Photograph by Michael Lionstar
Shakespeare just doesn’t show his age. His female characters were performed by men, and now women are performing his male characters; his tragedies have been re-set on a modern London police force, in a corporate office tower, and on an Iowa farm; he’s been animated, parodied, set to jazz, and turned into science fiction. Living With Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors is a new anthology that pulls together essays by people who have directed, acted, or reimagined the Bard: Julie Taymor, Ben Kingsley, Camille Paglia, Ralph Fiennes…and St. Louis native Jane Smiley, who was so irritated by the King Lear she learned at John Burroughs High School that she rewrote it as A Thousand Acres and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Smiley’s essay explains her impatience with Lear’s daughters and her frustration that their father’s tyranny went unexplored. “I was sure that if I was detailed enough, Shakespeare would see the daughters my way.”
You also point out that by the end of his life, he seemed far wiser in his definition of love.
If you read the plays in order, you can see that he evolves a little bit away from tragedy. The ones that have the greatest status are Hamlet, King Lear, Othello. You can see why: They are very moving and very grand. But at the end of his life, he was writing different things. In The Tempest, the main character says, “I’m done here.” He has a much more removed point of view. The action goes on around him. He contemplates it, but he’s slightly removed from it, whereas in the tragedies it does seem as though Shakespeare sort of pours himself into the feelings of the characters.
What about you—has your reaction to Shakespeare changed over the years?
Because we were introduced to Shakespeare at Burroughs at such an early age, I almost have no adult thoughts about Shakespeare. All of my thoughts are really entangled with being a kid looking at the adult and being told, “This is great. This is right. This is true.” I didn’t grow up in a religious family, so it was like people reading the Bible in their childhood. It’s very hard to separate your adult thoughts about that from your childhood thoughts.
Not too long ago, I watched a very modern production of Hamlet with Bill Murray as Polonius. What struck me this time was, I don’t agree with Hamlet. I don’t want there to be revenge. I want the mother and father to be tried and the witnesses to come forward and a case to be made. I’m in my sixties. The first time I read the play, I was in 10th grade. I’ve spent 50 years nodding along with Hamlet.
Yet you were brave enough to rewrite Lear!
It’s not just that I rewrote King Lear. I also wrote my own Norse saga, and I also rewrote the Decameron.
The first imitation of the Decameron [a medieval allegory by Giovanni Boccaccio] was by the French queen Marguerite of Navarre. The question she posed to her nine fellow storytellers was, “Can a woman know true love and also retain her virtue?” And the answer they came up with was no. My answer was yes, absolutely, because it doesn’t matter what she does sexually, as long as she’s thoughtful. She can have virtue and know love, because she’s a thoughtful, self-directed person. That’s a very modern answer.
I participated in an anniversary celebration of Shakespeare for the Folger Library. I offered a little short story about Marguerite of Navarre and [her friend, Italian poet] Vittoria Colonna giving Desdemona some advice. Vittoria writes to Marguerite and says, “You need to help this girl.” And of course Desdemona doesn’t listen.
For us the issues Othello raises are a little bit obscure and abstruse. When I was growing up in St. Louis, everybody was nice. I was well treated. It was all in the books. But for women in other parts of the world, male jealousy and male possessiveness and whether or not a woman can know true love are very real questions. Othello remains the most current of Shakespeare’s plays.
Did it take a certain audacity to do those rewrites?
It’s funny—I was walking through the Metropolitan Museum of Art one day, and I passed a man who was sitting in front of a painting I thought was quite beautiful. He looked like he was in despair. I called a friend who’s an artist and asked why. He said it was probably because it was so far beyond that man’s capacity to paint anything that good. And I thought, “Wow. I’ve never heard a writer say that.” Novelists don’t think other books are perfect. They think, “If Tolstoy had just come to me, I could have helped him do a rewrite.” Paintings and sculpture have a kind of perfection of surface that throws criticism off. But literary pieces are imperfect by nature. Because you experience literature sentence-by-sentence, minute-by-minute, over time, it doesn’t have that perfection of surface.
You’ve never read a flawless masterpiece?
There are books I do think are absolutely perfect from beginning to end. Our Mutual Friend. He Knew He Was Right. The Good Soldier. But if I put my list of perfect books on the Internet, zillions of people will come and say, “No, no, no, the tone of He Knew He Was Right is all wrong.” Henry James said Our Mutual Friend was “a loose, baggy monster.” Writers are never confirmed in their views of perfection.
How do you feel about Lear now?
After A Thousand Acres had been out about 10 years, I went to a convention in L.A. called Shakespeare in the 20th Century. The T-shirt had a picture of Shakespeare with short hair, wearing a T-shirt, looking hip. And there was a woman there, a Shakespearean scholar from an English university, and she talked more about Shakespeare’s biography and how as his father got older he seems to have suffered from dementia. Then I realized that one of the reasons, possibly, that the three daughters seem so one-dimensional is that they were each aspects of Shakespeare’s own response to his father’s condition. There was a part of him that wanted to be perfect and kind and good, and there was a part of him that was just enraged. As we get older, we learn more about how complex life is. So I’m not repudiating A Thousand Acres, but every novel you write is sort of a broadcast from a particular stage of ignorance at any given time in your life.
How has your own work deepened?
Well I don’t know if that’s for me to say. One of your jobs as a novelist is to maintain your own interest in your own work, and the way I’ve done that is to try all different things. I can’t say if it’s become deeper, but it’s become more complex. When I wrote Horse Heaven, I was seeing the world as a mixed place: It had its funny parts, it had its scary parts, it had its evil parts, and they were all perfectly represented in the microcosm of the racing industry. But then you go on, and you throw off that lens. In the mid-2000s I got interested in science, so I got interested in Private Life in that particular crackpot scientist, who’s a good Missouri boy. But I also got interested in the computer. And now I’m writing a trilogy that I think incorporates more ideas and a larger set of characters. I don’t know. You just keep going.
What do you think was Shakespeare’s genius?
The ability to come up with an endless number of characters and more or less get inside their heads and get them to express themselves in a believable way. One of the things that drew me to King Lear was that it had kind of a Nordic sensibility, vengeful and cold. Which was unusual for Shakespeare, but he got into it perfectly. I’m believing that Lear is taking place in Northumberland, and that Two Gentlemen of Verona took place in Italy. He was really good at fleshing out the people and the places.
So much fuss is made over how much he “stole” or appropriated from earlier works…
Oh, God, everybody does it. You can’t not do it. Supposedly there are only two plots: A stranger comes to town or a person in town leaves. In college I took drama up to and including Shakespeare, and really, gag me with a spoon, there was nothing interesting being produced. I think part of his pleasure must have been to take these pieces of trash that people had been producing forever, in his view, and give them new life along with the new ideas that were swirling around him. And that’s what we would call a Renaissance.
Living With Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors (Vintage Original), will be released on April 9.
