IN THE TWENTY-FIRST century most countries are no longer traditional societies, or will soon cease to be. England was the first to go through such a great cultural and psychological transformation, and the struggles that began there in the sixteenth century were a harbinger of those that have been fought in many parts of the world since. By its very nature, of course, modernity destroys tradition, the ‘givenness’ of the past. Like archaeologists, today we sift through the wreckage, examining texts and physical remains to reconstruct an idea of our history; but what is most exciting and valuable is to find a living continuance of the past that is still meaningful in the present. It can still be seen in surviving traditional societies, such as in south India, where it is possible to wander out of a high-tech computer block in Bangalore into a temple and see and hear the same rituals and language in the same building that people have used for 1000 years.
And what is the analogy for us in Britain? It is certainly not religion. The language of King James’s Bible or the Book of Common Prayer is no longer thought to be comprehensible, or even relevant, and has almost vanished from our lives. Where these texts are still spoken in public, they come in a modern translation drained of its poetry and numinous power. Today there is only one part of sixteenth-century English culture still expressed in the original language as a regular public performance or ritual: Shakespeare’s plays. His is the one case where the authentic language and thought of that time is still seen as integral to the national culture. And his is also the one case where sixteenth-century texts are still taught in their original language at the core of the national school curriculum. The religious language of the sixteenth century is gone; the tremendous words of the ‘Great Sentence’ for the dead have faded away. But Hamlet is still here.
This tells us something about the nature of the English Reformation and its 400-year aftermath in which we still live. The texts at the centre of the Tudor government’s conception of the national culture have no place today. Yet the texts of a popular mass medium, which frequently questioned the ways of authority and asked people to think for themselves, still matter to us. It is Shakespeare’s plays that are our living contact with the people of his time.
Our modern world began in the sixteenth century. Caught between tradition and modernity, religion and magic, state absolutism and individual conscience, even ordinary people glimpsed the beginning of the end, not only of the institutional structures but also of the ideas that had ruled people’s lives for so long. For some, all religion was revealed as the construction of men, all sacred texts merely as human works. In Queen Mary’s day Devon villagers held a marriage ceremony for a goose; others turned to atheism. People no longer knew what to think. Although he remained a Christian and a Bible reader, Shakespeare was deeply involved in all this questioning, evolving his own new world of words to mediate ‘the revolution of the times’.
In his parents’ day England had been a traditional society, a land of rood screens and female saints, holy wells and incantation magic, church ales and painted devils. Like many of his generation, Shakespeare knew that lost world through his parents. His tales exist on a profound psychological level, transcending language in their portrayal of character, love and friendship, power and suffering. Across cultures they have the entertaining and educative power of the fairy tales they often shadow. But they work on other levels too. His background enabled Shakespeare to incorporate into his drama the beliefs, the active mythology and the imagery of the pre-Reformation world: his characters are its kings and queens, priests and witches, mothers and fathers, clowns and fairies. This no doubt helps explain his great popularity in the eyes of his own audience, but it also helps us understand his continuing relevance today. He brings back to life the world we have lost. This will perhaps become even more apparent in the twenty-first century, as, through globalization, our past accelerates away from us at an ever faster rate. The changes we are now going through may turn out to be even more profound and far-reaching than those experienced by his contemporaries. Like the paintings in the guild chapel with which this story began, humanity’s encoded memories are being erased everywhere across the planet. But it is perhaps for this reason that, rather than diminishing in relevance, Shakespeare’s humanity, his language, his humour and his toughness of mind will become all the more valuable to us as our own ‘revolution of the times’ unfolds.