Exciting the Imagination: the Case of Shakespeare

I was writing recently on the subject of hype. (Also here.)  As I said in the posts, I don't mean hype only in the sense of commercial publicity, but in the more general sense of generating excitement, of making a big deal out of something.

One of the forms of hype that especially interests me is what I might call self-administered hype-- deliberately trying to excite one's imagination about something.

I'm guessing we all do it, but how much? I do it a lot.

Here is an example. If I decide to read a Shakespeare play, I find myself deliberately calling to mind all the times my imagination was stirred by the idea of Shakespeare. (Be warned: I've written about these before.)

The first instance I can remember is when my father was watching BBC productions of Shakespeare in the 1980s. I think it was this series.  I can't remember much of it, but I do remember a figure against a dark background. Whether this occured to me at the time or not, this image has now become emblematic to me of Shakespeare as the dramatist of universal, timeless human nature. My father might well have put this idea in my head as he spoke to me about the productions (I would have been eight in 1985). He was wonderful at describing writers and literature in an exciting way. Many years later, I remember him telling me that "Shakespeare's mind was like a sponge."

There was a sense of event about the broadcasts-- or so I remember it.

Later on (although I can't remember when this was-- it might have been any time from my childhood to my teens) my father recited the "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech from Macbeth, which both appalled and gripped me, especially the final words: "A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing."

I think my next brush with Shakespeare came when I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This might have been in my early teens. In that book, the "savage" (a character who lives outside the dehumanized utopian system) likes to quote Shakespeare, and I was electrified by this line that he quotes from King Lear: "The wheel has come full circle: I am here." (This line still agitates me, although I can't tell whether it's because of its intrinsic power or not.)

The savage also quotes a line from The Tempest that seized my imagination: "Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices."

Another time (it's impossible to date these memories), I found myself reading an old school textbook of Hamlet that was in our bookcase. The introduction said something like: "Hamlet is a prism through which we view our own experience of life". I'd never encountered this idea before and it stirred me. (How many synonyms can I find for "excite" in this blog post? Reader, may I just say "excite" from now on?)

My next Shakespearean memory comes from a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was staged by another (and older) class; I was only in the audience. I couldn't follow the story very well, but I was moved by the sense of excitement and lushness about the production. I'm not much of a theatre-goer, but for my money, school drama is more magical than professional drama, by virtue of its sheer amateurism. I may be imagining that I could smell greasepaint, but that's how I remember it.

English was by far and away my favourite subject in secondary school. I had one excellent English teacher for two years, when I was fourteen and fifteen. (I had the opportunity in later years to tell her how much her teaching meant to me, and it she seemed to be quite moved by this.) We studied The Merchant of Venice in her class-- the first time I had studied a whole Shakespeare play.

One period of studying The Merchant of Venice especially stands out in my memory. The teacher explained to us the various ways in which character could be conveyed in drama-- through action, language, costume, expression, and so on. I'd never thought about this before and I was-- well-- greatly excited by it.

And here's where we come back to the main point of this blog post. I have a very distinct memory, from this period of studying The Merchant of Venice, of deliberately exciting my imagination before a class. I found myself conjuring up the scents of Venetian cargoes-- coffee, spices, and so forth-- trying to evoke the whole atmosphere of Venice as I imagined it.

The other play we studied in my school years was Hamlet, when I was seventeen and eighteen. My memory of this experience is less vivid, strangely enough.

The last experience I have to mention is from around the same time, but it's a non-school memory. I was seventeen and I had just earned what was perhaps the first payment of my life, for cleaning somebody's shed. (I was not an enterprising kid. The job came to me.) I think I earned ten pounds for it. This was before the introduction of the euro.

I bought two books with the money: a horror novel called Ancient Images by Ramsey Campbell (which was pretty good) and a big poetry anthology called The Library of World Poetry, edited by the American poet William Cullen Bryant, and first published in 1872.

I bought the book in the bargain basement (which was literally a basement) of Chapters bookshop in Dublin. The shop still exists, although it's moved a few streets from where it was then.

The Library of World Poetry included excerpts from long poems and verse dramas. I can very vividly remember leafing through it, trying to decide whether or not to buy it, and coming across Prospero's speech from The Tempest. I may have encountered the famous last two lines already, but I had never read the speech in its entirety:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

This speech has come to haunt my imagination over the decades. I can remember being struck by it at the time, although perhaps mostly at a subliminal level. I had a very strange sensation, as I was reading: like I was falling, or floating, or both. The speech seemed to illuminate human nature as a whole, existence as a whole-- a feature common to Shakespeare's most famous speeches.

Such a long post, to make a simple point-- that I find myself deliberately evoking such memories, when I sit down to read Shakespeare. And this "self-administered hype" isn't at all unique to reading Shakespeare, but is something I do with any number of things-- things as simple as making a cup of tea!

After this rather lengthy discursion into Shakespereans impressions, I'm rather embarrassed to mention (although I'd be ashamed not to mention) that I'm by no means a great devotee of the Bard. I wish I was. I've tried to be. Some of the language in the plays (especially the great speeches) genuinely sets my mind and imagination on fire, no matter how often I read them or call them to mind. But as for the actual drama of the plays-- I regret that I am somewhat oblivious (or at least unappreciative) of their greatness. Perhaps fifteen or twenty years ago I read through most of The Riverside Shakespeare-- slowly, reading each play several times, as well as the introductions and notes. This made very little impression on me and I remember very little from this reading. I've never read Othello and I've only read Macbeth once, on an afternoon when I was sleepy and didn't take in much of it.

The only Shakespeare play that really appeals to me as a play is The Tempest-- and not just for Prospero's speech, although that seems key to the flavour of the whole work.

As well as this, I have never been an admirer of the sonnets. Occasional lines here and there give me pleasure, but the only sonnet I really love is the one that begins "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." They seem artificial and contrived, and not in a good way. I know this is a defect in me. (At the same time, I do greatly love some of the songs from Shakespeare's plays, especially "Fear no more the heat o' the sun" and "When icicles hang by the wall").

But that is something of a postcript. This post was really about the whole idea of deliberately exciting one's own imagination. I'm interested to know if other people do this, as well.