Introduction
The Power Template
Shakespeare’s Political Plays
In 2004 a small private college was established in Cape Town South Africa. It was to be a college of leadership, a place where young people of all races who had a sufficient capacity and desire to want to excel, to take on responsibility to make a new kind of world, could come to be educated. It was not for those vast masses that only see education as a means for getting a job. The syllabus was based upon contemporary as well as classical geo-political studies, history – from Roman history through to the end of the 20th century, bio-politics – the study of key people whose lives had an impact on their time and place in the world, then languages, and lastly fencing to cultivate noble character. It was a paideia for the 21st century designed to produce new men. The founder of the college was Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, whose Scottish family name of Dallas became the name of this place of learning, unique in this time, yet seeking continuity in the historical model of the great Mogul and Ottoman centres of higher education.
At the inception of Dallas College I was invited to teach Shakespeare & Rhetoric, an area of world literature in which I was excited about furthering my knowledge. I was informed that the focus was to be Shakespeare’s History and Roman Plays. These plays, more so than all the others, but not exclusively so, are his political plays. I was introduced to a handful of books that I promptly ordered and which soon arrived in South Africa. There was the Essential Shakespeare Handbook, which became our basic text-book. The others were Frank Kermode’s The Age of Shakespeare and his Language of Shakespeare. There was an excellent biography by René Weis and W.H. Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare that was derived from a lecture series he gave in Greenwich Village in 1946-47, that I was thrilled with. Then there was Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare and more recently his newest book, Soul of the Age, simply the best book I have ever read on Shakespeare. It is a masterpiece and I am convinced that Bate is today the preeminent Shakespearian scholar. As I continued with my lectures new books were added, many of which I will mention in the course of this study.
There are two unequivocal characteristics to this or any study of Shakespeare’s plays. The first is that you are exposed to the highest expression of the English language. It delights and excites the mind in a way that once you have tasted it your hunger only grows as you discover more of this living, pulsating language that is the very means through which meanings are communicated and shared by human beings. With extraordinary wit and a generosity of humour and humanity, Shakespeare has written characters that are as much alive today as they were four hundred years ago when he wrote them. The second characteristic, more specific to the actual plays that are covered within this book, is that they transmit an understanding of the dynamics of human politics: the play for power, position and influence that has been an unfolding drama as far back as history has been recorded.
What occurs in my lectures, and is replicated in the text that is presented here, is my attempt to awaken a curiosity and concern not only about the age of Shakespeare, which holds a very important place in our world view, but also the age we live in now. There are, therefore, numerous excursions as we move from 14th or 15th century England to the exigency of the early 20th century negotiations that preceded the outbreak of the First World War. We move quite freely from Prince Hal in Henry IV Part I and II (who, portrayed as a profligate prince who neglected his duties at Court, emerged through a series of life experiences that were the means by which his character was forged into the heroic Henry V) – and then on over to King Hasan II of Morocco who in his youth was dubbed by the French press as ‘The Playboy Prince’. King Hasan was under a constant barrage of attack, from both within his own inner circle as much as from outside forces, to sell off his country’s vast mineral wealth. Not unlike Hal, the king matured and was steeled into a sober and astute ruler who held fast the reins of leadership and preserved his country from the rapacious greed of disloyal subjects and foreign invaders.
There are digressions and forays into a multitude of current political affairs that find scope within Shakespeare’s vast landscape which serves as a setting for the machinations of human politics that drive the action of world events.
From English history to ancient Rome, we have the backdrop that allowed Shakespeare to portray the whole world within that Wooden ‘O’, the original Globe Theatre. It is, therefore, my intention through this exploration of Shakespeare’s political plays to make sense of the world I find myself in, and in doing so to make sense of myself within it. That that should also be awakened in others is my aim in this work.
Robert Luongo
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