Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
William Shakespeare in his mid-40s.
The ultimate fox? William Shakespeare. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
The ultimate fox? William Shakespeare. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

If we're all hedgehogs or foxes, what was Shakespeare?

This article is more than 4 years old

Specialist hedgehog or wide-ranging fox? In an extract from his new book, the late playwright Stephen Jeffreys identifies two kinds of thinkers – and one writer who defies definition

Just as people outside the theatre ask actors, “How do you remember the words?” so do they enquire of writers, “Where do your ideas come from?” In both cases, the truthful answer is: “That’s the easy part.” For a professional playwright, having ideas for plays is something that happens on a daily basis. Reading a newspaper, listening to a friend’s holiday anecdotes, glimpsing a curious image of, say, two people and a bag of firewood – anything can set you off. But as Robert McKee says, “Having an idea is like whistling a tune on the steps of Carnegie Hall. The hard part is getting the orchestra to play it inside.”

Isaiah Berlin, quoting the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, suggests that there are two kinds of writers and thinkers: foxes and hedgehogs. While the fox knows many things and forages across a range of experiences, the hedgehog concentrates its attention on knowing one big thing.

Like all such generalisations, it has, as Berlin admits, its limitations. However, in the matter of choosing subjects for plays, it can shed a certain amount of light. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Caryl Churchill, Molière, Brecht and Tom Stoppard are foxes, roving over different kinds of terrain, while Aeschylus, Ben Jonson, Congreve, Ibsen, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel and Nina Raine are all in their different way hedgehogs, sticking relentlessly to the same territory.

Playwrights naturally seek out subjects; our imaginations are susceptible to incidents, situations and narratives that seem to offer us material for “our kind of play”. To take an example, the story that formed the basis of Peter Shaffer’s Equus was told to him by a friend as they happened to drive past some stables. It buried its way into his subconscious. By the time he was ready to write his play about a boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike, he could no longer remember where the stables were and his friend was dead. He had to invent. Of course, there is already something Shafferesque about the blinded horses story and it becomes even more Shafferesque in his subsequent dramatisation. Another writer might have interpreted the incident as a political protest or an indictment of the nation’s youth. Shaffer’s slant, involving Dionysian worship, sexual failure and the rational healer’s sense of inadequacy, is typical of him as a writer.

‘Hedgehog’ playwright Peter Shaffer’s Equus. Photograph: Richard Davenport/The Other Richard

Shaffer is a good example of a hedgehog: his plays almost inevitably involve a pair of male antagonists, one representing a rational worldview, the other standing for something darker but more profound. His major plays – The Royal Hunt of the Sun, The Battle of Shrivings, Equus, Amadeus – generally pit the Apollonian against the Dionysian in a highly charged battle, in which the rational man destroys his adversary, fully conscious that by doing so he loses a vital part of himself. This, we might say, is the Peter Shaffer theme.

All writers get stuck at some point. Hedgehogs might search for years for their subject, but when they’ve found it, they’ll write something insightful about it. They run the risk, however, of writing the same play over and over again, with the material wearing thinner as time goes by. The hedgehog is focused on themselves: “Come into my burrow, this is the only burrow that matters.”

A fox can write about any subject but might not have anything to say about it – they cannot find themselves in it. Foxes run the risk of not nailing their colours to the mast: they engage audiences with the breadth of their discourse, but they can fail to issue any consistent statement about the world. Also, the fox has the problem of endless possibilities; because they can always write entertainingly, they can lack discrimination. The fox is more concerned with the audience: “Let me entertain you with all the tricks I can do.”

‘Both types of writers are searching for the same thing in different ways’ … playwright Stephen Jeffreys. Photograph: Martin Argles/The Guardian

Like most such cut-and-dried theories, it is only partly true, and the idea can be taken too far. Shakespeare, at first sight the ultimate fox, becomes in Ted Hughes’s analysis in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being an obsessive who returns again and again to the same pair of myths – Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece – constantly reshaping the conflict between these two opposing narratives in his last fourteen plays. So it could be argued that Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest fox of all – the writer who can deliver any subject in any genre without apparently leaving any fingerprints – was in fact a hedgehog all along. Maybe we are all of us, to some extent, hedgehogs rather than foxes, since we all have our own set of abiding preoccupations and obsessions, whether we set a play on a desert island or in a medieval Danish castle. But I still think that, in this matter of our choice of subject, the notion of this distinction holds good.

Both types of writer – the burrowing hedgehog and the ranging fox – are searching for the same thing in different ways: to find the perfect coalescence of form, subject and personal input. Though Shakespeare-the-fox may range wider across genres, historical periods, and geographical locations, he always finds himself in it; whereas Shaffer-the-hedgehog has a single subject and finds a way of dressing it up within different genres. The hedgehog starts with the self and searches for contexts where it can be explored differently; whereas the fox ranges over wide terrain and accidentally stumbles over something pertinent. Rather than saying we’re all hedgehogs, it’s about recognising the process of finding a successful subject. It’s done in a different order; one is a mirror image of the other.

Foxes and hedgehogs fail differently. Hedgehogs can become boring because they keep repeating themselves, while foxes can become irrelevant because they have too much to say. But the process is the same: to find yourself in the material in a way that is interesting to the audience. Let’s put it this way: the hedgehog has no problem finding themselves, but can have problems with being interesting; and the fox has no problem being interesting, but can have problems finding themselves.

What we all, as writers, need is a means to help us write a succession of plays.

Once we have exhausted our natural range of ideas, we must either break out of that one defining insight, or else find something that truly interests us among all the vast material the world has to offer. After all, writing a play consumes a great deal of time and energy. Writing a series of plays might be the work of a lifetime. So having a method for analysing why you gravitate towards your certain themes and topics, while laying others aside, is essential.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed