Though Shakespeare’s death didn’t attract much attention in 1616, it’s big news today.
To mark its 400th anniversary, there has been no end of events, whether it’s the Folger Library’s First Folio Tour to all 50 states or a production of “Hamlet” that, to date, has been performed in 196 countries. As far away as Tehran, performances and exhibits have been organized. In New Orleans, two full-blown “jazz funerals” will commemorate the occasion.
When thinking about the reasons for Shakespeare’s enduring popularity, you could point to his facility with language, his ability to deliver moments that possess both poetic complexity and heartrending simplicity.
There’s also the fact that his plays are ripe for adaptation, which has allowed “Timon of Athens” to be set during the Occupy movement and “Othello” to be adapted to contemporary India for a Bollywood film.
But many feel most attracted to Shakespeare’s characters, who seem to have lives that transcend the stage.
At the time, Shakespeare was crafting portraits of psychological depth—full of doubt, hypocrisy, and mystery—in ways that none of his contemporaries were. His characters hold up so well that we continue to see Shakespeare’s imprint on today’s most popular television shows and films.
Crafting a Psychological Landscape
Most of us know what it is to feel heartsick, jealous, blinded by ambition, or disappointed by ingratitude. Romeo, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear—all seem to have anticipated and expressed our own emotional experiences better than we could. Our mistrusted politicians are so many Julius Caesars and Lady Macbeths, our ill-fated lovers Romeos and Juliets, our ingenious heroines Rosalinds and Portias.
Shakespeare’s men and women are both archetypal and still so modern partly because, like no others before them, they grapple with inner conflicts. Soliloquies and dialogue become not only sources of information for the audience but also lead to action; in other words, whereas the plots of earlier plays depended on what the characters did, Shakespeare’s plays seemed to progress and develop because of what the characters thought.
Take Hamlet, who grapples with fear and doubt about avenging his father’s murder; he’s disturbed by the potential injustice of the act, and the prospect of risking his sanity, or even his soul, if he follows through.
Characters before Shakespeare’s time may have feared the act of revenge, but more due to the potential consequences of failure than out of the spiritual and psychological anguish that might accompany success.
In His Characters, the Allure of the Unknown
Staging these internal conflicts within the plays helps make the characters feel relevant today, and may account for why the best television and film characters are sometimes called Shakespearean.
The lead figures of HBO’s “True Detective,” PBS’s “Downton Abbey,” and the Netflix documentary “Making a Murderer” all struggle to resolve internal unrest, some of which is mysterious to us—and even to them.
In “Downton Abbey,” Lady Mary Crawley’s interest in her suitors often waxes or wanes without incident or explanation; her coldness to Edith is sometimes retributive, but sometimes a random attack—not unlike Hamlet’s spontaneous railing at Ophelia.
In the documentary “Making a Murderer,” mystery is, of course, central. But our sense of mystery is intensified because we cannot even be sure if Brendan Dassey knows whether he is guilty of a crime or not.
Shakespeare didn’t simply create characters who possess inner turmoil. He also constructed the characters in ways that were likely to stir up doubt among readers and spectators. For many of his characters, key details are omitted; we don’t know what to think—and this can create an illusion of psychological depth.
Hamlet, for example, isn’t mad: He tells his companions plainly that he will feign madness to avoid suspicion while carrying out his plan for revenge. But Shakespeare allows him to go too far, causing audiences to wonder whether he has actually gone mad.
