“Brexit – a tragedy. Not even Shakespeare would have conceived of that ... Very depressing.” When Michael Roth, Germany’s Europe minister, tweeted this in November last year, he had no idea how much worse things could get – but he also may have underestimated the UK’s national playwright. The combination of personal failing and collective paralysis that characterises the current political situation does in fact track the national and individual breakdown depicted in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Just as Brexit has lurched through successive phases of induction, crisis, intensification, torpor and now paroxysm that map the five act dramas of Shakespeare, so too has it produced a dramatis personae of variously wounded, self-deluded, malign or unheroic characters worthy of a Shakespearean cast: Theresa May, a Polonius who found herself unexpectedly on the throne; Jacob Rees-Mogg as a hedge-fund Bolingbroke; Michael Gove a wheedling Cassius; Dominic Grieve as the nostalgically principled John of Gaunt.
These equivalences provide an enjoyable game, and not a new one: Shakespeare’s works have always inspired contemporary parallels. In 1593 a disturbed former soldier and fantasist maintained that he was the real Adonis to Queen Elizabeth’s lusty goddess Venus, reading Shakespeare’s popular erotic narrative poem as a direct political allegory. In 2017, prominent commercial sponsors withdrew from a production of Julius Caesar in New York that appeared to model the eponymous tyrant on President Trump. And where such parallels have not been easily found, the plays have been rewritten to provide them: Nahum Tate’s infamous adaptation of King Lear in 1681 bins Shakespeare’s bleak ending and allows a chastened but triumphant king to return to the throne, in a happy echo of the Restoration mood. Alfred Jarry reworked Macbeth in his Ubu Roi (1896) to emphasise the appetitive and infantile brutality of modernity.
Deploying Shakespeare in Brexit discourse thus has a long and familiar history, and the plays have provided helpful material. One of Leave.eu’s early posters quoted the final lines of King John, beginning “This England never did, or shall / Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror”. Daniel Hannan, a Brexiter MEP, has made Shakespearean interventions his particular specialism, including rebuking Michel Barnier for misquoting Julius Caesar and upping the ante with lines from Cymbeline: “Britain’s a world / By itself, and we will nothing pay / For wearing our own noses.” (“Our own noses” uncomfortably – though not inappropriately – suggests a claim to ethnic purity, in contrast to the imagined hooked or Roman noses of the opposition.) On the other hand, Chris Bryant has written that “I have not a shadow of a doubt that William Shakespeare would have voted to remain,” a view echoed by the academic Richard Wilson who, like Hannan, cites Cymbeline, this time in more collaborative mode: “Publish this peace … Set we forward, let / A Roman and a British ensign wave / Friendly together”.
It’s easy to see that this spat tells us little about Shakespeare – it reinforces what we know about these writers and their own position in the Brexit debate. The plays can very easily function as a kind of confirmation bias, where we find exactly what we are looking for. The allure of such topical readings is ultimately narcissistic: Shakespeare is our contemporary, our own world is the most interesting of all, and the plays mirror our own times and our own views.
This is an interpretative trap even, or especially, when those views are apparently benign ones. In recent years a formerly marginal, possibly Shakespearean speech from a collaborative, unperformed play called Sir Thomas More has gained considerable traction. “William Shakespeare’s handwritten plea for refugees” was just what was needed to pep up the commemoration of the playwright’s 400th anniversary, against a desperately topical backdrop of Mediterranean migration and a hardening of borders. It was almost too good to be true. Such is our commitment to his relevance that we bring it about, in this case suppressing Shakespeare’s cruelties to the Jewish Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and amplifying instead More’s call to English rioters to imagine themselves as the hounded alien, and rethink their “mountainish inhumanity”. Shakespeare is thus both nativist and international, chauvinistic and large-minded, malleable to incompatible causes and ideologies.
The plays’ ethical tally is always double-entry, with each positive balanced by a negative in another column. In this reckoning, Shakespeare is, irreducibly, both for and against Brexit.
Contemporary parallels must always involve radical oversimplification of Shakespeare’s works. Take Julius Caesar. If the 2017 production was indeed anti-Trump, it picked the wrong play. The central scene following the murder of Caesar makes clear that its sympathies are more finely balanced. At first, Brutus has the people on his side as he regrets the necessary assassination of their leader “for the good of Rome”. But Mark Antony’s stirring rhetoric, and his promise of a Caesar dividend, “75 drachmas”, immediately turn their allegiance. The play doesn’t ultimately endorse one side over the other. We never actually know if the money is truly a sign of Caesar’s generosity or a strategic improvisation by Antony, just as we never know whether Caesar does indeed harbour monarchical ambitions, as his enemies suggest. Shakespeare is neither firmly for or against Caesar: instead, he is interested in changing perceptions, the rhetorical means by which groups are persuaded to action, and their forms of self-justification. Truth is less important: it is what people can support that matters. The play is about politics, rather than being partisan. It is as available for fascists as for liberationists to annex for their own purposes.
Perhaps Shakespeare’s most helpful deployment at this washed-up stage of Brexit is via this unprincipled drama of compromise. His works are fundamentally ideologically opposed to the binaries of our contemporary politics. The humanist education system he encountered at the grammar school in Stratford stressed a form of rhetorical and ethical training known as “in utramque partem” (both sides of the question). This encouraged the rewriting of classical scenarios from a different point of view, or via the experience of silenced or marginal characters. What mattered was less the skill to convey a particular position, and more the ability to shift perspective. This imperative structures Shakespeare’s drama, as we repeatedly cut away from the main action to insights from the outside. Characters are given glimpses of interiority that are strictly unnecessary to the plot, but these work to populate a busy and complex world of different viewpoints and resistant individuals. He does not so much rise above politics, as hunker beneath them: his characters embody an individualism and self-interest that are unconvinced by partisan commitment. If Shakespeare is the writer we need now for our partitioned national life, it is not for his quotable battle cries on either side of the divide. He is vital not because he offers fearless answers, but rather because he is the ultimate bard of the unheroic, the laureate of dishonour, the poet of the pivot.
One consequence of humanising different perspectives is that Shakespeare’s tragedies are never quite as isolating as their alienated heroes might hope. “The rest is silence,” Hamlet declares with perfect solipsism, when Fortinbras and the Norwegian army have just entered to appropriate Denmark. For tragic protagonists, there is no future beyond their own biography, but at the end of the tragedy those who are left gathering up the remnants of their society and attempt to imagine a quieter, less Technicolor future. Tragic characters live in interesting times, and destroy themselves by their own pursuit of greatness, but they do not take everyone with them as they fall. Perhaps the only meagre comfort in seeing Brexit as a Shakespearean tragedy is that the ordinary members of society are rarely seen as sufficiently important to be caught up in its destructive energies, as his tragedies focus resolutely on rulers, not the ruled.
For Shakespeare’s own society, the ultimate appeal of tragedy was its imaginative insight into questions of causation and agency. Is Macbeth responsible for his own actions? Would he have killed the king without Lady Macbeth’s encouragement? Do the witches simply see the future, or make it happen? What about Romeo and Juliet: are these “starcrossed lovers” victims of astrological predestination or of the “civil blood” of their feuding families?
If tragedy was the cultural means of probing questions of agency and culpability in the past, our own period has outsourced issues of causation to judicial investigations and public inquiries. “Some shall be pardoned and some punished,” announces the Prince at the end of Romeo and Juliet. Comparing a potential Brexit inquiry to Chilcott, the former civil servant Peter Ricketts described the inquiry into the Iraq war in distinctly tragic terms, as “cathartic”. If that’s true, then maybe the real Brexit tragedy, played out in the theatre of a public inquiry, is only just beginning.
• This Is Shakespeare by Emma Smith will be published by Pelican on 2 May.
