抵制莎士比亚
2023-08-14 10:54阅读：
Cancel Shakespeare
By Drew Lichtenberg
Dr. Lichtenberg is a lecturer at Yale University and the resident
dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington,
D.C.
It seemed, for a moment, that Shakespeare was being canceled. Last
week, school district officials in Hillsborough County, Fla., said
that they were preparing high school lessons for the new academic
year with some of William Shakespeare's works taught only with
excerpts, partly in keeping with Gov. Ron DeSantis's legislation
about what students can or can't be exposed to.
I'm here to say: Good. Cancel Shakespeare. It's about time.
Anyone who spends a lot of time reading Shakespeare (or working on
his plays, as I have for most of my professional career) unders
tands that he couldn't have been less interested in puritanical
notions of respectability. Given how he's become an exalted
landmark on the high road of culture, it's easy to forget that
there's always been a secret smugglers' path to a more salacious
and subversive Shakespeare, one well known and beloved by artists
and theater people. The Bard has long been a patron saint to rebel
poets and social outcasts, queer nonconformists and punk
provocateurs.
Yes, Shakespeare is ribald, salacious, even shocking. But to
understand his genius — and his indelible legacy on literature —
students need to be exposed to the whole of his work, even, perhaps
especially, the naughty bits.
The closing lines of Shakespeare's Sonnet 20, addressed to the
poem's male subject, are among the dirtiest — and hottest — of the
16th century. “But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,
/ Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.” A favorite
trick of Shakespeare's was to play with word order, especially when
he wanted to disclose something too daring to be said in a more
straightforward way, such as the love that dared not speak its
name. The untangled meaning here: Your love ultimately belongs to
me, sir, even if women (sometimes) enjoy your prick. Or, from the
neck up you are as beautiful as a woman, and from the waist down
you are all man.
Sex is one thing. The plays are also astoundingly gory. The bloody
climax of “King Lear” so horrified the playwright Nahum Tate that
he felt compelled to rewrite its ending. Tate's sanitized version
of “King Lear,” premiering in 1681, held the stage until 1838. In
the 18th century, Voltaire called “Hamlet” the apparent product of
a “drunken savage” who wrote without “the slightest spark of good
taste”— which didn't stop Voltaire, who also recognized
Shakespeare's “genius,” from openly borrowing from the Bard for one
of his own plays.
In 1872 in “The Birth of Tragedy,” Friedrich Nietzsche praised this
savagery. To him, Shakespeare contained the ne plus ultra of grisly
truths. Hamlet, he wrote, “sees everywhere only the horror or
absurdity of existence.” Nietzsche being Nietzsche, he considered
this a good thing. Art, wrote Nietzsche, transforms “these nauseous
thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions
with which one can live.”
In light of Nietzsche's counterintuitive epiphany, the notion of
Shakespeare-the-hipster caught fire. Hamlet, uniquely among male
roles in the classical canon, became an aspirational part for
female theatrical stars looking to prove their bona fides and upend
gender preconceptions: Sarah Bernhardt most famously, but also the
great Danish actor Asta Nielsen. Shakespeare's sonnets were a
source of succor to decadent aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde, just as
they had been to Charles Baudelaire. The writings and teachings of
queer poets such as W.H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg suggests they saw
themselves in Shakespeare's works, as did anti-racist writers from
James Baldwin to Lorraine Hansberry and Ann Petry.
Where the avant-garde led, pop culture followed. Shakespeare's
plays have always lent themselves to all manner of interpretations
and they found new life in the postwar era, with landmark works
like Basil Dearden’s “All Night Long,” a neo-noir film from 1962,
which set “Othello” in a British jazz soiree. Franco Zeffirelli’s
“Romeo and Juliet” in 1968 plugged into a different cultural
zeitgeist, capturing onscreen the summer of love, while Roman
Polanski’s film version of “Macbeth” in 1971 feels like an encomium
for the dying utopian dreams of the ’60s.
In the transgressive' 90s, Shakespeare was everywhere: taboo, art
house, alternative and cool. Gus Van Sant's “My Own Private Idaho”
reimagined Prince Hal and Hotspur as gay grunge gods and Baz
Luhrmann's “Romeo + Juliet” featured Leonardo DiCaprio at the peak
of his androgyne allure. Even “Shakespeare in Love,” a relatively
middlebrow Oscar winner, presented a vision of the brooding,
bearded, sexy Shakespeare, as embodied by Joseph Fiennes.
In many other cultures, the bawdy lowbrow and the poetic highbrow
are often personified by separate champions: In France, it’s
Rabelais and Racine; in Spain, Cervantes and Calderón. In English
literature Shakespeare has always combined both brows into
something rich, special and strange. In “A Midsummer Night’s
Dream,” one of Shakespeare’s most magical and sensual plays, Bottom
— a man with the head of a donkey — spends the night in bed next to
the fairy queen. He wakes up having had something close to a
religious experience. Every play in the canon features something
similarly subversive and transcendent — and all of them are
essential.
One can no more take out the dirty parts of Shakespeare than one
can take out the poetry. It's all intertwined, so that Shakespeare
seems almost purposefully designed to confound those who want to
segregate the smutty from the sublime. His work is proof that
profundity can live next to, and even be found in, the
pornographic, the viscerally violent and the existentially
horrifying. So if you're looking for sex, gore and the unspeakable
absurdity of existence in Shakespeare, you will definitely find it.
That's the genius of Shakespeare. And it's precisely what makes his
work worth studying.
