The Great Stratford-on-Avon Noise Machine

I don’t like deleting anyone from my online friends lists. I sometimes hold onto friendships that have shuffled along, zombie-like, for years. To get ejected from my social media lists, you generally must pick fights, engage in personal insults, or use my page to spread lies. Recently, I had someone attempt all three, and it involved one of literature’s most tedious questions:

Did Shakespeare write the works of Shakespeare?

Anti-Stratfordianism is a pseudoscience, akin to antivax or Flat Earth conspiracies. Adherents “prove” their propositions, not through evidence, but by “poking holes,” finding supposed inconsistencies in the documented narrative, and “just asking questions.” As my overuse of scare quotes indicates, anti-Stratfordian arguments rely on obfuscations and innuendo, not evidence. Yet my now-ex-friend insisted I must “engage” every specious argument, or surrender the debate.

That, immediately, should’ve been a clue. Flooding the market with unsourced innuendo or anecdotes, then claiming victory on every point somebody can’t immediately rebut, is the tactic of ufologists and Bigfoot hunters, not serious social scientists. Bullshit artists, like Steven Crowder with his “change my mind” schtick, love barraging the unprepared with binders full of photocopied talking points, demanding on-the-spot answers.

My ex-friend began by demanding why we should consider Shakespeare the author of Shakespeare, when we have little documentary evidence of his life. As though the absence of documents, in a time when creating and storing documents was expensive, proves anything. In fairness, professional doubt manufacturers use this same technique on Homer, Socrates, Pythagoras, or Jesus Christ. Rhetoricians call this the “argument from ignorance.”

Jon Finch (left) and Francesca Annis in Roman Polanski's Macbeth

Sometimes we must focus on gaps in our knowledge. Law enforcement and counterterrorist experts do this frequently. But formal argument considers this fallacious in most contexts, because absence of knowledge usually proves little, except that nobody can document everything. Shakespeare, a poor boy from the provinces, didn’t merit physical documentation until relatively late in life.

Well, the anti-Stratfordian argues, what about Shakespeare’s lack of education? Most playwrights of the English Renaissance attended Oxford or Cambridge; how could Shakespeare write great literature without academic credentials?

Yes, most late-Elizabethan playwrights attended universities. We remember Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, George Peele, and Thomas Nashe as the “University Wits.” Greene wrote a notorious pamphlet condemning Shakespeare as an uneducated bumpkin. However, Greene’s one surviving play isn’t worth reading. Of the University Wits, only Marlowe bears reading now—and he nearly flunked his education, until the Queen personally intervened.

Insisting that Shakespeare couldn’t write well without a university education is classist. As a former university composition teacher, I can attest that some people write well without higher education, others write poorly with higher education, and some write well despite higher ed. (When I mentioned social class, my ex-friend said I’d engaged in “ad hominem attack.” Not so, sir. If there’s a fallacy there, it’s hasty generalization.)

The anti-Stratfordian shifts tactics: how could Shakespeare write about foreign lands so authoritatively? We have no evidence he ever left England. (Again with the “argument from ignorance.”)

Except Shakespeare didn’t write authoritatively about foreign lands. In Hamlet, he misnames Denmark’s royal palace, and gives nearly every Danish character Greek or Latin names. He sets several plays in Italy, including Verona, Venice, and Padua. Each feature explicitly English scenes, including women speaking in public (verboten in Renaissance Italy), court cases argued on English common law, and common English courtship rituals. Shakespeare’s “foreign lands” are exotic names draped over English scenes.

Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet

Next, the anti-Stratfordian demands I explain how Shakespeare,a poor country boy, could write about aristocracy? How could a provincial merchant’s son understand noble households and aristocratic families?

First, Shakespeare’s playing company had aristocratic sponsorship. As first the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and later the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s company were members of the royal household, and therefore aristocratic insiders. Even without that, though, the poor have always understood how rich people think, as rich people don’t understand the poor, because they have to. Then as now, social class matters.

Finally, my ex-friend deployed the low blow: why was I getting emotional? “You don’t sound,” he wrote, “like a dispassionate academic here.” I realized that he’d gone for the troll argument, saying provocative things until I lost my composure, then crowing over my anger. His statement was a prettied-up version of “U mad bro?” So I blocked him.

I don’t brook bad-faith argument or underhanded tactics. I won’t engage future anti-Stratfordian arguments, and if anyone tries them on me ever again, I’ll show them this narrative, then mute them forever. It’s better than they deserve.

Romeo and Juliet in the Dying Old World

Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet

What, an acquaintance recently asked, is Juliet’s fatal flaw? We know Romeo is impetuous and overly emotional, driven by sentimental whimsy, but what about Juliet? The traditional attributions, like pride, avarice, or jealousy, don’t apply. Some friends and I got to discussing this question, and though we’re no closer to reaching a conclusion, the debate did generate some meaningful suggestions.

Aristotle postulates a “fatal flaw” as a humane virtue that becomes so extreme and disproportionate, that it distorts and becomes a vice. Oedipus wanted to investigate the truth because he considered the truth a straightforward moral good, and didn’t realise the truth would implicate him. Orestes wanted vengeance to rebalance the scales of justice, but in order to do that he had to kill his own mother, which upset the scales again.

Using that standard, what virtues do we see in Juliet? She loves deeply, and she rejects her parents’ conformist attitudes. In today’s individualistic society, we perceive these attitudes as good, as triumphant, as reasons to consider her a good human being. But in Verona's tightly controlled aristocratic society, they are deviations from systems of control. The desire to love deeply, contradicts the ways a late-feudal society holds itself together.

This concept of Verona as “late-feudal” matters. Shakespeare wrote while conservative aristocratic precepts were giving way to nascent capitalism. Though Shakespeare wrote in praise of kings and of history, and often appears conservative in his own writings, he did so in no small part because he was hamstrung by the attitudes of official state censors. He needed to satisfy the bureaucracy, which he achieved by flattering the Queen’s regime.

Shakespeare lawfully had to praise kings and priests, during the twilight of monarchs and ecclesiastics. The old ways of seeing and being in the world were winding down, gradually being supplanted by the ways of money and discovery, the power of nominally self-made individuals. Shakespeare was a rough contemporary of Sir Francis Drake and other national heroes; he could probably see the old systems growing threadbare.

Verona, as depicted, isn’t an actual Italian city-state. Juliet’s romantic forwardness reflects this; her behavior in vetting suitors and participating in family masquerades reflects this. Reading this play with historical hindsight, clearly Shakespeare presents Verona as a distant Neverland, a nation of ideological exploration, where the author manipulates character and events to underline his symbolism. Like Othello or Twelfth Night, this Italy is distinctly English.

Clare Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet

The Montagues and Capulets support the old systems, because they have to. Their aristocratic system no longer supports the people, lumbering on simply because the powerful fear change. The rising sense of individualism among Tudor England matters: the sense that one could circumnavigate the world and make a sort of conquest for themselves, the values of budding colonialism, the sense that we could remake ourselves in the New World.

These attitudes were probably new and dangerous, and Shakespeare maybe didn’t believe them himself. He presents the undiscovered world as dangerous in plays like The Tempest. But simultaneously, he needs to accommodate this New World, because the Old World was surely unravelling. The sense of wounded honor that dominates Verona’s aristocracy, becomes something different in the New World, the savagery of backcountry Hatfields and McCoys.

Because the old way is usually violence. Dedicated history readers know that war often marks the old edifices falling away: as we’re seeing right now, with threats of violent insurrection from people who perceive their privilege undercut by changes in society which they find scary. The Montagues and Capulets would have more in common with the January 6th mutineers than we might like to admit.

Violence recognizes that we’re bound to the past, that the dying order owns us, and we have nothing else to sustain us. Romeo and Juliet have something positive, something nonviolent, by which they survive. They’re naïve, of course, pummeled by their emotions, and had they survived the moment, they probably would have descended into something different and unglamorous. But in the moment, they have a world that isn’t defined oppositionally.

Viewed thus, I propose, Juliet has no “fatal flaw.” Young and morally unformed, she cannot possess either virtues enough to turn vicious, nor vices enough to condemn her. Instead, she simply is, in a world grown weary and gangrenous. The fault, expressed in the Prince’s final stiff scolding of Old Montague and Old Capulet, belongs not to the children; it belongs to Verona’s elders, for clinging to a dying way.

Romeo & Juliet is, beneath the surface, the Tragedy of Verona.

See Also: Romeo and Juliet in the Kingdom of Politics

Romeo and Juliet in the Kingdom of Politics

Clare Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet

I never cottoned to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet when I read it in college. Unlike Macbeth or King Lear, something about R&J sat badly with me. These protagonists came across as self-indulgent, petulant, and deaf to reason. Somehow I never twigged that maybe, that was Shakespeare’s intent: that Romeo and Juliet are bad people, molded by bad influences. Never, that is, until last week, when the Anthony Bouchard story broke.

If you missed this story, count your blessings. Bouchard, a Wyoming state senator and leading primary challenger for damaged incumbent Republican Representative Liz Cheney, admitted impregnating his 14-year-old girlfriend when he was 18. The relationship progressed through a teenage marriage and divorce, through personal and relationship strife, to suicide and estrangement. This folderol makes Shakespeare’s “pair of star-crossed lovers” look sober and abstemious.

Importantly for our purposes, Bouchard compares his tempestuous adolescent cyclone, to Romeo and Juliet. He clearly means this flatteringly, like his doomed first marriage was a beautiful love story of teenage innocence—like I once assumed Shakespeare intended. Yet considering the death, estrangement, and other violence left behind, I’ve reevaluated Shakespeare’s play, and realize Bouchard may be more correct than he realizes.

This idea that Romeo and Juliet is some beautiful story of innocence, probably comes from the accumulated myth. Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film presents its protagonists as beautiful, youthful lovers whose relationship is impeded by the grown-ups around them, the embodiment of Vietnam-era youth culture. Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 “white gangsta” interpretation contemporizes the same basic themes. These reflect the prettified baggage which Shakespeare’s story has accumulated through the centuries.

Yet one suspects, comparing Shakespeare’s play to Bouchard’s story, that perhaps The Bard anticipated a very different interpretation. Like Romeo, Bouchard used an esoteric legal loophole to wed his absurdly young bride. Things escalated, though. Like Juliet, Bouchard’s first wife destroyed herself. Which leads me to suspect that Juliet, and probably Bouchard’s first wife, had existing unresolved issues she couldn’t handle correctly. Their “romances” were extensions of this.

Wyoming State Senator
Anthony Bouchard

Bouchard’s wife committed suicide, and therefore is beyond questioning. But we can construe, from the fact that she married Bouchard, that she consented to the age-inappropriate relationship, inasmuch as teenagers can consent. Therefore she presumably sought an older boyfriend, looking for whatever psychological comfort he could provide. We can postulate the details; they don’t matter. What matters is the theme.

(Let’s withhold statutory considerations, which apply to Matt Gaetz. Wyoming’s age-of-consent laws include a four-year “close in age” exception. Bouchard’s behavior is skeevy, but not actually unlawful.)

Shakespeare’s play acknowledges that children have no control of their emotions. They fall in love easily, influenced by the courtly romances then popular throughout Europe. Without adult guidance, which Shakespeare shows early that both lovers lack, teenage emotions quickly go sideways, turning them into instruments of destruction. Kids feel deeply, and mistake their feelings for normal sexuality, which they assuage through reckless, sensual behavior.

We adults forget that teenagers aren’t miniature grown-ups. They have nearly adult bodies and desires, but haven’t learned to manage those desires, a reality compounded because our educational system extends the period of juvenile dependency until the almost-traumatic onset of adulthood. Our culture is bipolar, keeping kids helpless and childlike through young adulthood, then dropping the full burden of maturity upon them on their eighteenth birthdays.

Like Romeo and Juliet, Bouchard and his inappropriately young girlfriend had reckless sex, then had to face the consequences. Their marriage wasn’t happy, because it didn’t really sate the unresolved conflicts inside themselves, as Romeo and Juliet’s wouldn’t have. And like our star-crossed lovers, whose real desire was to die, Bouchard’s wife eventually fulfilled that goal. The living remained to gather the copious debris.

Shakespeare understood something which succeeding generations have forgotten: teenagers don’t have sex for the same reasons adults do. They don’t want to express love, feel intimacy, or even just get off. Plagued with the fallout of protracted adolescence, teenagers are possessed of inner fires which they fear will consume them. Sex offers a false promise of temporary release. But children, by definition, haven’t learned to handle these pressures appropriately.

This story has forced me to reevaluate my college interpretation of Romeo and Juliet. My reaction to them as immature and petulant maybe reflects a deeper truth: that children think themselves more mature than they are, or than society lets them be. Their self-indulgent behavior isn’t incidental. And if their adolescent intemperance isn’t stopped, they grow up thinking themselves entitled to power, because even as adults, consequences don’t matter.

The Sadness of Reading Hamlet as an Adult

Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet

Almost any erstwhile English major will confess, I suspect, to having read Shakespeare’s Hamlet before being formally assigned it for classroom reading. The kind of person who elects to study literature is likely the sort of person eager to discover new experiences, and to embark on journeys into mysterious worlds, and no “world” is more ballyhooed than reading Hamlet. It’s the Mount Everest of literature: supposedly impregnable, though the trail is well-marked and extensively traveled.

I personally read Hamlet as a senior in high school. This may surprise several classmates, since—open secret—I nearly flunked that year. Not because I was stupid, but because I was impatient with the carefully curated, low-risk “skillz drillz” approach to learning favored in American high schools. I wanted to make independent discoveries and learn what excited me. So I purchased a paperback Hamlet at B.Dalton and undertook it myself, blind and rudderless.

The book I discovered felt dangerous, scary, and frustrating. This giddy kid, angry at his discovery that life didn’t unfold with the elegant symmetry of a medieval morality play, challenged the social order which dominated him, embodied in his stepfather. Young Hamlet realized Denmark, once bold and vibrant, had rusticated and fallen asleep. King Claudius loved wine and sex, not the manful virtues of conquest and justice. Between his books and swords, Hamlet promised revitalization.

Hamlet probably electrified Elizabethan audiences for the same reasons it jolted one suburban White kid in 1991. Just as Elizabethan theatre emerged from the stultification of plays as religious instruction (and opposed the Puritans who threatened to overrun England), this paperback Shakespeare ratified my belief that the institutions dominating my life were overgrown and decrepit. Sure, like Hamlet, resisting this decay might kill me. But it remained a worthy fight, just because it was right.

Mel Gibson as Hamlet

I still own that paperback Hamlet. On a dare, I recently blew the dust off the sadly creaky binding, and reread it. What a massive disappointment. Imagine reacquainting yourself with your oldest friend, only to discover that, while you’re now approaching fifty and facing life as an adult, your buddy remains saddled with rebellious teenage angst. Your friend’s life has fallen into a rut; he keeps repeating the same melodramatic but meaningless shows of defiance.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins his play declaring how fat, ingrown, and dissolute Denmark has become. He promises to uproot this corruption, which he sees embodied in King Claudius, and restore Denmark’s glory, which was the person of Old Hamlet. And then...everything conspires to prove him right! Every single belief Hamlet has in Act One, is vindicated in Act Five. Nothing happens to make Hamlet change his outlook or reevaluate his principles. Hamlet just never grows.

This disappointment with Hamlet probably reflects my own life trajectory. Nearly thirty years after first reading Hamlet, I’ve realized my teenage disappointment with middle-class mediocrity was, if anything, too small. But I’ve also realized that throwing myself bodily against the system, hoping my simple mass will change anything meaningful, is foolish. Yes, like many people my age, I resent the concessions I’ve made to systems which, in principle, I hate. But adolescent tantrums change nothing.

Young Hamlet prances around onstage, delivering long monologues about how intemperate, foolish, and shameful modernity is. I felt that, at seventeen. Then, in Act Two, Scene Two, where Hamlet remains onstage for 450 straight lines (one of Shakespeare’s longest), he successfully outsmarts and embarrasses every exemplar of Old Order gerontocracy: Claudius, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. One suspects Richard Burbage, co-owner and prima actor of Shakespeare’s troupe, demanded something that allowed him unlimited virtuoso star time.

Laurence Olivier as Hamlet

Fearful that I’d become irretrievably cynical, I reread Macbeth, King Lear, and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Nope, these works remain complex, profound, and meaningful. Oedipus realizes his transgressions, and accepts his fate. Macbeth realizes his transgressions, and resists his fate. Lear realizes his transgressions, and gives up. Like my adult self, they realize the way life acts upon us, despite ourselves. These characters, in different ways, learn from their journeys, and emerge from the experience transformed.

Not Hamlet. He starts the play resentful and rebellious, sure his convictions matter more than everybody else’s, and he finishes vindicated in that belief. No wonder high school Kevin enjoyed this play. Hamlet reflects every black-clad teenager storming out of the house, screaming “You’re not my real dad!” And somehow, he still gets the hero’s death, so he never needs to realize his mistakes. He gets to be seventeen forever. Real life isn’t so merciful.

Lost in a Good Book

Kenneth Branagh as Henry V

I remember my first encounter with Shakespeare. It was Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 big-screen adaptation of Henry V. The local newspaper reviewer lavished lengthy praise upon its complexity, its nuance, and its almost-complete thematic reversal from Laurence Olivier’s 1944 paean to conquest. I knew little about Shakespeare, beyond his reputation, and a few oft-quoted lines (“To be or not to be,”) so I decided to give Branagh a try.

So I rented the VHS, sat down to watch, and greeted the production with… complete incomprehension. Who was this strange person in modern dress, played by Derek Jacobi, who introduced the film, and kept recurring throughout? Who are these various courtiers who appear for only one scene to speak Delphic riddles? And are these characters even speaking English? I could answer none of these questions with any confidence.

I call this my first encounter with Shakespeare, even though my 9th Grade English teacher had us read Julius Caesar several months earlier. But I have difficulty crediting that initial reading. This teacher had us perform weird exercises too hasty and premature for first-time Shakespeare readers, like designing the set, or translating the dialog into vernacular English. But several months later, this same teacher insisted we could tell Ernest Hemingway was profound because we couldn’t understand him, so I have difficulty taking her seriously anyway.

So Branagh’s Henry was my first direct Shakespeare, unmediated by interpreters or state-credentialed Cicerones. I leapt headlong into Henry and immediately got lost. I found the experience so unsettling that I didn’t repeat it for nearly two years, studiously sidling away from the Bard, except a mandatory 10th-Grade sojourn with King Lear. Again, officially mandated curriculum confused more than it clarified.

David Tennant as Hamlet

However, when Zeferelli’s Hamlet hit home video, the one with Mel Gibson, I heard the hype, swallowed my doubts, and tried again. The experience was totally different. I can’t say I completely understood everything, but I certainly followed events more clearly. I sometimes had to pick meaning from context, and many outdated words or high-flown phrases evaded me altogether. But I had a real experience this time, one I’d willingly repeat.

I figured the director might’ve made the difference, or perhaps the performers, or even the visual design. For whatever reason, it never creased my brain that I myself might’ve changed. That perhaps having thrown myself into King Henry, and even being dragged unwillingly through Caesar or Lear, might’ve changed my perspective. Only after I purchased paperback editions of several plays, and read them myself, did I realize: Shakespeare had rewired my brain.

This realization hit me like a cold slap several years later when, browsing my local bookstore, I encountered something called No Fear Shakespeare. Available for all Shakespeare’s major plays, and most of his minor ones, it offers the full Shakespearean text, with a facing-page translation into vernacular English prose. Rather than providing useful definitions of individual words and phrases, as the Folger editions I read did, it simply restates everything, with the poetry taken out.

Similar editions exist, under series titles like Shakespeare Made Easy, Shakespeare Side-by-Side, and Shakespeare ReTold. Each promises frustrated students that they needn’t strain their already overtaxed brains understanding Shakespeare; some expert somewhere, who doesn’t get title-page billing, has done the understanding already. You need only memorize the plot points likely to appear on a pop quiz, and you’re golden!

Jon Finch as Macbeth

This isn’t the place to expound on overloaded students and their teachers, suffering budget cuts and staffing shortages, aiming not for deeper thought but to ace standardized tests. We all have opinions. Rather, I mean only to state that, if students have the difficulty sanded off difficult books, I question whether they’re truly learning. By which I mean, are they truly having their brains rewired by exposure to unfamiliar ideas?

For me, the difficulty understanding Shakespeare wasn’t a bug in the system. The difficulty was the system. By forcing me to adjust my mental rhythms to match Shakespeare’s, I needed to step outside myself, to encounter new ways of thinking. I emerged transformed, better able to handle sophisticated questions and empathize with unfamiliar people, because I did the work of understanding Shakespeare myself, not outsourcing it to designated experts.

I’ve read pundits recently extolling the virtues of boredom or failure, traits putatively missing from modern education. But what about the virtue of confusion? If I’d understood Shakespeare like reading a paperback novel, I would’ve missed the joy of dawning awareness. And I fear that’s a pleasure today’s students will scarcely know.

Boy Shakespeare's Blueprint For New English Literature

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 20
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

Despite William Shakespeare’s unquestioned acclaim in literary, theatrical, and psychological circles, critics have always puzzled over what to do with Titus Andronicus. It lacks the aplomb of Shakespeare’s later tragedies, revels in gore, and ends in such abrupt, excessive violence that many audiences are moved to laughter. Samuel Johnson and TS Eliot hated this play. Contemporary critics like Harold Bloom haven’t treated it much better.

Yet, reading it unencumbered by the baggage accruing to Shakespeare’s name, it actually brims with implications about a young playwright’s course through Elizabethan London’s highly competitive theatre marketplace. The traits critics so eagerly attack—swinging masculine bravado, blatant racism, wholly predictable revenge plot—would have attracted massive London audiences. When Bloom or Eliot calls it an obvious rent-payer, less doctrinaire playgoers reply: “Yes! That’s what makes it great!”

Unlike Shakespeare’s other Roman plays (he wrote four), Titus Andronicus is entirely fictional. When the title character marches victorious into the Roman Senate and launches into his bombastic encomium, he addresses a sort of no-place, populated by the kind of “Romans” often envisioned in high school history textbooks. Rather than a place where people live, it’s a mental landscape where high-minded ideals feud with blood sports, and Christian virtue combats Pagan might.

Into this stew Titus, soul broken by endless battle, brings a captured Goth queen. Sudden stratagems turn this war hostage into a Roman empress. Students of literary history know nothing good comes of mixing power models. Soon the national hero finds himself fleeing the emperor he once defended, and blood flows. Titus becomes partly a tragic hero, like Hamlet or Macbeth, but also the savage, blood-painted revenger rebalancing the scales.

This, probably Shakespeare’s first play, debuted in a London still reeling from Christopher Marlowe’s two-part epic Tamburlaine the Great, which reinvented British theatre. Shedding reliance on moralistic themes and Francophonic singsong rhyme, Marlowe blasted audiences with historical recreations that must have felt as shocking as Cecil B. DeMille’s work. British theatre would never recover from Marlowe’s well-deserved body blow.

Peter Thompson and Northrop Frye suggest Marlowe may have collaborated on Titus Andronicus and others of Shakespeare’s earliest historical plays, though this remains mere speculation. Shakespeare’s earliest works, however, certainly show Marlowe’s influence, and this play certainly reflects Marlowe’s long shadow on British theatre. Young Shakespeare probably had to emulate Marlowe as new playwrights today must emulate Charlie Kaufman or David Mamet.

Yet reading this for its inputs misses the full impact. Many themes that define Shakespeare’s classic tragedies, the themes that helped redefine our understanding of human nature and theatrical potential, appear here in embryonic form. The division of power between the (fictional) emperor Saturnine and his Goth queen Tamora presages King Lear. Aaron the Moor, crafty strategian and captive of a captive, commences ideas that find their mature form in both Othello and Iago.

Imagine if you uncovered Vincent van Gogh’s student paintings, where he developed the early forms of his distinctive gestural technique. Imagine Beethoven’s student notebooks, where he tested the germinal approach that would culminate in throwing off vestigial baroque influence and changing European music. That’s what you have when you read this play. All the ideas and actions that Shakespeare used to transform all following literature appear here, in their most elementary form.

Titus Andronicus wasn’t included in the First Folio, or published under Shakespeare’s name during his lifetime, probably because Shakespeare’s company didn’t own it. As a young apprentice, he apparently sold this play to the Rose, which, after Shakespeare became famous with the Globe, deliberately performed it opposite Globe productions to split his audience. This play wasn’t performed at all between 1596 and 1923, not in Shakespeare’s own words anyway.

Yet since 1955, innovative theatrical productions, and adaptations like Julie Taymor’s Titus have invited scholars and students to re-evaluate this play. Some interpretations have emphasized Shakespeare’s boyishly exuberant violence and self-conscious grandiloquence, pitching it as a black comedy. Others have highlighted the process by which Titus loses everything by stages, presaging modern cinematic tragedies. Like Shakespeare’s best work, Titus Andronicus rewards multiple interpretations.

William Shakespeare came from somewhere. Scant evidence survives from his life, though, and we know remarkably little about the circumstances that created literature’s greatest mind. But we do have Shakespeare’s words. We can see how ideas evolved throughout his career, and how themes begun in one play come to fruition in another. This play essentially contains the seed of everything that came after. After centuries of neglect, it has received part of the recognition it deserves.

Sir Tom Stoppard's Maiden Voyage to Nowhere

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part Three
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Don’t you see?! We’re actors—we’re the opposite of people!
—The Player

Whoever coined the axiom “there are no small parts, only small actors,” never was cast as Rosencrantz or Guildenstern in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The roles are so indistinguishable that audiences cannot tell which name belongs to which character without a printed script. They don’t appear until Act II, vanish partway through Act IV, and die offstage, deaths so insignificant that we need an exposition character to explain their end.

Which makes them perfect characters for Tom Stoppard. This was his fourth play, debuting in 1966, and presaged an award-winning career in which he persistently blurred the lines of theatre. His characters comment on stage conventions, openly observe the audience, and disregard (rather than break) the fourth wall. And all together, these characters and actions create a strange momentum that questions the relationship between the show and its audience.

In some ways the play mirrors Beckett’s better known, but less accessible, Waiting for Godot. Two characters stand in place, trying to understand their strangely bleak life and abstract purpose, while the world caroms past them. They play the same sorts of games Vladimir and Estragon play to stave off awareness of their hopeless situation. Even the opening stage direction reflects Beckett:

Two Elizabethans passing the time in a place without any visible character.

But this play is emphatically not Godot Redux. Unlike Beckett, who saw all human action as essentially adrift, Stoppard repeatedly reminds us that we are watching the back half of a profound story. On the other side of the wall, the most important story ever staged continues, unheeding of the two daft courtiers, who in turn remain blind to the profundity surrounding them. Hamlet, Claudius, and Polonius keep interrupting their solitude, yet they never understand.

Sir Tom Stoppard

That’s because these two are more caught up in their own narrative. Like the audience, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have lost sight of the most important fact of their lives: themselves. They know their names as a pair, but no longer remember which of them is which. Throughout the play, they devise tests and games to see if they can rediscover their names. Everything that happens can be perceived as an attempt to relearn lost identities.

Without that inherent sense of self, everything else seems colorless to them. King Claudius has given them a task, but for them, it exists with no vital context. Hamlet keeps trying to draw them into his confidence, alternately entrusting them with his secrets, and turning them into his personal weapons against Claudius. But because the court is pouring its majesty into empty vessels, nothing ever happens. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern remain unmoved.

Throughout these actions, our antiheroes maintain a strange symbiosis with The Player, a character whose equal lack of identity spurs him not to inaction, but to vacillating rage and fatalism. His play within a play, The Murder of Gonzago, forms a bridge between this play and Hamlet, but the more our heroes see of it, the more they see their own stories played out. This layering of theatre upon theatre poses many of the play’s most interesting questions.

When Roland Barthes spoke disparagingly of authors having “theological” control over their creations, he may have had this story in mind. Shakespeare created Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, set their story in motion, and seemingly lost interest in them. Like a disinterested and mildly cruel God, he introduced these characters for no purpose but to die. Stoppard asks: what control, then, do they have over their lives?

Like us, these characters never grasp their place in their own story. The forces that placed them there remain curiously absent. They know they have some purpose, but they don’t see what, and their fumbling attempts to discover that purpose leave them only more confused. As history’s great pageant plays just beyond their vision, they remain trapped in a permanent present. Yet they retain a strange optimism. Guildenstern’s final words reflect this: “Well, we’ll know better next time.”

Of course, for us as for them, there is no next time; their optimism is part of the illusion that makes life bearable in the face of such profound nothingness.In this play, Stoppard has created the opposite of a tragedy: small characters whose insignificance achieves such overwhelming proportions that they don’t even understand their own deaths. And he defies us to ask which side of the wall we stand on, that of Shakespeare and the heroes, or that of these two, inches from eternity.

Honest Villain, Lying Hero, Son of Venice, Iago Alone

Nicole Galland, I, Iago: A Novel 

Iago Sorzano, youngest and most extraneous son of a prosperous Venetian merchant, has lived as someone’s pawn all his life. His father has managed his military career for family advantage. The city has made him a motto of its pretended virtues, without his permission. And his blunt honesty has made him an unwitting laughingstock. Yet he soldiers on, determined to be the right man for the right situation, because his integrity doesn’t let him stop.

Nicole Galland recasts Shakespeare’s most plainspoken villain as the hero of his own respective tragedy in this sequel to Othello. Far from the knave who challenges the audience to hate him, Galland’s Iago is a man determined to live up to the standards others set for him. But a series of brutal reversals upset a man known for his honesty, teaching him to dissemble aggressively. And when he stands to lose everything, he embarks on his notorious campaign of vengeance.

Though more a scholar by inclination, Iago’s father forces him into the military, where he proves to have unrecognized genius. This moves a formerly forgotten son to the peak of Venetian society. There he meets the two people who make him complete: Emilia, the beautiful wife who matches his constant witticisms, and Othello, the foreign general who becomes his best friend and greatest supporter. Iago appears to have every blessing a rich humanist society can afford.

But the intense military environment, and the shifting loyalties of the Senate and of factionalized Italy, test every citizen. Emotions run high, and when loyal friends make mistakes they can’t take back, an honest man thinks he has no choice but to defend his honesty. Iago, formerly relentless in his pursuit of truth, becomes a sudden master of self-justification. He never sees how his desire to restore the balances only compounds the problem until just too late.

Galland does not assume any prior familiarity on her readers’ part with Shakespeare’s original play. Iago tells his story with such detail and fluidity that complete novices could enjoy this novel—and, hopefully, feel inspired to go discover Shakespeare’s original. But She also packs her narrative with subtle, telling details that will give old hands the thrill of recognition as we see familiar characters and well-known situations in a new light.

Nicole Galland

Far from some random fop Iago manipulates, for instance, Roderigo becomes a force in his own right. Though Roderigo and Iago get up to some boyhood hijinks together, Roderigo has become his own man, reversing his family’s declining fortunes and making himself someone Venice must reckon with. Accustomed to getting his own way, he sees Iago as a fellow traveller when he encounters his life’s first frustration. Iago makes it plain his old friend could not be more wrong.

Actors and critics have struggled to interpret Iago since time out of mind. Frank Finlay, in Olivier’s 1965 Othello film, played the character as a straightforward Machiavellian schemer, with his eye on the bottom line but disguised behind a remarkable deadpan. Kenneth Branagh, playing alongside Laurence Fishburne in 1995, brought an ambiguous sexual tenor to the character. But these views are not unanimous. Iago remains one of Shakespeare’s most difficult characters.

I particularly appreciate that Galland does not attempt to simplify or ameliorate the complications so many find in the character. If anything, watching her Iago perform contortions to hold himself aloof from court intrigue or social niceties, she makes the character even more complex. His unreliable first-person narration disorients us, because we cannot tell how much of what we learn reflects reality, and how much reflects Iago’s ambitious whitewash.

This Iago pushes the bounds of morality from both directions. He will challenge a fellow soldier to a competition he has already rigged, then demonstrate how he rigged it. He uses his rigid sexual mores as a tool of seduction. He antagonizes the cream of Venetian society, then pretend offense when they applaud his rough discourtesy. Galland’s Iago is a man famous for not wanting fame, honorable (in his own eyes at least) for disdaining the pretenses of honor.

Galland’s Iago makes a courtly lover and a supreme gentleman. But we also cannot trust him to tell us everything. He protests his own honesty so much that we realize the one person he has completely gulled is himself. His studied eloquence and his elaborate rationalization reveal rather more about himself than he realizes. Galland does an excellent job unpacking the possible motives of a character that has defied easy categorization for centuries.