Shakespeare Does Not Agree With You
There’s a lovely moment in the finale of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner (until 32:53). I won’t spoil much, but the eponymous prisoner has been hauled before men who admire him. They want him to speak, to utter pearls of wisdom. They shout their assent: “Ay! Ay! Ay!”
They shout so loudly they can’t hear what he’s saying. They applaud the words they assume he said. They cry, “Ay! Ay! Ay!” but mean “I! I! I!”.
Our respect for great minds is often egotistical. We do not agree with them but with the words we put in their mouths.
I was recently talking to a Buddhist. This Buddhist was a secular humanist, and so was quite convinced the Buddha was also a secular humanist. Those other Buddhists, who believe in reincarnation, immaterial souls, celestial beings — those Buddhists deviated from the Buddha’s secular, humanistic, atheistic, rationally sceptical, scientific teachings.
There is no evidence the Buddha was a secular humanist. Read this passage from the Pali Canon (the earliest surviving Buddhist scriptures). Here, you find someone who assumes the existence of rebirth [reappearance] and celestial beings [Devas]. There are many more passages that similarly assume such things (Aṅguttara Nikāya 4.125, 4.232, 8.35; Majjhima Nikāya 36, 41, 135; naming just a few).
It’s fine to adapt your religion to your own culture. The Buddhist I was talking, however, was not shaving Buddhism of its supernatural “excesses”. They were denying they existed in the first place.
If a figure is great — and silenced by the grave — they become everyone’s mouthpiece.
You don’t have to start a religion to get this kind of follower, one who’ll reach into your mouth to shove words in and tear words out. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Albert Einstein have gained such cults. If a figure is great — and silenced by the grave — they become everyone’s mouthpiece.
Take Shakespeare.
Is the character Othello a racist caricature? A modern reader will rush to say:
No, no! Read the play carefully — and ignore the awful ways this character has been presented in centuries past. The attentive reader will find a sympathetic, three-dimensional portrait of a black man in Renaissance Italy.
They want to make an ally of the honourable dead.
A certain 19th Century reader (specifically the Romantic poet par excellence Samuel Taylor Coleridge) took the opposite position. As related in an article by the British Library:
Like many others in 16th–19th century England, Coleridge makes a troubling distinction between different types of African — the ‘Moor’ and the ‘Negro’. … For Coleridge, a ‘Moor’ could be a convincing tragic hero of noble and military rank, but he perceived a ‘Negro’ to be of lower status and therefore wrong for this type of play. He asks, ‘Can we suppose [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous Negro plead Royal Birth — Were Negros then known but as Slaves — on the contrary were not the Moors the warriors’.
We say, “Don’t worry. Shakespeare wasn’t racist!”
Coleridge says, “Don’t worry. Shakespeare definitely was racist!”
I am not going to come down on one side or the other. But I hope you can see the common motivation of the two statements above.
The speakers do not want to know what Shakespeare thought. They want to make an ally of the honourable dead.
By all means, make your heroes allies. Use their work and achievements for your own purposes. Make Shakespeare an anti-racist campaigner, or the Buddha a secular humanist neuroscientist. Just accept the fact that, seeing what you’ve turned them into, your heroes would hate what you’ve done to them.
