'Modernizing' Shakespeare & Homer

The Boomers' Race to the Bottom

Tolethorpe Hall, home of Stamford Shakespeare Company. Photo: the Comandante

Last night I took my mother to a Tudor manor house, Tolethorpe Hall, to see a production of Twelfth Night. In many ways it was well done: the acting was good, the costumes superb, and the staging imaginative. For me it was marred mainly by one thing: the music. The director chose not to have the play’s songs sung to Renaissance tunes, or even folk tunes, but instead took songs from the sixties and seventies, including one by the Jackson Five, Paint it Black, Whiter Shade of Pale, and a couple by Abba—the performance culminated with the cast singing and jigging to Give Me a Man After Midnight—and mostly with the twentieth century lyrics, though in one or two cases Shakespeare’s ditties were set to pop music. The audience loved it, perhaps predictably, as most of them were my age, and presumably their taste had not changed much in the last fifty years or so. But I found it jarring, as I did when Sir Toby Belch made asides in modern colloquial English. Again, the audience laughed, but I wondered if it’s possible to improve on Shakespeare, or for that matter Homer. Clearly many people think so. One of the current trends in the arts is not merely to preach and lecture, which is tedious enough, but to modernize, to make ‘relevant’ and ‘contemporary’. Christopher Nolan does this by having a rapper play his ‘bard’ (Homer, presumably), by making the dialogue slangy, informal, and in an American accent, by his casting choices, and by basing his script on Emily Wilson’s translation, which The New York Times has just described as ‘modernizing’ Homer. But do we need or want Homer modernized? Or Shakespeare? Isn’t the whole point of the classics that they are timeless?

I’m aware of the counter-argument: that there’s danger that the classics will disappear altogether, that hardly anyone actually reads them any more (unsurprisingly, since they are hardly taught these days), and that anything that gets modern audiences interested must be a good thing. There’s something in this. Art should not be so elitist that it’s inaccessible to ordinary people. Certainly it wasn’t in Ancient Greece, nor in Elizabethan London. Although ‘Homer’, or the anyonymous group of bards we call such, and ‘Shakespeare’, who might have been someone else altogether, were highly sophisticated artists, they also knew how to tell a rattling good story, and in Will’s case to make ordinary people split their sides laughing too; both the ordinary folk and the intellectuals could appreciate them for different reasons. But the trouble with the modernization of these texts is that if you don’t do it with consummate skill, you break the suspension of belief of the audience, and it all becomes very ‘meta’, so instead of watching a film of the Odyssey, you feel you’re watching a post-modern commentary on it, and instead of watching an admittedly rather silly play like Twelfth Night, you’re watching an ironic allusion to it, of the kind we’ve seen so often before, for instance in The Knight’s Tale, where, as Heath Ledger enters the lists on a horse to joust, the audience start clapping the rhythm to Queen’s We Will Rock You, and a medieval dance turns into Bowie’s Golden Years. It may be momentarily amusing, but it turfs you out of the extended dream which any great piece of narrative art is, so instead of being moved, the pleasure you get is a kind of self-congratulatory one on your cleverness and refinement. It’s very much a postmodern pleasure, and I dislike it.

The subtitle of this essay is ‘The Boomers’ Race to the Bottom’, because I believe popular art is increasingly targeting the Boomers and Generation X, and the old fogeys are not serving art well. There’s a frequent appeal to the lowest common denominator, and to nostalgia. At Tolethorpe Hall, the Boomers get Abba, the Jackson Five (those sublime geniuses!), and somewhat more acceptably, the Stones and Procul Harum. The subtext may well be that if you can’t follow Elizabethan English, at least you can rock out to the hits of your youth, which are equally timeless and equally important, as any French poststructuralist will tell you. The Progressives who flock to Nolan’s Odyssey are assured that their feminist values are the correct ones: Odysseus is not the endlessly resourceful, incredibly clever, witty hero of Homer, but a man broken by the trauma of war, miserable, curmudgeonly, and in need of the true wisdom of the women and immortal female figures he encounters, because, as Lupita Nyongo has said ‘Homer didn’t get much screen time to women’. (Which is actually nonsense, as anyone who’s read the Odyssey knows.) The film is not an attempt to dramatically reproduce the epic poem, but an attempt to improve it by reinterpreting it, largely without the agency of the gods. The problem is that Nolan, for all his gifts, is not an artist of the calibre of Homer. Nor are the modernizers of Shakespeare, those producing his plays with all-female casts, or trans casts, the equals of Richard Burbage and the men who produced Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe and the Swan. The modernizers are arrogant, conceited, and ignorant. And it shows.

I love drama, or perhaps I should say that I used to love it. Increasingly you can’t go to the theatre, or the cinema, without being proselytized, preached to, condescended to, and flattered with childish anachronisms like pop songs and American diction. I want to be enthralled, the way the theatregoers were enthralled at Athens and Epidaurus, in London and Elizabeth’s court. Treat me like an adult, not a teenager who’s failed to grow up. Give me a draught of the true vintage, not diluted slop. I’m afraid my generation is determined to wear their tie-dye tee shirts to the very end, and to face eternity singing adolescent lyrics rather than reciting eternal poetry. More’s the pity.