Of Shakespeare, Iraq and Afghanistan
Here’s an interesting comparative study in The Independent of the present international conflicts and what Shakespeare wrote long ago.
Shakespeare could have been writing about Iraq or Afghanistan, his scenes of battle were so prescient, says Robert Fisk. “Shakespeare would certainly have witnessed pain and suffering in daily London life. Executions were in public, not filmed secretly on mobile telephones.
“But who cannot contemplate Saddam’s hanging – the old monster showing nobility as his Shi’ite executioners tell him he is going ‘to hell’ – without remembering ‘that most disloyal traitor’, the condemned Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, of whom Malcolm was to remark that ‘nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it.’ Indeed, Saddam’s last response to his tormentors – ‘to the hell that is Iraq?’ – was truly Shakespearean.
“How eerily does Saddam’s shade haunt our modern reading of Shakespeare. ‘Hang those that talk of fear!’ must have echoed through many a Saddamite palace, where ‘mouth-honour’ had long ago become the custom, where – as the casualties grew through the long years of his eight-year conflict with Iran – a Ba’athist leader might be excused the Macbethian thought that he was ‘in blood / Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er’.
“The Iraqi dictator tried to draw loose inspiration from the Epic of Gilgamesh in his own feeble literary endeavours, an infantile novel which – if David Damrosch is right – was the work of an Iraqi writer subsequently murdered by Saddam. Perhaps Auden best captures the nature of the beast: ‘Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, / And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; / He knew human folly like the back of his hand, / And was greatly interested in armies and fleets…’
“In an age when we are supposed to believe in the ‘War on Terror’, we may quarry our way through Shakespeare’s folios in search of Osama bin Laden and George W Bush with all the enthusiasm of the mass murderer who prowls through Christian and Islamic scriptures in search of excuses for ethnic cleansing.
“Indeed, smiting the Hittites, Canaanites and Jebusites is not much different from smiting the Bosnians or the Rwandans or the Arabs or, indeed, the modern-day Israelis. And it’s not difficult to find a parallel with Bush’s disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq – and his apparent desire to erase these defeats with yet a new military adventure in Iran – in Henry IV’s deathbed advice to his son, the future Henry V:
‘…Therefore, my Harry, / Be it thy course to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out / May waste the memory of the former days.’
Meanwhile thousands of schoolchildren in the United Kingdom will soon be taught about Shakespeare by actors rather than their own teachers. “Pupils will take part in dramatisations of the plays they are studying and be given tips on how to interpret the various characters instead of sitting behind their desks reciting them in class…” Read on…
