The University of Birmingham provides their opinion…
“Why are you asking the Prime Minister about a dead playwright?” That is how one unimpressed constituent put it to James Morris, MP for Halesowen and Rowley Regis and Chair of the APPG for Shakespeare when he stood up at PMQs recently to raise the importance of Shakespeare’s works as a force for freedom in the world.
The constituent may have had a point.
What business do politicians have with Shakespeare? Aren’t there more urgent matters for our legislators to be dealing with than a famous four-centuries-dead playwright, who could hardly be said to need encouragement? And can’t we just get on with performing, reading, and admiring Shakespeare, without the state getting involved? What is the point of an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Shakespeare?
One important reason Westminster should take an interest in Shakespeare is that Shakespeare took a profound interest in Westminster. His concern with how historical change happens and how power is obtained and passed on led him to dramatize some of the key events which had taken place in Parliament over the two centuries before his time. When we now remember Richard II, builder of Westminster Hall, our view is still shaped by Shakespeare’s depiction of what happened there soon after its completion, ‘the Parliament scene, and the deposing of King Richard’. This episode in Richard II was so sensitive that it was only added to printed editions more than a decade after its original publication.
The plays of Shakespeare have long formed part of our political language: questions of popular sovereignty and the rival claims of commons, peers and monarchs haunt all his English histories. Sir Edward Dering, one of the first recorded buyers of the First Folio, staged an amateur performance of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 in 1622 which focussed on matters of political legitimacy, at a time when James I’s aspirations to absolute rule were pushing the country towards constitutional crisis. Dering went on to become a commander during the Civil War, and Shakespeare’s depictions of usurpation and rebellion clearly served as a vital part of his political education.
As Speaker in 1714, Sir Thomas Hanmer found himself trying to guide the House at a time when debates as to whether a Stuart or a Hanoverian should succeed Queen Anne threatened to plunge the nation into renewed civil war. Hanmer was relieved when the crown passed to the first Hanoverian, George I, but the Jacobite leanings of some of Hanmer’s Tory colleagues alarmed the new dynasty and condemned to perpetual opposition, Hanmer found he had time on his hands for literary pursuits.
While one Jacobite, John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, set about rewriting Julius Caesar to make it less sympathetic to the conspirators, Hanmer took instead to editing. With financial support from the Countess of Shaftesbury (who in the 1730s established the first Shakespeare fan organization, the Shakespeare Ladies Club), Hanmer published his Oxford edition of the Complete Works in 1744, the only Speaker to date to have pursued a second career in Shakespearean scholarship.
As Buckingham’s adaptation suggests, in the eighteenth-century Julius Caesar had become Shakespeare’s most important play for politicians. A cast of young aristocrats attending Westminster School staged it at the Haymarket Theatre in 1721, the first recorded instance of a school production of Shakespeare. By the 1770s the theatre critic Francis Gentleman was expressing a hope that all MPs would memorize Julius Caesar, that Parliament would commission an annual command performance, and that it should become part of a national school and university curriculum: from this, he claimed, the public would reap ‘essential service.’
Those who wonder why Parliament should be interested in Shakespeare might be reminded that some of these wishes are now granted, in ways which make the modern state one of Shakespeare’s leading patrons. Shakespeare’s plays are now embedded in the education system. Parliament may not have acquired the habit of ordering its own performances of Julius Caesar, but through the Department for Education the executive attends to Shakespeare in the classroom, and through the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport it provides a low but symbolically important level of subsidy for productions of Shakespeare in our theatres. Other branches of the state find themselves dealing with Shakespeare too: the Ministry of Justice when Shakespeare is staged in prisons, the Department of Health & Social Care when ‘applied Shakespeare’ is put to therapeutic purposes, and even the Foreign Office when Shakespeare provides opportunities for cultural diplomacy.
It was the Foreign Office which supported the RSC’s outreach to China in the days of the ‘golden age of Anglo-Chinese relations’ under Cameron and Hague; it was Shakespeare’s plays which were at the heart of the Cultural Olympiad in 2012, when Shakespeare’s Globe played host to ’36 plays in 36 languages’; and it was a copy of Henry V which the Prime Minister presented to President Zelensky on the occasion of his visit to Parliament in February this year – on the same day, incidentally, as the first meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Shakespeare.
But might Parliamentarians and the public alike yet reap more ‘essential service’ from Shakespeare? As Erica Whyman of the RSC pointed out at the first meeting of the APPG, Shakespearean drama teaches not only eloquence but a highly nuanced level of mutual listening. At the second meeting, a cast of distinguished RSC actors will read passages from Julius Caesar – a play which enjoyed a worldwide wave of topical productions in the wake of the populist irruptions of 2016. These passages provide a textbook display of how civilized rhetoric can unleash mob violence, but might they not also provide clues as to how a shared political language might contain and avoid such violence?
Shakespeare. A dead playwright? But his works and legacy are very much alive today. And if Parliamentarians are responsible for maintaining Shakespeare’s presence across many areas of our public life, then perhaps through attending to Shakespeare they might also attend to the health of our public discourse.
- Professor Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
- James Morris, MP for Halesowen and Rowley Regis
