This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

Shakespeare

“Adieu, adieu! remember me.” This phrase, uttered by Hamlet’s father as he alternately appears and disappears is the trigger of the tragedy. Hamlet doubts because he remembers. He acts because he remembers. Where others forget or wish to forget, Hamlet shoulders the burden of remembering and of reminding everyone of their obligation to be or not to be. His location is anomalous. Hamlet is a prince and lives in Elsinore, a palace filled with dynastic memories. A monarchy is sustained by tradition remembered; therein lies its legitimacy. Hamlet rebels, specifically, against the subversion of legitimacy committed by King Claudius, his father’s brother and murderer. Memory, succession, and legitimacy are the true “bare bodkin” that Hamlet brandishes, though the price he pays will be the “hush” of death.

Don Quixote, in contrast, emerges from an obscure village in an obscure province of Spain. So obscure, in reality, that the even more obscure author cannot or will not remember the name of the place. Cannot or will not: the place grows dark, it hides, it fades to black. The place is la mancha—that is, “the stain.” Right there, in the middle of Cervantes’s blank memory, the modern novel begins, sketching a vast circle that culminates with the obsession of Proust’s narrator, in search of lost time, or with the narrators of William Faulkner, who are there so that nobody will forget the burden of history, race, the Sartorises, the Snopes, the South. .

Hamlet promises his father’s ghost that he will banish from “the table of my memory” all but that which was his father’s legacy. We live in a “distracted globe,” as the Prince of Denmark observes, but as long as memory has a place at his table, all “trivial fond records” will be “wiped away.” The memory, after all, is the “warder of the brain” and Hamlet wishes to keep it that way, in living, breathing color. Macbeth, on the other hand, wishes to forget, to render memory nothing more than “fume.” Hamlet wants to remember a crime: Macbeth wants to forget one; he wants to pluck from the memory a “rooted sorrow”; he needs to banish all the burdens etched upon his mind, to find the sweet antidote that will “cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff”—that is, memory, the heart’s remorse. . What a contrast with Hamlet and his fervent desire to maintain his memory ever “green,” like the everlasting plant of life.

Such tension between memory and oblivion, such a mise en abîme of memory, reveals the sonorous modernity of both Shakespeare and Cervantes. Hamlet, Macbeth, and Quixote are all protagonists of a difficult and selective memory. Hamlet wishes to remember a crime. Macbeth wishes to forget one. Quixote only wants to remember his books, in the plural, yet he ends up remembering his own book, in the singular. A dilemma that is completely anathema to the epic of antiquity. According to Eric Auerbach, the omni-inclusivity of the epic is precisely what makes it an epic. Everything fits, everything must fit into the epic. Homer and Virgil forget nothing. Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, on the other hand, has been forgotten by his wife, his friends, his society. Everyone thinks that he has died on the fields of battle at Eylau. Penelope, however, weaves and unweaves, convinced that Odysseus has neither died nor will be forgotten. The characters of antiquity possess names and attributes that are unforgettable, immutable, eternal: Odysseus is the prudent one, Nestor is the subduer, while the light (and choleric) one is Achilles. But then, between two steps on the staircase, the house-maid forgets the name that Walter Shandy wishes to give his newborn son, Trismegistus, and thanks to the slipshod memory of a house servant, the “hero” of the novel finds himself forever saddled with a most undesirable name, Tristram.

Gogol adds a sublime twist to the relationship between memory and identity. His rogue Khlestakov is remembered by all, not as who he is but rather as something he is not: the feared Inspector General. With Kafka, we return to the tradition of Cervantes: nobody remembers the Land Surveyor K. And then Milan Kundera puts the final touch on this tradition in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in which those who remember forget. Kundera, writing this from within a repressed, disguised society, where nothing is what it claims or appears to be, tells us that forgetting is the only memory of those who cannot or will not identify themselves or others.

In his magnificent story “Instructions for John Howell” Julio Cortázar offers us yet another clue to the question of memory and forgetting. The eponymous character attends a play in a theater. A look of sheer terror comes across the face of the actress, who whispers to Howell, the spectator, “Save me. They are trying to kill me.” What is happening? Has Howell entered the play, or has the heroine entered the daily life of Mr. Howell?

What Cortázar proposes here is a circularity of genres, a blasphemy for which the minds of the Enlightenment — most notably Voltaire — reproached Shakespeare, for offering what they considered to be a vulgar salad of tragedy and comedy, characters both noble and burlesque, who could both spout lyrics and belch grotesquely, all in the same work of literature. Cervantes also broke through genres, mixing the epic and the picaresque, the pastoral novel and the love novel, but most of all mixing novels within the novel. This is where Shakespeare and Cervantes converge: in this circulation of genres, in that “impurity” that so offended Voltaire: Quixote’s Manchegan maculation and Macbeth’s soiled hands.

In the end, Shakespeare and Cervantes come together in this circulation of genres, effectively baptizing the freedom of contemporary creative life. With these two authors, the circulation manifests itself in a clear and parallel manner: in Cervantes, the novel within the novel, which becomes the theater within the theater in the puppet stage of Master Pedro which, in turn, leads directly into Shakespeare’s play within the play, the objective of which, in the case of Hamlet, is to “catch the conscience of the king.” Harry Levin, analyzing these two plays within plays, suggests that Hamlet ’s King Claudius interrupts the performance because the play has come too close to reality. In Don Quixote, however, the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance abruptly interrupts a performance that has come too close to his imagination. Claudius would like his reality, the death of Hamlet’s father, to remain hidden behind a lie. Don Quixote, however, would like his fantasy to become a reality: a princess imprisoned by the Moors, rescued by Don Quixote’s impassioned valor.

Claudius must kill the theater so that he can kill reality. Quixote must kill the theater so that he can give life to his imagination. Quixote is the ambassador of reading. Hamlet is the ambassador of death. To make the world remember, Hamlet, the hero of the North, imposes death upon himself and others as the only acceptable solution to his historical energy. To make the world imagine, Quixote, the hero of the South, imposes art upon the world, an absolute art that takes the place of a dead history. Hamlet is the hero of doubt, and his mad skepticism discharges a torrent of mortal energy. In the end, Hamlet offers a sacrifice to reason, the triumphant daughter of his ills. Don Quixote is the hero of faith. Our gentleman believes in what he reads and his sacrifice is the recovery of reason. And so he must die. When Alonso Quijano comes to his senses, Don Quixote can no longer imagine.

Hamlet and Don Quixote have something else in common as well. Both are nascent figures, characters that were inconceivable before Shakespeare and Cervantes shaped them with the clay of their imagination and set them on their course of action. The heroes of antiquity are born armed, like Minerva from the head of Zeus. They are born in one piece, whole. Don Quixote and Hamlet are unimaginable before they are described; both start off as inconceivable figures and eventually become eternal archetypes thanks to the contaminating circulation of genres. Their impurity gives them form. Claudio Guillén describes Don Quixote as an intense dialogue of genres that confront each other, debate among themselves, make fun of each other, and desperately call out for something that is just beyond their reach. And doesn’t Hamlet, in that Shakespearean freedom of genres, that magnificent stylistic jumble, that offers the sublime and the crass in the very same breath, as simultaneous as the rhetoric of Henry V and the belching of the cowardly Ancient Pistol, coincide exactly with the Cervantine stylistic confrontations?

Sancho Panza infuses this démarche—step, approach, demarcation — with its wildest meaning when he, the squire, the very representative of earthly realism, becomes the ersatz governor of the island of Barataria and, just like his master, Don Quixote, must act (though less happily) in another fiction within the fiction.

Shakespeare has his anti — Sancho Panza: the pompous Polonius who, in the most satisfying manner, declares his lack of respect for genre (which he obviously respects because genre is respectable and he is the guardian of courtly respectability) when he extols the virtues of the company of actors that has just arrived at Elsinore. “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene indivisible, or poem unlimited.”

The limited and divisible worlds of Shakespeare and Cervantes reject the unity of the indivisible, the poetry of eternity. The man of La Mancha and the Bard of Avon are here and now, for they are men of the Renaissance. One is more sorrowful than the other because his Spanish history is flagging, exhausted by the imperial impulse to circumnavigate the globe and conquer a new world, and drained by persecution and intolerance toward its Arab and Jewish traditions. For this reason Cervantes adopts the mask of comedy. But then the other is even more sorrowful because he harbors no illusions about the actors that strut across the stage like peacocks for an hour or so, looking back fondly upon some glorious exploits in Rome or Egypt, England or Scotland. For that reason, at the height of the Elizabethan triumph, Shakespeare dons the mask of tragedy.

I don’t think either of the two believes in God but then, neither of them can say so, and if the Englishman believes in the tragedy of will and the Spaniard believes in the comedy of the imagination, both certainly know how difficult it is willfully to hold on to one’s imagination except through “words, words, words. . ”

Quixote the good and Macbeth the bad wish to forget. Hamlet the undecided wishes to remember. But the Quixote character is of the novel; Hamlet and Macbeth, of theater. Quixote uses the mask of comedy; Hamlet and Macbeth, of tragedy. Quixote reads and is read. Hamlet and Macbeth act and are seen. Borges asks himself why we are so bothered by the notion that Don Quixote is a reader of Don Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet. He ventures that these inversions suggest, in turn, that if the characters within a work of fiction may be readers or spectators, then we, as readers and spectators, may also be works of fiction. But Shakespeare is theater, spectacle, public space.

One day, when I was with the writer Terenci Moix in Barcelona, I remembered London’s glorious old Gainsborough film studios, maker of movies featuring a Margaret Lockwood who could scarcely squeeze into her plunging necklines even though she hid her abundant bosom so that she might escape at night dressed as a man, to rob highways in the company of James Mason, and, no doubt, to later reward her lover with that very bosom.

Today, those old studios have become condominiums. But in a kind of posthumous artistic tribute, one of Gainsborough’s old soundstages was transformed into a theater for the duration of four months, to host a double bill of drama. On alternating nights, to packed houses, Ralph Fiennes performed two of Shakespeare’s political tragedies, Richard II and Coriolanus. The dashing movie actor, well known for his roles in The English Patient, Schindler’s List, and The End of the A fair, is, above all else, a creature of the stage. His Hamlet, performed on Broadway in 1995, won him a Tony Award. His Richard and his Coriolanus were the kind of award an actor bestows upon himself.

Both are among the most difficult roles of the Shakespearean canon because they are, to put it one way, naked works. In Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear, the protagonists do not know their fate but the audience does, so clearly that one almost wants to shout out to Romeo, “Don’t kill yourself, Juliet’s alive,” or “Iago is deceiving you. Desdemona is faithful,” to Othello. In Richard II and Coriolanus, the protagonists possess an absolutely perfect knowledge of who they are, and the audience is aware of this as well. In this sense, we have no surprises. What we do have — thanks to the decidedly public nature of both works — is the most intense dramatic reflection on the nature of politics and the exercise of power.

Richard II was written in 1595, between Titus Andronicus, the work of a beginner, and Romeo and Juliet, the playwright’s first major triumph. Richard II is a work about how power is held and how it is lost. There are two Richards. The Richard of the first part feels he has been anointed by God. He embodies the divine right of kings and he exercises this right capriciously. The ceremony gives power an incarnation and Fiennes infuses his character with a ritualistic movement, almost that of a sacred dandy. He is a man with two bodies: one anointed, the other physical. The monarch’s imagination closes in on itself in its attempt to reconcile man and king. Richard’s obsession is that of being king in spite of being a man; in other words, he is obsessed with annihilating the man in order to be king.

Such an enterprise requires a tremendous exercise of imagination and Richard, as he imagines himself, loses his grip on himself and his power. For him, the crown is a decorative accessory. Power, for Richard, becomes an interior fact, the power of the imagination, a lyric metaphysic. Victim of the imagination of power, the king loses all notion of how to exercise that power. His frivolity leads him to behave arbitrarily. His arbitrary behavior sparks the enmity of those people hurt by his power. The mounting list of grievances explode in rebellion. Defeated, Richard learns that his crown is hollow and that the name of his court is Death.

Ralph Fiennes moves deftly from the first Richard, frivolous and autocratic, to the second, beaten and bruised. His pain does not remain inside him. He empties himself of it with a kind of guilty tenderness. His greatness is his defeat, his pain, his woe. History allows him nothing more than to “sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.” In effect, he is telling the world, “You may crush my power and my glory but not my pain.”

Fiennes gives a great performance of a rather unforgiving role in a theatrical work that has its fair share of formalistic flaws. It is absolutely appropriate to pair it with Shakespeare’s most perfect political tragedy, Coriolanus, written in 1607, between Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, toward the end of the playwright’s career.

If Ralph Fiennes doubles his breadth as an actor in Richard II, he quadruples it in his performance of Coriolanus. This is a character at war with Rome, his homeland, the enemies of Rome, his mother, and himself. Coriolanus, champion of the Roman patriciate and detested by the city plebes, returns home triumphant from the war with the tribes threatening his city. Elected consul, he manages to turn all the plebeians against him, exiles himself from Rome to join his old enemies, prepares to sack and set fire to the city, until his mother Volumnia is able to dissuade him. But his clemency will cost him his life. In plainer, uglier terms, Coriolanus somehow ends up getting on everyone’s bad side. Except his mother’s. But this is the felicity that will ultimately destroy him, because Coriolanus, in his mother’s eyes, is not a creature made of flesh and bone. He is an icon of power, the product of maternal fantasy. She does not love her son, she loves the military and political conqueror. She does not allow him to be who he is. She wants to make him believe that “a man were author of himself, and knew no other kin.”

What the mother — in a peerless performance by the extraordinary Barbara Jefford — does not know is that Coriolanus will never be a great politician because he does not understand the art of adaptation, the art of the chameleon. He is a man of principle, without vanity or airs of importance, vices that a patrician scorns because he has no need to appear a certain way or act in a certain manner other than his own. He is. But Coriolanus’s integrity endangers the vanity and venality of those around him. He is doomed. He makes everyone uncomfortable. He will remain alone. And he knows this. He will be defeated if he acts, and he will be defeated if he doesn’t.

The genius of Shakespeare — and of Fiennes as well — lies in his ability to give this fatal man (a man who is conscious of his own dismal fate) an extraordinary sliver of humanity. A surprising sliver for such a verbal, discursive, occasionally rhetorical author as Shakespeare. That sliver — or crevice, if you will — is silence. The character of the wife Virgilia calls Coriolanus to a love without words. During those quiet moments with his beloved, Coriolanus shows that he is also conscious of what he loses, and that is love, victim of the political web that transforms manna from heaven into bile.

A work of art with a commitment to the political act, with the themes of party and state, Coriolanus has given rise to all sorts of ideological confusion. The French Right, in 1933, applauded it and the Left prohibited it. The Nazis glorified it and the U.S. occupying army, in 1945, banned all performances of it in Germany for a period of eight years. Brecht turned it into a Communist epic about class struggle: the good plebeians versus the bad patricians.

Without these congested ideologies, Coriolanus, a superior work of the Shakespearean canon, is nothing more than the story of a man abandoned by everyone. Shakespeare lends a rather inconclusive air to the work, just as Beethoven, another genius, did with his own Coriolanus, by ending it in an indistinct musical penumbra.

There is, finally, another Shakespeare, and to see it one must turn to the film version of Titus Andronicus, brought to the screen by the famous set designer of The Lion King, Julie Taymor. Ms. Taymor does not beat around the bush; she gives Titus’s daughter, whose tongue and virtue have both been mutilated, branches in place of hands. In this early work, Shakespeare decided to defeat Christopher Marlowe at his game of horrors that are more bearable when seen from the distance offered by the theater, as opposed to the close proximity the camera affords. Men buried up to their necks in sand, almost starving to death. Men who allow their hands to be chopped off in order to save their children’s lives, only to see them in jars alongside the decapitated heads of young princes. Men strung up by their feet, their heads cut off so that the blood will spill out in thick torrents. The children of Tamora, the proto — Lady Macbeth (played by a raging Jessica Lange), served to their father as vengeful cakes cooked up by Titus Andronicus (the chameleonesque Anthony Hopkins).

The list is an endless one and it reminds us that there is truly nothing new under the sun. In the annals of horror, Titus Andronicus beats American Psycho, Crash, and Stephen King. This is what allowed Voltaire to write off the Bard of Avon as “the height of ferocity and horror. . a barbaric buffoon. . whose works deserve the audiences of county fairs of two hundred years ago.” Shakespeare’s assault on “good taste” and “restraint” are truly admirable and remind us of the ferocity with which Octavio Paz responded to the description of Mexican literature as “refined and subtle.” “Give it to them, let them bitch, the whores,” he said.

Shakespeare grabbed words by the ass and made them shriek and bitch, showing us that the range of verbal expression cannot be constrained by the constipated or famished genres of literature. The savage, lyrical, and tragic abundance of William Shakespeare continues to be the greatest evidence to support the conviction that ironclad rules have no place in literature. As well as the fact that critics can often make the funniest, and occasionally most deplorable, mistakes.