If you were living in a golden age, would you know it? Did the Romans of Augustus’s time know that theirs was the most extensive, populous, and developed empire the world had ever known? Did the Elizabethans know that despite having just lost its last toehold in Calais, and being far outmatched in power by Spain and France, England was nonetheless laying the foundations of the most extensive, populous, and developed empire the world would know? Perhaps they did; perhaps, in fact, belief in their greatness was an important part of what made them great. On the other hand, if willing greatness were enough to make it so, then the swastika would be flying across Europe today instead of being the preeminent modern symbol of nihilistic destruction, revived only by those willfully determined to forget.
As originally described by Hesiod, the golden age was a prelapsarian era in which the Titans took care of all our needs. It ended with Prometheus’s stolen gift of fire and Pandora’s box of woe—with the beginning, in other words, of human history. When we refer to a golden age, we may paint it with a false patina of such harmony. But we actually mean an era within history, one in which a civilization as a whole achieved extraordinary things with a lasting and positive impact on history itself. The golden age of Athens was the age of Socrates and Plato, of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; Rome’s golden age was one of aqueducts, the Pantheon, and the Colosseum.
For those who participated in the creative ferment of such times, I think they would know. The artists who made the English Renaissance knew that theirs was an extraordinary era. William Shakespeare may have paid more attention to the publication of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece than he did to the preservation of his plays because poetry was the work of a serious artist while a playwright was a mere craftsman, yet it is impossible to read Hamlet or King Lear and not be struck by the extraordinary formal innovations and poetic achievements of those works. As a shareholder in his own playhouse, Shakespeare was certainly aware that he was living through boom times for the theater. And as they engaged in an entirely different kind of act of creation, the men of the American founding generation—Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, and of course George Washington—were acutely aware of the magnitude of what they aimed to achieve and how profoundly wide-ranging their legacy might be if they achieved it.
Yet nothing about these eras felt golden in the sense that Hesiod meant: times of comfort and repose. Quite the contrary. The era of Shakespeare’s unparalleled theatrical triumphs was punctuated by plague, religious strife, and the ever-present threat of the royal censor. Far more dramatically, the founders of our country launched their bid for independence with a war against the pre-eminent superpower of their day, and, after independence was achieved, established our constitution by operating beyond their official mandate in an atmosphere of profound national economic and political crisis, with many quite literally believing that if they did not succeed, then the country as a whole was likely to disintegrate and ultimately fall prey to always circling European powers. Perhaps that context is why in subsequent eras when our country was effectively refounded, presidents such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan consciously looked back to the founding era as a source of inspiration even as they transformed its legacy. The men of 1776 and 1787 did not have the luxury to work with gold but found the political alchemy to create it out of iron and lead.
Some key part of that alchemy, it seems to me, involves looking backward and forward simultaneously, making something truly new out of something profoundly old. The founders of our country looked to Rome for inspiration even as they sought to achieve something Rome never did: sustaining a republic on a continental scale. Shakespeare consciously looked back to Rome as well: to Seneca for his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, to Plautus for A Comedy of Errors, and to Ovid nearly everywhere. But deeper currents well up in Shakespeare that he may or may not have even been aware of. A modern reader of Euripides’s Medea or Orestes is apt to reach for the word Shakespearean to describe the Greek dramatist’s psychological depth, not to mention his willingness to alter already-familiar myths to intensify the paradoxes that reveal that depth. And the philosopher and critic Stanley Cavell famously identified Shakespearean comedy as having revived the raunch, political potency, and fantastic openness to possibility that characterized the so-called Old Comedy of the age of Aristophanes as against the more domestic and constrained stock characters of the New Comedy of the age of Menander.
What strikes me most about Shakespearean comedy, though, is that the Bard infused it with a depth of characterization and the possibility of self-creation through action that traces back more to Euripides than to Aristophanes. If tragedy involves one’s apparently free choice to do right leading, inexorably, to a fated doom and revealing one’s essential character in the process, then comedy with similar depth would make the same fated doom a happy discovery. Love may be as inescapable as death, and as revelatory of one’s nature. Marriage, in Shakespearean comedy, is a happy ending not primarily because it secures its participants property or status, nor even because it secures for them their hearts’ desires, but because it requires them to finally recognize themselves, to finally and freely choose to be who they already are.
That paradox of happy bondage freely chosen feels not only very Shakespearean but very American to me. Our founding document declares our unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, yet the word happiness comes from a root meaning “fortune” in the sense of luck or chance, not wealth—the gift of a capricious divinity and not some thing to be hunted. Yet this is precisely what Shakespeare’s comic heroes and heroines do, whether they doggedly stalk or flee from their destined happiness. This is also precisely what the heroes and heroines do in the great comedies that are among the greatest artistic achievements of America’s own the atrical golden age. And yet in both cases, the external quest ends with the choice of what was already given.
If you worked on Broadway from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, you surely knew that you were living in a golden age—a remarkable fact given that theater was thriving in the shadow of a new and burgeoning medium, film. In straight theater, this was the era of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, artists who, each in their own way, were reviving the forms of classical tragedy and remaking them for a new era and a new country. But it was also the era when a new theatrical form was invented: the American “book” musical, in which popular song and dance was fully integrated into and advanced the story, and characters had full psychological depth. The pioneer of the form was Showboat in 1928, but it was Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! in 1943 that finally conquered the medium. That show was a revelation to audiences, critics, and practitioners alike, a sudden passing from one era to another as definitive as the arrival of sound in movies. (The moment of transition is captured with elegiac beauty in Richard Linklater’s film from last year, Blue Moon, a portrait of Rodgers’s former artistic partner Lorenz Hart on the night Oklahoma! opens and the theatrical world definitively passes him by.) But what was very new was also, in its way, very old.
Oklahoma!’s main plot revolves around Curly, a cowboy, and Laurey, a farmer’s daughter, two youngsters in the Oklahoma Territory in 1906 who seem destined for each other. It is precisely that sense of obviousness, in fact, that is the only real obstacle to their love. Curly seems to think Laurey will readily accept him, and that’s enough to make her want to put him off—even to the point of briefly entertaining the attention of the lonely and troubled farmhand Jud Fry, whom she otherwise wouldn’t deign to look at. For them to find their way back to each other and happiness, Curly needs to demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice for Laurey’s love, and Laurey must reckon with the dire consequences she might face if she truly sabotages her happiness out of spite. All of this is wrapped in a patriotic bunting of impending statehood and the reconciliation of farming and ranching interests.
This is not so terribly different from Shakespeare’s own romantic comic plots. Curly has to learn the proper way to demonstrate his love, just as Orlando must in As You Like It. Jud is a Caliban-like figure of ungovernable desire and resentment who must be repressed or banished (or, in his case, die in a failed attempt to kill his romantic rival) before the lovers can enter into matrimony. The political and social setting make the story deeper and more real; the musical debuted in 1943, after all, in the thick of World War II, and as Rodgers says in the Linklater film, this musical would remind Americans what they were fighting for, in palpable, not abstract, terms. Most importantly, though this is a story of happiness pursued, it is not as a quest for a prize, because happiness was always there. The lovers need to go through the changes of the story in order to be ready to choose it. That’s a theme that redounds through the golden age of American musicals, from Guys and Dolls to The Music Man and beyond.
The same is true of the great romantic comedies of Hollywood’s own golden age, which happened at roughly the same time as Broadway’s. Many of the best have remarkably Shakespearean-seeming tropes and plot devices. In The Lady Eve, Barbara Stanwyck’s character, a con artist, falls in love, loses her love, then pretends to be an identical-looking person in order to win him again under a different identity, a scenario just as implausible as Olivia mistaking Sebastian for his sister, the cross-dressing Viola. In The Philadelphia Story, Ruth Hussey’s patience with Jimmy Stewart as he moons over Katherine Hepburn is almost as painful to watch as Julia’s fidelity to Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, while Hepburn’s daddy issues should be familiar from myriad Shakespeare heroines. And while Rosalind Russell’s character in His Girl Friday bears little resemblance to Isabella, the bleak and cruel worlds of the newspaper business, the criminal justice system, and the political machine bear a marked resemblance to the milieu of Measure for Measure, as does the manipulativeness of Cary Grant to the Duke of Vienna in that play.
But these are not the crucial similarity. Stanley Cavell once again, in his remarkable book Pursuits of Happiness, highlights how these films, which he terms “comedies of re-marriage,” revived Shakespeare’s version of Old Comedy for a new medium, turning a conventional genre with stock characters into a journey of personal transformation and discovery—or rediscovery. He calls them comedies of remarriage because these are all stories about divorced couples reuniting. They aren’t stories about regret, however, but about necessary change, realizing through painful (but always funny) experience that they are who they were always going to be, and that therefore their proper mates are still who they always were. They are about fate, but they are also about freedom, because without the freedom to go on that journey—including the freedom to divorce—they could never have discovered that their heart’s desire was right there in their own backyard all along.
The forms were new, but in crucial ways these revolutionary works of art harked back, whether consciously or not, to something older, to Shakespeare, and back further to ancient Athens. Yet each rediscovery was also a transformation. Shakespeare cre ated a new form of popular theater that in turn became a new kind of classic, and the pioneers of Broadway and Hollywood made his innovations new once again, creating a new canon of classics that are quintes sentially American in their concerns, their characters, and their essential spirit. They also feel like a quintessential product of that midcentury golden age, a time when the country was just beginning to shoulder the weight of the world and to take stock of itself in that context, like a young man who is orphaned and finds himself in charge of the family. There’s a boisterous vitality married to a mature sense of responsibility. There’s irony aplenty, but no cynicism.
Those are qualities that feel very far away now; if this is a golden age, artistically or otherwise, I certainly don’t know it. It’s hard to think of anything we are making now that is likely to last, hard to think of any thing that is even built with that in mind. It’s easy to look back on the middle of the last century with a sense of wonder that is married to an acute consciousness of decline from gold to something baser. But one hopes—and a major anniversary such as we are experiencing this year is an appropriate time for expressing such a hope—that it is married as well to a belief in the possibility of rebirth. The makers of the past, whether we’re talking about ancient Rome or Elizabethan England, the founding era of America or our mid-twentieth-century heyday, were not Titans but human beings like ourselves, and the troubles of their times were at least as perilous as those we face today.
So we have no excuses. As with the protagonists of these comedies, we inevitably need to change to truly become what we always have been. And we need to fall back in love with what we have divorced ourselves from in order to make it, and ourselves, new.
