Actor and director John Bell on how Shakespeare imagines a better world

*Originally published on Dec. 8, 2021.

CBC Radio has the Massey Lectures. The BBC has its Reith Lectures. And the Australian Broadcasting Corporation features the Boyer Lectures. The series was created in 1959 to spark ed conversation about the most critical ideas of our time.

The 2021 Boyer Lectures were delivered by acclaimed actor and theatre director, John Bell. His four-part series is entitled Shakespeare: Soul of the Age. And in it, he argues that Shakespeare speaks more trenchantly to us than ever when it comes to issues that affect virtually everyone on the planet right now: political self-interest, gender inequality and the ever-growing need for good governance.

[Shakespeare] couldn't do a lot to change the world. But he could imagine a better one.- John Bell

IDEAS is delighted to present all four of the Boyer Lectures in two episodes — each episode is comprised of two lectures.

Below are excerpts from John Bell's third lecture called Shakespeare's Women:

How Shakespeare confronted patriarchy  

"I want to trace Shakespeare's development of his female characters and guess at how that reflects his development as a person, as well as an artist. We can't help the times we are born into, and it's hard to think and act outside them.

Shakespeare inherited some 4,000 years of a culture Hellenic, Judeo-Christian, based on patriarchy and its inevitable corollary: misogyny. He couldn't do a lot to change the world. But he could imagine a better one. 

Patriarchy embodies a fear of women, fearful of them usurping power or seducing and corrupting the male. The myth of Adam and Eve is one of the cornerstones of the patriarchy and of European culture. 

His earliest women exhibit boisterous male characteristics, and it's easy to imagine male actors impersonating them. In Henry XI, Joan of Arc, or Joan la Pucelle, is an uncouth tomboy. And Queen Margaret, a merciless she-wolf — like Tamora, Queen of the Goths in Titus Andronicus. Others, like Lady Anne in Richard III are helpless victims of male brutality. They inhabit a man's world, a world of warfare and savage political upheaval, but they have little redress."

On Shakespeare's creation of new empowered women characters 

"Over the last 50 years and more, feminist studies have had a huge impact on our reading of Shakespeare and on the theatre practice. Female academics have given us new perspectives on the plays, realized in the work of female artistic directors, directors and designers. New generations of female actors have been empowered not only by reinterpreting the great women's roles, but the men's roles, too. 

Recent years have given us female actors in roles including Hamlet, Richard II, Richard III, Prospero and King Lear, as well as an all-female Taming of the Shrew. All of these ventures have proved Shakespeare's capacity to move with the times and hold the mirror up to nature. 

Throughout his career, in play after play, Shakespeare demonstrates the consequences of men undervaluing the kinder aspects of human nature. He urges the integration of the masculine values of power, ambition and control with those more recognisably feminine: empathy, compassion, nurturing and forgiveness. 

This synthesis is what makes a whole and healthy human being a whole and healthy society. It begins to address the issues of domestic violence, predatory male behaviour in the workplace, be it on the factory floor or in Parliament House. It forces us to confront the issues of equal pay, equal opportunity and redefining of male-female roles in our society.  

Over a lifetime, Shakespeare developed a deep understanding of women and a profound empathy with them. There's always a danger in taking the lines from one of Shakespeare's characters and saying: 'this is what Shakespeare himself believed.' But occasionally one can take a chance on it. And if I were asked which lines in Shakespeare best sum up his attitude to women, I'd probably offer these lines of [Lord] Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost:

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive 
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire
They are the books, the arts, the academes
That show, contain, and nourish 

Below are excerpts from John Bell's second lecture called Order vs Chaos:

On Shakespeare's kings

In Shakespeare's day, the existing order placed a king at the top. But this structure was only human and therefore fallible and had inherent weaknesses. Having read Utopia, Shakespeare would have taken on board Thomas More's observation: 'When I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world, I can't, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich.'

Order depends on the monarch being wise, temperate and virtuous, one who takes advice from sage councillors. Too often Shakespeare's kings ignore good advice and shut down criticism. Lear banishes Cordelia and the worthy Kent for daring to contradict him. Leontes, King of Sicily in The Winter's Tale, similarly hectors and bullies his faithful servants Camillo and Paulina. Both kings pay heavily for their arrogance.

The kings themselves are far from perfect. All of Shakespeare's kings except Henry V has some fatal flaw; King John is a treacherous murderer; Richard II is deluded by a sense of entitlement; Henry VI is weak and vacillating; and Lear a victim of senile arrogance.

But criticizing royalty was a precarious business. Ben Jonson was clapped into prison for making a joke about Scotsmen. King James, a Scot, didn't see the joke. Shakespeare himself came under the shadow of the scaffold with his play Richard II, which depicted Richard being deposed by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke and handing over his crown. This much displeased Queen Elizabeth who was in danger of being deposed by her own cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. The play was at first banned and then allowed to be performed only if the deposition scene was cut, thereby gutting the play.

On Shakespeare's use of republicanism

In searching for an alternative to absolute monarchy, Shakespeare seems to have flirted with the virtues of republicanism. His version of Julius Caesar reverses expectations. Caesar was widely regarded as one of the Nine Worthies of antiquity, his assassins wicked regicides. But Shakespeare depicts Caesar as a man who has outstayed his welcome, a man with a feeble constitution, falling into his dotage with delusions of grandeur. The conspirators who topple him are treated with varying degrees of sympathy, especially Brutus, 'the noblest Roman of them all."

The tyrannicides sacrifice their lives to preserve the [Roman] republic. But the civil war resulting from their actions sees the destruction of the Republic, and the emergence of something worse than monarchy; an Imperial Rome with an emperor endowed with a semi-divine status. The irony is not lost on Shakespeare, always skeptical about the men who rise to power and how they get there. There is nothing inherently wrong with power, but as Brutus reminds us:

'The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins
Remorse from power…'

A sentiment echoed by Isabella in Measure for Measure:

'Oh it is excellent
To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.'
 

*This IDEAS episode was produced by Greg Kelly. Special thanks to our friends at ABC Australia — Julie Browning, Russell Stapleton and Kate Macdonald — for all their help in making this happen.