Sonnet 55
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful wars shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room,
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wears this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
-William Shakespeare
A little over a week ago, the world in contradictory stillness, and a fair degree of irony, observed the 456th birthday of the greatest poet and playwright of all time. William Shakespeare (April 23, 1564 – April 23, 1616), in modern popular language, would be referred to as “the GOAT” (greatest of all time).
His birthday went by without clamour, but not quite in quietude. This silence and inactivity followed the global noise of previous years. But it was a palling silence amid much disquiet because of the marauding pestilence identified as COVID-19 that still threatens everywhere. The Globe has been forced to shut down, and so have all the other theatres in the great globe itself, so that on his birthday, not even the replica of Shakespeare’s own playhouse in London was able to shoot a line of commemoration.
The ironies multiply, as Shakespeare was himself a master of irony. The birthday of an artist who is the most fabled and acclaimed in the world, passed unsung in 2020 under the cloud of the coronavirus. Yet he had made the bold and incomparable prediction that his work would be immortal – invincible against all the mightiest foes of “sad mortality”, whether it be “rough winds”, mutability, time, war, pestilence, or death.
William Shakespeare, born in the town of Stratford on the bank of the River Avon in Warwickshire, England, was the greatest and most extraordinary literary artist known to the world. He worked in the Elizabethan era of which he was a product, and in turn contributed to its exceptional greatness. This era is considered, arguably, the most outstanding age in the development of English literature and theatre. The very greatness of the age created the conditions for the emergence of an artist such as Shakespeare, and the work and presence of this dominant artist are two of the things that made the era so great.
The age began in 1558 with the coronation of Elizabeth I as Queen of England. The reign of Elizabeth was the first contributor to the rise of a wealth of excellent literature and drama not to be equalled until, perhaps, the twentieth century. Most significant in this regard was when she outlawed religious drama. The background to this were the controversies in the court of her father King Henry VIII, who had been determined to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon. Since the Roman Catholic Church, headed by the Pope, refused to approve it, he divorced his kingdom from that church and formed instead, the Church of England – the Anglican Church – with himself, the king, as head.
During Elizabeth’s reign, there were persisting elements of the Mediaeval age in the country, including the dominance of religious drama. Elizabeth recognised the powerful influence of drama and saw religious theatre as a source of continued strife and war, so she outlawed it in an effort to preserve the peace. This forced playwrights to broaden their horizons, widen their imagination and seek other themes and plots for plays. It opened up several possibilities which enriched drama in the sixteenth century. While the Christian Morality Play from the Middle Ages still persisted, a new wave of diverse drama emerged.
Along with this was the climate for several new playwrights, a number of them great dramatists, including the university wits like Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe and John Lyly, graduates of Cambridge and Oxford. Others included Thomas Kyd, Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson who were not only outstanding, but led the way as professional writers, thus contributing to the literary greatness of the age after 1585. This was also the era of top-flight poets such as Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney and John Donne, with Lyly as a pioneering fiction writer and Francis Bacon in prose.
The pioneering playwrights, the opening of new permanent theatres and the development of theatre performing companies paved the way for the rise of the acknowledged best of them all, Shakespeare, who ran away from Stratford to eventually develop a thriving career in London in the 1590s.
Apart from the fact that even those of his contemporaries who never liked him acknowledged him as the best at the zenith of his career, there are many reasons why Shakespeare is considered the greatest.
There were areas in which he lorded it over them. The first is that he did not only become a writer but started as an actor and learnt the trade in the theatre by treading the boards, working on stage, producing, managing and directing. He was able to build his own theatre, the Globe, in 1599, and led his own company. This meant he learned and mastered the craft in a way many of his fellow writers did not. This gave him a command of the stage and the profession which definitely enriched his writing.
The second is that he outstripped them as a writer. Except for Marlowe, most of them were known to excel at one type of play, predominantly comedy or tragedy, while Shakespeare wrote in five categories – tragedy, comedy, history, Roman and problem plays.
Third is that he was equally the leading talent in poetry – the sonnet and long poems. One of the contributory factors of greatness in the Elizabethan age was the fruits of the Renaissance in the discovery and full utilisation of the Classics. All the unprecedented wealth of Greece and Rome was at their service, including the dramatic types, and Shakespeare borrowed from them like everyone else.
But what made him truly superior to others was his exceptional gift of innovation and originality. Not only did he master the classical forms, but he made them his own to the extent that thereafter, there emerged such genres as Shakespearean tragedy, Shakespearean comedy and the Shakespearean sonnet. So well did he transform them that they were named after him. Nor was he afraid to experiment with them and break the rules of the classical forms.
Marlowe, the greatest talent after Shakespeare, was known for brilliant adaptation and innovative use of the Morality play, and other dramas challenging Christianity, and Kyd produced the impactful Elizabethan Senecan Revenge tragedy. But Shakespeare outstripped even those with the way he turned the Senecan Revenge formula into all-time great tragedies like Hamlet and Julius Caesar.
At the same time, his work outlived his age in a number of different ways. Some of his creations, like what critics later called the Problem Play, are of unending interest today. Additionally, Barbadian UWI researcher Cheryl Barker Griffith did a revealing study of how he advanced the genre of Romance in a number of plays, arguably creating a sixth type to add to the five for which he was already famous. He was not satisfied just to borrow the English Sonnet, but applied innovation much as he did with the Courtly Love tradition.
The university wits were scholars known for their knowledge and application of the Classics, and Shakespeare who was not a university graduate, was even sneeringly described as “a man of little Latin and less Greek”. The great writers of the time showed off their learning in their poetry and plays with particular reference to the Classics, all of which contributed to the superior place in history occupied by the Elizabethans. But Shakespeare never lagged behind them in this respect, excelling no less in his application of classical mythology in addition to Roman and English history, which demonstrated his reading and incomparable knowledge of the leading textual authorities available to scholars and researchers at that time.
Yet another factor of his greatness is his everlasting timelessness. In “Sonnet 55” he boldly describes his own poetry as “this powerful rhyme” in whose “contents” his subject “shall shine more bright” than “unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.” In his immortal verse “your praise shall still find room, / Even in the eyes of all posterity”.
No other poet had the audacity to predict that his verse would live forever and preserve forever the life of his subject – “So long as men can breathe and eyes can see / So long lives this and this gives life to thee”. Which other poet could boast for his poetry, that “Devouring time . . ./ My love shall in my verse ever live young”, or “that in black ink my love shall still shine bright”?
And all of that has proved to be accurate in the way Shakespeare’s work speaks to the present time. Not only does it do that in theme, subject and living characters, but in the making of the language. Many words now common in English usage were coined by Shakespeare such as “glister”. Many a clichéd saying in everyday English is a quotation from his work, as in “all that glisters is not gold”. Several indelible, memorable phrases now etched in the English language, such as Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me”, are taken from his dramatic imagery. Shakespeare is among the most quotable and quoted, and no line in literature is better known than Hamlet’s “to be or not to be, that is the question”.
The currently marauding pandemic might have dumped a wet blanket over his birthday celebrations, including the British Ambassador’s annual Shakespeare film in Georgetown, but every day as people speak and go about their daily business, William Shakespeare is commemorated in the common language of the people.