Quakers and Shakespeare
John Lampen writes about drama and spiritual understanding
Through most of our history, Quakers were strongly discouraged from going to the theatre. Friends once objected to Shakespeare being studied and performed in Quaker schools. Our attitudes changed gradually, with the formation of the Quaker Youth Theatre in 1976 as a key moment. Nowadays we have excellent touring Quaker drama and well-attended Shakespeare courses at Woodbrooke and Charney Manor. Nonetheless professional Quaker actors tell me they feel tensions between their Quakerism and their calling. One of the last things Walt Whitman wrote was an essay contrasting George Fox and William Shakespeare, and claiming that Fox gives us the one thing that Shakespeare was unable to offer.
Besides Shakespeare’s universal human sympathy and matchless writing, I find there are many ways in which he appeals especially to Friends. Quakers can tolerate very different positions on the same question. Without (I hope) ever abandoning our spiritual and moral foundations, we welcome contrasting viewpoints in our decision-making and witness, Friends are encouraged to examine every side of a situation without prejudging. We are not told what to think; we look, ponder and decide for ourselves with the guidance of the Light.
This is how Shakespeare asks us to consider moral dilemmas. He simply shows us what is happening and forces us to ask what it is right for a Viola or Hamlet or Macbeth to do. The answers are not spelled out, but are there to be found. This is why productions of the same play can differ so strikingly.
Shakespeare is preoccupied with forgiveness and reconciliation, themes which dominate most of his later plays and provide their most memorable moments: Isabella pleading for the life of the man who tried to rape her; Lear reunited with the daughter he rejected (‘If you have poison for me, I will drink it’); and Prospero struggling to be reconciled with the king who wronged him and failing to forgive his treacherous brother. These stories illuminate and test our faith in that of God in everyone.
He also probes how wounded societies can be cured, an abiding Quaker concern. Windsor is a divided community where everyone is deceiving somebody or being deceived, frequently both. Yet the wit and wisdom of its ‘merry wives’ operate to restore the social bonds and bring the community together to feast. In Romeo and Juliet peace only comes when the warring parties are united in a catastrophe they jointly caused. In the histories and Macbeth a tyrant is defeated and killed by a ‘good’ and legitimate successor; but other plays raise doubts whether violence can ever bring healing.
Shakespeare’s superb ability to make goodness attractive, dynamic and convincing, especially in his heroines, appeals to Friends. He shows us too what it is to be in a state of grace. Hamlet finally achieves this (‘There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow… the readiness is all’), and Lear when he recovers his sanity. Most touching of all is Katherine of Arragon in Henry VIII. Learning of the death of her enemy cardinal Wolsey, she says: ‘So may he rest; his faults lie gently on him.’ And to the king who betrayed her: ‘Tell him in death I blessed him.’
Friends love to explore these insights on our Woodbrooke and Charney Manor courses. We find they enlarge our human sympathies and spiritual understanding.
John is leading a course at Woodbrooke on The Merry Wives of Windsor in September.
Walt Whitman’s essay is reprinted in The One Thing Needful by Diana and John Lampen, availabe from the Quaker Bookshop.
