The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [120]
My mother was a victim of my father’s inability to be empathetic to the living. I am another of his victims, and yet I have in turn treated my children and wife and sister no better, and day after day Petra did not come to my door to say I was forgiven and that a new start would be granted me. All my empathy has gone into trying to understand fictional characters, fantasies of my own making.
Of all Shakespeare’s pithy quotes, most people recall the one that goes something like “First, we kill all the lawyers.” My father cited it often enough, and I hear it from a lot of people who, I am certain, have never read or seen a Shakespeare play but who like his authority for their natural instinct.
The sentiment shouldn’t really be credited to Shakespeare (as it was on the T-shirt that Chuck Glassow once gave my father). Shakespeare was in the business of making up characters with fictional views, and should not be held responsible for advocating, for example, mass advocatocide. The character who speaks these words in Henry VI, Part Two is a henchman of Jack Cade, a revolutionary, a blood-covered ideologue not interested in fine justice or sparing the theoretically innocent in his passion to scrape away the existing order. Cade is a Lenin, a Pol Pot, and he is often cited as an example of Shakespeare’s quasi-prophetic powers: Shakespeare wrote Cade, and then Pol Pot appeared three hundred years later to fulfill the imagination of the creator.
Unless … what if Pol Pot, as a student in Paris, read Henry VI, Part Two? Saw a French production? What if Lenin read it? Or Hitler? And a man of certain tendencies and politics sighed with pleasure to find a role model, a character with whom he so closely identified that he adopted some of his policies? “First, we kill all the people with glasses … First, we kill all the kulaks … First, we kill all the mentally ill.” I think a case could be made that Shakespeare has twentieth-century blood on his hands.
An absurd position, I know, but if critics insist that he showed us how to live and think and love, then surely he taught us how to run an efficient terror-based revolution and how to commit genocide, too.
A Buddhist critic wrote that Shakespeare helped ruin Western civilization by giving such eloquence to resisting change, to analyzing emotions, to the despair over passing time, to exerting one’s will: in short, to enunciating so stirringly the opposite of a Buddhist world-view.
He can’t win, I suppose. That’s the price of his deification. To be fair, I don’t hate Shakespeare, and that’s to his credit as a writer, because I can’t imagine anyone who’s been given more good cause to hate him than I. But I cannot find myself in his works. I identify with none of them, no matter how many fawning critics bleat to me that he captured all of humanity in his eye and pen.
Dana saw me splattered all over the canon, citing Richard II’s arrogance, Iago’s pointless and free-range resentments, Benvolio’s friendship, Mercutio’s loyalty, Tybalt’s fire, Romeo’s idealism, Falstaff’s appetites, Arthur’s passions. Arthur most of all, and I still have to laugh, because if Shakespeare can be so easily imitated by one of those he cast in his likeness, then he is no god at all.
“Of course he’s not,” she would have chided me now. “He’s just a writer. Like you. He deserves only what you deserve: to be read and treated like a writer. A reader likes something you wrote, but something else not so much. Good. That’s what he deserves, too, not to be punished with this religion of his perfection and prophecy. Who wants to read something unquestionably perfect for all of us? That’s not good for us or him. He wouldn’t have wanted it.”
44
I AM NOT A FEARLESS PERSON. I am not proud of it, but I cannot claim much courage when faced with letters like that one from the Random House lawyer. That sort of letter, I know, is designed to cow people. I was cowed. There it is. I sat back, did nothing, wrote nothing, was not openly uncooperative, responded noncommittally