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Friday 18 July 2008

The divine pork butcher

Tragedies by their nature do not end in a redeeming, but was there ever such a bleak, nihilist play as King Lear? Dr Johnson declared that he could not bear to read the play through. Cordelia may be Christ-like in her forgiveness but she ends dead in Lear’s arms and there is no resurrection. And when characters in Shakespeare do come back from the dead, it is because they were never dead at all. Cymbeline is not Lazarus. Nor is Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; she has just been kept hidden away from her jealous husband Leontes and she returns with the extra wrinkles that she would have acquired in the interim. As for extracting from the plays any clue as to what Shakespeare thought about the Reformation, forget it. Which is why you will notice that what is common to the Shakespeare-was-a-Catholic obsessives and the Shakespeare-was-Marlowe/ Bacon/Oxford/Queen Elizabeth brigade is that they draw their hidden messages or cunning acrostics from some bit of wordplay in the Sonnets or a minor poem like ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’. The plays themselves resist such fantastical interpretations, as does Shakespeare himself.

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