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Chris Jury<\/strong> tells us why he can’t stand Shakespeare.<\/em><\/p>\n I don\u2019t like Shakespeare. There, I\u2019ve said it. Said the unsayable. A man who claims to be literate, educated and intelligent says he doesn\u2019t like Shakespeare. It\u2019s an outrage!<\/p>\n And I know \u2018outrage\u2019 will be a response to this statement because I\u2019ve been saying the same thing for 40 years and have been met with occasionally violent outrage over and over again.<\/p>\n My nose was broken in 1981 by a \u2018civilised\u2019 Shakespeare lover, who launched himself across the table and set about me, simply because I dared to suggest that in 1981 The Clash were more culturally relevant than Shakespeare. This pattern has been repeated throughout my life as civilised, sensitive, Shakespeare lovers become rabid tyrants simply because I say I don\u2019t care for the work of this particular Elizabethan playwright.<\/p>\n In middle class, educated, society it is perfectly acceptable to say, \u201cI don\u2019t like the plays of Christopher Marlowe\u201d or \u201cI don\u2019t like the plays of Harold Pinter\/Samuel Becket\/Jez Butterworth etc, etc.\u201d But to say, \u201cI don\u2019t like the plays of William Shakespeare\u201d is to commit a cultural cardinal sin and to condemn oneself out of one\u2019s own mouth as an ignoramus and cultural Philistine. It is simply not acceptable for anyone who claims to be educated or intelligent to say they do not care for Shakespeare \u2013 to not like Shakespeare is to be by definition either uneducated or stupid.<\/p>\n Yet Shakespeare wrote his plays nearly 450 years ago in an England that was a brutal, religiously extremist, totalitarian regime that makes modern day Iran look like a liberal paradise. When Shakespeare wrote his plays England was ruled by an absolute monarch, religious faith was a political not a personal matter, religious heretics were regularly burned alive at the stake, and to incite the displeasure of the monarch could easily (and often did) end in your torture and execution. Concepts of equality before the law, universal suffrage, and women\u2019s rights as we know them today were unthinkable.<\/p>\n Shakespeare also wrote in a version of English that is very different to that we use today, with many of the grammatical forms and individual words he uses no longer having common currency. This makes Shakespearean verse difficult to speak and very difficult for a general audience to understand.<\/p>\n If drama plays a part in defining and redefining human society how does putting on plays that helped define the world 450 years ago help us today?<\/p>\n Do we not have stories to tell today? Are there not enough events and ideas in the world today worthy of treatment by playwrights? Of course there are, I hear you cry, and playwrights continually do exactly that you say. BUT and this is the point, it is extremely difficult to get a new play on in a theatre in the UK. Most regional theatres do at most one new play a year. The rest of the repertoire is made up of modern or historical classics. The West End is dominated by \u2018classic\u2019 revivals and 20-year old musicals. New plays are generally relegated to the low budget fringe theatre and performed in venues seating 50-100 punters.<\/p>\n Today our theatre is not a vibrant part of our modern culture, it is part of the heritage industry. One of the major justifications for state subsidy of the theatre is the tourism it stimulates. So does this mean the RSC, National Theatre and the West End are simply no more than historic tourist attractions? If so why do regular theatregoers have such a sense of their own moral and intellectual superiority? If going to see Macbeth at the RSC is no different than visiting the Shakespeare\u2019s Birthplace tourist attraction, or Kenilworth Castle, then what\u2019s the big deal?<\/p>\n So what on earth is going on here? Why can we not have a rational debate about Shakespeare? Why are people not allowed to dislike Shakespeare as a writer? Why do we spend hundreds of millions of pounds every year on performing plays that are 450 years old and that describe a world that no longer exists? Is it because Shakespeare is the \u2018timeless\u2019 genius our cultural elite claims he is; or is it because appreciating Shakespeare has become a sort of defining orthodoxy for membership of the middle class?<\/p>\n For a bourgeois cultural elite the more \u2018difficult\u2019 a form is the more useful it is in establishing elite credentials. The more educated and informed you need to be to \u2018appreciate\u2019 an art form then the more your appreciation of that art form demonstrates your elite status. Shakespeare is difficult to appreciate; ask anyone who has been tortured by it in school! But it was not written by Shakespeare to be difficult. Shakespeare\u2019s plays were written for the appreciation of largely illiterate, popular, commercial, audiences. The \u2018difficulty\u2019 of Shakespeare is not based in its intellectual complexity or even the literary genius of its poetic language. The \u2018difficulty\u2019 of Shakespeare is that it is written in an obsolete form of English that is 450 years old. The willingness to overcome that linguistic \u2018difficulty\u2019 is what grants you membership of the cultured middle classes. Your willingness to work hard to appreciate the form despite the linguistic difficulties demonstrates your commitment to civilised middle class values.<\/p>\n And this is at the core of the outraged reactions I get when making the surely uncontroversial statement that I am not an uncritical fan of a particular Elizabethan writer. Appreciating Shakespeare has become a symbol of acceptance of a whole range of middle class cultural ideas. To say \u2018I don\u2019t like Shakespeare\u2019, is to reject the \u2018authority\u2019 of all the elite experts, the academics, theatre critics and artistic directors. To say \u2018I don\u2019t like Shakespeare\u2019, is apparently to say I don\u2019t like the theatre at all nor classical music or ballet and art and everything civilised. To say \u2018I don\u2019t like Shakespeare\u2019, is to say I side with the \u2018plebs\u2019 who would tear civilisation down and replace it with wall to wall X Factor and super hero movies. To say \u2018I don\u2019t like Shakespeare\u2019, is to say that English is not the world\u2019s greatest language and that England is not an exceptional country. To say \u2018I don\u2019t like Shakespeare\u2019, is to say I\u2019m not part of the civilised \u2018middle class\u2019, that I am not \u2018one of us\u2019, that I am one of the uneducated masses who wish to tear down everything decent and civilised.<\/p>\n In fact, I said no such thing. All I said was, \u2018I don\u2019t like Shakespeare\u2019. All I said was that after reading and watching Shakespeare\u2019s plays for over 40 years and using my own rational, critical faculties, I have come to the conclusion that the plays of Shakespeare are massively over-rated. That\u2019s all I have said.<\/p>\n In my view out of 37 plays attributed to Shakespeare only about half a dozen are really any good. This is unsurprising with such a massive output and indeed a pretty good record by anyone\u2019s standards but it’s a more moderate response to the writer\u2019s oeuvre than the worship of every line he ever wrote that is so common today. I also think that by the critical standards of today, even Shakespeare\u2019s \u2018good\u2019 plays are all over the place in terms of structure, plotting and characterisation.<\/p>\n The entire plot of Romeo And Juliet, for example, rests on a drug that allows Juliet to fake her own death. No such drug exists or ever has existed. Shakespeare simply invented it to allow him to overcome a plotting problem. This might be acceptable in a play like Twelfth Night or The Tempest that are clearly set in magical, \u2018other worlds\u2019, but in Romeo And Juliet, which is set in the real, contemporary world of Shakespeare, the drug is just a cheap trick and no playwright writing for at least the last 200 years would have been allowed to get away it.<\/p>\n Sometimes people respond to such criticisms by reference to the poetry of Shakespeare\u2019s language. They claim that the beauty of Shakespeare\u2019s language overcomes these other manifest weaknesses and renders them insignificant. Just think about that for a minute. Do you buy it? Would you buy it in reference to any other writer? We are being asked to forgive all the \u2018scriptwriting 101\u2019 errors of Shakespeare on the basis of his beautiful, poetic use of the English language, which as we\u2019ve already established is written in an obsolete form most people simply can\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n My contention is that no one would accept this in any other writer in English or indeed any other language. With Shakespeare we are asked to set aside our own critical faculties, we are told that if we find Shakespeare boring then the fault lies within us not with the writing. We are told that if we find elements of Shakespeare\u2019s plotting or dramatic structure weak or implausible then that illustrates our blindness to his greatness, rather than a problem with Shakespeare\u2019s writing.<\/p>\n This is surely irrational, and indicative that Shakespeare has achieved a \u2018cult\u2019 status. Shakespeare\u2019s plays have attained the status of religious texts that cannot be criticised \u2013 to criticise Shakespeare as a writer is to deny his unique creative genius and has become the cultural equivalent to denying the divinity of a Christ or Mohammed. And just as religious heretics must be silenced and punished so must the heretical critics of Shakespeare, the beloved one.<\/p>\n It is interesting to note that the \u2018cult\u2019 of Shakespeare as the \u2018special one\u2019, rather than an appreciation of Shakespeare as part of the cannon of English literature, developed simultaneously with the development of the British Empire. Crucial to the moral justification for the brutal imperial conquest of half the world was the idea that the British were an exceptional<\/em> \u2018race\u2019 whose moral, practical, creative and intellectual superiority over other \u2018races\u2019 meant they were \u2018destined\u2019 to rule the world.<\/p>\n Shakespeare was a central plank of this claim to British Exceptionalism. The English language had given rise to Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, and of course the greatest writer in world<\/em> literature, William Shakespeare. Surely a nation that could produce such brilliance must be destined to greatness!? Thus Shakespeare became a literary equivalent to Nelson or Wellington, an Imperial hero confirming Britain\u2019s greatness.<\/p>\n Finally, it is worth pointing out that the idea that the \u2018classics\u2019 of literature reveal \u2018universal human truths\u2019 is a denial of the political. In Shakespeare\u2019s plays nearly all the protagonists are aristocrats or royalty. Working class and even merchant-class characters are almost always comic fools or villains. In Shakespeare\u2019s plays the idea of monarchy and aristocracy is never challenged and no alternative ever even hinted at. To suggest that this reflects some sort of \u2018universal\u2019 representation of human truth is to suggest that monarchy and aristocracy are the \u2018natural\u2019 way human beings organise themselves and that there-is-no-alternative. (Sound familiar?) This is of course deeply political, and deeply reactionary.<\/p>\n Even as late as the mid 19th<\/sup> Century Shakespeare was known as a great playwright along with Johnson, Marlowe etc, but he did not have the \u2018cult\u2019 status that he does today. Indeed, in the 19th<\/sup> Century it was common for producers to re-write Shakespeare\u2019s plays introducing theatrical effects like floods and fires to the narrative and changing a sad ending for a happy one.<\/p>\n However, today the \u2018cult\u2019 of Shakespeare entirely dominates UK theatre. We fund the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre puts on Shakespeare, every Rep in the UK puts on at least one Shakespeare production a year. Schools, universities and colleges all mount endless productions of Shakespeare. The recent rebuild of the RSC theatre at Stratford cost the taxpayer \u00a3112 million plus \u00a35 million from the lottery to keep the theatre staff employed for 2 years while all the theatres were closed!<\/p>\n If the time, money and creative effort that today goes into performing Shakespeare were put into performing new plays, we would be living in a new Golden Age of the theatre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chris Jury tells us why he can’t stand Shakespeare. I don\u2019t like Shakespeare. There, I\u2019ve said it. Said the unsayable. A man who claims to be literate,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":362,"featured_media":12465,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1662],"tags":[2107,2106,2108],"class_list":["post-12466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theatre-2","tag-national-theatre","tag-rsc","tag-west-end"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/362"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}