There’s nothing like binge-watching your favorite franchise to help you see the larger patterns in the weave, and having just recently achieved one of my more minor lifetime reading goals of absorbing all of Shakespeare by binging a large number of Shakespearean film adaptations, I find myself itching to share with someone some of my observations. Since the day I write this is the Fourth of July, it seems appropriate to begin with observations that connect Shakespeare to us here in America, even, more specifically, us here in the American South.
It should not surprise anyone that Shakespeare’s English shares certain properties with English here in the American South, given that the history of the South begins in his lifetime. The very first of the Colonies was, after all, Virginia, named in honor of Shakespeare’s own Queen Elizabeth, the virgin queen, and its first permanent settlement, Jamestown (named after her successor, King James), was founded in 1607, when Shakespeare was writing, or had just written, some of his best plays. Still, many see Shakespeare as exclusively English, in the narrow sense of the term, so it might come as a surprise to hear how natural his writing sounds when performed by an all-American-accented cast, as we find in the excellent adaptation of Romeo and Juliet done in 1996 with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in the title roles, or Joss Whedon & Co.’s version of Much Ado About Nothing several years later.
But what really strikes me about Shakespeare is how American some of his thinking appears at points. Just a few years back, as I was reading Julius Caesar for the first time since high school, I was surprised to find his characters talking as if they were written in the late eighteenth century instead of the late sixteenth. Just after Caesar has been stabbed, Brutus suggests they go through the marketplace waving their blood-soaked arms and swords, “And waving our red weapons o’er our heads / Let’s all cry, ‘Peace, freedom, and liberty!’” Then, after a meta-theatrical moment when they imagine the scene they are in being re-enacted on stage “many ages hence…in states unborn and accents yet unknown,” Cassius says, “So oft as that shall be, / So often shall the knot of us be called / The men that gave their country liberty.”
If I read this in an American version of the story of Caesar, I would suspect the author was projecting too much of his own cultural heritage back into ancient Rome, but this was Shakespeare—an Englishman. Were not the English the ones we fought a war against to establish our own liberty in 1776? What is this Briton doing sounding like Patrick Henry or George Washington? The truth is that the American Revolution was fought by Englishmen for the very rights they were accustomed to as Englishmen, but which were being denied them by those who wanted to treat them as mere colonies. The Bill of Rights which had to be added to the Constitution in 1787 before the states would ratify it protected rights that were familiar to these men by long use, not invented by them in the aftermath of revolution.
Julius Caesar reminds us of this, and suggests we think harder and look more closely at how our American tradition of freedom is rooted in our English cultural heritage, and perhaps even our classical heritage as well (I wonder what I might find if I read Plutarch on this topic, although Cicero would likely be a better choice if one is looking for Roman sources of our democratic tradition).
But the really funny part was what I found recently while watching an adaptation of Shakespeare’s late Roman play Coriolanus. There, late in the play, as the title character is preparing to lay siege to Rome itself to repay it for banishing him earlier in the story, he is confronted by his family, including his young son, who says, “He shall not tread on me. / I’ll run away till I am bigger; but then I’ll fight.” Here I find a classic slogan of the American Revolution (“Don’t tread on me.”) in a play written under King James of England, set in ancient Rome. Again we see how all this is part of a tradition, and that we Americans are not as original as we like to think we are (the Founders knew they were not original, but we like to tell ourselves that they were).
And finally, we get to the South itself. It too, and not just America in general, has Shakespearean echoes about it. There are of course the little bits of Southern speech patterns one finds in Shakespeare, such as when he has one of his high-born heroines in Midsummer Night’s Dream use “et” as the past-tense of “eat,” or the many times that “them” is shortened to “‘em” in expressions along the lines of “get’em.” Then there are the words of Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing: “Being that I flow in grief, the smallest twine shall lead me”—as an English composition teacher in the South, how often do I have to remind my students that “Being that…” is no longer an acceptable way to start a sentence in standard English?
But the real point of contact is the matter of honor. As I was binging Shakespeare lately, I could not help but notice that the men in his plays made their decisions more based on matters of personal honor than based on anything else. Personal honor and personal vengeance were mentioned far more often than explicitly Christian ideas like justice, mercy, or forgiveness. Shakespeare’s England, it seemed, was still half-pagan, and his characters spoke more often like Samurai than Christian knights.
Then I watched The North and the South. And I saw the very same thing there: a society in the South that spoke and acted more in accord with the code duello than in accord with the Ten Commandments, much less the Sermon on the Mount. This seems to me one way in which Shakespeare’s world survived in the Antebellum South (after the war was another matter). This no doubt connects to the Germanic tribal roots of English civilization, but that is something to explore another time, in another essay.
