What I'm saying, Shakey...

[triedunture]

I just finished reading Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt, the Harvard professor of Shakespearean studies and editor of the Norton Shakespeare anthology. This book, about 350 pages, was also put out by Norton. I found this paperback edition under a table, left behind by whoever had lived in my Brooklyn apartment before I arrived.

I brought it on vacation to read because I thought it would make a nice nonfiction break from Heyer and the Sedaris I have slated to read next. Plus, I like learning about history. History is cool.

In this book, Greenblatt compares historical facts with the few concrete clues we have about Shakespeare's life, using his writings to back up the vivid and persuasive picture he paints of the man.

Cool things I learned about Shakespeare:

1. He was, or at least his parents were, a secret Catholic in a time when that was punishable by torture and death.
2. Hamlet was a remake of several other popular plays about that same prince of Denmark, though Shakespeare wrote his version after what may have been the devastating death of his only son.
3. The clique of university-educated playwrights, including Marlowe, would surely have made it difficult for Shakespeare to succeed, except they all died young by various strange and violent means just as Shakespeare was coming into his own.
4. Shakespeare was probably hired by the Earl of Southampton's guardians to write his famous sonnets as a way to entice the Earl to marry; didn't actually work very well, as Shakespeare almost surely fell in love with him and totally made him his boytoy.

Historically, a thrilling piece of research and logical conjecture. But the most intriguing thing, for me, was how Greenblatt connected things that were happening in Shakespeare's life to the changes in his work and inspiration. Hamlet is held up here as the turning point, where Shakespeare went from constructing sound plays with neat and tidy motives, to an exploration of inner turmoil. Greenblatt argues that the greatness of Hamlet and the plays that follow (Othello, King Lear, etc.), stems from an obscuring of motive. The messiness of the human plot (why doesn't Hamlet exact his revenge immediately? why does Iago work so hard to destroy the Moor? why does Lear test his daughters' love when he's already divided up his kingdom for them equally?) is what makes these later plays great.

It's an interesting thought, that opaqueness in the motive makes the play more appealing to us. Surely in a play, where interpretations are made and the story can be reformed again and again, this is true. I wonder if the same can be applied to fiction, where the closeness to a first-person narrator especially gives the audience a sense of entitlement to the characters' thoughts. I think, I think, I THINK this all comes back to the secret heart, and how our job as writers is to both reveal and never completely show the secret heart to the audience. There should be--no, I think there has to be--pockets of doubt in the plot, where a reader can build their own interpretation for motive.

Sometimes, in creating a world from our own imagination, we forget to leave room for the collective imagination of our audience. And maybe it's that collective power (1000 reasons why Hamlet falters, 1000 reasons why Iago schemes) that elevates the simple framework of a story to something approaching greatness and immortality.

I know that I will always read and watch Hamlet in a way that is completely different from another person. No matter how the characters are portrayed, I am always going to be convinced that Hamlet's feigned madness is less than feigned, that Ophelia's death was a murder at Gertrude's hands, that Gertrude knew of or maybe even participated in the murder of Hamlet's father.

And why? Why does my readerly gut tell me differently than a thousand other interpretations that I've read? Did Shakespeare set out to allow me this leeway? Or would he have seen it as a failure that his vision of events was not kept safe? Maybe that's the key. Maybe the playwright cannot afford to cling to his own vision of events.

Well. Nothing in this book will completely explain how a great writer does great work. But it gives me something to think about when playing with my own little writerly worlds.

Comments

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Maybe the playwright cannot afford to cling to his own vision of events.

That was pretty much Phillip Pullman's philosophy when His Dark Materials became first a stage-play and then a movie.

And hee! w/r/t point 4 about Shakespeare...