The Satirical Rogue Says Here

I think it’s a bit of an obvious statement to say I love Shakespeare. I discovered this passion when I was eighteen and struggling to understand the world around me. The funny thing is when most of my world didn’t make sense, I discovered I could understand Shakespeare. I thought it was a foreign language that required a super intellect… but all it required, as a few enthusiastic professors and directors showed me, was an openness to interpret the language. I realized there is not just one meaning, not just one right or wrong. And that in spite of the fact the men wore tights and the women shaved their foreheads, their high falutin language said the things I felt.

Well… that’s what I always tell myself anyway. Fact is I’m sure if I spoke to a contemporary of Shakespeare (or whomever), she might not have a lot of sympathy for my outlook on life, if I didn’t outright terrify her with my strange magical contraptions. Maybe our human sentiments remain the same over the centuries – our grief, our need for love, our struggle to find meaning in this all too brief time, our misunderstandings, our anger, our malice, our ruthlessness. I suppose those things don’t change. But maybe… I do have to wonder if my need to understand something from the past makes me decide that the people from those times saw the world the way I see it. Do I just decide that because their words have overcome the disintegration of time passing that what they say is truth for me? And proof that what I believe isn’t just something I made up in the here and now?

You have to admit using dead people to affirm belief is a pretty clever idea. I mean… who is going to say you are wrong? Except the people who disagree with you… and obviously, they just don’t get the dead people. They don’t KNOW or fully understand what that person felt or saw or observed… or intended.

I’ve directed a few interpretations of Shakespeare. I don’t pretend for an instant what I put on the stage is what old Willy intended when he put his quill to parchment. I think if I did that, I’d be bored. Never mind the people who wanted to watch it. I choose to take what resonates with my emotional fabric and see how it translates into a world I know and can live with for a rehearsal period. But… inevitably… I tend to clash with fellow actors and crew about how what I see is wrong or misunderstood. That I just don’t know enough to create a legitimate interpretation of Shakespeare. In other words, I’m wrong.

Maybe… but who knows what is right? We can’t even agree who Shakespeare was, so how can we agree what he meant when he wrote the words? How can we say that what he wrote was an opinion that confirms the right or wrong of what we believe? And yet… we validate his words so much that we believe that Richard III actually had a hunchback.

I learn as I get older to preface my conversations about the Bard and history with the action word of interpret. I am telling a story – a story I see with the filter of my life and emotions and beliefs. It isn’t necessarily an authentic retelling of what actually was five hundred years ago. And it never can be. Because I have only lived through the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. So I don’t know how that man saw the universe and whether or not he approved or disapproved of my opinions.

It is still easy… and tempting to use the thoughts and words of the past to validate our opinions of today. To condemn the choices with which we don’t agree. To congratulate our successes. To say this is what a man wanted when he wrote a few sentences two hundred years ago. To decide when we read a piece of the English language and understand it because it makes us feel something, that we KNOW what the writer wanted. That somehow because we read it, we can be a voice for their original intentions. 

I like to think I understand Shakespeare… or Jesus… or Thomas Jefferson. But really, really, at the end of the day, I have absolutely no clue what their opinion of the world was. And it’s definitely not for me to use their opinions to tell the world they are wrong.