The liturgical rearrangement—or in Peter Kwasniewski’s
somewhat more colorful description, the liturgical bloodbath—that recently
occurred in Tyler, Texas, has affected me on multiple levels. It affected me
personally, because I have a family connection there. It affected me as a
member of my local church, because I also live in a place where the Latin Mass
seems to be rather unpopular among the diocesan leadership. It affected me as a
member of the universal Church, because I love sacred Tradition and have for
many years been devoted to the ancient eucharistic rite of western Christendom,
which so fully and so poetically reifies that Tradition.
And there is yet another level, one which is not so widely
shared as the first three I mentioned, and which perhaps has sent the emotional
weight most directly into my heart. It has affected me—has wounded me—as
someone who studies and teaches and writes about the dramatic literature of the
English Renaissance. It has wounded me as someone who recently stood in front
of a classroom full of college students, English majors among them, and spoke
at length about Othello. This is a play in which the relentless
manipulation of reality leads to appalling destruction. It is a play in which
cunning words breed death.
As is my wont when lecturing on such topics, I searched for avenues of passion and beauty and timeless significance that might convince the next generation of parents and artists and scholars that this play—written over four hundred years ago, in language that is often unfamiliar and unclear to them—is still worth their time, is still worth reading and studying and talking about, is still worth pondering and admiring and loving. Imagine how strange, how disorienting, how deeply disturbing it would be if the president of the university walked into my classroom and calmly declared that Shakespeare would no longer be taught. “We have new plays now,” he explains, “and some people consider them simpler, and more relevant, and less likely to offend or exclude, and therefore Shakespeare is abrogated—for the sake of unity. We must all study the new plays now.”
“But Mr. President,” I protest “there are a great many
students and faculty members who enjoy and value Shakespeare, and some have even discovered a transformative richness in his works.”
“Of course, yes, we would never—er, well, we will not now
completely exclude those who believe themselves to have a preference for old
things. An unused room in the basement of Ebenezer Hall will be made available
once per month for Shakespeare studies. It seats nine people.”
“But Mr. President, Shakespeare is the most revered author
in the history of the English language—and perhaps the most revered playwright
in all the world! His works are the beating heart of the English literary
experience. They are utterly irreplaceable!”
“And yet they are, as of today, replaced. And lower your
voice, please—what are you, some kind of anarchist? Do I not have the
authority to decide what will and will not be taught in my university?”
“But Mr. President, the university’s collection of
scholarship on Shakespeare is a small library unto itself. Brilliant
researchers and scholars of the past and present wrote these books, which help
us to understand not only Shakespeare’s plays and poems but drama itself,
poetry itself, literature itself—life itself!”
“Those books will not, in the foreseeable future, be
disposed of. But you’ll have no need to assign them and no need to consult
them. If they then gather dust and end up in storage, that merely confirms
their irrelevance.”
“With all due respect, Sir, your logic there seems
slightly—”
“Your compliance in these matters is greatly appreciated. It
is the duty of the university to guard our intellectual traditions from the
threat of disunity.”
“Mr. President, this classroom was united from the first day
of the semester until you opened that door.”
“The stagnant unity of the past is not the same as the
dynamic unity of the future.”
“But the dynamic unity of the future is, for me, no future
at all. I teach Shakespeare. I read and study and esteem and cherish
Shakespeare. You have destroyed my professional life, and you have broken my
heart.”
“You will learn to cherish the new playwrights. Class is
dismissed.”
If you are not able to imagine this scene, don’t worry. There’s really no need to imagine the unimaginable. Something like this would never happen, in a university.
Dr. Harold Bloom—professor at Yale, preeminent twentieth-century literary scholar, prolific author—was not the most progressive of academics, but he was a thoroughly modern man. He concluded that Shakespeare “wrote the best poetry and the best prose in English, or perhaps in any Western language,” and he saw Shakespeare’s plays as
the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind’s reach.
Bloom is but one voice among many in a chorus of praise that has been heard for centuries and continues to this day. Indeed, the monumental excellence of Shakespearean drama has become a commonplace in our culture; it is woven so thoroughly into the very fabric of modern existence that one might know nothing about Shakespeare and yet live a life that is profoundly enriched by his art.
But surely, multifaceted cultural brilliance of this magnitude doesn’t simply appear in a young Englishman’s restless and uniquely rhetorical mind. Only God creates ex nihilo. What were the antecedents? The residual dramatic energies? The formative influences? Let us not oversimplify; there were many. My intention here is to discuss only one, though it is one which you perhaps have not heard of, and which may be more significant than some would like to admit.
Though it saddens me greatly to say it, few have seen a
Shakespeare play performed in anything approaching an ideal theatrical
environment. Early modern theaters looked something like this:
The reconstructed Globe in London gives us an even better idea:
The style is known as a “thrust stage,” whereby the performance area projects out into the audience. The action on the stage can be seen from the front and from the sides. The arrangement is vaguely reminiscent of a traditional sanctuary, wouldn’t you say?
And though it again saddens me to say it, few people,
historically speaking, have seen a Shakespeare production that sought to fully
and faithfully reproduce the sensory and psychological experience of an
Elizabethan theater—and we must remember, as the Shakespearean scholar Sir
Stanley Wells pointed out, that Shakespeare was, “supremely, a man of the
theater..., a man immersed in the life of that theater and committed to its
values.” We learn from Coleridge that in a theater of Shakespeare’s time, “the
circumstances of acting were altogether different from ours; it was much more
of recitation”; thus, “the idea of the poet was always present.” What we call
acting today is often a rather boisterous and busy affair; for Shakespeare,
acting was fundamentally recitation, poetry, oratory. There was little need for
extravagant scenery; ornamentation was achieved through language and music, with some help from what
must have been exceedingly fine costumes and elegantly coordinated movements.
The overall aesthetic was one of visual gravity and decorative simplicity
offset by consummate verbal artistry; the mind was drawn, thereby, to the
essence of the thing.
Can you imagine this? Does it not somehow resemble, in your
mind’s eye, a traditional liturgical service? If it does, we need not be
surprised: the medieval drama of sacred liturgy led, in the best
possible way, to the early modern drama of the theater. That is to say, it
led to Shakespeare.
Allow me to share three remarkable statements made by Dr. O.
B. Hardison, who was writing not, I emphasize, as an apologist for the Latin
Mass. He was writing as a mainstream scholar, and a highly distinguished one at
that—an author, an esteemed educator, a professor at Georgetown, and a director
of the Folger Shakespeare Library:
In the ninth century the boundary ... between religious ritual (the services of the Church) and drama did not exist. Religious ritual was the drama of the early Middle Ages and had been ever since the decline of the classical theater.
Modern Western drama is the product of a Christian, not a pagan, culture. Its forms, its conventions, and its characteristic tonalities are shaped by this fact. To study early medieval drama is to study the way in which these forms, conventions, and tonalities came into being.
Just as the Mass is a sacred drama encompassing all history and embodying in its structure the central pattern of Christian life on which all Christian drama must draw, the celebration of the Mass contains all elements necessary to secular performances. The Mass is the general case—for Christian culture, the archetype. Individual dramas are shaped in its mold.
I wrote in an earlier NLM article that “traditional Christian
liturgy was the heart of Europe’s artistic genius.” We have here yet another
example of this, and it is an example that should resonate throughout the
artistic consciousness of the entire Christian world. Shakespeare was a
playwright, a dramaturgical poet, a “man of the theater”; and the theater was a
secularized descendant of the Church’s sacred liturgy—her medieval liturgy.
I have introduced a complex subject and cannot explore it with adequate length or nuance in this one essay. We will need to return to this topic in the future. Nevertheless, I hope I have at least provided some thought-provoking context for the following statement: marginalization or prohibition of the classical Roman liturgical rites is a grievous threat to human culture, not least because it is a threat to liturgical forms and experiences that served as archetypical precursors to early modern English theater—and from early modern English theater emerged some of humanity’s most compelling, cherished, influential, enlightening, and artistically virtuosic works of literature.
Cardinal Ratzinger said, quite boldly, that “the only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” It is unthinkable that we should deprive future generations of the liturgical rites that for so many centuries breathed the breath of life into Christian art. The modernized rites, though currently favored by the ecclesial hierarchy, have demonstrated no comparable ability to inspire great artists, sublimate poetic sensibilities, and elicit artistic masterpieces; given their apparent effects over the past sixty years, we have no justification for assuming that they ever will.
The artistic, and therefore spiritual, crisis in Western Civilization has no simple solution, but a first and crucial step in this solution is simple: Let the Roman Church return full freedom to her ancient and everlasting Mass, which was described by the French playwright Paul Claudel—and perhaps would have been described in like terms by the English playwright William Shakespeare—as “the most profound and grandiose poetry, enhanced by the most august gestures ever confided to human beings.”
For thrice-weekly discussions of art, history, language, literature, Christian spirituality, and traditional Western liturgy, all seen through the lens of medieval culture, you can subscribe for free to my Substack publication: Via Mediaevalis.
