Happy Birthday, Shakespeare

First and foremost, after a long two months, welcome back to Poets & Parchment. I started this site with such excitement and then unfortunately shortly after found myself extremely distracted by basically everything else. Writing music, school, and work are things that will always come first for me, but what I love about this online journal of mine is just that: it’s mine! There are no rules and therefore nothing happens if I don’t post, the world keeps spinning. 

However, I decided that when I did finally come back to posting (hopefully) semi-regularly, there would be a reason. That reason? Well today, April 23rd, is Shakespeare’s birthday! Anyone that knows me or talks to me on a daily basis knows that my favorite thing in the world is simply anything by William Shakespeare (don’t tell Hemingway that, though). I am sadly nearing the end of my second, and final, Shakespeare course at the University of Arizona with one of my favorite professors, and while I am excited for the summer and finishing out classes, I am becoming increasingly saddened at the thought of not having a class completely dedicated to my favorite type of literature. While I am still obviously able to read Shakespeare whenever I want, there is nothing quite like being in a class for an hour and fifteen minutes where you get to not only discuss what you’ve read, but learn about the context and the history of why the play was written in the first place. 

Unfortunately, we don’t know much about Shakespeare aside from minor details and simple facts. Any letters or additional writings he did have been lost, or were just never held onto to begin with. But we do know that he was born on April 23rd, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom, and that he passed away on April 23rd, 1616. He was married to a woman named Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children, and four grandchildren who passed without heirs. 

Quite literally, we do not know much else about his personal life. We can infer plenty from other writers and what we know was happening at the time. Stephen Greenblatt, esteemed Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote a very good book titled Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, where he discusses what he believes Shakespeare’s life would have been like based on the history of London and the surrounding area that we know of. Aside from basic details, we don’t know a lot, and it truly is a shame. Considering Shakespeare is one of, if not the most famous writer in English literature, one would think that scholars and historians would know more. 

So, with that and with all we know, my favorite thing about Shakespeare and the reason I will always say his name when asked, “If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be?” is simply because of the way he writes women.

With literature from so long ago, it’s hard to imagine that a male writer would actually write something that isn’t inherently misogynistic. Misogyny is kind of built into the world we live in. It has become almost common practice, at least in the literature world, to take a piece of writing for what it is, and not for the person behind it, unless you need information for contextual reasons. Jack London, for instance, is one of the classic American writers from the 19th and 20th centuries that I love to read from, but his views on race and the lower class leave much to be desired. 

That’s not at all to say that we should support writers or artists that are not good people. But unfortunately, art, literature, and writers will always be indicative of the time period that they are in, and through reading them, we can learn what life used to be like, and in turn learn that we do not want to go back to that.

Shakespeare, however, does something a little different in his plays that seems to diverge from the societal and literature norm of his time. He tends to follow a pattern, and while many of his plays are generally male-centered, Shakespeare almost always ensures that the smartest people in his plays are the women. The most level-headed characters will always be women, and there are a multitude of examples of this. 

Take The Merchant of Venice. The principal female character is a woman named Portia, who is portrayed throughout the play as almost omniscient, or all-knowing. She is extremely intelligent, and uses this knowledge to resolve the crisis that almost causes the play to move to a tragic ending, rather than a comedic one. 

Another example is Emilia in Othello. While she is not the main heroine, she uses her wit and intelligence to expose her husband, Iago, who is without a doubt portraying the “vice” character that would have been common in Shakespeare’s time and known amongst his audience. This is essentially someone whose entire motives are purely evil, and they are pretty much only there to bring down the main character. In one of the last scenes with Emilia, she speaks to Desdemona, the “angelic” wife of Othello, about the equality of sexuality between men and women, and how ultimately, men and women are not so different in terms of sexual freedom and expression; they’re just quieter about it because they have to be.

In my personal favorite play, Much Ado About Nothing, one of the four main characters, Beatrice, is genuinely one of the best characters I have ever had the privilege of getting to know. From the moment she enters the stage, she immediately comes across as smarter than all of the men around her. Her counterpart, Benedick, dislikes her at the beginning entirely because of her wit, believing it is that of a man’s, saying that he wishes his “horse had the speed of her tongue.”

Aside from just intelligence, Shakespeare understands how to write kind and soft women, as well. As I previously mentioned, Desdemona is the angel-like wife of Othello, who even through the chaos and darkness of Cyprus stays true to herself and remains kind and gentle no matter what happens to her. Even in her unfair death, she is loyal to her husband despite all of the false infidelity rumors that have been spread about her. 

There are so many other examples I could list, but I’m sure if you are unfamiliar with these plays, reading a long list of, albeit incredibly developed, characters can get a bit tedious and unnecessary, so I’ll leave it at those four. All of that to say, William Shakespeare ultimately understood what women wanted. He knew that during the day so many women would either come with friends, their husbands, or even by themselves to see his plays. He knew that they would want to see themselves represented through performance, and for the time, he did such an excellent job at doing so. This idea of women having agency and being their own person was so rare, that portraying women as being intelligent, kind, funny, well-rounded individuals was so incredibly important, as it still is today, four centuries later. 

So, this is a pretty short post, but to sum everything up, I just want to say happy birthday to William Shakespeare, and I wish I could thank him for giving fourteen year old me, as well as twenty-one year old me, her favorite stories in the whole world. 

See you so soon (I promise!),

Lindsey Hoover