Shakespeare the Time Traveler

Most conscious attempts to predict the future are way off: the human mind, or indeed the artificial one, just can’t keep track of all of the big variables as time passes, let alone all of the small ones. I’m thinking of the visions of the future which always, always seem to include hover-cars, without realizing that technology only proliferates if it’s economically beneficial for it to do so, or Henry Sweet’s prediction in 1877 that American and British English would be mutually unintelligible in a century: he simply could not have foreseen the leaps forward communication technology would make, from telephone, to television, to thousands of satellites in orbit.

The same could be said of literary predictions: they tend to project the future in a stylized, specific way which focuses on a particular aspect of the present world and exaggerates or distorts that, rendering a future which is not so much a future in and of itself, but rather a future-as-comment-on-the-present. Much of the writing concerned with the future is often grouped under a generic term – science fiction – though we would do better to follow Margaret Atwood and use the more neutral term, speculative fiction.

Though Shakespeare ably commented on the present (and absolved himself of any treasonous accusations by locating his plays abroad), his plays were not speculative. Instead, through the minds of his characters (as Hegel would correctly identify, the most powerful parts of the plays), he was able to project conceptions and opinions far beyond his own time sphere. Sometimes, his writing can peer through the telescope and see the way we might eventually think before it comes down to us.

Parts of Shakespeare’s writing show a remarkably progressive perception of beauty. By the late 1500s, the vogue for sonnets was waning, partly because sonnets after the Petrarchan model, which would hyperbolically praise a woman’s beauty, comparing her hair to golden flax, and her eyes to burning suns, had become tired. These monolithic tropes of beauty were stale, and Shakespeare would famously lampoon them in some of his own sonnets. The “Dark Lady” sequence, thought to have been composed earlier than the others as a direct response the wash of shiny, cookie-cutter Petrarchan ones, send up many of their calling cards: “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun.”

Shakespeare often goes out of his way to highlight instances of non-standard or heterodox beauty, such as Imogen’s mole in Cymbeline:

Come off, come off;
[taking off her bracelet]
As slippery as the Gordian knot was hard.
'Tis mine; and this will witness outwardly,
As strongly as the conscience does within,
To th'madding of her lord. On her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I'th'bottom of a cowslip. (2.2.34-39)

In this play, Iachimo has made a bet with Posthumus that he can seduce Imogen (who Posthumus has secretly wedded), and bring proof back to him. His attempts to sleep with her are an abject failure, so he switches to a slightly disturbing plan B. Iachimo hides inside Imogen’s bedroom, then when she’s asleep, and only partly clothed, he steals the bracelet Posthumus had given to her, and examines her body for the things that only a lover ought to see; and it’s here he spies her mole, making the surprising comparison to the dots inside a cowslip flower.

Looking at an old edition of the play from the nineteenth century, we are told that the crimson dots are “an inaccuracy”– we can confirm this by looking ourselves at a cowslip, whose dots are a deep yellow. This scientific inaccuracy strengthens the power of the image: Iachimo is waxing poetical about Imogen, and he is focussing on something which in medieval/Renaissance physiognomy would be considered a blemish, an imperfection: her mole.

There’s no doubt it’s a very creepy scene. Iachimo is perving on a sleeping girl, but that’s not the point: his character brings a post-Enlightenment perception of beauty to a time that saw beauty as something traditional and standardized: the “beauty” of the blonde-haired, bright eyed women in Petrarchan sonnets. Shakespeare is writing a long time before the ideas of the Enlightenment became established and respected: the ideas that reason, and the individual, should be respected alongside tradition, and the (oft-prejudiced) beliefs of the masses. The Enlightenment got a lot of things wrong, of course, but it substantially pierced a great deal of ignorance, and in this way, Shakespeare preempted part of it.

In The Merchant of Venice, classified as a comedy in the First Folio, post-Enlightenment ideas about individual equality can be seen escape the shackles of their age. The play concerns Bassanio, who is desperate to win the hand of Portia in marriage. His friend, Antonio, has given him money and bailed him out many times, and has run out of money to do so again. Bassanio takes out a loan with the moneylender Shylock, using Antonio as the guarantor. Shylock, who is Jewish, refuses, citing the antisemitic abuse he has received from Antonio, then yields, on the condition that if Antonio fails to repay the loan, Shylock can take a pound of Antonio’s flesh. And hey, as if his motives weren’t clear enough already, he won’t even charge interest on the loan!

The play itself is heavily antisemitic, with characters gleefully insulting Shylock on the basis of his religion, and him being forced to convert to Christianity in the end. In this way, it reflected its age: an article on Shakespeare Online describes succinctly the ingrained prejudices of Shakespeare’s England, and the drama reflected that.

The Merchant of Venice is often compared to the earlier play The Jew of Malta by Shakespeare’s predecessor (chronologically and stylistically) Christopher Marlowe. The main character of The Jew of Malta is a Jewish anti-hero called Barabas, and he’s often compared to Shylock. Barabas is a pantomime villain with the scraps of humanity that inevitably occur when written by a dramatist with Marlowe’s imagination, but Shylock is something different. He speaks with a power and depth that have led some more recent critics to re-interpret him as a tragic hero. He isn’t, and the play remains a comedy (and would almost certainly have been acted as such in Shakespeare’s day, with Shylock being pretty much a pantomime villain), but Shylock’s humanity does not so much have to be found as it explodes out of the play. This famous speech is its best instantiation:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means,
warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer
as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?
Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his
sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.
The villainy you teach me, I will execute,
and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (3.1.62-73)

It’s a remarkably eloquent statement of general human equality through the particular prism of Judeo-Christian relations in the sixteenth century, and it’s difficult to say anything original about it. The way Shakespeare modulates from the formal and generic “a Jew”, through to insistent repetition of the far more personal “we” in the middle part of the speech, and back up to “Christian” and “Jew” at the end, is a part of what makes it so resounding, as it seems to cover all of humanity at the same time as being personal to Shylock.

I would claim, maybe a bit contentiously, that it’s a case of style informing ethics: Shakespeare’s rich portrayal of the human condition practically demands that we (and his audience) start to be more egalitarian in our views on different cultures.

What can we learn from this aspect of Shakespeare? We should always make our speakers and characters free artists of themselves, and allow them to escape the confines of our own minds, or rather, force them. That’s the way to time-travel and immortality.