Shakespeare and Angry Mobs

What did Shakespeare think of angry mobs? To answer is not so easy. For four hundred years, Shakespeare readers have mistakenly extricated this or that phrase, said by this or that character, from this or that play, and proclaimed that it expressed Shakespeare's opinion on the given subject. "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," says s follower of the rebel Jack Cade (a real historical character) in Henry VI, part 2. Cade agrees. This is said to mean Shakespeare hated lawyers. Really, what it means is that the rebel and mob-inciter Jack Cade hates lawyers. But Jack Cade also wants to kill anyone who can read and write. Does that sound like something that would interest Shakespeare?

This is not to say that we can't discern Shakespeare's attitude on some subjects. It is only to say that doing so is a complex, lengthy, and painstaking effort that requires, paradoxically, not trying to discern Shakespeare's attitude. Instead, we learn Shakespeare's mind as a secondary result of getting to know his plays. If you immerse yourself in Shakespeare's work the way you would surrender yourself to a conversation, not pursuing an agenda but simply hearing what is said, you eventually get to know, from a thousand repeated explicit or subtle suggestions, how Shakespeare viewed certain issues, or, at least, to which views he inclined. You may notice, for example, that every man in Shakespeare who is prone to soliloquy rather than to conversation falls prey to unfounded jealousy of his wife or lover, and this may lead you to suspect that Shakespeare thought isolation bred tormenting delusions. Or you may come to recognize a sympathy for woodlands in the very quantity and variety of sylvan plants that spring up in Shakespeare's dialogue, whether these plants are directly described as part of the imaginary landscape, or whether, as happens more often, they function metaphorically to describe some human experience. In The Winter's Tale, Perdita speaks of "pale primroses, / That die unmarried ere they can behold / Bright Phoebus in his strength -- a malady / Most incident to maids."

So, we may ask, in this day of angry crowds demonstrating and, sometimes, looting in cities across America, in the wake of the latest police murder of a black man --

Plague in Shakespeare's Time

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when Shakespeare was writing his plays and living, for the most part, in London, plague was an occasional but expected social evil. At various times from the middle ages through the seventeenth century, the bubonic plague moved from country to country via flea-bearing vermin on ships, and so entered port cities, London being one, and spread from there. Those who could afford it, or had rich friends who owned country manors, fled the town. Those less fortunate "sheltered in place," or didn't, in London, and many caught the "pest." The proportion of fatalities was astronomically higher than any nation is experiencing from Covid-19. In the 1592-93 outbreak, ten percent of the London population died. By comparison, in New York City at the time of this writing, fewer than two-tenths of one percent of the population have died of Covid-19. Not as many people recovered from the plague as now get over Covid, though a lot did, especially as its strain apparently mutated and grew less virulent. People could hope.

There was a second outbreak of plague in London while Shakespeare was there, in 1603, and a milder one in 1605. During none of these plague years did civic authorities outlaw church services, and they rarely interfered with people's shopping, but they did outlaw morally sketchier gatherings in which people pressed

Shakespeare, Jonson, and Social Distance

This month, in our time of modern-day plague, I shall not write yet one more claim that Shakespeare wrote King Lear or Macbeth while quarantined for the "pest," as they called it. (He did not.) Instead, I am offering my parody of a poem by Shakespeare's greatest rival, his brilliant contemporary, the playwright and poet Ben Jonson (pictured left of Will), who inhabited the early modern theater world alongside Shakespeare and enjoyed insulting him from his bully pulpit of the stage. All evidence suggests that Jonson and Shakespeare were friends, though they

Shakespeare and Socialism

Shakespeare wasn't a socialist. He was a businessman. He wrote for money, and invested, and got rich. There is no biographical evidence that he was interested in sharing his wealth, or doing anything but acquiring more of it. He was like everybody else.

Indeed, English Renaissance writers tended only to fantasize about what we would call socialism. In his 1513 Utopia, Thomas More envisions a society in which all property is equally shared, but in real life, he lived in a manor, and expended no effort, in his influential role as Lord Chancellor, to urge laws that might redistribute royal wealth, or the wealth of privileged men like himself. In The Tempest, written nearly a century later, Shakespeare's kindly old nobleman Gonzalo imagines a "commonwealth" where there will be neither riches nor poverty, no commerce or forced labor, and no "sovereignty," but places himself as "king on't," as though "the latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning." Renaissance literature is full of ideas about equalizing wealth and eliminating poverty, but the ideas are always

Shakespeare in India, India in Shakespeare

A post-colonially-minded colleague of mine once asked to visit my Shakespeare class, and I said, sure! He told my students that the reason Shakespeare was a requirement for their degree was that in the prior century in India, the British Raj had determined that requiring the study of Shakespeare in schools was an effective instrument of cultural indoctrination and control. Cricket was the English national game, and Shakespeare was the English national poet.

All this was true. But it wasn't the whole truth. India was the first geographical locale to require Shakespeare for formal study in English, since Shakespeare was seen as a conduit to the appreciation of what was most admirably English. However, as most people who have read any Shakespeare know, Englishness and Raj aside, Shakespeare is an excellent writer with a lot of fascinating ideas, so requiring him to be studied in any English class, east or west, is not such a bad idea for a whole slew of reasons. In a Shakespeare class, there are more fruitful ways of discussing his poems and plays than by showcasing their dubious history as tools of cultural indoctrination. 

India didn't throw out cricket when they threw out the British, and they didn't throw out Shakespeare. He was too popular. As in other countries, Shakespeare has been used and enjoyed in India in all kinds of interesting ways, suspicious and otherwise. Knowledge of Shakespeare in English served as "cultural capital" for the "upper-class, elite Indians" of nineteenth-century Calcutta, to quote scholar Jyotsna Singh. But Shakespeare has also been translated into numerous Indian languages;

Happy Twelfth Night!

I usually post on the first of the month, but this month I held off for the Feast of the Epiphany. I had no idea what  "epiphany" meant growing up, and learned it as a literary term having to do with James Joyce before I ever knew what a liturgical calendar was (we were "low" Protestants) and before I lived in New Orleans and found out about Kings' Day (on January 6th, the celebration of the arrival of the three kings to visit the baby Jesus). This revelation was the Epiphany. In later years I discovered from the Oxford English Dictionary that my own last name, "Tiffany," originated in slang for "Epiphany," which in England was sometimes called "the Tiffany" (God knows why). And before that, I had learned what was meant by Twelfth Night.

In Shakespeare's England, Twelfth Night was the last night of the Christmas holiday, and (despite Puritan reformers' dismay) was still celebrated in many of the lordlier households and by many of the rowdier London youth in a Mardi Gras like atmosphere of mayhem and misrule. Twelfth Night is the fifth of January, or the eve of the Epiphany. In Shakespeare terms, Twelfth Night is of course the title of one of his most famous plays, although, true to Shakespeare's occasional habit of

My Shakespearean Grandmother

My parents were pack rats, who kept in our attic not only decades-old Christmas cards and records of paid bills from previous residences, but all the relics of their own pack-rat parents after those died. All this stuff was left for me and my siblings to sort through when my dad passed away ten years ago. We're still sifting. Among the sometimes amazing detritus, I uncovered an ancient theatrical makeup kit from Harlowe & Luther Druggists, 46th and Broadway. It looked a century old, and so it was. When I lifted its lid I found trays bearing boxes of "Finest Theatrical Face Powder," made by Oscar F. Bernner of New York; " "Rexall Theatrical Cold Cream (Prepared Especially for the Profession and General Toilet Purposes by United Drug Co., Boston & St. Louis)," some bright lipsticks and "Rouge fin de theatre" from Paris, and numerous brushes and puffs long-stained with these same paints and powders.

I knew instantly whose treasure this had been. My grandmother Teresa Tiffany, nee Crowley, born on July 28th, 1900 (my own birthday some six decades later), had for the entire time I knew her on this earth bragged about her experiences acting on the New York stage, while my mother discreetly rolled her eyes. "I was in the theatah!," Nana would proclaim, her arm lifted high like SNL's Master Thespian,