Just the other week, April 23 was Shakespeare’s birthday (or at least the day we celebrate it, because it was the day in 1564 when he was baptised). In national terms it was just before Anzac Day and this year, with its late Easter just a few days after the dark night of Good Friday and then the sublime light of Easter Sunday. Baby boomers are getting on and find they can celebrate anniversaries liturgically, on Maundy Thursday, the day of the Last Supper and the first communion. Still, it was surprising to hear the one I’ve known longest say of Macbeth, that darkest and most Machiavellian of tragedies, the tragedy Germaine Greer says of a man who tries to kill his soul but can’t, ‘I virtually know the play by heart.’
You didn’t have to be especially literary for that to be true. ‘Romeo, Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo?’ was chanted in suburban front yards and it didn’t matter that we thought ‘wherefore’ indicated location rather than the reason why.
People copped Shakespeare at school the way they did pure maths and French, maybe a bit of Latin. But Shakespeare was part of the air we breathed. For some reason a priestly schoolmaster got us to learn this from Macbeth:
‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain, / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff / which weighs upon the heart.’
Did some personal melancholy drive him to that? Who knows. There’s a sense in which Macbeth’s melancholy – never mind the murders – is universal. And so too with Brutus’s philosophical reflection, ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries. / On such a full sea are we now afloat, / And we must take the current when it serves, / Or lose our ventures.’
It’s sententious and reflective and Hamlet-like (to which Julius Caesar is close in time). It’s also the case that neither of these set speeches were things we knew independently.
And we were equipped, if we had remotely dramatic ambitions, to grab hold of spoken word versions of them. An abridged version of Julius Caesar had a grave