All the World Is a Stage According to Shakespeare by Chuck Spurgeon
All the World Is a Stage According to Shakespeare
by Chuck Spurgeon
In the days of my youth, Shakespeare was the center of English literature and thus of English-speaking culture. I turned 20 years old when Shakespeare became 400! We started high school with some mild and weepy astrology, the ‘star-struck love’ of Romeo and Juliet. A few years later teachers added the anti-gang, anti-family feud, the joyous musical celebration of America in West Side Story to their curriculum. We proceeded to Julius Caesar to analyze forms of government, the effects of great-man personalities, the morality of civic responsibilities and duties. Perhaps more importantly, however, we studied Shakespeare to discern when and if we could trust people. Through an early movie we witnessed how easily powerful but very tricky rhetoric could sway a mob: “Friends, Romans, and countryman”, lend me your ears and I will tell you what you should think and feel and believe and do. This frightened us as much as demonstrations of hypnosis and analyses of advertising. The next year we got out of this slump and refreshed ourselves with the ever-joyful madness of hot-blooded lovers romping around in an enchanted forest, as we enjoyed the “fine phrenzy rolling” of The Poet in love. A Midsummer Night’s Dream got us all in bed, (happily married, of course), and what seems strange to me now, we concluded our senior year with Macbeth, which is truly a horror story, ‘a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing’. Well, to be fair, Macbeth shows us that the horrors of ambitious tyranny getting wiped out by a good ol’ king of England who saves Scotland from the Scots.
In Shakespeare’s history plays we witness how a cocky young Prince Hal transforms himself into a hot-blooded warrior king. Henry V, anxious to prove his rights against women under Salic Law and to prove himself worthy of his kingship agrees with the Catholic Church that he should conquer France. We remember too that his father had become King Henry IV by usurping and killing King Richard II, so we learn about irony and karma. We get to be with the king when he questions how he is different from the common man. Out blood-thirsty warrior king has a conscience and, while in disguise, ponders kingship and duty with his common soldiers.
We smile, ironically, in the Henry VI plays when a “mutter” called Jack Cade rants that he will “kill all the lawyers” and make himself king. And then comes another historical contrast. Henry VI, who became king while he was still an infant, prays and studies church music while his soldiers slaughter each other in bloody civil warfare. The war becomes the dynastic Wars of the Roses, which end when the evil Richard III gets killed on the battlefield and Henry Tudor crowns himself King Henry VII, and the Tudors come to the throne. To keep their power, they have to dump Rome (horrid Henry VIII) and establish or settle a new church under Elizabeth I.
You cannot understand Shakespeare or English literature, for that matter, without good knowledge of the Bible, yet some scholars regard the complete works of Shakespeare as ‘the secular bible’, because Shakespeare does not preach religion nor does he espouse any particular philosophy, but he does show us endless possibilities of how we live our lives and fit or stage-manage ourselves into the world. “All the world’s a stage”, after all, but keep in mind that “Shakespeare” requires you to seek out satire, unwind the complexities of paradoxes, and me mightily mindful of ironies. Thus, if you want students to become open-minded, independent thinkers, get them into Shakespeare. And if you feel a bit jaded about life during a pandemic, rediscover what it means to be human, listen to, see, and read Shakespeare. And then ponder the possibilities of subtle satire and irony and how easy it is to misinterpret what we read and hear. For instance, Polonius gives his son his soundest advice before Laertes leaves for college in Hamlet (1.3.77-79):
This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Alas! Such solid advice from a parent is not a guarantee youth will live a life of genuine integrity. Place these three lines in their context within the play and you will see, sadly, perhaps, that Polonius is just telling his son to dress and act appropriately. “Remember who you are, and don’t embarrass me.” Oft’ though, our Shakespeare comes in compact, pharmaceutically approved doses. Consider the following recommendations from the Sonnets:
Feeling really low?
“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state”.
Lonely? Think about your friends:
“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past…
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.”
Feel your love belongs on a pedestal?
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou are more lovely and more temperate.”
Nervous before an important interview:
“As an unperfect actor on the stage, / Who with his fear is put besides his part."
Remembering dearly departed friends:
“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, / I summon up remembrance of things past”
Baffled about why you are in love?
“What is your substance, whereof are you made?”
Getting older and feeling life passing you by:
“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end…”
In love with yourself?
“Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye…”
[Or, in the vulgar parlance of today: “Get a life!”]
Want to comfort your family after you are gone, gone, gone?
“No longer mourn for me when I am dead…”
Do not want to interfere between friends:
‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments…”
Burning in passion?
“The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action…”
[PS: Do not go near anyone named Othello!]
Caught in a questionable relationship?
“Two loves I have, of comfort and despair
Which like two spirits do suggest me still…”
Following in the tradition of Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare’s observations can get highly holy and rather lowly and raunchy. As I tried to show students at Rolling Hills, Palos Verdes, Miraleste, and Peninsula High Schools, and during one year at Margate Intermediate School, when you study “Shakespeare”, you go centerstage: you study your “self” and the soul or souls within you that make you human, in the most positive sense of the word. Shakespeare’s plays dramatize our physiological, neurological wiring, our philosophical, psychological, and spiritual psyches, our discovering and rediscovering what it means to be human, what it feels like to be “alive”, and about our commitment to a more perfect union of the “brave new world”. When Prospero drowns his magic books, acknowledges the Earth-creature Caliban as his own, his daughter Miranda falls in love with Prince Ferdinand, son of her father’s enemy. In The Tempest the stars that condemned Romeo and Juliet are uncrossed, our revels are ended, and our “little life” that is “rounded with a sleep” awakens to themes and images that are magical and musical.
Bio of Dr C W (Chuck) Spurgeon
After being graduated from GWHS where English teachers awakened and nurtured his Anglophilia, Chuck began higher education at Indiana and Purdue Universities, and then he moved to California to earn B.A. (Pepperdine) and M.A. (Loyola University of Los Angeles) degrees. Chuck got the courage to study at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and finished his doctorate from the University of London with special interests in psychology and literature.
A member of the Church of England, Chuck served Westminster Abbey as a guide in Poets’ Corner, where he has been privileged to give poetry readings, and composed a 600-year anthology of poetry about the Abbey, The Poetry of Westminster Abbey.
Retired after 50 years of teaching from teaching at Marymount California University and Regent’s University London. Author of books on which interrelate religion, literature, history, and psychology, Dr Spurgeon is working on the autobiographical study of history and his devotion to St John’s Church, Little Gidding, England, made famous by T S Eliot in his Four Quartets.