William Shakespeare

The humanities are currently experiencing what’s been called a ‘material turn’ that is in some ways comparable to the linguistic turn that animated the academy half a century ago. Then it was language that commanded attention, and appeared to constitute a primary ‘reality’; now the focus is on physical objects, and what they can tell us about the world in which we live. Within certain humane disciplines – art history, archaeology, museum studies – objects have always loomed large, and it is therefore not surprising that a leading figure in the present field should be the distinguished director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, whose brilliant study, A History of the World in 100 Objects (2011), has deservedly won both popular and scholarly acclaim.

At the dangerous time when Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey were around, the sonnet sprang into English from Petrarch’s Italian. A constant cuckoo, it has stayed in our linguistic tradition ever since. It is an odd verse form to have done so, regular, yet in one way asymmetrical. Moreover, this cuckoo form has long stood at the heart of what we mean by ‘lyrical’. As Wordsworth quotably if unsubtly wrote, ‘With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.’ Borges was to see through that romantic sense of the poet-dramatist in his mini-story ‘Everything and Nothing’, where God and the playwright eventually come face to face: that is if they have faces at all. Or hearts.

Ambitious, arrogant, talented, brave, learned, truculent, and convivial: Ben Jonson was too outstanding, too odd, and too contrary to be taken as a creature of his time. Yet he had so wide-ranging a life that to write his biography is to capture, in little, a great part of his remarkable age.

When Arnold wrote his famous sonnet, he could have been anticipating John Bell’s book, which repeatedly asks provocative questions about the man and the work that have been his life’s inspiration – and arrives at much the same conclusion as Arnold. We don’t go to Shakespeare for mere knowledge, but for insight, challenge, and enrichment, and perhaps to help us know ourselves and others better. Further, as Bell says: ‘There is no worldwide conspiracy to keep Shakespeare alive. He survives because actors want to go on performing him and audiences want to listen.’ These sentences come from his second-last page, and the rest of the book helps us to understand why.

Literary critics used to adopt a persona claiming disinterested separation from the text being analysed. Critical theory, in particular post-colonial and gender studies, eroded this stance, showing that criticism is always self-interested, concealing or inadvertently revealing tacit assumptions stemming from the critic’s biography, class, gender, and political persuasions. As a result, it is common nowadays for critics to be more self-aware about their own value systems. In some ways, this returns us to a Romantic understanding of interpretation reflected in Hazlitt’s ‘It is we who are Hamlet’, Coleridge’s ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so’, and Keats’s ‘axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved on the pulses ... you will know exactly my meaning when I say, that now I shall relish Hamlet more than I ever have done’.

Recently I engaged in an act of bad faith as a teacher. I set my second-year Shakespeare students a ‘research essay’ as a final piece of assessment, and insisted that they engage with primary scholarship – hardcover monographs and scholarly articles – if they wanted to do well. The problem is that industrial-strength literary criticism is almost unintelligible to undergraduates, and that is not entirely their fault. I knew this, but went ahead and set a criterion I knew would benefit only the tiny minority who might go on to a higher degree. The bulk of my students, who will be teaching adolescent South Australians Romeo + Juliet for decades to come, may never get around to thanking me.