George Kerevan: Shakespeare Supper should be in everyone's diary

Published on Wednesday 22 April 2009 21:58

TODAY is both St George's Day, when the English are supposed to remember their patron saint, and (traditionally) Shakespeare's birthday.

Actually, all we know for sure is that Will was baptised on 26 April, 1564. Giving him St George's Day as his official birthday was a whimsical 18th century innovation, which also makes a pleasing symmetry with the Bard's death, on 23 April, 1616. I mention this because I'm forever amazed (and bemused) that the English don't celebrate Shakespeare's birthday in the same inebriated passionate way we Scots hold Burns Suppers.

Comparing Shakespeare and Burns as artists is superfluous as well as absurd. We don't have to choose: we have both. However, I think there is a reason why Rabbie Burns provoked such a popular response that, on his death, people immediately began to commemorate his life and work. Burns was an 18th century rock star whose poetry expressed the revolutionary cultural and political changes that created modern western society. He gave his contemporaries an emotional anchor and a sense of identity in changing times, as well as entertaining them.

Burns is the quintessential modern man. His birth year, 1759, marks a watershed between a world dominated by pre- industrial economies and non-rationalist modes of thought, and the modern age of capitalist industrialisation and the Enlightenment (both pioneered in Scotland). In 1759, Britain was engaged in the first ever world war – the Seven Years War with France – that created the first global empire. It is the year Adam Smith published his Moral Sentiments and the British Museum opened.

The year saw the birth of a host of people who would define the era along with Burns: Mary Wollstonecraft, the first feminist; William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery campaigner; Georges Danton, the French revolutionary; and William Pitt, the prime minister during the Napoleonic Wars. Burns was not some provincial who wrote cheesy lyrics; he was (by his own choice) the muse of a new epoch – which is why he was (and is) celebrated internationally.

Will Shakespeare, master playwright and erotic poet, certainly had an electric impact on his own generation. All those subsequent, silly conspiracy theories that the Bard's plays were written by someone else are given the lie by the simple fact that, when Shakespeare died, his friends and professional contemporaries promptly had his works republished in a celebration edition with his picture on the cover. Far from being a mysterious figure, much of Will's life was fully documented by the ever-meticulous and omnipresent Tudor bureaucracy.

Shakespeare's plays were hugely popular in his lifetime but have enjoyed a somewhat complex and erratic reputation since. The Victorians, for instance, liked to change the endings (Hollywood-style) and add songs. On one level, if you understand the language and historical context of Shakespeare's plays, they are endlessly gripping and hilariously dirty.

Taken at face value, they are brilliant entertainment, deliberately crafted by a theatrical impresario and entrepreneur who wanted to make money and so had to entice his paying audience away from the local bear-bating and brothels that littered the south bank of the Thames. No-one ever said Will Shakespeare did it for the sake of art.

While Shakespeare wrote about politics, he did so at a time when the wrong word would get your head chopped off; or at least get you knifed in some dark London lane by Elizabeth's secret service. Shakespeare was paid to perform at court: he was not about to annoy his patrons by making overt political criticism. As a result, Shakespeare's political dramas are not about contemporary issues so much as the human motivations and responses of the participant.

Because Shakespeare can't take sides, his political characters and their motivations are always deeply ambiguous – just like in real life. This means Shakespeare is the best political writer ever and explains why his dramas never age. That is also why each succeeding era always ends up rediscovering his work and why it still speaks to us. (And yes, he's brilliant at dialogue.)

The truth is Will Shakespeare is not easy to celebrate as an individual, in the way we do Burns. With Shakespeare, the play's the thing, not the man. Shakespeare is not an English nationalist, or even a Tudor one – those subtle ambiguities again. He is a great love poet, but the humanist in him also remorselessly exposes our dark side. He's not an internationalist, like Burns. There's endless speculation that Shakespeare couldn't have authored all the cannon because there is no record of his travelling abroad, which (supposedly) he would have to have done in order to write about Italy or Classical Rome. But Shakespeare's plots are not historical travelogues – their cribbed settings are only ever a device to display universal human dilemmas.

In the 20th century, the English theatre rediscovered Shakespeare as a writer. Perhaps England was going through such a political and economic decline as result of the two world wars that Shakespeare was convenient as a face-saving cultural emblem and visitor attraction. More important, I think Will's ambiguous moral and political universe struck a cord with an English society that had lost an empire and didn't want to be part of Europe. But that still didn't enamour England to Will the man. An England that is still unsure what to make of its national identity will never know what to make of its Bard.

A few years ago I (a Scot) began celebrating Shakespeare's birthday. I do Burns religiously and it seemed to me that if the English were not prepared to celebrate the world's greatest playwright, someone should. For the record, Elizabethan food is wonderful: like North African because you mix meat and fruit. Sonnets will be read and Banquo's ghost will preside at the feast. I live in hope the new tradition will spread south of the Border someday. Robert Burns would approve.