(The seventh in my nine posts about European culture from the 400s to the 1700s.)
I include in the Renaissance the great literary renaissance in England in the 1500s and 1600s — especially in Elizabethan London.
In the late 1500s, Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599), Philip Sidney (1554-1596), and John Donne (1572-1631) began to write poetry of great range and quality. Spenser’s allegorical poem The Faerie Queen fused Arthurian chivalry with ancient wisdom, Civic ethics, and Christian values. Donne wrote sophisticated love poems in his younger years and Christian poetry and sermons of great literary quality later in life, when he was a leading Anglican cleric.
From 1587 to 1613 there were 275 new plays written and produced in England. The English literary renaissance was very heavily about the genius and skill of its playwrights: Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Thomas Dekker, Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Middleton, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and, above all others, William Shakespeare.
Other writers have peopled a virtual world of enduring characters. Other writers have conveyed profound truths. Only William Shakespeare (1564-1616) did both, for the ages.
In delineating hundreds of characters, Shakespeare had preternatural powers. Among these hundreds of characters, Rosalind stands out the most for her psychological insight, Prospero for his insight into the ultimate nature of things, Sir John Falstaff for wisdom about consciousness and meaning, and Hamlet for sculpting his own consciousness.
Let me start with what I regard as the greatest tragedy and greatest play ever written.
In the most iconic moment of tragedy, Hamlet stands in the cemetery and holds in his hands the skull of the only person who truly loved him when he was a child.
Hamlet fails to love anyone, fails to truly listen to anyone. He is divided against himself.
And yet Hamlet’s awareness is so perceptive and keen, always expanding its circumference. His consciousness is so wide, so unbounded, so capacious. His mind is agile and subtle yet intense and formidable. No one can see as he does.
Hamlet is afflicted by his own self-scrutiny, self-knowledge, self-revision. And we identify with him and learn from him.
However perplexed and conflicted we become as we respond to the world’s demands, we cannot be lazy. To avoid Hamlet’s fate, we must become sure of our bearings. We must grapple with moral and ethical dilemmas, work out our values, exercise judgment, and restrain ourselves from harmful conduct. Beyond the surface of things, beyond the world of appearances, we must discover our true motives and make the effort to discern other people’s motives, which are often obscure to us.
As we look around us at a sea of troubles, will we do what we ought to do, when we “have cause and will and strength and means to do it”? Will we be “noble in reason”, “like an angel in apprehension”, “admirable in action”? We might become, at least some of the time, “passion’s slave”. But we have within us “that which passeth show”. What is best within us deserves to be worn “in my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart”.
Let me turn to what I regard as Shakespeare’s best comedy. As You Like It.
Rosalind is one of the best characters in all of literature. She’s tender and passionate but she never lets her feelings overwhelm her. She’s wise and sensible and intelligent. She’s gentle and virtuous and full of integrity. And she has a wealth of insight into human nature and life.
Rosalind is balanced. Her passion and judgment are balanced. She’s bold and brave when she needs to be, she’s spirited and resourceful, glowing with vitality, joyous, full of life. She’s always up for an adventure. And even her faults are charming.
Orlando is not too perfect and not too heroic, but he has an endearing soul. He has admirable qualities, including noble virtues. Orlando shows innate ability, courage, constancy, and self-mastery as well as shrewdness in taking care of himself. He’s warm, pleasant, amiable, modest, sunny, and generous.
Ultimately, behind all the scenes of As You Like It is some uplifting force, some grand cosmic beneficence. We can hear something immense behind the actions, something running through all the events, even the catastrophes and the suffering – a humane joy, compassion, a triumphant affirmation of life.
Shakespeare teaches us something: Through all our troubles, through all the terrible stuff that happens to us, we can keep our sense of wonder and well-being. We can hold onto the joy and wisdom and love in our soul. We can know deep inside of us that, things are fundamentally right with our world.
If we think that genuine happiness and true love are as real as bricks, we experience them as real when we watch Shakespeare’s play. If we think they’re illusions, they remain so. Life is as we like it.
As a writer, Shakespeare is peerless. His lyrics, sonnets, narrative poems, and plays were all feasts of language — each one thought out, executed, and delivered with his ever-maturing technical mastery of these genres. In his 39 plays (which include at least two dozen masterpieces), he handled perfectly fantasy, biography, history, and allegories of good and evil.
Shakespeare had inner depth — a capacious consciousness, a vital will, and a powerful and penetrating mind. In his miraculous rendering of reality, Shakespeare held a mirror up to the universal, perennial dimensions of human nature. He revealed us to ourselves, told our innermost secrets, displayed the bitter pathos and sublime joy of our lives, and opened window after window into our interior depths.
Shakespeare left us many different points of view on human life and human nature. Ultimately, he taught us that there is both a moral order and a blind fate, and that we must wage our ethical battles in a hostile and often evil world. He taught us about valor, tolerance, honesty, and honor, and — in his final plays — about acceptance, forgiveness, openness to the strange anomalies of life, and knowing deep down that something is fundamentally right with the world.
Excellent essay! Although I wish you had spent more time on my favorite character Prospero. So much to be said about the way he battles with the dualities of being human: good vs. evil, forgiveness vs. redemption, the corpus vs. the spirit.
This is refreshing! Keep it coming!!! Wonderful read and vey informative. Thanks for enlightening me. Francisco