Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (20 page)

Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow

(Psalm 23, Verse 4)

Poetry, unusual words, language play, and cultural references: there’s doubtless a lot more to find, and this is no renowned literary work from hundreds of years ago, it’s a great but fairly regular and relatively unknown rap song from the 1990s.

This song isn’t actually much different from Shakespeare and the kind of things you’ll find in his plays. Go to the back of a Penguin edition of Shakespeare (or look below the text in an Arden or Cambridge edition) and you’ll find that the editor has pointed out all the Bible references and the cultural references, named the stories Shakespeare based his writing on, explained any use of foreign languages, and discussed particular pieces of language play.

In this Act I’m going to use part of a scene from one of the most frequently performed plays in Shakespeare’s canon,
Macbeth
, and take it apart. The techniques I’ll use
are exactly the same as the ones I used to look at Mos Def’s lyrics, but supported by the important bits and pieces I’ve talked about in the previous Acts: the context, the story, the characters, the settings, and the thoughts, and how they’re
all
expressed through the language and metre.

Once I’ve shown how to do it with this scene, you can use the same techniques and tools to break open any Shakespeare scene you encounter.

It’s William back from the dead,

But I rap bout gats and I’m black instead,

It’s Shakespeare, reincarnated

I’m similar to William, but a little different,

I do it for kids that’s illiterate, not Elizabeth,

My thing, I tell em like this

It’s like Shakespeare, with a little twist

Modern American hip-hop is complete garbage: it’s about champagne and naked women, so rap has not got respect as an intellectual entity … Great rappers like Chuck D are literary geniuses; they’re no different from Shakespeare, Blake or Roald Dahl
.

Akala, winner of the Best Hip-Hop Artist 2006, Music of Black Origin (Mobo) Awards (quoted in
The Guardian
, September 2006; above, lyrics from the Radio Edit of his song ‘Shakespeare’)

Scene 5

London, England, 1600s

S
o why have I chosen an extract from
Macbeth
rather than any other play? No particular reason, as it goes, although it’s one of the most studied plays, so a lot of people have a memory of the play being particularly dull, which it really isn’t – Macbeth is Al Pacino in
Scarface
(1983).

One might equally ask why did Shakespeare choose to write it in the first place, and then we’re back to the basics: context. A bit like understanding the finer points of iambic pentameter, dig into a little bit of the play’s background, and it’ll make the rest of it much easier to crack.

When Shakespeare wrote
Macbeth
(around 1605), Galileo was still five years away from announcing that the sun
didn’t
go round the Earth, and the previous few years of Shakespeare’s (and everyone else’s) life in England had been fairly traumatic.

Will’s dad had died in 1601, and the following year while writing
Hamlet
(a play primarily to do with the grief of losing a father), it seems that Shakespeare started to think about his own future, and bought some land and a cottage in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon.

The next year, 1603, not so long after Shakespeare had
performed before her, his patron, the monarch of England, Queen Elizabeth I, died.

This, in and of itself, needs to be seen in the context of the time.

The effect that the death of a monarch would have had on the Elizabethans would have been monumental. The closest equivalent we might have would probably be the death of Princess Diana in 1997, or the assassination of JFK in 1963. Anyone old enough will remember the world stopping, the grief, the masses pulling together in support.

Imagine (or remember) that, and then magnify it 100 times over.

Why would such an event be so devastating? Well, it was an incredibly religious time. The two main religions of England were Catholicism and Protestantism. Queen Elizabeth was Protestant, but unlike her predecessors was more relaxed about people practising Catholicism, i.e., they wouldn’t be tortured or executed as long as they didn’t threaten the realm or her reign.

The king or queen in Shakespeare’s time was considered to be one step down from God. God would speak through the monarch. The monarch was leader, protector, father, mother, and the route to heaven. Love and obey your monarch, and you will go to heaven. Conversely, defy, contradict or kill a king and you are killing God, and you will surely go to hell.

Disloyalty to one’s nation is treason, and to plot against the monarch was high treason, one of the most serious crimes the Elizabethans had at their disposal. If you were caught committing an act of treason you were branded as a traitor (in Dante’s
Inferno
the lowest and worst circle of hell was reserved for traitors), and you would very probably be sentenced to death.

Most likely (if you’ve seen the end of Mel Gibson’s 1995 film
Braveheart
you’ll be familiar with this process), death would involve you being hung by the neck until you were nearly dead, then your insides would be drawn out of you while you were still alive, then your body would be quartered (as the name suggests, cut into four pieces) and sent to the four corners of the kingdom. Your head would be put on a spike and displayed at the, ahem, head of London Bridge, and would be the first thing people would see when entering London from the south – as a message to all others considering betrayal. Unless you were a woman, in which case you’d just be burnt at the stake.

The closest parallel we have occurred in March 2007, when a Swiss man appeared in a Thai court after being accused of insulting the Thai king (still considered by many Thais to be semi-divine) by spray-painting images of him. He was looking at a
75-year
jail sentence. For graffiti. He was later sentenced to a mere ten years in prison, and then the king, ‘in his kindness’, pardoned him …

Pretty persuasive message.

Back to the context: Queen Elizabeth I dies, and the crown goes to King James VI of Scotland, who becomes King James I of England too. Now as anyone knows who has been to school in Britain or seen
Braveheart
, there’s a fairly unhappy history between the Scots and the English, mainly due to the English trying to claim Scotland as their own, and the Scots wanting none of it.

After centuries of animosity, there was now a Scottish king on the English throne.

What Shakespeare thought of all this is a moot point, but it’s worth noting that while all this was going on in London, his personal life was about to take a kicking. Back in his home town of Stratford, where he was setting up his retirement nest, all theatrical performances of any kind were summarily banned by a puritanically-minded town council.

Betrayed by his own, some might say. In buying the cottage and land, it would appear he’d just started to think about returning home and settling down, and now his life’s work was essentially barred from taking place there. Think Elvis coming home to Memphis and being told that rock and roll music was forbidden.

The next year, 1604, James comes to London and is crowned King of England, and if that didn’t piss on a number of English loyalists’ chips, then the fact that one of the
first things he did was condemn tobacco, everyone’s new and favourite import from the Americas, certainly upset a few more.

Elizabeth I had had her fair share of rebels, treasonists and revolters, yet despite the fact that the unrest was reaching bubbling point, no one had so far tried to do what Guy Fawkes and his mates would try to do to James: a conspiracy commonly known as the Gunpowder Plot – an attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament, and kill the king.

It failed, of course, and around the time that James had Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators put to death for treason, Shakespeare was putting the finishing touches to his new play.

Revenge, in Jacobean times

James’s reign as king began with £350,000-worth of debt from Elizabeth’s reign and an assassination attempt, and ended with an outbreak of bubonic plague. Elizabeth had been a strong, fighting queen; James was a king from another country, afflicted with a number of illnesses, including a rather crippling arthritis. It was a time of great change and turmoil, and during these troubled, early years of James’s sovereignty, Shakespeare wrote (among others)
The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth
and
King Lear
, thought by many to be his greatest and most thought-provoking tragedies.

Hamlet
, generally considered to be his best work, is Shakespeare’s only Revenge Tragedy – a particular type of tragedy that was extremely popular at the time. Now fairly infamous, the
Jacobean Revenge Tragedies seemed to especially capture the Elizabethans’ imaginations.
Hamlet
is certainly one (despite being written a few years before James came to the throne, and so technically Elizabethan and not Jacobean), together with
The Spanish Tragedy
by Thomas Kyd, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and the anonymously written
Revenger’s Tragedy
.

Elements that a standard Revenge Tragedy tended to include were: murder, ghosts, real or feigned madness, and a great scene of violence towards the end of the play, culminating in the death of most of the characters. The main theme was usually the corruption of power within monarchy, and the plot often involved an attempt by a protagonist to restore equilibrium within the state by removing a usurping ruler (Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
, where the ruler is murdered by a group of conspiring senators, was written at a similar time).

Perhaps the Elizabethan – now Jacobean – people found a release by watching these tragedies: taking part, for a few hours, in acts of revenge, rebellion and blood-letting; and so venting what anger and dissatisfaction they might have had with the state in the safety of a wooden theatre, leaving behind only their ire and a stage covered in pig’s blood …

Playwrights, like their audiences, want to explore aspects of life they hope they’ll never experience, as much as they want to explore life they have experienced.

Shakespeare had written about the loss of a father in
Hamlet
. He then wrote about the loss of a monarch in
Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, Timon of Athens
(though Timon is less a monarch, more a monarchic
figure), and
King Lear
, and every time he wrote it from a different angle, choosing a different take on the idea, perhaps in response to the world around him: while Elizabeth was dying, while she died, while the crown shifted to Scotland and the future lay uncertain, then while James assumed the throne.

It’s a theme he carried on exploring until he stopped writing – what happens when you take a powerful man, and then take his power away from him?

When the Gunpowder Plot was uncovered, suddenly the unthinkable was put before Shakespeare; something he’d written about earlier with his
Henry VI
trilogy, but probably not something he ever thought he’d be able to practically witness at first hand. A fantastic, fascinating idea for a play:

What would it be like to kill a king?

What would it be like to kill
God
?

And get away with it?

And in so doing, become king …

… You could
become
God.

These were terrible, treasonous thoughts, and only a slight dramatic extension beyond the bloody reality that Fawkes and his fellows had been planning.

In the midst of a dying monarch he knew and loved,
in the midst of a strange, new and uncertain monarch (would James be a good or an evil king?), and while civil unrest was so strong it had almost reached anarchy – in the midst of all this, Shakespeare wrote a new play.

A dark and enigmatic thriller about treason, murder, a kingdom in chaos, forecasts of a doomed future, and betrayal of friends.

He wrote
Macbeth
.