Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life

Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life: A Radical Guide to
Shakespearian Tragedy
Fintan O'Toole

Jessica Greenman

What Fintan O' Toole is doing in his interpretation of Shakespeare's Tragedies is a fundamental travesty of all that Shakespeare is about.

It is a travesty that someone like O'Toole is trying to make Shakespeare accessible to people by banging on about things like racism in 17th century England and racism now. Othello has nothing to do with racism. Racism is a local detail from which he springs his marvellous purchase on the world of hell. Othello is about the bright flame of love stamped out, about ignorance overwhelming the heat of life, of something that feeds on the will to rapture and destroys it quite.

While it is relevant that Desdemona is white and Othello black it is relevant only because these things are pronunciations of deeper issues, illustrations of much more profound feelings and fortunes than the conflict between the old and new world he speaks of, the world that allows black people in, the world that allows a white girl to marry a black warrior.

Put out the light, and then put out the light. This is what O'Toole is doing. In attempting to resurrect Shakespeare for modern culture he is killing the one and only thing that Shakespeare means finally to any of us and that is a poetic understanding of the human soul.

Shakespearian Tragedy is about entering a state of profound intoxication and profound horror. We are brought to the brinks of our being - not because what happens is bad, but because of how we are brought into the living force-field of what it is to face damage of the most remorseless sort. We are challenged, not as cripples, but as Gods.

Do you think I care that Desdemona was white or female just because I happen to be? Like Shakespeare - like anyone who thinks - I have no interest in her plight for those reasons, just as I have no interest in the plight of Othello because he was black. I am interested in Othello because of his torment, why else would I care?

O thou black weede, why art so lovely fair?
Thou smell'st so sweete, that the sense aches at thee.. (Act IV, Scene ii)

This is what he says about the girl he loves, the girl he is going to kill. This is what O'Toole is saying about Shakespeare. Though not in so many words. Because he's not engaged, not engaged even in his own act of murderous suffocation.

He is ignorant, as ignorant as Othello:

Oh gull, o dolt,
As ignorant as dirt (Act V, Scene ii)

And he like Othello is murdering the entire and perfect chrysolite that is Shakespeare.

had she bin true
If Heaven would make me such another world,
Of one entyre and perfect Chrysolite,
I'd not haue sold her for it.
(Othello, Act V Scene ii)

I've deliberately left in the weird folio spellings because it reads better
that way, it is more chilling.

And yet she'll kneel and pray, I've seen her do it

For thou hast kill'd the sweetest innocent that e'er did lift up eye

It's not that O'Toole is wrong - I so agree that Hamlet isn't a neurotic prince but a real saviour, that Othello's incorporated his own racism etc and so forth, all the boring correct things he's saying I agree with - but they have nothing to so with Shakespeare.

Fintan O'Toole has no real appreciation of Shakespearian language. He refers to G. Wilson Knight at one point, as an example of one of the many critics who have seen Hamlet as somehow the cause of the problems in the play, or at the very least sick and ineffectual - an opinion Fintan does not share. And nor do I. I agree with what he's saying - but not the way he says it. He's just so debonair, so chatty. That's great for a counselling session but it's just no good here. If we take, by contrast, Wilson Knight's 1930 essay: 'The Embassy of Death' (in The Wheel of Fire), we have a man who at every point condemns Hamlet for his sickness, his malaise, his mauvaise fois, his existence as contagion in the rosy heart of Denmark. 'Alone in the gay glitter of the court, silhouetted against brilliance, robustness, health, and happiness, is the pale, black-robed Hamlet, mourning' .

Look at that sentence. This is someone who engages with the imagination of Shakespeare. That is just how it seems, just as Hamlet himself feels it to be. It could be his autobiography. Of course I think Knight's assessment is somewhat limited, I think Hamlet is reflecting the misery that exists; just being honest about it; dissecting himself as the problem because he is incorporated within it: 'But I have that within which passes show, these but the trappings and the suits of woe' (Act I, Scene ii). I think Hamlet is, as John Jones says (in another brilliant book that nobody's read, Shakespeare at Work, which by the way is actually dedicated to Wilson Knight): 'both privately haunted and publicly trapped in a sick society.'

Hamlet is attempting in every way possible to redeem the good of yore, the love that has been lost, to bring back, resurrect something of the past: oh cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right; he is a man tainted but tainted by circumstance, dealing with a poison in Denmark that no one else sees (but everyone feels); here is a character brought to the brink of insanity by the crowding of an evil, perpetual and nebulous, that seeks to traduce him at every point; heartsick at the act he will somehow recover a lost garden even if it kills him, even if he must face whatever demons coil within him to stop him wreaking any revenge that might in some way benefit him…

My Hamlet is not Wilson Knight's Hamlet
But he resembles Knight's Hamlet far more than O'Toole's
And it should be obvious why this is.
Who I actually agree with and why this is.
Because Knight, however misguided, understands Shakespeare, understands the
poetic drive, the character, the communicative mystery of language. He has plucked from the past the dark pearl of Hamlet's intellect and offered it up to us, a tiny flame that can again thy former light renew.