Billy Shakespeare

Southern man.

I tried to beg out of a recent invitation to speak at a fundraising event for the Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre. The organizers wanted me to talk about the Bard himself, and that is a subject I am definitely not qualified to address, especially on a program with a Hollywood producer, award-winning writers, English professors, and other Shakespeare experts. I'm just the publisher of a Southern literary magazine.

But once I started to look a little more closely at the Bard, I gained some confidence. After all, if you leave out most of the particulars, you are left with a boy named Billy, who was bored living in his little rural town. He knocked up his girlfriend before he was eighteen, so he got married, and then he had a couple more kids. It wasn't long before he left them behind to run off to the big city to chase his dreams in the entertainment industry. At the very least, you have the beginnings of a serviceable country-music song.

Now, I'm not saying that Shakespeare was actually Southern. That's just silly. But if you think about what makes his work unique, you begin to see how his legacy is best reflected in works that come from the South.

Other forms of American literature are too earnest or straightforward. Russian literature is unmitigated pain and tragedy, while the French do better with romance and comedy. The Germans take themselves too seriously, and even British literature (after Shakespeare) is a little too cool and reasonable.

The true inheritors of Shakespeare's mantle are Southern: Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain, and especially Tennessee Williams. These writers capture all of life's nuances and subtleties in ways that are both believable and ridiculous (and sometimes believable because they are ridiculous).

In essence, they:

Find the comedy in tragedy.

Find the tragedy in romance.

Find the romance in the pedestrian.

Find what is pedestrian among the powerful.

Uncover what is powerful among the fools.

Demonstrate how the fools can uncover wisdom.

Find the wisdom in irony and contradiction.

Turn the irony and contradiction into comedy.

In other words, they chart the full circle of human experience.

Consider the characters we meet in Shakespeare. There are drunks, rogues, and harlots. Corrupt politicians. And a constant parade of innocent and naive young people who are always carnally motivated while professing only a religious devotion to piety and love. All of that sounds pretty Southern to me.

There is no doubt that the echoes of Shakespeare can be found in Southern literary characters, and vice versa. Others have noticed the presence of Macbeth in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! The Southern concept of honor is taken to its extreme by Hotspur. Furthermore, almost any Shakespeare play can be given a Southern twist—even A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 2008, the Tennessee Shakespeare Festival staged a production in which (according to a news article), "The king and queen of fairies are actually a couple who died in the Civil War...and the other sprites are the ghosts of children—orphans and runaways who also died during that time."

In fact, the structure of Elizabethan England was a lot like the South, with its hierarchical society and plantation economy. Still, what is interesting about Shakespeare is that he did not always set his plays in England. Aside from his histories, he placed his characters in foreign locales. And since he had not traveled outside of the country, he conjured everything from his imagination.

Sometimes it seems as though he was imagining the South.

Take the very beginning of Twelfth Night, for example. In the first lines of the play, Duke Orsino says:

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

That strain again! it had a dying fall:

He goes on a little while longer, and then Curio answers him:

Will you go hunt, my lord?

There, at the start of this play, Shakespeare includes all of the basic touchstones of Southern culture: music, food, and hunting. It's as if he had us in mind!

But the real evidence of Shakespeare's Southern predilections is exposed in an unlikely place: Antony & Cleopatra.

Take these lines by Cleopatra in Act II, Scene 5:

Give me some music; music, moody food

Of us that trade in love.

Let it alone; let's to billiards: come, Charmian.

And when good will is show'd, though't come too short,

The actor may plead pardon. I'll none now:

Give me mine angle; we'll to the river: there,

My music playing far off, I will betray

Tawny-finn'd fishes; my bended hook shall pierce

Their slimy jaws; and, as I draw them up,

I'll think them every one an Antony,

And say "Ah, ha! You're caught."

Then Charmian says:

'Twas merry when

You wager'd on your angling; when your diver

Did hang a salt-fish on his hook, which he

With fervency drew up.

And Cleopatra responds:

That time,—O times!—

I laugh'd him out of patience; and that night

I laugh'd him into patience; and next morn,

Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed;

Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst

I wore his sword Philippan.

I think it's pretty clear that we know this Billy...and he knew us. In just a few lines, we are introduced to a sex-starved woman who likes good music and food; who plays pool and gambles; who fishes and drinks; and who knows her way around tires. I rest my case.