I’m old enough to remember that 1964 was a really big deal. Not because of Johnson/Goldwater or the beginning of the descent into the quagmire of Vietnam. No, it was the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, and any theater company worthy of the name trotted out one or more of his plays.
I’m pretty sure that’s the year I saw “Twelfth Night” at the Cleveland Playhouse on a school field trip and “Hamlet” at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in the summer. Now, fifty-two years later, the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death is coming to an end. PBS has been hosting a cycle of his history plays and Britain’s National Theatre Live offered viewers worldwide a chance to see heartthrob Benedict Cumberbatch as the Prince of Danes.
Many more productions of his work on stage, on film and on television are in the works. The books roll off the presses. Audiences come out to see the plays and students suffer through “Romeo and Juliet” or “Julius Caesar,” baffled by the weird old-language and funny clothes, but a few notice what has kept Shakespeare alive and well for four centuries.
Tales told by a genius, full of sound and fury, sweetness and humor, signifying many things. Whitman said, “I am large. I contain multitudes,” but not as various a crowd as came out of Shakespeare’s imagination. Princes and villains, soldiers and merchants, fops and rustics and rude mechanicals, lovers and murderers and sometimes both at the same time.
And then there are his women. A Queen of Egypt with immortal longings, victimized women like Desdemona and Mariana, spunky women who dress up like men and outdo them — Portia in court and Viola shipwrecked and bereft in Illyria. Lovely young women like Miranda, witty women like Beatrice, villainous women like Lady Macbeth, Goneril and Regan. Idealized women like Cordelia and Rosalind.
The whole range of a society seems to canter through “The Canterbury Tales,” but Shakespeare outdoes them with his voluminous cast. Not to mention his stagecraft, his perfecting of moldy tales, his shocks and amazements, storms and magic, battles and intrigue, ghosts and sprites, his acute understanding of the human heart — pure or lustful, twisted or decent or mad.
And then there’s that language that puts off lazy students but thrills and rewards those who hang in there. His immense vocabulary, large but necessary to capture the scope of his ambition, to show us all of real life and places purely imagined, his gamut that runs from midsummer nights to wintery tales.
When Elizabeth I was queen, he was the greatest writer who’d ever put pen to paper in English, and as Elizabeth II approaches the end of her reign the world is changed in every way imaginable. Except for the infinite variety of the humans who inhabit the globe. Not only our planet, but his theatre that hold up a mirror to our nature. Four hundred years later, Shakespeare can still claim to be the undisputed heavyweight champion of our literature.
Powerful in style, but becomingly modest in the way he vanishes behind his creations, amiable but analytical, a connoisseur of chaos but a voice for reason and order, capable of dulcet tones and massive blasts of organ music. A writer of comedy, tragedy, history, romance and wise enough to know that none of them are unalloyed, but that life as it is lived is a hodgepodge of high and low, misery and elation, wickedness and benevolence, scheming and innocence. If he were still around, he’d know exactly what to make of Trump or Hillary, Putin or Pope Francis, your charitable neighbor or nosy uncle.
No wonder you can still see “Othello” in New York one day, “Measure for Measure” in Long Beach the next, “The Two Noble Kinsmen” at Stratford, “King Lear” in London. By one count he has a writer’s credit on over 1,100 movie and TV productions. He may be dead, but his works live and breath, entertain and appall, move us to tears one minute and make us laugh the next. What a piece of work was Shakespeare!