Time Essay: The Contemporary Bard

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"Why, what an intricate impeach is this!" —Comedy of Errors

"Well, he in time may come to clear himself... he with his oath ... will make up full clear, whensoever he is convented." —Measure for Measure

"Your Grace has given a president of wisdom above all princes..." —Henry VIII

Bardsmanship is a game with no losers. As the new, computerized Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare proves, every critic and defender of the Nixon Administration can find barbs and shields in the blank verse. The playwright has some thing for everyone: politics and religion, sin and redemption—if it is in the human condition, it is in the Shakespearean canon. Most of the year, Shakespeare resides quietly in the volumes of his work. But each summer he thunders and chuckles in festivals from the Spokane Expo to Central Park. For those sun-flooded weeks, the Swan of Avon returns to the group for whom he really wrote — the audience. This year, as in the 370-odd before, that audience will find whatever it seeks in the ceaselessly contemporary productions.

Indeed, Shakespeare's themes remain as valid in the epoch of Henry K. as they were in that of Henry V. The vanished English world, like this one, was beset with crises. Scientists had just proved that the sun no longer orbited the earth; skepticism had been imported wholesale from Montaigne's France; religious wars had undermined faith.

The Shakespearean stage, like our own, was cankered with financial woes and preoccupied with sex. Shakespeare produced more dubious double entendres than anyone before or since. Some are readily perceived: Hamlet's announcement, "Then came each actor on his ass," meant then what it does now. In the first Elizabethan world — when there were some 40 euphemisms for sexual organs (including will, dial and den)—almost every passage twinkled with lewdness. Like today's cheerless smut, the Elizabethan bawdiness was both deplored and exploited. The nonsexual slang has traveled with greater success: here are the witches in Macbeth, telling each other to "cool it"; here is Anthony in Julius Caesar: "I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,/ Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,/ To stir men's blood. I only speak right on ..."

Yet it is not the glistening language that keeps the plays fresh; it is their powerful moral undertow. The characters may be caparisoned in quattrocento raiment, but they speak to eternal situations. When Othello says, "I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation/ That chamberers have," he escapes temporal boundaries and becomes the chorus of the ghetto. Similarly, Shylock cries, "... Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" The tone of the merchant's queries seems lifted not from ancient Venice but from some current Security Council dispute.