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“How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else’s words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance.”
In this passage, from Act 2, Scene 7, Oliver describes the attitudes of different students at Dellecher about the opening performance of Julius Caesar. While most shower the actors with lavish praise, the musicians remain silent, believing that there is insufficient discipline in acting to warrant such a response. But, as Oliver explains, they are missing the most basic point about acting. It is less about bravery or fame than about the desperate desire for connection and communication, both tenuous and fragile. In bringing a dramatist’s words to life, the actor creates not just art but the possibility of substantial, shared understanding. This forges a link between the speaker and the audience, as well as between the author and the audience. While the desire for attention or fame might seem to motivate an actor, instead it is a yearning to be able to partake in these rare and important moments of communion and association that sustains the actor’s efforts.
“But maybe every day we let grief in, we’ll also let a little bit of it out, and eventually we’ll be able to breathe again. At least that’s how Shakespeare would tell the story.”
While giving a eulogy for her cousin Richard, Wren offers these words of encouragement and hope to the mourners gathered for his funeral at the end of Act 3, Scene 6. She notes that even Shakespeare’s comedies, which end happily, include death, pointing to the loss of brothers in Twelfth Night. She contemplates various ways to manage grief. One might indulge it or ignore it, but neither of these coping strategies seem adequate in the wake of her cousin’s death as Richard was someone who could not tolerate being ignored. Yet it is also wrong to let Richard tyrannize people from the grave. Her counsel is to seek balance, acknowledging grief’s presence in order to release its potency. Although Wren suggests that this idea is Shakespeare’s, her subsequent reference to Hamlet, a play in which the title character is unable to let go of his grief, argues against that conclusion. The passage presents a compelling definition of how to handle grief with dignity and respect but is one that is likely best attributed to the character of Wren, and not the famous dramatist who sets so much of the agenda in If We Were Villains.
“The thing about Shakespeare is, he’s so eloquent…He speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.”
From its title to its conclusion, If We Were Villains relies on the work of William Shakespeare. In this passage, from the Prologue to Act 4, Oliver attempts to explain to Detective Colborne the hold that Shakespeare had—and continues to have—over him and his former classmates. What Oliver wants for the detective to grasp is the extraordinary connection Shakespeare was able to make between words and feelings. Even if what people feel might seem to defy expression, Shakespeare’s genius inheres in the unmatched ability to craft phrases that would give them voice. Rather than being relegated to silence, in other words, people could express what might have seemed unspeakable. The full range of human experience, negative and positive alike, thus becomes explicable. According to Oliver, Shakespeare makes humanity itself understandable. This is a powerful defense of Shakespeare’s genius, but the Prologue does also note the burden his works placed on the young acting students at Dellecher. Immersed in Shakespeare’s writing, they were also immersed in the powerful emotions he could express, a burden that Oliver likens to what the mythical figure of Atlas must have felt in holding up the world.
