I had a lovely and lively discussion about this with an English English student who wanted to defend his nation's proprietorial rights to the bard. Surely geographical location counts for something, he said; surely he is more English than anything else?
But as an Australian, my culture and language are unthinkable without Billy the Shake. My education was saturated with Shakespeare; his influence was tremendous on the politics and culture of my country. After all, nations are not places, but ideas. We have every right - even a duty - to study him as one of our own. Shakespeare, we might say, came out on the First Fleet.
I think Shakespeare is more Australian than French: though he knew the French and the Italians, and no doubt he has had enormous influence there and even in Russia. But something is carried in the language itself that means it is not even deliberate for us to own him. He is part of our cultural DNA.
Of course, putting the boot on the other foot, we might say that the England that was Shakespeare's - the 'sceptred isle' - is no more, and has not been for centuries. That notion has long gone. He was not English as we think of English now...
17 comments:
"nations are not places but ideas"
I suspect that is rather too modernist for the Bard!
Or do you mean Australia is more Shakespearean than France, and maybe England?
No, not MORE: he is certainly a New Zealander as well, and even an American...
After all, we inhabit the brave new world, that has such people in it..
No I just meant it is Australia that is Shakespearean, not Shakespeare Australian. A trivial methodological point.
Yes, but it gets up the noses of the english more if you say 'Shake was an Aussie'
Shakespeare was not Scottish. Apart from that, I'm sure that you're right both that he belongs to the entire English speaking world and that it's very important to irritate English nostrils. Removing the 'hugger' far away from the 'mugger' and letting lose the latter.
Well raising Scotland is an interesting point, because it was in S's lifetime that the two kingdoms were united in the person of James 1 - and hence, MacBeth gets written!
Ol' Shaky dissed Glyn Dwr in Henry IV, so you Aussies are welcome to him!
MPJ,
Could you please list the ways in which Australia is Shakespearean? Apart from him being in the English syllabus in high school (a lot!), and the fact that we speak English...
But parliament??? Did he invent the Westminster system or something?
Well S's influence over our culture is inestimable - our whole view of political processes and also what it is to be a human being and a citizen in a just society etc.
Which is why Shakespeare can't be Scottish. MacBeth was got up by the Union of the Crowns, yes, but it took another troubled century to get round to a union of parliaments. Duncan flees to England in MacBeth and doesn't meet the same fate as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Shakespeare's vision of Scotland must have been pretty bad if England could be presented as a place of refuge. When actors refuse to say 'MacBeth' they are showing Shakespearian contempt for Scotland.
Exiled Preacher's attempt to throw off the shackles of the English Bard don't really work since Llewellyn in Henry whatevereth Part N. is such a sympathetic character proving for once and for all that for Shakespeare to be Welsh was to be English. Not so for the Scots.
Yes, but isn't there a scot in that scene in Henry V? It is a gratingly patronising scene of course... the 'band of brothers' dying together for the ENglish king. Plenty of aussie young men fell for the same ploy and lie buried on the Somme...
Touché, so we leave Shakespeare to the English and the Klingons then and let them fight it out between them. My money's on the Klingons. Aussies aren't klingons are they?
Actually, I'm Polish. I don't like to talk about it much.
Oh, and Bacon wrote my stuff. Except for the Sonnets - they were by Marlowe. But the signature on my will - that was mine.
WS
OH, it's you. I wondered when you'd catch the blogging thing.
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