I

Shakespeare is as close to a universal author as humanity has produced. His plays are performed and read all over the world, and show no signs of losing their popularity. His dramatic and poetic genius is no doubt responsible for the widespread appeal of his plays, but they offer something more than mere entertainment or even aesthetic pleasure. In an era that has increasingly lost its reverence for the past, Shakespeare's centuries-old plays are still looked up to as a genuine source of wisdom. Many attribute his universal appeal to his profound understanding of human nature, which makes his plays speak to people of all times and all places. If we find Shakespeare's plays so compelling, the reason is that they teach us all something about ourselves.

But for those of us interested particularly in Shakespeare's political wisdom, his universal appeal may seem at first glance puzzling. Many of his plays deal with Britain and with political issues seemingly specific to the British experience. A substantial body of Shakespeare criticism—for example, the New Historicism—is devoted to showing that all Shakespeare's plays are rooted in his immediate historical circumstances and thus reflect political problems peculiar, if not unique, to Shakespeare's day. This kind of criticism often sets out to debunk the idea of Shakespeare's universality by demonstrating that his thinking is confined to the limited horizons of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. If Shakespeare were truly preoccupied with the parochial and partisan disputes of his contemporaries, one might well wonder why people in other places and other times would have any reason to turn to his plays for political wisdom.

In short, Shakespeare's plots and characters evidently travel well, and even his extraordinary language seems to be translatable, but can his political wisdom cross national and cultural borders as well? This is a vast subject; here I will look at an admittedly narrow corner of it, but one that I hope will open up to broader vistas and provide new evidence of Shakespeare's universality. I will discuss a very puzzling play—Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth. If it takes a playwright to know a playwright, then Stoppard provides one of the greatest tributes to Shakespeare's genius in our day. Over his lifetime, Stoppard has kept coming back to Shakespeare as a reference point, and, arguably, the lodestar of his career. Stoppard began that career—and became famous—with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), a brilliant new take on Hamlet, which transforms the Renaissance masterpiece into Beckettian theater of the absurd. One of Stoppard's greatest popular successes came from cowriting the screenplay for the film Shakespeare in Love (1998). No author has done more than Stoppard to bring Shakespeare to life in the contemporary world and to show his continuing relevance to our concerns.

But where is the stretch here, the crossing of boundaries? Is this not simply a case of one Englishman paying tribute to another? No doubt Stoppard's admiration and affinity for Shakespeare are rooted in a certain Englishness they share. But, although many people still do not realize it, the man we know as Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in 1937 in what was then Czechoslovakia. A strange and painful odyssey took him and his family to the Far East during World War II, where his Czech father died during the Japanese occupation of Singapore. Evacuated to India, his widowed mother married a British military officer named Kenneth Stoppard, who eventually took the family to Britain, thus effectively bringing “Tom Stoppard” into the world.

With their wit and verbal facility, Stoppard's early plays seemed quintessentially English. It took him a while to get back to his Czech roots, but by the late 1970s, his gaze increasingly turned to Central and Eastern Europe and he began to take up—both in his plays and his prose statements—the related issues of totalitarianism, Communism, artistic censorship, suppression of free speech, and resistance to tyranny. He championed the Czech playwright Václav HavelFootnote ¹ and, showing his solidarity with the land of his birth, he supported many other anti-Communist dissidents in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Peering behind the Iron Curtain, Stoppard experienced perhaps his first encounter with the hard realities of politics, and, moreover, he saw that writing and performing plays can be a political act, not just the occasion for dazzling audiences with verbal pyrotechnics and clever mind-games. Connecting with his Czech roots turned Stoppard into a more serious artist, and political themes began to become central to his plays.

In terms of his dramatic output, Stoppard's turn to the East began in 1978 with Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, set in the Soviet Union, and Professional Foul, set in Prague. Every Good Boy Deserves Favor deals with Soviet use and abuse of mental hospitals to imprison dissidents. Professional Foul portrays a British academic who gets entangled with the Communist surveillance state in Czechoslovakia when a former student, who has become a dissident, is arrested on trumped-up charges. Continuing this confrontation with serious political issues in the Communist world, in 1980, Stoppard brought out Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, partially set in Prague again. The Macbeth part deals with Czech dissidents, but the Hamlet part seems at first to have nothing to do with politics. It includes a Fifteen-Minute Hamlet Stoppard wrote several years earlier, a dramatic tour de force, which is just what its name suggests—Stoppard ruthlessly pares down the text of Shakespeare's Hamlet to the point where it can be performed in fifteen minutes, although with farcical effect.Footnote ² Dogg's Hamlet places the fifteen-minute version within a very strange and alienating setting, which I will explain more fully later. For the moment, suffice it to say that Stoppard uses ordinary English words to create an artificial language called Dogg (in which the words no longer have their customary meanings). He then contrives to have the Fifteen-Minute Hamlet performed on stage before an audience that speaks Dogg, not English. The result is unnerving: when we hear the familiar text of Hamlet, we must feel that it is being performed in a foreign language, that is, foreign to the audience up on stage.

Stoppard links Dogg's Hamlet with Cahoot's Macbeth, another play about the staging of a Shakespeare play. This time Stoppard recreates a historical event. In 1978, a group called the Living-Room Theater staged an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth in Prague in the home of the actress Vlasta Chramostová. The Czech playwright Pavel Kohout (the basis for Stoppard's “Cahoot”) prepared the adaptation from E. A. Saudek's Czech translation of Macbeth. Together with Chramostová and the popular actor Pavel Landovský and two others, Kohout performed Shakespeare's play as a quiet protest against Communist tyranny in Czechoslovakia. In a brilliant stage move, Stoppard shows Kohout's Macbeth interrupted by a thuggish member of the Communist secret police, who tries to close down the subversive proceedings. But the inspector's attempt to impose order only results in comical chaos. A character from Dogg's Hamlet named Easy jumps theatrical worlds and wanders on stage in the middle of Cahoot's Macbeth. He teaches Stoppard's invented language to the cast, with the result that, at the end of the play, we are hearing Macbeth performed in Dogg—much to the consternation of the inspector, who senses that something is being put over on him, although he cannot put his finger on exactly what is happening. What unites the apparently disparate halves of Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth is this: both parts end with Shakespeare being played in a language foreign to the audience on stage—Hamlet is performed in English for a Dogg-speaking audience, while Macbeth is performed in Dogg for a Czech-speaking audience.

It will take a while to unravel the complexities of Stoppard's Wittgensteinian language games, but one thing is clear. In Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, Stoppard is moving between the two sides of his identity: English and Czech. Juxtaposing these stagings of the two plays raises the question of the status of Shakespeare in two different worlds—the English-speaking and the non-English-speaking. We think that the English-speaking world is Shakespeare's natural home, and we assume that his plays must seem alien to foreigners, and perhaps irrelevant to their experience. But Stoppard develops a paradox in Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth. Today, Shakespeare may have more vitality in the non-English-speaking world, where very different conditions lead readers and viewers to seek the deeper meaning of his plays, including their political significance. By contrast, English speakers have become so familiar with Shakespeare's plays (almost to the point of memorization) that they no longer pay real attention to what they are reading or hearing on the stage.

It seems that Stoppard had to travel to Czechoslovakia to discover the real power of Shakespeare's plays.Footnote ³ He began his career with the absurdist language games of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which he managed to turn Shakespeare's profound text into meaningless Beckettian chatter. It was only when he began to think as a Czech, as it were, that Stoppard discovered that Shakespeare's plays contain a deep political wisdom. The subject of Macbeth is tyranny. For English audiences in the modern world tyranny may seem to be a remote subject—a calamity limited to foreign lands. But twentieth-century Czechs came to know tyranny all too well and in particularly virulent forms, first under the Nazi occupation and then under the Soviet-backed Communist regime. That may be one reason why the Czechs have been more attuned than the English to the political significance of Macbeth. In sum, Stoppard shows that Shakespeare's plays do travel well, while also suggesting that they may need to be liberated from narrow English contexts in order to reveal the full range of their political wisdom. Stoppard seems to be hinting that Shakespeare's plays are too important to the world to be left the exclusive property of the English. As Ralph Toucatt says in a perceptive essay on Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, the play “makes you want to take Shakespeare away from the English and give him to someone who will really know what to do with him.”Footnote ⁴

II

Stoppard had good reason to turn to a Czech subject in Cahoot's Macbeth. As surprising as it may seem, Shakespeare's dramas in general and Macbeth in particular have played a significant role in the history of Czech literature and theater. According to the eminent Czech Shakespeare scholar Zdeněk Stříbrný, the translation of Shakespeare's plays into Czech was central to the Czech nationalist movement in the nineteenth century. Incorporated into the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Czech people felt subjugated to a foreign culture (emblematized by the fact that German was the only official language in their lands).Footnote ⁵ Many today speak of the spread of Shakespeare's plays around the world as a form of English cultural imperialism, as if his works were being imposed on recalcitrant peoples by a hegemonic foreign power. But as Stříbrný shows, the nineteenth-century Czechs welcomed Shakespeare as a liberating cultural force. They could validate their native language by demonstrating that Czech is just as capable of translating Shakespeare as German, while using a play like Macbeth to embody their hopes of being freed from Habsburg oppression. With its powerful images of a land groaning under tyranny, beset with spies, and eagerly awaiting a liberator, Macbeth spoke to the yearnings of the Czech people for their own independent nation.

With the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, an independent republic of Czechoslovakia was indeed founded in 1918. Sadly the Czechs' emergence from foreign domination proved to be short-lived. During the brutal Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia, Macbeth again came to the aid of the beleaguered Czech people in a number of productions that served as protests against the German invasion.Footnote ⁶ The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia was soon followed by the equally brutal—and longer-lived—Communist takeover. Stříbrný and other Czech scholars have documented the way Shakespeare's plays became a site of resistance to the Stalinist tyranny imposed on the Czechs by their Soviet overlords.

To show how Macbeth served as a protest against Communism in Czech hands, Stříbrný turns to the 1978 Pavel Kohout version on which Stoppard based his Cahoot's Macbeth. In Shakespeare's play, Kohout and his associates found a vision of hope in the depths of Czech despair:

Historicist scholars may insist that Macbeth, as a play about Scotland, deals narrowly with the political issues raised in Shakespeare's day when James VI of Scotland became James I of England. But to the Czechs, Macbeth can at any time embody their fears and hopes as a subjugated people. For them, Macbeth is a study of tyranny as such, not just its one-time embodiment in medieval Scottish history as revived in Jacobean England. Over the years, the Czechs have turned to Macbeth to symbolize tyranny and to grapple with the problem of how to rebel against it. The one constant is their sense that Shakespeare, for all his remoteness from them in time and space, has something to teach them on the subject of tyranny. The Czechs have kept adapting their productions of Macbeth to local circumstances, but by that very act they acknowledge a core of essential truths about tyranny that Shakespeare's play embodies.

III

Stoppard uses Cahoot's Macbeth to explore the difficult and precarious position of the artist under a totalitarian regime. The play proceeds at a brisk pace through the action of Shakespeare's play up to the point where Macbeth has murdered Duncan. We then hear a loud knocking offstage, just as happens in Shakespeare's Macbeth at the corresponding moment in the action. We assume that this is the famous knocking at the gate in Macbeth, the subject of much critical comment over the years.Footnote ⁸ It is the sound that provokes Macbeth's pained exclamation: “Wake Duncan with thy knocking”Footnote ⁹ and soon results in the comic relief scene with the castle's porter. But Cahoot's Macbeth omits the garrulous porter, and the knocking turns out to come from the “real” world outside the performance. It announces the arrival of the secret police, headed by an inspector determined to find out if this theater company is engaged in any subversive activities.Footnote ¹⁰ Stoppard pulls off a coup de theatre—a kind of pun in sound effects. What we thought was an event within Macbeth actually marks an unwelcome intrusion of the external political world into the stage world.

The inspector can barely contain his contempt for this stage world as he interrupts the performance: “I'm sorry—is this the National Theatre? … Is it the National Academy of Dramatic Art, or, as we say down Mexico way, NADA?” (185). When the hostess (based on the actress Chramostová) indignantly says: “It's my home,” the Inspector ridicules the idea of staging theater in a private residence: “Don't you find it rather inconvenient? … I mean, who wants to be packed out night after night by a crowd of fashionable bronchitics saying ‘I don't think it's as good as his last one,’ and expecting to use your lavatory at will?” (185). It is emblematic of the totalitarian nature of the Soviet-backed regime in Czechoslovakia that no private space remains in Prague. Even a living room (which we soon learn is bugged) is subject to unwarranted intrusion by the state apparatus.

The seeming freedom of the Prague Spring had tempted Czech artists and intellectuals to go public with their dissent from the Communist regime. After the Soviet invasion in 1968, Czech authorities began to crack down on all forms of dissent, and artists, theater people, university professors, and many other public figures lost their positions and were forced into demeaning occupations just to stay alive. Stoppard bitterly satirizes this development in a dialogue between the Inspector and Landovský, the actor who played Macbeth in the 1978 production:

Stoppard keeps switching back and forth between the real world and the theater world in Cahoot's Macbeth, showing how the vocabulary of one can be used in the other. The Inspector cruelly elides the distinction between Landovský’s current menial job hawking newspapers and his preinvasion status as a star of Prague theater. The brutal totalitarian state humiliates the dissident artist, taking away his livelihood and reducing him to a base position in the social order.

After the Inspector's rude interruption, the action of Macbeth resumes and reaches the point where Macbeth is about to be crowned king of Scotland: “He is already named and gone to Scone / To be invested” (190). The Inspector cannot contain his joy at this development; he interrupts the performance again: “Very good. Very good! And so nice to have a play with a happy ending for a change” (190). As an agent of a totalitarian regime, the Inspector knows a tyrant when he sees one, and he is overjoyed that Macbeth is taking control of Scotland. Stoppard has fun with the very serious business of the Communist disposition to rewrite history, or in this case, drama. A Macbeth with a happy ending—one in which the usurper secures the Scottish throne—is a Stalinist's dream.

The Inspector continues to toy with the acting troupe, until he finally levels with them, asserts his authority, and puts them in their place:

Here Stoppard has a Communist thug acknowledge what many literary critics insist on denying—that Shakespeare is a “universal and timeless writer,” and, as such, a challenge to any oppressive regime. Totalitarian states recognize the power of Shakespeare's plays. With his “popularity with the public,” his plays are not confined to their local settings but can cross cultural borders and speak truth to power (what the inspector calls “spitting in the eyes of the beholder”). The inspector wishes that Shakespeare's plays were in fact restricted to a local context (“he should be keeping his mind on Verona”), as historicist critics are always claiming they are.

The fact that Shakespeare could embody universal truths in local settings means that his political wisdom lies concealed in what may appear to be simple stories, with no broader application. That is what frustrates the inspector and his chief about Shakespeare:

As an agent of a repressive regime, the inspector fears any form of “underhand” communication, which does not come right out and make its opposition to tyranny clear. In drama, a playwright can hide behind his characters—he never has to state his opinions openly, especially not in a form that could be used as evidence against him in court. In an open conflict of opinion, the party with the greater force on its side will inevitably prevail. But if a dramatist uses forms of indirect communication, he can work subtly to subvert the entrenched powers confronting him. That explains the Czechs' repeated use of Shakespeare. “Macbeth” became their code word for “tyranny.”

Stoppard thus connects the possibility of a truly universal writer to the possibility of indirect or esoteric communication. The totalitarian authorities are no fools—they recognize the fact that dissident authors might hide behind a smokescreen of conformity to party dogma. In a climate of repression, authors might give the impression of deferring to authoritative opinions to protect themselves from censorship and/or persecution. The scholars who insist that Shakespeare's mind was limited to the established dogmas and opinions of his day mistake rhetorical concessions to the power of a surveillance state for Shakespeare's genuine convictions. Living in a modern liberal democracy, we have lost touch with the difficult and perilous writing conditions that prevailed under the illiberal regimes of the past. Because authors today generally enjoy freedom of speech, we forget that in centuries past, they were constantly faced with the threat of censorship and persecution, and had to learn how to write accordingly. That is why the experience of totalitarian surveillance in the modern world has been intellectually useful. Witnessing Soviet censorship and persecution, for example, has reminded us of the conditions that all writers faced in earlier centuries. In Cahoot's Macbeth, Stoppard shows that he understands the phenomenon Leo Strauss famously refers to as “persecution and the art of writing.”Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, analysis of dissident writing behind the Iron Curtain—especially of the practice known in Slavic Studies as “Aesopianism” or “Aesopian writing”—has confirmed Strauss's argument about the importance of esoteric writing to philosophers.Footnote ¹² Only if authors learn the art of secret writing can they remain independent of the regime under which they live and transcend the limits of its intellectual horizons.

By linking Dogg's Hamlet to Cahoot's Macbeth, Stoppard is able to give a demonstration of esotericism in action on stage. When a character named Easy from the first play crosses into the second, he teaches the invented language Dogg to the Czech actors. Soon they are performing Macbeth in Dogg, bewildering the hapless inspector. Confronted with Easy speaking Dogg, the inspector can only wonder: “What's that language he's talking?” The Hostess can reply in all honesty: “At the moment we're not sure if it's a language or a clinical condition” (205)—or a cunning strategy of evasion. Under the changed circumstances, all the inspector's normal resources fail him. As act 5 of Macbeth begins, he threatens: “I must warn you that anything you say will be taken down and played back at your trial” (206), but what good is that if he and his associates do not understand Dogg? The inspector is sure that something subversive is occurring right in front of his eyes, and he knows that the apartment has already been bugged. He insists that the wiretappers record every word spoken: “Did you get all that? Clear as a what? Acting out of hostility to the Republic. Ten years minimum. I want every word in evidence” (207). But when his superiors phone him, the inspector is forced to admit that he does not know the meaning of the words he is having recorded: “How the hell do I know? But if it's not free expression, I don't know what is!” (207). Faced with a communication code he cannot break, the inspector discovers a form of free expression in the very midst of a totalitarian state.

In Cahoot's Macbeth, Stoppard portrays the nightmare of a totalitarian regime—a form of double speech that allows an author to address two different audiences at once. Early in the play, the inspector expresses his frustration with the possibility of one Macbeth for initiates and one Macbeth for the authorities: “Now listen, you stupid bastard, you'd better get rid of the idea that there's a special Macbeth which you do when I'm not around, and some other Macbeth for when I am around which isn't worth doing. You've only got one Macbeth. Because I'm giving this party and there ain't no other. It's what we call a one-party system” (188). Surveillance of artistic expression seems at first unproblematic to the inspector. There can be only one Macbeth and he has come to monitor it. But in the course of Cahoot's Macbeth, the inspector discovers to his dismay that the actors can speak in a language he cannot understand and still communicate to others who are in on the secret. In these circumstances, the two Macbeths he spoke of can exist simultaneously, with one play conveying two different messages to two different segments of the audience, an exoteric and an esoteric meaning.Footnote ¹³ Esoteric communication—a kind of antiauthoritarian double speech—threatens to evade tyrannical surveillance and subvert an oppressive regime. Stoppard had to turn to Communist Czechoslovakia to discover an artistic and intellectual possibility that he had not been aware of growing up in democratic England.

IV

Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth appears at first to be two separate plays, but Stoppard insists on joining them, and not just in the title. In his introduction, he writes: “the first is hardly a play at all without the second, which cannot be performed without the first” (142). On the simple level of plot, Cahoot's Macbeth cannot work without Dogg's Hamlet, because a character from the latter crosses over into the former and introduces the Czech characters to the Dogg language, thus making an esoteric performance of Macbeth possible in the Prague of the play. But is there a deeper meaning to the way Stoppard connects the two parts of the play?

On its own, Dogg's Hamlet appears to be a pure exercise in Wittgensteinian language games.Footnote ¹⁴ Stoppard's own explanation of what he is doing in the play is so lucid that I will quote it at length:

This linguistic experiment is acted out at the beginning of Dogg's Hamlet, and provides our initial clue to deciphering the Dogg language.

Stoppard has a lot of fun in Dogg's Hamlet. The situation is quite confusing at first, but, having seen the play, I can testify that, surprisingly, the audience quickly catches on to what is happening. The play offers a Wittgensteinian lesson in the way that context supplies meaning to words. Observing what is happening on stage and listening to the intonation of the actors' voices, the audience begins to figure out the unfamiliar meanings of the familiar words it is hearing. Although Stoppard's linguistic experiment would work if he simply exchanged meanings between words arbitrarily, he increases the fun by repeatedly reversing the valence of words. Perfectly harmless phrases in English become curse words in Dogg. For example, the phrase Daisy squire means Mean bastard in Dogg, and Afternoons means Get stuffed! (148). By the same token, Dogg phrases that sound offensive to English ears turn out to have innocuous meanings. Cretinous pig-faced, git? is the way to ask Have you got the time please, sir? in Dogg (148). All this is very amusing, but the serious side of the play begins to emerge only when one considers the setting in which Stoppard has placed his linguistic experiment in Dogg's Hamlet. The dialogue in Dogg is intended to establish the context for the performance of Stoppard's Fifteen-Minute Hamlet with which the play culminates. Dogg's Hamlet takes place in a fancy English boarding school. We know that fact from the outfit of Baker, the first character we see on stage; according to the stage directions: “He is a schoolboy wearing grey flannel shorts, blazer, school cap, etc.” (147). When the character named Dogg comes on stage, we learn that he is “the headmaster” and is dressed “in mortar-board and gown” (148). In short, what we are witnessing in Stoppard's play is a performance of Hamlet by students at an elite boarding school.Footnote ¹⁵

The result of all Stoppard's linguistic tomfoolery is that when Hamlet is finally performed at the boarding school, we must imagine that it is being recited in a foreign language, that is, a language foreign to the student actors and their audience on stage. After all, we have seen them speaking nothing but Dogg. When a couple of students start rehearsing their lines from Hamlet, the stage directions strongly suggest that they do not understand the English words they are speaking: “They are not acting these lines at all, merely uttering them, tonelessly” (150).Footnote ¹⁶ Stoppard thus in effect explains why the Fifteen-Minute Hamlet is what it is. These schoolboys do not understand a word of Hamlet, and thus for them acting out the play becomes a matter of merely going through the motions, mouthing the words. They might as well get through the performance as quickly as possible. Thus, in Dogg's Hamlet Stoppard may be reflecting on what has happened to Shakespeare in the modern, English-speaking world. He is revered in our culture, but in the process, we have put him on a pedestal, remote from ordinary life and unconnected to it. Schoolchildren learn Hamlet by rote, and thus the play has lost all meaning for them and become a mere academic exercise.Footnote ¹⁷ Hamlet does not speak to these students; at most they have learned to recite the words to please their teachers and their parents. “Shakespearean” is not a living language in the world of Dogg's Hamlet—Shakespeare's great plays have become museum pieces, closeted away in the academic world.Footnote ¹⁸ Cordoned off from the broader culture in a largely academic setting, Shakespeare's plays have lost their vital connection to the mass of English people. By contrast, in Cahoot's Macbeth, Shakespeare is truly “living room” theater, coming right into the homes of the Czech people and speaking to their hearts.

V

Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth is a dramatic jigsaw puzzle—to understand the play, one has to figure out how its apparently separate parts fit together. When Stoppard originally wrote the Fifteen-Minute Hamlet in 1975, he probably had nothing more in mind than the sheer fun of showing that by ruthless cutting he could reduce the world's most complicated play to farce. Only when placed in the boarding school context Stoppard creates in Dogg's Hamlet does the fifteen-minute version take on serious meaning. It becomes Stoppard's way of suggesting that our English-speaking culture has come to take Hamlet for granted. The text of Hamlet has become too familiar to us—we are hardly able to dwell on the words anymore and think about them. We know the story so well, we can follow it even in a drastically edited version.

This would be a sad commentary on Shakespeare's cultural standing if that were Stoppard's last word on the subject. But this is where Cahoot's Macbeth comes to our aid and explains why Stoppard insists that “the first is hardly a play at all without the second.” The second play complements the first, and shows us an alternative view of Shakespeare's place in culture, one in which he has an active role to play.Footnote ¹⁹ Cahoot's Macbeth takes Shakespeare out of the classroom and places him in the political arena, where he belongs. In Dogg's Hamlet, Shakespeare is enlisted in the service of an established cultural institution; in Cahoot's Macbeth, he serves to challenge an authoritarian regime.Footnote ²⁰

Now that Shakespeare has been appropriated by the cultural establishment in England, we cannot imagine that he ever had an antiestablishment thought. That is one origin of the historicist understanding of Shakespeare, which places his thinking squarely within the horizons of the England of his day. The young Tom Stoppard initially encountered Shakespeare as this kind of conventional figure, a cultural icon representing the English establishment at its most established. Stoppard described his youthful self as “totally bored and alienated by everyone from Shakespeare to Dickens.”Footnote ²¹ Early in his career as a dramatist, Stoppard enjoyed taking on the establishment, treating Shakespeare iconoclastically in plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and the Fifteen-Minute Hamlet, which cut Shakespeare down to size and show that we do not have to revere his works or worship at his shrine. Shakespeare became the subject of the kind of mind games that make Stoppard's early plays so scintillating.

It was only when Stoppard began to explore his Czech identity that he came to appreciate Shakespeare's true power to move people and to do so in political ways. It sounds at first paradoxical that it took the Czechs to open Stoppard's eyes to the depth of Shakespeare, but there really is a logic to this development. As a part of English culture, Shakespeare was in a way too easily available to the Englishman Tom Stoppard. Dogg's Hamlet shows that staging a Shakespeare play in England has become such a routine event that it can even become a required assignment in a boarding school. But in Cahoot's Macbeth, the Czechs have to fight to produce a Shakespeare play—against government efforts to close it down. The Czech actors are risking their freedom, perhaps even their lives, for Shakespeare. Because the Czechs have to struggle for their Shakespeare, they appreciate his plays all the more.

In liberal democracies, authors have freedom of speech, but the result is that they do not have to fight to express their views and the public tends to ignore them as insignificant in political terms. In Czech dissidents like Havel, Stoppard discovered authors who matter politically—indeed some of them have become political heroes. For Havel, living under a brutal Communist regime, writing became a matter of life and death, a brave struggle against tyranny. And in Czech culture Stoppard found that Shakespeare's plays became an integral part of this political struggle for freedom. The Czechs turned to Shakespeare's plays for inspiration in their fight for national independence and then against their foreign conquerors. No wonder the Czechs take Shakespeare and their own playwrights more seriously than the English, for whom drama has become mere entertainment or an academic exercise. The fact that Havel was elected the first president of a liberated Czechoslovakia speaks volumes about the way the horrors of a totalitarian regime can force people to take drama and dramatists seriously.

Unfortunately, the logic of this situation dictated that once the Czechs were liberated from Communist tyranny, the role of art in their lives paradoxically diminished. And this is what Stoppard found when he revisited Prague. Talking about his play The Coast of Utopia on the Charlie Rose Show on February 7, 2007, Stoppard recalled the oppressed artists he met the first time he visited Prague in 1977. Upon returning to Prague years later, he was surprised by what he saw:

Obviously, Stoppard was not calling for a return to Communism in Czechoslovakia, but he could not help observing that resistance to tyranny had energized literature in writers such as Havel and Kohout; correspondingly, their victory ended up taking a lot of steam out of their literary activities.Footnote ²³

In the same interview, Stoppard relates his Czech experiences to what he had learned in his research about one of the central figures in his Coast of Utopia. Of the Russian author Vissarion Belinsky, who was constantly “in danger of being arrested” and “had to write very carefully,” Stoppard said:

Artists struggle under despotism, but it spurs them to find new ways to creative freedom. Unfortunately, as Stoppard argues, under political freedom, they may go soft and their writings lose their edge. In Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, Stoppard shows something similar in his portrayal of the reception of Shakespeare's plays in liberal England as opposed to repressive Czechoslovakia.Footnote ²⁵

The story of Tom Stoppard, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, and the role of Shakespeare in Czech culture is only one episode in the remarkable spread of Shakespeare's cultural influence around the globe.Footnote ²⁶ Many other examples could be given of the way Shakespeare's understanding of politics has helped artists and thinkers in remote lands. When one adds up all such cross-cultural encounters, one sees that Shakespeare truly is a universal author and that his political wisdom travels across borders just as well as his dramatic and poetic power.