I’ve been reading through some of Shakespeare’s plays, now that I’ve got his complete works. It’s actually quite different reading them now from what it was like when I had to read them in high school. This is probably simply due to the fact that I’ve read thousands of books since then, and thus the language of 17th Century England isn’t as odd as it used to be.
Reading up on the biographies of the Bard, it’s apparent that Shakespeare was not original with his story ideas. My collection claims that there are only two unique plays that Shakespeare created himself: The Tempest and Love’s Labour’s Lost. However, I’ve also heard from a different source that only The Tempest is original with Shakespeare. Regardless, it is a fact that the vast majority of the stories he wrote were based off previously published or performed ideas.
This is not to say that Shakespeare was plagarizing (although perhaps under today’s laws it would be considered that). At the time, he was doing what every playwright did. Why, then, did Shakespeare’s works last while these other works faded into obscurity? After all, even though Romeo and Juliet was not original with Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s is the only version that 99.9% of modern readers know.
The answer is found in the sheer talent that Shakespeare had with the English language. His gift was the ability to take an already circulating story and “Shakespeare-ize” it. In short, he took stock stories and owned them (or, for today’s 1337 gamers, }{3 pwn3d!11!!).
There is a lesson for artists today. It is not the uniqueness of an idea that will get you remembered in the history books; it’s the sheer excellence of your work that will do so. You can take something that’s been done a thousand times before and, if you make it well, your product will be the one that is remembered. This happens to some extent already in Hollywood. There are some movies that come out with plots that are nowhere near unique, yet they are done so well that the retelling of the story doesn’t matter; we love it because of the exceptional talent displayed.
Exceptionalism, therefore, is the the ultimate key.
Naturally, this is something I’ve written on before, but it bears saying again. Christians tend to be the worst at performing exceptionaly in artistic fields. From what I’ve seen, this is mainly due to the fact that the average attitude of a Christian is, “God loves me no matter what, so I just have to show up with something and He’ll be glorified.” Basically, it’s like a four-year-old showing off a finger painting to his parents. Obviously they’re going to be pleased.
But are they really? There was a commercial on this holiday season that stated: “Homemade gifts are fine…if you’re seven years old.” In the same way, making crappy art for “God’s glory” is fine…if you have no skills in the first place. If, on the other hand, you just throw a bunch of stuff together and say, “Dedicated to God” that doesn’t make your work glorifying to Him.
Or to put it another way, why would God be glorified with a fingerpainting when He desinged you to paint the Sistine Chapel? Or, since I’m a writer, why would God be pleased with an error-filled, shallow attempt at a novel when He designed you to be Steinbeck?
In the same way that we forget the talentless hacks who produce art, art that “glorifies” God without talent is also forgotten. As a Christian artist, therefore, we have an obligation to produce the absolute best work that we can produce. In the end, even if we are not Steinbeck or Da Vinci, it is our best that glorifies God; not what we do halfway and pretend it’s for His glory.
