Chapter TWELVE Not of an age but for all time
Shakespeare remembered a number of his friends with small gifts in his will, but only three of them were members of his company: the great actor Richard Burbage, John Heminges and Henry Condell. Burbage died in 1619. The other two are the men who made it possible for us to see and read Shakespeare's plays today.
At that time, few people thought of plays as literature. When Ben Jonson published his collected works in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, people made a joke about it. They said that Jonson did not know the difference between 'work' and 'play'. So Heminges and Condell did not expect to make much money from publishing Shakespeare's plays in the same way. They did it as a duty in memory of their friend. Eighteen of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays appeared for the first time in the collected works published in 1623. They included some of his finest tragedies and comedies - Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It and Twelfth Night.
Ben Jonson often criticized Shakespeare's work in private conversations. He was a great dramatist himself, but he wrote a different kind of play. But for Heminges and Condell's complete works, he wrote a fine poem about his friend and rival. He compared him to the best of the Greek and Roman dramatists and said that Shakespeare was the greatest of them all: 'He was not of an age but for all time.' (He did not only belong to his own time. His work will live for ever. ) All writers belong to the time when they live. It is a mistake to imagine that Shakespeare had the same views on religion or politics as we have. No serious student accepts that, and it is a pity that so many modern directors change the meaning of his plays in performance to suit their own opinions. So Jonson was right that Shakespeare was not only a man of his own time. But he was also right in the sense that Shakespeare's plays give pleasure to people at all times and help them to understand life better.
This is partly because the plays are full of exciting scenes and wonderful speeches, and the characters are still real for us because they have a special way of speaking that suits them personally. Shakespeare was never satisfied with one form of play, and so almost all of his plays contain something new and different. He studied the successes of other dramatists and improved on them. Finally, he was a great dramatist because he was an actor. In some of his sonnets, he seems ashamed of his profession. He wanted to be known as a gentleman. But his plays are great because he always imagined them on the stage while he was writing and he knew which actor was going to play each part.
But Shakespeare's great ability in the theatre is only part of the story. King Lear is a play that asks the question: 'What is a man?' In this play, Lear realizes that titles like King or Lord are not the things that matter in life. He learns that ordinary people suffer in the same way as he does and that before everything else, a man is a father, son or husband.
Shakespeare understood the minds of men and women and can help us to understand them. Because he was an actor and spent his life studying people and listening to them, he could imagine the thoughts and emotions of all kinds of men and women. He can make us believe that he knew what an old Jewish person or a black soldier thought, although he had probably never spoken to one. He can show us the hopes and fears of an intelligent young girl or an Egyptian queen, although in his lifetime these parts were always acted by boys.
And so if you are fortunate enough to see a great Shakespeare play well acted, this is still the most wonderful experience that you can have in a theatre.
- THE END -
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