Civilization #51: Shakespeare's Language of Empire

We will focus on William Shakespeare, but first, it is important to provide an overview of the framework for our discussion: the four great modern civilizations that have fought for global dominance these past 200 years. These four great civilizations are the Russians, the Germans, the British, and the Americans.

What's interesting about all four civilizations is that they all claim to be the ultimate Christian civilizations that are heir to Rome. But because of the differences in their geography and their culture, they have different interpretations of Christianity and "Romanness."

The Four Great Modern Civilizations

Let's compare and contrast these four great civilizations.

These are the four great civilizations that will drive history from the 19th century up to today. The conflict between these four great civilizations is what drives human creativity—in science, technology, and philosophy. That's why from about 1800 up until 2000, you had a tremendous flowering of ideas and culture.

The question we're looking at today is: How did Shakespeare transform English into the language of empire? For the longest time, English was what they spoke on the British Isles—not even the British Isles, primarily in England. So how did Shakespeare transform that into the language that everyone speaks today?

English really is the language of empire. When you learn English, you're not just learning grammar and vocabulary; you are really learning a culture, a philosophy, an identity. What's amazing about English is that it has, through soft power, convinced everyone to believe that Anglo-American culture is the best in the world when, objectively speaking, it is not. You can make the argument that Russian and German culture is far superior to Anglo-American culture. But everyone, especially young people in the world today, believes that Anglo-American culture is just vastly superior. The reason why is because most people speak English, and we absorb our understanding of the world through language.

The Power of Language: Art, Culture, and Civilization

Before we talk about Shakespeare, I want you to understand some basic principles about language, art, culture, and civilization.

The first major principle is that great art—Dante, Homer, Vermeer, Shakespeare—lifts the soul of a civilization and changes the neurological structure of societies, creating a new way of being and seeing. Civilization has a collective consciousness, and what great art does is seep into this collective consciousness and rewire the brain to make the civilization see the world in a new way, which causes people to behave differently.

The way poets transform civilization is they innovate in imagery, grammar, and vocabulary. When they do that, poets expand a civilization's capacity to imagine, feel, and think.

William Shakespeare did not live very long; he died at 52. But his accomplishments are amazing. In his brief life, he wrote anywhere between 38 to 41 plays, and he established the English cultural identity and historical memory. The reason we don't know how many plays he actually wrote is that he never published in his lifetime. All his plays were published after his death by his friends, who were working with his notes as well as recollections from actors who participated in his plays.

In his plays, he used anywhere between 20,000 to 30,000 different words. His range of vocabulary was just vast. What's really unique about Shakespeare is he introduced anywhere between 1,700 to 3,500 new uses of words, which we call diction. To put this in context, between the years 1500 and 1650, around 10,000 new words were being introduced into England because of revolutions in agriculture, trade, communication, and technology. What Shakespeare does that's really important is he transforms the British imagination to better absorb these new ideas, and he does so through new uses of words.

Shakespeare's Genius: Diction and Imagination

Let's examine how he does this. Let's look at the word "dagger." Dagger means just a short sword, and it's a very common English word. But what Shakespeare does is he uses it in a really imaginative, metaphorical way that forces you to reimagine the world around you.

(These are my examples, by the way, not Shakespeare's.)

1. "He has a dagger fat and short." This is interesting because when we see a dagger, we think of something thin. This forces you to think about what "dagger" is as a metaphor. It's possible that on the surface, a person looks fat and short, but actually, he is lean and mean—very clever. He pretends he's stupid, but he has very precise cleverness. Shakespeare takes a traditional metaphor and radically reverses or inverts it to force you to reimagine things in a new way.
2. "I daggered him with questions." The word "daggered" actually exists in the English language, but it means you carry a dagger with you. But there's no reason why you can't do what Shakespeare does and say, "I daggered him with questions," which means "I stabbed him with questions." It's very visual and imaginative.
3. "His voice is daggerly." "Daggerly" as a word does not exist. But because you know what the word "dagger" means, you can imagine what "daggerly" could mean—a voice that is very high and feels like it is jabbing at you.

That's the genius of Shakespeare. He takes words that we use every day and finds new ways of using them in his plays that force us to reimagine the world. What Shakespeare understands is that language can be a portal into the neurological framework of our minds. Our brain is structured by these things called synapses, these pathways. By manipulating language in a new way, you can also perform a sort of surgery on the synapses.

Shakespeare as Music: The Power of Iambic Pentameter

The thing to remember about Shakespeare is his plays were meant to be performed as musicals. Today in school, we have you read Shakespeare, but during his time, no one read him. You experienced Shakespeare by going to his plays, and his plays were musicals. When people spoke Shakespeare, it was as though they were singing, and there were also lots of dance routines within the plays.

The way that Shakespeare creates music in his plays is through a device called iambic pentameter. An iambus is just the arrangement of syllables where you have one that is deep and then another that's high: deep-HIGH, deep-HIGH, deep-HIGH, deep-HIGH, deep-HIGH. When you have 10 syllables, it's called pentameter. An example, of course, is: "To BE or NOT to BE, that IS the QUES-tion."

Shakespeare does that throughout his plays, which is why it comes across as musical. If it's musical, then it's easy to remember because it becomes like a song. Through iambic pentameter, Shakespeare's plays are memorable, beautiful, and resonant, meaning they touch our souls. Through this device, Shakespeare is performing a surgery on the imagination of a civilization.

The World of Shakespearean Theater

During the time of Shakespeare, theater was extremely popular around the country. It was primarily the means of mass entertainment, but it was also the means of mass education. If you wanted to know about history or culture, you went to the theater. The problem with this was that during the 16th century, there was a major conflict going on between the Protestant and Catholic religions. Queen Elizabeth was concerned about theater as a means of creating dissent in society, so they forced all theater productions to be placed in a suburb of London. That's where Shakespeare worked.

By doing that, Shakespeare was being introduced to all the major theater of that time. He never actually wrote anything that was unique. Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Othello, King Lear—these are all plays that were part of the British theatrical imagination. But what he does that's different is he reimagines the characters and introduces new diction into the plays to make them beautiful.

This is the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare performed much of his productions. The thing to remember about this time is that theater was low-class. In this district, there were lots of brothels. People went to the theater and got drunk; they were drinking, spitting, and eating. They also participated in a gambling activity called bear-baiting. The idea is you take a bear, chain him up, blind him, and then you have dogs attack him. You then bet on who wins: the bear or the dogs.

This just shows you that we think of Shakespeare as very high-class, but at this time, he was very, very low-class. His plays were performed right beside bear-baiting venues and brothels. But this is important because if Shakespeare is reaching the masses, he's educating the masses into a global imagination.

Shakespeare and theater were so detested by the upper class that from 1642 to 1660, the Puritans banned them from England. Remember, the Puritans were obsessed with control. They hated alcohol, fun, and especially theater. They hated Shakespeare.

Deconstructing Hamlet: A Study in Meaning and Imagery

Let's discuss the genius of Shakespeare. I'm going to focus on one example that distinguishes Shakespeare from all other playwrights: Hamlet.

The story is very simple. It's about this prince of Denmark called Hamlet. He's at university in Wittenberg, Germany, which is where Martin Luther went. He comes home and is visited by the ghost of his dead father. The ghost tells Hamlet, "I was killed by your uncle Claudius, who now has stolen the throne from me as well as married my wife, Gertrude, your mother. It is your responsibility as my son to seek vengeance against Claudius."

The problem is that Hamlet is a very analytical person. He thinks too much. Paralysis by analysis. He spends the entire play thinking about how to kill Claudius, but also whether to kill Claudius. This is why we believe that Hamlet is Shakespeare's best play—it is a very deep philosophical work. In many ways, Hamlet is really the expression of Shakespeare. You may not know this, but Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet, who died when he was young. A lot of scholars believe Hamlet is Shakespeare's most personal play.

We're going to look at the most famous soliloquy in Shakespeare to understand how he thinks and writes.

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 heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
...
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

As you can understand, it's beautiful. It's also, if you think about it, pretty easy to read. There are lots of complicated words, but it's really smooth. That's the power of iambic pentameter. If you really want to be fluent in English, just read Shakespeare aloud for a few months, and your English will be perfect.

This is very complicated, but it's actually not that deep. It's not like Dante, who is very, very deep. Let's look at what he's literally saying:

Against the misfortune in our lives, is it more brave and good to bear it or to stand against it? I no longer want to bear this pain. Let me sleep. I no longer want to feel my heartache and my body become weak and injured. That is my wish. I want to sleep and to dream. But that is a danger, isn't it? When we are dead, we cannot control what we dream. And that is what frightens me. And that's why I continue to build more misfortunes around me. It is my own mind that has made me a coward and why each time when I become determined, my resolve breaks apart and I cannot act.

Of course, when you simplify Shakespeare, you lose the beauty and richness. So the question is, why is Shakespeare so complicated? What's he trying to do with his language?

Multiple Layers of Meaning

The first thing he's trying to do is use language as a mechanism to convey different realities, different meanings. Within each of his plays, there are many different layers of meaning that can be true at the same time.

1. To die or to live? "I cannot decide. I do not know if it's more brave to live a painful life or to run away from it and escape into death." This is saying that Hamlet is overwhelmed by the impossible moral dilemma he's in.
2. To kill or not to kill? "I do not know. Is it more good to let those who do evil suffer their own fate, or should I stop their evil and end their lives?" Here, he's asking himself if and how he should kill Claudius.
3. Should I follow my fate or defy it? "Is it more brave and good to do as I am told or to fight against my fate, and in so doing, perhaps die?" This is a much deeper meaning, where he's talking about fate and free will.
4. What is the point of existence? "I do not know. When we exist, we must face pointless questions in our lives. Should we suffer or should we fight?" This is the deepest meaning, where he's asking about the purpose of existence itself.

There are four possible interpretations of this speech, and they're all correct. That's the first power of Shakespeare: he's forcing you to interpret his speech in different ways.

Language as Visual Imagery

The second power of Shakespeare is that it's visual. In this oral culture where most people don't read and write, people are accessing information through words, and in this tradition, words are images.

When Hamlet says, "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles," the audience is seeing these pictures. They're seeing a movie in their heads.

Another image: "For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause." This is an image of a person who's dead, his soul going up to heaven. But what's in heaven? What's in that sleep of death? No one knows.

Another image: "the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." This is a complicated sentence, but it's about how something that is clear to us, once we think about it, becomes very dark and unclear.

And another: "enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action." Imagine a ship going in a set direction. The moment you think deeply about what you're doing, the ship collapses. You don't know where you're going anymore.

Rhetorical Surgery: The Power of Language in Julius Caesar

Another example of the power of Shakespeare is Julius Caesar. The plot is very simple. Julius Caesar has defeated all his enemies in the Roman Civil War, and his friends, Brutus and Cassius, are worried he'll become a dictator. So, they plot to kill him. After they kill Caesar, Mark Antony, Caesar's lieutenant, swears vengeance and combines forces with Octavian to destroy Brutus and Cassius.

In Julius Caesar, you will find some of the greatest speeches in the English language. In these speeches, you will find examples of how Shakespeare understands language as a surgery on the brain—how through speechmaking, you can actually transform the neurological structure of the human brain.

Mark Antony and Brutus are going to engage in a speech competition. Brutus's strategy is to use a rhetorical device called the antithesis, which is basically two opposing ideas. The idea is: "I am Brutus. I am honorable. Caesar is ambitious. Honor and ambition cannot go together. I love Caesar, but because he was ambitious and wanted to enslave us, I had to kill him to free us." He's trying to create a dichotomy between Caesar and himself.

Mark Antony then responds using something called chiasmus. Chiasmus takes these two opposing principles and combines them together in an ABBA structure. What Mark Antony will say is that Caesar was ambitious and honorable, as honorable and ambitious as Brutus. When you do that, you collapse the antithesis. The chiasmus shows you that these are mirrors of each other. In the Roman mind, you then collapse the dichotomy between Brutus and Caesar and see them as one and the same. But if it was Brutus that killed Caesar, then Brutus must be the less honorable and more ambitious one.

Let's see an example. This is Brutus talking to the Roman crowd:

If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?

This is an antithesis. "I loved Caesar less, but I loved Rome more." "Caesar living means we are slaves; Caesar dead means we are free men." These are two exclusionary ideas. Now, Mark Antony is going to collapse this.

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?

This is a chiasmus: cause-love / mourn-cause. He continues:

But yesterday the word of Caesar might
Have stood against the world; now lies he there,
And none so poor to do him reverence.
O masters, if I were disposed to stir
Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage,
I should do Brutus wrong, and Cassius wrong,
Who, you all know, are honourable men:
I will not do them wrong; I rather choose
To wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you,
Than I will wrong such honourable men.

This contains two examples of chiasmus. "Word of Caesar" and "reverence" match; "stood" and "lies" match. He's collapsing the dichotomy. Through his language and rhetoric, he's transforming the British imagination so that it is more open, more fluid, and can absorb new ideas.

Founders of Civilization: Comparing Homer and Shakespeare

Homer did the same thing. So let's compare and contrast Homer and Shakespeare and how they were both able to be founders of great civilizations.

• Cultural Tabula Rasa: Tabula rasa just means "blank slate." Homer came at a time after the Bronze Age Collapse of Greece. The Mycenaean civilization collapsed, and now you have the polis system. Same thing with Shakespeare, where Britain at this time was not as advanced a culture as the French and the Spanish.
• Rapid Cultural Change: Britain was undergoing revolutions in agriculture, trade, and technology. When a society is undergoing such changes, people are anxious and looking for new ideas.
• Oral Culture: In an oral culture, people have a stronger memory and a greater imagination. That's why they were able to sit through three hours of Shakespeare and visualize his language. Back then, they were smarter than we are today. We have Google and ChatGPT, but all these things are just making us stupid.
• Open Cooperative Competition: Homer was just one of thousands of bards traveling around Greece singing legends. Shakespeare was one of many playwrights in London. They were all stealing from each other, which allows for rapid innovation.
• Democratic Sensibilities: Homer was talking to ordinary people. Shakespeare was talking to ordinary people. The problem with today's culture is market differentiation. A university professor doesn't want to talk to common people; they want to talk to other university professors. That leads to stagnation.
• Free Market: The free market provides an objective feedback loop which forces you to constantly innovate and improve. How do you know you're good? Because people come and listen to you. They pay for your plays.
• Poet as Prophet: Yes, Shakespeare became very wealthy. He came from a common background and didn't go to university. But what drove Shakespeare and Homer was the idea that you have a divine, messianic mission to spread the truth. They were not driven by money; they were driven by a mission to transform the world.

Three Great Poets: Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare

Let's recap and summarize the three great poets that have impacted Western civilization.

Language as a Reality Unto Itself

Let me give you an example of what it means to have language as a reality onto itself. To do so, I'm going to use a different poet, John Keats, and his most famous poem, "To Autumn," which is considered the greatest English poem of all time.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

It's beautiful. What does it mean? This is language as a reality onto itself. It is language visualizing a new world.

"While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, and touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue." It's a painting, guys. This one sentence is a painting of a new world that you can see in your heart.

"Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn among the river sallows, borne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or dies." You can see the music within this picture. It's not just a picture but a world that you can access because it's moving, it's alive.

This poetry is entering your soul and activating all your emotions, all your senses. There's the visual, the sound, the smell, the touch. That's what poetry is: the expression of a new world that you can access. And when you access it, it transforms your soul and your capacity to think, feel, and imagine.

The Legacy and Limits of Anglo-American Culture

Shakespeare turns English into the world's linguistic internet, a platform in which all cultures, ideas, and worldviews can meet and crossbreed. He transformed English into this extremely flexible, beautiful, memorable language.

But there's a problem with this. This exchange is mediated through Anglo-American civilization, which is at its heart utilitarian, skeptical, and empirical. When you embrace English, you're also experiencing British culture, history, and philosophy.

• Utilitarian: We should do things that work, as opposed to what is right.
• Skeptical: To be skeptical of our capacity to reason and think. If you think you know something, you probably don't.
• Empirical: The only thing you know is things you experience.

In other words, Anglo-American culture, even though it dominates the world, is pretty lackluster. It's very narrow-minded, very practical, pretty mediocre. Think to yourself, what was the last great American novel you read? There are lots of great Russian and German novels. The Germans have great philosophy. But I struggle to think about what great art the Americans have produced, even though they are the most wealthy, most powerful country that has ever existed.

Shakespeare is great. King Lear is one of the greatest plays ever written. But Shakespeare compared with Dante? I don't know. Dante is like you are in the mind of God; you can feel it is divine. But with Shakespeare, you're like, "This is beautiful, but is it a pretty nothingness?"

To give an example of how British culture is kind of narrow-minded, consider the greatest epic in the English tradition, Paradise Lost by John Milton. It's about Adam and Eve. It's 12 books, modeled on the great epics of Homer and Virgil, and there are some parts which are beautiful. But the reality is, as an epic, as a grand vision of the world, it doesn't really work. The vision of Paradise Lost is not as fully formed and as grand as Homer, Virgil, and Dante.

Shakespeare is really the founder of this great British civilization. Next, we'll discuss America, and then after we do these two cultures that now dominate the world, we'll move on to the Germans and the Russians.