Small Comments on Approaching Shakespeare
We come to art for particular pleasures, to receive sensations that deliver our spirit unto a sea of enjoyment.
If you have ever experienced romantic love in your youth — when the passion is fresh and the heart unschooled — you will read the dialogue between Ferdinand & Miranda in The Tempest and say to yourself: Yes, this is what it was like. The poetry, the sentiment that under girds the prose, is taken directly from the fount of feelings. The style of Shakespeare’s poetry serves as a mirror to display the dark waves of the fluctuating heart. A wave of emotion washes over us. All of our thoughts are soaked, and seem to steer towards a single point. When we sort things out, those same thoughts drip out and off our tongue to our dissatisfaction. We may have felt love, hatred, envy, fear, awe, but it was so, so much more than that. The single word cannot capture the heights and falls of our being, the flights of fancy, the trains of images that pass across our mind’s eye.
Being in love is to be raised out of the routine. Your common days are gone. Now you walk as if you stumbled into a waking dream, and the world seems to shake under your foot.
Take a look at Anthony and Cleopatra. The duties of Rome call upon Anthony, but that was part of his past life, before his heart began to yearn for Cleopatra. See how he views the world:
Ant. Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space,
Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life
Is to do this [embracing] — when such a mutual pair
And such a twain can do’t, in which I bind,
[On] pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless.
(Act I.i)
Try to place yourself in the mindset and the mood where you could utter such things with complete sincerity. We stand up peerless. The union of the two bodies into one created in their imagination something invaluable, without rival, as what they had was a rare, original love, whose force and depths have yet to be felt before or since.
What does this look like, or what are the actions that follow from such feelings of superiority? It is this:
Ant: No messenger but thine, and all alone,
To-night we’ll wander through the streets and note
The qualities of people.
(Act I.i)
This is not the regular game of people watching that you might do on the high floor of a city hotel or behind the front window of a cafe. These are two lovers, arm in arm, commenting on whatever passes them by with the enthusiasm of new delight under the hushed, intimate covering of the night sky. This is Adam and Eve strolling through paradise, surrounded by new born beauty, marking each organism as if it were named children under their protection.
On this walk they could pass someone with an outrageous outfit, and say nothing until they are outside of the poor fellow’s hearing. They turn the corner of the street or down the next block to exchange a whisper and let out giggles. Every ugly, obnoxious, dirty thing that could sour the mood or dampen spirits takes on a new beauty, a kind of grandeur, that erases feelings of the pathetic. They see in the homeless dethroned nobility.
This exercise in setting yourself into the mind of the characters you read is what great actors attempt to do when performing these plays.
I would highly recommend Ian McKellen’s thoughts on acting in the plays. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25QcYpYCu4Q&t=8s
Now, think of what must have happened to you, what horrors you have witnessed, what terrors scare off peaceful sleep, to sink you into the very bottom of despair. Whatever fulfillment derived from meaning has been so long absent you have forgotten the feeling. You look into the sky: the sun is showing its age, and it feels cold. The past, the present, and the future blend into one long gray day. You state your observation:
Macb. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(Act V.v)
We are to approach poetry and get underneath it, move around within the interior of the emotions, find how the sound matches the sentiment, and let imagination take the reins.
The only supplementary material required is an informative footnote here or there concerning a change of meaning in a common word, a refreshed definition for an archaic term, or some expired reference explained for the contemporary reader. Everything important is to be found within yourself. You hold the key to unlock the secrets of the human experience, and Shakespeare’s art is one of its greatest.
