Acopy of William Shakespeare’s complete works was once smuggled into South Africa’s Robben Island prison, in the guise of a Hindu prayer book. It passed from hand to hand, with each prisoner marking the verses that meant most to them.
Nelson Mandela chose a passage from Julius Caesar: “Cowards die many times before their deaths/ The valiant never taste of death but once…”
Much more recently, under the auspices of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), that very play has been performed as an African tragedy, to widespread accolades. The play, as Shakespeare wrote it, building on details passed on by the historian Plutarch, revolves around the assassination of a burgeoning tyrant and the eventual comeuppance of his chief assassins.
The scenario has, give or take a few nuances, been commonplace through much of the 20th century, and by no means only in Africa.
It’s intriguing to imagine what sort of a tragic hero Shakespeare might have conjured up out of Mandela’s life story. Or, for that matter, from that of Abraham Lincoln — who had the added advantage of delivering speeches of almost Shakespearean quality.
It’s hardly a surprise, though, that Lincoln was a huge admirer of Shakespeare’s tragedies. And there’s a striking irony in the fact that just weeks before he was assassinated, his assassin, alongside two of his brothers, was playing the title role in Julius Caesar.
It was Brutus, though, whom John Wilkes Booth channelled at the crucial moment, thereby sullying a character described as “a noble fool” — and perhaps the only of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes not to have a play named after him.
There are, inevitably, scores of other historical characters who would likely have fitted the criteria Shakespeare deemed essential for a fatally flawed leading character — he would surely have found plenty to go on in the case, for instance, of Napoleon, Lenin, JFK and plenty of others, not least Pakistan’s Bhuttos and India’s Nehrus and Gandhis. Jinnah, too, may have qualified as a tragic hero, but he was also an aspiring Shakespearean actor on the London stage — a redeeming quality, clearly.
Shakespeare was, not surprisingly, anglocentric in his histories, but his tragedies and some of his comedies ranged widely across the known world, from Italy to Egypt. A couple of years ago a member of Scotland’s Parliament introduced a bill seeking to rescue King Macbeth’s reputation from the calumny of Shakespeare’s portrayal.
The playwright was notoriously cavalier with his facts when borrowing from history — on the other hand, however, would anyone outside modern academia been familiar with Macbeth but for Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Scottish king? Shakespeare’s 450th birth anniversary falls on April 23; two years hence, it will be his 400th death anniversary, followed just seven years later by the quadricentennial of the First Folio — the first time that the bulk of his literary output, including previously unpublished plays, was collated.
It remains unclear who edited the First Folio, whose versions of plays differed substantially on occasion from those previously published in the Quarto version while Shakespeare was very much alive. The controversy over whether Shakespeare indeed authored the plays that bear his name continues to play out, although not many scholars pay it much attention any longer. Ultimately, of course, it doesn’t much matter precisely who wrote the plays. The miracle lies in their longevity. And that ought not to be particularly surprising, given the extent to which they immortalised common human flaws as well as transcendent qualities.
Have the causes and consequences of jealousy ever been summarised better than in Othello? Has “vaulting ambition” ever been more cogently represented than in Macbeth? Have the depravities induced by the prospect of inheritance ever been more clearly illustrated than in King Lear? Have the trials of tyranny — and the challenges of democracy — ever been more formidably illustrated than in Julius Caesar? Has revenge ever been sweeter — or more painful — than in Hamlet?
Some 30 years ago I had the unusual pleasure of climbing up to the stage at Stratford-upon-Avon, not as an actor, but as an audience member seated in the wings for a performance of Macbeth — with Jonathan Pryce, if memory serves, in the key role.
It was an unforgettable experience, although Shakespeare also gives considerable pleasure as a purveyor of the written word. Theatres across the globe continue to give precedence to scripts by the greatest playwright of them all, and studios in countries across the globe regularly stage his plays, often in a manner that provides scope for indigenous interpretations.
It’s a comforting thought. “Somehow,” as Mandela put it, “Shakespeare always seems to have something to say to us.” Thankfully, this tendency is unlikely to be rendered obsolete in the foreseeable future.
