EILEEN BATTERSBYponders William Shakespeare and Al Pacino
VERY LITTLE IS KNOWN about him. Aside from instantly recognisable caricatures with a quill, there is only a portrait in which the wary Elizabethan reveals nothing of his status as the world’s finest poet/playwright.
William Shakespeare is everywhere: from great moments of history to the speeches of triumphant or defeated kings, from the sighs of passion of Romeo and Juliet to Antony and Cleopatra to the simple beauty of a flower on a spring morning. His lines are spoken, referred to, paraphrased, quoted from memory or simply hijacked by ministerial speech writers.
As he was baptised on April 26th, 1564, in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, it has been traditionally assumed that he was born three days earlier, April 23rd, also St George’s Day. England duly celebrates its national playwright and national saint on Monday.
Shakespeare’s father, John, was a Stratford-upon-Avon glover, tanner and wool-dealer. His mother, Mary Arden, was a farmer’s daughter from a neighbouring village. Through his father’s position as bailiff, or mayor, young Will entered grammar school when he was eight. While at the King’s New School, he learned Latin and the classical stories that would later feature in his plays.
He left school at 15. Perhaps he became a teacher or a soldier? Or perhaps he travelled abroad? It is known that he was caught poaching. By 18 he was married to Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and pregnant. They had three children.
Shakespeare acted, but he concentrated on writing plays. Not only do these plays evoke a vivid sense of the classical world and of Elizabethan England, they explain how society works and what makes people dream and fail, love and hate, aspire and forgive.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” No one compares with Shakespeare; line for line, image for image, English prose draws its life’s blood from his vision. Poets revere him, while composers and visual artists have been, and continue to be, inspired by Shakespeare, an enigma who died at only 52.
His great tragedies, history plays and insightful comedies, and the theatre nurtured and sustained by them, are the backbone of the British theatrical tradition. Hollywood has always favoured the “classy” ability of British actors to execute period scripts, the legacy of performing Shakespeare apparently since birth. Small wonder the decision to cast Marlon Brando as Mark Antony in Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 Julius Caesar incited derision. Yet in the company of the great John Gielgud, a triumphant Brando was nominated for an Oscar. Still, even Disney remains respectful and so far has confined itself to drawing on Hamlet for The Lion King (1994) with minimal parody.
The Royal Shakespeare Company has a busy repertory progamme. Moviemakers revere Shakespeare in film with the assistance of Belfast-born Kenneth Branagh. Everybody loved John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998). The inspired casting of Al Scarface Pacino as Shylock in Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice (2004) surprised and impressed. Not bad for Pacino, who had made his name in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) opposite Marlon Brando.