Directions for Deifying
A few months ago, I was given a book that I simply devoured on the train from New York to Pittsburgh. And I’d like to share that book with you.
You should probably read this book.
Becoming Shakespeare by Jack Lynch chronicles the journey of one man’s legacy from commercially popular writer to demigod. Lynch isn’t interested in a nouveau Will of the World, he doesn’t attempt to rationalize historical records and artifacts (or the lack thereof) to illuminate what kind of man was Shakespeare (or if he was himself at all!) – he quotes the critic Paul Fussell, “What we actually know about Shakespeare as a person can go on a 3×5 card without crowding. But the writings confidently telling his life story and delineating his personality, morals, temper, and character would fill moving vans.” Instead, Lynch is more concerned with the series of events following April 25, 1616. And it’s an interesting story indeed. He asserts, “[This] is a book about an afterlife, but there’s nothing mystical about it.” It is simply the tale of “how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.”
As an educated actor, familiar faces from theater’s history were peppered throughout. I found the section on re-writing Shakespeare quite intriguing. For years Shakespeare’s work was heavily edited, if not re-written entirely, to fit the standards and mores of a given era. This practice, coupled with his popularity still rising exponentially, has caused some of the re-writes to be absorbed into our contemporary cultural fabric. For example, in Olivier’s 1956 Richard III, Olivier declares, “Off with his head! So much for Buckingham,” which was an addition by Colley Cibber (points if you can tell me what Charles Brown has to do with Colley Cibber) in 1700, and famously performed by David Garrick in 1741. However, Lynch maintains that these rewrites, while seemingly blasphemous, may have been catalysts in making Shakespeare into what he is today. ”Lear and Macbeth,” he says, “after all, were not very successful until they were rewritten.”
Lynch traces the road to deification from reviving, to studying, to improving, to co-opting, to domesticating, to forging, to worshipping. Like a worn cloth, his work was dug up, washed, bleached, re-stiched, re-fashioned, ironed, and has been used for just about everything.
The course of history is perpetually amazing; I recently finished work on the Ben Jonson play Epicene for (re:)Directions Theatre Company as a part of their Anybody But Shakespeare Festival, and I perpetually thought back to reading Lynch’s book – “Why Shakespeare? Why not Jonson or Marlowe? Why was Shakespeare the one who has withstood the test of time; Jonson and Marlowe were thought superior in their day.” Lynch harkens to the words of Jonathan Bate, “Because ‘genius’ was a category invented in order to account for what was peculiar about Shakespeare.” Lynch explains, “The rules for literary excellence has changed, and Shakespeare was the one who changed them.”
Lynch sets up a thorny path and history, as chronicled by Lynch, doesn’t disappoint:
“It’s a book about sex comedies with no sex, about tragedies where everyone lives happily ever after, about a Shakespeare festival where not a line of Shakespeare was spoken. [...] It’s about a classic of children’s literature written by a murderess, a war fought in scholarly footnotes, and foreign affairs being conducted on the London stage. [...] It’s about a provincial bumpkin who became the greatest portraitist of the human condition. It’s only fitting that it should be a book about paradoxes, because it’s about one of the greatest paradoxes in all of world literature: how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.”
Buy it here! Read it and tell me your thoughts! And thank you Mr. Kelly for the wonderful gift. You are too generous for words.
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