The Debate: Is Shakespeare elitist?
City A.M.’s weekly feature takes the fiercest water-cooler debates and pits two candidates head to head before delivering The Judge’s ultimate verdict.
The Debate: Is Shakespeare elitist?
Yes: I studied English Literature, and am a theatre critic, and still much of Shakespearian language goes over my head
“Don’t forget Shakespeare was common as muck when it was written, performed for the masses,” argue The Bard’s smug stans.
Full disclosure: I wasn’t there so I can’t be fully sure, and thank goodness for that: I probably would’ve died of consumption after a particularly messy night at Henry IV. But it does seem likely that workers paid a penny – a day’s wage – to escape fears of the bubonic plague and go to The Globe theatre to find out if Romeo gets to bang Juliet.
It’s strange to think that theatre was more accessible in the 1700s than it is today, but let’s just say the crap seats in Ian McKellen’s current Shakespeare production start at £110. Unlike at the Globe in the 1700s where you’d be in the pit at the front, for that cash today you’d barely see the stage.
There’s no question that theatre has barriers to entry, not least the fact that most shows happen in London. But I’d also argue there’s a distinctive whiff of elitism to Shakespeare itself.
We talk about privilege as if it’s just financial, but cultural privilege is also real. Shakespeare is hard to understand in writing and in speech, and because of that, it takes time to get interested in. You need guardians with the time and headspace to help you learn about The Bard, and a good education with teachers that have – yep, you guessed it – time and space to teach properly without disruptive pupils.
Shakespeare may not be thematically elitist, but it is materially. The barriers to entry for Britons that have been let down by school systems, or have overstretched parents, or just don’t hang out in bookish circles, are significant. To even understand the notion that Shakespeare is relevant today (the importance of nurturing classic writing, the evergreen themes, blah blah) requires a decent education and an arena for debate. I studied English Literature, and am a theatre critic, and still much of Shakespearian language goes over my head. You also need to discount those of us that simply cannot be arsed. Love Island’s much easier to ingest after a long day, isn’t it?
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No: Only the soft bigotry of low expectations would remove Shakespeare from the syllabus
The enduring popularity of Shakespeare is surely all the evidence you need that his work is not elitist – 460 years of history can’t be wrong. People across the world have been engaging with his work for centuries. His words are so embedded in our idiom that many people don’t even realise that phrases like ‘the green-eyed monster’ and ‘a pound of flesh’ originated with him. There have been popular and accessible screen adaptations of his stories, like 10 Things I Hate About You and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. Without Shakespeare there’d be no Succession.
The idea that audiences of today are alienated by his work is, frankly, a little patronising. Why should current generations be less able to enjoy his writing than any that have gone before? Is it because they are less literate? And where does this argument lead? Removing his plays and poems from school curriculums and stages would be to deny British people some of the greatest jewels of their cultural inheritance – and for what? To protect them from words they may find challenging? That is the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Shakespeare understood that human nature consisted of both base instincts and soaring principles. His work survives because its themes are eternal: valour and vengeance, love and hate. Fashions in the discourse may change, but the force of Shakespeare’s insights never will.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The Verdict: Not everything old is good, but Shakespeare is an exception
Shakespeare’s plays have indeed endured in popularity since early 1600s: half of Brits have seen a production (though bare in mind, they may have been dragged kicking and screaming to the theatre). So, can 460 years of history be wrong? Denby says no, but on this she is mistaken. There are plenty of things that endured when they shouldn’t have done: the unpalatable myth of primogeniture persevered for well over five centuries, for one.
Bloodworth rightly argues that theatre tickets are costly, but there are other ways of accessing the Bard – Baz Luhrmann’s film is one, or a multiplicity of television shows. Overall, it might appear that Bloodworth is really arguing for education in this country to be improved, so that all pupils gain access to stellar scholarship of Shakespeare and find it less taxing to engage with. This could dilute the distortions of disparate cultural capital.
But barriers to accessibility, whilst undesirable, do not mean Shakespeare’s plays are only reserved for the elite. Chilling with King Lear post pint isn’t for everyone – but that doesn’t make these plays irretrievably elitist; after all, there’s an abundance of Bard at all our fingertips. Not everything old is good, but Shakespeare is a winning exception.