Shakespeare's works: Beguiling, unsettling

To be or not to be?

With dramatic force, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presents the existential crisis faced by his homeland after the illegal Russian invasion in a speech to the British House of Commons on 8 March 2022. The former actor deploys a metaphor that everybody can understand because the quote has long been part of our universal cultural heritage: “The question for us now is to be or not to be. Oh no, this Shakespearean question. For 13 days this question could have been asked, but now I can give you a definitive answer. It’s definitely yes, to be.”

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When related to the death and destruction at the edge of Europe in this way, the famous, and admittedly often labored, Hamlet reference acquires fresh, more urgent dimensions and much greater resonance. At the same time, the episode illustrates the timeless relevance of Shakespeare’s dramatic words. When it comes to the really big themes of war and peace, life and death, love and passion, friendship and betrayal, there is no surer guide than William Shakespeare. The fascination inspired by his plays continues unabated.

In times like these, moreover, in “times of upheaval such as characterize the current political and social landscape worldwide,” Shakespeare’s works “once again seem highly contemporary,” says LMU professor Claudia Olk. Part of the reason for this, according to the Chair of English Literature, lies in the complexity of the plays: “Shakespeare’s oeuvre is challenging and troubling. Anyone looking for easy answers in Shakespeare will be disappointed.”

And so “trigger warnings” have been issued for Shakespeare’s works at American universities for their depictions of violence, racism, classism, and sexism; and some colleges have even removed Shakespeare from the syllabus, notes Claudia Olk regretfully. The director of the internationally renowned Munich Shakespeare Library has had quite different experiences at her institute: “Students are keen to engage with Shakespeare. This is partly because the historical moment in which he wrote his works is so fascinating. But even more important is the vibrant relationship his plays maintain with the contemporary moment – whenever that moment happens to be.”

Looking at the present through the lens of Shakespeare

Because of these qualities, Shakespeare remains one of the most performed playwrights today. The large Munich theaters alone, for example, have staged a half dozen of his plays during the current season. Shakespeare’s subject matter and themes are adapted for cinema, TV, and online series such as House of Cards. Or they serve as templates for novels by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson. They have been, says Claudia Olk, “translated into many languages and have also proven to be translatable into many different political and cultural contexts – from Reykjavik to Cape Town, and from Hollywood to Bollywood.”

Shakespeare’s complex heroes and villains also offer models for explaining the present, as American cultural historian Stephen Greenblatt demonstrated in his impassioned Shakespeare essay The Tyrant, through which he obliquely commented on the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016. Naturally, “charming arch rogues like Richard III are not attractive despite their wickedness, but because of it,” emphasizes Olk. Shakespeare’s theater “makes us call into question bombastic self-glorification and treacherous pathos.” But that alone cannot explain our perennial fascination with Shakespeare.

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A key to understanding this is provided by Shakespeare’s late work The Tempest, in which the audience is forced ineluctably, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to question their own position. Somebody somewhere is constantly falling asleep and quickly it becomes unclear what is true and what is a dream, what is theater and what is reality. In the permanent crisscrossing of boundaries, meaning itself becomes as fluid as the water and the wind which play such a central role in Shakespeare’s dramas. Another example is The Merchant of Venice, where we see a blurring of gender roles in the form of the lawyer Balthazar, who is actually Portia in disguise. In his/her rabulistic rhetoric, moreover, the meaning of the contract between the Jew Shylock and his debtor Antonio becomes fluid, as do the very laws of Venice.

“We would not die in that man’s company / That fears his fellowship to die with us,” says Henry V to his hopelessly outnumbered army in the St. Crispin’s Day speech, which is saturated with stirring national pathos. Then the thing happens that was thought impossible – his troops defeat the French in a heroic victory in the middle of the Hundred Years’ War, and in so doing legitimize the Tudor dynasty’s claim to the English throne.

Accusations of antisemitism, racism, nationalism fall short

The charge prompted by Henry V that Shakespeare was a nationalist falls short, as do accusations of antisemitism and racism based on The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest. The portrayals of antisemitism (The Merchant of Venice), racism (Othello, the character of Caliban from The Tempest), or nationalism (the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V) must not be confused with approval, says Claudia Olk. Rather, by illuminating them from all sides and opening up a panoply of possible interpretations, Shakespeare shows how racism can arise and how exclusion and animosity work.

Therein lies the true reason why Shakespeare is never out of date, says Claudia Olk: “It is this excess, the sheer, inexhaustible, never-ending possibilities of interpretation and portrayal that account for the global Shakespeare reception, or Shakespeare industry if you prefer, down to this day.”

This excess in Shakespeare’s work can manifest in a “superabundance of exotic luxury in Antony and Cleopatra” or in the “unsettling way that gender roles are played out in The Taming of the Shrew or in the extreme violence of Titus Andronicus” – all examples, according to the Shakespeare expert, “of how the Bard, in his choice of sources, had a predilection for subject matter that operates on the borders of the imaginable.”

Even Romeo and Juliet, this epitome of a modern tragedy, is full of excess, as Juliet herself admits: “My true love is grown to such excess / I cannot sum up sum of half my wealth.” The poetic force and its potential to enlighten actually reside in this excessiveness, says Claudia Olk: “Excess is intrinsic to the theater. It causes people to reflect on their own possibilities and initiates a logic of self-transcendence.” It serves as an indicator of “their conditions of possibility” and displays “the poetic force of creation and imaginative transgression precisely in the limitations of the means and the words.” Moreover, “in breaking forth into excess, Shakespeare’s characters are continually acting out the performative crossing of boundaries.”

However, this very excessiveness has sometimes made Shakespeare’s works hard to take for the general public. This was particularly so in Germany, where Shakespeare was adopted as an honorary “third German playwright after Goethe and Schiller” in the 18th/19th centuries. During the Hamburg premiere of Othello, audience members fainted by the dozen during the “gruesome scenes,” reported contemporary observer J.F. Schütze in his history of Hamburg theater from 1794, and several “prominent Hamburg ladies suffered miscarriages” as a result. “And yet,” says Olk, “it would seem that Shakespeare’s plays did not delight directors, actors, critics, and spectators despite their excessive qualities, but because of them. They inspire horror and fascination at once.”

Hollowed out: a Hamlet without Hamlet

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In their original versions, many Shakespeare dramas were nevertheless considered unsuitable for a bourgeois public – or unstageable full stop. This resulted in intensive rewriting and editing, as Claudia Olk can demonstrate with reference to the many stage adaptations kept in the Munich Shakespeare Library – “incidentally, the only one of its kind on the European continent, a humanities laboratory” observes the professor of English literature. It is “paradoxical” that despite his popularity in Germany and England, so few of Shakespeare’s works were accepted in their original form: “For all the rapturous admiration of Shakespeare, theatergoers in the 18th and 19th centuries often couldn’t take his plays without extensive alterations,” says Claudia Olk.

A production of Hamlet at the Viennese Court Theater in 1773 furnishes a vivid example. It was a resounding success despite, or because of, the interventions of director Franz Heufeld. He gave the protagonists Danish sounding names – Polonius was called Oldenholm and Horatio became Gustav. Important secondary characters like Fortinbras, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Osric, and the gravedigger were cut out altogether, as was the Norwegian subplot.

The play no longer ended in a bloodbath, because Hamlet was allowed to live in this version, unlike his opponents. Heufeld thus denuded the play of its political, humorously self-reflective, and tragic dimensions – a Hamlet without Hamlet as it were. Shakespeare’s works, says Olk, “were too much for the German critics and German theater of the 18th century – too unsettling, too complicated, too confusing, and too threatening, not to mention too shocking, bloody, and gruesome. In a word, they were unsuitable.”

And if Hamlet had to be hollowed out, so too did King Lear: In the German-language premiere, the “irrational, ambivalent, and absurd aspects were stripped out in a staging that emphasized the pathos of the story.” What remained, notes Olk, was a “drama without any morally objectionable elements and with a simplified style, as exemplified in the speeches of the Fool, which were divested of their erotic allusions.” A Hamlet without Hamlet, then, and a Lear without Lear for the German bourgeoisie?

Theatergoers no longer faint at Shakespeare’s plays today. It takes more shocking material to achieve that effect, such as Florentina Holzinger’s adaptation of the Hindemith opera Sancta Susanna. At its premiere in Stuttgart at the start of the current theater season, according to media reports, 18 audience members collapsed “despite an age rating of 18 plus and warnings printed in bold type.”

Nevertheless, Shakespeare still has the power to unsettle today. A good example is King Lear, which always fills theaters just the same. The irrational, the ambivalent, and the absurd are the true core of the play – and this is what makes it so difficult to bear. Lear, according to Olk, “eschews an edifying resolution. At the end, the audience is presented with total meaninglessness; they are cast into the void, as it were.” As Professor Olk notes, anyone looking for easy answers in Shakespeare is bound to be disappointed. “The play is over and nothing is well – this is how King Lear ends.”

Although Shakespeare might be hard to stomach sometimes, he is not entirely bleak and unforgiving. And Claudia Olk values this lighter side of him greatly. Alongside his tragedies, comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream – where the crossing of boundaries appears in a positive light – dominate the theater landscape to this day.

As the curtain falls, the jester Puck is given the last word: “Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue, / We will make amends ere long; / Else the Puck a liar call; / So, good night unto you all. / Give me your hands, if we be friends, / And Robin shall restore amends.”

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Prof. Dr. Claudia Olk is Chair of English Literature and Director of the Munich Shakespeare Library at LMU. Olk completed her doctorate in English philology at the University of Münster and received her habilitation degree from the Humboldt University of Berlin. Subsequently, she was Professor of Comparative Literature with a special focus on English at the Peter Szondi Institute, Freie Universität Berlin before joining LMU in 2019. In addition, Olk served as President of the German Shakespeare Society for nine years.

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• Psychology – what we instill : How can we support young people in realizing their potential and learning about social responsibility? Read now!