{"id":104361,"date":"2016-11-02T13:19:32","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T17:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=104361"},"modified":"2016-11-02T13:19:32","modified_gmt":"2016-11-02T17:19:32","slug":"the-meaning-of-the-bones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/02\/the-meaning-of-the-bones\/","title":{"rendered":"The Meaning of the Bones"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does Shakespeare really have \u201cuniversal appeal\u201d?<\/i><\/p>\n

\"From<\/a>

From the U.K. cover of Shakespeare in Swahililand<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cPeople frequently ask me why I devote so much time to seeking out facts about man\u2019s past,\u201d the paleontologist Louis Leakey said in 1964. \u201cThe past shows clearly that we all of us have a common origin and that our differences in race and color and creed are only superficial.\u201d Leakey sought to prove that humankind\u2019s earliest ancestors evolved in East Africa\u2019s Rift Valley, and in doing so, to invert the common Western idea that \u201cAfrica is always producing something new.\u201d Rather than an endless fount of novelty, Leakey\u2019s Africa held a promise of the immutable. He believed that excavating African earth could speak to the universal essence of humankind.<\/p>\n

Over the past few years, the literary critic Edward Wilson-Lee went searching in East Africa for his own evidence of a shared humanity. Wilson-Lee, a Kenyan-born son of British descent, sought \u201cthe Holy Grail of Shakespeare studies\u201d\u2014the key to the Bard\u2019s \u201cuniversal appeal.\u201d His new book Shakespeare in Swahililand: In Search of a Global Poet<\/em><\/a> asks whether Shakespeare\u2019s plays, like Leakey\u2019s specimens, can point toward an essential human quality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The claim that Shakespeare possessed a universal genius, and that his plays transcend culture, is at least as old as the first published edition of his works. \u201cHe was not of an age, but for all time!\u201d Ben Jonson declared in the \u201cEulogy\u201d accompanying Shakespeare\u2019s First Folio<\/em> in 1623. Prefacing his own edition of the works in 1765, Samuel Johnson confirmed that Shakespeare\u2019s plays had \u201clong outlived his century,\u201d and argued that the secret to their durability was universalism:<\/p>\n

\n

His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpracticed by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can but operate upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply and observation will always find.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Jonson\u2019s verdict went essentially unchallenged for centuries, during which the English language\u2014and Shakespeare\u2019s plays\u2014rapidly spread across the globe. English colonists, imperialists, and travelers encountered characters and incidents that echoed his works, giving rise to what Wilson-Lee describes as \u201ca belief \u2026 that certain scenes in life have an eternal form, a universal structure.\u201d In the circular logic of colonialism, Shakespeare\u2019s presence in far-flung places was proof of his universalism, regardless of how he got there.<\/p>\n

But in recent years Shakespeare\u2019s universal appeal has become something of a critical punching bag. Universalism, its critics argue, is yet another eraser of diversity, an assertion that the traditionally privileged are humankind\u2019s exemplars. Contemporary criticism locks Shakespeare in the era Jonson claimed he transcended\u2014the patriarchal, class-divided, white Western world of late Tudor and early Stuart England. That project has met its own critical backlash, such that now it would be difficult to say which is the more radical claim: that Shakespeare is of an age, or for all time.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Shakespeare in Swahililand <\/em>begins in Zanzibar, where a nineteenth-century missionary named Edward Steere distributed a hand-stitched pamphlet featuring four stories, translated into Swahili, from Charles and Mary Lamb\u2019s Tales from Shakespeare<\/em>, a popular 1807 children\u2019s book that condensed Shakespeare\u2019s plays into simple prose. While his contemporaries wanted to unify humanity under a common God, Steere sought harmony through Shakespeare. He was as committed to an idea of Shakespeare\u2019s universalism as he was to the equality of souls, and he \u201cbelieved in the possibility of shared thought, language, culture \u2026 a common humanity which reversed the fragmentation of human society after the Tower of Babel.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Edward<\/a>

Edward Steere, third Missionary Bishop of Central Africa.<\/p><\/div>\n

That belief set Steere apart from many Western explorers, who carried the works not as a means of connection but as a prophylactic, a talisman of self-proclaimed civility. When Teddy Roosevelt embarked on his two-year hunt in Africa, he brought along \u201ca veritable ark of Western culture,\u201d a fifty-five volume, sixty-pound \u201cpigskin library\u201d that included three volumes of Shakespeare and required its own porter. Early explorers Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke bore the Bard during their search for the source of the Nile. With the plays in one\u2019s pocket, \u201cthe reader\u2019s poetic soul was immune to the lures of barbarism.\u201d<\/p>\n

If, in East Africa, Shakespeare\u2019s plays saw little success as texts, they fared much better in performance, through which they bridged the cultural gap so successfully, Wilson-Lee writes, that many of them eventually found their way into East African folklore. This transition began with \u201cone of the most incredible stories in all of Shakespeareana,\u201d the staging of Hamlet <\/em>onboard an East India Company ship off the East African coast in 1607. (\u201cShakespeare was being acted off the Swahili coast even as Shakespeare was still alive and writing plays,\u201d marvels Wilson-Lee.) But even more marvelous are the performances by Indian rail workers in Mombasa, which began in 1896. British imperialism was so well established at this point that Indian workers<\/em> were staging performances in Kenya<\/em>, performing in a variety of Indian languages.<\/p>\n

Throughout the twentieth century, Shakespeare\u2019s presence in Africa took on a more political aspect. An astonishing number of key post-independence players studied English literature at Kenya\u2019s Makerere College, with a heavy emphasis on the Bard. Perhaps most notable was the future first president of Uganda, Apollo Milton Obote, who starred in a production of Julius Caesar<\/em> while leading protests against the Ugandan elites\u2014faculty members were forced to don the production\u2019s helmets and shields to protect themselves from the protestors\u2019 stones.<\/p>\n

Wilson-Lee argues for the vital importance of such early exposure to Shakespeare. Not only did the productions give these future leaders some of their first experiences of community organization, he claims, but the students learned to turn \u201cwhat they had received as the totem of British civility\u201d against them. During a heated debate in the Kenyan Legislative Council, its first African member, Eliud Wambu Mathu, protested unfair taxation by comparing the government to Shylock and their tax to a pound of flesh. If Shakespeare had once served as the emblem of British enlightenment, then it carried an extra sting to have his words describe British barbarity.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A production of Coriolanus<\/i> staged at Makerere University in 1951. Courtesy Makerere University Library Archive.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

To proceed with his search for the universal, Wilson-Lee eventually forfeits the historical basis of Shakespeare\u2019s presence in East Africa: \u201cThe Victorians\u2019 idolization of Shakespeare meant that he would have a place at the foundations of language learning in their colonies,\u201d making his prominence in East Africa inevitable. But embedding Shakespeare in political conditions, he argues, \u201ccan explain how Shakespeare got into these hands or those, but it doesn\u2019t explain what happened when he got there.\u201d The plays have functioned in wide capacities since their arrival, as \u201ca primer for children\u2019s reading in a foreign tongue, a prompt for fantasies in the wilderness and urban revelry, a tool for testing what we share with others and a weapon used by colonizer and colonized.\u201d These varied, sometimes contradictory uses of Shakespeare prove his universal application, but do they suggest a universal quality?<\/p>\n

In the concluding pages, Wilson-Lee floats a personal impression of what\u2019s essential to the works. \u201cThere is nothing more ever-present in his plays than the border of meaning,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe cliff\u2019s edge beyond which lies the incomprehensible realm in which answers are thought to reside.\u201d Some who have journeyed this far will be disappointed by Wilson-Lee\u2019s destination, as if being told a barren stretch of sand is the site of a mythical kingdom. Indeed, \u201cthe border of meaning\u201d might aptly describe the route of his search; for all his admirable research and fieldwork, he never quite defines the universal. Merely unearthing our common ancestor doesn\u2019t provide the meaning of the bones.<\/p>\n

If having a universal quality means simply sustaining a popular presence in various countries, through various periods, then a great many authors meet the definition. But if a universal poet is meant to be like water\u2014something truly no one can do without\u2014then it\u2019s an impossible standard. As Tolstoy said of Shakespeare\u2019s works, \u201cNot only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium,\u201d and one wouldn\u2019t need to travel outside London to find people who manage perfectly well without the Bard.<\/p>\n

Shakespeare in Swahililand<\/em> compels us to wonder why Wilson-Lee felt it so important to seek Shakespeare\u2019s universalism. It would be a coup to somehow prove Ben Jonson\u2019s instincts correct, but considering the simplicity of the English Renaissance view of the world, it wouldn\u2019t even be desirable\u2014humankind became more interesting after Babel. Perhaps the most miraculous thing about Shakespeare is that, through the accidents of history, he\u2019s come to form a global point of reference. Through him, we can better perceive the refractions of culture. Such chaotic variety might not be what Jonson had in mind,\u00a0but it will keep humanity transfixed for all time.<\/p>\n

Michael LaPointe (@MWLaPointe<\/a>) lives in Toronto. He contributes to the <\/em>Times Literary Supplement and writes a monthly literary essay for <\/em>The Walrus.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Does Shakespeare really have \u201cuniversal appeal\u201d? \u201cPeople frequently ask me why I devote so much time to seeking out facts about man\u2019s past,\u201d the paleontologist Louis Leakey said in 1964. \u201cThe past shows clearly that we all of us have a common origin and that our differences in race and color and creed are only 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