Shakespeare — Portraits

The Shakespeare portrait newly unveiled by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust shows us a man with a twinkle in his eye and a Mona Lisa smile just beginning to curve on his lips.

Methinks he would have been a jolly man with whom to quaff a glass of ale.

Certainly he looks lively and intelligent enough to have written his own works and he is handsome enough to have charmed a virgin queen.

Shakespeare has been showing up in my reading lately. Adam Gopnik — yes, I’ve been back at my stack of old New Yorkers — says

There�s another rhetorical style that runs like the Mississippi right down the middle of the mid-nineteenth-century American mind, shaping phrases and supervising thoughts, flowing as strong as the classical, the Biblical, and the lawyerly, and that is the Shakespearean. Lincoln�s love of Shakespeare is familiar, but is usually treated as a delightful character trait, like his fondness for ice cream or the comedy of Artemus Ward. But Lincoln�s taste in Shakespeare was narrow, significant, and almost obsessive. He didn�t love �A Midsummer Night�s Dream� and �As You Like It�; it was the histories and three of the tragedies that held him. In 1863, he repeatedly went to see �Henry IV� when James H. Hackett was playing Falstaff, with all the Falstaffian black comedy against conscription and the cult of honor. He took volumes of Shakespeare out of the Library of Congress; went to a Washington theatre to see the famous E. L. Davenport in �Hamlet�; attended private recitations of Shakespeare; sought out a production of �Othello�; watched Edwin Booth, John Wilkes�s brother, in �Richard III,� and the greatest American Shakespearean, Edwin Forrest, in �King Lear,� at Ford�s. Just five days before the assassination, on April 9, 1865, steaming up the Potomac in the Presidential yacht, he spent �several hours� reading aloud from Shakespeare to those on board. Reciting from his favorite plays was a weakness of his; on August 22, 1863, [his secretary] Hay records in his diary that he fell asleep at the Soldiers� Home while listening to Lincoln recite Shakespeare.

The idea of Abraham Lincoln boring the help with recitations of Shakespeare pleases me. But it was not Shakespeare of the Giaconda smile that Lincoln loved. Gopnik continues:

But even stranger and more striking is Lincoln�s identification or, at the very least, fascination with the figure of Claudius. In that same letter to Hackett, Lincoln insisted that Claudius�s soliloquy beginning �O, my offense is rank� was superior to any of Hamlet�s, and we know that he committed it to memory, and would recite it at length even to acquaintances�an artist who had come to paint his portrait, for instance. Lincoln�s evaluation was as unorthodox then as it is now. And what is the burden of Claudius�s speech? It is about guilt and ambition, and about the fraternal blood-dealing that that produces. As Kenneth Tynan has pointed out, Claudius�s tragedy is that he is clearly the most able man in Denmark, but he has got his throne through blood and cannot be free of the taint.

As it happens, we have just been watching the 1980 BBC production of Hamlet, in which Derek Jacobi plays the antic cherub and rolls his barrel basso provocatively over some of Shakespeare’s most delightful lines. Jacobi’s Hamlet is truly mad, and his scene-chewing rather overpowers Patrick Stewart’s quieter Claudius. A member of my household was also moved to giggles by the wig Stewart is wearing for the production. It does tend to reduce that great dome of skull to silliness.

Still, Claudius cannot be completely denied his moments. And Stewart is a masterful actor.

Just as an aside, before I go on to more serious matter, Lalla Ward, onetime Romana (the only woman Time Lord) to Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, made an aggressive and affecting performance as Ophelia.

But here’s the speech in question, from Hamlet Act 3, Scene 3:

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will.
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?
And what’s in prayer but this two-fold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon’d being down? Then I’ll look up;
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? “Forgive me my foul murder”?
That cannot be; since I am still possess’d
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.
May one be pardon’d and retain th’ offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but ’tis not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature; and we ourselves compell’d,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? what rests?
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!
Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe!
All may be well.

Possibly related posts:

Mr. Shakespeare has a birthday

When all else fails, turn to Shakespeare

Abraham Lincoln

A perversely cruel press

There are trials, and then there are trials

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