For ever and a day: why we turn to Shakespeare at times of crisis
In May 2020, Robert De Niro, in conversation with BBC TV’s Newsnight, seemed at a loss to describe American politics. Finally, he exclaimed, “It’s like Shakespearean, the whole thing,” to summarise the crisis as he saw it. “So Shakespearean”, an unexamined cultural shorthand, has now become a strangely comforting assurance that says, “You are not alone.” For some contemporary readers, the work collected in Shakespeare’s First Folio does indeed become such “a book of life”.
Shakespeare revels in the dramatic present. No fewer than three of his plays begin with “Now”. He will always confront the most overwhelming questions, and come to our rescue in many guises, but imminence is his default position. This is Elizabethan: Shakespeare’s age lived in the “now”, from sunrise to sunset. “The readiness is all,” says Hamlet. All or nothing is a challenge the playwright celebrates in his resonant antitheses. “To be, or not to be”, his most famous dramatic opposite, is at once Anglo-Saxon, existential and direct.
Was it the accident of his birth in Elizabethan Warwickshire that awoke him to the drama of everyday life? Was it here that he learned to extract many nuances of meaning from the quotidian detail of the turning world? At some point, growing up in Stratford, or moving to London, he discovered the wellspring of great drama: imminent peril. In his imagination, this would blossom into a, the man remains an enigma, being simultaneously “many, and no one”.
