Ten Greatest Poets – William Shakespeare, England’s National Poet

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, ENGLAND’S NATIONAL POET

“The sun never sets on the British Empire” was a popular boast in the nineteenth century. In its original form it was applied to the Spanish Empire of Charles I, the same as the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, in the sixteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, Spain had lost almost all its colonies, and when America acquired the Philippines, the epithet was also applied to the U.S.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, vast swathes of the globe were subject to Anglophone hegemony, the British and American empires. British authority stretched from Canada in North America, south to the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, west to Honduras, crossing the Pacific Ocean to encompass New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, and Malaysia, extending further west to include the crown jewels of India and Pakistan, and chunks of the African continent, namely, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana—modern country names are used—besides various territories all around. The U.S. spanned the entire width of North America, spreading across the Pacific to include Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippine islands, among others.

In 1913 the total population of the British Empire was 412 million or 23% of the world population. The same year the U.S. population totaled over 97 million or 6% of the world population. At the greatest extent of Anglo-American hegemony, the British and American empires included nearly one-third of the world population.

Not surprisingly, English language and culture spread over a widely distributed and sizable proportion of the world’s inhabitants. The logical result is that English literature today is highly influential in world culture. Moreover, English is the language of international business and of large segments of the international scientific community.

Therefore, we include in our top ten, William Shakespeare, the foremost luminary of the English literary heritage. He well represents the English contribution to the world canon.

Shakespeare has been hailed as England’s “national poet,” an honorific going to the leading representative of a country’s poetic heritage. Two or more poets sometimes contend for the title, informally bestowed by consensus. In Shakespeare’s case, he is not only England’s poet primus inter pares but also its preeminent literary figure.

Only a small number of countries have leading national poets—for example, Dante Alighieri in Italy, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany, Luís de Camões in Portugal, Alexander Pushkin in Russia, or Pablo Neruda in Chile. The title is not commonplace.

Shakespeare’s title is well-deserved. Although it is disputed by some, it is not particularly debated.

Critical literature about Shakespeare and his works is huge, and it grows daily. His dramatic works, especially, are regularly performed, not only in classical revivals of the English Renaissance but also in productions ranging anywhere from amateur theatre to Hollywood. They are watched by millions.

Because of the voluminous corpus that has already been generated about Shakespeare, I will offer only a few remarks.

Almost anyone who has studied Shakespeare will at some point realize—the sooner, the better—that Shakespeare doesn’t speak English. Modern English, that is. He speaks Elizabethan English, yes, nearly half as different from today’s English as Old English, the English of Beowulf, is entirely different from contemporary English.

When Hamlet agonizes, “Who would fardels bear?” the contemporary English speaker might ask, “Who would fardels understand?” When Lady Macbeth invokes the spirits to “unsex me here,” our postmodern generation might wonder whether she is a transgender in pursuit of sex change surgery.

Shakespeare’s incomprehensibility to the contemporary English speaker will only get worse as time passes.

Notwithstanding, iterated readings of Shakespeare, especially when the reader pays solicitous attention to footnotes, is rewarded not only by understanding but also with appreciation, indeed, admiration.

At least two outstanding attributes distinguish Shakespeare. He is the astute observer of humanity and thereby the gifted creator of character. In Shakespeare’s characters, we encounter humanity in variegation and depth—for example, Falstaff’s roguery, Hamlet’s melancholy, Miranda’s ingenuousness. Samuel Johnson said it best in his preface to The Plays of Shakespeare (1765): “His characters…are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find.”

Shakespeare also epitomizes Renaissance Humanism. True, other artists exemplify this archetypal role—Michelangelo in sculpture, for example, or Da Vinci in painting—during what is acknowledged to be a vital turning point in Western history. Shakespeare embodies in literature this seismic cultural shift.

Renaissance Humanism changed the focus of art and culture from the supernatural and eschatological to the human, natural, material, and temporal. It drew inspiration from the study of classical, i.e. Greek and Roman cultures. Unlike the exponents of medieval Christendom, the Renaissance humanist, while continuing to profess a fundamentally Christian worldview, was also deeply interested in the human being existent in the natural world and in worldly society. Hence, Shakespeare’s ranging exposition of character.

So widely esteemed is Shakespeare today that it might surprise many that he has not been always so highly regarded. During the one hundred or so years after his death in the early seventeenth century, Shakespeare was only one among many Elizabethan playwrights and poets who vied for lasting remembrance in literary history. Neoclassical John Dryden, for example, faulted Shakespeare for his want of decorum. Shakespeare’s star began to rise in the middle of the eighteenth century, so that by the nineteenth century William Hazlitt would hail him as a genius. Burgeoning Shakespeare scholarship proceeded apace.

At one point I considered selecting Elizabeth Barrett Browning instead of Shakespeare in our top ten. She is among the premier luminaries of nineteenth-century Romanticism in England. During her lifetime her work received the highest critical praise, and it is still esteemed today. Her greatest work of poetry, “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” is well beloved and renowned.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning fulfills all the criteria for inclusion in our top ten poets, with the added advantage of being female. However, Shakespeare is so far and away world famous, justifiably so, that he outstrips her.

We close our discussion of Shakespeare with a sampler of his work—one excerpt each from his histories, tragedies, and comedies, concluding with a sonnet.

Henry V’s speech to the English soldiers at Agincourt can be better understood and appreciated by putting it in historical context. Henry IV, Henry V’s father, had deposed Henry IV’s first cousin, Richard II, in a disputed accession.

When Henry V assumed the throne, his position was not undisputed, so that Henry V’s victory over the French at Agincourt bolstered his claim—and the English crown—considerably by making Henry V regent and heir apparent to the throne of France. Agincourt was a great military victory not only for England but also for Henry V.

Henry V won the battle at a time when kings still led their armies on the battlefield, risking death. Henry V’s words establishing a blood compact, as it were, with his soldiers, carry, not surprisingly, a world of drama.

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remember’d;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

—Henry V, Act IV, Scene 3, 58-67

Kenneth Branagh plays the doughty king in Henry V (1989), the movie. His stirring delivery of the battlefield speech is worth viewing.

Title of the 1992 non-fiction book by Stephen E. Ambrose and of the 2001 TV series “Band of Brothers” based on the book is lifted from the above passage in Henry V.

The following passage from the tragedy Macbeth retains its power over the audience 500 years later.

Upon hearing of Lady Macbeth’s suicide, Macbeth speaks about the futility of a short, pointless life.

Shakespeare’s figurative language here seizes the reader, or listener, as the case may be, shakes them up, and holds their attention fast to the very end of Macbeth’s exclamation.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

—Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5, 19-23

Title of William Faulker’s novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) is lifted from this passage. One fourth of Faulkner’s narrative is told from the standpoint of an intellectually disabled man—“a tale told by an idiot.”

Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Shakespeare’s original play has seen numerous productions and adaptations. The 1971 and 2015 movie productions of Macbeth, commercial failures, both darkly gripping, are worth viewing.

The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play, builds on the allegory that “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players,” words spoken by Jaques in As You Like It.

The protagonist of The Tempest, Prospero, is Shakespeare himself. In the excerpt below, he muses philosophically on how life is very much like a dream, a theatric illusion. “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on,” he says, “and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.”

When Prospero speaks reassuringly to Ferdinand, dispelling, with a wave of his wand, so to speak, the illusions he had wrought by magic, he broadcasts Shakespeare’s swansong, the playwright’s farewell to the life of the stage.

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself—

Yea, all which it inherit—shall dissolve,

And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

—The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1, 141-148

“Such stuff as dreams are made on” is famous, inspiring Humphrey Bogart’s closing line in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Carly Simon’s 1987 hit.

Shakespeare has been immortalized for his sonnets, not only his dramas. He wrote 160 sonnets. Among them we select one of the small number frequently anthologized, Sonnet 73. It deals with the classic motifs of death, love, and related.

SONNET LXXIII by William Shakespeare

That time of year thou may’st in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day,

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by-and-by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire

Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The sonnet illustrates well Shakespeare’s surpassing lyric gift. Deftly, he weaves together a lilting exposition adorned by exquisite metaphor. The sonnet is sealed with a brilliant couplet.

Matsuo Bashō, the Greatest Master of Haiku:

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2018/06/ten-greatest-poets-matsuo-basho.html 

William Shakespeare (c. 1667) by Gerard Soest