For right-wing British newspaper The Telegraph, the past stays uninvited for an eternity. Author, columnist, and former member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan wrote on Nov. 11, 2023, “Four centuries on, it is indisputable: the genius of Shakespeare will never be matched.” In his column, he chronicles the “greatest act of literary salvage in history”: the publication of William Shakespeare’s First Folio 400 years ago. Without Shakespeare [source of national pride and tourism revenue, indicator of class and privilege, symbol of white western artistic hierarchy] where would we [sophisticated wealthy bigoted Britons] be?
Hannan once wrote for The Telegraph about how British people post-lockdown are “drunk on free money” and “addicted to handouts.” He wrote that women throughout Britain need to give birth more this year to fight the “baby shortage.” And he wrote that Britain should stop apologizing for its colonialist, slave-trading past because slave-trading was simply the hot, hip thing at the time and all the cool kids were doing it. That’s who we’re dealing with. So let’s see what he has to say about Shakespeare.
I know that columns like these are designed to rile up people like me, and god damn if digging up Shakespeare’s corpse to sing praises wasn’t the thing to do it. This vile scum of a man is a racist bigot, but his smallest crime, and the one I want to write about for a moment here, is his opinion of Cleopatra, as written by Shakespeare. He regards her as an ancient Egyptian glam princess “It Girl”—his preferred term for her—who was tragically and foolishly focused on position, legacy, and greatness. He doesn’t see her for the multifaceted, constantly evolving character we’re given in Antony and Cleopatra. She’s cheeky and subversive, undercutting the dead emperor Julius Caesar casually in conversation. She’s manipulative and cunning, but she’s also fragile. Each scene shows us more mirrors of the kaleidoscope of Queen Cleopatra.
Core to Hannan’s oddly structured essay here is how much he purposefully misreads and misinterprets Shakespeare as a whole. Hannan advocates for a very explicitly personal reading of Shakespeare’s works. He argues that Shakespeare, a highly political artist, is nevertheless somehow politically amorphous, capable of being read like a Rorschach inkblot as whatever political or ideological affiliation the reader associates with. “[Shakespeare] always seems to be on your level, speaking directly to you,” Hannan writes. The reason for this is because Shakespeare’s plays, though intended to be performed, were always written with specific audiences in mind. In some plays, specific lines were meant to be directed to King James during performances at royal court. Most of the jokes and lewd scenes are intended for the standing-room crowd, who would have paid low prices to stand in the mud and watch the actors up close. Then, Hannan reveals why this intentionally incorrect reading of Shakespeare is so important: “To Tories he is a Tory, to radicals a radical, to cynics a cynic,” he writes. Gross. He asserts the extremely lazy, academically idiotic argument that Shakespeare is such a great and powerful writer that he cannot have an identity of his own, that Shakespeare is just what you make of it. That his works just exist, like mountains and rivers and poverty, and it’s whatever you want it to be.
Obviously Shakespeare’s work is full of ideological posturing and political commentary. Let’s give Hannan a little credit here: What if, instead of being intentionally malicious, Hannan is merely dense and doesn’t understand how Shakespeare could be political? If that’s the case, then Hannan’s insistence that Shakespeare’s works are ideologically ambiguous is because Hannan does not know or care about the political circumstances of Shakespeare’s time. King Lear, for instance, is wary toward absolute institutional power, and historians have suggested that the events of the play were closely tied to early-1600 politics and King James’ rule of England. James at the time was trying to unify Britain, and in King Lear, the old, decrepit king divides the nation between his daughters. The play is at once enamored with the power of Lear and disgusted with his poor control of his realm. As You Like It, meanwhile, is the people’s play: Court life in As You Like It is for liars, traitors, and ladder-climbers, while the peaceful, idyllic Forest of Arden is a haven for poets, dreamers, fools, and lovers. As You Like It can no more be read as a cynical, conservative production than King Lear can be read as pro-monarchy. And neither play is apolitical.
Nevertheless, Hannan marvels that any line of Shakespeare’s can mean multiple things to multiple people. Literary interpretation appears to be an art Hannan has just now discovered. “How does it work, this sorcery?” he asks. I dunno, idiot, maybe the guy’s a good writer and art is subjective. Hannan, in his very next paragraph, tells the bold lie that we know basically nothing about Shakespeare’s life. Motherfucker, Kenneth Branagh made a whole movie where he played him as an old cantankerous gardener. (The movie is fine. Kenneth, if you’re reading this, I loved you in The Chamber of Secrets.) Anyway, Hannan writes, “We have … nearly a million works by the man, but hardly any about him. We are thus free to infer what we will from his plays.” Are we? We also know a lot about Shakespeare’s life—not enough that the authorship of his plays isn’t disputed, and not enough that we know exactly where he spent every year of his life, but we know plenty. We know that in his latter years he was a penny-pincher. We know that he was a bit of a fuckboy in his prime. We know that he married a woman eight years his senior and that they had several children, one of whom, Hamnet, died when he was just 11 years old.
Hannan suggests that Shakespeare’s plays “bring more to our experiences than our experiences to the plays,” a bit of wordplay so clunky it would have made Shakespeare kill himself. What I think Hannan means, though, is that we learn about ourselves from reading the Bard, his texts like a looking-glass through which we can learn about our world. It seems to have never occurred to Hannan that we can use Shakespeare’s plays to learn about Shakespeare. Hannan then gives up completely. His argument explodes, and he declares that what Shakespeare believed doesn’t even matter, that his plays can be read however we want because Shakespeare is dead and art is open to interpretation. “Even if some new piece of evidence definitively pinned down his beliefs, it would make no difference to the universe he created,” Hannan writes, and I can’t help but think that he’s writing this to defend some insanely racist reading of Othello he wants to publish in The Telegraph next week.
“How was Shakespeare possible?” Hannan’s godawful essay concludes. “I have given up asking.” He then ends with a quote from Hamlet where Hamlet talks about how ghosts are real. Hannan is the guy who reads that play and identifies with the prince, but the dude’s a Polonius if ever I saw one. His words are springes to catch woodcocks.
Yet there is a deeper vein of literary misunderstanding to Hannan’s column. As much as the writer blatantly ignores aspects of Shakespeare’s history and the common academic understanding of the Bard’s life, times, and popular interpretations of his plays, he also reveres him. Hannan writes about the weight of Shakespeare’s influence on Britain with the reverence a guinea pig has for the metal drinking straw on the side of its cage. He is puppydogish in his praise, Wikipedia-esque in his writing style, and totally committed to name-dropping Shakespeare plays like he’s trying to win Bard Bingo. But has Hannan actually read Shakespeare? Like, ever? And copy and pasting a few references into your copy isn’t the same as having read Shakespeare. Hannan is the sort of man to write about money like “a cool £3½ million” and reference Sam Bankman-Fried halfway through his Shakespeare elegy. I don’t think he’s the kinda guy who sees a performance of A Merchant in Venice in his free time, has a line from the lovers’ quarrel in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that always makes him chuckle, or has a favorite soliloquy in Twelfth Night.
He cites the unparalleled linguistic achievement of Shakespeare’s work. The Bard introduced hundreds of phrases and words into modern English, but Hannan’s argument, that we would have lost these beautiful words and clever turns of phrase without Shakespeare, is asinine. Words exist because of a desire to communicate certain ideas. Shakespeare might have coined the word “eyeball,” but he didn’t invent the eyeball. He gave voice to that idea, but the world is vast, and people are smart, and some writer would have come up with the “ball of the eye” and condensed it to “eyeball” eventually. Lexical innovation is created by more factors than just being a British playwright genius. Linguistic evolution and innovation are happening every day—there are just far fewer papers, resources, and university students and professors dedicated to exploring these everyday innovations than there are to poring over every play of Shakespeare’s.
Hannan subscribes to the Great Man Theory of cultural innovation, whereby great cultural leaps forward are only attainable thanks to people (usually men) of outstanding intelligence and education. This theory has been exhaustively criticized and debunked since its inception. Language would have changed and grown, and new, clever turns of phrase would have been discovered, all without Shakespeare. A world in which Shakespeare had never existed would be precious little different from our world today—maybe some of the British greats, like Sir Patrick Stewart and Dame Judi Dench, wouldn’t be as renowned, and Stratford Upon Avon would definitely not be a tourist destination, but besides that, the world would be pretty much the same.
Shakespeare is much less interesting as a God than he is as a writer. I think that people like Hannan would find that if they erase from their minds the writer’s history, the public imagination of him, and the academic momentum behind the artist, he becomes much more engaging as a writer. Because he can find ways to subvert your expectations and surprise you, because people put into a box don’t yield inspiring work.
There are two schools of thought on literary superlatives. Personally, I hate titles like “the greatest book ever written” (usually reserved for stuff like Ulysses or The Brothers Karamazov) and “the greatest author of all time.” I am firmly in the camp of agnosticism. I think the greatest book ever written either hasn’t been written yet or has been written and either wasn’t published or was lost to time. What are the odds that this man from late 1500s England, who was remarkably good at self-promotion, was a close friend of monarchs, and who had a run of dozens of successful plays, is the greatest writer to have ever lived? Kind of slim, I think. It’s much more exciting to think that we don’t even know who the current greatest living writer is, that they don’t have a Wikipedia page, a Penguin Random House publishing deal, or even a cult following. Maybe they don’t even have time to write. Maybe they wash cars for a living, maybe they deliver mail, maybe they mine precious metals, or maybe they’re a scaffolding contractor. Maybe they don’t have internet access. Maybe they’ve never read Shakespeare. Never even heard of him. It’s more rewarding for a critic or cultural commentator to believe that all the great people of history aren’t in textbooks, that the best books are yet unwritten, that there’s still some parts of the map yet to explore.
The genius of Shakespeare will of course be matched. But for writers like Hannan, I suspect that they know, somewhere deep in the backs of their skulls, that what was once revered will not always be so, that one day someone will dethrone Shakespeare in school curricula. One day, the things they were taught in private school will be less relevant, if not outright rejected. And that terrifies them. So they have to continue, 400 years on, to assert the importance of the Great Men of History. Huddling in their worm-eaten shadows keeps them out of the lie-detector light of the sun.
CLEMENT TYLER OBROPTA is a culture editor at MAYDAY. He studied film and English at Ithaca College, and his work can also be found with Film Inquiry, The Slice, and Gen Z Critics. He also serves as photo editor with Wanderlust Journal.
