George Orwell Knew What Made Shakespeare Great
Not only is April 23 Saint George’s Day, the national feast of England, it is also the anniversary of both the birth and death of William Shakespeare, the finest poet that nation ever produced. But whereas today used to be a day to celebrate English heritage, and especially the Bard, ideological forces seek to turn the West away from this greatness. Just last month, for instance, the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon announced that it would undertake to “decolonize” its collections because narratives about his genius “benefits the ideology of white European supremacy.” Student radicals on college campuses have taken up this argument as well, claiming that stripping Shakespeare’s works from syllabi and canons would somehow advance the cause of social justice.
Of course, these ideologues are not the first to protest against Shakespeare on moral grounds. A more sophisticated version of this attack was advanced by another giant of world literature, Leo Tolstoy, in a 1906 essay. The Russian author argued against conventional wisdom that Shakespeare possessed no sense of transcendent morality, asserting that his plays betrayed a fundamentally aristocratic attitude and lack of concern for the plight of the working classes. Tolstoy concluded that Shakespeare had no coherent philosophy; at best he was a cynic, and at worst a nihilist.
Ironically, perhaps, the aristocratic Shakespeare’s ablest defender was a democratic socialist – George Orwell. In a pair of essays from 1941 and 1947, the Englishman argued that the Russian misunderstood Shakespeare perhaps out of envy, but also out of a fundamental misconception of the purpose of art. He concedes that Shakespeare may not have been a systematic thinker, an entirely coherent thinker, or overly meticulous when it came to his plotting, but denied that this is enough to banish him from our libraries. The Bard created works of truly astounding beauty, and Orwell fiercely maintained this was worth preserving.
Orwell’s defense rests on the notion that Shakespeare does not, in fact, need defending. “There is no argument by which one can defend a poem,” he wrote, because “It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible.” A play has a different purpose than a treatise and does not require the same kind of tight, logical reasoning. Instead, the poet aims at moving the human heart – something Shakespeare clearly succeeded at for millions and millions over the centuries. “He can survive exposure of the fact that he is a confused thinker whose plays are full of improbabilities,” Orwell wrote. “He can no more be debunked by such methods than you can destroy a flower by preaching a sermon at it.” The continued reverence so many feel for Shakespeare’s plays is proof enough that Tolstoy’s attack failed.
Read in Providence Magazine.
