The Shakespeare Consensus

Americans have conscripted Shakespeare in service of a surprising range of causes going all the way back to the founding of Jamestown. While some ideas have aged well, others have not. Looking ahead, scholar Paul Menzer wonders if in a world of fractured concentration the “agreement that Shakespeare can give us pause—or give us time to pause. And attend.” could bind “disparate energies and interests” in a new unifying consensus.

The 300^th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement was celebrated in 1907 with, in part, a pageant by George Frederic Viett called, Pocahontas, the Virginia Nonpareil. A contemporary newspaper described one surprising feature of the show:

The playwright has made a daring innovation in the introduction of the character of Shakespeare on the stage. The Bard of Avon appears in the first act where, in a fine oration he wishes God speed to the Colonists as they depart from Blackwall, England to plant the first permanent English speaking colony on American soil.

This “fine oration” foresees the company’s success in Virginia. Shakespeare calls them the vanguard of that “Saxon genius and Saxon speech…. / That great Saxon tide whose flood / Shall fertilize and bless the earth.”

Talk about fertilizer.

Shakespeare’s final words to the Virginia Company—met by “Tremendous applause from the company”—are “Fare you, then, forth upon your destined way, / Until no wind can sweep the earth / That bears no echo of our English tongue.” If Shakespeare’s appearance is surprising, it’s all the more so that he comes across as a Jacobean Brownshirt with a penchant for blank verse.

George Frederic Viett was a minor poet of Norfolk, Virginia who published several books of poetry in the early 20th century, including The Deeper Harmonies, and other poems in 1905. Among Viett’s deepest harmonies was Victorian racialism, what historian Stuart Anderson calls “Anglo-Saxonism,” the notion of “the innate racial superiority of the people who were descended from the ancient Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain.” This explains why Viett has Shakespeare laud the Virginia adventurers as “of the tribe whence Vikings came,” an otherwise baffling reference. Viett’s investment in this fake genealogy—from the halls of Asgard to the shores of Virginia—comes together at the play’s conclusion when the “allegorical figures of Columbia and Britannia, Uncle Sam and John Bull” harmonize in the singing of the “Star Spangled Banner” and “God Save the King,” a true English speaking union that whitewashes any Anglo-American dissent. What’s a few armed skirmishes over taxation and tea when Uncle Sam and John Bull are both Vikings at heart?

Across the four hundred years that have followed the Jamestown settlement, America has often conscripted Shakespeare in the cause of a “purified” English and all those who speak it. At the opening of the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1932, its first director, Joseph Quincy Adams, positioned the Folger as a fortress against a rising tide of immigration, “when the ethnic texture of our population was seriously altered.” Ringing the same cracked bell as George Viett, Adams hoped Shakespeare would continue to bind together “the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon people.”

It’s not Shakespeare’s fault that, across America’s history, he’s been enlisted on the side of the Saxons, a word he never used (in Cymbeline, his play most interested in English origins, he prefers “British” or “Briton.”) But for America’s first 250 years—and well before—Shakespeare’s been made to wave the flag for some repugnant ideas, whether that flag’s the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes.

As we move across this semiquincentennial year, however, we can look forward as well as back and entertain some ideas—even some ideals—of how Shakespeare might serve our divided nation between now and its quincentennial. (I won’t be here, so let me know how it goes….)

Against George Viett’s dispiriting pageant of a “Virginia nonpareil,” let’s consider a French one, Victor Nonga Wembanyama-de Fautereau-Vassel, or “Wemby” to legions of NBA fans. For the uninitiated, Wemby is a center—the center—of the National Basketball Association’s San Antonio Spurs, a 7-and-a-half-foot prodigy with the elegant angularity of a Giacometti figure. He is not just a physical prodigy. He is nearly as accurate from the three-point line as he is around the rim (though he’s not really “around the rim,” he’s practically above it). What’s more, he plays with sense of space, place, grace, and pace—what John McPhee, speaking of Bill Bradley, called “a sense of where you are.” It is obvious at the end of just his second year that Wemby’s a slam dunk to make the Hall of Fame.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by The Athletic (@theathletichq)

This all may seem impertinent to the role Shakespeare might play in American life, but Wemby was spotted in New York’s Gramercy Park following game two of this year’s NBA finals (he’s hard to miss). He was photographed hunched over a sketch pad, deep in concentration, seeking an eddy from what he called the “whirlwind” of the finals. He was sketching the statue of Edwin Booth as Hamlet (the statue is life size and perched on a pedestal, so Wemby could have looked it right in the eyes).

As a figure for how Shakespeare can serve America in the coming years, we could do worse than a French-born descendant of Congolese parents drawing the New York statue of the American scion of an English acting family in his seminal role as a medieval Danish prince, one whose brother—Edwin’s, not Hamlet’s—assassinated America’s 16th president. When the Folger mounts a celebration at America’s quincentennial, let’s hope they locate Wemby’s sketch and place it right next to the First Folio.

This may seem like a fantastically optimistic, even utopic vision of a Shakespeare with pan-national appeal. But Wemby offers a rare vision of arrested attention, an image of repose among the riot of American life, even an eddy in the whirlwind. If there’s anything like a public sphere left, Shakespeare might serve it as the rarest of phenomena, a point of consensus that binds disparate energies and interests. Not a “consensus” of opinion, of course, what fun would that be? But a consensus that Shakespeare rewards attention, rewards reflection, rewards consideration. Among the initiated and the non, the casual fan and the professional scholar, the enthusiast and the evangelist there is an agreement that Shakespeare can give us pause—or give us time to pause. And attend.

Speaking of utopic visions, can we dare dream that Shakespeare might serve the next centuries as a principle of alignment and sympathy not division and exclusion? More, might Shakespeare help restore attentional discipline in a world of fractured concentration? At our most grandly utopic, can we ask if Shakespeare can promote the elevation and celebration of Human Intelligence (HI!) over the artificial kind?

This is not to put Shakespeare on a pedestal (or Wemby for that matter, since he doesn’t need one), nor to stake a claim for Shakespeare’s universality or timelessness—after all, it’s literally always too soon to call something “timeless.” Instead, it’s to counter Viett’s reactionary pageant with a more progressive one—a communication, even a communion, between a 16th-century English writer and a global superstar of the 21st. Their encounter was contemplative. Their encounter was concentrated. And their encounter was also creative, as Wemby made of Hamlet something of his own. What America makes of Shakespeare in the centuries to come is uncertain, but we can raise a hymn of hope that he might serve to bind our branches, of which there are many many more than just the two that Joseph Quincy Adams mentioned.

>> Explore more of our series in which Folger Director Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper asks American Shakespeareans what role Shakespeare will play in the next 250 years of the American story

About the author

Paul Menzer is Executive Director and professor of Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Sciences and as Provost. A renowned Shakespeare scholar, he has written several biographies of the playwright. He is the inaugural Folger Chair in Shakespeare Studies.