A Mystery Of Errors

IT MAY BE THOUGHT THE height of arrogance to use William Shakespeare as a fictional character in a novel, and I imagine there will probably be those who will curl their lips with disdain at the idea, but at the same time, I have a strong suspicion that Shakespeare would have approved, or at the very least, been rather amused by the whole thing. After all, it is precisely the sort of thing he did himself.

I do not, I should say right up front, make any pretense to being a serious literary scholar or critic on the subject of the Bard. While I have some knowledge and I have done some research, for my own enjoyment and as part of working on this book and teaching Shakespeare in college level English courses, there are numerous authorities whose knowledge of Shakespeare and his plays far exceed my own. My purpose here was really just the same as Shakespeare’s, no more, no less-to entertain.

I am by no means the first to use the Bard in such a manner nor, I am sure, shall I be the last. In this regard, I am certainly no less derivative than Shakespeare was himself when he based his works on other sources, such as the Chronicles of Holinshead, when he chose to borrow from history, or the works of Greene or Nashe or Marlowe, when he chose to steal outright. What I have tried to teach my students in order to help make Shakespeare more accessible to them is that if he were alive today, William Shakespeare would probably be known unpretentiously as Bill to his friends and there’s a good chance he’d be on the writing staff of some prime-time television show like Melrose Place or perhaps a soap opera such as The Days of Our Lives. I really do believe that. He would doubtless fit right in at a Hollywood power lunch with Steven J. Cannell and David Kelley, with whom he would feel very comfortable talking shop, and he might script for Spielberg or Lucas or whoever hired him to write a screenplay. In short, he would be exactly what he was in his own time, and what Dickens was in his-a working writer, without any literary pretensions, one who simply practiced his craft, as Balzac said, “with clean hands and composure.”

This is not to say that I am trying in any way to denigrate Shakespeare by comparing him to Hollywood scriptwriters, which many scholars would probably consider blasphemy, nor necessarily elevate them by a comparison to him. Marshall McLuhan, I think, was wrong. The medium is not the message. Genius will always transcend the medium, or else exhalt it, much as Paddy Chayevsky and Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles did. From everything I know of him… and to a large degree, subjectively, from what I feel… I think that Shakespeare would have been amazed beyond belief at the effects he has produced and the impact he has made, at the immortality he has achieved. Certainly, he never sought any such thing.

I know writers today who never throw anything away, who obsessively keep copies of every marked-up draft and every note ever scribbled on a napkin in a bar on the off chance that, someday, these things may be worth something, if not in a material sense, at least in an academic one as papers to be donated to some university for future bibliographical and biographical research. Future doctoral candidates need never worry, for there will be no dearth of manuscripts and notes for them to sift through en route to stultifying dissertations. Shakespeare, on the other hand, never saved a thing. If not for his printers, we would probably have nothing, for immortality was the last thing on his mind, and I doubt that the idea would even have occurred to him. He knew that his medium was an ephemeral one and he regarded it accordingly. He wrote his works to be performed, not deconstructed in a college classroom or analyzed with pathological precision for every possible nuance and interpretation. He understood, without a doubt, that his was a collaborative medium, that actors would bring their own contributions to the table, that plays were a dynamic group effort of the entire company, not a showcase for an individual writer’s talent and/or ego.

Students who are forced to sit through agonizing lectures by monotonous professors who drone on and on about iambic pentameter and heroic couplets never truly learn to appreciate the Bard, and more’s the pity, because Shakespeare himself would have been aghast to learn that his words were putting young captive audiences to sleep. He wanted, more than anything, to make them laugh, or weep, or rage… to make them feel, for that was why Elizabethan audiences went to the theatre. They went looking for a bit of escapism, some amusement, a little entertainment. They wanted, simply, a good time. And Shakespeare became Shakespeare because he knew just how to give it to them.