But here’s something you might not have thought of. Shakespeare also provides a figure against whom
writers can struggle, a source of texts against which other texts can bounce ideas. Writers find themselves
engaged in a relationship with older writers; of course, that relationship plays itself out through the texts,
the new one emerging in part through earlier texts that exert influence on the writer in one way or another.
This relationship contains considerable potential for struggle, which as we mentioned in the previous
chapter is called intertextuality. Naturally, none of this is exclusive to Shakespeare, who just happens to
be such a towering figure that a great many writers find themselves influenced by him. On intertextuality,
more later. For now, an example. T. S. Eliot, in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917), has his
neurotic, timorous main character say he was never cut out to be Prince Hamlet, that the most he could
be is an extra, someone who could come on to fill out the numbers onstage or possibly be sacrificed to
plot exigency. By invoking not a generic figure—“I am just not cut out to be a tragic hero,” for
instance—but the most famous tragic hero, Hamlet, Eliot provides an instantly recognizable situation for
his protagonist and adds an element of characterization that says more about his self-image than would a
whole page of description. The most poor Prufrock could aspire to would be Bernardo and Marcellus,
the guards who first see the ghost of Hamlet’s father, or possibly Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the
hapless courtiersp. 44used by both sides and ultimately sent unknowing to their own executions. Eliot’s
poem does more, though, than merely draw from Hamlet. It also opens up a conversation with its
famous predecessor. This is not an age of tragic grandeur, Prufrock suggests, but an age of hapless
ditherers. Yes, but we recall that Hamlet is himself a hapless ditherer, and it’s only circumstance that
saves him from his own haplessness and confers on him something noble and tragic. This brief interplay
between texts happens in only a couple of lines of verse, yet it illuminates both Eliot’s poem and
Shakespeare’s play in ways that may surprise us, just a little, and that never would have been called into
existence had Eliot not caused Prufrock to invoke Hamlet as a way of addressing his own inadequacy.
It’s worth remembering that comparatively few writers slavishly copy bits of Shakespeare’s work into
their own. More commonly there is this kind of dialogue going on in which the new work, while taking
bits from the older, is also having its say. The author may be reworking a message, exploring changes (or
continuities) in attitudes from one era to another, recalling parts of an earlier work to highlight features of
the newly created one, drawing on associations the reader holds in order to fashion something new and,
ironically, original. Irony features fairly prominently in the use not only of Shakespeare but of any prior
writer. The new writer has his own agenda, her own slant to put on things.
Try this for slant. One of the powerful voices to come out of resistance to apartheid in South Africa is
Athol Fugard, best known for his play “ Master Harold ”... and the Boys (1982). In creating this play
Fugard turns to you-know-who. Your first instinct might be that he would grasp one of the tragedies,
Othello, say, where race is already at issue. Instead he turns to the history plays, to Henry IV, Part II,
to the story of a young man who must grow up. In Shakespeare, Prince Hal must put his hard-partying
ways behind him, stop his carousing withp. 45Falstaff, and become Henry, the king who in Henry V is
capable of leading an army and inspiring the kind of passion that will allow the English to be victorious at
Agincourt. He must learn, in other words, to wear the mantle of adult responsibility. In Fugard’s
contemporary reworking, Henry is Harold, Hally to the black pals with whom he loafs and plays. Like his
famous predecessor, Hally must grow up and become Master Harold, worthy successor to his father in
the family business. What does it mean, though, to become a worthy successor in an unworthy
enterprise? That is Fugard’s question. Harold’s mantle is made not only of adult responsibility but of
racism and heartless disregard, and he learns to wear it well. As we might expect, Henry IV, Part II
provides a means of measuring Harold’s growth, which is actually a sort of regression into the most
repugnant of human impulses. At the same time, though, “ Master Harold ” makes us reexamine the
assumptions of right—and rights—that we take for granted in watching the Shakespearean original,
notions of privilege and noblesse oblige, assumptions about power and inheritance, ideas of accepted
behavior and even of adulthood itself. Is it a mark of growing up that one becomes capable, as Harold