Kevin O'Brien claims that G. K. Chesterton shows us the only way to read Shakespeare
A lecture delivered at the 2012 American Chesterton Society Conference in Reno, Nevada.
Almost nobody reads Shakespeare any more. And of those who do, almost nobody reads his long and obscure poem The Phoenix and the Turtle. Chesterton did. And he quotes from it, as will I, to begin this lecture.
Truth may seem, but cannot be:
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
That, my friends, is an epigram for the modern world – or perhaps its epitaph.
For Chesterton teaches us how to read Shakespeare by teaching us how not to read Shakespeare. To
read Shakespeare rightly, we must stop trying to bury Truth and Beauty;
we must stop trying to strangle Goodness and put a butt-ugly imposter
in her place. In short, to read Shakespeare well, like Chesterton did, we need to give up our mistaken common approach to life.
What mistaken common approach am I talking about? I'm talking about the one thing Chesterton fought against his entire career, heresy. And
I'm talking about the one thing all heresies have in common - focusing
on a tiny slice of truth in order to shield ourselves from the awesome
scope of the big truth; or even worse, peddling an outright lie so as to
leave Truth, like Lear, abandoned and mad, raving on the heath, while
we sit warm and comfy beside the fire of falsehood.
Because
- and I say this emphatically not as a partisan - the only way to
understand Chesterton; the only way to understand Shakespeare; the only
way to understand life - is as a Catholic. Anything shy of the fullness of Catholic Truth gives us first a comfortable security, but eventually an empty self-parody.
"And you all know security / Is mortals' chiefest enemy," says Hecate to her witches in Macbeth. By
which I would suggest she means what Macbeth himself does - which is
not only catering to his own disordered desires, but trying to found his
own kingdom, an earthly city, upon these disordered desires, these
sins. For it is not so much sin
itself that does us in, but our frenzied attempts to establish our
lives so that we can be secure in our sins.
This is why, while preparing a scene from The Merchant of Venice for the EWTN series The Quest for Shakespeare, hosted
by Joseph Pearce, one of my young actors told me that, "You know, the
two main male characters in this play, Antonio and Bassanio, are gay
lovers."
Aghast, I countered, "There is not the slightest bit of evidence for that in the text. The
love that these men have for one another is the love of friendship,
something that would necessarily exclude any genital encounter between
them. It's incredible even to suggest such a thing. Have you ever been in any production of this play that actually tried to sell to the audience this crazy notion?"
He
looked at me with the kind of patronizing pity that can only be
expressed by a young man frustrated with an old man who is sliding into
his dotage and who just doesn't get it. He smiled and patiently explained, "I've never been in a production of The Merchant of Venice where their relationship was presented in any other way. They are clearly gay lovers."
And that's the new tradition. That's the way the show is now being produced.
Well, you may ask, how can a stage production present something in the performance that's not included in the script? In many ways. I was told by one of our other young cast members that in every production of The Merchant of Venice that she'd seen or that she'd been in, Portia cheats. Portia, the most virtuous of all of Shakespeare's heroines, cheats. When
Bassanio is before the three caskets and, in great peril, must choose
the right one in order to marry Portia (for if he chooses the wrong one
he must take a lifelong vow of celibacy and renounce marriage forever) -
in every production my young actress had seen or been in, the director
adds a bit of stage business where Portia nods or winks or gives
Bassanio some silent clue as to which casket he should chose in order to
win her - though why she'd want to marry Antonio's gay lover is beyond
me. And why she'd cheat like
that when the whole point of the Ordeal by Caskets is to determine the
hidden virtues of her suitors is a mystery.
Such
a directorial choice - especially one heartily endorsed by the actors -
reveals the most fundamental misunderstanding of Portia, of the play,
of Shakespeare, of virtue, and frankly of life itself.
Similarly, in a recent production of The Winter's Tale in
St. Louis, the director brought back to life a character at the end of
the play who had died earlier in the play - confusing the audience, but
satisfying her own mistaken interpretation of what The Winter's Tale is all about. Why
people don't simply demand their money back at such performances is
beyond me - as you all may be tempted to do by the time I finish.
Because I sense I am not in fact making my point. Even though missing the point is part of my point.
For my
point is this - whether you like Shakespeare or not (a lot of people
don't); whether you like Chesterton or not (all of us, I presume, do);
whether you'd rather read a book or watch a movie or just have dinner
with your friends, you cannot begin to understand life - you cannot
begin to be grateful for life - you cannot begin to approach life -
until you learn how to read - how
to read a book, how to read a play, how to read a movie, how to read
your friends, how to read the Great Book of Being written by and filled
by the Incarnate Word of God.
This is why Chesterton is such a great writer - because he's a tremendous reader. He can read a book and get it. He can read a play and get it. He can read a joke and get it. He can read the signs in the sky and the signs of the times. He can read life - and he can write about it.
And so, bullet point number one on why a Catholic approach is the best approach, even to reading -
· The Catholic Church is not sola scriptura. The Catholic Church says that the Bible alone does not convey everything we need to know about salvation. The
Catholic Church says that God's message to us is bigger than one book -
His message to us can be read in Scripture, certainly, but it can be
read as well in the teachings of the Church, of which the Bible is a
part; it can be read in a broader way in nature, in history, in the
dialogue of prayer, in art.
Chesterton says of George Bernard Shaw, who did not know how to read Shakespeare ...
His
misunderstanding of Shakespeare arose largely from the fact that he is a
Puritan, while Shakespeare was spiritually a Catholic. The former is
always screwing himself up to see truth; the latter is often content
that truth is there. The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the
Catholic is strong enough to relax. ...
This power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of
believing a thing without experiencing it, this is an old Catholic
complexity, and the Puritan has never understood it.
Nor,
I would add has the modernist, the post-modernist, the Queer Theorirst,
the Marxist, or anyone else who would cut out the meaning of
Shakespeare so as to make him conform to their own agendas - who would,
in fact, tell you there's no truth there to cut out - no "there" there -
nothing objectively in the text except what they chose to impose. And this is what people do all the time. As Joseph Pearce himself says, "There are two kinds of people. Those who do things to books, and those who let books do things to them."
Now
you all may not agree with Joseph Pearce when he argues, both from
historical documents and from the plays themselves, that there is ample
evidence that Shakespeare was more than just "spiritually Catholic", but
was in fact "ritually Catholic", a confirmed and secretly practicing
Catholic, living in a totalitarian state - Elizabethan England - that
waged a war of terror against practicing Catholics.
So
let's set that question aside, because I am using the word Catholic
throughout my speech to mean what Chesterton calls "spiritually
Catholic", or Catholic in atmosphere, in other words, both
Catholic with a large C and Catholic with a small c, catholic in the
sense of universal, but also Catholic in the sense of full and complete -
of that which is above denominations, parties, and narrow agendas .
This contrast, then, that I will be pointing out in this lecture, is between
· Doing something to a book; or letting a book do something to you.
· Reading
Shakespeare so that he says what you want him to say; or reading
Shakespeare so that you understand the objective meaning of his works.
· Staging
Shakespeare so that you sell your own selfish snake oil; or staging
Shakespeare so that you communicate the truth, beauty and goodness to be
found in his plays. For there's plenty of it there.
In short, the choice is between
· Serving the God of Truth, or serving a god of your own making.
Or as we read in the Book of Wisdom, "For the worshipping of idols ... is the beginning, the cause, and the end, of all evil.” The Book of Wisdom has been cut out of Protestant Bibles.
Chesterton ends his famous essay comparing the Catholic Shakespeare with the Protestant Milton thus ...
Milton’s religion was Milton’s religion, and ... Shakespeare’s religion was not Shakespeare’s.
This is the key to everything Chesterton writes about Shakespeare. Instead
of reading Shakespeare in a deliberately wrong way, instead of turning
him into an idol to suit his own desires - the Gay Shakespeare, the
Nihilist Shakespeare, the Baconian Shakespeare -
Chesterton approaches Shakespeare so that one might paraphrase GKC and
say, "Shaw's Shakespeare was Shaw's Shakespeare, but Chesterton's
Shakespeare was not Chesterton's".
It is, I would suggest, the same way Chesterton approaches all of life. Which is what made him "spiritually" and actually a Catholic.
***
Let
me illustrate this by looking at a collection of Chesterton's essays
and quotations on Shakespeare compiled and edited by Dale Ahlquist,
published by Dover, in a soon to be released volume entitled The Soul of Wit. Be sure to get this book when it comes out.
By
looking at Chesterton's insights into the Bard, written over the course
of Chesterton's career, we can see the points that I'm making.
To
begin with, and to echo what I just said, Chesterton is emphatic that
Shakespeare cannot be co-opted for the sake of a "message". Chesterton faults his nemesis Shaw for looking for something Shavian in Shakespeare. Gilbert Keith says of George Bernard ...
He
was looking [in the plays of Shakespeare] for that ghastly thing which
Nonconformists call a Message, and continue to call a Message, even when
they have become atheists and do not know who the Message is from. He
was looking for a system; one of the very little systems that do very
truly have their day. The system of Kant; the system of Hegel; the
system of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Marx and all the rest. In each
of these examples a man sprang up and pretended to have a thought that
nobody had ever had. But the great poet only professes to express the
thought that everybody has always had.
... he continues ...
Before
the time of Shakespeare, men had grown used to the Ptolemaic astronomy,
and since the time of Shakespeare men have grown used to the Copernican
astronomy. But poets have never grown used to stars; and it is their
business to prevent anybody else ever growing used to them.
... or as is famously said in Love's Labors Lost
These earthly godfathers of Heaven's lights
That give a name to every fix-ed star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
So that we come to Bullet Point Number Two on why the Catholic approach to life and literary criticism is the best -
· Humility. Naming the stars gives us no true profit of them. If
anything, it makes us proud, thinking we have somehow comprehended
them; whereas poetry reminds us that they are not made for our
self-interest, but to be wondered at – to be grateful for.
Chesterton explains ...
"
... the soul never speaks until it speaks in poetry; and ... in our
daily conversation we do not speak; [in our daily conversation] we only
talk."
In fact, Chesterton's sensitivity to poetry is something itself to be wondered at. And
while modern audiences and readers are frustrated by the archaic
language used by Shakespeare, and at times have to struggle just to
understand what old Will is simply saying; still, with some effort we
can learn to understand this poetry - but we can never really manage to
translate it. Chesterton, again sparring with Shaw, writes ...
I will give Mr. Shaw three lines out of As You Like It from the exquisite and irrational song of Hymen at the end:
Then is there mirth in Heaven
When earthly things made even
Atone together.
Limit
the matter to the single incomparable line, "When earthly things made
even." And I defy Mr. Shaw to say which is matter and which
is manner. ... If the words, "When earthly things made even" were
presented to us in the form of, "When terrestrial affairs are reduced to
an equilibrium," the meaning would not merely have been spoilt, the
meaning would have entirely disappeared. This identity between the
matter and the manner is simply the definition of poetry. The aim of
good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical
words is to mean what they do not say.
This is another way of saying that Shakespeare's poetry, like all great poetry, cannot be reduced.
But more than that, there's something Catholic here in the sense of something sacramental. Bullet point number three ...
· The Catholic view is sacramental - which is to say incarnational - specific things have value in their specificity. Thus
Chesterton's love for the local, the small, the particular; thus his
love for poetry, where the matter and the manner cannot be divorced,
where the soul and the flesh are beautifully conjoined.
And
yet this does not mean that Chesterton sees Shakespeare being
"particular" in the sense of nitpicking; if Gertrude were to ask Gilbert
as she asked Hamlet, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" Chesterton
would reply, not as Hamlet did in a nit-picking way by contrasting
"seeming" with "being", by contrasting "appearance" with "existence",
but by affirming that what appears in the particular embodies what exists beyond the particular, particularly in great poetry. Which leads me to bullet point four.
· The
sacramental Catholic view affirms the value of specific things because
the Catholic view recognizes the reality of both the corporate thing and
the reality of the thing it incorporates - a ship is really a ship and
not just a word for our impression of a ship.
Or, in Chesterton's words, when he writes of the large illustrations in medieval manuscripts ...
Plato
held, and the child holds, that the most important thing about a ship
(let us say) is that it is a ship. Thus, all these pictures are designed
to express things in their quiddity. [The technical term of philosophy
meaning the "whatness" of things] If these [medieval] artists draw a
ship, everything is sacrificed to expressing the "shipishness" of the
ship. If they draw a tower, its whole object is to be towering. If they
draw a flower, its whole object is to be flowering. Their pencils often
go wrong as to how the thing looks; [but] their intellects never go
wrong as to what the thing is.
…
When we are very young and vigorous and human we believe in things; it
is only when we are very old and dissolute and decaying that we believe
in the aspects of things. To see a thing in aspects is to be crippled,
to be defective. A full and healthy man realises a thing called a ship;
he realises it simultaneously from all sides and with all senses. One of
his senses tells him that the ship is tall or white, another that the
ship is moving or standing still, another that it is battling with
broken and noisy waves, another that it is surrounded and soaked with
the smell of the sea. But a deaf man would only know that the ship was
moving by the passing of objects. A blind man would only know that the
ship was moving by the sound of the swirling water. A blind and deaf man
would only know that a ship was moving by the fact that he was seasick.
This is the thing called "impressionism", that typically modern thing.
[That thing, in other words, very much like seasickness.]
Impressionism
means shutting up all of one's nine million organs and avenues of
appreciation except one. Impressionism means that, whereas Nature has
made our senses and impressions to support each other, we desire to
suppress one part of perception and employ the other. Impressionism, in
short, may be justly summarised as "winking the other eye". The
impressionist desires to treat mankind as a brood of the Cyclops. It is
not surprising that Whistler wore a monocle; his philosophy was
monocular.
[...
what is he describing here if not a kind of heresy, the picking out of
one view of things to the exclusion of all the others? In applying this to Shakespeare, Chesterton observes Hamlet indignant at the singing grave-digger. "Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that be sings at grave-making?" Hamlet asks, and Chesterton answers ...]
[By
that question] Shakespeare has shown the utter inferiority of Hamlet to
the Grave-digger. Hamlet by himself might almost be a character in
Maeterlinck [Chesterton's example of a narrow playwright who wrote
"message" plays]. Hamlet wishes to make the play of Hamlet a
Maeterlinck play - united, artistic, melancholy, in a monotone. He
wishes the Grave-digger to be sad at his grave-digging; he wishes the
Grave-digger to be in the picture. But the Grave-digger refused to be in
the picture, and the grave-digger will always refuse. The common man,
engaged in tragic occupations, has always refused and will always
refuse, to be tragic.
Bullet point five,
· The
cosmos in the Catholic world is like a medieval Cathedral - it includes
gargoyles and comic figures; it includes the ridiculous and the
grotesque, it includes the sinners and the saints, the princes and the
common men; all things somehow fit into the picture; and it is not a
frame of our making.
In
other words, while James Joyce said the Catholic Church means "here
comes everybody", Chesterton would have countered by saying the Catholic
Church means "here comes everything".
But everything understood as ordered and related by God. Not
the everything of chaos, but the everything that connects to everything
else in a hierarchical way, in a way of degree or inherent value. Not
the everything of a narrow human system, which are the things that only
fit into a heresy and that exclude everything that doesn't fit, but the
everything of a vast divine system, which is much more than a mere
human system. In other words,
not the one thing of impressionism, but the everything of our senses and
impressions, each of which Nature has made to support the other, and to
see the substance of a thing behind our impression of it..
This
is another way of seeing how Chesterton's vision of Shakespeare was
Catholic - for Chesterton acknowledged that Shakespeare's plays and
Shakespeare's characters were, like all great creations of art, too
great to be systematized. The characters were more than "impressions" in an "impressionistic" series of scenes; they were rounded and living.
Very early in Chesteton's career, back in 1901, he makes one of the keenest insights he'll ever make regarding this. Chesterton writes ...
The
truth is that Shakespeare's Hamlet is immeasurably vaster than any mere
ethical denunciation or ethical defence. ... Falstaff was neither brave
nor honest, nor chaste, nor temperate, nor clean, but he had the eighth
cardinal virtue for which no name has ever been found. Hamlet was not
fitted for this world: but Shakespeare does not dare to say whether he
was too god or too bad for it.
Now
a more minor critic and a more pedestrian thinker would have marched
along with that insight and denied any ethical content in the plays for
the rest of his career. But
Chesterton understood that while Shakespeare's plays were not merely
ethical, they were utterly and staggeringly moral - which is to say the
plays are about the Consequential, they are about the consequences that
grow out of our actions, our limitations, our sins. They are about how what we do reveals how God has made us.
In
Chesterton's day, Freud was still a fad and psychoanalysis all the
rage, with the belief that all of our problems result from the
repression of our impulses. Chesterton
applies this insipid psychology to the plays and in doing so reveals
how true psychological insight, like that of Shakespeare, reveals not
suppressed Freudian tendencies, but the profoundly moral nature of our
makeup.
Chesterton notes …
Lady
Macbeth does not suffer as a sleep-walker because she has resisted the
impulse to murder Duncan, but rather (by some curious trick of thought)
because she has yielded to it. Hamlet's uncle is in a morbid frame of
mind, not, as one would naturally expect, because he had thwarted his
own development by leaving his own brother alive and in possession [of
the throne]; but actually because he has triumphantly liberated himself
from the morbid impulse to pour poison in his brother's ear. On
the theory of psycho-analysis, as expounded, a man ought to be haunted
by the ghosts of all the men he has not murdered. Even if they were
limited to those he has felt a vague fancy for murdering, they might
make a respectable crowd to follow at his heels. Yet Shakespeare
certainly seems to represent Macbeth as haunted by Banquo, whom he
removed at one blow from the light of the sun and from his own
subconsciousness. ...
In
plain words, this sort of criticism has lost the last rags of common
sense. Hamlet requires no such subconscious explanation, for he explains
himself, and was perhaps rather too fond of doing so. He was a man to
whom duty had come in a very dreadful and repulsive form, and to a man
not fitted for that form of duty. There was a conflict, but he was
conscious of it from beginning to end. He was not an unconscious person;
but a far too conscious one.
And, you might say, "there's the rub". Shakespeare
is about becoming more conscious of who we are and Who God is; the
modern world is all about becoming unconscious of who we are and Who God
is. The comedies of
Shakespeare are about the shortcomings of our foibles and of our need
for disguise, pretense or relief in order to overcome them. The tragedies are about the consequences of our sins and how the noble side of our nature struggles against the corrupt side. In both cases, these plays are about a playing-out of who we are and of what we do; and
they are about becoming conscious of that - about becoming aware of how
our identities, how our choices, how our free wills, how our actions -
how all of this bears out our destinies, revealing to man not only man
himself, but also revealing God. Indeed, "there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will." Hamlet says this, but Hamlet, like every character in a drama, is limited by his own agenda. Hamlet
would have been more accurate to say, "There's a divinity that shapes
our ends, the shape of which we approach the minute we begin to hew."
And that's where the Catholic view has a great advantage over the modern view. Bullet point six -
· The
Catholic view is rational; it says we must be conscious of our sins and
responsible for our actions, for it affirms that they come from us and
our free choices. By contrast,
the modern view is irrational; it says we are motivated by things we are
unconscious of; that we can never be responsible for anything; that the
law of cause and effect is replaced by the dumb fact of absurdity. In
the modern view, who we are and what we suffer are disconnected; what
we sow and what we reap are disconnected; where we end has no connection
to what we hew or to any divinity that shapes it. The modern world is sterile; it is contraceptive.
The modern critic, Chesterton says, "gives Hamlet a complex to avoid giving him a conscience."
A conscience, you see, is rational; you must be rationally conscious of it - perhaps painfully so. A complex is irrational; you are, by definition, always unconscious of it. A conscience demands to be brought to light. A complex lurks in darkness - in feelings, in Freudian slips, in compulsions, in moods.
The modern man, like the modern conception of Hamlet, believes only in mood. [Chesterton writes] But
the real Hamlet, like the Catholic Church, believes in reason. Many
fine optimists have praised man when they felt like praising him. Only
Hamlet has praised man when he felt like kicking him as a monkey of the
mud. Many poets, like Shelley and Whitman, have been optimistic when
they felt optimistic. Only Shakespeare has been optimistic when he felt
pessimistic. This is the definition of a faith. A faith is that which is
able to survive a mood.
Bullet point number seven ...
· Not only is " The Catholic Church is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age,"
but the Catholic Faith is the only thing that frees a man from the
degrading slavery of being a child of his moods, a captive to his fears,
a product of his irrational complexes.
Pagans and Calvinists believe in the inexorable fates. Catholics believe in cooperation with grace; where both salvation and damnation hang in the balance.
For
the play of "Macbeth" [Chesterton writes] is, in the supreme and
special sense, the Christian Tragedy; to be set against the pagan
Tragedy of Oedipus. It is the whole point about Oedipus that he does not
know what he is doing. And it is the whole point about Macbeth that he
does know what he is doing. It is not a tragedy of Fate but a tragedy of
Freewill. He is tempted by a devil, but he is not driven by a destiny.
But note, dear friends, the flipside of this. There
is a destiny that shapes our ends, for the story of Mr. and Mrs.
Macbeth is not just the story of an ambitious couple who do what they
want; it is the story of an ambitious couple who do what they want and
suffer for it because our natures and our destinies will not rest
comfortably when we try to establish our sins, will not let us sleep
when we try to secure ourselves in them. Chesterton says of Macbeth
You
cannot call Macbeth anything but a victim of Macbeth. The evil spirits
tempt him, but they never force him: they never even frighten him, for
he is a very brave man. I have often wondered that no one has made so
obvious a parallel as that between the murders of Macbeth and the
marriages of Henry VIII. Both Henry and Macbeth were originally brave,
good-humoured men, better rather than worse than their neighbours. Both
Henry and Macbeth hesitated over their first crime - the first stabbing
and the first divorce. Both found out the fate which is in evil - for
Macbeth went on murdering and poor Henry went on marrying.
And he says of Lady Macbeth ...
Unfortunately,
like such a very large number of people living in dark, barbarous,
ignorant, and ferocious times, [Lady Macbeth] was full of modern ideas.
She tended especially to maintain the two brightest and most
philosophical of modern ideas: first, that it is often extremely
convenient to do what is wrong; and second, that whenever it is
convenient to do what is wrong, it immediately becomes what is right.
Illuminated by these two scientific searchlights of the twentieth
century in her groping among the start trees and stone pillars of the
Dark Ages, Lady Macbeth thought it quite simple and businesslike to kill
an old gentleman of very little survival value, and offer her own
talents to the world in the capacity of Queen. It seems natural enough;
to most of us who are used to the morals of modern novels, it will seem
almost humdrum and tiresomely obvious. And yet see what a snag there was
in it after all!
Indeed, see what a snag there was in it after all!
· The Catholic view affirms, nay insists, that our lives have a purpose and an aim. Deny the aim for which we are made, and what a snag there is in it after all – which we call tragedy.
And yet it is from this great aim that all adventure comes, and on which all stories depend. The moderns, fond of the syphilitic madman Nietzsche, think that adventure comes from making up our own rules as we go along. On the contrary, adventure comes from Him who gave us these rules.
Compare Chesterton on the plot of As You Like It...
Rosalind
did not go into the wood to look for her freedom; she went into the
wood to look for her father. And all the freedom—and even all the fun—of
the adventure really arises from that fact. For even an adventure must
have an aim.
To summarize where we are, then.
The
Catholic view of Shakespeare is the only valid view, in the same way
that the Catholic view of all literature and art is the only valid view,
and in the same way that the Catholic view of life is the only valid
view, for the following reasons.
1. The Catholic does not believe in the Bible alone or in faith alone or in anything alone; thus the Catholic can read the world, read his friends, and read a book without blinders on. God is bigger than the Book He gave us; Shakespeare is bigger than our own selfish pride.
2. The Catholic view exalts humility, placing one in the proper frame of mind to worship - or to read.
3.
The Catholic view is sacramental and sees the world that God has made
as communicating His glory; and the works that man has made of
potentially doing the same thing.
4. The Catholic view acknowledges the reality of things, both in their particular incarnation and in their general form. Without this shocking vision of the reality of things, neither poetry nor philosophy make any sense; they become mere words.
5.
The Catholic view is God's view and, like a big tent or a medieval
cathedral, includes all of the apparent incongruities that we would
rather eliminate.
6. The Catholic view is one of reason, consciousness and light; recognizing free will. Other views seek out the irrational, the unconscious and the dark.
7. The Catholic view is pragmatic. It's all about faith, and faith is opposed to the shifting sands of opinion and mood. It
thus provides encouragement and a tool whereby we have the strength to
move beyond mere impressions to what the impressions signify.
8.
The Catholic view recognizes teleology, or that we are designed for an
aim, for an end; and that when we avoid this end we make ourselves
miserable. Without such an insight, great drama – whether history plays, romances, tragedies or even comedies - is not conceivable.
I would add, briefly, two more things
9. The Catholic Church loves poverty; it loves the poor without applying to them the modern litmus test of utility. Thus
a Catholic appreciation of drama (and of life) would appreciate the
common man and even the vulgar man, the funny as well as the serious,
the little as well as the big.
Chesterton says
It
may be noticed that the great artists always choose great fools rather
than great intellectuals to embody humanity. Hamlet does [indeed]
express the aesthetic dreams and the bewilderments of the intellect; but
Bottom the Weaver expresses them much better.
And finally ... I would have you note that the villains in Shakespeare's plays, especially in King Lear, are the New People, the self-made men, the "men without chests" that C. S. Lewis speaks of in The Abolition of Man. They are hungry for power and position; they have wiped out the old order that went before them. They are usurpers. They will slaughter babies and torture old men. They
can be seen in the politicians of Shakespeare's day; and they can be
seen filling the halls of Congress and the White House and the Courts of
ours.
I began and will end with a quote from The Phoenix and the Turtle, where Shakespeare writes
"Truth
may seem, but cannot be; Beauty brag, but 'tis not she." Certainly
[Chesterton comments] that is what a man might well say, who felt
hostile to a new world.
For the anti-Catholic modern world cannot even begin to understand truth and cannot endure beauty. As for goodness, well, we’d rather glory in our shame. Thus the moderns deconstruct great literature, and do their best to bury truth, beauty, goodness, Shakespeare and Chesterton.
But there is a tenth bullet point, and the most important one, and it was pointed out long ago by G. K. Chesterton.
10. The Catholic Church is always, like its founder, being reborn.
I once wrote the following ...
Chesterton, the most brilliant essayist and thinker of the twentieth century, had been buried. But
... this is a Faith of Resurrection, and we now see Chesterton out of
his grave, jovial and ebullient as ever. This has caused a rush on
shovel sales.
Which means that, if you haven't noticed, intellectuals worldwide are busy damning Chesterton with faint praise. They
seem disturbed that he's up and walking again, saying funny and
penetrating things, when they were certain they had buried him. And this quite naturally disturbs them, as something very similar disturbed Macbeth.
But the lesson is that even if they do manage to rebury Chesterton, he'll come back again. No grave is big enough to hold him. Even if they bury Shakespeare (the modernists have certainly killed him), he'll come back again, too. And
even if we bury the Catholic Church and its view of things (I say we
because it is Catholics themselves who are most guilty of burying the
true Church), she, too, like her founder, will come back again.
The phoenix is a mythical bird, and the turtle is a turtle dove. Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle fully ends thus ...
Truth may seem, but cannot be:
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
And
so there is a hint, even in the forlorn end of the one poem of
Shakespeare's that nobody has read - except of course G. K. Chesterton -
the one poem that everybody has buried; there is a hint of hope at the
very end. A phoenix never ends in ashes, even if those ashes are enclosed in an urn. And we cannot cremate truth and beauty – or goodness for that matter – our hearts will not long endure it.
For
Our Lord and Savior rose from the tomb; and may we pray that our once
fully Christian Culture - which is to say our once Catholic culture -
the culture that produced the greatest writer of all time - and that
produced Shakespeare as well - may we all pray that this Catholic
culture, the only culture of sanity and common sense the world has ever
known, may one day do the same – may one day rise again from the tomb.
Thank you.
