To Be OR Not To Be: How Shakespeare Charted the Path to the Modern

To be, or not to be, that is the question,

Thus begins the big speech from the play Hamlet. This speech and play are universally accepted as being the best, most profound, most significant (add your superlative here) play in the English Language, or of the Millennium, or the History of Man (add your frame of reference here). 

The big question has been: Why is to be or not to be, the question?  Like most people, I’ve always focused on the “to be” and “not to be” parts.  Lately, I’ve come to understand the most important word in the sentence is the “or”. The speech offers two opposite and mutually exclusive options.  It’s not sort of this and sort of that.  It is this or that. It is a choice.  Hamlet has a choice.  It is for him to make.

The version of the play we know is not the first rendering. The story originated in Germany in the 14^th Century.  It was retold many times and performed as a play.  Each writer changed it. Shakespeare based his version on a lost play scholars call the Ur-Hamlet. It was performed in London in the late 1580s. Shakespeare started writing his Hamlet in the early 1590s. It seemingly was performed many times over the decade. One of his early drafts of the play was stolen and printed in 1601.  Scholars call it the “Bad Quarto.”  The thief was capitalizing on the success of the Shakespeare’s newly revised work that was burning up the stage of the newly built Globe Theatre.  Shakespeare’s company quickly printed a “true and perfect copy” of the play the next year, called the “Good Quarto.” [Follow this link to: Ay, there's the point: the Bad Quarto of Hamlet]

The Bad Quarto, like the early renderings of the play, was a straight forward revenge drama.  The Ghost of the King, Hamlet's father, tells Hamlet that his uncle has murdered him and taken his throne and wife.  He commands his son to revenge him.  Hamlet plots his revenge, acts crazy as a diversion, and eventually gets the job done.  There are dramatic twists and plots (otherwise the play would be about fifteen minutes long), but in the end Hamlet exacts his revenge as any good Medieval son should do.

The Good Quarto of Hamlet is a different play.  Sure, it’s still a revenge drama, but it is about something else.  Earlier Hamlets did not question whether they should revenge their dead fathers, the question was how.  This new improved Hamlet (or as I like to think, the Hamlet Reboot, since the treatment he got from Shakespeare is not unlike the current reboots of superhero franchises we see today: Hamlet, the Dark Prince.) questions everything especially whether he should kill the king. 

Whether to revenge or not creates the huge difference between the Bad and Good Quartos. Shakespeare changed the play. This was more than a few additions and notes from a producer. While the plot remained essentially the same, the play changed. He added complexity. The play got longer. The text got sharper, but also more complex. Hamlet’s path is less clear. He watered down Ophelia and made her weaker. Gertrude’s is more of an accomplice to Claudius. Every place where he could Shakespeare made the play more ambivalent.  Yes, he made a better play.  But "why" is the question? 

The biggest change is that the “to be or not to be” speech is moved from the second act to the third act after he has made the plan with the players to perform the a play like the murder of his father to catch his uncle.  (It's all very Perry Mason, if you remember that sort of thing.) In the Bad Quarto: Hamlet says he's going to act crazy; he does the speech acting crazy, the Players show up, he makes a plan to catch Claudius and he stops acting crazy.  In the Good Quarto: he does the speech after he has made the plan with the Players.  This speech is not an acting crazy speech. It's different. This speech is an argument for himself and the audience.

To be, or not to be, that is the question,

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing, end them, to die to sleep

No more, and by a sleep, to say we end

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to; tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished to die to sleep, [i]

This is no revenge drama speech. Hamlet's questioning whether he should kill Claudius. He realizes he has a choice. He will also bear the responsibility for his choice. He has two opposite paths. His “to be or not to be” is:

TO BE (to Live)

OR NOT TO BE (to Die)

TO BE (Suffer through one’s life dealing with whatever the world throws at you)

OR NOT TO BE (End your life or the life of someone else, to murder, to kill)

TO BE (Be in civilization and absorb the pain of being in community)

OR NOT TO BE (Be a violent barbarian forcing your will on others)

TO BE (Live and be present, feeling everything that it is to be human)

OR NOT TO BE (To shut off one’s feelings/emotions and be numb in the world)

Or it could be all of the above, plus anything you can imagine “be” to be, all at the same moment.[ii]

The “to be” and the “not to be” are very important, however, the “question” is in the “or”.  There is a choice. Hamlet must make a choice.  This is the difference between the two versions of HAMLET. In the “bad”, Hamlet doesn’t question whether he should revenge his father’s death. It’s his duty. In the “good”, he realizes he has a choice. This is huge. Hamlet has a choice. He has control of this decision. He, not God, has control of his fate. Either choice is valid. He can go either way.

Four hundred years later it’s hard for us to appreciate how remarkable choice is for Hamlet. We post-modern folk, or post-post modern folk or postie-tostie modern folk make decisions and choices every day. But for someone coming out of the Medieval Era, for Hamlet to have a choice and realize it, it is world changing.

Over the ten years of writing this play, Shakespeare came to this understanding because choice was the story of his life.  He understood how new, complex and amazing choice actually is. He had made a choice about becoming a poet and player that changed his life. In the time between starting to write HAMLET and it being a huge hit in the newly opened Globe Theatre some ten years later, Shakespeare’s life changed.

• He had left his small town, his wife and kids.
•  He had turned his back on his father’s trade as a Glove Maker and had become an actor and a poet. (One step above prostitute)
•  He had matured in age from 27 to 37.
•  He had gone from being a minor playwright, an “upstart crow”, to the chief playwright and an actor in the top theater company in London.
• His only son has died at home while Shakespeare was away in London.
• He had made a fortune.
• He had become an Elizabethan Rock Star.

Shakespeare made a choice and his life changed.

Choice was profoundly new for Shakespeare and his age. The Medieval era did not contain options and choices for people. The Medieval Man (I use the term generically though it would have never occurred to the Medieval Man to do so. I’m also speaking in broad generalities. I know this and can argue with myself on any of these points, so please hang with me); the Medieval Man understood his place. He knew where he was in the world. He knew what his job was. If he stayed in his place and followed his predetermined fate, he would go straight to heaven when he died. Life was preordained. Fate was set. Everything was clear. If your father was a stone mason, you would be a stone mason like your grandfather was a stone mason. If you were a serf, you would spend your life working in the dirt, eating the dirt, you would return to the dirt. A Serf was a Serf. A Duke was a Duke. Even the royalty had their place in the wheel, the “great chain of being.” 

You had a responsibility to stay in your path. Life was ordered. There was surety, but no control. A higher power outside the system had control and responsibility for each and every life. There was a minimal concept of individuality and personal identity. Everyone was a cog in the wheel. You were identified by your place in the system. It even became your last name. (The Medieval version of “We are the Borg”) Within this pre-ordained world of fixed hierarchies every person, high or low, would look around and be able to say with absolute certainty: “I have my place in the system.” Life was fated; time was fixed; space was insurmountable. A thing was what it was. This led to that! This was this!

If a person questioned or failed to follow God’s will, he would end up damned for eternity in Hell. You might get there anyway if you were fated by God to go to Hell, but mostly it was reserved for those who didn’t stay in their place, those people who thought they had choices. You could make a choice to be a villain, rogue or actor, but the consequences were completely clear. [Richard III made the most of this. God made him a villain and he committed to it in a big way.  Read: The Last Medieval Man: Richard the Third]

The transition from the Medieval to the Renaissance began as early as 1200. The Crusades, the discovery of Classical writing and rise of the merchant/middle class helped. In England, when King Henry VIII decided to toss out the Catholic Church so he could marry Anne Boleyn, everything went into disarray. Which church do you follow, the Pope’s or your King’s? It created doubt and choice. It didn’t help that the monarchs switched religions back and forth for the next twenty-five years. When Elizabeth I took the throne, she also did something that impacted the creation of the English Golden Age more than anything: Literacy. Due to the installation of public schools, the literacy rate in England went from 20% of the men to 80% in thirty years.[iii] (Only wealthy women were taught to read, even a female monarch couldn’t change things that much.) These elements and many others affected this idea that a man could make a choice about his life. It was a rising tide. [Look for my coming article on Left and Right Brain Architecture: The Teeter Totter of the Brain.]

When Richard Burbage, playing Hamlet, spoke “To be or not to be” on the platform of the Globe Theater in 1601, he embodied the major question of the age. Shakespeare charted the path for the creation of the modern era. For it all begins with having a choice and the challenge of consequences.

Following Hamlet, Elizabethan Man embraced his control over his life. Everything changed. He was on his way to becoming Modern. He now had to choose his path. He had to deal with the consequences. His choice made him unique, an individual. This was the birth of individual identity. “I am a person. I chose this over that. I made this choice. I caused this to happen. I created my life. My future is created by my present." Time became linear. Space could now be crossed in time with effort. Distance became fixed.

(Of course, in a few decades after Shakespeare a group of people thought this was all bullocks, beheaded the King and started to follow God’s will.  It was the type of backlash that always happens when people think they have control over their lives.)

If there was no Shakespeare, then we might not have had a Newton. Classical Mechanics is the physicist expression of Shakespeare’s work. Without Shakespeare, we probably would not have had the Enlightenment. Or, the United States. We don’t get to the Modern. I know I’m overreaching, we probably would get to now without Shakespeare, but it was his clear embodiment of causality and individual choice that gave us the path to the Modern.

With choice came consequences. Hamlet really got this. He became paralyzed with the consequences of his choice. It is the source of modern angst, depression and schizophrenia. Hamlet says so much at the end of the “to be or not to be” speech.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hew of resolution

Is sickled ore with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment,

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

In the end of the play, Hamlet’s confrontation of causality and his cowardice cause him to throw up his hands and accept that he has no real control of the circumstances.  He needs to remain true to what is right.  Toss the dice and see the way they come up.  He does this, get’s his revenge, kills a few more people and dies, “the rest is silence”. [for more on this read: The Readiness is All]

It has been a four hundred year journey from that day in the Globe Theater to our time that some call post-modern. We are leaving the Modern because about a hundred years ago the painters and the physicists started to suggest that the world works in a different way than we thought. Rather than fixed, everything behaves in a relative way to everything else. It depends on observation which causes entanglement, because as soon as we are involved in the observation it changes the observed. The same thing can be two opposite things at the same time. An electron can be a wave or a particle depending on how we look at it. Time, light and space can bend upon itself. Time is spontaneous and simultaneous. Space bends and can be transgressed instantaneously. “I am both separate and equal. I am both an individual and fully part of the community, I am universal. [I'll have to say about this in the coming month.]

Our experience of our world is changing. The challenge for the writers, dramatists, screenwriters today is to embody the question of our age in the same way Shakespeare embodied his age. For us to get to the Next, the quantum era, we need the human example. Since theatre, films and television are the most human of the art forms, it is dependent on us to lead to the new era.

Knowing that the question is no longer one of choosing opposites, the new question is living in the duality of opposites being true at the same moment. This and that, rather than this or that. The new question might be:

To be and not to be, that is our challenge.

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[i] Full text of Quarto 2 “To be, or not to be” speech, in original text:

To be, or not to be, that is the question,

Whether tis nobler in the minde to suffer

The slings and arrowes of outragious fortune,

Or to take Armes against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing, end them, to die to sleepe

No more, and by a sleepe, to say we end

The hart-ake, and the thousand naturall shocks

That flesh is heire to; tis a consumation

Devoutly to be wisht to die to sleepe,

To sleepe, perchance to dreame, I there's the rub,

For in that sleepe of death what dreames may come

When we have shuffled off this mortall coyle

Must give us pause, there's the respect

That makes calamitie of so long life:

For who would beare the whips and scornes of time,

Th'oppressors wrong, the proude mans contumely,

The pangs of despiz'd love, the lawes delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurnes

That patient merrit of th'unworthy takes,

When he himselfe might his quietas make

With a bare bodkin; who would fardels beare,

To grunt and sweat under a wearie life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country, from whose borne

No traviler returnes, puzzels the will,

And makes us rather beare those ills we have,

Then flie to others that we know not of.

Thus conscience dooes make cowards,

And thus the native hiew of resolution

Is sickled ore with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment,

With this regard theyr currents turne awry,

And loose the name of action. Soft you now,

The faire Ophelia, Nimph in thy orizons

Be all my sinnes remembred.

[Adapted from Internet Shakespeare Edition: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Ham/Q2/default/]

[ii] This list of “to be’s” are inspired by the work of Tina Packer, Founding Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Company and one of my mentors. While she has spoken often of this speech often, this bit was taken from Women of Will, Tina's lecture/theatrical on the feminine in Shakespeare.

[iii] The actual percentage of increase in literacy is highly debatable. A low number would be an increase of 5% to over 30%. I picked a higher number. The basic idea is that far more men could read and write in 1600 than could in 1560. And this made a huge difference in the culture.

Voyager 1 and 2; a diversion

This is a diversion to the article Creating the 21st Century: An Overview Overview

OK when I say that Voyager 1 is about to “travel farther than any human made object.” I know that Pioneer 10 and 11 were on a trajectory to leave the Solar System when we lost communication with them in 2003 and 1995, respectively.  They might have crossed the great divide, but I think Voyager 1 has already gone farther than they would have gone if they are still going.  Besides it’s still sending back messages; messages that take 18 hours to reach earth. That counts for something.

Before posting this, I did a little tour on Wikipedia about the two Voyagers and the two Pioneers.  The Pioneers had a plaque to communicate to any aliens who might find it some idea of who we are.  I remember this well.

It seems that Isaac Asimov and others got into some controversy about sending naked images of humans into space.  When the Voyagers were sent, instead of a plaque they sent a record album, which seems quaint as I listen to music on my Ipod.

It included images, sounds of earth and representative music, including Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F and Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode. 

In a Saturday Night Live episode, Steve Martin played a psychic who predicted that the next week’s Time Magazine cover would be a four word message from extraterrestrials who found the record: “Send More Chuck Berry.”

It Must be a Parallel Universe

Theoretical Physicists, Science Fiction Writers and Psychics (Intuitives) tell us we are living in is not a universe, but a Multiverse: A place where parallel and alternate universes sit adjacent to our own. We can’t see and or seemingly experience these other universes, though the dividing line between the one we call ours and the others a thin veil. Alternate realities are a popular notion.

The Physicists suggest that the number of parallel universes could be near infinite. Some of these universes might even follow wildly different natural laws than the universe we recognize. In these universes, everything is different.

There is another thought that says the parallel universes are nearly identical to our own with small changes that might alter the world in huge ways.[i] Germany does not have to win the Second World War for everything to change.[ii]

Many people remember the original Star Trek episode where Kirk ends up on an alternate Enterprise where everyone was evil. At the same time the bad Kirk ended up on the good Enterprise. This is a rudimentary expression of alternate realities.

There is a thought that at each turn or decision a parallel universe splits off playing out that story.

The Gwyneth Paltrow film Sliding Doors is a good example. A young woman runs to make a train. At this moment the action splits. In one scenario, she makes the train goes home and finds her boyfriend sleeping with someone else. While her life is awful for a while, it gets better. In the other scenario, she misses the train and does not catch her boyfriend’s philandering. She stays with him, gets pregnant and her life is awful in the end.

I like this idea of diverging universes being generated by each decision or event. Some have a short life because the consequences are minimal. Others persist due to the divergent scenario. They continue on in their own place. There are many ways for me to drive home from work. While the choice might save a minute or two of travel or be more or less enjoyable (as much as sitting in traffic can be enjoyable). The larger impact of the decision is not to be known. Going left rather than right at this stop sign might keep me from being in a horrible accident. It is best not to think about things that can’t be known.

Years ago, I had to make a decision to either take a job as Resident Stage Manager at Actors Theatre of Louisville where I would be working at a higher level or remain at Arkansas Rep as the Production Stage Manager where there was the possibility of directing. I went to Louisville. For many years, I could almost sense the other me living out a life in Little Rock. I kept wondering whose life was best, the one I chose or the other me who chose the other path.

In 2004, The Chicago Cubs were on their way to winning the National League Pennant. Then, a fan reached out a grabbed a foul ball keeping the Cub fielder from making an out. After that, the Cubs collapsed, lost that game, a few more and the series. Being a huge Cubs fan, it made me question why this me had chosen to live in a universe where the Cubs not only lost every season, but raised my hopes to dash them every year. In another parallel universe there had to be another me celebrating the Cubs winning the World Series. That guy in his universe was clearly having a better life. Why was I living in this one?

In 2000 when the election was decided for Bush by one vote on the Supreme Court, a parallel universe was formed where the one vote went to Gore. The United States were split; divided down the middle. We have remained divided over the last twelve years. I always considered the split universe was continuing right alongside this one, undetectable, though present.

As the forthcoming election approaches, I read an article by Paul Waldman about how the Republicans characterize Obama as being divisive.[iii] Obama has many flaws, but being divisive is not one of them. Waldman theorized that the Republicans were projecting their own divisiveness onto Obama. I had complained for months that the favorite Republican tactic was accusing their opponent of being and doing the very thing they were doing. I thought this was a sinister and conscious campaign tactic born out of the sick mind by the likes of Karl Rove. I’m beginning to believe that they actually believe what they are saying. They are projecting their own flaws on Obama. They are unable to acknowledge that these are their very own flaws, that would be too much of a psychological undertaking.

When Clint Eastwood had a conversation with an invisible Obama at the Republican Convention, it became clear that they were seeing a different Obama. John Stewart made serious fun of this on the Daily Show. He joked that they saw another Obama than the Obama liberals see.[iv]

I think Obama encourages projection. He is a mirror. Growing up as a mixed race person, he seems to have developed a high level skill of being a chameleon. Rather than blending in with the environment, he reflects what you want to see. That is one of the reasons it was easy for everyone in 2008 to hang their hopes on him. He reflected people’s hopes and desires. He has also become the reflection of all that is bad. People see him as they want to see him. It is one of the reasons he is struggling with this election. People who hung their hopes on him became disappointed. There was nothing he could have done to maintain the shine people put on him. And those who projected their negative beliefs on him easily had them confirmed. The more his shine is tarnished, the more they saw the flaws that they projected on him.

All of this has made me wonder something new. Could we be living in two or more parallel universes at the same time? My Republican friends and family see a very different world than my Liberal and Progressive friends. Could it be that the film, boundary, veil between the parallel universes are thinner than we think? Are the alternate realities not only perceived by each person, but are also collective? Do we pass from one to the other as we pass through the day.

I keep hearing people respond to news stories, fact checkers, and, well, all media with the statement: “I don’t know who or what to believe anymore.”

Is it possible that the true revolution, the difference in view points and our inability to bridge the dividing gap and come to any type of agreement in America is that the disagreeing parties are living in a different parallel universe?

We might be really living in the multiverse.

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[i] Ok, I know I’m generalizing even beyond my general knowledge. I’m trying to get to an important idea. If you want to know more about the Multiverse, I recommend:

                Paul Davies’ article “A Brief History of the Multiverse”. New York Times. 12 April, 2003.

                George Ellis’ article “Does the Multiverse Really Exist?”. Scientific American 305 (2) pp38-43.

                Or Wikipedia is always good for a primer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

[ii] There are many books that chase some form of this idea. I like Fatherland by Robert Harris and The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.

[iii] Here is the link to the article. It’s good: http://prospect.org/article/projection-party

[iv] Here is Clint Eastwood at the Republican National Convention: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoqKdWY692k&feature=related

Here is John Stewart’s take on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDWOduw-Rnc

Creating the 21st Century: An Overview

Voyager 1 is preparing to leave our solar system. The spacecraft launched in 1977 has traveled farther than any human made object. This is so cool, but what also boggles my mind is how much has changed since Carter was in the White House, Star Wars premiered at the box office, and Disco was queen. It’s stunning that Voyager 1 is traveling to the outer reaches of our solar system with 1977 technology.  Think about how explosive the change in technology, culture, and our understanding of, well, everything has been in the last 35 years. We are living in a different world than what came before.

The exponential change of the last thirty years is minor compared with the revolutionary change that has occurred in the last century. About a hundred years ago, the physicists and the painters began to suggest that our world worked differently than what was accepted. Our view of the world was simple in comparison. The world they showed us turned out to be far more complex and incomprehensible.

This wasn’t the first time humans had experienced such a profound shift. Three to four hundred years ago a similar dramatic shift occurred as we moved from the Medieval Era to the Modern. That transition was the Renaissance, which means re-birth. First the Scientists and the Painters pointed the way to the change. It was taken up by the other artists, including the dramatists and actors who taught the rest of us how to live in our new time. By the end of the Renaissance, the new way of living was embraced by most people and this affected government, philosophy, religion, economics, sociology, psychology, i.e., Everything.

As far as seismic changes go, we are right on schedule. It took centuries from the beginning of the Renaissance until most people had left the Medieval and were on their way to the Modern. The Modern era took another four hundred years to climax; for most Westerners to embrace the difference in the fundamentals of how our new world worked. Of course before we got there; before the Modern climaxed, the picture of our world began to shatter as new ideas cracked the glass.

A hundred years after Einstein, Planck, Bohr, and Heisenberg began to deconstruct Newtonian Physics, few of us can explain the ideas behind the Theory of Relativity or the principles of Quantum Physics. A hundred years after Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Braques and Picasso, few of us can really explain how the early Modern artists were expressing in paint a different view of our world.

The fact that I didn’t get what they were trying to tell us got me thinking. I knew that our time was fundamentally different than what I was taught in school, society and family. I knew instinctively that we had left the Modern era that began with the Renaissance and we were entering a new era, which I sometimes call the Quantum Era and other times just refer to as the Next. I knew as I read and listened to the media, arts, and entertainment that others were also trying to embrace this phenomenal change. I began to ask: how can I understand the change and embrace it in my life? Since I believe the job of the artist is to express how to live in our time, how could I communicate this new working of the world to the rest of my community? How could I help create the 21^st Century?

Embracing the Next is really a shift in thought; as simple as an idea and as profound as a supernova. I write how with Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech Shakespeare embodied the idea that humans have choices. Once we realize we have a choice, we have identity, responsibility and consequences. This thought, though not original to Shakespeare, but best expressed by him, generated the Modern Era.

The difference between the Next and what came before is a set of assumptions and perceptions. Generally, the Medieval Man believed that that one thing lead to another and it was guided by God, who ordered our lives and placed us in our place. There was not much stake in linear time or the movement through space. Life was. This was this. The revolution of the Modern era is that man had identity, choice and the ability to alter his life. Since there was causality there was a following of linear time and space was something to be traveled. The question was this or that. The Next era asks us to embrace all levels of quantum uncertainty, including the idea that two conflicting things can be both be true simultaneously. This and that can both be true even though they are opposites. It goes beyond an electron behaving as both a particle (a something) and a wave (an action). The chair I sit on can both be “real”/solid and simultaneously porous/insubstantial/a mental construct. Our entire world could be a construct along with being concrete. Time marches on moment to moment and is happening all at once.

I’ve often thought that once I truly embraced the idea of the Next I would be able walk through walls. As soon as I achieved the shift personally, then I could communicate it to others. While I haven’t yet walked through any walls, I believe I’m onto something that others need to consider. I believe it is imperative that we take the next step. The current political and cultural divide in the United States is derived from this very split in perception.

The split in our cultures and our ways of understanding our time is deeply linked with our brain architecture and the conflict between the left and right hemispheres of our frontal cortex. Our very brains are causing the way we see our world, generating our developing culture and inspiring new technology.

The essays on this blog will chase the ideas of how to understand the change we are experiencing and how we can express/communicate these changes to move us forward. The question I’m asking is, ultimately: how can we Create the 21^st Century?