The Beatles, Shakespeare, and God

What on earth do the Beatles have to do with Shakespeare? Or with God for that matter?

The Shakespeare connection is easy. They once performed the Pyramus and Thisbe scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream on television in 1964, and the end of the song “I Am the Walrus” features random dialogue from a radio production of King Lear. 

But I think Hamlet can be cited as a part of the Beatles’ canon, at least in a “meta” way. Hamlet is a difficult play to interpret because it is largely about atmosphere - the atmosphere of a corrupt Denmark, led by a king who is guilty of both murder and incest, but whose guilt is known to Hamlet only by means of the revelation provided by the ghost - though the rest of the body politic suffers from the intrigue, spying and machinations of King Claudius without knowing the root cause, which are the king’s hidden crimes. The murky atmosphere of doubt and disgust that Hamlet comments upon in his soliloquies is the natural result of the secret sin of this usurper. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” but that something is only sensed in a vague way by everyone but Hamlet, who had gotten the explanation of the source of the rot from the ghost of the primal victim himself.

Hamlet’s Denmark, then, is a dysfunctional family. And as in most dysfunctional families, the children grow up only with intuitive and hesitant knowledge of the poisonous atmosphere in which they are being raised. There seems to be an elephant in the living room, but that elephant remains invisible - even though everyone in the family spends all of their effort accommodating it.

I would suggest that the same thing is going on with the Beatles songs (mostly written by John Lennon) that are the most bizarre. “I Am the Walrus”, for instance, is as much a cry for help as “Help!” “I Am the Walrus” (which is a fascinating and complex song on many levels) is all about isolation, alienation, disjointedness, disintegration and a kind of schizophrenic fracture of reality, even to the point of a loss of identity (“I am he as you are he as you are me, and we are all together …”). It is, in some ways, the musical apex of alienation and absurdity.

 As much as Lennon played around with this alienation and absurdity in a psychedelic or humorous way, his songs are nonetheless a cri de coeur, as raw and emotional as some of his lead vocals can be.

 Indeed, something was rotten in the state of Denmark for John Lennon, though he never seemed to confront the ghost of a father figure who could tell him what it was.

Or did he?

Here’s where God comes in (though, of course, God never really leaves). 

We all know of John Lennon’s famous atheism, best exemplified by his haunting song “Imagine”. As beautiful as the melody of “Imagine” is, many have commented on the insipid quality of the lyrics. Sure, the sentiment is great, but (as with the awful hymns at most of our suburban Masses) it’s mere sentiment, utterly disconnected from rational thought. For instance,

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

Well, perhaps in the New Jerusalem there will be no countries and no religion (there will be no temple in the New Jerusalem, another John tells us, “because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” - Rev. 21:22) - and there can be nothing to kill or die for in heaven, which is beyond suffering and death … but on this side of heaven, to have literally “nothing to kill or die for” would mean a life without love. A man who would have nothing in his life that he would be willing to defend by force if need be (such as friends or a wife or children), especially a man who would have nothing to “die for”, would be a man not in heaven but in a kind of hell. Lennon, then is “imagining” a place where there’s “no hell below us; above us only sky” because, perhaps, hell is among us and the sky has fallen.

Indeed, John Lennon knew he was in a kind of hell - an inner hell that his heroin addiction and perhaps even his wife Yoko were expressions of. “I want out of hell,” he wrote to televangelist Oral Roberts in 1972: “Explain to me, what Christianity can do for me. Is it phony, can He love me? I want out of Hell!” And while there are some who doubt the authenticity of this letter to Roberts, it fits in with where John Lennon was at this period of his life.

As John Waters wrote in First Things

In 1977, he [Lennon] became deeply moved by NBC’s broadcast of the Franco Zefferrelli miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, starring Robert Powell as Jesus. He reportedly told friends that after seeing the movie he had become a born-again Christian. (He was later dissuaded by Yoko.) He also wrote some explicitly Christian songs, including one called “Talking with Jesus,” though none of these made it to vinyl. In the 1970s he became fascinated by evangelists like Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Oral Roberts.

 Steve Turner, who wrote The Gospel according to the Beatles, provides more details.

The change in his life perturbed Yoko, who tried to talk him out of it. She reminded him of what he'd said about his vulnerability to strong religious leaders because of his emotionally deprived background. She knew that if the press found out about it they would have a field day with another John and Jesus story [the first one being John’s proclamation “We’re more popular than Jesus” in 1966, which created an uproar]. John became antagonistic toward her, blaming her for practicing the dark arts and telling her that she couldn't see the truth because her eyes had been blinded by Satan.

Turner continues, "In an unpublished song, 'You Saved My Soul,' he spoke about 'nearly falling' for a TV preacher 'while feeling lonely and scared in a Tokyo hotel’.” However, "Whatever happened in Tokyo, it marked the end of his personal interest in Jesus." This is apparently because of Yoko’s mighty efforts to dissuade the inchoate Christian faith of the ex-Beatle.

One wonders what would have happened had there been a more robust and rational form of the Christian Faith displayed on television in those days. For Lennon was a TV junkie in the post Bishop Sheen and pre-Mother Angelica era, an era when a variety of scam artists flooded the airwaves as televangelists. It may not have taken much for Yoko to have convinced John of the folly and fraud that was intermingled with the televised truth in the heyday of televangelism. And it’s a shame that Lennon never, it seems, encountered the combination of Faith and Reason in the more solid of modern Christians - for instance, in the writings of G.K. Chesterton, whose work would have appealed to John Lennon’s intellect and to his sense of poetry.

But back to Shakespeare. 

If the living hell expressed by Lennon in his songs and in his letter to Roberts cannot be assuaged by a transcendental solution; if Yoko managed to pull John away from the religious answer to his sins and suffering, then what can we expect would come next in John’s life?

 In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the arch witch Hecate tells us that her “artificial sprites” - the demonic spirits she will create by the artifice of her black magic - will have a disastrous effect upon Macbeth. The “artificial sprites”

… by the strength of their illusion

Shall draw him on to his confusion:

He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear

His hopes 'bove wisdom, grace and fear:

And you all know, security

Is mortals' chiefest enemy.

 In other words, Macbeth, who at this point of the play is steeped in sin and sees no way out, will seek refuge in the “confusion” of the sprites’ “illusion”. He will ignore fate, death and wisdom and, in his pursuit of “security”, take refuse in an unreality - in a life that is bereft even of the natural consolations of our mortal existence, such as sleep and a supportive wife.

 Thus we see the unreality of 1967’s “Strawberry Fields Forever”, where “Nothing is real / And nothing to get hung about” blossom into 1980’s “Watching the Wheels”, where John assures us “I'm doing fine watching shadows on the wall”; and “Nobody Told Me”, a posthumously released recording where John extols one of the quirky Rituals of Unreality that he and Yoko indulged in, “There's a place for us in movies; You just gotta lay around.” John and Yoko believed that you could make your fantasies real somehow by lying around and picturing yourself as characters in movies while watching them: this is what the writer of “Imagine” was now imagining. They also believed that the “UFOs over New York” mentioned in that song were real and were portending a great New Age for humanity.

 And yet this rejection of the realissimum, of the highest reality of God, in favor of the psychedelic, quirky and contrived “artificial sprites” of our own queer and potentially demonic unreality, is not just the story of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It’s the story of our culture - even (I’m sorry to say) our modern Christian culture - as well. 

 Could there be an original sin at the heart of the alienation and isolation we all feel, even in the liturgical and doctrinal abuse surrounding us in the modern Catholic Church, as there was in Hamlet’s Denmark? Is the atmosphere of our modern worship poisoned because of a hidden sin? Could there be an ongoing attachment to sin that avoids its own consequences by running after an artificial make-believe that we assert in our lives, as in Macbeth’s Scotland, where we sink further and further into a vortex “where nothing is real” and the “shadows on the wall” that we sit and stare at, mesmerized by them, threaten to grow larger and engulf us?

I think the answers to these questions is yes. And if it is, what we we need is for the invisible elephant in our dysfunctional living rooms to start becoming visible, so that it can be acknowledged by all, or at least by those of us who hope to address the corruption that alienates us and thereby begin (in Hamlet’s words) “to set it right”.  

 And perhaps the reality of this, and an even higher reality, is something that we might someday see, if we make it to a place beyond all of this confusion, a place none of us can ever fully “Imagine”.