Challenges Facing Today’s Leaders: A Shakespearean Perspective

A Talk Delivered at the Pre-Conference Session for the Inaugural Conference of the Asian Shakespeare Association on 15th May 2014.

1. My name is Hasting Chen. Along with my wife, who should be sitting somewhere in the audience, I started a humble publishing company. It is my tremendous honor and pleasure today to be here revisiting my love for literature, especially in the very place where I was first exposed to this wonderful subject of study. After so many years in and out of academia, though not being able to show off “Pride, pomp, and circumstance” before you, Shakespeare remains one of my favorite topics in literature. However, I need to find a way relating Shakespeare to my readers, which in economic terms serves as the emerging market of literature.

2.  In other words, I need to ask a difficult question, namely, “Why do we scholars foreign to the English soil study Shakespeare, and in the meantime ask our students to do the same?” 

3. Should there be doubt on my true intention asking the question, let me clarify myself, with Shakespeare of course, and say

“Be not offended. 

I speak not as in absolute fear of you.

I think our country sinks beneath the yoke;
It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash
Is added to her wounds.” (Macbeth 4.3)

4. As the recent student protests suggest, “something is rotten in Denmark” (Hamlet). Love it or loath it, but our young men and women have genuine reasons demanding political reforms, and I am overall impressed with what they do.

5. That being said, demagoguery is always a threat in democracy. Are the student leaders or political figures “honorable men” restoring law and order to the Republic? Or are they, like Jack Cade in Henry VI, rather like “the head of an army of rabble and a demagogue pandering to the ignorant.” In this turbulent time, have we proponents of literature sufficiently prepared our students (and future leaders) for the challenges they will have to face? 

6. Paul A. Cantor, in my opinion the greatest living literary critic, says “[m]ost people come to literature because they are trying to learn something about the world. They are interested in important questions of economics and politics.” 

Also, known for his Closing of American Mind, political scientist Allan Bloom further claims that “the proper functions of [Shakespeare] criticism are … to recover [his] teachings and to be the agent of his ever continuing education of the Anglo-Saxon world.”

7. To transpose such thoughts in view of the students under our care, I would thus say the task of teachers in higher education are

1. To Fashion Qualified Individual Men and Women into Ladies and Gentlemen (or Thinking Human Beings), and
2. To Foster Leaders in the Society

In other words, other than holding Victorian ideas concerning education, I believe there are political implications for what we do, and we can only neglect them at our own peril. Before an audience as distinguished as this one, I do not need to enumerate how Shakespeare may contribute to both aims in bringing forth future well-educated leaders in the society. However, in my opinion, with its disciplinary focus in this keenly competitive world, literary studies, I am afraid, has so deviated from those aims that students may not learn the things vital to their development as they should. 

8. To exemplify what I mean, let me demonstrate with Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy.

Comprising Richard II, two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V, the series of plays in a nutshell depicts the development of Hal (and later Henry V) as a young leader of a nation. One could even say they are not too different from a bildungsroman.

Just as nothing comes from nothing, a dictum we know almost too well from King Lear. To know how a character comes into being one needs to see the background he is born into. In retrospect, one can say Shakespeare uses at least a whole play just portraying such troublesome background which Hal and later Henry V must cope with and find solutions to.

9.  Richard II begins with Henry Bolingbroke, Hal’s father, who will become Henry IV before the play ends, accuses Mowbray of murdering Gloucester. Unable to calm Bolingbroke and Mowbray, King Richard agrees to have the two men challenge each other to a duel. However, even before the duel begins Richard intervenes and banishes both into exile, a clear obstruction of justice and of rule of law.

10. Similarly, last year in Taiwan a young private died from abuse in mandatory military service, resulting public concern and outrage. Although the president is no by means personally responsible for the live lost, but he, being Commander-in-Chief as well as SJD from Harvard, has apparently not done the homework when talking to the victim’s family. 

11. Politically, Richard is also a disaster. In his deathbed, John of Gaunt cautioned Richard for having “A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown, / Whose compass is no bigger than thy head.” Such criticism of nepotism is exactly the same outcry we hear for our incumbent president of this isle. 

12. In other words, rather than recruiting and retaining a group of advisors who are willing to confront the present administration or its policies, he surrounds himself with a court of adherents who care more about their own interests than about the people they actually serve.

13. More importantly, Richard is economically inept. Living beyond his means, the King, according to John of Gaunt, “[He] tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder:
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.” 

In modern economic parlance, this is deficit spending, a common fact that we citizens are forced to live with in view of our insatiable governments who just like Richard refuse to live within their means.

14. As a result, England, a land that was once known for its “Christian service and true chivalry,” now becomes a means to profit for the king, who has no idea of sanctity or respect attached to his title. Thus, Gaunt scolded the King:

Why, cousin, wert thou regent of the world,
It were a shame to let this land by lease;
But for thy world enjoying but this land,
Is it not more than shame to shame it so?
Landlord of England art thou now, not king,
Thy state of law is bondslave to the law.

Same thing could and should be said of the sale and lease (in the name of 國有資產活化) of our public properties and infrastructure, 

15. as such transaction denigrates the economic state or the moral standing of our central and local governments, but also brings them closer to powerful businesses, feeding further favoritism and widening the gap between the governments and the people they purportedly serve. Hence the student and popular revolt in March and April.

16. Most egregiously, Richard intends to seize all property of Gaunt’s and deny Bolingbroke’s right to inherit his estates, in order to fund his Irish campaign.

When he does, Richard not only undermines the very principle by which he gets to be King, (just as York says “For how art thou a king / But by fair sequence and succession?”) but also for this reason he forces his subjects and York to rebel against him. As we can see throughout the rest of Second Tetralogy, rebellion has its tremendous repercussions.

17. After detailing judicial, political, and economical failure of Richard, I am going to briefly review how Hal or Henry V rises to such occasion. Despite his many critics, Hal remains in my opinion a worthy figure to look up to, if not a subject of emulation.

For example, in solving the judicial and political problem aforementioned, Henry V not only turns away from Falstaff, who wrongly thinks “the laws of England are at my commandment,” but also reconciles with Lord Chief Justice, saying “My voice shall sound as you do prompt my ear / And I will stoop and humble my intents / To your well-practiced wise decision.” One may claim Henry V aligns himself with the establishment to secure his rule, but can anyone seriously hope Henry to rule well while hanging out with someone who have no regard for rule of law? 

18. Moreover, in order to make an informed decision, a leader has to embrace reasoned opposition and sometimes even to dispense with old friends who may just turn out to be more concerned with their own benefits.

19. Particularly germane to our time, with the loss of legal succession, every king that follows, though not democratically elected, must somehow show his worth before his subjects. This is portrayed most clearly in Act 5 Scene 2 of Richard II, when York in an epic-like metadramatic simile speaks of the people seeing Richard after newly-crowned Henry IV:

As in a theatre, the eyes of men,
After a well-graced actor leaves the stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious;
Even so, or with much more contempt, men's eyes
Did scowl on gentle Richard. 

20. (And alas, they do on our present administration!) Rather than just showing his worth as Henry IV does by maintaining a “presence, like a robe pontifical, / Ne’er seen but wondered at”, Hal ups the ante by knowing his people and learning to speak their language firsthand, a skill he later uses in a common soldier’s clothes at the eve of the Battle. Though speaking in prose, Henry V still tells the official story as it is:

The king is not bound to answer the particular endings

of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master

of his servant, for they purpose not their death when

they purpose their services.

21. By studying this and other metadramatic scenes, one not only sees how Shakespeare furthers his own thespian agenda by staging the important historical events in his simple stage or “wooden O.” Furthermore, with such agenda one can even say (with or without some cynicism) that a leader must be an actor, as when Henry V asks his solider to become a beast when the situation requires.

In peace, there's nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility,

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger:

Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage.

Philosophically, as Bertrand Russell beautifully states in his famous History of Western Philosophy, such appearance is actually real, and the dichotomy between appearance and reality (or idea) cannot have the importance attributed by Plato.

23. One may of course say Henry V’s argument and method are self-serving and uncaring, especially in view of the lust for power underlying the whole French campaign, but a leader of any group of people has to make hard decision to achieve certain aim, sometimes in spite of their well-being. Nevertheless, the leader has to take all the blame, deservingly or not, a burden Henry V realizes all too well when alone recounting his talk with his soldiers

“Upon the king! “Let us our lives, our souls,

Our debts, our careful wives,
Our children, and our sins lay on the king.”

We must bear all.”

24. We have only scratched the surface of my topic. However, I do pray you, my fellow ladies and gentlemen, realize that we are in our capacity the leaders of our society, and with this realization take up the burden having our students and fellow human beings understand the tremendous value in Shakespeare, who is after all, as Ben Jonson says, “not of an age, but for all times.” 

25. I look forward to working with you for that aim, so as to bring the Bard to all readers as well. Thank you very much.