Podcast: William Shakespeare

Participants:Nicholas Carlie – HostBrita Strand Rangnes – Associate professor at the University of Stavanger, literary critic

The great William Shakespeare

Host: Hello, I’m Nicholas Carlie. Today, it’s all about ‘the Bard’. Shakespeare is one of the most influential writers of all times. Everybody has heard about at least one of his plays, if it’s Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, or Othello. I could go on and on, and I will go on with the help of my guest, Brita Strand Rangnes. She’s an associate professor at the University of Stavanger, as well as a literary critic. She knows quite a lot about William.

I have a big question for you, and I would love a small answer ... Who was William Shakespeare? I know it’s a big one, but what is the modern historical consensus on William Shakespeare as we stand today?

BSR: Well, we all know that William Shakespeare was perhaps the most famous writer in the world, or at least the one that most people have heard about. He was a not highly educated, but fairly well-educated, man from a small English town, who moved to London towards the end of the 16th century – towards the end of the 1500s. And he joined the very fast-growing industry of theatre in London at the time. And he wrote some of the most famous texts or … well, we can come back to whether they’re texts in the way we understand them, but some of the most famous plays and literary works in history – at least in Western history of literature.

Host: Because he is strictly speaking a playwright more than an author. Am I correct in assuming this?

BSR: Definitely – even though he did produce other texts than plays. He also produced quite a lot of poetry. But he is most famous for writing plays, or producing plays, because the thing about a play is that it is a text that isn’t primarily written to be read; it’s written to be performed. So, in many ways the original way of experiencing one of Shakespeare’s plays would, of course, be to watch it or to hear it, as would be the case in Shakespeare’s days. And in some ways, it’s as unnatural to read Shakespeare, or to ask if you have read Shakespeare, as it is to ask someone if you’ve read Sex and the City. Because they are all texts that are not primarily written to be read but written to be experienced as a performance.

Host: So, he was kind of a moviemaker of his time, in a way?

BSR: You could say that. He is part of a very, very large new industry that is producing entertainment for a lot of people. And he is producing, in a sense, mass entertainment; he’s producing plays to be performed for a huge crowd consisting of audience members from all walks of life, both men and women, which is quite important for the kind of text that he produces. So he is, in a sense, producing for what would be the equivalent of the movies or even television.Host: Was he famous in his time or is that something that happened afterwards?

BSR: No, he was very famous in his time.

Host: He was a celebrity then?

BSR: I don’t know if you could say that. Well, he was very famous, he was. We’re used to thinking of authors as these lonely geniuses, almost – someone who is cooped up writing as much for themselves as for an audience, right? This is something that we’re used to thinking, this kind of myth of the author. But of course, Shakespeare is part of, as I said, a huge industry. He’s a professional writer, so he’s writing for money; therefore, he needs people to come and see his plays, or he’s not going to make money. So, he is an entertainer, and he is part of a very, very large group of writers and theatre entrepreneurs and actors – as I said, a large industry writing, producing, performing at this time. But he is definitely one of the most famous and the most recognised in his time. Definitely.

Host: I think we could say that he nailed it pretty much then, he he.

BSR: I think he did. Yes!

Host: Tell me a little bit about the time, what is going on in England and London at this time. You said that the theatre is a new craze, but what are the politics and the social issues of the time?

BSR: Shakespeare was born in 1564, and he died in 1616, so he is sort of smack in the middle of what has very often been referred to as the Renaissance in England. And now we also much more frequently use the expression ‘early modern’ because this is when we’re starting to recognise society, in some ways. But Shakespeare is part of a society that is very much changing, I think we can say. If we think about the 16th century, the 1500s in England – and in Europe and the world – so much is going on. If we think about the world, first of all, we have in 1492 the start of the so-called discoveries of ‘the New World’. So, all of a sudden the world is expanding; we have brand new trade routes, we have brand new goods and knowledge coming into the world. We have the explorations that have a lot of impact in the 16th century. In the middle of the 1400s, we have the invention of the printing press, and suddenly making printed material is much easier, and written material is much more available to so many more people than previously. In England at the time, we also have a lot of religious controversy, which is of course not something that is just limited to England, because the first half of the 1500s is also, of course, the time of the Reformation. So, Shakespeare is living in a time of expansion, globally and in Europe. He’s living at a time when we have a lot of religious and cultural conflict. The father of Elizabeth the first – who is the queen, the monarch, the first part of Shakespeare’s life – Henry the 8th, broke with the Catholic Church in order to marry his mistress. We still have a lot of religious conflict in England going on between Protestants and Catholics, and new Puritan movements, and Shakespeare is navigating this cultural, political, religious landscape as a writer and, of course, as a businessman. We see a lot of that in his plays, and that’s a very interesting backdrop for his plays.

Host: It’s fascinating, because like you said, he’s writing to make money, so he’s obviously working as a ‘crowd pleaser’ – in some sense – if we could say that. Can we also hear a personal voice and personal opinions that he’s somehow sneaking into his work?

BSR: Well, it’s really difficult to find a personal voice in dramas, in the sense that what we get in the dramas would always be character speaking, right? So, it’s always difficult to say who Shakespeare would be or who the author would be – if that’s relevant at all. It would perhaps be much easier to recognise a personal voice in his poetry, especially the sonnets, than in his dramas. But of course, one of the things that Shakespeare is so recognised for is his ability to mirror or represent so much of human experience, so much of society, and so much of humanity, in a way. Things that we still recognise. But what his voice in the dramas would be is really difficult to know.

Host: But people recognise the emotions he’s describing, then, in his characters?

BSR: Yes, and perhaps we could. This is perhaps also linked to the fact that he is writing for money, and he’s writing for such a diverse crowd as he’s writing for. I guess it’s a very well-known fact that all actors in Shakespeare’s time would be male, because women were not allowed on stage as actors. So that might then lead us to think that, yes, Shakespeare is writing sort of a very masculine form of drama. But so many of his audience members were women, and they were actually really important in terms of his financial stability. So, if Shakespeare hadn’t written really interesting and really good female characters that women wanted to see, and that they recognised, then of course he wouldn’t make money. So, he is writing very, very interesting characters for all kinds of people and social classes – both men and women. And I think that this is something that we still recognise and one of the things that makes him so interesting and so accessible … or perhaps not instantly accessible, but something that still speaks to us today.

Host: Who are his colleagues at the time? Are there other names, other authors or playwrights from the same time, that I would recognise?

BS: Oh, there are so many, so many wonderful authors from the time. Sometimes you think that they have just been very unlucky to be writing at the same time as Shakespeare, because we don’t read them as much. One of the very important playwrights for Shakespeare, and someone who is writing slightly before or at the same time as Shakespeare’s very early plays, would be Christopher Marlowe. He’s one of the famous playwrights. We have people like Ben Johnson, John Webster. We have more than 300 plays actually surviving from the period. We have a lot of contemporary playwrights producing plays at the time, but a lot of them would be people that most of us wouldn’t recognise today.

Host: So, it’s a very political time – it’s an awakening of culture, It’s very productive and exciting. Why do you think that Shakespeare emerges as ‘the goat’, If I could use a more modern expression of writing? Why did he win that generation?

BSR: Well, he did! He is really within that very competitive field. He is the greatest. I think most people agree that he was top of his class, so to speak, in his period.

Host: Is it because of his language or the volume of production? What do you think if you were going to put your finger on something that kind of made him stand out?

BSR: Well, I do think that some of it has to do precisely with the fact that he’s able to write for such a diverse crowd and that he is so good at that, and he’s able to produce or to do and capture so much of human emotion and human existence. But in terms of his language, yes he’s very productive, and he has a very varied vocabulary. But this is something that a lot of people attribute to Shakespeare. They say that he invented so many of the words we have today and so on, and this is perhaps not as correct as we’d like to believe. It’s just like we want the author to be this genius, this one person who comes up with everything on his own and just sort of creates something out of nothing – the way that we’ve been trained to think of authors since the Romantic Period, more or less towards the late 1700 and early 1800s. This is quite different. I mean, this is a time of a huge language expansion in England. So, Shakespeare is, of course, really good; he’s making up a lot of new words – but at the same time, so is everyone. And the English language is going through such a huge transformation at the time. So, this need to make Shakespeare the sole inventor of all these new words is perhaps a reflection of a need to make him out to be this extreme exception, this genius in every single field … whereas, as I said, this is a time of great linguistic expansion in the English language.

Host: So maybe he gets a little more credit than he should have, but it’s the time he’s living in that is exploding, not only him as a playwright – is that what you're trying to say?

BSR: Definitely, definitely. This is a time when there is a change from Latin in learned texts, for instance. Every scientific text would traditionally be in Latin, and now more and more people are starting to get an education and starting to write in English – meaning that there is a huge need to translate all of the scientific and theoretical vocabulary from Latin to English, meaning that you have so many words coming in from Latin.

Host: You were speaking about his appeal to large and diverse audiences and then the women as well, which was unusual at the time. Is he a working-class voice or is he a posh writer who kind of taps into to the working class?

BSR: Some of his colleagues actually look down on him because he doesn’t have a university education. So, some of the colleagues find him crude. Some of the other writers find him crude and uneducated and just a show-off or a wannabe. So, he definitely has a different background from several of his colleagues. But at the same time, he is also very well versed in upper-class life, and he knows a lot, and he observes. He becomes a favourite amongst a lot of upper-class people as well. So, he is someone, I think, who is very good at observing, and he uses what he sees, what he knows very, very, very well. But of course, he does have a very different background from some of the other writers at his time. He has a grammar school background, which is still a good education, but it’s nowhere near a university education.

Host: So, he is dealing with bias at the same time as he is a big hit? How do you think that affects him? Is that something that possibly hurts his feelings? Do you think that his colleagues see him in that way?

BSR: I really wouldn’t know. I’m not sure that he would pay that much attention to it. At least it didn’t stop him; if anything ...

Host: It did not, that’s for sure. He kept writing.If I don’t have any experience with Shakespeare, what do you think would be a good starting point for me if I wanted to get into it? And obviously we do read him a lot these days, but there are possibly hundreds of movies as well that are very true to his texts. I know a lot of Hollywood actors; they see it as a status symbol to end their career with some thespian movie or something like that. Where would you recommend that I start?

BSR: Well, I really would recommend that you start with whatever you think is fun and enjoyable? Remember that Shakespeare actually wrote for entertainment. And that is quite important. I would also remind people that Shakespeare is difficult. When you don’t understand Shakespeare, it’s not because you're stupid. It’s because the texts are difficult. It’s not meant to be difficult, necessarily, but of course – they are 400 years old! I always have my students read everything. Read the summaries, read all the help you find on the internet, and also watch the movies or watch any kind of dramatisation you get. But I also think that you should find a version that you think is enjoyable. You also have, for instance, modern adaptations like 10 Things I Hate About You – that’s a movie that a lot of people know. And that is, of course, Taming of the Shrew. You have She’s the Man, Twelfth Night. You have a lot of modernised versions that take their plotlines from Shakespeare. I say: go ahead, but enjoy it, and then read the texts. Don’t worry too much about all this stuff you don’t get. We have this tendency to get hung up. We think that what we don’t understand is what must be important. Focus on what you do understand instead and go from there.

Host: Thank you so much, Brita. It’s fascinating. I’m sure we could talk about Shakespeare for hours and hours, but I’m pretty sure we’ve touched on the main points.

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