Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!

When Romeo looks down on Juliet’s body, the mourning man notes that “Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, / Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.”

One could make the same observation about the play’s author, William Shakespeare, who died 400 years ago this month, on April 23. After four centuries, his words still ring with beauty and truth. Like Juliet in the scene above, Shakespeare is not really dead. Because his plays continue to be performed every day in theaters and classrooms around the world, he has achieved true literary immortality.

We live in an age of transitory entertainment. This month’s tentpole-event film is next month’s bargain-bin DVD at Walmart. (“Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice,” I’m looking at you.) Walk into any bookstore and scan the selection of bargain books to see recent bestsellers marked down to prices that more accurately reflect the impression they’ve made. It’s enough to silence many a budding writer.

Yet Shakespeare, like The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” abides.

His work has become part of the fabric of our culture. Even somebody who has never heard of Shakespeare or read any of his plays is likely to recognize the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet” or know that a man holding a skull is referencing Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. They can probably even identify the character’s signature line, “To be or not to be.”

Performances of “Hamlet” can be somewhat problematic because so many of its lines have become part of our lexicon that audience members find themselves nodding in recognition at one after another, the theatrical equivalent of a greatest hits album. “Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark” is applied to many a political quagmire. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” is sound advice, even for those who have never set foot in a theatre.

Add these to “the lady doth protest too much,” “hoist with his own petard,” the oft-misquoted “though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” and a score of others, including “Good night, sweet prince,” so often applied last week to the late capital-P Prince, musician extraordinaire.

If Shakespeare were alive today, he would likely be horrified at what we have done to his work. He is often despised by teens, who strain under the yoke of his language in English classes, scratching their heads over his thees and thous and what they consider to be the tortured syntax of his sentences.

Shakespeare — and, by extension, the theater — was the popular entertainment of his time. Plays were not burdens to be endured; they were events to be celebrated. The best way to reconnect with that sentiment is to see a Shakespeare play, preferably live. But if that isn’t feasible, then a filmed version will suffice.

Watching a Shakespearean play proves the old adage that you can’t bathe in the same river twice. The lines may be the same, but they will be delivered in a different way by different actors on different nights. Even if you are watching one on film, where lines and performances are fixed, (ital.) you (end ital.) will be a different person each time — older, wiser, and of different disposition than when you watched it last.

Adam Gopnik, writing about Paul McCartney in the April 25 issue of “The New Yorker, notes that “each of us has only so many heartbeats. All artists have fat years and leaner ones afterward. They just hope that the lean years don’t turn into a famine, and that there’s enough seed corn left over for sweet if stressed fruit.” Yet Shakespeare seems not to have had such lean years. The man who wrote “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Romeo and Juliet” early in his career saved works like “King Lear” and “The Tempest” for much later, although the exact chronology can be difficult to mark. He went out on top, the exception that proves the rule.

Recent high-tech radar scans of Shakespeare’s grave at Holy Trinity Church in his native Stratford indicate that the Bard may be as headless as poor Macbeth at the end of that tragedy. The playwright’s skull appears to be missing, perhaps spirited away by graverobbers in the late eighteenth century.

No matter. Wherever his head may be, his heart still dwells in his sonnets and plays, beating away on the page and especially on the stage.

Shakespeare lives, on his 400th anniversary and quite likely on his 800th, wherever an audience looks for a good story, well told. And that’s an event worth celebrating.

Originally published April 28, 2016, in The Alliance Review. 


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