A man fumes in a field, carrying his righteous anger like a weapon with which he hopes to slay another man, a man he believes has wronged him. Somewhat ironically, this angry man is a healer, a physician, and the man with whom he wishes to duel is a parson, a clergyman, a healer of souls. Other men, observers, are in the field as well, watching the situation evolve.
PAGE: Yonder is a most reverend gentleman, who, belike
having received wrong by some person, is at most
odds with his own gravity and patience that ever you
saw.
SHALLOW: I have lived fourscore years and upward; I never
heard a man of his place, gravity and learning, so
wide of his own respect.
SIR HUGH EVANS: What is he?
PAGE: I think you know him; Master Doctor Caius, the
renowned French physician.
SIR HUGH EVANS: Got’s will, and his passion of my heart! I had as
lief you would tell me of a mess of porridge. (MW 3.1.49-59)*
Both of the potential combatants are of foreign descent. Doctor Caius is French, and Sir Hugh Evans is Welsh (Wales having its own distinct cultural identity even today–in spite of being a political and economic part of the United Kingdom). Although both men may have a high level of education, their accents make them vulnerable to the atypical pronunciation of English words–often in ways that sound comical to the native English speakers around them, and also to the play’s audience. In productions of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Doctor Caius and Sir Hugh Evans tend to be always played for a laugh–perhaps reflecting Commedia dell’Arte origins, where aliens virtually always displayed heightened ‘differences’ for comic effect. In addition, Shakespeare frequently leaned on comic conventions of his time, and mocking the Welsh accent is only one example of the casual prejudice that may have been part of the early modern social landscape of his time, just as some characters tend to be ridiculed frequently in modern motion pictures and television (characters who are older, mentally aberrant, or overweight, for example).
Yet, the proverbial street seldom runs only one way. In Henry V, Captain Fluellen’s Welsh pronunciation and his tendency to pontificate do not detract from his serious and relatively admirable dedication to duty and honour. When Pistol ridicules the Welshman for wearing a leek in his hat on St. David’s Day, Fluellen subsequently catches him and beats him, making the hapless Pistol eat a leek raw. The episode’s cautionary note comes from Gower, who watches the scene while saying to Pistol, “You thought, because he could not speak English in the native garb, he could not therefore handle an English cudgel: you find it otherwise; and henceforth let a Welsh correction teach you a good English condition.” (Henry V 5.1.82-3) Again, Shakespeare seems to experiment with form, expanding the stock comical foreigner until the character encompasses a less conventional wholeness, fleshing out the character until Fluellen becomes more like a human being, and more a reflection of actual human experience, than he is a mere convention on a page.
What about the Merchant of Venice? Well, that may well be a subject for another post, but suffice it to say that (as is often pointed out) the final repeated goading and jeering of the Christian characters offers a dramatic portrait of them that looks little better than the Jewish character Shylock’s infamous insistence on his “pound of flesh” in payment for Antonio’s forfeited bond. The audience is also reminded that Shylock had been reluctant to make the loan in the first place, because Antonio had insulted him, spitting on him and kicking him in public.
The question arises in the play about where such wrongs begin and where they end. When wrongs give birth to other wrongs, perpetuating the violent cycle entails becoming intimately participatory with the ongoing violence, supporting a cycle rather than ending it.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his Nobel lecture in 1964, said:
Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert.
Violence and abuse may be verbal (written or oral) as well as physical. Bigotry or prejudice in speech may be as much or even more violent than that rendered by a beating. Certainly intolerance, in mind, emotion, or in spirit, is the wellspring of so many evils in the world. How sad then, and how tragic, when we hear words of prejudice come from the mouths of supposed leaders, those who are supposed to set examples, who are supposed to lead us all to greater things.
Dale Carnegie said, “God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I?”**
We seem to be enlightened in some ways, and yet we remain woefully ignorant in others. Prejudice persists as does (thank goodness) the resistance to its insidious influence. Bruce Hornsby painted it in music:
Perhaps, in the end, we might be better off if we listened more to philosophers than we do to leaders. Leaders tend to have too many agendas while philosophers simply tend to try to make sense of things. Philosophers tend to begin from a place of knowledge (or at least a place where they seek a genuine understanding of a subject). Leaders, politicians, seem to frequently begin from a place of little true knowledge, using rhetoric as an influential tool rather than as an explanatory one.
We are always cautioned about the times when people begin banning and/or burning books, and we are cautioned against the people who would censor or silence others, especially when such censorship or silencing might be couched in populist rhetoric that repeatedly plucks emotional strings by bandying about charged language, using terms like ‘God’, ‘great’, and ‘nation’. Such rhetoric is so often the magician’s waving scarf, the flash of smoke that distracts from the true agenda of the trick proceeding smoothly while the audience remains distracted.
It may seem a cliché, but it is still true that we are all audiences really, and all actors on the “great stage of fools”. Ghosts are like crows, seeking the shiny bauble of a rapidly passing afternoon. Fading in and out of our conscious and focused existence. Easily distracted or mislead by flashes of momentary beauty, or the lightning of passing events. And sometimes we all need to take time off as well. We may need to watch the third season of Stranger Things, or catch up on watching whatever of that other series we haven’t quite finished. We can’t be so focused all the time. Who could stand it? Even Descartes admitted (in a letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia) that he couldn’t think that way all the time.
Yet, it is important to pay attention. Listen to the language leaders use, the words they choose to convey what they say. Opinion takes funny forms, but so does rhetoric that proposes to downplay or dismiss evidence or facts. This is how we lose understanding, by missing the forest for the trees, or the speech for the words–missing the real agenda for the seductive spin.
It remains all too easy to follow the wrong path in the woods. As Huckleberry Finn says, “That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.”*** Seems an awful lot like politics today, often taking anyone, observer, proponent, but mostly the politicians themselves ‘so wide of [their] own respect’.
*Shakespeare, William. The Merry Wives of Windsor. Edited by Giorgio Melchiori. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2014.
**Although the line is sometimes attributed to Samuel Johnson, it may have really been Carnegie. The line appears at the end of the first chapter of Carnegie’s 1936 book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
***from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (the pen name of Samuel Clemens). Often called ‘the great American novel’, it was first published in the U.K. in 1884, and was published in the United States the following year.