Kozlowski: Show Shakespeare some love

One of the most intimidating words in the English language is “Shakespeare.”

The Bard is… One of the most intimidating words in the English language is “Shakespeare.”

The Bard is rightly credited as being one of the world’s best writers. There’s a reason why “Intro to Shakespeare” classes are offered and “Intro. to Stephenie Meyer” classes aren’t.

The rub is that the English language as he understood it 400 years ago can be difficult for us to understand today. The commons comment that language most uncommon is of greater than common difficulty.

It doesn’t help that Shakespeare is often presented in the popular media and accepted by the popular imagination as something sacred, what George Bernard Shaw referred to as “Bardolatry.” And when Shakespeare isn’t presented as sacred, he’s caricatured as the exclusive domain of extremely smart and nerdy people who sit around in smoking jackets making quips to one another in plumy British accents, even if they happen to be living in, say, Braddock-upon-Monongahela.

The caricature is unfortunate and would no doubt be a shock to Shakespeare. In Elizabethan times, the theater was considered a form of low and rude entertainment and was struggling to gain acceptance among respectable folk. It was sort of like the WrestleMania of its day; entertainment for the common people, who would go to the theater and lend performances an air of the British House of Commons, being loud and rowdy as the play went on.

Many plays of the time were countercultural and controversial. The English government occasionally banned theater performances for sedition and tried to keep a very close eye on the playwrights. And the theaters were crowded, so much so that they would be shut down as a public health measure whenever a plague appeared in London. If those who saw the world premiere of “Hamlet” had British accents, they were natural accents , not accents of affectation.

Considering the audience he was writing for, we can conclude that Shakespeare wasn’t writing plays for dramatic critics 400 years in the future. He was writing plays that he hoped would show for a good long while and maybe earn a revival or two. And in an era in which there was a lot of competition between various theater groups for the almighty shilling, the plays had to be accessible to a wide audience. If they weren’t, it wasn’t like there was “Ye Olde National Endowment for the Arts” to fund starving artists. The artists just starved the old-fashioned way. Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be enjoyed, and this fact, so often forgotten in our day and age, makes his work much more accessible.

But don’t take my word for it — take Shakespeare’s.

One thing that is often swept under the rug by those who hold Shakespeare sacred is that the Bard engages in not only slapstick humor, but some humor that is downright sophomoric. “As You Like It” contains all sorts of raunchy lines and sex jokes. Part of the fun in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is that Titania falls in love with a guy who’s been transformed into a donkey. “Henry IV, Part 1” has Prince Hal, the future King Henry V, conspire to commit highway robbery with his drinking buddies. Even the tragedies have some humor with wide appeal, from Polonius, Windbag of Denmark to the drunken porter in Macbeth to the gruesome lines “O, my good lord, the Duke of Cornwall’s dead: / Slain by his servant, going to put out. / The other eye of Gloucester.”

Some of the stuff in Shakespeare is so edgy that it made some people uncomfortable to think of schoolchildren reading the actual plays. Thomas Bowdler famously produced an expurgated “Family Shakespeare,” trimming away the bits that couldn’t be read in polite company, including the removal of the implication that Ophelia’s death in Hamlet was a suicide and the changing of Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot” to “Out, crimson spot.” Bowdler was not the only one who wanted to produce such an censored version. Lewis Carroll wanted to produce one too, but never published it.

Because Shakespeare wasn’t expurgating himself, we can see that, in a way, he was trying to appeal at least somewhat to the lowest common denominator, the average Joe the Groundling, if you will.

The general issues Shakespeare addresses are also not uncommon to our own time. There are issues of divided loyalty, friendship, revenge, greed, power, jealousy, race, flattery, senility, madness, murder, love, hatred, reconciliation and gossip — all of these no different in his time than ours. Pitt Repertory Theatre’s excellently modernized version of “As You Like It” that I had the pleasure to see this semester brought this important realization home. Sure, the language can take some getting used to, but given a solidly annotated edition and some exposure, there is no reason to feel afraid of or intimidated by the Bard of Stratford.

Write kozthought@gmail.com. Bonus points for iambic pentameter!