In his new book, Peter Conrad explains how the Bard’s plays are the perfect mirror for our troubled times
Next time you go to a Shakespeare play, don’t think you can settle back into a safe invisibility when the lights go down. You will be under observation: the actors we watch are in turn watching us, examining our personal flaws and the fault lines in our fractious society. We receive fair warning of the test that is in store. Hamlet invites a troupe of itinerant players to perform at Elsinore in the hope that they will embarrass and with luck incriminate his guilty uncle. Their purpose, he tells them, is to “hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature” and expose “the very age and body of the time”.
It’s our age and body, our manners and manias, that Shakespeare’s plays now probe, perhaps more pointedly than ever before. The film-maker Errol Morris, introducing American Dharma, his sulphurous documentary about Trump’s ideologue Steve Bannon, recently remarked that we are suffering through a period resembling “bad Shakespeare” – a mismanaged chaos that matches Horatio’s summary of the plot at the end of Hamlet, when he reflects on “accidental judgments, casual slaughters” and “purposes mistook”. History, while you’re living through it, doesn’t have the cyclical predictability discerned by Marxists; like Shakespeare’s plays, it is a melee of upsets and reversals, driven by capricious individuals whose actions seldom turn out as they are supposed to do.
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