The Island Editorial

What’s in a date?

05 January 2017

Celebrities are prone to disturbances of all sorts which they have to learn to live with. They have to grin and bear it even when intrusions are made into their private affairs. This is the price they have to pay for being famous! Some of them are not spared even after they go the way of all flesh!

It was reported last year that a group of archaeologists who used ground-penetrating radar to scan Shakespeare’s grave traced his skeletal remains sans his skull which had once protected the most prized part of his anatomy. Some grave raiders had not given two hoots about the poetic admonition on the Bard’s tomb: "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear to dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones/And cursed be he that moves my bones."

Now, researchers tell us that one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, Hamlet, has been dated wrongly and the error has been in plain sight all these centuries. Those who thought the play had been written in early 1601 while Elizabeth was still on the throne stand corrected. Some scholars who conducted a study on the play have pointed out that it was, in fact, completed two years later during the reign of James I. What’s in a date? A Shakespearean play, even if wrongly dated, remains as great!

Why on earth should anyone scan Shakespeare’s tomb or try to determine the dates of his peerless creations? His works are ageless; all one should do is to sit down and enjoy them. However, Prof. Gary Taylor, who, together with others, conducted the aforesaid study on Hamlet, has made a very interesting observation.

Shakespeare knew which side his bread was buttered; he used his genius to curry favour with the rulers of the day. Taylor has said the need to flatter the king would have been foremost on the Bard’s mind when he finished Hamlet ‘because one of James’s first acts was to appoint Shakespeare’s acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, as his own official players, allowing them to rename themselves the King’s Men’.

Drama was a very powerful medium in times of yore and, therefore, dramatists were a force to be reckoned with owing to their ability to shape public opinion and their iconoclastic tendencies. (One may recall what Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere says in Anonymous, a movie which shows the Bard in a bad light––"Words will prevail … not swords.") The King may have thought of rewarding the crème de la crème of the dramatists of the day so that he would have some peace of mind. His method worked; the Bard reciprocated. As for Hamlet, the inclusion of a regime change in Denmark following the demise of Claudius and Hamlet with Fortinbras being crowned was meant as a parallel to James’s ascension to throne after Elizabeth’s death, Taylor argues.

Thus, one learns that much as the Bard had greatness thrust upon him, he had a weakness for ingratiating himself with the rulers just like our popular artistes who, having benefited from the former regime, are dancing attendance on the current rulers. Our King’s Men have apparently taken a leaf out of Shakespeare’s book in insinuating themselves into the court of the reigning monarch. If only they had the ability to create plays like Hamlet! Their comedies make us weep and their tragedies are rib-ticklingly funny! They produce tele-dramas like films and flicks like soap operas.

That the Bard was blessed with business acumen is fairly well known. In 2013, a group of researchers from Aberystwyth University in Wales described Shakespeare as a ruthless businessman who grew wealthy by dealing in grain during a time of famine. They argued that one could not fully understand the Bard unless one studied his ‘often overlooked business savvy’. He has also been called a hoarder, moneylender and tax dodger. Going by claims made by Taylor et al anent Hamlet one may argue that studying the Bard’s political acumen is also a prerequisite for understanding him properly.