Heritage History Month Day Twenty-Three: William Shakespeare

Happy William Shakespeare Day!

We are now less than a week away from completion and are on day twenty-three of Heritage History month. Today, we will celebrate the person and contributions of Shakespeare as a literary figure who looms large behind our Anglo-American deep sentiments toward our own culture. Literature is one of these areas of culture studies that people can often miss because they don’t realize how key a role literature plays in culture-making. The idea of a culture without any literary soil is a highly deficient culture, if it can’t even be called a true culture.

I debated whether to place John Milton or Shakespeare in this role, for the former’s impact on our understanding of the meta-narrative of Heaven and Earth obviously penetrates our moral imagination in deep ways, but Milton stands on Shakespeare’s shoulders and depends upon his contributions. Shakespeare of course wrote in the marvelous Elizabethan era of England, an era of immense development in English High Culture.

Shakespeare’s rendition of classic figures in Western Civilization, such as King Richard and Caesar, are often the very first things Anglo peoples have absorbed about them, and are nestled the deepest into our collective psyche. But more than just the transmission of historical “fact,” Shakespeare’s employment of history in the presentation of drama infuses into culture a type of historical understanding of the past the builds the present. This is the function of literature as foundational to culture.

Throughout his works, Shakespeare also relays moral lessons. Not the cheap modern type of arbitrary behavioral strictures; but narratives that touch on duty, tragedy, and the frailty of man. Hamlet portrays the story of a man who must take up his inherited duties to the social order, and Shylock offers cultural warning of the influence of moneylenders. Richard Weaver famously used Macbeth’s three witches as a foil to present Modern Man’s decision to engage in cultural descent.

Shakespeare’s use of language helped to standardize the spelling of English, and he contributed a vast number of phrases, words, and sayings that are now deeply part of our everyday life. “Wild goose chase,” “in a pickle,” “for goodness’ sake,” be-all, end-all,” melted into thin air,” and “neither rhyme nor reason” are all from Shakespeare, and there are plenty more.

This will have to do on Shakespeare for now, but I’ll leave you with this, from the Julius Caesar play:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.