Shakespeare, the country boy

The city is a bully. It gets people to do its work for it. It invades your space. The bully turns people against each other or leaves them like deer in the headlights. (Capitalism, at work.)

Shakespeare caught people going mad so well because he was a country boy. He could admit his own fragility, his own sense of victim’s hurt. He understood a perpetrator’s madness, the wildness of a dark suspicious thought eating at you like a lion at your ribs. He heard the bedeviled moans. He clung to the thespian troops’ art to keep from shaking. He knew what a bully the city, the people of a court could be, the bear-baiting ring, a horrible and true metaphor. It was, in a way, a horrible risk for him to depict such things, much like and in keeping with the religious risks of the day.

People are natural creatures at the bottom of it all. In this way they are prone to craziness, is how a city draws its labels. A return to nature soothes them. (So are Ted Hughes’s poems about the appearance of natural creatures amidst our lives, to provide metaphor for our feelings, a baby fox, a swooping owl, all taking on meaning with regard to a relationship under a city’s pressure.)

The madness he rendered, it made the hairs on their backs raise, someone fucking with someone else. Invigorating, in a way, to playwright, to actor, to those standing in the pit, to throw down the veil and show what was brewing underneath. In nature, as when he put Lear out on the heath, or Hamlet on the parapet in the night, Shakespeare tapped into the beast as he is, the natural knowledge, the power of thought inherent in the creature. (Hamlet is both well and not well, balanced between the world of his own nature—somewhat reclusively—and the world of the court, with some candor and honesty, as if he was the initiator of a dialogue that would deeply consider the whole set-up as it was within Denmark.) His best villains are those adept at wielding a court's social devices, public opinion, power, etc., particularly in a moralizing way.

We know so little about him for the very reason. The country boy, with his differing encompassing seditious view, had no stomach for self-promotion or anything that smacked of giving into the fashions a city preaches (beyond what was going on organically in the theater of the time.) You wouldn’t want to admit your troubled mind to anyone, candidly, if you didn’t have to, outside of your art.
A natural creature, he cleaned up after the tracks he made and went back to the hills, the English countryside, the quiet stream, having lodged the best blows against the city he could. (We get some of that weird clean sense of self-satisfaction, real pleasure, in the oft-gallows oft-earthy humor he placed here and there into a situation, a giving of the finger to remember after curtain's fall.)

Jesus himself was a country boy, trying to get back to nature, to be in touch with the deep stuff within humanity that is merely instinct, not so much the things of craziness and mental breakdown. Jesus was a preserver of time spent in the natural world, grasping the richness of the metaphors nature offers. His metaphor about the tree and its fruit stands as one of his richest, lasting and most applicable.