conquest, but Tennyson was wrong. Homer’s wisdom seems to have escaped the Victorian poet (I refer to Tennyson’s poem Ulysses). For like Oedipus before him, the gods love Odysseus so much it is as if, in the words of Louise Cowan, they conspire to ask “How can we get Odysseus here?” And so they grant Odysseus (who, like Oedipus is brought low in order to be honored greatly) the suffering that will aid him in coming to know the right order of his own being and his own world: He is a King, he is a father, he is a husband. But he’s mis-ordered his own identity and upended his world in sailing off to Troy. He must learn who he is by the end—and, significantly, he does this by telling his story. He is first a husband, then a father, and finally a King. And he cannot be reunited with Penelope, who alone has protected the order of the kingdom in his absence through a wisdom that more than matches Odysseus’ “cleverness,” until he has demonstrated that he finally knows the right order of his own being and its relation to everything. Only then can he join his Queen in a bed that is made out of the living bowl of an Olive tree, itself in the sanctum sanctorum of the (finally) well-ordered polis, bespeaking that that order issues from the husband and wife with child (Telemachus, who is the future), the family. Odysseus alone is granted the happy ending and so the wise Homer lets him fade into obscurity, to live the unheralded life immortal Achilles’ in the Underworld complains that glory itself robbed from him.

So, every myth will traffic in all the questions you’d expect—the origin and creation; the fall from the garden, the suffering, the discovery of death, the transition from tribal to civilizational order, the second fall, the various roads to redemption. But, the rest of the story (that which is not included in the myth) must be rounded out not only in the lives we live but the stories we tell. But they must be the right stories. Moreso than his later northern counterpart, the Gilgamesh poet intuits something of this in framing his heroic tale in words enshrined upon the very walls of Urak. And the poem begins and ends with reference to this nesting-doll framing device that fractal-like expresses but cannot explain the real nature of reality.

Shakespeare, then, —or “Shakespeare”—is a convenient header for literature and the arts in general as the vital conveyers of the most vital of meanings humans can concoct about anything and everything. And which are essential if human beings are not to lose a sense of their own real meaning. That our own “real meaning” is a frightening thing is the reason we so often deny it to the point of suicide in our efforts to seize a god-like control of everything in our ridiculous belief in perfection. Man-Made Global Warming, anyone? It’s a Religion in a Scientific Box. Just pick one up at Walgreens and follow the instructions (they are printed, after all, on the receipt, which explains why it is so much longer than the “Tale of the Armament of Igor”). Add water (filter out the carbon) and make sure to report your efforts to your social media minders to increase your credit score. Does it mean anything to Progressives that the only way to stop change in Nature is to kill Nature? Is it not obvious that suicide is the only sure-fire way of guaranteeing that no mistakes can ever occur again? That suicide is a self-fulfilling prophecy that is the human version of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross—except suicide has the virtue of being the sin that delivers itself as its own punishment and expiation, nullifying everything?

Our hubris—which is the overarching topic, theme, and matter of every good piece of art—is the very heart of that from which we suffer. It is the very texture, depth, and quality of our being as human beings. We cannot cure it by any genius we possess, but we can acknowledge it and humble ourselves to the reality that we are not the authors of the reality within which we suffer; but we are the authors of how we respond to that reality and fit ourselves rightly in it.

If we continue to believe that we can cure ourselves by lifting ourselves by our own power out of a reality we did not create, then we doom not only ourselves but everything—and the Universe itself—to Death. And in choosing Death we say to the next generation: I have come to believe that you have no right to exist.

In one sense, this is absolutely correct. But only in that sense that we didn’t deserve to exist either. But to decide that because we didn’t, no one does, is an act of such colossal arrogance that I’m not sure we deserve its cure.

And yet its cure is surely available—In the Old and New Testament, in Allende, or Morrison, or Welty, or Faulkner, or Sappho, Homer, Dante, Marlowe, Chaucer, Achebe, and Yeats. Try Dickens, Gogol, Dostoevski, Flaubert, Sterne, Melville, and Austen. Start with Gilgamesh and Mwindo, the Aboriginal Creation Tales of Australia, the Popol Vuh, The Epic of Gesar, and The Armament of Igor, Beowulf, and Gargantua and Pantegruel. Hell, give Tristram Shandy a go. You won’t be sorry and will be the wiser, certainly, for it.

And Shakespeare. Read William Shakespeare. Every word.