Shakespeare or C.S. Lewis?
William Shakespeare or C.S. Lewis, that is the question… Which of these might take the crown for King of English letters? It is the topic of this brief piece, and it is what we will discuss this Thursday. Two writers with millions of readers, dead and alive, but with vastly different approaches to their craft. The challenge of the debate is twofold: 1) articulating the terms and 2) assessing their respective bodies of work against them.
Surely “the best” writing cannot be what sells the most. If then, Colleen Hoover and other works within the Fifty Shades of Gray variety would quickly take the crown. What sells the most in terms of quantity is hardly the best in terms of quality. And pinning down a definitive idea of “quality” has taken others pages to say, so we’ll give a picture of our idea, and leave some room for divergences in our discussions. Great writing is simply what gets to “the heart of the matter” in the human condition. That we might love, or watch it by; that we might speak the truth or lie; that we might live knowing ‘destined to die are some of the central conditions of our humanity. Great writing speaks to the slew of situations we might find ourselves in by hoping to address those very ailments. Most of you have probably encountered such writing that is able to elucidate those thoughts and feelings we may only have in the quiet moments with our head against the pillow. Perhaps while suffering the pangs of a lost love of life, we heard or read a certain something (be it a song, a novel, or a bit of poetry), that, in falling on our ears, seemed not only to be written precisely for us…but appeared spoken across centuries (bridging time itself), and with such chilling accuracy that we cannot help but be brought to tears. Put plainly, we feel the author is in the very room with us, that he has taken our very heart from our chest, and shown us a side we had never known until then.
If any of you are readers, you will understand the feeling I am describing. An author who, with such terrific precision, has articulated our condition with perfect conjecture. This is the sword in the stone that may be unsheathed for any brilliant writer. This author, unlike artificial intelligence or the chair we are resting in while we read this, has a soul. It is only with perfect profundity that any good author may reach inside that great chasm of soul and deposit its wealth on the page.
However, it is not simply their ability to reach within the soul and pull forth excellence…rather, their ability to sample the plate (much like artificial intelligence) at the treasure, diversity, and intricacy that forms the human condition. If they are good writers, they are good readers…synthesizing their metaphors and restating what has been repeated or mulled over a thousand times (but perhaps never quite outright declared).
Recognizing that most writers reside within the style they are comfortable within, yet cognizant of the means by which excellence may come about within each, we now pose two authors who we think are in the running for “the best.” We have defined the parameters, for the time being, to the best writer from within the English language.
William Shakespeare (playwright and poet), and C. S. Lewis (novelist and essayist), form the two sides of the spectrum. Shakespeare, classic and seemingly archaic as his work may be, is unequivocally cemented at the heart of literature. Lewis, new on the scene compared to the literary giant of Shakespeare, is competing in a completely different class. Shakespeare writes plays and sonnets, and he does so with exceptional skill. Lewis on the other hand, although a wonderful writer of his own work, is a generalist. He is in many ways the librarian of our opening paragraph. He has perused the shelves, read the literature, and placed a concise, carefully considered consensus before us.
Lewis is not simply some regurgitating impersonator…rather, he has a soul. Just like Shakespeare, and many of the authors we hold in high regard, his work is like a dagger; sliding into us quickly and wrenching our hearts. When we arrive at the climactic finale of Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, or we have finally understood the dramatic themes of Hamlet, we know we are looking at excellence. Who then shall prevail?
William Shakespeare:
Shakespeare is King. Arguing in favor of this seems as redundant as arguing that Mt. Everest is tall while standing at its base. The fact that Shakespeare is not read as often or as deeply today as just 50 years ago is not a judgment on him, but a judgment on us. Shakespeare demands patience, and for us to still our chattering minds enough to listen: two qualities most obviously lacking in our society. Beyond his language itself echoing centuries beyond his life: “A heart of gold,” “star-crossed lovers,” “break the ice,” his stories remain some of the primary lenses we interpret our lives from, even if we have never formally “read” them. We know Romeo and Juliet better than some movie we might have watched only a month ago. And even still, take ONE play from the bard, and you could base a compelling argument for his greatness on that alone, but he has dozens of them, and on top of that, some of the finest rhymes “of tongue or pen.” I would trust Lewis more as my mentor or a friend, but as a writer, the crown is clearly Shakespeare’s. He has a profound sympathy for our human condition and seeks only to mirror those triumphs and tragedies back to us, which is precisely why his works speak across centuries.
Fully investigating a play from the bard would take much too long for the scope of this piece, but let this just be a crumb; If it’s enticing, only remember it is but the tiniest part of the breadth and depth of his work. Remember to listen when reading Romeo and Juliet; that it is a tragedy is revealed in the chorus’ very first lines: “a pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life…doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.” We are then introduced to a scene of comic masculinity, where a literal sword fight breaks out, but quickly, we return again to the tale’s tragic nature. In just fifty lines, Shakespeare paints a scene with a depth most writers couldn't capture in an entire work.
We meet Juliet’s mother and nurse. After fetching Juliet at her mother’s request, the nurse recounts an offhand tragic story of losing her daughter in infancy, who was born around the same time as Juliet. Had we listened from the start, we would have picked up the pathos of the scene. Here we have two mothers. One has lost her daughter, and the other is losing her daughter in two weeks to a betrothed marriage. The nurse’s story seems out of place, but when we consider what most mothers feel when their first and only child is married off, it is not far off. But, as we consider the prologue’s premonition, our first picture of Juliet comes with a preview of her death. This brief scene is none other than one mother with a dead daughter trying to grieve with another. That the nurse’s loss is still felt 14 years after the fact should only make us shudder at our foreknowledge of what Lady Capulet’s plot is inexorably moving toward. “
“It is a law that parents should not have to bury their children. And someone should enforce it.” - John Greene
Beyond the plays and the poems is the humility of Shakespeare’s work and what it reflects on the ultimate nature of writing. His Sonnet 106 places his works fairly in the “chronicles of time.” What makes great writing is never the writer, but only the quality of the subject: “and beauty making beautiful old rhyme.” And this suggestion is all the more potent coming from the pen of the greatest. The heights he could reach were self-admittedly “not enough.” There remains a phenomenon we might call “awe,” a feeling of something too big, or beautiful, or perhaps even terrible that words can never do it true justice.
“For we which now behold these present days
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.”
As great as he may be, his honesty makes him all the greater. His plays, his characters, and his poems at their greatest will only ever be a glance “through the glass, darkly.”
C.S. Lewis
How true it is that the simplest stories are often the most profound. Lewis is quick to remind us of our modern error in over-complicating perspicacious ideas. Rather than read Plato ourselves, we read some drab commentator’s lengthy analysis…bored out of our minds, yet convinced we must wade through laboriously to obtain what it is we set out to acquire.
Lewis, ironically, was often the butt of jokes in his own circles…laughed at by the likes of Tolkien for his simple, straightforward style. Yet, were he not remarkably clear in his fantasies, his memoirs, his essays, and his philosophical analyses, he would not have developed the brilliant potency he is renowned for. Speaking on the development of writing, Lewis said in his final interview before his death in 1963:
“The way for a person to develop a style is to know exactly what he wants to say and to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him.”
Lewis was successful because he wrote about simple ideas, using metaphors that are woven into us from an early age and characters that we cannot help but empathize with. Rather than fixating on originality, he sought to tell the truth in the most obvious, simplest way…and in doing so, crafted that which was wholly unique.
Sometimes, in the early morning, when a thick fog distorts and refracts the sun’s rays into ethereal crimson, I think about that red sun…the glowing manifestation of otherworldly imagery that persists beyond any pages of text, becoming something palpable inside my imagination. This sun, weary with a long life of burning brightly, dully hangs in the sky of one of Lewis’ worlds in The Magician’s Nephew. It is alive, and although I have never seen it, I recognize when this present reality paints me a picture akin to what Lewis had thus painted with words.
“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality. . . . In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” (Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others’ Eyes)
It is through his works of fantasy that a love of stories and faerie tales becomes evident. These are not the silly, useless, children’s books that spoon-feed oversimplified ideas in small words with big letters. It is a disgrace to the brilliance of the mind of a child to prevent them from feasting on the extraordinary beautiful, the majestically courageous, and the infinitely mysterious. In these stories, a child can become the knight, the servant, the maiden in distress, or the bullfrog. They climb great mountains, fight fierce dragons, and drink from a glimmering chalice. When they return to this world, however, their sense of self is changed. Their own character, having tasted the purity of noble temperament, is refined by the encounter.
When discussing these faerie tales and stories, Lewis says, “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”
What can we in our fifties learn from Mr. and Mrs. Beaver? How can we, with our minds like a heavy sponge, wring out the excess and return to the simple?
Perhaps we can learn once more what it feels like to be brave.
No more than sixty years has Lewis been in legacy mode. His death followed a life of prolific writing, thinking, and teaching, and was marked by Europe and the world at large. The West, no doubt, has a stark image in their minds of Narnia…this world of the Lion and the Witch. The rolling green meadows, deep forests and rushing rivers, are separated on a fierce line of demarcation, where the grass falters and droops as it is covered with ice and snow. It is, in a sense, the epitome of the cold front, moving like a sleeping beast and extending across the folds and ripples of the landscape.
Yet Lewis has done so much more than tell wonderful stories. His writings on the human condition, the weight of pain and suffering, the glory of unexpected joy, and his short, profoundly poignant essays, mark him as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. In sixty years, his legacy has been cemented. The question thus is posed: “How might we hail him in five hundred?”
