Shakespeare matters because we do

LITTLE ROCK — This actor, Avery Clark, who’s playing Hamlet at the Rep, is really good.

He’s internalized the role, so the lines don’t feel like lines to him, but come unbidden, rolling, tripping, bouncing off his tongue. He’s managed the trick of self-deception necessary to become someone other than yourself-he’s jettisoned the sort of selfconsciousness that prevent most of us from flipping that switch. He electrifies the old play, introducing an unlikely hint of danger into what ought to be a rather predictable enterprise.

This Hamlet is crazier than he believes, and he’s got a touch of adolescent entitlement about him. Which might not be precisely true to the period-not the period Shakespeare wrote in, or even the quasi-Edwardian period the Rep’s production is set in-but feels authentic to modern audiences. I love Clark’s Hamlet-even though I recognize it’s just a clever trick.

Which is, I think, the point of drama, and maybe more than that, the point of going on, of persisting in spite of the inevitable enfolding darkness. We are shimmering here for a second, we might as well delude ourselves that it matters, for it is all we have.

All we can be sure of is the things we generate with our imagination, from our puny, little spinning minds. We rebuild cities in an eyeblink, fill in the details, fool ourselves into believing that the next step, the next word, the next thought matters. We are human, and so we are compelled tobelieve in the significance of our self-created dramas: All the world’s a stage.

It has long been suggested that Shakespeare played a major role in devising the notion of selfconsciousness and the idea of individual identity. Critic Harold Bloom, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, has even argued that “human nature” was “invented” by Shakespeare, that because Shakespeare essentially invented literary character as we know it, and since we create ourselves through literature (or at least through language, through thinking in words), then Shakespeare is the ultimate father of us all.

I might not go that far, but then I am not so learned as Professor Bloom. I think others must have grasped the notions that Shakespeare codified. Men must have early on grasped some essential sense of “self;” we must have run up against the epistemological limits of our own intellects before Hamlet wondered whether it was better to suffer the slings and arrows or sleep forever.

But Shakespeare has infectedthe psychology, if not the very chemistry, of the human mind, creating the templates to which even those unfamiliar with his work reflexively subscribe. Shakespeare is a ghost who haunts us; even if we don’t recognize the face there’s something eerily familiar in those clanking chains. (He’s part of what a certain kind of person calls our “cultural baggage.”)

In Shakespeare, we can glimpse both the beginning of neuroses and of the concept of free will. Shakespeare recognized that there was more to a given character’s destiny than the way he was buffetted by the fates-that a person’s character was at least as responsible for what he was as the circumstances of his birth or what happened to him.The key to Shakespeare’s stories is that he imbued his characters with free will, that he gave them the option to choose-even the option to consider, as Hamlet calls it, “self-murder.”

And while the concept of suicide surely existed long before Shakespeare-recall Judas’ guilty reaction-the interesting thing about Hamlet is that the play hinges on the prince’s existential crisis. Shakespeare allows Hamlet to worry these thoughts because he imagined his audience (which, by the way, wasn’t an intellectual elite but largely comprised of unwashed rabble) would find it dramatically interesting.

Groundlings could watch this character on stage and feel that they understood what it must be like to be the Prince of Denmarkbecause the Prince was like them in that he suffered self-doubt and indecision. Because the Prince of Denmark was a man like themselves.

It’s been suggested, by Bloom and others, that before Shakespeare, before Hamlet, we didn’t have self-doubt and indecision; we had these inchoate feelings stewing in us, but it was up to Shakespeare to figure out how a human could integrate and articulate these feelings.

“Before Hamlet taught us not to have faith either in language or in ourselves, being human was much simpler for us but also rather less interesting,” Bloom writes. “Shakespeare, through Hamlet, has made us skeptics in our relationships with anyone, because we have learned to doubt articulateness in the realm of affection.”

Similarly, Bloom suggests “our ability to laugh at ourselves as readily as we do at others owes much to Falstaff” and that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is the model for all complicated erotic feelings-she taughtus “how impossible it is to divorce acting the part of being in love and the reality of being in love.”

In Iago’s malign purpose, in Lear’s madness, in Macbeth’s suspicion that life is meaningless, lie the roots of 19th-Century nihilism-Shakespeare anticipated Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Freud, Kurt Cobain and shoegazing emo.

Are these claims extravagant? Maybe, had Shakespeare never existed, we would still be human-if you cut us we’d still bleed-butperhaps our minds would have evolved differently. I wonder if words would have the same power to move our hearts; if the heart would even suffice as a symbol for the headquarters of affection?

There are some scholars-New Historicists, they call them-who would tell you genius is a kind of accident, a chimera perceived because the forces of history conspire to force the mirage. For them, Shakespeare was a product of the economy, a cynical playwright seeking to draw paying customers to his plays. And because the plays somehow endured we think that he was special. Because something has to be special, something has to persist.

But I believe Shakespeare matters because we matter, because what’s inside us is more than a jumble of responses to an external matrix of various social energies. I could be wrong.

But I think Shakespeare is special because he passed along to us the suspicion that we were all special-that we shared a kind of common divinity. And that we could decide what was important in our world, and maybe our highest purpose was to construct a reality and manufacture meaning.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com