Shakespeare, Establishment Poet?

Bardolatry has been the default attitude toward Shakespeare in the English-speaking world for centuries. Even people who have never read or seen Shakespeare's work--or who have read and seen it and didn't think much of it--seem to regard themselves obliged to exalt him as not a Bard, but the Bard, the greatest poet who has ever written in the English language, and perhaps any other language that has ever existed as well.

Still, the ranks of the Bardoclasts have not been wholly undistinguished--including as they do such figures as Lev Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair and Graham Greene. They do not all make the same charges, but it is notable that all four criticized Shakespeare for being, as Greene put it in his classic "The Virtue of Disloyalty," "the supreme poet of conservatism, of what we now call the Establishment." Tolstoy was particularly explicit on this point, declaring that for Shakespeare "the fundamental principle" was "the absence of all idealism," "the conservation of the forms of life once established," and that "the end justifies the means," with all this capped off by a "Chauvinist English patriotism . . . according to which the English throne is something sacred." The translator of Tolstoy's essay on the matter, Ernest Crosby (a significant figure in his own right), was to address in particular the question of Shakespeare's attitude toward questions of authority and class, presenting in "Shakespeare's Attitude Toward the Working Classes" a formidable case founded on close reading of an abundance of Shakespeare's material from across the whole body of his plays, testifying to Shakespeare's worship of authority and those who yielded it, and more specifically his combination of an exaltation of kings and nobles with utter contempt for the lower orders.

Of course, those critics were all far too intelligent to overlook the reality that Shakespeare was writing in an earlier period. Even in Tolstoy's time (and certainly today) one gets much further being congenial to those in power than challenging them--and there was much less room to offer such a challenge in Shakespeare's time. Formal, statutory censorship was immense, every play having to be approved before it could be presented on the stage, and the sanctions for those who met with the disapproval of the authorities severe. (One may recall Ben Jonson's being imprisoned for having written The Isle of Dogs--a play that, not coincidentally, we no longer have.) And aristocratic patronage was still indispensable to an artistic career.

Accordingly the more politically-minded critics take pains to demonstrate that rather than a man who felt differently but worked within the space allotted him Shakespeare's profuseness in his celebration of the powerful, the abundance and sheer gratuitousness and vehemence of his displays of contempt for the lowborn (no one required him to present Coriolanus as a hero!), testifies to a man thoroughly at home in the Establishment poet role, with the fact the clearer because of comparison with other literary figures of the era. If risking the fate of a Jonson was an unreasonable thing to ask of him, where, Crosby asks, can we find a single man of the people to compare with that creation by that writer coming from a culture the English endlessly flatter themselves is so much more reactionary and unfree than their own, Miguel de Cervantes' Sancho Panza?

I have to admit that in the end I find the case these figures make compelling--far more than the contrary one, however congenial that would be for admirers of at least slightly progressive inclinations, or simply humane ones, who would, to paraphrase Greene, be better able to "love as a man" the same figure they love as "the greatest of poets."