Hugo Rheinhold, Ape with Skull, Image via wikipedia
Commentators looking for a way to understand the phenomenon that is Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump could do well to look at the insights of a man who died four centuries ago.
Panelists discussing the enduring impact of Shakespeare’s plays at the Sydney Opera House Culture Club this week identified a likeness to Trump in various Shakespearean characters.
Damien Ryan, director and artistic director, Sport for Jove Theatre Company cited the rebel Jack Cade in Henry VI as a Trump archetype. Cade, a real person who led a revolt against the English government in 1450,is characterised by Shakespeare as a rabble-rouser who cannot deliver.
He stirs up the populace with the catch-cry ‘you that love the commons, follow me’ but creates chaos and is ultimately defeated.
‘He’s a political hand-grenade; he’s a bomb the country has sent to itself,’ said Ryan, adding that both Cade and Trump operate by ‘throwing hand-grenades and watching who responds’.
Peter Evans, Artistic Director, Bell Shakespeare sees similarities between Trump and the character of Mark Anthony in Julius Caesar. Both,he said, are ‘willing actually to completely explode the country in order to have power’.
‘With Trump we’ve got somebody who actually has no ideas – actually there’s a couple of provocative thought bubbles but we’re willing to actually follow celebrity to that level. I think Shakespeare would find that absolutely fascinating.’
Charlton Heston as Mark Anthony​
Lady Macbeth and gender question
Shakespeare references have found their way into political parlance in recent Australian politics too. Writer Jane Caro highlighted how former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Chief of Staff Peta Credlin has been directly referred to as ‘Lady Macbeth’.It is a reference that the panel saw as ‘reductive’ but also relevant. While gender is one area of public life where there is a marked – though perhaps not complete – difference with the world Shakespeare portrays, women who speak out or ‘raise the temperature of male anxiety’ are still characterised as shrews and the Macbeth tag is a common shorthand.
‘We do hear a lot of Lady Macbeth comments when women express themselves,’ said Ryan.
Ryan likes to think that were Shakespeare alive today he would be appalled at the limitations he had given his female characters. ‘The men go on these fully articulated journeys all the way through the plays and get to express endless opinions and responses to things while women come on periodically and they always have missing scenes that they have to connect the dots emotionally for themselves and then move to the next moment. He very rarely gave them a full character to play.’
But the panelists agreed that Shakespeare’s insights about human character were as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.
Referring to Harold Bloom’s book The Invention of the Human, Australia Council Director of Theatre Marion Potts said Shakespeare’s insights almost invented our perception of ourselves.
‘He knew us better in a sense than we know ourselves and he was able to pinpoint that and in so doing he sort of laid the foundations also of what we were to become,’ she said.
Because of this insight, Shakespeare continues to lead people on a journey to explore their ‘concerns and aspirations’ of what it means to be a citizen, a human being, said Potts.
Ryan said Shakespeare’s ability to ‘​x-ray the human being and know what doesn’t change’ made his writing ‘ageless’.
Evans, said Shakespeare’s ‘incredible empathy for characters’ and his ability to change point of view makes the plays seem ‘endlessly open-ended’.
He said without the view into Macbeth’s imagination the play would be ‘unwatchable’, adding it was a ‘study of a psychopath in a way that..allows us to have empathy because we see this person imagining what they may feel after this particular act or the next threshold they go past’.
In audience question time the panel was asked what Shakespeare would say about ‘arguably the biggest tragedy of our time’: climate change.
Plenty, suggested Ryan, describing Titania’s speech in Midsummer Night’s Dream as an ‘essay on climate change’. ‘It’s the definition of tragedy – we are the problem; don’t look outside yourself; you are the problem; you are creating it; you are the seed of your own destruction; it lives in you; what are you going to do about it?’
‘Titania and Oberon in that play are…nature itself at war with itself.’
Trouble spots
But not all aspects of Shakespeare have lasted the test of time.
Like gender, issues of racism, anti-Semitism and family violence in some plays date Shakespeare’s attitudes.
All’s Well That End’s Well; Troilus and Cressida and Cymbeline, all plays in which women are treated as chattels, are ​often seen as too confronting for modern audiences.
Ryan said Sport for Jove’s production of All’s Well That End’s Well was ‘the biggest loss we’ve ever had as a company’.
Bell Shakespeare had made a commitment to program some such plays in its five to 10 year plan, said Evans. But he added that ‘sadly’ these plays were very difficult to make work for a modern audience.
Evans thinks the teaching of Shakespeare makes a huge difference to how future audiences engaged with his plays. ‘The Victorians have done terrible damage I think in the teaching of Shakespeare,’ he said. ‘I think there was a long period where people were in a way struggling with the Victorians’ idea of Shakespeare as high art, as elite.’
‘I think what we’re rediscovering is a playwright for the people and writing for all people and that there is something in Shakespeare for everybody and that it should never be isolated as something that is high art.’
What about the question of language? Does the language of Shakespeare prove a barrier to his continuing relevance in our society?
The panel did not believe so.
‘We can’t forget that Shakespeare was an adventurer with words, his playfulness with words​. In fact, he was very naughty with his use of words, his use of poetry and his use of assonance and the way that he put combinations of words together.’
‘We do a lot of work with students where English is a second language and they absolutely love coming to hear Shakespeare,’ observed Evans.
