UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO

FACULDADE DE FILOSOFIA, LETRAS E CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS

DEPARTAMENTO DE LETRAS MODERNAS

Adriana Regina Buzzetti nº USP 6468271

Shakespeare: obra e crítica – Prof. Dr. John Milton

SHAKESPEARE AND HIS POPULARITY: AN ESSAY ON JONATHAN

BATE’S “A MAN FOR ALL AGES”

How can an author that wrote plays and poems in the transition from the

medieval times to the modern age still be recognized about 400 years later as the author

of all times and of all ages? In the era of the electronic gadgets, when every adolescent –

and even many adults – prefer the easiness of having fun with computer games rather

than working their brains out with a good book, how can it be explained that everyone

at least knows that William Shakespeare was an English writer? Not to mention the cult

involving his name among the literature lovers. Where does this popularity come from?

Since he was buried in 1616 in his home town Stratford-upon-Avon with no honors how

come did his plays and sonnets become so popular and some of his characters so

representative that they achieved the status of entities?

First of all, the reprints of his plays should be taken into consideration. Some

actors who had worked with him were responsible for the publication of his works in

Folio size seven years after his death. This Folio got three more reprints before the end

of the 17th century and there were other new editions in the following centuries. As

stated by Jonathan Bate, these publications made Shakespeare’s work more available to

the public than his contemporaries.

 Moreover, in the end of the 17th century, Shakespeare’s plays suffered some

alterations in terms of language, which made them more palatable to more concerned

audiences. Many considered the language in his plays low and not appropriate to

families. The elite which had been influenced by the neoclassical tradition of the French

thought “tragedy should be kept apart from comedy and high style from low”. Thus, in

order to make his plays more accessible to more people, the poet John Dryden was in

charge of refining the language in the plays for new performances, “polishing and

improving it”. Also, some alterations in the plots were made, because people thought

that innocent characters should not die; others were removed because they were not

appropriate to the highness expected from a tragedy, for example. On the other hand,

some of his contemporaries found in his works examples of mastery in the use of

language, in a moment when the English language was in a process of expansion,

incorporating and creating new words. The Oxford English Dictionary played an

important role in that due to the fact that it attributes to Shakespeare the first use of

many words.

All this accessibility and the adaptations made Shakespeare’s work more

popular, but it would not have been so if it was not for an actor called David Garrick.

He helped develop and propagate the cult of the bard or Bardolatry. Garrick was

talented enough to outstrip other actors who used to play the most important characters

on stage. Managing his own acting company, Garrick brought more respect to the

profession of actor and helped increase the bard’s popularity. According to Bate, the

celebration of the bicentenary of Shakespeare’s birth organized by Garrick in Stratford-

upon-Avon triggered the literary tourist industry that took over the town.

One can say that Shakespeare was vey connected to what happened in England

and in other parts of the known world at his time. But it should not be ignored that he
was quite ahead if his time when it comes to the role women played in his stories.

Needless to say that female roles had to be played by young men, but the female

characters themselves showed women in a better position that they in fact occupied.

Taking Romeo & Juliet into account, it can be said that Juliet was very strong-willed for

a teenage girl who should obey her parents with no questioning. Let alone the nurse,

who had a very effective participation, stating her opinion to Lady Capulet and Juliet

herself about the girl’s behavior.

As mentioned above, Shakespeare was aware of what was happening and took

advantage of the moment to historically situate his plays. He was political enough to

dedicate some works to politician who patronized his work, as the Earl of Essex and the

Earl of Southampton, and also to perform some plays to directly flatter Queen Elizabeth

I. Many plays also have Republicanism as background to the conflicts arisen. Bate says

that the fact that both monarchy and republic can be portrayed in his plays is a sign of

Shakespeare’s capacity to adapt and, therefore, this is why his work has survived four

centuries.

One of the most interesting aspects of Shakespeare’s plays that contribute to his

popularity until today rests on his characters. Harold Bloom cites Samuel Johnson to go

as far as to say that Shakespeare helped us understand human nature; that his characters

are imitations of life; that they represent universal characteristics which relate to all the

people who read his plays; and that “personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean

invention”. Bloom claims that Shakespeare goes so deep into the souls of the characters

that he could understand more about the psyche than Freud did. Shakespeare was

profound enough to understand the essence of human beings and to portray it through

his characters. The Shakespearean characters are not stereotyped. They have both good

and bad moral qualities, they live the highs and lows, the ups and downs of life as
human beings do. What they feel and show can be felt and shown by people from any

part of the world. The plays, therefore, could not be categorized in comedies or

tragedies since they have the elements that are part of both genres. And there lies their

and their creator’s universalism. Shakespeare did not need high education in order to do

what he did. As said by Dryden, “he needed not the spectacles of Books to read

Nature”, which means he found his own way to understand people and their nature and

used it in his work. And this is how the concept of negative capability relates to Bate’s

text. This idea corroborates the notion of his universalism as one can understand his

plays as open work that can be adapted and interpreted at the light of the context

surrounding who reads it.

REFERENCES

BATE, Jonathan. A man for all ages. Article published in The Guardian on 14th
April 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/14/classics.shopping

BLOOM, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York:

Riverhead, 1998.