Table of Contents

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Myth 1: Shakespeare was the most popular writer of his time

Myth 2: Shakespeare was not well educated

Myth 3: Shakespeare's plays should be performed in elizabethan dress

Myth 4: Shakespeare was not interested in having his plays printed

Myth 5: Shakespeare never traveled

Myth 6: Shakespeare's plays are politically incorrect

Myth 7: Shakespeare was a Catholic

Myth 8: Shakespeare's plays had no scenery

Myth 9: Shakespeare's tragedies are more serious than his comedies

Myth 10: Shakespeare hated his wife

Myth 11: Shakespeare wrote in the rhythms of everyday speech

Myth 12: Hamlet was named after Shakespeare's son

Myth 13: The coarse bits of Shakespeare are for the groundlings; the philosophy is for the upper classes

Myth 14: Shakespeare was a Stratford playwright

Myth 15: Shakespeare was a plagiarist

Myth 16: We don't know much about Shakespeare's life

Myth 17: Shakespeare wrote alone

Myth 18: Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical

Myth 19: If Shakespeare were writing now, he'd be writing for Hollywood

Myth 20: The Tempest was Shakespeare's farewell to the stage

Myth 21: Shakespeare had a huge vocabulary

Myth 22: Shakespeare's plays are timeless

Myth 23: Macbeth is jinxed in the theater

Myth 24: Shakespeare did not revise his plays

Myth 25: Boy actors played women's roles

Myth 26: Shakespeare's plays don't work as movies

Myth 27: Yorick's skull was real

Myth 28: Queen Elizabeth loved Shakespeare's plays

Myth 29: Shakespeare's characters are like real people

Myth 30: Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare

Coda

Further Reading

Shakespeare's Life

Shakespeare at Work

Shakespeare in the Theater

Interpreting Shakespeare

Index

For Katherine Duncan-Jones

This edition first published 2013 © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maguire, Laurie E.

30 great myths about Shakespeare / Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-65850-5 (hardback : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-470-65851-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616— Criticism and interpretation. I. Smith, Emma (Emma Josephine) II. Title. III. Title: Thirty great myths about Shakespeare.

PR2976.M36 2013

822.3′3— dc23

2012026659

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This memorial monument in the garden of the church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, London, is actually a double tribute. It commemorates Shakespeare and the two editors who collected his plays in the posthumous memorial volume of Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623).

Photo: Col. Peter J. Durrant MBE.

Introduction

This book attempts to interrogate the things we think we know about Shakespeare, and we have called this body of knowledge “myths.” Why “myths”? We were drawn to this term for the Shakespeare content in each of our chapters because “myth” foregrounds the act of storytelling; because it underlines the cultural work these stories do rather than their accuracy; because it is not about a specific point of origin but about accepted beliefs; because it is about the people who accept or invent or need these stories as much as it is about the stories themselves. Not all of our myths are untrue: in calling these beliefs “myths” we are less interested in stigmatizing them as foolish or unsubstantiated than we are concerned to understand how they become ossified and block, rather than enable, our interpretation of Shakespeare's works.

Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth (2005) offers some pithy observations. Myths are dynamic: they change over time, they adapt themselves to cultural and historical developments, they have accretions and deletions, they iron out—or accumulate—contradictions. Myths are not historically accurate: they do not work by being factual; they are interested in what an event meant, not in what actually happened; they are designed to be effective, not true. Myths provide explanations for something we might not otherwise be able to make sense of; they give us comfort. Myths serve different purposes at different times, being factored into a culture's national or religious or political history. And, she argues, humans are myth-seeking creatures.[1] That is to say, we are creatures drawn to stories. Myth, from the Greek muthos, means something that is told, a speech, a narrative, a fiction, a plot. From here it comes to mean a set of beliefs (personal or collective).

Myths abound about Shakespeare in part because of half-remembered or out-of-date scholarship from schooldays, because Shakespeare the man is such an elusive and charismatic cultural property, and because interventions in Shakespeare studies, particularly biographical and theatrical ones, make headline news: witness the “authorship question” (Myth 30) or speculation about Shakespeare's beliefs or sexuality (Myths 7 and 18). Put simply, myths are told and retold about Shakespeare because no other writer matters as much to the world: nineteenth-century Germany had a flourishing academic Shakespeare criticism before England did; India had a Shakespeare Society before England; Shakespeare is regularly performed at amateur and professional levels, in translation, worldwide. Shakespeare is not just English (as Germany's “unser [our] Shakespeare” attests). Thus myths about Shakespeare go some way toward telling us stories about ourselves.

As Armstrong details, myths can be fictional and erroneous—and many, but not all, of these Shakespeare myths are—but more often they turn out, in important and revealing ways, to follow two related definitions of the word “myth” from the Oxford English Dictionary. The first is

A traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon.

While Shakespeare is not quite a “supernatural” being, many of the myths we discuss explain or justify widely held, often unexamined, beliefs about art, authorship, and cultural value. The second relevant definition of myth is “a popular conception of a person or thing which exaggerates or idealizes the truth.” Many of our myths are just that: popular, often reiterated ideas which may have a basis in fact, but which over-emphasize the available evidence or speculate to fill in gaps in the documentary record. Often the honest answer to our questions about Shakespeare has to be that we are unsure: in place of that uncertainty, myths provide comforting and positive “truths” about the subject. In this book we try to peel our collective fingers from this comfort blanket, even though sometimes the unsettling outcome is that we know less than we thought we did.

This book arose from our interest in a related book in a different field: Fifty Great Myths of Popular Psychology (2009). The book includes such familiar propositions as: opposites attract; we use only 10 percent of our brain power; playing Mozart to babies boosts their intelligence; it's better to express anger than to hold it in. These are myths that have become traditional truths; in fact, they have attained proverbial status, as the epigrammatic chapter headings show. The book's subtitle, Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior, indicates its purpose: it is a demythologizing book. The authors explain: “In this book, we'll help you to distinguish fact from fiction in popular psychology, and provide you with a set of myth-busting skills for evaluating psychological claims scientifically.”[2] What, we wondered, were the equivalent myths that populate popular understanding of Shakespeare?

A book exploring this question already exists: Stanley Wells' Is it True What They Say about Shakespeare?[3] Wells' encyclopedic Shakespeare knowledge is here put to the service of eighty-nine myths about Shakespeare's life and authorship. He considers whether Shakespeare “had a shotgun wedding,” “was gay,” “died of syphilis,” “wrote a play called Cardenio,” “portrayed himself as Prospero,” or “uses an exceptionally large vocabulary.” Like Fifty Great Myths of Popular Psychology, Wells' is a myth-busting book. Wells interrogates the categories with invigorating briskness, and ends each chapter with a verdict: “unlikely,” “maybe,” “I remain sceptical.” Although we investigate many of the same categories as Wells, it is not because we disagree with his conclusions but because we are interested in different things. When we consider the question of whether “Shakespeare was the most popular writer of his day,” for instance, we are interested in the daunting question of how one would even begin to evaluate such a proposition, where one might go for evidence to support or refute it, in fact, what constitutes “evidence” (print runs? reprints? references to Shakespeare? audience attendance?); we are not interested in reaching a Yes or No conclusion.

The number of essays in this book—thirty to the eighty-nine of Wells' book or the fifty of the Psychology book—illustrates our different focus. Many of Wells' myths are summarized in one paragraph or, memorably, even one sentence. We have given ourselves 2,000–2,500 words for each of our myths. It is no coincidence that this is the length of the standard undergraduate essay (or newspaper article). As academics we are accustomed to writing in chapter-chunks of 8,000-12,000 words. Here we are interested in seeing just how much one can do in the shorter essay format, how much information a 2,000-word essay can develop, how many turns of an argument it can make; in short, how it can pursue evidence without getting too bogged down in detail. We have learned a lot from this exercise; and it is our hope that students may learn from reading our examples of the format in which they conduct all their arguments.

This is not to say that we have written this as a composition textbook. We hope, equally, that the general Shakespeare reader and lover will find much of interest in the material we cover, and will find a path from well-known and often-repeated ideas into plays, approaches, and angles with which he or she is less familiar. In each chapter we aim to give authoritative, up-to-date, and even-handed treatments of controversies and scholarly disagreements. Our approach is interrogative, not prescriptive. We are interested in assessing the evidence for both sides of a dispute and seeing how cases can be or are made. We are interested in the historical moments at which tentative speculations ossify into self-evident truths. More importantly, we also try to understand the appeal of the myths and their power to attract passionately partisan proponents. The book evaluates evidence for and against myths to show not just how historical material—and the lack of it—can be interpreted and misinterpreted, but what these processes reveal about our own personal investment in the stories we tell about our national (and international) poet. Nor do we even attempt to hover, omniscient, above these stories: we are as implicated as all of Shakespeare's readers in presupposition, and in trying to understand these myths we may well have promulgated some others. We are grateful to Wiley-Blackwell's anonymous reader who pointed out a number of these contradictory moments, and forced us to acknowledge more directly our own positions.

The temptation for a book of this sort is to focus on Shakespeare's biography. Shakespeare biography is a fruitful field for myths, from the youthful deer-poaching episode (described by Nicholas Rowe at the beginning of the eighteenth century) to the technicalities of the marriage (attested by the record books) to the missing years (documented nowhere). Inevitably, we have included some of these examples but we have tried, wherever we can, to move the discussion on to the plays and poems themselves. Whereas most of our myths involve layers of interpretative accretion between us and the Elizabethan period, reading Shakespeare's works themselves can shortcut some of this narrative padding. But in the analysis of Shakespeare's words, too, there are few certainties. We can never know how realistic Shakespeare's acting company was in performance, for instance, because “realism” is a relative concept. Nor can we say what was the experience of watching Twelfth Night in 1601, but we can suggest ways that more recent, and attestable, productions give us access to some of its performance possibilities. In resituating Shakespeare's works, rather than his personal beliefs or his private life, as the most fruitful and provocative territory for multiple interpretations, we try to suggest some of the ways that an openness to different meanings meets these complicated texts on their own terms.

We have imagined each myth as a self-contained story, even as we have attempted to keep repetition to a minimum. Conscious that overwrought academic prose often obscures as well as illuminates, we have tried to do justice to the material in a readable style, and not to get snagged in a web of references. We offer extensive, guided reading suggestions at the end of the book for readers to investigate further. We hope that, cumulatively, these essays offer the set of “myth-busting skills” we found such an attractive model in the psychology book, and that readers will turn these skills to critique our own blindspots and assumptions.

We have used the Oxford edition, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) for all quotations from Shakespeare. Where the Oxford edition prints two texts of King Lear (The History of King Lear and The Tragedy of King Lear), we have quoted from the Tragedy unless otherwise indicated. For unedited quotations from Shakespeare quartos we have used the facsimiles at http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html. Spelling from other Renaissance texts has been modernized.

This book is dedicated to one of the most accomplished interrogators of Shakespeare myths, Katherine Duncan-Jones. We do not expect her to agree with all of our discussions in this book but we wish to acknowledge how much our thinking here, as elsewhere, has been stimulated and shaped by conversation with her over many years.

Laurie Maguire

Emma Smith

Oxford, 2012

Notes

[1] Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005).

[2] Scott Lilienfield, Steven Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry Beyerstein, Fifty Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 3.

[3] Stanley Wells, Is It True What They Say about Shakespeare? (Ebrington, Glos.: Long Barn Books, no date).

Myth 1

Shakespeare was the most popular writer of his time

One popular website in which users ask and answer each other's questions poses this question: “Was Shakespeare popular in his day?” The entire answer posted by a reader states “Yes he was Shakespeare!”[1] It's a fair summary of general assumptions: how could Shakespeare be Shakespeare—read and performed 400 years after his death and translated across languages, media, and hemispheres—had he not been popular in his own time? But the question of how we define popularity and whether the evidence about Shakespeare confirms this myth need a little more probing, and we need also to separate popularity in the theater from popularity in print.

First, to the theater. From 1594 onwards, when he joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men as both sharer (part-owner) and resident playwright, Shakespeare's own popularity is intrinsically related to that of the company. Thus, while the development of the Chamberlain's Men and the company's increasing dominance in the London theater economy cannot be solely attributed to Shakespeare's plays, nor can it be separated from them. The Globe theater on Bankside, built by the Chamberlain's Men in 1599, could take over 3,000 spectators; in 1608 the company opened an additional indoor theater, Blackfriars, for winter performances. In 1603 it received the patronage of the new king, James, becoming the King's Men and performing regularly at court. Shakespeare's own wealth also grew over this period: in 1596 his family acquired a coat of arms and with it the right to be styled “gentlemen”; a year later he bought a large five-gabled house in Stratford-upon-Avon, New Place, reputedly the town's second-largest. All these economic and prestige indicators suggest that the company and its house dramatist were thriving, and this in turn suggests that Shakespeare's works, like the plays the company performed by other dramatists including Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, were popular.

It is, however, harder to be more specific. Almost no one who went to the theater at this time wrote about what they had gone to see. John Manningham, a legal student who saw Twelfth Night at Middle Temple in February 1602 is a rare exception, noting that it was “a good practice in it to make the steward believe his lady-widow was in love with him, by counterfeiting a letter as from his lady, in general term telling him what she liked best in him and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparel, etc. and then, when he came to practice, making him believe they took him for mad.”[2] Manningham enjoys the situational humor of the trick on Malvolio, but frustratingly has nothing to say about Viola's male disguise as Cesario or the representation of fraternal twins: the glimpse of what was memorable, or popular, about the play is fleeing. Something similar could be said of the Jacobean accounts of performances of The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, and Cymbeline by the astrologist/doctor Simon Forman (see Myth 13). The only sustained details we have about the economics of the Elizabethan theater come from the rival company the Admiral's Men, and from papers associated with their entrepreneurial manager Philip Henslowe. These papers suggest that Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, with its dynamic and amoral central character Barabas, was among the most frequently performed plays, with a schedule including ten performances in six months, far in excess of records for any Shakespeare play. When Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess, a sharp satire on Anglo-Spanish relations, hit the Globe in 1624, it was such a sensation that it played for nine consecutive performances: no play of Shakespeare can claim anything like that box-office success. While our iconic reference point for classical literary drama is probably the image of Hamlet holding the skull of the jester Yorick (see Myth 27), for the early modern period the most instantly recognizable drama was not Shakespeare, but the bloody revenge tragedy by Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (written around 1590). Kyd's play spawned a prequel, a ballad version, was reworked by later playwrights to extend its stage life, and was quoted, parodied, and generally riffed upon by writers up to the closing of the theaters. There is no contemporary evidence that any of Shakespeare's plays had this reach, although we do know that other writers copied and reworked his plays: for example Hamlet echoes are evident in two almost contemporary plays, John Marston's Antonio's Revenge and Henry Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman, and early in the seventeenth century John Fletcher wrote The Woman's Prize, a sequel to Shakespeare's battle-of-the-sexes comedy The Taming of the Shrew.

There is one particular aspect of Shakespeare's dramatic work where we can see significant contemporary popularity: the characterization of the disreputable, lovable, and obese knight Sir John Falstaff. Falstaff first appears in a play apparently called Henry IV, where he is a distinctly unheroic and satiric counterpart to the play's depiction of noblemen fighting in the aftermath of the deposition of King Richard II. As the companion of King Henry's eldest and rather prodigal son, Prince Hal, Falstaff offers an alternative world of tricks and taverns which draws both the heir to the throne and the play's audience away from the play's political content. Falstaff's popularity seems to have been immediate. A sequel was written—Henry IV Part II—and Falstaff was also transplanted into a quite different locale, the bourgeois town of Windsor, in the comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor (see Myth 28). There is evidence in letters from the period that his name had become a popular type. As the index to the classic collection of contemporary references to the plays, The Shakspere Allusion-Book, notes, “for the purposes of this index, Falstaff is treated as a work,” and references to Falstaff far outnumber allusions to any other aspect or play. Among the entries are comments in plays by Massinger, Middleton, and Suckling, as well as private references including the Countess of Southampton's gossipy postscript to a letter to her husband: “All the news I can send you that I think will make you merry is that Sir John Falstaff is by his Mrs Dame Pintpot made father of a goodly miller's thumb.”[3] Falstaff can also be said to have inaugurated Shakespeare scholarship: debates over his characterization developed into one of the earliest books on Shakespeare, Maurice Morgann's 1777 defense, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff.

Some of the plays we know to have been popular in the theater are lost because they were apparently never printed: The Wise Man of West Chester, for example, had repeated performances over a long period in 1594–7.[4] The question of how Shakespeare's plays came to be printed is discussed in detail in Myth 4. In trying to use the evidence from Shakespeare in print to pin down his contemporary popularity, it is interesting to note that only half of his plays were published during his lifetime: there was no market for, say, a quarto of Macbeth, but this fact might be explained by saying the play was not popular (no one wanted to buy it) or that it was (the theater company therefore did not want to sell it). Lukas Erne has argued that in 1600, the year in which Shakespeare was most visible in the print marketplace, his works account for about 4 percent of that year's published output across all genres. Erne identifies forty-five separate editions of Shakespeare's plays in print during his lifetime, more than for any other contemporary playwright: particularly popular in terms of the number of editions were the early history plays Richard II (six editions before 1616), Richard III (five) and, thanks to Falstaff, Henry IV (like many sequels, Part II does not seem to have been such a success).[5] For comparative purposes, The Spanish Tragedy also had six print editions over the same period; the bestselling play by reprints is the anonymous pastoral romance Mucedorus (first published 1598) which has more than a dozen editions over three decades. The attribution in print to Shakespeare or, more allusively, to “W.S.,” of plays not now generally thought to be Shakespearean, including the mythical story of the founding of London Locrine (1595), the city comedy The London Prodigal (1605), and the true-crime murder story The Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), may point to the fact that Shakespeare's name sells.

Additionally, there is evidence of an inverse relationship between the historical survival of texts and their contemporary popularity. Some printed texts do seem to have been read to death. There are, for instance, only two extant copies, neither complete, of the first edition of Hamlet (1603), and just one copy of the first, 1593, edition of Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis: his first entry into print, and the work, along with the tragic narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece (first printed in 1594), for which he was probably best known during his lifetime. The majority of contemporary references to Shakespeare are to him as the author of these two popular poems, which went into nine and five further editions respectively before 1616. The dictionary derivation of “popular” is “belonging to the people as a whole”: it's hard to state that any writer in the Elizabethan period was popular in this sense, where, as David Cressy has estimated, literacy rates may have been around 30 percent for men and less than 10 percent for women in 1600.[6] In addition, no print run of any book in the period was allowed to exceed 1,500 copies (the Globe theater, remember, could take 3,000 spectators). Literary works in any case were only a small part of the print market, which was dominated by religious works—sermons, prayer books, bibles, commentaries, and psalm translations—and by household manuals—conduct books and “how-to” works: within this restricted sphere, however, Shakespeare was certainly a significant player.

Popularity and personal renown or artistic recognition are not necessarily the same thing: if we were looking at bestselling books from our own period we would probably not expect that category to overlap extensively with critically acclaimed or “classic” literary works. There is evidence that Shakespeare's works were valued by contemporaries. Francis Meres, writing in 1598, identifies Shakespeare's predominance:

As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love labours lost, his Love labours won, his Midsummers night dream, & his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy his Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry the 4. King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.

The identity of “Love labours won” is unclear. Elsewhere in his analysis, though, he seems to identify Shakespeare as on a par with contemporary writers rather than exceeding them in quality or popularity. For example, here is his list of “the best for Comedy amongst us”:

Edward Earl of Oxford, Doctor Gager of Oxford, Master Rowley once a rare Scholar of learned Pembroke Hall in Cambridge, Master Edwards one of her Majesty's Chapel, eloquent and witty John Lyly, Lodge, Gascoigne, Greene, Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Heywood, Anthony Munday our best plotter, Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathway, and Henry Chettle.[7]

This is a roll-call of theatrical writers of the time, not a selective pantheon. The existence of the posthumously printed edition of Shakespeare's collected dramatic works (1623), in an expensive, high-status folio format more usually associated with bibles and serious works of history or topography, is evidence less for his popularity than for his literary—and financial—value. And even as the Folio's editors address it to “the great variety of readers,” “from the most able, to him that can but spell,” and joke that they wish the readership were weighed rather than numbered, they do so at the head of a volume whose cost pushes it well beyond anything that might be called “popular” in its true sense—“of the people.”

Notes

[1] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Was_shakespeare_popular_in_his_day

[2] Quoted in Emma Smith (ed.), Blackwell Guides to Criticism: Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 1.

[3] F.J. Furnivall, C.M. Ingleby, and L.T. Smith, The Shakspere Allusion-Book (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), vol. 2, p. 536; vol. 1, p. 88.

[4] http://www.lostplays.org

[5] Lukas Erne, “The Popularity of Shakespeare in Print,” Shakespeare Survey, 62 (2009), pp. 12–29 (pp. 13–14).

[6] David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 177.

[7] Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury (London, 1598), pp. 282, 284 (sigs. 2O2r, 2O3v).

Myth 2

Shakespeare was not well educated

The idea of the untutored genius or the self-made man or woman is irresistibly attractive. For Milton, Shakespeare was “Fancy's child, / Warbl[ing] his native wood-notes wild” (L'Allegro); the concept of the inspired rustic held sway to the Romantics and beyond. At the other end of the spectrum sits Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson, who noted Shakespeare's “small Latin and less Greek.” Out of context it is easy to interpret Jonson's phrase as meaning “almost no classical knowledge” and, by extension, “uneducated.” In fact, the phrase is part of an extended compliment to Shakespeare who, Jonson says, eclipses not only his contemporaries but the ancients. Shakespeare outshines Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe, and, “though [he had] small Latin and less Greek” he stands “alone” in comparison for comedy and tragedy with “all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome / Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.” (Call you this railing?) And we must note a further context: Jonson himself. Most authors have small Latin and less Greek when compared with Jonson's prodigious classical learning. Nonetheless Jonson's remark is constantly quoted out of context and so the myth of the poorly educated Shakespeare continues.

There are many ways of testing such a myth. First, let us think about the sixteenth-century humanist educational atmosphere into which Shakespeare was born. “Humanism” is the name we give to the post-medieval scholarly drive that recovered ancient texts. But humanism was ambitiously multi-layered. It was ethical, aiming to marry the highest ideals of pagan classical thinking to a Christian universe. It was stylistic: humanists studied the ancients not just for what they said but for how they said it; they thought about what a vernacular English literature might look and sound like; they experimented with the English language, importing words from Greek and Latin (see Myth 21). It was pedagogical: humanists wrote textbooks and founded schools and colleges, passing their ideals to the coming generations. It was scholarly: humanists translated texts, edited them, indexed them, made dictionaries. And it was positively secular, not rejecting a theocentric world view but placing man and his potential at the center of it with questions about government, nobility, court, the commonwealth, kings, and tyrants. (Humanist texts often foreground an individual in their title: Sir Thomas Elyot's The Governor, Castiglione's The Courtier, Machiavelli's The Prince.) The invention of the printing press—the internet of its day—enabled humanist ideas and values to spread with enormous speed.

This is a simplified summary, but the essential point is that humanism had practical effects, not least on the Elizabethan educational system and the development of the grammar school. A sixteenth-century schoolboy (only very few girls, such as Margaret, daughter of Henry VIII's lord chancellor, Thomas More, were formally educated, and then at home rather than in school) was the beneficiary of a new nationwide system of education—a national curriculum. Although Ben Jonson was educated at Westminster, where he studied under the antiquarian and historian William Camden, and Thomas Kyd was educated at Merchant Taylor's school under educationalist and writer Richard Mulcaster, their education would not have been substantially different from Shakespeare's in Stratford-upon-Avon. We don't have any records showing that Shakespeare attended the local grammar school—they are missing for that period—but it would be odd if he hadn't.

Grammar schools were so called because what they taught was grammar. The grammar taught was Latin. (The standard grammar book was William Lyly's—this is the book William Page is studying, not very well, in The Merry Wives of Windsor.) School started at 6 a.m. and continued until 6 p.m., followed by homework, and, as the boys moved into the higher forms, the language in which they conversed and in which they were instructed was Latin. It is often said, without exaggeration, that by the time a grammar-school boy left school he had as much classical education as a university student of Classics today.

But grammar meant much more than just the parsing of sentences. Grammar was a part of rhetoric; and rhetoric had many branches, all rooted in stylistic awareness. Exercises ranged from copia (saying the same thing in various ways) and imitatio (trying to emulate the style of a revered author) to double translation—from Latin to English then back again to Latin, to see if one's own composition in Latin could approach the elegance of the original (see Myth 15). These exercises were designed to prepare boys for professions that required rhetorical skills: the church or the law or local government. They were also ideal training for a writer, fostering in Shakespeare a love of language, of stylistic variation, of the sounds of words—precisely the qualities we value in his writing today.

So Shakespeare left school well equipped. But education does not stop with formal schooling (although belief in this myth seems to imply that it does). Although Shakespeare did not attend university (neither did Thomas Kyd or Ben Jonson), he did not stop reading. The sources of his plays show that Shakespeare read medieval poetry (Chaucer, Gower), Italian fiction (Boccaccio, Cinthio), contemporary history (Raphael Holinshed, 1577, 1587), ancient history (Plutarch), contemporary romance (Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Greene), Greek romance (Apollodorus), contemporary continental philosophy (the essays of the French humanist Montaigne). He read French and Italian, using sources in these languages when they had not yet received an English translation. (Jonson spoke neither modern language, according to his friend William Drummond of Hawthornden.) He read Latin. Yes, he made mistakes. He twice confuses Pluto (god of the underworld) with Plutus (god of wealth). This is hardly a hanging offense, nor is he the only one to confuse the two—ancient Romans did so too. Lois Potter points out that differences in scansion of the classical name Pirithous in the co-authored play Two Noble Kinsmen may suggest that one author (Fletcher) knew more Greek than the other (Shakespeare).[1] But this play was written in 1613—over thirty years after Shakespeare had left school. This is evidence of rusty memory, not of lack of education.

Multi-volume books were expensive. Shakespeare may have read them through the auspices of the printer Richard Field in London. Field was a Stratford contemporary of Shakespeare and the printer of his first poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594). Field had been apprenticed to the Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier. When Vautrollier died, Field married his widow in 1588, inherited the business, and continued the specialism in foreign works. Field first introduced Ariosto's epic Orlando Furioso to an English-speaking audience through the translation by Sir John Harington in 1591. But his list is also impressive for its collection of what are now classics of English literature and Latin-translated-into-English literature. In 1587, Field printed Raphael Holinshed's magisterial three-volume History of England, Ireland and Scotland; in 1589, he printed George Puttenham's Art of English Poesie, a seminal humanist text about English writing, and Thomas Lodge's hexameter translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In 1595 he printed Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives (reprinted in 1603). In 1596 he printed Edmund Spenser's epic poem, The Faerie Queene, and in 1598 Sir Philip Sidney's prose epic, the Arcadia. It is remarkable how many sources of Shakespeare's plays were printed by Field: Ovid, Plutarch, and Holinshed are probably Shakespeare's three favorite texts.

Did Field alert his countryman to exciting new authors and hot-off-the-press publications? Did Shakespeare buy them? Or did Field allow his printshop to function as an unofficial library with Shakespeare borrowing them or reading them on site? What is clear is that Shakespeare kept up with new ideas and new literary discoveries as they reached the English market.

It is often alleged that the level of technical knowledge of certain areas in Shakespeare's plays—such as law or the court—is incompatible with the knowledge of a grammar-school boy from Stratford. This assertion is behind the search for other candidates for authorship of Shakespeare's plays. Thus, the argument goes, the legal knowledge is such that the plays must have been written by a lawyer (enter Francis Bacon). The knowledge of court is such that they must have been written by an aristocrat (enter the Earl of Oxford). Similar points have been made about the plays' knowledge of botany or of seafaring or of birds. There are several problems with this kind of argument. First it assumes that authors are dependent on their own professional or emotional experiences. (It is this presumption of emotional experience that drives Myth 18, that the sonnets must be autobiographical.) One does not need to be a lawyer to acquire legal knowledge, and this was especially so in the Elizabethan period, which was surprisingly litigious (Peter Beal has shown that in one year George Puttenham had over seventy lawsuits in process, and Shakespeare himself was involved in half a dozen legal cases). The legal satires of Thomas Middleton's city comedies, such as Michaelmas Term, are effective because they target the familiarly quotidian not the esoterically specialized. Court life was also familiar to Shakespeare once the Chamberlain's Men were invited to perform there. But even before then, “what great ones do the less will prattle of” (Twelfth Night, 1.2.29). And to believe that only lawyers can command legal references or aristocrats courtly references misses a crucial concept: imagination. Imagination is the single most important qualification for being a writer.

If writers imagine, they also do research. Research takes many forms. It is clear that Shakespeare consulted multiple versions of history in the forms of prose (Holinshed's Chronicles), poetry (Samuel Daniel's The Civil Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York), and drama (the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth) when writing his history plays. But there is another form of research that has no technical name: human observation. There is nothing in Shakespeare's plays that could not have come from close observation of the world around him: observation of human idiosyncrasy, hypocrisy, humanity, compassion, hierarchy, politics, paradoxes.

Although libraries contain annotated books that belonged to Jonson and Milton, we have none of Shakespeare's. He left no books in his will; most scholars assume that he had already given them to his son-in-law, the physician John Hall. Thus, we know of Shakespeare's reading only from our knowledge of the sources of his plays. For a long time it was believed that a copy of Florio's translation of the French humanist Michel de Montaigne's Essays (1603), now in the British Library, belonged to Shakespeare: its flyleaf bears the signature “William Shakespeare.” The bibliographical history of this volume's front matter and endpapers (which have been rearranged at various times) is complex, but the indisputable fact is that the paper that carries the signature is late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century. Presumably someone thought that Shakespeare's signature would increase the value of the book. (The British Library owns Jonson's copy but, although Jonson was in the habit of annotating his books, this one has no marginalia.)

We have been thinking so far about what Shakespeare read; it is also worth thinking about how he read it. John Florio's translation of Montaigne may help us. Shakespeare is intellectually attuned with Montaigne. Both are interested in human identity. Montaigne is a “psychological philosopher” and Shakespeare is a “psychological dramatist.”[2] We don't know how much Montaigne Shakespeare had read (there is a lot of it to read). Gonzalo's speech in The Tempest on the ideal commonwealth (2.1.153 onwards) comes from Montaigne's essay “On Cannibals.” There are general similarities in ideas elsewhere, but when two writers are interested in selfhood, inwardness, the individual, it is hard to distinguish confluence from influence. However, looking at Shakespeare's vocabulary, and in particular the effect on it of Florio's Montaigne, is instructive.

Montaigne's Essays were introduced to the English-speaking world through John Florio's translation of 1603. It was a massive enterprise: three volumes. Shakespeare clearly read it soon after it was published as it had a notable effect on his vocabulary from 1603 onwards. George Coffin Taylor first catalogued the parallels in 1925, identifying 750 words and phrases that were not in Shakespeare's vocabulary before 1603 but all of which appeared there after that date and are also in Florio's Montaigne.[3] Taylor wrote in a period of obsessive parallel-hunting when critics pounced on parallel phrases of such ordinariness that it is as easy to imagine the authors hitting on them independently as it is to see one author influencing the other. But most of Taylor's words do not come into this category: “hugger-mugger” (Hamlet 4.5.82; this is its only appearance in Shakespeare), “marble-hearted” (King Lear 1.4.237—again its sole Shakespeare usage). Florio is fond of compound coinages, and they seem to have impressed Shakespeare. Thus, although “holy-water” is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1583, it is not used by Shakespeare until King Lear, where it appears in the phrase “court holy water” (3.2.10); Florio writes (in a similarly ironic context) “seeke after court holy-water and wavering-favours of princes” (this is his imaginative version of Montaigne's prosaic “c[h]ercer le vent de la faveur des Roys” [seek the wind of kings' favors]).[4]

Although OED researchers have since found earlier occurrences of words that Taylor claimed were introduced by Florio, these are not large in number and many of Taylor's distinctive words, first used by Florio, command attention: we find “concupiscible” in Florio and in Measure for Measure (5.1.98); “harping [up]on” in Florio and in Hamlet (2.2.189–90); and, close by, “pregnant wit” in Florio and “pregnant … replies” in Hamlet (2.2.210–11); “chirurgions” in Florio and “chirurgeonly” in The Tempest (2.1.146).When we come across “consanguinity” in Florio and in Troilus and Cressida (4.3.23, nowhere else in Shakespeare), we have to question the 1601–2 date of Troilus or assume that Florio's translation was circulating in manuscript.[5] The same applies to Hamlet (1600–1), where the coincidence of the two phrases above, both in Florio and contiguous in Hamlet, invites attention.

F.O. Mathiessen notes that Shakespeare's use of Florio's Montaigne forms an interesting pattern. The new words are used often in Shakespeare's vocabulary in 1603 and immediately thereafter, then gradually taper off, before reappearing in The Tempest in 1610. This suggests how Shakespeare read and responded to Montaigne: an initial immersion, a gradual distancing, and then a later rereading. Philippe Desan is concerned that Shakespeare seems to have been more interested in Florio's coinages than in Montaigne's ideas.[6] This, in fact, is precisely what interests us—what caught Shakespeare's ear when he read. Given his school training in rhetoric and his subsequent career as a poet, it is not surprising that he would react so enthusiastically to language.

So: was Shakespeare well educated? His schooling certainly gave him a substantial grounding in classical literature and in rhetorical structures; but he carried on building on this strong foundation himself.

Notes

[1] Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 398.

[2] Peter Holbrook, Shakespeare's Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 187.

[3] G.C. Taylor, Shakspeare's Debt to Montaigne (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), p. 5.

[4] F.O. Mathiessen, Translation: An Elizabethan Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1965), p. 143.

[5] Philippe Desan suggests that “extracts of Florio's translation may have circulated in manuscript among the London literati as early as 1597–8”. Cited in Richard Scholar, “French Connections: The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Montaigne and Shakespeare,” in Laurie Maguire (ed.), How To Do Things with Shakespeare (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), pp. 11–33 (p. 14).

[6] Scholar, “French Connections,” p. 14.

Myth 3

shakespeare's plays should be performed in elizabethan dress

In Ben Jonson's comedy The Alchemist a character is asked to impersonate a Spanish count. He requires a Spanish suit (the dialogue makes clear that Spanish fashion differs from the English) and a temporary sartorial crisis occurs when no such costume is to hand. Another character proposes a solution: “Thou must borrow / A Spanish suit. Hast thou no credit with the players? … / Hieronimo's old cloak, ruff, and hat will serve” (4.7.67–71).[1]

The suggestion is satirical. It refers with parodic affection to one of the most popular stage-Spaniards—Hieronimo—in the most influential play of the Elizabethan period, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (see Myth 1). Costumes were a major expense. Theater companies did not rent them out. In fact, the traffic was in the other direction: many costumes came from real life. Expensive fashionable clothes were bequeathed to servants (for example) by rich employers. Sumptuary legislation prevented servants from wearing them (the legislation aligned social status with fabrics and accessories, dictating who could wear what; hence Faustus's anarchic vision of dressing the undergraduates in silk in Marlowe's Dr Faustus); and so the servants sold their inherited clothes to the players, turning their bequest into cash.

Jonson's The Alchemist is set in the period and location in which it was written—London in 1610. Like other city comedies, it depends on topicality: contemporary fashions are satirized in plays from Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) to Massinger's Caroline comedy The City Madam (1632). But there is some evidence to suggest that even historical plays were more conveniently contemporary than historically accurate in their costumes.

We have only one contemporary picture of a Shakespeare play: a sketch of Titus Andronicus, made c.1595 by the writer Henry Peacham (1578–1644). The drawing, often reproduced independently of the manuscript in which it appears, forms a horizontal band at the top of a manuscript page on which Peacham has written out forty lines from the play. The drawing depicts Tamora, queen of the Goths, pleading to Titus for the life of her sons. At the picture's far right stands the inked black figure of Aaron the Moor; at the picture's far left stand two soldiers; in the center are Titus and the kneeling queen. The drawing is unlikely to represent an actual performance (the prisoner Aaron freely brandishes a sword, for instance!), but it may combine Peacham's memory of a performance of Titus with his reading of the quarto published in 1594. Although the stage action at this point requires three of Tamora's sons, the stage direction (erroneously) provides an entry for only two (see Myth 8); the fact that Peacham draws two sons may suggest that he was illustrating a text he was reading rather than a performance he was remembering. However, the drawing's eclectic mix of styles and periods is more likely to derive from memory than from imagination. Consequently it is helpful in suggesting how one of Shakespeare's historical tragedies was costumed in the 1590s.

What is notable is that the costumes make no attempt at historical accuracy although there is considerable success in suggesting historical atmosphere. Tamora, fictional queen of a fifth-century people, wears a loose-bodied medieval- or Elizabethan-style gown. Titus wears a Roman toga and carries a spear, but the two soldiers behind him carry Tudor halberds, and one of them, perhaps both of them, also carries a scimitar (an Eastern curved sword). Both also wear wide, baggy pants—an Elizabethan fashion (called “Venetians”). They wear Elizabethan hats (one with a fashionable feather) and medieval body armor.[2] Shakespeare's theater company did not have the resources costume designers use today (books of pictures of historical costumes illustrating changing fashions). This was not a handicap: they had no desire for such resources. What the Peacham sketch makes clear is that the theater company was aiming for accessibility.

This does not mean that they were careless or cavalier in costume choices. Costumes were their single biggest expense. The canopy over the Globe stage was to protect the costumes, not the actors. Philip Henslowe's Diary records lavish expenditure on satin doublets, taffeta cloaks, silver and copper lace, cloth of gold, velvet breeches, and shagged cloth (worsted cloth with a velvet nap on one side), and is detailed about cuts and linings and ornament and color and design (pinking, facing, spangling). Theater companies' “greatest accumulation of capital was in their clothing stock, which might easily be worth more than the theatre in which they were performing.”[3]

Figure 1 This drawing of characters from Titus Andronicus shows the Elizabethans' eclectic approach to historical costume.

Reproduced by permission of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire, Great Britain.

If Elizabethan costumes mixed the contemporary and the historical, so too did props and language. A clock strikes anachronistically in Julius Caesar, and the wakeful Brutus, inhabitant of a scroll culture, sees “the leaf turned down / Where I left reading” (4.2.324–5). Gloucester, resident in Lear's ancient Britain, makes a joke about spectacles, first known in medieval Italy. The medieval Hamlet attends a university (Wittenberg) not founded until 1502; in the Trojan war setting of Troilus and Cressida Hector quotes Aristotle, who lived and wrote many centuries after Hector (rather as the Fool in King Lear acknowledges, “This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time” [3.2.95–6]). Aristotle was standard academic reading in Shakespeare's day, just as clocks and books and spectacles were familiar objects. Shakespeare's plays are rooted in the present. If Shakespeare wrote about only one city—London (see Myth 14)—it was always contemporary London.

This is most obvious in the comedies. The Comedy of Errors changes the recognizably Roman slaves of its Plautine source to the more familiar Elizabeth servants. Elizabethan marriage conventions are very much to the fore in Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado about Nothing. In the comic-tragic world of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet leads the life of a typical cloistered wealthy Elizabethan daughter. It was natural for the Elizabethans to stage these plays in Elizabethan dress.

Is it therefore natural that we should do so? After all, in 1590 Elizabethan dress was modern dress. A logic of equivalence might dictate that today we should costume Shakespeare's plays in contemporary dress. Indeed, some very successful productions have done so. In 2004 Trevor Nunn directed Ben Whishaw as Hamlet for generation Y. A teenage student, wearing jeans and a beanie, this Hamlet contemplated suicide while staring at his bottle of prescription anti-depressants. Gertrude (Imogen Stubbs) was that new discovery of the 1990s, a Yummy Mummy. Ophelia, dressed in her school uniform, danced alone in her bedroom with her iPod and earphones (thus motivating Hamlet's later misogynist jibe, directed against all her sex, “You jig” (3.1.147; Whishaw's emphasis).

Both Rory Kinnear's Hamlet (2010) and David Tennant's (2008) were placed in similarly effective modern-dress settings. When Ophelia appeared (in the Tennant Hamlet) in her mad scene wearing only her underwear—an innocent floral cotton starter-bra and mini-shorts—the social impropriety and personal vulnerability of her uncontrolled behavior was conveyed more powerfully than a bawdy song alone could. A teenager talking (or singing) about sex does not shock us today or invite our concern; a teenager appearing in public in underwear does (Gertrude compassionately covered Ophelia with her pashmina). In the Kinnear Hamlet Claudius's spy-state was conveyed by besuited officials with clipboards and walkie-talkies exchanging information and receiving instructions. Similarly, when Romeo climbs the orchard walls of the Capulet estate in Romeo and Juliet, it is hard for us to appreciate the danger he runs in entering enemy territory. Banks of CCTV security monitors and patrol-guards with Alsatian dogs, as in Baz Luhrmann's film Romeo + Juliet, set the scene and create the atmosphere in ways we instantly comprehend. Today we understand the social statements made by modern dress when we no longer know how to “read” the sartorial status of codpieces.

Modern stage business is a logical extension of modern costume. In Midsummer Night's Dream, Snug the joiner identifies himself to the onstage audience (lest they fear that he really is the lion he plays). When Kenneth Branagh directed the play in 1990, Karl James's Snug removed his mask and came forward to the onstage audience of newlyweds on the line “Then know that I as Snug the joiner am” (5.1.221). He proceeded to distribute his business card; with three weddings he was clearly anticipating a lot of home improvements. This piece of stage business perfectly complemented the line it accompanied: both worked together to break the theatrical illusion.

Modernizing need not always take us into the here-and-now. The 1930s has proved a congenial home for Shakespeare productions, as in Ian McKellen's Richard III (filmed by director Richard Loncraine), for example, which paralleled Richard's growing tyranny with the rise of fascism. Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy that seems firmly set in its own time, the product of a period that believed that male friendship was more important than heterosexual love (see Myth 10). In the last act this results in several (to us) un-psychologically motivated volte-faces, and the reduction of one of the heroines to an object, tossed between men like a pass-the-parcel prize. When David Thacker directed the play at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991, he set it in the Cole Porter/Gershwins/Irving Berlin/Rogers and Hart world of the 1920s and 1930s—not the real world but the world of the Hollywood musical. In so doing, he replaced one set of cardboard conventions with another—but this time, conventions we understand and accept.

Thus, there are no ideological reasons not to stage Shakespeare's plays in modern dress. There may, however, be some logical reasons not to do so. Not all the plays can leave the Elizabethan period. The Taming of the Shrew is based on a sine qua non of Renaissance domestic life: that a wife owes obedience to her husband. The 1950s is therefore probably the latest period to which one can transpose this play. In 1978 Michael Bogdanov set the play in the present and its Katherine, Paola Dionisotti, registered her discomfort: “I kept wondering why I just didn't get up and go”; from the 1960s onwards, the barriers to Katherine's liberty had come down so the 1978 setting made no sense. (Dionisotti again: “The point is that she can't. Kate can't get up and go.” [4]) Recent productions which set the play in the present have avoided this problem by making obvious the plot's status as a play-within-the-play (the taming of the shrew is the plot of a play put on by traveling players for a deluded drunken tinker). This calls attention to the fact that all the characters in the plot are actually playing roles (the submissive wife being just another role). By removing the play from the realm of domestic reality, productions remove the problem of the characters' actions and attitudes (problems for our world, if not for Shakespeare's).

Similar concerns apply to updates of Much Ado About Nothing. The sticking point in modern-dress productions comes in Act 5 when Hero passively accepts in marriage the man who has hastily and untrustingly rejected her at the altar in Act 4. When Nicholas Hytner directed the play (National Theatre, 2007), he created a Hero with attitude (an embryonic Beatrice) who had to be convinced of Claudio's genuine repentance before she would consent to the wedding going ahead. This was achieved by the economic addition of Hero as eavesdropper in Act 5, scene 3. She witnessed a sackclothed Claudio read the epitaph for his dead (as he thinks) bride and prostrate himself on her grave—whereupon she signaled permission to her father and the friar to proceed with Shakespeare's plot. When the BBC Shakespeare Retold updated Much Ado in 2005 to a contemporary newsroom setting (Bea and Ben the news anchors, Claude on the sports desk, Hero the weathercaster), everything worked except a career-girl Hero taking back Claude at the end. (So the BBC gave us the following dialogue: Claude. But when you've had some time, maybe you would think about carrying on where we left off? Hero. What get married to you? Never in a million years. Claude. OK, maybe not in the short term, but …). The fact that the stage production had to add something at this stage to indicate a psychological repentance for Claudio and to motivate Hero's acceptance of him, and that the television production had to adapt it, indicates the difficulty that this plot moment causes when removed from its 1600 setting.

Shakespeare's political and historical plays often update very successfully, perhaps because transposing periods is already built into them. Elizabethan dramatists were prevented from writing about contemporary politics; the consequences of doing so were dire (Jonson was imprisoned for co-writing the comical satire the Isle of Dogs because the inclusion of a character with a Scottish accent was deemed disrespectful to England's royal neighbor (soon to be England's king) James VI). When Jonson published his Roman tragedy Sejanus (1603), it had copious marginalia showing his source material in Tacitus. Scholars see this as yet another example of Jonson's self-conscious advertising of his scholarly credentials. It may also be evidence of his instinct for self-protection. “Look,” the notes proclaim, “I'm not stimulating political foment: all I'm doing is translating Tacitus.”

The Elizabethans had no newspapers with a letters-to-the-editor page in which to express their political opinions. (They were not supposed to have political opinions: the state had those for them.) Elizabethan drama was the journalism of its day. And like any other kind of writing in a non-democratic state, it was censored. (All plays had to be officially approved prior to performance.) So the easiest way to write about contemporary politics—in fact, the only way to write about contemporary politics—was to write about history—until that, too, was censored, along with satire and other dangerous forms, in the Bishops' Ban of 1599.

Shakespeare had no permitted way of talking about a republic—unless he wrote about republican Rome. He had no permitted way of talking about government or monarchy—unless he wrote plays like Julius Caesar (which debates prospective tyranny) or Macbeth (which depicts a tyrant) or Measure for Measure (which begins with “Of government the properties to unfold …” as the duke hands over power to his deputy) or Henry V (which depicts a rhetorically skilled monarch using ethically dubious means—the invasion of a foreign country—for a nationalistic end). Henry V comes into its own at times of foreign invasions. Olivier's positive view of Henry (achieved only by extensive strategic cutting of Shakespeare's text) was an important contribution to the Allied war effort in 1944, and Olivier was seconded from Fleet Air Arm duties for this different war work. In 1986, shortly after the Falklands war (1982), Michael Bogdanov directed Henry's army as a crowd of football hooligans, going to war with tuneless football chants and an offensive jingoistic banner (“Fuck the frogs”) whose style reflected similarly offensive headlines from one of the UK's tabloid newspapers. These tabloid headlines had themselves made headlines in the broadsheets as the offending newspaper's non-readers debated the appropriate attitudes with which to go to war. The gentlemanly attitude and tone of Bogdanov's French scenes—one of them staged as an Impressionist painting—could not have provided a greater contrast. Olivier's modernized production was pro-English, Bogdanov's was critical of the English (it was, as one critic observed, the first production in which you actually wanted the French to win). But in both cases, Shakespeare's politics were contemporary.

Shakespeare's plays were, for Shakespeare as for his audience, dramas debating contemporary issues of crucial importance: the status of women, the role of marriage, the responsibilities of the monarch, the duties of citizens, the dangers of civil war, the ethics of foreign invasion. Whether we clothe the actors in modern dress or Elizabethan costume makes little difference; we cannot disguise the plays' contemporary applicability. After all, that is why we still perform them.

Notes

[1] Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. Richard Harp (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001).

[2] R.A. Foakes, Illustrations of the English Stage 1580–1642 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 48.

[3] Gabriel Egan, “Theatre in London,” in Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin (eds.), Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 20–32 (p. 28).

[4] Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today (London: The Women's Press, 1988), p. 3.

Myth 4

Shakespeare was not interested in having his plays printed

Enter any bookshop today and you will notice that Shakespeare has an entire section to himself. Every year editions of individual Shakespeare plays or of the Complete Works proliferate in a highly competitive (and lucrative) publishing market. Although, unlike a novelist, the dramatist's destination is performance not print, for today's dramatists publication is a highly desirable end-product, a confirmation of theatrical presence and literary prestige. The two are related: drama is literature. This was not yet the case in Shakespeare's England, although it may be that the period bears witness to the process whereby one was developing into the other. Thus, thinking about Shakespeare's plays in print involves thinking about literary identity, the concepts of career and canon, and what it meant to be an “author.” All these were new issues for anyone writing drama in the late sixteenth century.

England did not have professional dramatists (or drama) before the sixteenth century. Medieval drama was amateur. The mysteries (the noun “mystery” means “trade”) were short biblical plays forming part of a long cycle, staged annually by trade guilds. (For a wonderful modern take on the medieval process, see Anthony Minghella's play, Two Planks and a Passion.) Non-biblical morality plays and interludes toured, but the players were not professionals as we understand the term. They were attached to a lord's household, and they toured when he did not need them; the tour both enhanced his cultural prestige and saved him their living expenses. But in-house entertainment was not always dependent on a resident company. In the early sixteenth century, Henry Medwall's play Fulgens and Lucres was performed as an after-dinner entertainment by members of Henry VIII's household at Hampton Court. The first secular comedies, the mid-century Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle, were written, respectively, for schoolboys and for university students to play.

It was 1576 before London had its first purpose-built playhouse, The Theatre, built by James Burbage on the north side of the River Thames in Finsbury Fields, Shoreditch (today it's on the Islington–EC1 border). It was followed within a year by the Curtain Theatre, in the same location, and then, on the south side of the river, the Rose in Southwark, in 1587. With permanent playhouses came professional players, in large companies (a minimum of twelve, sometimes as many as twenty) under the nominal patronage of a lord: Worcester's Men, Derby's Men, Sussex's Men, the Chamberlain's Men. With daily performances (except during Lent or when plague closed the theaters) opportunities arose for writers to provide over forty different plays per year (this figure from Henslowe's Diary refers to the period 27 December 1593 to 26 December 1594; see Myth 17). But the concept of the dramatist as a respectable profession was not yet in place. Marlowe was described as a “poet and a filthy playmaker”: playwriting has a disparaging adjective; poetry does not.

The concept of the literary career, soi-disant, at this time was poetic, and often based on the model of the classical writer Virgil. Young men circulated poetry at court; it was read by their friends, not published. Or rather, it was published (made public: the literal meaning of “publish”) in manuscript circulation. This was true lower down the social scale too. Some of Shakespeare's sonnets were evidently in circulation by 1598 when Francis Meres praised Shakespeare as a new Ovid: “witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, &c.”[1] Venus and Adonis and Lucrece were in print by this time, but the sonnets were not; Meres could only have known them in manuscript.

Print complicated the question of “literature” because with it poetry entered the marketplace. Poetry was sullied by “filthy lucre,” by indiscriminate availability, by promiscuous circulation, by commodification. As an Elizabethan proverb has it: “Manuscript is a virgin, the printing press a whore.”[2] The same negativity attached itself to drama as performed. Because the public paid to see it, it was a commercial transaction—worlds away from the private, gentlemanly world of court poetry. One version of the 1609 text of Troilus and Cressida carried a prefatory letter, probably by its publisher, promising “a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar”: that the play had not been performed (this is probably untrue, and the alternative version has on its title page “as it was acted by the Kings Majesties servants at the Globe”) is presented here as attractive to potential readers, who are implicitly distinguished from “vulgar” playgoers.

Many Elizabethan poetry collections reached print posthumously, the author thereby innocent of self-promotion. Sir Philip Sidney died in 1586; his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella was published in 1591. Other collections reached print with prefatory material indicating the author's reluctance to publish, having eventually yielded to friends' entreaties. The title page of Thomas Watson's sonnet sequence Hekatompathia, published in 1582, tells us that the poems were “Composed by Thomas Watson Gentleman; and published at the request of certain gentlemen his very friends.” Others contained dedications and elaborate prefatory epistles, thus making the volume a tribute to an aristocrat, a gift to a patron, not a publishing enterprise. Shakespeare's first two published efforts were poems and they come into this last category: Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594) were both dedicated to the Earl of Southampton (see Myth 16). Neither title page identifies the author, but the dedicatory letters to the patron are signed “Your Honour's [Lucrece: Lordship's] in all duty, William Shakespeare.” So although the title pages are anonymous, the volumes are not.[3]

When Shakespeare's plays reached print, they contained no authorial prefatory epistles. Prefatory epistles to drama were not typical but nor were they unusual. Webster wrote a prefatory letter to the White Devil (1612) in which he offers his views on tragedy and gives the history of this play's reception; Jonson wrote prefatory letters to Volpone (1606) and Catiline (1611), among others. Other kinds of pre-play matter indicate an author's involvement in the printing process or their attitude to it. John Marston dedicated his play The Malcontent to Ben Jonson; when Jonson published Sejanus in 1605, Marston contributed a prefatory poem to the edition; John Ford wrote commendatory verses for plays by Massinger, Webster, and others. Shakespeare's plays have nothing comparable. If Shakespeare had been interested in his plays reaching print, mightn't we expect to find him providing some critical commendations as he did with his poems or as other dramatists did with their plays?

Not necessarily. The statistics tell an interesting story. Dedications preface only five of the plays printed between 1583 and 1602 (5 percent); between 1603 and 1622 the number rises to twenty-two plays (19 percent of printed drama); and between 1623 and 1642 it jumps to seventy-eight (58 percent).[4] The figures are similar for other paratextual material—lists of characters, for instance. Drama was developing a printed identity—but slowly.

This fledgling identity perhaps also explains the stuttering way in which title pages identify authors of plays. The first Shakespeare plays to reach print did not have his name on the title page. The selling point of a play was its theater company: the marketing point that promised success for a printed play was the stage on which it had already been successful. Titus Andronicus was published in 1594, followed by Richard II, Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet in 1597; none of these identifies Shakespeare as the author but all of them name the theater company that had performed the play. In 1598 a change creeps in. When Richard II and Richard III were reprinted that year, they advertised Shakespeare as the author; so too did the 1598 reprint of Love's Labour's Lost (the first edition has not survived) although its phrasing “newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare” is ambiguous about whether Shakespeare wrote the original or just revised it. But the introduction of Shakespeare's name on title pages is not consistent. In Shakespeare's lifetime there were thirty-nine editions of sixteen of his plays: only 66 percent of these editions say “Written by William Shakespeare” or “Newly corrected by …” or “Newly augmented by William Shakespeare.” The concept of the author was not yet a title-page requirement. Anonymity cannot be taken as reliable evidence of Shakespeare's lack of interest in publication any more than the absence of prefatory material can.

Playwrights had little control over printing their plays. A dramatist who sold a play to a theater company had no subsequent rights over it. Authorial copyright is a development of the eighteenth century. Thus an Elizabethan playing company could do as it pleased with the text of plays that it owned. The issue is complicated by the fact that Shakespeare was a shareholder in the Globe. In this capacity, though not as a playwright, he would have shared in decisions the company made about buying and selling property (and a playbook was property).

The issue of whether Shakespeare was interested in seeing his plays printed is further complicated by the existence of variant versions of some of Shakespeare's plays. When Romeo and Juliet was first printed in 1597 it was in a relatively short version (2,225 lines, just about feasibly “the two-hours' traffic of our stage,” Prologue 12); reprinted in 1599 the title page advertised it as “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended,” and it runs to over 3,000 lines. Similarly, the first published version of Hamlet (1603) is short (2,155 lines), blunt, and at times even ungrammatical; within a year, a longer, more philosophically poetic version with subtler characterization was printed. The title page advertised the new edition as “newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy,” and the figures bear this out (3,660 lines). The vocabulary of correction and enlargement suggests that someone in authority is replacing an unauthorized version—and this may reflect a Shakespeare concerned about damage to his literary reputation and hence keen to publish a creditable version.

Figure 2 This lurid description of the events of the play gives away a lot about its plot, but doesn't mention an author.

©The British Library Board, Huth 47, title page.

Trying to deduce the source of these “short” quartos has occupied critics for a century. Most agree that these versions indicate theater practice or intent. Stage directions choreograph the action: Nurse offers to goe in and turns again (Romeo and Juliet 1597, sig. G2r); Fryer stoopes and looks on the blood and weapons (Romeo and Juliet 1597, sig. K2r); Leartes leapes into the grave … Hamlet leapes in after Leartes (Hamlet 1603, sig. G1v). Did Shakespeare write a long version that the company cut down for performance? The argument against this is that it seems profligate for a writer regularly to write 3,000 lines if he knows a company will only play 2,000. Did Shakespeare write a short version for performance, then later expand it? Against this view comes the argument that some of the short quartos are distinctly unpoetic, linguistically divorced from anything we would expect that a Shakespeare might write.

However, Lukas Erne champions the idea of the longer versions as reading texts developed by Shakespeare from the shorter playing versions: Erne argues that the greater length, the subtler characterization, and the longer speeches are aimed not at a playhouse audience but at a reader, one who has the leisure to ponder.[5] If so, this is evidence of a Shakespeare who wrote for the theater but was also interested in publication: interested enough to revise some of his plays for print.

Although Erne's narrative fits the relative quality of short and long quartos (i.e. the differences between them), it does not fit the absolute quality of most play printing. Although short quarto versions are problematic, the longer quartos are far from perfect. Thus, Erne's theory obliges us to postulate a Shakespeare concerned enough with his reputation in print to want to present a fuller text but not so concerned as to oversee the quality of that replacement.

Let us turn to the concept of a canon. In 1616 Ben Jonson printed his collected works (plays, poems, court masques, entertainments) in a large folio volume. The notion of a collected canon including plays was not new: in 1570 Thomas Norton's Treatises included his collaborative play with Thomas Sackville, Gorboduc;[6] in 1573 George Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundry Flowers included two plays.[7] What was new was the format (folio was a form reserved for serious works such as the Bible) and the title: Works (“Pray tell me, Ben, where doth the mystery lurk, / What others call a play you call a work?” wrote one wit.) Despite such derision, the idea was attractive enough to prompt two of Shakespeare's actor-colleagues, John Heminge and Henry Condell, to collect Shakespeare's plays and publish his Folio in 1623 (the volume took two years to go through the press).

The Folio collection of plays may have been Shakespeare's idea. In their letter addressed “To the great variety of readers,” Heminge and Condell wrote:

It had been a thing we confess worthy to have been wished that the author himself had lived to have set forth, and overseen, his own writings. But since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he, by death, departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their care and pain to have collected and published them.

Does this suggest that Shakespeare intended to “set forth” and “oversee” his own collected writings before he died? This could fit with what we know of Shakespeare's biography in his last years. Although he reduced his activities for the King's Men he does not seem to have severed his links with them (his purchase of the Blackfriars Gatehouse in 1610, his first purchase of London property, is not the action of a man who is retiring to Stratford). If, as we explore in Myth 20, Shakespeare is retiring from acting but not from writing in 1610, he may have done so to provide time for editing.

One more consideration needs to be factored into our discussion. In 1612 Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Oxford library that bears his name, told his librarian to exclude plays because it was not fitting that so noble a library should house “idle books and riff-raffs … baggage books.” Eleven years later, the Bodleian acquired from the Stationers' Company a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio and sent it to an Oxford binder (books were mostly sold unbound). Perhaps attitudes to plays had changed; or perhaps a folio collection of plays was viewed differently from the “almanacs, plays and proclamations” printed in separate small-format editions that Bodley objected to.[8] If so, Shakespeare may well have been interested in publishing his plays collectively while displaying no interest in individual volumes.

This myth actually splits into several: Shakespeare was interested in publishing his plays; Shakespeare was interested in publishing his poems. But the drama component itself subdivides: Shakespeare wanted his plays printed individually; Shakespeare wanted a Complete Works. Shakespeare himself left us no evidence to adjudicate these matters.

Notes

[1] Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury (London, 1598), pp. 281–2 (sigs. 201v–202r).

[2] The Latin is “Est virgo haec penna, meretrix est stampificata,” quoted by Douglas Brooks in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 4.

[3] The letter to Southampton appears in the 1594 reprint of Venus and Adonis.

[4] Benedict Scott Robinson, “Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections,” Studies in English Literature, 42/2 (2002), pp. 361–80 (p. 366), citing Peter W.M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in John D. Cox and David S. Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 383–422.

[5] Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[6] Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 38.

[7] This edition was produced without Gascoigne's knowledge; he issued an authorized edition in 1575.

[8] Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, ed. G.W. Wheeler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), letters 220 and 221.

Myth 5

Shakespeare never traveled

We know that Shakespeare did travel: while the journey from Stratford-upon-Avon (where he was born) to London (where he worked) is now a smooth couple of hours' travel by the M40, at the end of the sixteenth century it was a considerable trek. According to late-seventeenth-century folklore, Shakespeare traveled via Banbury, and met in Grendon Underwood in Buckinghamshire a malapropistic constable on whom he modeled Much Ado About Nothing's Dogberry.[1] Another story had him traveling via Oxford, enjoying the hospitality of the Taverne (later named the Crown), where he met the infant William Davenant, who, according to later rumor reported by John Aubrey, claimed “that he wrote with the very spirit that Shakespeare [wrote], and seemed contented enough to be thought his son.”[2] Neither the route—nor this myth of paternity—can be confirmed, but either journey would have been four or five days by foot: presumably as he became more prosperous, Shakespeare would have hired a horse, halving his journey time. We do not know how often he returned to Stratford from his playwriting base in London (see Myth 14).

But when it is said that Shakespeare never traveled, it is usually meant that he did not travel outside England. There is, indeed, no evidence that he did, and, indeed, it is unlikely that he would have, since foreign travel required official permission. The other writers of his era who travelled in Europe tended to do so in a professional diplomatic or military capacity. We know from a Privy Council letter that as a Cambridge student Christopher Marlowe had “gone beyond the seas to Reames [Rheims],”[3] probably on government service; Ben Jonson joined English expeditionary forces to the Low Countries in the early 1590s; and books by Thomas Coryate (Coryat's Crudities of 1611) and Fynes Moryson (An itinerary … containing his ten years' travel through the twelve dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Switzerland, Netherland, Denmark, Poland, Italy, Turkey, France, England, Scotland, and Ireland, published in three volumes in 1617) document their travels in Europe. Of course, that Shakespeare traveled to Europe is one of the suggestions that usefully fills in the so-called “lost years” between 1588 and c.1591, where no documentary evidence attests to his whereabouts or activities.

If Shakespeare didn't travel outside England, the question might seem to be: how did he get his knowledge of, in particular, Italy—the setting for Romeo and Juliet, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Othello—and also of Illyria (modern-day Croatia and Slovenia) for Twelfth Night, Denmark for Hamlet, Sicily and Bohemia for The Winter's Tale, Ephesus (in the modern state of Turkey) for The Comedy of Errors, Vienna for Measure for Measure, Cyprus for Othello, and the Mediterranean for Pericles, not to mention the “uninhabited isle,” located in a place to which a voyage between Naples and Tunisia could be diverted, in The Tempest? We don't even know whether Shakespeare went to Windsor. But the answer, of course, to the question of how Shakespeare got his knowledge of these places is the same as the answer to a related puzzle—how did he “travel” to ancient Greece (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida), to ancient Rome (Julius Caesar, Coriolanus), to ancient Egypt (Antony and Cleopatra), ancient Britain (King Lear and Cymbeline), or to the England of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (the history plays from Richard II to Richard III)? Answer: he traveled through reading, conveyed by books. He didn't go to these places; he read about them.

Nothing in Shakespeare's use of foreign locations requires more knowledge of these nominal settings than might be easily gained from reading, or than is part of a source story used by Shakespeare. Take Romeo and Juliet, for instance, and its relation to “fair Verona, where we lay our scene” (Prologue, 2). In the northern Italian city of Verona you can now find a popular tourist destination of “Juliet's house,” complete with balcony, making it look as if the events of the play might really have happened there, and as if Shakespeare might have learned about them from visiting. But the tourist spot postdates Shakespeare's play, rather than predating it: it cashes in on the literary associations of Verona rather than prompting them. In 2009 the city council launched a project “marry me in Verona,” allowing couples to have their wedding on Juliet's balcony, apparently undeterred by the rather inauspicious precedent in the play.[4] Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet in Verona because that is where Arthur Brooke set the poem that is the play's main source: The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, first published in 1562 and reissued in 1587; Brooke, in his turn, got the setting from his source, a novella by the Italian writer Matteo Bandello. Shakespeare has made many significant changes to Brooke's poem, particularly in its moral temper. Brooke's prefatory letter states that this is a didactic story of the consequences of disobedience to one's parents, youthful lusts, and undue reliance on “drunken gossips and superstitious [i.e. Catholic] friars.” The “evil man's mischief warneth men not to be evil”: it would be hard to emerge from Shakespeare's play on the side of the feuding parents. Shakespeare also adds the character of Mercutio, Romeo's witty friend whose death in Act 3 cursing “both your houses” seems to render the tragedy inevitable. But one thing Shakespeare does not change is the setting.

The same is true for the sources for many of the other plays with Italian settings. Shakespeare took the Sicilian setting for Much Ado About Nothing from Bandello (although the Watch is his own invention); Fiorentino's Il Pecorone gave Shakespeare a plot about a Jewish moneylender in Venice; in Cinthio's Hecatommithi he found the story of a Moor of Venice who married Disdemona which became Othello.

For the most part, the plays contain relatively scanty particularizing local details. The apparently knowing familiarity of Shylock's “What news on the Rialto?” (1.3.36), a reference to the business district of early modern Venice, must be set alongside the absence of any references to the city's ghetto for Jewish residents in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare does not seem to be well versed in Venetian locations or customs, nor is it necessary for the play that he is. We might compare Ben Jonson's contemporaneous rewrite of his own play, Every Man In His Humour: reworking its original location in Florence to London, scene of the popular contemporary city comedies, required only the most superficial of changes, and, were Shakespeare to have relocated his plays, we might anticipate similarly minor reworkings. Often, Shakespeare's places seem barely or only intermittently disguised versions of more familiar locations. Despite being set on the Adriatic coast, Twelfth Night, for example, has the distinctly English-sounding Sir Toby Belch mentioning “the bed of Ware,” a contemporary four-poster bed famed for its huge size (his afterthought “in England” [3.2.45–6] leans on the knowingness of the London audience, just as they would have enjoyed the jokes about England being full of madmen in the ostensibly Danish environs of Elsinore at the end of Hamlet). The name of the inn at which Antonio and Sebastian are staying, the Elephant in the “south suburbs” (Twelfth Night 3.3.39) must have recalled the Bankside tavern of the same name (see Myth 14). Dogberry and his band of watchmen in Much Ado About Nothing parody English, not Sicilian, constables.

Although Shakespeare never sets a play in contemporary England except, perhaps, the provincial comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, we might argue that none of his plays has a clearly foreign setting. Just as his temporal anachronisms give the plays a timeless air—the ancient Romans are ruled by a clock striking (Julius Caesar 2.1), or Cleopatra whiles away the time playing billiards (see Myth 3)—so this geographical vagueness means their settings can stand for the familiar world of early modern London. Shakespeare sees these settings in terms of his own location. Some settings are deliberately ambiguous: is the forest in As You Like It the French Ardenne, as in Shakespeare's pastoral source story, Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (1590), or is it the more immediate forest of Arden in Warwickshire? At times Shakespeare's depiction of the forest seems to emphasize its Englishness: the exiled Duke is a kind of Robin Hood, surrounded by a rustic band of merry men, and Audrey, William, and Sir Oliver Martext, the unnecessary priest, seem distinctly English. But Orlando “is the stubbornest young fellow of France” (1.1.133–4), Jaques and Le Beau have French names, and when the forest produces a “green and gilded snake,” escalating to “a lioness, with udders all drawn dry” (4.3.109, 115) and reaching a fantastical climax with the appearance of Hymen, goddess of marriage, its location becomes a composite no-place of wonder and make-believe, rather than a real place one might travel to.

We can see this, perhaps, in the subsequent stage history of some of his plays. Illyria, for instance, the setting for Viola's adventures in Twelfth Night, has been variously imagined by directors and designers. In Regent's Park in 1973, Robert Lang used an eighteenth-century Venetian setting to stress the commedia dell'arte characteristics of the comic plot; the BBC television film (directed by David Giles, 1974) used Castle Howard, a Baroque country house designed by John Vanbrugh, to bring out the wealth and luxury of the households. Terry Hands' wintery setting at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979 reminded one reviewer of “a deserted Parisian square with a blurred, watery full moon above”; the following year for television the inspiration was Dutch Old Masters, with Sir Toby dressed to recall Rembrandt portraits. Director John Caird chose a “romantic craggy Athenian coast” dominated by a single venerable tree: one reviewer designated this Illyria “a Neverland for a Duke who declines to grow up,” suggesting a parallel with Alain-Fournier's Lost Domain (in the classic French novel Le Grand Meaulnes, first published in 1913) and expanding, “Illyria is in each of us.” For Nancy Meckler's production at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester (1984) Dermot Hayes' set suggested a decaying Elizabethan playhouse, complete with rotting galleries and warped woodwork. “A dinky Greek island setting of sun-baked white walls … suitable for holiday madness and sexual escapade” was the Illyria of Bill Alexander's 1987 RSC production; the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, imagined “a lazy decadent Illyria in the last days of the British raj”; for John Godber's Hull Truck Theatre Company, Illyria was set in a cloistered academic world (1989); Pip Broughton washed up her Viola on “a shore fringed with banana palms” (Birmingham Rep, 1989); one reviewer was not impressed by Orsino's court as “a mixture of H.M.S. Pinafore and the Ruritanian Navy circa 1900”; at Stratford in 1994 Ian Judge pictured Illyria as an echo of Shakespeare's own Stratford; Propeller played Illyria as “a purgatorial limbo where the characters are garbed in funereal black” (1999); one Washington, DC, production directed by Douglas C. Wager had a “gorgeous decayed Greco-Roman temple site, with crumbled ionic columns and fallen monumental statuary” and another had “snow falling gently” on a “warped hilly landscape set about with pianos in various states of collapse”; at the Colorado Shakespeare festival in 2000, the word “Illyria” glowed in red neon light in a 1930s Hollywood design.[5] This sampling of various directorial interpretations indicates that the setting of Twelfth Night is ultimately a fiction and that the play can be located in whatever setting, realistic or expressionistic, that best brings out its director's view of its themes and characters.

When Shakespeare does change the settings for his plays he occasionally betrays geographical ignorance. Ben Jonson was the first to complain of the fallacy in The Winter's Tale where the landlocked Bohemia is given a coast, but this is in part due to the fact that Shakespeare has chosen to swap the two locations from his source, Robert Greene's prose romance Pandosto, or the Triumph of Time (1588). Greene sets the court of the jealous and tyrannical king (Shakespeare's Leontes) in Bohemia and the pastoral escape of Perdita in Sicily, but, probably for political rather than topographical reasons, Shakespeare switches them: King James had strong political connections with the Protestant court of Emperor Rudolf II in Bohemia. Jonathan Bate suggests that it would have been “politic” to switch the monarchs and make the Catholic, Sicilian king the one marked as “irrational, cruel, and blasphemous” (although Polixenes, King of Bohemia, is not saintly either).[6] In changing the location of the action of The Comedy of Errors from Epidamnus, as in Plautus's Menaechmi, to Ephesus, Shakespeare activates a set of biblical associations with Paul's epistle to the Ephesians, and in particular its strictures on marriage, as well as the magical associations of Ephesus. Again, Ephesus is a literary source derived from reading rather than a geographical one derived from traveling.

What has been at the root of this question about Shakespeare is not really the nature of his geographical realism or otherwise. Rather, it has become a bone of contention in the “authorship question” (see Myth 30). Anti-Stratfordians have often claimed that Shakespeare's plays require direct knowledge of foreign locations, and that, since there is no evidence that Shakespeare had such experience, it is more likely that an alternative candidate who traveled in Europe wrote the plays. That Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, traveled as a young man in the 1570s is often cited as crucial to his claims to authorship of the Shakespeare canon; more difficult to explain is how he achieved this with his negligible poetic skill. If Shakespeare's career suggests it is possible to write great plays set in foreign locations without traveling, then Oxford's gives us the corroborating suggestion: the experience of travel does not necessarily lead to great writing.

Notes

[1] Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 118–19.

[2] John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Richard Barber (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1982), p. 90.

[3] See Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), p. 92.

[4] “Fair Verona to Stage Weddings on Juliet's Balcony,” Independent, 14 March 2009.

[5] Reviews from John O'Connor and Katharine Goodland, A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance, vol. 1: Great Britain, 1970–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1496–1544; for Canada and the USA, see vol. 3 (A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance since 1991), pp. 1882–1970.

[6] Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 305.

Myth 6

Shakespeare's plays are politically incorrect

By the standards of our own day, the drama of the Elizabethan period is obviously, distastefully, politically incorrect. Minorities are everywhere disenfranchised: blacks, women, Jews, Catholics, servants, New World inhabitants, animals. The question this myth poses is whether Shakespeare's plays rise above the ideology of his age in a humane transcendental vision, subscribe to the prevailing codes of his culture (wholeheartedly or uneasily), or sit on the fence; and whether our ability to see sympathy for minorities in his plays reflects our twenty-first-century desires rather than the plays' actuality or potential.

Let us begin with an apparently straightforward example: hunting. In the Elizabethan period foxhunting and the hunting of hares was both a recreation and a standard means of pest control. Foxes and hares were not the only quarry; deer were hunted too. Shakespeare's images of hunting are always of deer and evince nothing but sympathy for the innocent, victimized animal. The slaughtered children of Macduff are “murdered deer” (Macbeth 4.3.207). The raped Lavinia is a “dainty doe” hunted and cornered “not … with horse or hound” but by rapists (Titus Andronicus 2.2.26, 25). The harmlessly deaf, unfit Julius Caesar is butchered: “Here wast thou bayed, brave heart; / … here thy hunters stand / … O world, thou wast the forest to this hart; / … How like a deer strucken by many princes / Dost thou here lie” (Julius Caesar 3.1.205–11; the pun on heart/hart is common). Duke Senior is troubled by conscience when killing deer in the Forest of Ardenne (his point is political: the deer are “native burghers” unfairly gored in their own territory: As You Like It 2.1.22–5); the Princess of France voices similar scruples in Love's Labour's Lost (4.1.24–35). Such sympathetic reactions were atypical in the sixteenth century: the other notable exceptions are More, Erasmus, and Montaigne.[1] So here the evidence lines up quite straightforwardly: Shakespeare's images are consistently sympathetic and this goes against the prevailing norm.

In Taming of the Shrew the shrewish Katherine is described in (different) animal terms: she is a wasp, a wildcat, a shrew (a shrew is both a small mammal and a metaphor for a talkative woman). This play's attitude to women—and to its central female, Katherine—is difficult to assess. The title seems to offer an apparently straightforward summary of the plot: a woman of spirit has her personality extinguished. Shrew-taming was a stereotypical comic subject, in prose, ballads, and drama (on the English stage it goes back to Noah's wife in the mystery cycles). But, as critics note, Shakespeare's shrew is depicted more sympathetically than her predecessors. Katherine has a short soliloquy in which she explains why she speaks. She says, “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart” (4.3.77). Anger? She does not identify the cause of her anger, although we might deduce it to be female stereotyping. Early in the play she complains about her sister Bianca's apparent docility. “Her silence flouts me” she says of Bianca's behavior; Lucentio says he has fallen in love with Bianca's “silence” and “mild behaviour” (2.1.29, 1.1.70–1; our italics). Katherine's soliloquy continues, “or else my heart concealing it [her anger] will break” (4.3.78). As Coppélia Kahn points out, Katherine is simply saying that speech is “psychologically necessary for her survival.”[2] Katherine's line is both poignant and full of insight.

So, at the start of the play, Shakespeare presents a binary view of women. Society divides women into silent (and therefore marriageable) or talkative (and therefore unmarriageable). Despite this apparent sympathy for Katherine, the last scene presents her as a dutiful wife. She gives a long speech—her longest in the play—explaining that a wife owes obedience to her husband. The speech makes modern audiences and readers uncomfortable, and productions, like critics, have various ways of rationalizing it. It is seen as ironic: although she describes a reciprocal relationship in which men work hard and women obey, the fact is, none of the men in the play behave as she describes (caveat: forty-three lines of irony are hard to sustain in the theater). It is seen as genuine love: Katherine has fallen for her trainer (caveat: can love be inculcated through cruelty?). It is seen as a performance: Katherine is performing simply to win a bet. It is seen as a clever arrangement: Katherine ends the play doing what she wants—speaking—but has found out how to do it with society's approval. If a husband invites or commands you to speak, you can do so for forty-three lines (caveat: is this not a pyrrhic victory? It may profit Katherine but not the cause of women if one gains freedom in private only by acting submissively in public). It is seen as evidence of a new, expanded, happy Katherine who has learned the pointlessness and unacceptability of her previous persona (caveat: is it offensive to suggest that a woman can only find herself with the help of a man?). As our parenthetical counters indicate, it is not clear where this last scene directs our views.

How might the Elizabethans have viewed it? We can perhaps approach that question by looking at a sequel to The Taming of the Shrew—The Tamer Tamed—written by John Fletcher in 1611. In this play Katherine has died and Petruccio takes a second wife, one who loses no time in showing him who's boss. “You have been famous for a woman tamer,” Petruccio's martial new wife tells him, “And bear the feared name of a brave wife-breaker: / A woman now shall take those honours off” (1.3.266–8).[3] This plot seems to indicate that Elizabethans viewed The Taming of the Shrew as concluding with the husband in control and the wife tamed; Fletcher's sequel reverses the positions. If that is the case, readings of The Taming of the Shrew in which Katherine triumphs reflect our desire to rehabilitate a morally unpalatable play, a play that was of its time. And that time is the 1590s.

Shakespeare was not drawing from life in the 1590s when he created his memorable Jewish moneylender, Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice: since their banishment in the thirteenth century there had been no Jews living publicly in England, although historians have found evidence of a small, secret community in Elizabethan London. But Shylock, although he is present in only five scenes of the play, has become its most prominent character, with a cultural presence towering over his role in the plot. In The Merchant of Venice he lends Antonio the money to give to his friend Bassanio who wants to go and woo a “lady richly left” (1.1.161), Portia of Belmont. There is no love lost between Shylock and Antonio: Shylock bears Antonio an “ancient grudge” and declares: “I hate him for he is a Christian” (1.3.45, 40). Antonio freely admits that he has spat on his adversary and spurned him, and feels justified because of Shylock's profession of lending money at interest (1.3.128–35). Shakespeare's technique here is to show us the position of outsider from inside: we are shown more of Shylock and his character than would be strictly necessary were he simply the comic villain. While he does play the conventional role of the blocking figure who must be circumvented in order to get a happily comic ending, he is also the romantic comedy's enabler: at once repressive father figure (to Jessica) and sugar daddy (indirectly to Bassanio). When he talks of Jessica, who has eloped with her Christian lover Lorenzo and is squandering her father's money, he picks out a lost turquoise: “I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys” (3.1.113–15). The tone is sentimental (we never hear of Leah except at this moment, and although editors suggest she is Shylock's dead wife, we are never sure: it's one of those areas of opacity that makes characters seem so lifelike, as discussed in Myth 29).

Shylock repeatedly exceeds the role appointed him in the play, by occupying the drama's major interpretative space: questions about his motivations and behavior dominate any production or reading of The Merchant of Venice. And while there have been some profoundly anti-semitic readings of the play which rejoice in Shylock's enforced conversion in the fourth act, since the end of the nineteenth century it has been much more common to see Shylock as a figure torn between worlds and to sympathize with his outsider status in the play. And since the Holocaust, of course, it has been, rightly, impossible to present Shylock as a racially typed villain, although the playwright Arnold Wesker is among those who have suggested it is not a play that should be performed. In fact The Merchant of Venice was not a favorite play of the Nazis: while the long association of German writers and thinkers with Shakespeare meant he was somewhat protected from the Third Reich's nationalistic suspicion of foreign art, the marriage of Jessica to an “Aryan” meant that the play was performed only in a complicated adaptation in which Jessica was not really Shylock's daughter (the Nazis seem to have preferred the virile militarism and coldness of Coriolanus).

The Merchant of Venice also features a black prince of Morocco who tells Portia “Mislike me not for my complexion” (2.1.1). Othello, also a native of Morocco, has no need to say the same to the citizens of the Venice in which his play is located; the Duke honors and trusts him as a military leader, a protector of Venice to whom the senate turns first in time of threat, and Brabantio, a senator, invites him to his home (“oft”) and listens to the stories of his adventuring life. Yet by Act 5 Emilia can protest that her mistress, Othello's wife Desdemona, was “too fond of her most filthy bargain” (5.2.164). Statements like this are partly responsible for the view that miscegenation is the root of this tragedy.

In its Mediterranean locations and combination of geo- and sexual politics, Othello shows its links with the contemporary vogue for travel plays in the 1590s and early 1600s. Plays such as the anonymous Sir Thomas Stukeley (1605) and The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607, by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins) are based on true stories; others, such as Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West (published 1631 but probably written c.1597–1603) are fictional. All are tales of travel and adventure beyond Europe and of assimilation. In The Travels of Three English Brothers one of the brothers actually marries an Ottoman princess and has a baby girl. These plays explore the threat to identity when Christians turn Turk either literally (changing religion, undergoing circumcision) or metaphorically, living and dying abroad (A Christian Turned Turk is the title of a play by Robert Daborne in 1612); they explore the physical threat when exotic black women tempt white men sexually and lure them to destruction. In Othello Shakespeare both follows this vogue and inverts it. Othello is a play in which an African travels to Europe and in which a Muslim becomes a Christian; in Othello the exotic other woman is white, not black, and disaster is caused by her chastity, not her sexuality. As Jean Howard observes, the novelty in Othello is seeing the experience of otherness from the African's, not the European's, point of view.[4]

Something similar happens in Sir Thomas More (written and revised about the same time as Othello according to the play's latest editor, John Jowett, who places More's composition c.1600 and its revisions in 1604). Sir Thomas More is about two things: immigrants to London (the word for foreigners is “strangers,” a much stronger word than now) and the downfall of Sir Thomas More. In the first half of the play More calms the rioting Londoners, He does this in a speech, added by Shakespeare in 1604, which invites the Londoners to imagine the situation if the positions were reversed: that is, if they were banished:

whither would you go?

What country, by the nature of your error,

Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders

To any German province, Spain or Portugal,

Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:

Why you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper

That, breaking out in hideous violence,

Would not afford you an abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs? …

What would you think

To be thus used? This is the strangers' case,

And this your mountainish inhumanity.

(Add. II. 6. 141–56)

In effect he says: get in touch with your inner Fleming; imagine things from the point of view of the outsider. That unusual adjective “mountainish” enacts this flip perfectly: the word suggests the ignorant or uncivilized people of a mountainous region, in order to turn this evocation of otherness onto the self. It's a technique we see again and again in Shakespeare: an imaginative empathy with the minority or persecuted person's point of view.

And yet it is also true that minorities can be presented critically: the fickle crowds in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, for instance, or the enslaved Caliban in The Tempest who sees freedom as simply having a new master:

No more dams I'll make for fish,

Nor fetch in firing

At requiring.

Nor scrape trenchering, nor wash dish.

'Ban, 'ban, Cacaliban

Has a new master.—Get a new man.

Freedom, high-day!

(2.2.179–85)

One of the reasons it is hard to decide whether Shakespeare is politically correct or incorrect is that he has it both ways. Modern productions of Coriolanus or Julius Caesar have attempted to stabilize the plays' political sympathies through topical costuming—the conspirators as freedom fighters against a dictatorship, or the patricians as the self-interested fat cats of an undemocratic state—but in Shakespeare's hands the balance of sympathies is more delicate. Does Caesar have absolutist aspirations to disband the republic and accept the crown? We don't know, because the scene is only reported, not shown.

It is also possible to recontextualize some of these most sensitive plays and remove them from historically specific problems. A recent production of Merchant of Venice by Edward Hall's all-male theater company Propeller set the play in a modern prison. The inmates were staging a production of Merchant of Venice without the knowledge or approval of the prison warders. Floors were scrubbed when the warders patrolled; as soon as they were out of sight, scenes from the Merchant of Venice began to be acted. But this amateur dramatic group of prisoners was not a cohesive entity. The performers were divided into two uneven groups—as often happens with institutional politics—one of power-wielders, one of victims. The victims played the Jews, the power-wielders the Christians. Shakespeare's play was thus seen to be about minority versus majority groups and the behaviors that accompany them. It mattered little whether the groups were rival football supporters or different races or religions: the play exposed the emotional workings of political hierarchies not religious or racial politics.

Does this indicate that Shakespeare's plays are above political incorrectness? or that it is we who are able to make them so? It is impossible to say decisively. But as Myth 22 argues, part of their enduring appeal on stage and to readers is their ability to speak to different periods and mean different things at different times. Shakespeare is both the Elizabethans' contemporary and ours.

Notes

[1] Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 76–8.

[2] Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), p. 108.

[3] John Fletcher, The Woman's Prize; or The Tamer Tamed, ed. Celia Daileader and Gary Taylor, Revels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

[4] Jean Howard, “Othello as an Adventure Play,” in Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt (eds.), Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's “Othello” (New York: MLA, 2005), pp. 90–9.

Myth 7

Shakespeare was a Catholic

The seventeenth-century censor at St Alban's, the Jesuit English College in Valladolid, Spain, clearly set to work to make their library copy of Shakespeare's collected works acceptable to seminarians. This largely took the form of excising unsuitable passages from the corpus of plays, and in particular, lines of bawdy humor and those which seemed to treat Catholic doctrine lightly, such as Rosalind's view that Orlando's “kissing is as full of sanctity as the touch of holy bread” (As You Like It 3.4.12–13), or, more substantially, the disrespect shown to the papal legate Pandulph in King John. Coming to Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's seedy story of sex and coercion and starring a novice nun and an ethically ambiguous disguised friar, however, no such piecemeal amelioration was possible. The twelve leaves have been summarily torn from the volume. Presumably this Catholic reader would have been surprised to read the critic G. Wilson Knight's interpretation of the “atmosphere of Christianity pervading” this religiously problematic play: for Knight, the Duke's “enlightened human insight and Christian ethic” is “exactly correspondent with Jesus',” and the play should be read as a religious allegory or parable.[1] Far from being ripped from the Folio, Wilson Knight's play should surely have been required reading for the St Alban's seminarians.

These apparently polar views of Measure for Measure give some indication of the range of religious interpretations that can be generated from Shakespeare's plays, and, perhaps, suggest that the religion of Shakespeare's plays is largely in the eye of the beholder. Indeed, much of the discussion of religion in Shakespeare's life and work has been doctrinally partisan and ideologically motivated, telling us as much about its adherents—religious and secular—as its object. But questions about Shakespeare's own religious affiliations have entered mainstream biography and criticism over the past two decades, with the result that now, as Dympna Callaghan (not a religious partisan critic) admits, “the long-held assumption about Shakespeare as the Protestant national poet is probably wide of the mark.”[2]

Suggestions that Shakespeare himself retained his allegiance to the old Catholic religion after the Reformation have been circulating for centuries. Three main lines of argument are frequently cited. The first is the spiritual testament of Shakespeare's father—found by workmen in the mid-eighteenth century in the rafters of the house in Henley Street in Stratford, seen by the Shakespearean scholar Edmund Malone, copied and then later lost. Malone later suspected it was fraudulent: the most judicious recent assessments of the evidence by the Shakespeare Centre archivist Robert Bearman suggests he was probably right to be suspicious. Colin Burrow puts it in characteristically dry terms: “Shakespeare may or may not have been Catholic, but generally if a document that sounds too good to be true is found exactly where you'd hope to find it and then goes missing in mysterious circumstances it is indeed too good to be true.”[3] In this lost testament John Shakespeare calls on “the glorious and ever Virgin Mary, mother of god, refuge and advocate of sinners” to be his “Executresse” and swears his undying allegiance to the traditional faith. If the testament is a fake, it was a prescient one: at the time of its discovery, no parallel was known, but in the twentieth century other versions of similar documents were found, suggesting that this one—if it indeed existed—was based on a template, perhaps brought to England in Edmund Campion's Jesuit Mission of 1580. This declaration of Catholic belief seemed to confirm that John Shakespeare's fines for not attending church in 1592 were a sign of doctrinal resistance to reformed religion. The alternative explanation is that Shakespeare senior's business affairs were in a dire state, and that he was avoiding his creditors; adherents of the Catholicism theory argue both that debt was a common excuse for non-attendance at church by Catholics, and furthermore that, like other recusants, John Shakespeare was attempting to hide his wealth to secure it from sequestration by the authorities, and that his apparent financial difficulties were in fact a stratagem. The fact that Susanna, Shakespeare's favored daughter, was likewise fined in 1606 only seems to confirm the family's loyalties. Interestingly, Shakespeare himself was never fined for recusancy.

The suggestion that Shakespeare is “William Shakeshaft,” described as a “player” or perhaps working as a tutor and attached to the recusant (Catholic) Lancastrian Hoghton household during the 1580s, is a third line of argument, although it has to be admitted that no version of Shakespeare's name ever looks remotely like Shakeshaft, which was not an uncommon northern surname. Stephen Greenblatt imagines him meeting the Jesuit missionary Edmund Campion: “Shakespeare would have found Campion fascinating … if the adolescent knelt down before him, he would have been looking at a distorted image of himself”: it's an unlikely if attractive scenario, since we are by no means sure that Shakespeare was ever in Lancashire, still less that he met Campion at this date.[4] But that a connection with northern recusancy might have been promoted by John Cottom, Shakespeare's schoolmaster with strong associations with the region and its recusant traditions, and that in turn the local Catholic gentry might have introduced Shakespeare to his first acting job with Strange's Men, who were also connected with the Hoghtons, is tantalizing, but it rests on chains of unverifiable “ifs.”[5] That this whole theory has been recently revitalized by scholars keen to insert Lancashire into the lucrative academic and tourist itineraries does not necessarily add to its claims.

Because Catholicism was dangerous in the late sixteenth century—after the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth by Pope Pius V in 1570, Catholics were the dangerous enemy within and subject to violent repression—the idea that its ideas and imagery are covert in Shakespeare's plays has been an attractive one. Clare Asquith's Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare had its genesis in its author's Cold War observation of “the artful double language and hidden identities used in Russian dissident writing.” Asquith describes her glossary of “coded terms” as “an entry point to a long forgotten, almost foreign language” of encrypted Catholicism in Shakespeare's works: Hercules is a “favourite Counter-Reformation image of resistance,” the red rose “an all-purpose image, but used specifically by Catholics for the old, ‘beautiful’ religion,” and “tempest” an image of the Reformation: the placing of The Tempest at the beginning of the First Folio “provides a subtitle to the book as politically loaded as ‘The Blitz’ or ‘The Troubles’ might be to a modern reader.”[6] As with all codes, it's entirely possible to be skeptical: red roses in Shakespeare's history plays are already coded with political, rather than religious, allegiance, as the Temple Garden scene between the supporters of York and Lancaster in 1 Henry VI, and, as we know, “that which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet 2.1.85–6). While Asquith's theories do not go so far as Baconian cryptology (see Myth 30), their author shares with anti-Stratfordians a kind of over-ingenuity and a sense that the literary text is a cipher to be broken rather than a poem susceptible to multiple readings. Richard Wilson's argument, in Secret Shakespeare, is allied but different: he claims that by not explicitly engaging with contemporary religious controversy Shakespeare creates “a drama out of silence”: Wilson speculates that “Shakespeare's limitless talent for entering the consciousness of others was an ultimate function … of Catholic England's greatest act of ventriloquizing self-forgetfulness.”[7] As Gary Taylor notes of Shakespeare's personal invisibility in his plays, there “may be many motives for such self-erasure; any act so bizarre and so sustained must have been overdetermined. But the desire to protect yourself from those ‘who would pluck out the heart of [your] mystery’ is perhaps understandable in adherents of a religion which was defined by law as treason.”[8]

Shakespeare's apparent reticence on religious topics in his writing is also notable. He does not write religious verse (unless you argue that his opaque poem The Phoenix and the Turtle is a coded Catholic requiem: it is certainly one of the most obscure things Shakespeare ever wrote). Where he does treat religious topics and figures, his purposes seem to be most obviously dramatic rather than doctrinal: it is hard to make the inept Friar in Romeo and Juliet, his more commanding counterpart in Much Ado About Nothing, the potential Marian echoes of Hermione's breathing “statue” at the end of The Winter's Tale, or the attitude to the Pope's “usurped authority” and “juggling witchcraft” (3.1.86, 95) in King John into a coherent expression of their author's own religious beliefs. These references to Catholicism do theatrical not religious work, as a largely secular theater took on some of the social functions of collective display and ritual associated with the traditional religion along with its vestments (often bought by theater companies as props), but transformed its spiritual import.[9]

As with other biographical readings of the plays discussed in our myths (10, 12, and 18), attempts to deduce Shakespeare's religion from his writing tend towards selectively shaping the range of material to fit their particular agenda. Hamlet is a case in point: Shakespeare seems here to draw on a range of religious associations rather than endorsing any one position. Hamlet is a student of Wittenberg, strongly associated with the reformer Martin Luther (and with Hamlet's strongly anti-Catholic stage predecessor, Marlowe's Dr Faustus). In orthodox Protestant terms, he describes death as the “undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.81–2), but he has himself encountered the distinctly Catholic ghost of his father, returned from the distinctly Catholic location of Purgatory, “doomed for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away” (1.5.10–13). Drawing on the language of John Shakespeare's spiritual testament, Greenblatt describes Hamlet, like the playwright himself, as a Protestant haunted by the spirit of his Catholic father, while noting that in the play Shakespeare “seems at once Catholic, Protestant and deeply skeptical of both.”[10]

In fact the most compelling evidence that Shakespeare might have been a Catholic is not really about Shakespeare at all, but about revisionist histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead of swallowing top-down assertions of religious conformity, historians have looked again and found extensive evidence that in families and parishes the shift to reformed practice was much more gradual and less complete than previously thought. David Cressy, for instance, has gathered numerous examples of parishes continuing to ring church bells in defiance of official reformed policy, or defying dictats about moving fonts (it was thought a Catholic “superstition” to place them near the church door for ease of exit for the devils banished at baptism).[11] Some of this was clearly principled and informed resistance to the new religion, but more of it was probably a general preference for things to stay as they were, and some operational uncertainty about what practices were and were not permitted. Most priests, after all, remained in their posts across the turbulent religious changes of the mid-sixteenth century. And we have stopped looking back on the religious history of early modern England from the point of view of Protestant dominance. As one of Shakespeare's contemporaries acknowledged, the outcome of the century's pendulum swings was far from certain:

In one man's memory … we have had to our prince, a man, who abolished the pope's authority by his laws and yet in other points kept the faith of his fathers; we have had a child, who by his like laws abolished together with the papacy the whole ancient religion; we have had a woman who restored both again and sharply punished protestants; and lastly her majesty that now is, who by the like laws hath long since abolished both again and now severely punisheth catholics as the other did protestants; and all these strange differences within the compass of about thirty years.[12]

For many of Shakespeare's recent biographers, this religious palimpsest has its image in the Guild Chapel on Church Street in Stratford-upon-Avon. Just before Shakespeare was born, the chapel's painted interior was whitewashed over; seven years later, the civic authorities paid to have the stained-glass windows knocked out and replaced with clear panes. This local iconoclasm registers the overlap of established and reformed religious identities over the period of Shakespeare's life. As James Shapiro puts it, “to argue that the Shakespeares were secretly Catholic or, alternatively, mainstream Protestants misses the point that except for a small minority at one doctrinal extreme or other, those labels failed to capture the layered nature of what Elizabethans, from the queen on down, actually believed”: the traces of the old paintings beneath the coats of whitewash symbolize this superimposition of beliefs.[13] Put this way, Hamlet and Shakespeare shared with their transitional Elizabethan generation the experience of having Catholic fathers who had been born before the Reformation, of living through the fervent anti-Catholicism of the second half of Elizabeth's reign, and of leaving their successors with the new religious politics of James. Shakespeare's religious beliefs become less a matter of individual biography and more a snapshot of contemporary doctrinal shifts, uncertainties, and overlaps; the “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet 73:4) epitomize a general rather than a personal, cultural nostalgia amid the debris of English monastic architecture.

The so-called “turn to religion” has become a critical commonplace in early modern studies over the last couple of decades, and this shifting intellectual climate has enabled the old question of Shakespeare's Catholicism to be reconsidered anew. But this movement is not without its own ideological agendas, and in popular culture the religious politics of the sixteenth century—in the detective novels of C.J. Sansom, the TV series The Tudors, or in the film Elizabeth (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 1998), for example, the Elizabethan period has become a historical metaphor for fears about religious fundamentalism in our own time. Perhaps it is worthwhile concluding with something about Shakespeare the skeptic, the secularist: a Shakespeare who is reticent on matters of religious belief not because he is a hidden partisan but because his world view is something different. The philosopher George Santayana, finding only a handful of direct references to Christianity in Shakespeare's works, concluded that “for Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing; he chose to leave his heroes and himself in the presence of life and of death with no other philosophy than that which the profane world can suggest and understand”.[14] This powerfully positivist reinterpretation of Shakespeare for the existentialist twentieth century finds itself in Macbeth's bleak assessment:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time, …

It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(5.5.18–27)

In Santayana, as in the recent debates about Shakespeare's Catholicism, the interpretative pattern is familiar: we look to Shakespeare for what we ourselves believe, or don't believe. The balance of critical and biographical interest has shifted towards Shakespeare's Catholicism at least in part because that represents for us now not simply a religious position but a political one, and a consciously personal one at that. It offers a glimpse of a Shakespeare who is not simply accumulating wealth and property but who apparently suffers inner conflict, a struggle with his conscience, and whose writing is shaped by the mechanisms he has developed for his own psychological and physical self-protection. In this model, Catholicism registers as much as an act of individual assertion and defiance—the poet at an angle to establishment values—as it does as a specific doctrinal allegiance. While the question of whether Shakespeare was a Catholic is unlikely to be definitively answered, we can certainly affirm that we want him to have been.

Notes

[1] G. Wilson Knight, “Measure for Measure and the Gospels,” in The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Sombre Tragedies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), pp. 83–4, 90.

[2] Dympna Callaghan, “Shakespeare and Religion,” Textual Practice, 15 (2001), pp. 1–4 (p. 2).

[3] Robert Bearman, “John Shakespeare's ‘Spiritual Testament’: A Reappraisal,” Shakespeare Survey, 56 (2003), pp. 184–202; Colin Burrow “Who Wouldn't Buy It?”, review of Greenblatt's Will in the World, London Review of Books, 20 January 2005.

[4] Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), pp. 108–9.

[5] The best summary of all this material is John D. Cox's admirably careful “Was Shakespeare a Christian, and if so, What Kind of Christian Was He?”, Christianity and Literature, 55 (2006), pp. 539–66.

[6] Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), pp. xiv, 289, 293, 297, 299.

[7] Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 295, 19.

[8] Gary Taylor, “Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton,” English Literary Renaissance, 24 (1994), pp. 283–314 (p. 314).

[9] See Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Learning to Curse (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 161–83.

[10] Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 248–9; id., Will in the World, p. 103.

[11] David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

[12] William Allen (1581), quoted in Peter Lake, ‘Religious Identities in Shakespeare's England’, in David Scott Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 57–84 (p. 57).

[13] James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), p. 167.

[14] George Santayana, “The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare,” in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Scribner's, 1916), p. 152.

Myth 8

Shakespeare's plays had no scenery

Scenery as we know it—painted flats that fly in from above or slide in from the wings to change the scene—is a product of the proscenium stage. Shakespeare's actors performed on a thrust stage. As the name implies, it thrust forward into the auditorium; with the audience on three sides, it had no place for wings. The proscenium was a seventeenth-century import from France: the exiled Cavaliers had enjoyed the theater styles of the French court during the Interregnum, and when they returned to England in the Restoration they brought with them French theater practices. All ties with Elizabethan theater practice were decisively severed. Whereas Shakespeare's theater was demographically diverse (see Myth 13), Restoration theater was bourgeois. Whereas Elizabethan female roles were played by boys, the Restoration theater introduced actresses. And whereas Shakespearean drama was played outdoors in an amphitheater (except from 1608 onwards when the King's Men alternated seasons between the indoor Blackfriars and the outdoor Globe), Restoration drama was played indoors on a proscenium. Consequently, Shakespeare's plays were adapted to suit the new Restoration aesthetic and staging styles.

If scenery is a product of the seventeenth century, stage directions that indicate where a scene takes place are a product of the eighteenth century. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe produced the first scholarly edition of Shakespeare's works, complete with an introductory essay about Shakespeare's life and career. This prompted a flurry of editions: by Alexander Pope in 1725, Lewis Theobald in 1726 and 1734, Thomas Hanmer in 1743–4, and William Warburton in 1747. These editors introduced many of the stage directions that remain in Shakespeare editions today. But their stages were large, as were their theater companies, and do not reflect Elizabethan practice. In Rowe's Measure for Measure Act 1, scene 1 takes place in “A palace”; scene 2 in “The street”; scene 3 in “A monastery”; and scene 4 in “A nunnery.” By the nineteenth century we can find editions of As You Like It that specify Scene: The forest; Scene: Another part of the forest. But Shakespeare's plays do not take place in a palace or a forest; they take place on a bare stage. The introduction of scenery necessitated the introduction of stage directions that specified changes of scene.

Although the Elizabethan theater did not have scenery as we understand it, it had many ways of setting the scene. The theater manager Philip Henslowe includes in his 1598 inventory of properties “the city of Rome” (presumably for Mephistopheles' and Faustus's visit in Marlowe's Dr Faustus); another equally ambitious prop—“the cloth of the Sun and Moon”—indicates how these background scenes were presented: on painted backcloths. But backcloths like these are infrequent in Henslowe's inventory, which is more typically populated with large props: Tantalus's tree, a rainbow for Iris, several tombs (distinguished by owner: the tomb of Guido, the tomb of Dido), a great horse (possibly the Trojan horse for a play about Troy), a cauldron (for Marlowe's The Jew of Malta), a dragon (for Dr Faustus) and a hellmouth (presumably also for Faustus).

The Elizabethan stage had an overhead “heavens” (so called because it was painted with the signs of the zodiac) which housed winching machinery from which props and people could descend. Large props such as beds could be pushed in and out from a door or doors at the center back of the stage; a bed thrust forth is a common stage direction (Philip Henslowe's 1598 inventory of the props belonging to the Admiral's Men contains “1 bedstead”). A key prop tells us where we are just as much as realistic background scenery.

Small hand-held props and costumes also indicate location. A mirror and a hairbrush indicate a lady's (and sometimes a man's) chamber; a napkin from which one brushes imaginary crumbs indicates that the character has just finished dinner; spurred boots indicate a travel scene. Stage directions that require characters to enter “as from bed,” “as from hunting,” “as in prison,” “as in his study” use costumes and small props to set the scene: a nightgown implies a bed, a hawk on a wrist implies an open field; gyves imply a cell; books on a table imply a backdrop of bookcases.[1] But as these examples show, one of the most important instruments of scene-setting was the actor's body. It is the actor's actions rather than the props that do the work: As it were brushing the crumbs from his clothes with a napkin, as newly risen from supper (Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, 2.1.181). It is not clear in this example whether the napkin actually exists or is governed grammatically by the hypothesis “as it were.”

Shakespeare's plays are sparse in stage directions. The usual explanation is that because he was a sharer in his company he was on hand to instruct; thus, detailed stage directions were not necessary. This may well be true. It is notable that his early plays (before he was a sharer) and his late plays (when he was in semi-retirement—did he sell his shares to buy the Gatehouse in 1610?) contain more detailed instructions, such as The Tempest's Solemne and strange Musicke: and Prosper on the top (invisible:) Enter severall strange shapes, bringing in a Banket [banquet]; and dance about it with gentle actions of salutations, and inviting the King, &c. to eate, they depart (Act 3, scene 3; we quote from the Folio, TLN 1535–8). But masques of the period are also characterized by detailed stage directions; the masque-like qualities of his late plays are perhaps indebted to this. And Elizabethan writers were generally fluid in their staging requirements. At the end of Robert Greene's Alphonsus of Aragon we find the direction: Exit Venus; or, if you can conveniently, let a chair come down from the top of the stage and draw her up (ll. 2109–10). Probably something equally imaginative lies behind the many stage directions in Elizabethan drama that state simply “Exit X.”

With its large props and descending chairs, the Elizabethan stage was an intensely visual space. Chariots are a spectacular feature in both George Peele's Battle of Alcazar and Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, written within a year of each other. We must not underestimate the dramatic effect of such items on a small stage. When the Rose theater on the south bank of the Thames was excavated in 1989, it turned out to have a small, lozenge-shaped stage: the stage was 37′ 6″ wide at the back, tapering to 24′ 9″ at the front, and 15′ 6″ at its deepest (subsequent Elizabethan rebuilding work moved the stage further north but did not much alter its size). When Tamburlaine in his chariot has an eighteen-line speech of ambitious visions—“still climbing after knowledge infinite, / And always moving as the restless spheres” (2.7.12–29)—he speaks the Neoplatonic language of upward movement to divinity. However, the only possible movement for his chariot on the small Rose stage is circular. The stage picture undercuts the verbal effect: we hear the language of endless ascent but what we see is a character going nowhere. Thus, props help establish the setting but, unlike a backcloth, they can also be thematically integrated into the play's meaning (see Myth 27).

It is often said jokingly that the prologue to Henry V shows Shakespeare wishing that someone would invent Hollywood film: “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them” (Prologue 26; see Myth 26). The Chorus to Act 4 apologizes that “we shall much disgrace, / With four or five most vile and ragged foils, / Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous, / The name of Agincourt” (4.0.49–52). But in the theater you only apologize for your most reliable effects. Shakespeare clearly had complete confidence in his language's ability to suggest cavalries and his actors' ability to turn four or five weapons into an epic battle.

Shakespeare's plays are interested in the visual effects and scene-setting that can be created by actors' bodies, especially processions and procedures. An unusually lengthy and detailed stage direction at the opening of Titus Andronicus indicates what the stage should look like (we reproduce the direction as it appears in the quarto):

Sound Drums and Trumpets, and then enter two of Titus sonnes, and then two men bearing a Coffin covered with black, then two other sonnes, then Titus Andronicus, and then Tamora the Queene of Gothes and her two sonnes Chiron and Demetrius, [actually three sons, including Alarbus] with Aron the More, and others as many as can be, then set downe the Coffin, and Titus speakes.

The scene begins with ceremonial sounds (“Drums and Trumpets”). The processional order is precisely choreographed with a series of “then”s, a marker of temporal sequence functioning simultaneously as a spatial marker. Action is specified: “then set downe the Coffin.” Only then do we get speech. Shakespeare is very focused on the stage picture. 1 Henry VI, a few years earlier, opens with a ceremonial funeral procession interrupted by a succession of three messengers rushing onstage to deliver increasingly bad news about lost French territory. Both these examples are from opening scenes—scenes that indicate location by establishing occasion (a funeral in Henry VI, a triumph in Titus) and mood (formal in both).

This is not just true of opening scenes. Kneeling structures an entire scene in Richard II when the Duchess of York, on her knees, begs the newly crowned Henry IV to forgive her traitorous son, Aumerle; her husband, the Duke of York, also on his knees, begs Henry to punish the traitor. Both refuse to rise until Henry has granted their wish. (In fact, it is not clear that they ever do rise to their feet. Sheldon Zitner suggests we should import a stage direction from Sheridan's The Critic: Exit kneeling.[2]) Shakespeare does not just write speeches; he writes stage pictures. And in Titus, 1 Henry VI, and Richard II the stage pictures are created not by scenery but by actors' bodies.

Modern productions provide many examples of the spectacular visual effects that can be achieved by the actor's body. Barry Kyle's production of Two Noble Kinsmen opened Stratford's Swan Theatre in 1987. Imogen Stubbs played the Jailer's daughter and in her first mad scene she entered from rear stage right in a handstand; she walked on her hands across the long diagonal to front stage left, singing a mad song. It was not just a memorable image but one that expressed the upside-down, topsy-turvy world view of the madwoman more succinctly than any “special effect” could have done. On stage, the actor's body is a special effect. Marlowe uses actors' bodies in a similarly imaginative way in Dr Faustus when Mephistopheles transforms two of the clowns into an ape and a dog. The transformation is effected by the actors' talents at animal imitation.

But Shakespeare has another scene-setting tactic at his disposal: language. He often begins a scene with a discussion of location. (This is one of the reasons his plays transfer so well to radio.) “What country, friends, is this?” asks the shipwrecked Viola in Twelfth Night. “This is Illyria, lady,” responds the sea captain, orienting both Viola and the audience (1.2.1–2). At this stage we do not know who Viola is, nor who the captain is, nor have we been given a name for either. But we know one thing: where we are. “What sport shall we devise here in this garden / To drive away the heavy thought of care” asks the Queen in Richard II, 3.4.1. “Well, this is the forest of Ardenne” says Rosalind in As You Like It (2.4.13). The line both sets the tone (“huh” might be an accurate paraphrase; she is not yet impressed. Or perhaps the tone is one of exploratory wonder?) and sets the scene.

We see the same throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream. “Here's a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal” says Peter Quince at the start of Act 3. “This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake our tiring-house” (3.1.2–4). The line is not just an economic way of setting the scene but part of a play-long joke in which Shakespeare contrasts his artistry in creating scenes with the literal approach of the mechanicals. In their playlet the mechanicals can see no way to indicate that a scene takes place at night except by bringing in moonshine (quite literally: they use an actor to play the man in the moon), or that there is an impediment to the lovers meeting except by bringing in a physical wall. When the mechanicals meet to rehearse, Shakespeare extends the joke: the green plot that Quince indicates for use as a stage is actually a bare stage that he has first imagined as a green plot; the hawthorn brake that he presses into use as a tiring-house is actually a tiring-house that the audience and actors are imagining is a hawthorn brake. Even this early in his career, then, Shakespeare is showing his audiences alternatives to literal stage representation; not for him a backcloth representing “the city of Rome” or “a wood outside Athens.” The Victorian and Edwardian spectacles of directors such as Herbert Beerbohm Tree would have been his worst nightmare. Beerbohm Tree's 1900 production of Midsummer Night's Dream showed the moon rising over the Acropolis, presented an entire corps de ballet of fairies in tutus sitting on ascending mushrooms, and had live bunnies hopping across the stage. He staged the pastoral of The Winter's Tale with a woodland glade, a shepherd's cottage, and a babbling brook; his Tempest opened with a replica Elizabethan ship and a realistic storm; his Merchant of Venice recreated a Renaissance Venetian ghetto. To create further realism where Shakespeare had unaccountably omitted it, he added the staging of the Magna Carta to King John and the coronation of Anne Bullen to Henry VIII. This is Shakespeare as directed by Peter Quince.

Notes

[1] Alan Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); id., Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

[2] Shelden P. Zitner, “Aumerle's Conspiracy,” Studies in English Literature, 14 (1974), pp. 239–57.

Myth 9

Shakespeare's tragedies are more serious than his comedies

Surely this one is a no-brainer. A story such as King Lear, in which a king is rejected by his daughters, loses his power, and descends into madness and then death must be counted more serious than one about the farcical confusions ensuing when two sets of twins converge on the same city (The Comedy of Errors) and one of them almost sleeps with the other's wife. The playwright George Bernard Shaw denounced Shakespeare's comedies as commercial “potboilers which he frankly called As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and What You Will [the alternative title for Twelfth Night].”[1] According to Shaw, then, the very titles of the comedies betray their intrinsic superficiality. And it's not only Shakespeare's tragedies that are assumed to be more serious than his comedies, but the two genres themselves. The nature of tragedy is part of one of the foundational documents of Western culture—Aristotle's fourth-century BC treatise Poetics, which states that “tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude.” No such ur-text of comic theory exists, although Umberto Eco's medieval whodunit The Name of the Rose turns on the existence of Aristotle's lost tract on comedy, which Eco imagines as a document feared by the church because it gave philosophical backing to comedy's anti-authoritarian impulses. George Puttenham, writing a manual for would-be poets called The Arte of English Poesie (1589), evaluated the differences between comedy and tragedy in terms that collapse literary, social, and stylistic categories. According to Puttenham, comedies deal with “common behaviours … of private persons, and such as were the meaner sort of men,” whereas tragic writers “meddled not with so base matters: for they set forth the doleful falls of infortunate & afflicted Princes.”[2] Comedy's “base matter” and its socially inferior protagonists compare unfavorably with the regal and “doleful” tragedy.

There is no doubt that Shakespeare's tragedies embrace weighty philosophical, personal, and political themes. Macbeth, for example, circles incessantly around issues of guilt and of manliness as it repeatedly poses questions about who or what is in charge of our actions. Is Macbeth driven by his own “vaulting ambition” (1.7.27), or by the goading encouragement of his wife, or by the “supernatural soliciting” (1.3.129) of the Weird Sisters? In dramatic form Shakespeare is presenting significant philosophical debates about agency associated elsewhere with the writings of Machiavelli and Hobbes. In Julius Caesar, as in Richard II and Richard III, the question is the nature of good rule, and this insistent political issue swirls around Shakespeare's tragedies. It is not simply because they have further to fall that tragic characters are princes and emperors, but because their actions combine the public and private, and their sphere of influence is the polis rather than the household. Tragedy, wrote the Elizabethan courtier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, “openeth the greatest wounds and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue,” and “maketh kings fear to be tyrants and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours.”[3] It's a picture of tragedy that sees it intimately involved in anatomizing court corruption, imagined as the ulcer beneath the skin or rich clothing—a role akin, perhaps, to satire. Hamlet's play “The Mousetrap” would fit Sidney's definition admirably.

We tend now to value tragedies not because they depict great men—Aristotle prescribed that a tragedy must concern “one who is highly renowned and prosperous”—but rather because they show us more universal experiences (see Myth 29). That Hamlet is a prince is downplayed in most modern productions, which often show him, as in Rory Kinnear's portrayal at the National Theatre directed by Nicholas Hytner in 2010, dressed in a studenty hoody rather than a princely doublet (see Myth 3). Rather, his appeal is as a man struggling with grief at the death of his father, and with his own place in a familial and social structure after that life-changing event. Similarly, that Lear is a king seems irrelevant compared with his role as father and as a man losing his powers as he ages: the politics of the union of the kingdoms and the parable of the dangers of national division which spoke to King James's unionist aspirations when the play was first performed have lost their edge. Again, the relationship between husband and wife in Macbeth seems important to us in psychological terms and the “barren sceptre” (3.1.63) that haunts their marriage is freighted more with emotional than political and dynastic resonance. Shakespeare's tragedies occupy particular life-stages and achieve a wider significance through the echoes of his characters' experiences, if not their social situation, in his audiences.

That Shakespeare's tragedies obviously address serious and significant themes in public and private life need not mean that his comedies are correspondingly insubstantial: Shaw's dismissal of the comedies as vacuously populist needs some modification. The later twentieth century has taught us that comedy and its physiological response, laughter, are neither neutral nor benign, but expressive of violent and dominating energies. Unacceptable, aggressive, or sexual desires are sublimated in telling jokes, Freud asserts in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Consider the wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream to which the lovers escape from the repression of Athenian life: like the joke itself, this space offers a release which is both comic and terrifying. Performances often double the repressed Athenian rulers Theseus and Hippolyta with their fairy counterparts Oberon and Titania, making the passionate dispute in the woodland world which disrupts the “mazèd world” (2.1.113) into the expressive obverse—perhaps the unconscious—of Theseus's winning his Amazonian bride “doing thee injuries” (1.1.17). Dark, dangerous desires can be rehearsed in the frightening freedom of the wood: dreams, as Hermia finds when in sleep “methought a serpent ate my heart away, / And you sat smiling at his cruel prey” (2.2.155–6), are full of what Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Nashe called “the terrors of the night”: Nashe proposes that there is “no such figure of the first chaos whereout the world was extraught [extracted] as our dreams in the night. In them all states, all sexes, all places are confounded, and meet together.”[4] An influential book by the Polish theater director Jan Kott described A Midsummer Night's Dream, often considered an innocent, rustic depiction of a fairy world and a play particularly suitable for children, as Shakespeare's “most truthful, brutal and violent play” in which sexual desire is violently dehumanized in the interchangeability of the lovers and the animal transformation of Bottom; Kott's vision lay behind Peter Brook's landmark production of the play at Stratford-upon-Avon, which stripped the conventional rustic frou-frou from the staging and set the play on swinging trapezes in a white-painted box.[5]

In Shakespeare's plays we tend to be encouraged to laugh at (Dogberry's verbal mix-ups in Much Ado About Nothing, Malvolio's cross-garters in Twelfth Night), rather than with: such laughter is, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it a half-century after Shakespeare, an attack of self-satisfaction, either of pleasure in “some sudden act” of one's own, or “the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof [we] suddenly applaud ourselves.”[6] “Laughter,” writes Henri Bergson at the beginning of the twentieth century, “is a corrective.”[7] In showing us our own aggression, comedy is a serious business, based on a complicated form of recognition and on forms of social control. Shakespeare did not, unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, leave us any theoretical writings on drama, so perhaps Jonson's own description of comedy showing “an image of the times,” showing “human follies” rather than “crimes”—“such errors as you'll all confess / By laughing at them, they deserve no less” (Every Man in His Humour, 1598)—can stand in.

Comedies can thus deal with serious themes. Let's look again at The Comedy of Errors, the apparently light and farcical play cited at the head of this myth as the fall-guy to King Lear's evident superiority in seriousness. Like King Lear, The Comedy of Errors is deeply concerned with questions of identity and selfhood. Just as Lear descends into madness when his daughters Goneril and Regan do not acknowledge him as their father, so too the twin Antipholuses and Dromios enter a world of madness when they are repeatedly mistaken for one another. As Adriana, wife to his brother, berates him for his lack of care to her, the bewildered Antipholus of Syracuse wonders “what error drives our eyes and ears amiss?” (2.2.187). Error here has a stronger connotation than our modern sense of “mistake”: it is, as in Book 1 of Edmund Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene (1590), a terrifying condition of spiritual and intellectual wandering (from the Latin verb errare, to wander astray). When Antipholus of Ephesus returns to his own house only to have his way barred by a servant telling him he cannot enter because he is already inside at dinner, the comedy of mistaken identity becomes an existential exploration: how do we know we are ourselves, if those nearest to us do not recognize us or if they tell us we are someone other than we believe ourselves to be? John Mortimer's observation that “farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute”[8] is appropriate to The Comedy of Errors: while the tragedies may approach similar themes they do so in a more consciously dilated and reflective way, whereas the comedy hurtles through the same difficult territory at breakneck speed.

To take another example of the overlap between comic and tragic treatments of the same theme: in both genres Shakespeare depicts the destructive effect of male sexual jealousy. In Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio is persuaded by the malevolent Don John that his bride-to-be Hero has been unfaithful on her wedding night, and he denounces her publicly. In Othello Iago works on the credulous Othello to make him believe his wife Desdemona is a “lewd minx” (3.3.478). Despite the fact that both women are the blameless victims of male rivalry and manipulation, death is their punishment. In Hero's case, it is a faked death but one which nevertheless has the force of ritual purgation. Reconciled with Claudio at the end of the play she tells him that “One Hero died defiled, but I do live, / And surely as I live, I am a maid” (5.4.63–4). For Desdemona there is no such “resurrection”: although she revives briefly in the bed on which her husband has smothered her, it is only to acquit him of blame for her murder. The theme is taken up again in one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote, The Winter's Tale. This play belongs to a group of Jacobean comedies whose combination of generic elements, use of the fantastical or supernatural, and more extended chronologies across generations mean they are often called “romances.” In it Leontes, the King of Sicilia, becomes convinced that his wife Hermione has been unfaithful with his friend Polixenes. He puts her on trial for treacherous adultery and banishes the child he believes a bastard, but when the Delphic oracle brands him a “jealous tyrant” (3.2.133) and both Hermione and his son Mamillius die, he repents, acknowledges “our shame perpetual,” and vows that “tears … shall be my recreation” (3.2.238–9). So far, so Othello. But the difference here is that the play is not over. Leontes is a tragic character who is not allowed the comfort of suicide—like Othello—and a jealous character who is not permitted timely resolution—like Claudio. He has to live with his terrible mistakes. A comic, pastoral second half, set after a sixteen-year gap, sees the courtship of Perdita—the lost child of Leontes and Hermione—by Florizel—son of Polixenes. This new couple are to heal the breach in their parents' generation. Back in Sicilia, the family is reunited, and, wonder of wonders, Hermione is returned to life. This final treatment of male jealousy goes beyond tragedy, and shows us that what is on the other side is a version of comedy, ending in marriage and reconciliation. As elsewhere in his career, it seems that Shakespeare's commitment is less to the differences between comedy and tragedy than to their continuities and overlaps. As Dr Johnson put it, “Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind but in one composition.”[9]

Notes

[1] Edwin Wilson (ed.), Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw's Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 79.

[2] George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 25–6.

[3] Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry; or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Thomas Nelson, 1964), p. 117.

[4] www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Nashe/Terrors_Night.pdf (page 11, accessed 18 February 2012).

[5] Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 178.

[6] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 43.

[7] Henri Bergson, Le Rire (1900), trans. F. Rothwell as Laughter, in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 74.

[8] Georges Feydeau, A Flea in Her Ear, trans. John Mortimer (Old Vic theater program, 1986).

[9] Quoted in Emma Smith (ed.), Blackwell Guides to Criticism: Shakespeare's Tragedies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 19.

Myth 10

Shakespeare hated his wife

Shakespeare's will is a tantalizing document in many respects. Dated 25 March 1616, preserved in the National Archives in Kew, and prepared by his lawyer Frances Collins, it is three pages long and a second draft, showing amendments and corrections.[1] It contains half the extant examples of Shakespeare's signature we know about—one on each page—and paleographical analysis has suggested that the signatory was weak and ailing.[2] (Shakespeare died a month after signing his will.) Perhaps unexpectedly, there is no mention of any books or papers in the property to be dispersed (any playscripts would, of course, have remained the property of the King's Men: see Myth 4). Unlike some other self-made men Shakespeare is not particularly philanthropic in disposing of his property to charitable causes: the actor Edward Alleyn, for instance, had endowed Dulwich College and left money for the building of ten almshouses in Southwark at his death in 1626, and compared with this generosity the £10 left by Shakespeare for the poor of Stratford is derisory. Shakespeare seems instead to have favored his daughter Susanna and her respectable husband, the Stratford doctor John Hall, over her younger sister Judith, whose ne'er-do-well husband had recently come before the church courts for getting a local woman pregnant before he was married. Shakespeare makes small gifts to friends from Stratford and from the theater world in London, singling out fellow King's Men Richard Burbage, John Heminge, and Henry Condell for gifts to buy mourning rings. But it is for one of the will's final provisions that it is most famous. An inserted clause squeezed into a space between the lines reads: “Item. I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture.” Anne Hathaway, it seems, was only mentioned at all as an afterthought, and that a niggardly one: a second-best bed as a reward for three children and more than three decades of marriage? Surely this is evidence that Shakespeare despised his wife and wished to use his will to express this animosity?

Figure 3 The will shows the bequest to Anne as an insertion—an afterthought?

Reproduced by permission of the National Archives.

Maybe. What has made the second-best bed story so compelling in a narrative of Shakespeare's unhappy marriage is the way it can be made to correspond with other things we think we know about the relationship between William and Anne. First, their marriage itself. Because Anne was evidently pregnant at the time of their marriage late in 1582 (their first child, Susanna, was born six months later), and because the marriage was conducted not in the usual way, by having banns announced on successive Sundays, but by license from the Bishop of Worcester, perhaps suggesting particular haste, biographers have been keen to sense reluctance or compulsion on the bridegroom's part. There is even an apparent error by a diocesan clerk who wrote the name of the bride as “Anne Whateley”—a romantic but entirely fanciful line of speculation constructs this mysterious person as the third point in a love triangle: the two Annes and Shakespeare. Added to this, Anne Hathaway was—gosh—older than her husband. As the usually rather dry biographer Samuel Schoenbaum puts it, the “unambiguous testimony” is that Anne was “seven or eight years her husband's senior, and twenty-six in 1582; by the standards of those days, growing a bit long in the tooth for the marriage market. She took a teen-aged lover, became pregnant, and married him.”[3]

Stephen Dedalus puts it more colorfully, in the punning and allusive style so characteristic of James Joyce's Ulysses:

He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.[4]

The parallel is with the unwilling Adonis, wooed by the amorous goddess Venus in Shakespeare's first, and highly popular, erotic narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593). Further fuel is the mention of a £2 debt, money lent to Anne Shakespeare, in the will of a Stratford shepherd Thomas Whittington, which seems to suggest that her husband kept her short of money. The marriage was empty and loveless, the biographical consensus has often been, and it is therefore no wonder that Shakespeare hot-footed it to London to leave behind this unwanted family. Poor Shakespeare (trapped unwillingly), or, if you prefer, Bad Shakespeare (treating his dependent family cruelly).

In fact, Shakespeare kept strong connections with Stratford throughout his life, buying property there, including New Place in 1597, and maintaining business relationships. Conversely, he did not buy property in London until the very end of his career, living instead in a series of lodgings, and so it is by no means evident that he turned his back on his family or made his settled life in London without them. Literary evidence for a warmer relationship between husband and wife has also been proposed, including the suggestion that one of the less accomplished poems gathered in his collection of sonnets, first published in 1609, is an early work addressing Anne in the cryptic phrase “hate away”:

Those lips that Love's own hand did make

Breathed forth the sound that said “I hate”

To me that languish'd for her sake;

But when she saw my woeful state

Straight in her heart did mercy come,

Chiding that tongue that ever sweet

Was used in giving gentle doom,

And taught it thus anew to greet:

“I hate” she alter'd with an end,

That follow'd it as gentle day

Doth follow night, who, like a fiend,

From heaven to hell is flown away.

“I hate” from hate away she threw,

And saved my life, saying “not you.”

(Sonnet 145)

If so, their relationship is cast in an unfamiliar light, with a speaker who “languish'd for her sake” in place of the unwilling suitor often imagined by biographers (the conventions of sonnets are important cautions here: see Myth 18).

Of course we can't know the secrets of the Shakespeares' marriage—nor, with our modern Western idealization of marriage as a union of minds as well as bodies, can we understand the perhaps more pragmatic early modern expectations of this relationship. Renaissance commentators were more inclined to discuss male–male friendship in the intimate and affectionate terms we might now reserve for romantic partnerships. As Michel de Montaigne put it in his Essays, translated into English in 1603 in a version we know Shakespeare consulted extensively (see Myth 2), “If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed, but by answering: Because it was he, because it was my self.”[5] Many of Shakespeare's comedies dramatize marriage as the painful severing of strong male affections, such as the idealized boyhood relationship between Leontes and Polixenes in The Winter's Tale, who “as twinned lambs that did frisk i'th sun” “tripped” from this innocence only when women entered the frame (1.2.69, 77). Similarly, it is no accident that when in Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick swears his love for Beatrice, and bids her demand anything of him, her answer is the terse “Kill Claudio” (4.1.290): Benedick must kill his best friend to be with his lover.

But if we cannot see the secrets of the marriage bed (best or second-best), we can be conscious of the cultural operations of the myth of the wife who does not understand her genius husband. Germaine Greer titles the first chapter in her spirited defense of Anne Hathaway against misogynistic assumptions based on very little evidence “considering the poor reputation of wives generally, in particular the wives of literary men, and the traditional disparagement of the wife of the Man of the Millennium”: Greer deftly points out that the depiction of a foolish, contrary, scolding, or generally unsympathetic wife is one of the tropes of literary biography and thus part of the ideological construction of male creative genius.[6]

The second-best bed thus chimes with a whole range of other scattered facts in Shakespeare's biography and helps to turn them into a narrative of an unhappy marriage, usually one in which the teenage Shakespeare cannot be blamed. Attempts by scholars trying to defend Shakespeare from the charge of mistreating his wife have suggested that the second-best bed in a Jacobean household would be the marital bed, with the best bed being reserved for guests, and that therefore the bequest was a romantic one: the sentimental biographer A.L. Rowse asserted that it was an act of great care and generosity to his wife, in response to Katherine Duncan-Jones's view of the bequest's “shabbiness.”[7] Carol Ann Duffy's sonnet “Anne Hathaway” develops Rowse's interpretation in sensual style: “The bed we loved in was a spinning world / of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas / where he would dive for pearls” (ll. 1–3).[8] Or apologists have stressed the residual rights payable to widows, at least by London custom, or assumed that Shakespeare knew his wife would be cared for by Susanna and John. The arguments here, as so often, tend to proceed from the desired conclusion back to review the evidence, rather than vice versa.

If we cannot know whether Shakespeare's bequest of his second-best bed to his wife in 1616 was evidence of his disregard for her, does this matter? Not for Shakespeare the playwright. As Myths 7, 12, and 18 show, neither Shakespeare nor any of his contemporary dramatists was writing autobiographically. A mainstay of humanist models of learning, much copied in grammar-school curricula such as that at the King's New School in Stratford, was known as utramque partem (on either side of the question). This training in being able to argue from both points of view was formative for the generations who wrote for, and attended, the new Elizabethan theaters, since it introduced them to a rhetorical narrative form in which different perspectives were always simultaneously present. We cannot readily deduce anything about Shakespeare the man from Shakespeare the works, and even at those moments when the writing may seem most confessional, it is shaped by convention, artifice, and imagination (see Myth 18). So looking at attitudes to wives in Shakespeare's plays, or trying to draw out the way he deals with women, cannot help us.

Greer observes that the spectacle of an active, perhaps more worldly or experienced woman wooing a more naïf or tongue-tied young man is, in Shakespeare's comedies, a source of erotic and dramatic satisfaction (think of Rosalind seducing Orlando in As You Like It, or the attraction of Portia for Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice). Greer's biographical application of this observation to the Shakespeare–Hathaway relationship has to be as off-limits, argumentatively, as the assumptions of earlier biographers that the frequent depictions of male sexual jealousy in Shakespeare's plays (in Othello, or The Winter's Tale, or Cymbeline) told us something about Anne Hathaway's assumed infidelity, or, as in Stephen Dedalus's analysis above, that the reluctant Adonis tells us something about the courtship of Anne and William. And in any case, Shakespeare's plays would always furnish contradictory examples: Shakespeare's women range from the demure Ophelia to the charismatic Cleopatra, and from the unconventional Katherine (The Taming of the Shrew) to the wronged Innogen in Cymbeline. It would be hard to know which to select to build a biographical reading.

Notes

[1] See http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/museum/item.asp?item_id=21

[2] Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 297.

[3] Ibid., p. 82.

[4] James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 183.

[5] Michel de Montaigne, The essays or morall, politike and militarie discourses of Michaell de Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1603): ‘On Friendship’, p. 92 (sig. I4v).

[6] Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 1.

[7] This particular skirmish was in the Times Literary Supplement, 18 and 25 November 1994.

[8] Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife (London: Picador, 1999), p. 30.

Myth 11

Shakespeare wrote in the rhythms of everyday speech

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur “Thou still unravished bride of quietness”, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary. I know this because the texture, rhythm and resonance of your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning … Your language draws attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like “Don't you know the drivers are on strike?” do not.[1]

Terry Eagleton's example of the literary, the first line of Keats's poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, is also an example of the most common metrical pattern in Shakespeare's writing: iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter structures a pattern of five paired unstressed/STRESSED syllables that we usually render as “de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM”: hence “Thou STILL unRAVished BRIDE of QUIetNESS.” There are thousands of iambic pentameter lines in Shakespeare: “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks” (Romeo and Juliet 2.1.44) or “When I do count the clock that tells the time” (Sonnet 12) or “If music be the food of love, play on” (Twelfth Night 1.1.1) or “False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (Macbeth 1.7.82). But iambic pentameter shows up, as many critics have pointed out, in lots of everyday situations too: “We hold these truths to be self-evident” (the first line of the American Declaration of Independence); “the baffled king composing Hallelujah” (Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah”); “A skinny cappuccino, please, to go” (us, in Starbucks). On the one hand, iambic pentameter is part of a package of qualities epitomizing the literary; on the other hand, it crops up in prose, popular song, and everyday speech. Which is it?

An example from Shakespeare may help us answer that question. Stage directions in Shakespeare's plays are always in prose. In the first quarto edition of King Lear (1608) we find the following direction for Regan to stab a servant: Shee takes a sword and runs at him behind (H2r). The theater person who prepared the version which reached print many years later in 1623 reduced the direction to the essential: Killes him (TLN 2155), which gets the job done. The quarto simply offers extra details about the way in which the killing is staged. But it adds something else too: a line of poetry. The quarto stage direction is a perfect example of iambic pentameter. Is this an example of Shakespeare at work, having penned dialogue in iambic pentameter and not switched off the rhythm when he wrote the stage direction? Or is it another example of the poetic rhythms of everyday speech? Of course, it's both.

Writing about poetic forms, Derek Attridge describes pentameter verse as having “a relatively weak rhythmic architecture, neither dividing into half-lines nor forming larger units. It can be rhymed or unrhymed, stanzaic or continuous. It makes no use of virtual beats [silent beats implied by the rhythmic pattern].” “These characteristics,” writes Attridge “make it particularly suited to the evocation of speech and thought.”[2]

Shakespeare can use iambic pentameter lines as part of formal, literary, heightened language, or as an indication of more conversational speech. Let's consider the exchange between Juliet and her Nurse about the unexpected guest at the Capulets' party:

Nurse: His name is Romeo, and a Montague,

The only son of your great enemy.

Juliet: My only love sprung from my only hate!

(1.5.135–7)

This is poetic iambic pentameter but it is also idiomatic conversation. The Nurse offers information: Romeo's names, his parentage. But it is also highly patterned: Juliet's one-line response is structured as an antithesis and a paradox. The effect here is as much to do with vocabulary and word order as with rhythm.

This kind of variety operates not only within dialogue but within each pentameter line. Iambic pentameter is always tipping towards the stressed beat, so its cadence moves quickly: inverting that rhythm is preemptive, eager. Richard's well-known opening “NOW is the winter of our discontent” (Richard III 1.1.1) suggests, in its stressed first syllable, that just as he can seize the expected meter, so he will seize the throne. When Juliet, awaiting Romeo, speaks the inverted “GALlop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” (3.2.1), her impatience reveals itself metrically: she cannot wait for the stressed syllable. Other variations on the iambic pentameter include syllabic ones: Hamlet's most famous line “To be, or not to be; that is the question” (3.1.58) ends on an extra unstressed syllable (sometimes this is called a “feminine” ending). Perhaps this is suggestive of the unfinished nature of Hamlet's thought here. (Cicely Berry, veteran voice coach of the Royal Shakespeare Company, suggests that these additional syllables “occur less frequently in the histories where action is more definite, perhaps swifter and less considered.”[2])

Lines are broken between speakers, often suggestive of powerful, even sexual, awareness of each other's rhythm: the first encounter between Katherine and Petruccio in The Taming of the Shrew, for instance, or the taut exchanges between Angelo and Isabella in Measure for Measure. The tension between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as they absorb, jumpily, the aftermath of Duncan's murder, is enacted through the suspension between them of a pentameter line:

Did you not speak?

When?

Now.

As I descended?

(2.2.16)

The scene's rhythms are further punctuated by the insistent knocking at the castle doors. In an essay on the play, the Romantic poet and opium addict Thomas de Quincey noted that this knocking wakes the playworld from the dreamlike trance in which the murder takes place: but the beat of the pentameter is a more subtle version of the same thing: “the pulses of life are beginning to beat again.”[4] That iambic pentameter has a beat like the human heart is a nice conceit—and it is helpful to try to connect poetic rhythm with physiological ones (but it's a rather Anglocentric view: other languages have quite different poetic meters even as their speakers have the same somatic ones).

If iambic pentameter is not an English bodily phenomenon, neither is it an English dramatic tradition. Elizabethan playwrights did not have a history of iambic pentameter plays. Medieval mystery plays were composed in a variety of stanzaic structures; aural unity was partly achieved through alliteration. Mid-sixteenth-century interludes and comedies were often written in rhyming couplets. Gammer Gurton's Needle (published 1575 but probably written in the reign of Mary or Edward) gives us an example from university drama: “Alas, Hodge, alas! I may well curse and ban / This day, that ever I saw it, with Gib and the milk-pan”; 1.4.1–2).[5] At the end of the century the successful professional company, the Queen's Men, were performing the flat-footed “fourteeners” (a line of seven stressed syllables) of Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (published 1599). Listen to this dialogue between Juliana and Sir Clamydes in the play's first scene:

Juliana: My faith and troth if what is said by me thou dost perform.

Clamydes: If not, be sure, O Lady, with my life I never will return.

Juliana: Then, as thou seemst in thine attire a virgin's knight to be, Take thou this shield likewise of white, and bear thy name by me.

The problem is obvious: the long fourteener unavoidably breaks into two parts and becomes jog trot.

It was Christopher Marlowe who established blank verse (“blank” because it does not rhyme) as the medium of dramatic poetry and exploited the range of the more fluid pentameter line. He announced his innovation in the prologue to Tamburlaine (1587):

From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,

We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,

Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine

Threatening the world with high astounding terms.

He distances himself from earlier drama both in subject matter (he promises soldiers not clowns) and in sound (he promises not rhymes but rhetoric: “high astounding terms”). It was an acoustic paradigm shift. Thereafter almost every dramatist of the early 1590s tried to sound like Marlowe: Peele, Greene, Nashe, Shakespeare, Anon. And it is not just authors who are aware of the sound of Tamburlaine (the hero and the play); literary characters themselves frequently mention what it is like to hear, or talk like, Tamburlaine. Simon Eyre, shoemaker-turned-mayor in Thomas Dekker's comedy The Shoemaker's Holiday, says he is not nervous about meeting royalty because he “knows how to speak to a Pope, to Sultan Soliman, to Tamburlaine and [if] he were here” (20.59–60).[6]

Eyre means, primarily, that he can hold his own in terms of tone and vocabulary. But other literary characters are equally sensitive to poetry and prose rhythms and the differences between the two. In George Peele's The Old Wife's Tale (1595) a character who has just spoken in hexameter verse (verse of six stressed syllables) says, “I'll now set my countenance and to her in prose” (l. 641).[7] When Orlando greets Ganymede/Rosalind in As You Like It—“Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind!”—Jaques takes this as his cue to exit: “Nay, then, God b'wi'you an you talk in blank verse” (4.1.29–30). Jaques has just been conversing with Rosalind in prose; he draws the audience's attention to the fact that the scene is now changing register from (satiric) prose to (Petrarchan) poetry. Rosalind is similarly sensitive poetically when Celia first quotes Orlando's love poems to her: she criticizes them for being hyper-metrical (having “more feet than the verses would bear”; 3.2.162–3). And in this play even the goatherd Audrey wonders what “poetical” means. When Benedick tries to write a love poem in a play written almost entirely in prose, Much Ado, he is aware of literary precedent: classical lovers like Leander and Troilus “still run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse” (5.2.32–3). Blank verse is synonymous with poetry. When the players arrive in Elsinore, Hamlet anticipates that the boy actor playing the lady “shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for't” (2.2.326–7). In other words, if she is censored or interrupted, the lines will not scan.

It is interesting to note the dates of these three Shakespeare plays; they cluster together in the period 1598–1600. These are plays in which the characters are intensely aware of the relations between drama and life; part of that awareness is a self-consciousness about sound. In the same period, in Julius Caesar (1599), Cassius comments on the inept rhymes of the poet who has entered with a couplet to try to reconcile Cassius and Brutus: “How vilely doth this cynic rhyme!” (4.2.185).[8] Brutus agrees, calling the poet a “jigging fool” (4.2.189)—a pejorative phrase like Marlowe's “jigging wits” (the RSC Shakespeare edition glosses it as “rhyming in a jerky and metrically unsophisticated manner”; our italics). As the RSC gloss indicates (and our italics emphasize), references to rhyme are often in tandem with references to meter. They are part of an awareness of what poetry sounds like.

In Marston's Antonio and Mellida (1599), a discussion about meter moves quickly to a dialogue about rhyme (and is also filled with double entendres: as those highly charged split pentameter lines attest, poetic rhythm has a sexual component). Balurdo tries to compose a poem. His page, Dildo, identifies an error in Balurdo's versification; he then offers a (bathetic) rhyme:

Balurdo: I'll mount my courser and most gallantly prick –

Dildo: “Gallantly prick” is too long, and stands hardly in the verse, sir.

Balurdo: I'll speak pure rhyme and so will bravely prank it

That I'll to love like a—prank—prank it—a rhyme for “prank it”?

Dildo: Blanket.

(4.1.268–73)

Benedick has the same problem in Much Ado: “I can find out no rhyme to ‘lady’ but ‘baby’” (5.2.35–6).

The mechanicals in Midsummer Night's Dream don't discuss rhyme but they too are metrically aware. When they plan to add a prologue to their interlude, their first consideration is the meter in which it should be written. Quince proposes “eight and six” (alternating lines of eight syllables and six syllables); Bottom favors two more: “let it be written in eight and eight” (3.1.22–4). A character in Chapman's comedy The Gentleman Usher (1605) proposes composing “in a verse of ten” (i.e. pentameter) (2.2.71).[9] We in the audience are inescapably aware of Shakespeare's prosody, if only because the characters call our attention to it. But although meter and rhyme are often invoked in plays, we cannot consider these references independently of references to language generally. Characters from the comic Polonius in Hamlet to the romantic hero in Antonio and Mellida are consistently linguistically aware. Here is Polonius trying to be a literary critic: “‘mobbled queen’ is good” (2.2.507). Here is Marston's Antonio, confronting the inadequacy of similes to express the beauty of his beloved:

Come down; she comes like—O, no simile

Is precious, choice or elegant enough

To illustrate her descent. Leap heart, she comes,

She comes.

(Antonio and Mellida 1.1.151–4)[10]

In its monosyllabic—but repeated—simplicity, “She comes” is every bit as “poetic” as a simile.

Partly thanks to humanism (see Myth 2), Shakespeare's was a linguistically self-aware age. Meter is part of a composite package of poetic language that includes vocabulary and metaphor and rhyme and rhetorical devices. Together they are a play's soundscape. And when you include stage noise—like the knocking in Macbeth, or the “sennet” or “alarums” sounding—it is clear that there is a lot more to the “sound” of Shakespeare than the mechanical scansion of lines.

We must not forget that prose has a rhythm too. Prose may not scan according to rules, as poetry does, but it has its own internal balance, incremental developments, and repetitions, all of which work on our ear in a fashion similar to poetry. Malvolio bursts upon the midnight revelers in Twelfth Night with “My masters, are you mad?” (2.3.83). The alliterative frame gives the phrase a neat symmetry, not unlike rhyme; but the phrase also has an acceleration of rhythm because of the three monosyllables which lead to the terminative emphasis on the adjective “mad”—a significant theme in the play.

Malvolio continues with two triadic structures: “Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty? … Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?” (2.3.83–9). Shakespeare uses triads in blank verse too: Antony's “Friends, Romans, countrymen” in Julius Caesar (3.2.74); the Bastard in King John muses “Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!” (2.1.562). Shakespeare's prose and poetry are here using the same rhetorical structures; his prose and his poetry overlap.

The close relationship between prose rhythm and poetic rhythm can be seen in a phrase in Florio's translation of Montaigne that clearly caught Shakespeare's ear as much as his eye. In Florio's translation of “An Apologie of Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne wonders “whether it be lawfull for a subject … to rebell and take arms against his prince.”[11] In Hamlet the prince wonders whether “'tis nobler in the mind to suffer … / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles” (3.1.59–61). Florio's/Montaigne's literal use of arms (to oppose one's ruler) becomes in Shakespeare a metaphor (material arms against a liquid sea would be of little use). But what seems to have caught Shakespeare's attention first was the syntactical balance of Florio's prose. In prose he heard poetry.

The contemporary poet Peter Porter has said that “a poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.” The same can be said of Shakespeare's prose. Just as we cannot separate iambic pentameter from everyday speech, neither can we entirely separate prose from poetry.

Notes

[1] Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 2.

[2] Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 166.

3 Cicely Berry, The Actor and the Text (New York: Applause Theater Books, 1987), p. 63.

[4] Thomas de Quincey, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” in Miscellaneous Essays (The Project Gutenberg EBook of Miscellaneous Essays, by Thomas de Quincey; accessed 8 July 2012; http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10708/10708-8.txt).

[5] Gammer Gurton's Needle, in Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies, ed. Frederick S. Boas (1934; reissued Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

[6] Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday, ed. Robert Smallwood and Stanley Wells, Revels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).

[7] George Peele, The Old Wife's Tale, ed. Charles Whitworth (London: A. & C. Black, 1996).

[8] In all other Shakespeare editions this is 4.3.133.

[9] George Chapman, The Gentleman Usher, ed. Robert Ornstein in The Plays of George Chapman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970).

[10] John Marston, Antonio and Mellida, ed. G.K. Hunter (London: Edward Arnold, 1965).

[11] Michel de Montaigne, The essays or morall, politike and militarie discourses of Michaell de Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1603): ‘An Apology of Raymond Semond’, p. 254 (sig. Z1v).

Myth 12

Hamlet was named after Shakespeare's son

We all enjoy equivalence, symmetry, and circularity, from the fun of card games like Snap through the fascination of identical twins, to the pleasure of coincidence or a delight in rhyme. In Julius Caesar Cassius dies on his birthday (“This day I breathèd first. Time is come round, / And where I did begin, there shall I end”; 5.3.23–4). So did Shakespeare: he was baptized on 26 April, and can have been born only two or three days before that; he died on 23 April. The birthday of England's national poet coincides with the day dedicated to England's national saint. The age at which Shakespeare died—52—is the same as the age at which Augustan Rome's greatest poet died: Virgil.

The relationship of the name of Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, to the tragic hero, Hamlet, comes into this same pleasurable category of seeing or seeking equivalence. Sigmund Freud, for one, was confident that the son and the prince were the same. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) he wrote:

it can of course only be the poet's own mind which confronts us in Hamlet. I observe in a book on Shakespeare by Georg Brandes (1896) a statement that Hamlet was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare's father (in 1601), that is, under the immediate impact of his bereavement and, as we may well assume, while his childhood feelings about his father had been freshly revived. It is known, too, that Shakespeare's own son who died at an early age bore the name of “Hamnet”, which is identical with “Hamlet”.[1]

Note the interpretative and biographical elision—Hamlet equals Shakespeare; Hamnet equals Hamlet—and the certainty with which it is expressed: “it can of course only be the poet's own mind which confronts us in Hamlet … ‘Hamnet’ is identical with ‘Hamlet’.”

Certainly, Elizabethan names are fluid, as the surname of Shakespeare's contemporary and rival Marlowe—spelled variously as Marlow, Marloe, Marley, Marlin, Malyn, Morley, Merlin—shows. Shakespeare's wife was called Anne, or Agnes, or Annis. This is not the same as the Marlowe variants because here the pronunciation is almost identical. Agnes can be pronounced An-yes (the name derives ultimately from Greek hagnos [pure, chaste] but it was also associated with the Latin agnus [lamb, a symbol of Christ]); it can also, with a silent “g,” be pronounced Annis, and thence abbreviated to Anne. Hamnet and Hamlet do not come into either of these categories of variation. “N” and “l” would be an unusual variant. Pace Freud, Hamnet is not (likely to be) Hamlet.

Shakespeare's son Hamnet, and his twin sister Judith, were named after their godparents, Stratford neighbors Hamnet and Judith Sadler. The twins were born in 1585; Hamnet died, aged 11, in 1596 (Judith lived until 1661/2). The cause of Hamnet's death is not known (but August, the month in which he died, was always a bad month for plague deaths). Biographers point out that one twin is often weaker than the other; the sixty-five-year discrepancy in death dates between Hamnet and his twin sister suggests that he may have been the weaker one.

The reason for thinking that Hamlet is Hamnet is that the tragedy of which he is the hero is a play about father–son relationships. It is also a play about grief. From Hamlet's unnatural extended mourning (he exceeds the official court mourning period for his deceased father) to his rejection of his stepfather's memento mori wisdom (the “common theme [of life] / Is death of fathers” [1.2.103–4] is Claudius's consolatory pull-yourself-together observation) to the play's two visitors from beyond the grave (the ghost in Acts 1 and 3, the skull of Yorick in Act 5 [see Myth 27]) to the incapacitating grief of memory (“Heaven and earth, / Must I remember?”; 1.2.142–3) to the anecdotes about the death of Julius Caesar to Hamlet's contemplation of suicide to his acceptance of death (“there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”; 5.2.165–6), the play is haunted by thoughts of death. So too, some think, was its author.

Hamnet died in August 1596; Shakespeare's uncle, Henry, died in December that year. Did Shakespeare wait five years to exorcise his grief in writing? A complication (or simplification) is added (as Freud foregrounds in the quotation above) in that Shakespeare's father died in September 1601 (after all, Hamlet is about the death of a father not a son, unlike its great Elizabethan prototype The Spanish Tragedy, which focuses on a father's grief for his son). Grief was part of Shakespeare's creative repertory at the turn of the century. In Twelfth Night (written in 1601) Viola mourns her lost (twin) brother. She disguises herself not just as a male but as her brother—a sartorial embodiment of a recognized stage of mourning in which the bereaved takes on the character(istics) of the lost person. “There's something deep in the psychology of a twin, when the other twin dies, which would make her want to keep that twin alive by acting out his life as well as her own” observed the theater director John Caird when he directed the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1983–4.[2] The psychology is not, as it happens, confined to twins (it was identified by Freud as a classic component of grief), but they provide a striking visual illustration of it. In Shakespeare grieving twins are mistaken for each other not because (or not just because) they are twins but because mourners temporarily incorporate the lost one in themselves. “I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too” says Viola (2.4.120–1). When Sebastian is restored to Viola in Act 5, his return marks the conclusion of her mourning; it also marks the conclusion of her cross-dressing. As John Caird observes, “The brother turns up, which means she doesn't have to be a boy anymore.”[3] Although the play doesn't give up the frisson of Viola's sexually ambiguous persona that easily, and she ends the play still dressed, and addressed, as Cesario, it is significant that we get, for the first time in the play's dialogue, a name for the female twin: until this point no one, including the audience, has known what to call her.

Although Twelfth Night and Hamlet can be seen to have personal resonance for Shakespeare, it is important to remember that death and grief were never far away from anyone in Elizabethan England. Ben Jonson lost his first son, Benjamin, aged 7, in the plague of 1603; his second son, Joseph, died the same year, probably from the same cause. His first daughter, Mary, had died a few years before at only 6 months. Jonson wrote poems for the deaths of Benjamin and Mary. Shakespeare had lost no children when he wrote 3 Henry VI or King John but he could imagine such loss. In 3 Henry VI (included in the Oxford Shakespeare under the title Richard Duke of York, as in its 1595 publication), Queen Margaret, the “she-wolf of France,” kills the Duke of York's youngest son, Rutland, and taunts York with her latest atrocity. York's grief moves even his enemies to compassion. Northumberland says:

Beshrew me, but his passions move me so

That hardly can I check my eyes from tears

…

Had he been slaughter-man to all my kin,

I should not, for my life, but weep with him,

To see how inly sorrow gripes [grieves] his soul

(1.4.151–2, 170–3)

Margaret later experiences her own scene of grief in Act 5 when she, in turn, loses her son, Prince Edward. And the play's most famous stage direction describes the chiastic mourning of Act 2: Enter a Sonne that hath kill'd his Father, at one doore: and a Father that hath kill'd his Sonne at another doore (Folio TLN 1189–91).

In King John Constance laments the loss of her young son, Prince Arthur. In this speech she defends her right to grieve, explaining the emotion's psychological function:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

(3.4.93–8)

The logic she uses here (that grieving fills the emotional void of bereavement) is the logic expressed as far back as St Augustine, the fourth-century bishop who, in the Confessions, depicts his tears of grief as occupying the space of his friend: “Tears alone were sweet to me, for in my heart's desire they had taken the place of my dearest friend.”[4] Thus grief is a constant Shakespeare topos from his earliest plays, independent of his personal circumstances.

Christopher Rush's novel Will (2007) illustrates this beautifully when, in the pun of the title, Will Shakespeare dictates his will to his lawyer. “Death,” says Shakespeare, is what he does best. A childhood fascination with that biblical traveler from the undiscovered country (“Why did no one ask him, ‘Lazarus, what's it like—being dead?’”); the metaphoric death of his teenage relationship with Anne Hathaway; his observation that the primary qualification for a University wit is “the ability to die young” (Thomas Watson “went down in '92”); literary experimentation (his interest in Hamlet is not that of revenge tragedy, “putting one person to death but an interest in death itself”). “I do deaths, you see. And I can do the deaths of children. ‘Their lips were four red roses on a stalk’…—that sort of thing.”[5]

The temptation to speculate on a Hamlet who is Hamnet goes hand in hand with—or is reinforced by—a related possibility, that of Ophelia's drowning being an event close to Shakespeare both geographically (in Warwickshire) and emotionally (in his family). Critics have long known of the drowning in December 1579 of a young woman, Katherine Hamlett. She drowned in the River Avon at a part of the river, in Tiddington, which was known for “its overhanging willows and coronet weeds.”[6] Although her death had the appearance of suicide, her family, understandably keen to have a Christian burial, maintained it was an accident caused when she tried to fill her milk-pail with water from the river. The drowning, the willow and weeds, and the debate about suicide parallel the circumstances of Ophelia's death; the surname provides an additional point of contact. In June 2011 Steven Gunn, a historian studying coroners' records in early modern England, came across a report on the death of the 2½-year old Jane Shaxpere, who drowned while picking marigolds at Upton millpond in 1569. Whether she was related to William Shakespeare or not, it is possible that Shakespeare knew of the story, and the marigold-picking Jane may have developed into the herb-gathering Ophelia. But the media interest in Gunn's discovery (the infant Jane Shaxpere, invariably accompanied by a reproduction of John Everett Millais' pre-Raphaelite painting Ophelia, completely overshadowed all Gunn's other archival work) suggests something more: that we want Shakespeare's characters to derive from real events, perhaps because we want to get hold of their inspiration and peg it to something recognizable—like the death of a son.

If Hamlet does not derive his name from Hamnet or his grief from Shakespeare's loss of his son, where does his name come from? In writing Hamlet, as in all his plays, Shakespeare worked from source material (dramatic, poetic, prose, classical, contemporary, written, oral). In this case, as so often, Shakespeare's source material was multiple. The plot derives from Danish legend, where the avenging hero is called Amlothi. This story, written down in Latin in manuscript in the thirteenth century by Saxo Grammaticus, was printed (in Latin) in 1514 and translated into French in 1576 in François Belleforest's Histoires tragiques. Within a decade this story had been dramatized on the English stage. By 1589 Thomas Nashe could speak of it as being cliched: “whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragic speeches” (Epistle to Robert Greene's Menaphon). Thomas Kyd is believed to have written the Hamlet play which was the forerunner of Shakespeare's version. (A play in which a son mourns a father would be an obvious partner piece to his Spanish Tragedy, in which a father mourns a son.) The theater manager Philip Henslowe was still recording performances of a Hamlet play in June 1594. In all these English versions the hero's name is Hamlet.

Shakespeare sometimes changed the names he found in his sources. (In the source of All's Well That Ends Well, Boccaccio's Decameron, the heroine is called Giletta; Shakespeare rechristens her Helen. He may have changed the name Rosader, the hero of the source for As You Like It, into Orlando in part to avoid confusion in abbreviated speech prefixes with the heroine, Rosalind.) In Hamlet, he retains the hero's name. He may have done so because of its closeness to his personal circumstances. But to assume that he did so is to take us into the territory of Myth 18, with its impulse to read the sonnets as autobiographical. Hamlet is a play full of grief; but there is no need to assume that this derives from grief in Shakespeare's life (although it may coincide with it). Proximity of emotion there is, just as there is proximity in the names of hero and author's son. But proximity is not the same as identity; we cannot call “snap!”

The play we are discussing explores this very conundrum. When Marcellus asks Horatio to agree that the ghost they have seen is indeed like the deceased King of Denmark, Horatio provides reassurance in an image that is not as straightforward as it sounds:

Marcellus: Is it not like the King?

Horatio: As thou art to thyself.

(1.1.57–8)

But Marcellus cannot be like himself because he is himself. Similes work by making a temporary connection between two things that are actually dissimilar. And Hamlet is full of linguistic tricks that constantly ask us to be suspicious of conflationary maneuvers. In marrying his sister-in-law, for instance, Claudius conflates relationships: he makes Gertrude an aunt-mother, himself an uncle-father, Hamlet a nephew-son. Hamlet resists such conflationary procedures by puns—he is “too much i'th'sun/son” (1.2.67), his stepfather is a “little more than kin and less than kind” (1.2.65)—which try to separate the new semantic and emotional relationships. This is a play whose hero constantly defies attempts to turn two separate things into one single entity. It is an example we should perhaps heed.

Notes

[1] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: George Allen & Unwin/Hogarth Press, 1965), p. 299.

[2] John Caird, in Michael Billington (ed.), Directors' Approaches to “Twelfth Night” (London: Nick Hern Books, 1990), p. 40.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Augustine, Confessions, ed. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 76.

[5] Christopher Rush, Will (London: Beautiful Books, 2007), p. 10.

[6] Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (London: Vintage, 2006), p. 82.

Myth 13

The coarse bits of Shakespeare are for the groundlings; the philosophy is for the upper classes

The opening of Laurence Olivier's film Henry V (1944) sees a high-angle pan across the Elizabethan city of London and an implausibly blue River Thames, coming to rest at the thatched Globe theater. We see the audience gathering for the performance of the play. The sequence shows us men and women in dull-colored clothing taking their seats in the galleries and milling around the yard, with flashes of color when a pair of finely dressed women, to whom the men doff their hats, enter. Two small boys play, and a nobleman, with feathered hat and fashionably slashed two-tone doublet, passes through the crowds of artisans, apprentices, and citizens, crossing with a woman selling oranges from a basket. The implication of all this is clear: the Globe had a socially mixed audience; Shakespeare's plays appealed to nobleman and commoner alike; men and women attended the theater in large, easy-going numbers, and presumably enjoyed different aspects of the play being performed.

Figure 4 An audience today at the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe in London, watching Henry VIII in 2010. Photo: Pete le May.

Reproduced by kind permission of Shakespeare's Globe.

Olivier took this view of the Globe from a significant book published by Alfred Harbage a few years before his film. In Shakespeare's Audience, Harbage trawled contemporary documents to demonstrate that audiences in the period were “a cross section of the London population,” although “youth may have predominated somewhat over age, male over female, the worldly over the pious.”[1] Both Harbage and Olivier had an agenda in promoting this view of the early modern theater. For Harbage, the contrast was between the theater of the Elizabethan period and of his own time, which was too socially narrow and therefore could not produce a modern Shakespeare: “if an accidental collision at the Globe would have brought us face to face with a grocer, an accidental collision in a theater today would bring us face to face with a schoolteacher.”[2] For Olivier, the significance of the Globe's cross-section of London society was ideologically aligned with his overall propaganda purpose in his wartime film. All indications of rivalry and treachery are cut from the play—Olivier's Henry does not, as Shakespeare's does, threaten the besieged citizens of Harfleur with rape and slaughter, nor do his own noblemen take French gold to betray him—to produce an unproblematically triumphant film (what the director Trevor Nunn would later call “the National Anthem in five acts”[3]). In the same way his representation of the Globe audience locates the play as addressing—and constructing—an idealized, united, classless Englishness. As Ann Jennalie Cook noted, in a study revising Harbage and Olivier's view—her title, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London 1576–1642, says it all—this is a sentimental view. Her analysis suggests that actually playhouse spectators “came chiefly from the upper levels of the social order,” noting that in addition to the relatively modest cost of entrance, money for conveyance across the Thames plus the afternoon leisure time to attend the theater made it a more elite pursuit than Harbage had allowed.

In fact, the issue about who actually went to the theater in Shakespeare's day has been difficult to disentangle from the idealized image of rich and poor, elite and common rubbing shoulders as they enjoyed Hamlet. (Anthony Scolaker cited the play as a model for good writing which “should please all, like Prince Hamlet” in the early seventeenth century.[5]) Evidence about who went to the theater—we will come to the matter of how different segments of the audience might have been differentially addressed by the plays they went to see—is hard to evaluate, largely because much of it comes from partisans. When Stephen Gosson, for instance, in The School of Abuse, addresses “the Gentlewomen Citizens of London” “many of you which were wont to sport yourselves at theaters,” it is important to be aware of the extended title of the work: “a plesaunt invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillers of a Commonwelth; setting up the Flagge of Defiance to their mischievous exercise”: this is not a neutral account, and Gosson may well have been exaggerating the role of women in the nascent theater audiences for moral effect.[6] When the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London wrote to the Privy Council asking for its help in suppressing plays, they described playgoers as “the refuse sort of evil-disposed and ungodly people” including “divers apprentices and servants” and “masterless men,” and when Henry Crosse writes of “the common spectators and play-gadders” as “an unclean generation, and spawn of vipers: must not here be good rule, where is such a brood of hell-bred creatures? For a play is like a sink in a town, whereunto all the filth doth run, or a boil in the body, that draweth all the ill humors unto it,” the language of the complaints identifies their authors with proto-Puritan tendencies, rather than sociological description.[7] From a different perspective but with a similar conclusion, William Fennor address “Sweet Poesye,” “oft convict, condemned, and iudged to die / Without just trial, by a multitude / Whose Judgements are illiterate, and rude,” citing the response of the audience who “screwed their scurvy jaws and looked awry” at Ben Jonson's turgidly classical drama Sejanus (while “wits of gentry did applaud the same, / With Silver shouts of high loud sounding fame”).[8] Explaining the theatrical failure of his The White Devil to its readership, John Webster claims that it lacked “a full and understanding auditory” because the playgoers were “ignorant asses”—but he, too, might be thought a prejudicial witness.[9] Colorful as these descriptions are, none can tell us what audiences were actually like.

We do know something about the costs of playgoing. The cheapest admission to the outdoor theaters, a standing place in the yard, cost a penny, the modest equivalent of “a quart of the cheapest ale, one-third the cost of a small pipe-load of tobacco, and one-third the price of a meal in the cheapest ordinary [tavern].”[10] It is reasonable to assume that different theaters attracted a somewhat different clientele, and certainly the indoor theater of Blackfriars was a much more niche or boutique theater experience, with reduced capacity and increased prices. Whereas in the outdoor amphitheater playhouses like the Globe the cheapest admission got punters closest to the stage, at indoor theaters such as Blackfriars, such privileged proximity to the action cost one shilling and sixpence. The cheapest admission to Blackfriars was sixpence. But it does not seem that Shakespeare wrote plays specifically for that theater audience: his later plays seem to have been performed in both the King's Men venues, the Globe and Blackfriars, so while the audience composition might have been significantly different, the program of entertainment was not.

More significantly, perhaps, the indirect costs of playgoing were in the currency of time rather than money. In order to go to the theater, a patron had to be free from 2 p.m. on a weekday. When the Grocer and his wife, the appreciative and literal-minded theatergoers in Francis Beaumont's mock-romance The Knight of the Burning Pestle, attend the playhouse with their apprentice Rafe, it is not clear what has happened to their shop while they are away. That playgoing was, at least in part, a leisured pursuit is suggested by numerous references: the entry for “An excellent actor” in a popular book of urban stereotypes, Sir Thomas Overbury's A Wife (see Myth 29), claims that “he entertains us in the best leisure of our life, that is between meals, the most unfit time either for study or bodily exercise,” making it clear that that second-person “us” tacitly imagines a community who do not need to work for a living.[11]

Indeed, most of the evidence of actual individuals going to the theater concerns people of higher status, but then these are the people whose letters and documents have been preserved. There are also hints of a wider social basis for audiences. Thanks to the work of Andrew Gurr, there is documentary evidence of a wide range of individuals who went to the theater during the period, although it is hard to be sure how typical these playgoers were of the huge number—Gurr estimates 50 million theater admissions between the opening of the first London theaters in the 1560s and their closure by the Puritans in 1642—who attended. Gurr's list of almost 200 names includes plaintiffs involved in various instances of disorder at theaters and identified as butchers, felt-makers, sailors, cordwainers, surgeons, apprentices, Catholic priests, and “a serving man in a blew coat”; noblemen including the Duke of Buckingham, and Sir William Cavendish; tourists including Thomas Platter and Johannes de Witt, who sketched the Swan Theatre in 1596; upper-class women including Mary Windsor, who went to the Globe in 1612, Lady Jane Mildmay, and Mrs Overall, wife of the Dean of St Paul's who, according to the biographer John Aubrey, had “the loveliest eyes that were ever seen, but wondrous wanton. When she came to Court, or to the Playhouse, the gallants would so flock about her.”[12]

What did these varied audience members enjoy? A few playgoers reported on their experiences. Law student John Manningham approved of “a good practise in [Twelfth Night] to make the Steward believe his Lady widow was in love with him, by counterfeiting a letter as from his Lady, in general terms, telling him what she liked best in him, and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparel, &C., and then when he came to practise, making him believe they took him to be mad”—but has nothing to say about the staging of the twins.[13] The astrologer Simon Forman—in a document to be used cautiously as it may be in part a nineteenth-century forgery—enjoyed the choreography of the banquet scene in Macbeth with Banquo's ghost appearing and sitting in Macbeth's chair, and also the scene of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking, but his only mention of the witches is that they were “three women, fairies or nymphs”; when he saw The Winter's Tale he noted the tricks of Autolycus, “the rogue that came in all tattered like a colt-pixie,” but does not comment on Hermione's statue returning to life in Act 5 (perhaps he left before the end of the play). At a performance of Othello in Oxford in 1610, Henry Jackson was moved by the ending: “the celebrated Desdemona, slain in our presence by her husband … entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance.”[14]

These three comments by learned men press on the theme of this myth. Did Shakespeare write the coarse bits for the groundlings and the philosophy for the upper classes? Not according to Manningham, who has apparently most enjoyed a slapstick sequence of physical comedy in Twelfth Night, nor for Forman, who also recalls physical stage business from Macbeth and comedy from The Winter's Tale, nor for Jackson, whose response is of emotional empathy. None of these audience members identifies something learned as the source of their pleasure, and from this we may suggest that any easy equivalence between social status and aspects of audience enjoyment is false. Plays for university students in the period draw readily on scatological humor, as when, for example, the eponymous implement of Gammer Gurton's Needle (performed at Christ's College, Cambridge) is found in the seat of someone's breeches.

That aspects of Shakespeare's plays might fall out along status lines draws on Victorian notions of social refinement. For Robert Bridges at the beginning of the twentieth century, writing on “The Influence of the Audience on Shakespeare's Drama” (for Bridges, a regrettable one), “the foolish things in his plays were written to please the foolish, the filthy for the filthy, and the brutal for the brutal,” and he went on to warn that “to admire or tolerate such things” involves “degrading ourselves to the level of his audience, and learning contamination from these wretched beings who can never be forgiven their share in preventing the greatest poet and dramatist of the world from being the best artist.”[15] For Bridges, then, Shakespeare's audience was a deleterious influence, dragging the sublime poet into the crowd-pleasing brutalities of, for example, the murder of Macduff's children in Macbeth, or the on-stage blinding of Gloucester in King Lear. To be sure, these are savage episodes in their respective plays, but it is by no means clear that they are the gratuitous excrescences imagined by Bridges. The gouging out of Gloucester's eyes develops and literalizes the themes of blindness and insight in the play, for instance, and by showing this cruelty on stage Shakespeare amplifies the chilling diagnosis of the Duke of Albany: “humanity must perforce / Prey upon itself, like monsters of the deep” (The History of King Lear 16.47–8; this line is not in the Tragedy). The episode is thus integral to the play's ethics of bleakness and its unflinching anticipation of the twentieth century's Theater of Cruelty.

Suggesting, as Bridges does, that Shakespeare wrote his plays in spite of his audiences cannot account for his ongoing success. As Andrew Gurr puts it, because the audience “are the most inconstant, elusive, unfixed element of the Shakespearean performance text, their contribution is presented as an easy means of explaining away features of the dramaturgy which seem incongruous to modern audiences.”[16] Shakespeare wrote for, not against, the range of Londoners who came to the Globe and later to Blackfriars, and, unlike fellow dramatists including Webster and Jonson, he does not address them extensively in prefatory or introductory material (when he does, the tone is courteous, even flattering: the language of “gentles all” [1.0.8] of the Prologue to Henry V, or the “gentle breath” of the Epilogue to The Tempest [l. 11] elevates the audience's social status). Shakespeare has not left us any critical or theoretical material on his dramatic practice other than the plays themselves: perhaps, then, the discussion on theater in Hamlet can stand in.

A group of traveling players has come to Elsinore, and Hamlet is keen to coach them in a performance that will help confirm the Ghost's message and reveal the King's guilt. He tells the actors to refrain from excessive gesture and ranting, suggesting—presumably to the outraged delight of the Globe's own audience—that these are practices “to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise” (3.2.10–13). Overdone, non-naturalistic playing style may “make the unskilful laugh” but it must “make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others” (3.2.26–8). Clowns must not extemporise, another weakness of “barren spectators” (3.2.41). Hamlet recalls a play concerning the mythological story of Dido and Aeneas and the stirring story of the sack of Troy: the play “pleased not the million. 'Twas caviare to the general” (2.2.439–40). But presumably, performed amid the standing audience in the yard of the Globe, these comments are archly theatrical rather than straightforward. Hamlet delivers the remembered opening of the speech on the “rugged Pyrrhus” (2.2.453–67), and it is only Polonius, the foolish university-educated counselor, who judges it “too long” (2.2.501); we might imagine the Globe playgoers rather caught up in the emphatic and compelling rendition, just as they enjoy the player-Prince's strictures about the degraded acting styles likely to please the “groundlings.” Like those other apparent witnesses to the question of the audience for Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet, too, is partial. All we know for sure is that Hamlet—a play so complex it continues to generate one scholarly article or book of new published criticism every week, 400 years after it was performed—was written for and deeply engaged by the theater, and by a sure sense of its heterogeneous audiences.

Notes

[1] Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare's Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 90.

[2] Ibid., p. 166.

[3] Ralph Berry, On Directing Shakespeare: Interviews with Contemporary Directors (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), p. 57.

4 Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576–1642 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 8.

[5] Anthony Scolaker, Diaphantus (London: 1604). Duncan-Jones cites as evidence of the play's popularity the high incidence of the name “Hamlet” for boys in the first decade of the seventeenth century: Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life, Arden (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), p. 180.

[6] Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse (London, 1579), sig. F2.

[7] G. Blakemore Evans (ed.), Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama (London: A. & C. Black, 1987), p. 5; Tanya Pollard, Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 192–3.

[8] William Fennor, “The Description of a Poet,” in Fennors Descriptions (London, 1616).

[9] John Webster, “To the Reader,” in John Webster: Three Plays, ed. David Gunby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 37.

[10] Quoted in Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare by Stages: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 85.

[11] Blakemore Evans, Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama, p. 99.

[12] Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 197–212, 4.

[13] Quoted ibid., p. 225.

[14] Forman's comments are included as appendices to the Oxford editions of the plays (Macbeth, ed. Nicholas Brooke, pp. 235–6; The Winter's Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel, p. 233). Jackson's note on Othello is in the Oxford edition, ed. Michael Neill, p. 9.

[15] Robert Bridges, “The Influence of the Audience on Shakespeare's Drama,” in Collected Essays Papers &c. of Robert Bridges (Oxford, 1927), pp. 28–9.

[16] Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, p. 3.

Myth 14

Shakespeare was a Stratford playwright

Shakespeare is to Stratford-upon-Avon what Juliet is to Verona. Just as you can visit Juliet's balcony in Verona (see Myth 5), so you can visit the house in which Shakespeare was born, the houses in which his mother and grandmother were born, the school he probably attended, and the church in which he was baptized and buried. The difference is that Juliet is a fictional character and her balcony a product of the Veronese tourist industry. (The tourist industry is not entirely self-serving; here it caters to the desires of all those who wish a fictional character to have been real, the adult equivalent of children wanting their toys to come alive at night.) But Shakespeare really lived. He and his family have a tangible material presence in the parish and legal records of Stratford.

The medieval market town of Stratford (current population 25,000) has a thriving tourist trade thanks to its Renaissance playwright. There are six Shakespeare properties to visit plus a theater company dedicated in name and practice to staging his works. It is ironic to think that when an annual Shakespeare festival was first mooted in the nineteenth century, the initial response was an incredulous, “Who would want to visit a small Warwickshire market town?”[1] Today the answer to that question is: 3 million people each year.

Shakespeare left Stratford sometime in the late 1580s. How frequently he returned to visit his wife and three children, whether he was able to attend the funeral of his son Hamnet in 1596 or that of his mother in 1608, is not documented. But he obviously continued to support his family; he was involved in Stratford investments or actions in 1598 (when his Stratford friend Richard Quiney wrote to him and visited him in London), in 1605 (when he bought a share in tithes) and 1611 (when he was one of seventy citizens petitioning parliament for the improvement of the roads); he invested in Stratford property in 1597 (New Place) and 1602 (107 acres in Old Town plus a cottage in Chapel Lane), retiring to Stratford (or commuting from Stratford) sometime from 1608 onwards (in a London court case in 1612 he gave his address as Stratford-upon-Avon).

Stratford, its inhabitants, and its language make appearances in Shakespeare's plays. One of his earliest plays, The Taming of the Shrew, opens with a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, whose experiences are rooted in Warwickshire. In a dispute about his ancestry, he calls for support from a neighbor: “Ask Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot if she know me not” (Induction 2.20–1; Wincot is a village four miles outside Stratford). Later in his career, Shakespeare uses Warwickshire dialect. In Coriolanus (1608) a character admires the destructive capacities of Coriolanus' son. She describes the cat-and-mouse game the young boy played with a butterfly, catching it and letting it go, before finally tearing it to pieces with his teeth. “I warrant how he mammocked it” she says approvingly (1.3.67). “Mammock” is a Warwickshire noun meaning a torn remnant; Shakespeare converts it to a verb: to tear something to shreds.

The sixteenth century saw the expansion of the English language as humanist scholars, translating and editing classical texts, imported Greek and Latin words to the English language (see Myth 21). Sir Thomas More gave us Latin-derived words such as lunatic; Francis Bacon, a scientist, gave us skeleton and thermometer (both from Greek). Sir John Cheke, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, was a lone voice of opposition to this influx among his classically minded contemporaries. Shakespeare simply made up words (he uses nouns as verbs) and imported them from Warwickshire. No one seems to have commented on this at the time and so his practice probably seemed reasonable during this period of linguistic innovation. Thus, “language rose like a tide on all sides until the ghost of Sir John Cheke relinquished its Canute-like efforts.”[2]

One of the most beautiful lyrics in Shakespeare is the funeral dirge for Fidele in Cymbeline. This lyric lists items in the natural and political worlds that must fade and die, or, in the poem's poetic euphemism, “come to dust.” The poem begins:

Fear no more the heat o'th'sun,

Nor the furious winter's rages,

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

(4.2.259–64)

“Chimney-sweepers,” with its Victorian associations, seems a curiously inept image in the elegy; for a long time it perplexed editors. It was the twentieth century before researchers discovered that “chimney sweeper” is Warwickshire dialect for “dandelion,” the weed whose mature flower (which resembles the chimney-sweeper's brush) is a suitably fragile and evanescent symbol for this poem about transience.

In the same play Shakespeare pays tribute to a Stratford contemporary and friend, Richard Field. The disguised Innogen, asked to name her master, improvises a French name, “Richard du Champ.” The translated pun is multiply appropriate. Richard Field was a printer who specialized in foreign language books (see Myth 2). On many title pages he gave his name and print shop in a translated or transliterated form appropriate to the language of the book he was printing: in Spanish, French, Latin, and (pseudo-)Welsh. Thus, we find “Ricardo Campello” in Spanish texts. Field was two years older than Shakespeare and was the London printer of Shakespeare's first published works, the narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). This book-ending of Shakespeare's career with Field (as printer at the start and punning reference at the end) suggests that the men maintained a friendship throughout.

But if Shakespeare was and remained a Stratford man with Stratford connections (at home and within London) he also had a professional life in London for two decades. What kind of affiliation did he have with the city?

It is notable that Shakespeare was never asked to write a city pageant. City pageants were allegorical tableaux sponsored by livery companies to celebrate the incoming Lord Mayor each year and, in 1604, the royal entry of the new king into London (James' entry had been delayed because of the outbreak of plague in 1603). This was the moment for the city to commission its heavyweight writers. George Peele, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Heywood all contributed to city pageants; Shakespeare never did (see Myth 17). The reasons for this are far from clear. Birth outside London did not disqualify someone (Heywood hailed from Lincolnshire), nor did the lack of a university education (Jonson did not attend university). Possibly membership of a livery company was an advantage (Jonson continued to pay his quarterly dues to the bricklayers' company even when he was rising to success as a playwright), but not all pageant writers were freemen of a livery company. So Shakespeare did not, as far as we know, have the literary links with London through celebrating it in an annual pageant that many of his contemporaries did.

Nor did he ally himself with the dominant comic genre of the late 1590s and early seventeenth century—city (London) comedy. City comedy is a branch of satire caricaturing the foibles and eccentricities of London's middle-class citizens; London is obviously an essential ingredient in this genre. The prologue to Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour (1598) proclaims: “Our scene is London, 'cause we would make known, / No country's mirth is better than our own.” William Haughton's Englishmen for my Money (1598) relies on the audience's detailed knowledge of London topography and landmarks. The plot concerns three daughters who are wooed by three foreign and three London suitors; the London suitors trick the foreigners by giving them directions which take them in the opposite direction from that which they requested. Full of meaningful geographical references, the play is a veritable Elizabethan A–Z (a modern edition provides a map to enable non-Londoners to follow the plot). The closest Shakespeare came to writing in this satiric city genre is Merry Wives of Windsor, a city comedy of c.1597 in which Falstaff is tricked by the merry wives of the title. But the play is set in Windsor—hardly the typical city location of the genre. Shakespeare was not a London playwright.

In another sense, of course, he was. All his plays were performed in London; arguably, they are all also set in London. He may call the city Venice or Padua or Rome (republican or imperial) but the coloring is recognizably English. When shipwrecked in Illyria (modern Croatia), Twelfth Night's Antonio recommends that Sebastian lodge “in the south suburbs at the Elephant” (3.3.39). Southwark (London's south suburbs) did indeed have an inn called the Elephant, at the end of Horseshoe Lane. This allusion may be more than just a local reference, constituting what we would now call “product placement”: Antonio actually says “In the south suburbs, at the Elephant, / Is best to lodge” (3.3.39–40, our italics) and when Sebastian leaves him, Antonio reminds him: “To th'Elephant”; Sebastian reassures him, “I do remember” (3.3.48). The reminiscences of Falstaff and Justice Shallow in the English world of 2 Henry IV naturally include London landmarks (the Inns of Court, Turnbull Street, the Tilt-yard) but they also include a known Southwark tavern (or brothel): “the Windmill in Saint George's Field” (3.2.192). The penthouse (lean-to roof projecting from a building) under which Borachio and Conrade converse in Much Ado About Nothing is both Italian and recognizably English, and they shelter for a familiar English reason: “it drizzles rain” (3.3.101).

Shakespeare lodged in London. For four years (between approximately 1592 and 1596) his parish church was St Helen's Bishopsgate (the church is beautifully intact, having escaped both the Great Fire of London and the Blitz, although it was partially damaged—and then restored—by an IRA bomb in 1992). Shakespeare performed on stage in London; he rented rooms in Bishopsgate, in Southwark, and in St Giles Cripplegate; eventually he bought a house in London, just three years before he died, in 1613. But there are hardly any walking tours of Shakespeare's London; no advertising of St Helen's as Shakespeare's church. Shakespeare has become for us a Stratford playwright, as Cole Porter's lyrics to “Brush up Your Shakespeare” attest:

But the poet of them all

Who will start 'em simply ravin'

Is the poet people call

The bard of Stratford-on-Avon.

Part of the attraction of Stratford (see titles such as The Man From Stratford) is the romantic story of small-town boy makes good in the big city. It is Dick Whittington, a version of the rags-to-riches story. Someone who went to Westminster School or was taught by William Camden ought to be successful, it is thought (this was Ben Jonson's pedigree). (Of course, that Shakespeare's grammar-school education was equivalent is testimony to the pedagogical vision of the sixteenth-century humanists; see Myth 2.) But while it is true to say that Shakespeare was and remained a Stratford man, we ought perhaps to separate Stratford man from Stratford playwright (“the bard of Stratford-on-Avon”). Shakespeare's plays are as neutral geographically (Stratford/London) as they are in terms of religion (Protestant/Catholic) or politics (conservative/radical).

There is no doubt that Shakespeare the actor in London was the same person as the man from Stratford. In fact, as we saw in Myth 2, there is nothing in Shakespeare's plays that cannot be attributed to an author who simply had very close powers of observation. As we discuss in Myth 16, one of the reasons we have very little sense of Shakespeare's personality (unlike that, say, of the flamboyant, iconoclastic, irascible Marlowe) is that Shakespeare seems to have been the kind of person who sat in the corner and watched people.

And he watched people in both Stratford and in London.

Notes

[1] For a history of the town's festival attempts from Garrick's bicentenary celebration onwards, see ‘The Borough of Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespearean Festivals and Theatres’, in A History of the County of Warwick, vol. 3: Barlichway Hundred, ed. Philip Styles (1945), pp. 244–7; http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=57017 (accessed 10 July 2012).

[2] George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. xciii.

Myth 15

Shakespeare was a plagiarist

The first recorded reference to Shakespeare as a writer is in a pamphlet called Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (it purports to be by Robert Greene but many scholars now believe Henry Chettle actually wrote it): “there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”[1] The tiger's heart alludes to the line in 3 Henry VI when the captured York replies to the taunting Queen Margaret that she is “a tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide” (titled Richard Duke of York in the Oxford Shakespeare, following its initial publication title in 1595; 1.4.138). Like all the documentary allusions to Shakespeare, this one has been pored over and subjected to a range of interpretations, but one idea in particular has stuck: it is often assumed that the author of the pamphlet is accusing Shakespeare, like a crow who has the power to mimic but not invent, “beautified with our feathers,” of something like plagiarism.

The charge is a difficult one to discuss, not least because ideas of plagiarism and literary property have undergone such a sea-change since Shakespeare's time. Whereas we might now identify “originality” as a compelling literary feature, Renaissance writers learned the importance of imitatio—the copying of fine examples from classical and modern sources. Seneca advised the writer to consider “the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey,” and although ancient apian knowledge was not sufficiently advanced to understand quite how pollen was converted to honey, this process of “transformation” was nevertheless cited as exemplary.[2] As Ben Jonson put it, appropriately, drawing on Seneca, the poet must “be able to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use … Not as a creature that swallows what it takes in crude, raw, or indigested, but that feeds with an appetite, and hath a stomach to concoct, divide, and turn all into nourishment”: “observe how the best writers have imitated, and follow them.”[3]

Jonson's metaphor of imitation as nourishment—the ingestion and transformation of nutritional material—suggests that imitatio is not mechanical but organic, creative rather than repetitive—in short, it is far from the unthinking attempt to pass off others' work as your own that marks the modern concept of plagiarism. T.S. Eliot, writing of Shakespeare's near-contemporary Philip Massinger in The Sacred Wood, puts it more quotably: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”[4]

Let's look, then, at Shakespeare's transformative use of his sources. There are some books of source material that Shakespeare clearly must have had open on his writing desk as he worked on the relevant play: Raphael Holinshed's book of English history, his Chronicles, for the English history plays, for instance. If we look at the long description of the Salic law, the arcane genealogy barring women from ruling in France adduced by the wily Archbishop of Canterbury to persuade the young King Henry V to war, for instance, we can see that Shakespeare reproduces errors of arithmetic and of history verbatim from his source.[5] In Titus Andronicus the source—Ovid's Metamorphoses—is brought on stage: in this play playwright and characters alike know their Ovid. In Pericles, the author of Shakespeare's source, the medieval poet John Gower, becomes a chorus to the action. A more famous example comes from Antony and Cleopatra, where the description by the usually laconic Roman soldier Enobarbus of the Egyptian queen is taken directly from Shakespeare's source, Sir Thomas North's translation of the historian Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. On page 981, Shakespeare found North's description; we have placed Shakespeare's reworking below it so you can decide for yourself whether his borrowing here is plagiarism:

Therefore when she was sent unto by divers letters, both from Antonius himself, and also from his friends, she made so light of it, and mocked Antonius so much, that she disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, hautboys, citherns, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of her self: she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus, commonly drawn in picture: and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. Her Ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the nymphs Nereides (which are the mermaids of the waters) and like the Graces, some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge, out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweet savour of perfumes, that perfumed the wharfside, pestered with innumerable multitudes of people. Some of them followed the barge all alongst the rivers side: others also ran out of the city to see her coming in. So that in the end, there ran such multitudes of people one after another to see her, that Antonius was left post alone in the market place, in his Imperial seat to give audience: and there went a rumour in the peoples' mouths, that the goddess Venus was come to play with the god Bacchus, for the general good of all Asia.

Maecenas: She's a most triumphant lady, if report be square to her.

Enobarbus: When she first met Mark Antony, she pursed up his heart upon the river of Cydnus.

Agrippa: There she appeared indeed, or my reporter devised well for her.

Enobarbus: I will tell you.

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne

Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that

The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster,

As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,

It beggared all description. She did lie

In her pavilion—cloth of gold, of tissue –

O'er-picturing that Venus where we see

The fancy outwork nature. On each side her

Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,

With divers-coloured fans whose wind did seem

To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,

And what they undid did.

Agrippa: O, rare for Antony!

Enobarbus: Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,

So many mermaids, tended her i'th'eyes,

And made their bends adornings. At the helm

A seeming mermaid steers. The silken tackle

Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands

That yarely frame the office. From the barge

A strange invisible perfume hits the sense

Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast

Her people out upon her, and Antony,

Enthroned i'th' market-place, did sit alone,

Whistling to th'air, which but for vacancy,

Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,

And made a gap in nature.

(2.2.191–225)

The similarities are easy to see here, but so too are the differences: in particular, Shakespeare's version of the scene draws out its eroticism and sensuality. The winds are “love-sick,” the water “amorous,” the tackle is “silken,” hands are “flower-soft,” and where Plutarch busies the scene with props, Shakespeare's focus is on Cleopatra as its animating deity. And there is a crucial difference between the scene in prose and in verse. We see in Shakespeare's writing a metrical equivalence to the excesses of the scene: form and content are inseparable. A number of his lines end in an additional, unstressed syllable, known at the time, appropriately, as a “feminine ending” (see Myth 11)—“vacancy,” “tackle”—and some lines have a complete extra foot. “The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver” and “As amorous of her strokes. For her own person” are both hexameters, standing out from the more usual pentameter rhythm. Put less technically, they are longer, spilling over, depicting in their form the impossibility of conveying the description of a Cleopatra who “beggared all description.” Shakespeare hasn't just cut-and-shut Plutarch: he has created a version of Cleopatra in which the verse form itself contributes to the scene's excesses. He has also transformed a simile in Plutarch with spectacular effect. When Plutarch compares Cleopatra to Venus, it is a straightforward image of equivalence: “attired like the goddess Venus.” In Shakespeare it becomes multi-layered. Cleopatra “o'er-pictur[es] [goes beyond] that Venus [a specific Venus: a painting] where we see / The fancy [imagination] outwork [go beyond] nature”; Cleopatra outdoes that famous painting of Venus in which the artist outdoes nature. The sequence is dizzying: Nature→Venus→Art→Cleopatra. (Tom Stoppard took the joke one step further in Arcadia [1993] when the tutor, Septimus Hodge, tells his pupil to put some passion in her translation of Plutarch's Cleopatra and shows her how—by passing off Shakespeare's version of this speech as his own improvised poetic translation.)

This Plutarch passage is an exception, and more often a look at Shakespeare's plays alongside their sources reveals how he has radically reshaped them. The opening of King Lear transforms the old play King Leir that was one of Shakespeare's sources: instead of beginning with the newly widowed king worried for his daughters without a mother's care and wearied with grief of the cares of state, Shakespeare creates an air of uncertainty about his king's behavior. Opening with an oblique look from Gloucester and Kent which also establishes the interplay between the story of Gloucester's sons and Lear's daughters, Shakespeare moves to the love-test without any real explanation: like Cordelia we are uncertain what is being requested and why. More dramatically, though, Shakespeare has transformed the ending of his play from the outcome of the story in his sources. The story of Lear has its antecedents in Holinshed's history, as well as in more distant folkloric stories of the Cinderella type (Goneril and Regan as the Ugly Sisters?), in other texts of the period by Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, and even, perhaps, in the contemporary court gossip around the elderly Sir Brian Annesley, whose elder daughter was attempting to have him declared insane (and thus to sequester his property), against the will of his loyal younger daughter, suggestively named Cordell. In all of these stories, though, Cordelia survives her father to become queen after him. Shakespeare's twist to a well-known story gives the play its bleak punch: the expectations of the audience, fanned by the joyous reunion of father and daughter in Act 4, are cruelly dashed. Dr Johnson famously professed himself “so shocked by Cordelia's death” that he was unwilling to reread the play's conclusion, but he does not seem to have wanted to believe that his outrage at a play “in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry” was entirely Shakespeare's design.[6]

Sometimes Shakespeare's changes to his source are small but revealing details. In the pastoral romance from which he took As You Like It, it is a lion who menaces the sleeping Orlando. For his play in which Rosalind so dominates her suitor, Shakespeare's change to a “lioness, with udders all drawn dry” (4.3.115) seems telling. In the sources for Othello the couple made by Shakespeare into Iago and Emilia have a little daughter, who unwittingly distracts Desdemona while her father takes the fateful handkerchief. It adds to the sterility of the passions of the play that Shakespeare has removed this humanizing aspect, leaving Iago's own generative impulses directed towards the perverse “child” of his plot against Othello: “I ha't. It is ingendered. Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light” (1.3.395–6). Shakespeare's Hamlet is even more psychically overshadowed by his father than his source story equivalents: only in this play do the haunted prince and ghostly father share a name (echoed in the two Fortinbras). Shakespeare characterizes the formidable mother Volumnia in Coriolanus, the zany Mercutio of Romeo and Juliet, fat Falstaff in 1 and 2 Henry IV, and the charismatic bastard Philip Faulconbridge in King John, either from minimal details in his source material or entirely from his own imagination. At other times, the ghostly shape of the source is still incipient in Shakespeare's own drama. The tragi-comic or “problem play” structure of Measure for Measure, for instance, may owe something to the influence of George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra (1582), a two-part play in which the first part corresponds to a tragedy and the second to a comedy. Part of the difficulty in the multiple reunions at the end of The Winter's Tale may be the dark shadow of Robert Greene's Pandosto, in which the eponymous Leontes-figure falls in love with his long-lost daughter and commits suicide in shame and remorse for his transgressive desire. Oh, and Greene doesn't bring Hermione back to life either.

Almost all of Shakespeare's plays have an identified major source: only the plots of The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Tempest seem to have been Shakespeare's invention. Increasingly as Shakespeare's career proceeds, however, it is his own previous plays that serve him as a source. Perhaps this self-plagiarism reaches its peak in Cymbeline, a romance play from the latter part of Shakespeare's career, and a play reveling in too much plot. Cymbeline is almost a compendium of Shakespearean tropes: male jealousy (as seen in Othello, Much Ado, and Merry Wives); a plotting queen (compare Titus Andronicus, 2 Henry VI, Macbeth); a woman dressed in male clothing (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night); a pastoral interlude (As You Like It, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Winter's Tale); beheading (Macbeth, Measure for Measure); multiple reunions and mistaken identity (stick a pin in the Folio contents list). Elsewhere the late plays rework earlier Shakespearean material: The Tempest gives us an ameliorated Hamlet: the ambitious brother deposes but does not kill the ruler, thus allowing for the adult child in The Tempest to be the means of healing rather than, as in Hamlet, revenging, the crime. The Winter's Tale revisits Othello with the possibility of a second chance. In Pericles the title character does, unlike Lear, find salvation in the reunion with his daughter. The villain who plots (unsuccessfully) to destroy husband and wife in Cymbeline is resonantly called Iachimo (meaning “little Iago”).

Finally, the question of whether Shakespeare was a plagiarist has had a new twist in recent years. Software designed for educational institutions to identify—and punish—plagiarism in its students has been used on the corpus of Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists to try to secure their authorship. For example, Brian Vickers, the doyen of this methodology, has recently attributed parts of Edward III to Shakespeare based on an analysis of phrases shared by this play and the rest of the Shakespearean canon.[7] Of course, the method rests on an assumption that Shakespeare's own works are just that, and that there is a stable body of Shakespeare's own, unplagiarized work. Renaissance cultures of imitatio here clash with modern cultures of plagiarism and originality.

Notes

[1] Quoted in Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 151.

[2] Seneca, Epistulae morales 84, quoted in Brian Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 24.

[3] Ben Jonson, Discoveries, in Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson, Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 585–6.

[4] T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920; reissued Faber & Faber, 1997), pp. 105–6.

[5] For Holinshed see http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed

[6] Quoted in Emma Smith (ed.), Blackwell Guides to Criticism: Shakespeare's Tragedies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 20.

[7] http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/article6870086.ece

Myth 16

We don't know much about Shakespeare's life

One of the most enduring myths is that we don't know much about Shakespeare's life. When Bill Bryson's biography of Shakespeare was published in 2007, reviewers were agreed that “Considering the hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about Shakespeare, relatively little is known about the man himself.”[1] Indeed, Bryson's biography begins with George Steevens's famous one-line summary of Shakespeare's biography: “he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, produced a family there, went to London, became an actor and writer, returned to Stratford, made a will, and died.” Although Bryson acknowledges that this is not all we know, he inclines towards Steevens: “it is not all that far from the truth either.”[2] In fact, we know a great deal about Shakespeare's life and movements—far more than we know about most other Elizabethan dramatists. We may not know all that we want to know, or precise details of the bits that most interest us, but it is not true to say that the records are scant.

We know when Shakespeare was born (plus or minus a day). We know when he died. We know the birth dates and death dates of his three children. We know their godparents. We know about his mother's family and his father's, and we know about his father's civic activities in Stratford, his activities in wool-brogging (smuggling) and usury, and his subsequent debts. We know who Shakespeare's Stratford neighbors were. We know about his property inheritance, acquisition, and investment—houses in Henley Street and New Place, a cottage in Chapel Lane, land in Old Town, Stratford, a gatehouse in London's Blackfriars, a share in Stratford's tithes. We know about his litigation (it was a litigious culture). We know about his son's premature death and his two daughters' marriages. We lack comparable information for many of Shakespeare's Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries.

Part of the reason that we know so much, relatively speaking, about Shakespeare is that he maintained links with his home town, thus providing a constant in his life. Yes, there are gaps. We do not know what Shakespeare was doing in the crucial period between leaving Stratford and showing up in London, the “lost years” of the late 1580s. (Colin Burrow notes that “opinion even differs as to how many years were lost.”[3]) Did he go straight to London working as an actor? (Much has been made of the death of the Queen's Men's actor William Knell in 1587 while the company was on tour, just before it visited Stratford. Was Shakespeare recruited to fill the gap?) Or did he work, as John Aubrey first reported in the late seventeenth century, as a schoolmaster in the countryside, perhaps in Lancashire, in a county and a family (at Hoghton Tower) with Catholic and Warwickshire links (see Myth 7)? Clearly there is much that we would like to know; but this should not blind us to how much we do know. It is what we do with what we know—how we evaluate the evidence (and negative evidence) and the inferences we draw—that is important.

One of the key things to do with what we know is to put it in context. Thus, the shotgun wedding of Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare, allied to the fact that she was eight years his senior, is often used to argue that Anne trapped her teenage lover into marriage (see Myth 10). In fact, unmarried pregnant women were not uncommon in Stratford, and historians estimate that 25 percent of late-sixteenth-century brides were pregnant when they married.[4] In certain circumstances, pre-marital sex could be seen as an advantage: it enabled lovers to marry in defiance of their parents' wishes since parents were likely to prefer a son-in-law of whom they disapproved to the alternative: an illegitimate grandchild. Shakespeare's hurried wedding can be interpreted as evidence of his marital desire as well as evidence of marital entrapment.

Whether the Hathaway–Shakespeare alliance was or continued to be “a willing … bondage” (as The Tempest's Ferdinand calls marriage, 3.1.89–90) depends on how we contextualize it with later evidence. The couple's failure to have more children after the early death of their only son in 1596 (see Myth 10) may indicate, as Katherine Duncan-Jones believes, that conjugal relations had long since ceased; or it may, more neutrally, reflect Anne's infertility after the difficult delivery of twins.[5] Stories can be told in more than one way, based on the same evidence.

A similar need for context surrounds Shakespeare's education (see Myth 2). Critics often cite Shakespeare's marriage as an event that would have prevented him going to university. This was a period when Bachelors of Art were still, literally, bachelors. But Shakespeare married at 18 and that was a late age to be starting university in the sixteenth century. (There are plenty of records of students matriculating between the ages of 11 and 13.) By 1582, then, it was clear that university was not on the Shakespeare family's agenda for their first son. In fact, as Lois Potter reveals, only one of the Stratford men born in 1564 attended university (and he took holy orders, for which university was the essential training).[6]

What is clear from the records is that although we know a considerable amount about Shakespeare's transactions and activities and finances, we have very little sense of his personality. This contrasts with other Elizabethan playwrights. Ben Jonson's personality is quite clear to us: he was, in Stanley Wells's trenchant summary, “the most aggressively self-opinionated, conceited, quarrelsome, vociferous and self-advertising literary and theatrical figure of his time.”[7] Marlowe comes across as intellectually and socially unorthodox: an iconoclast, or perhaps just a braggadocio. His entire family was irascible and impulsive: the archives record a “rowdy, quarrelsome, awkward, busy, self-assertive” father, a sister accused of extra-marital philandering, and another chastised as a “scold, common swearer and blasphemer of the name of God.”[8] Thomas Kyd, arrested in 1593 for the possession of atheistical documents, identified the papers as Marlowe's, and under torture offered further details of Marlowe's beliefs: that Christ was a bastard and Mary unfaithful, that Jesus and John the Baptist were sodomitical lovers, that religion was established only “to keep men in awe,” and “that all they that love not tobacco & boys were fools.” Richard Baines, a Secret Service spy whose allegations against Marlowe led to Marlowe's arrest, accused him of inciting people to atheism. Certainly, Marlowe associated with freethinkers (Sir Walter Raleigh, the mathematician Thomas Harriot, the magus Earl of Northumberland), but Kyd and Baines are not impartial witnesses: Kyd was under torture, and Baines was in government service. The student author of the Parnassus plays, performed at Cambridge at the turn of the century, is perhaps more reliable: he did not know Marlowe, but he reports what everyone thought about him:

Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell

Wit lent from heaven but vices sent from hell.

(1.2.288–9)[9]

While there are many details we would like to know about Marlowe—his precise activities in Rheims when absent from Cambridge on government service, his illegal coining in Flushing, the activities of his last day and the truth of his last moments—this information is unlikely to alter our sense of Marlowe the man. It is because we know so much about his personality that we read his protagonists—such as Tamburlaine and Faustus—as expressions of his personal views; paradoxically, it is because we know so little about Shakespeare's personality that we read his plays as personal expressions.

We have only one letter written to Shakespeare in his lifetime. It is a business letter from two Stratford aldermen in 1598 trying to interest Shakespeare in an investment.[10] The closest thing to a letter from him is the printed dedications to the Earl of Southampton, prefaced to his narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). They read like love letters: “What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours” (Rape of Lucrece). These could be the words of Juliet (Romeo and Juliet was written the year after the publication of Lucrece, in 1595) or of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, written in 1596. It is an elegantly incremental expression. The tricolonic structure moves from past tense (“what I have done”) to future tense (“what I have to do”) to an eternal present (“being”) which unusually goes beyond the expected patronage relationship of dependence and devotion to one of symbiosis and unity (“being part in all I have”). It is, or sounds, simple and heartfelt. As such, of course, it fulfills the conventions of the genre of dedication whose art was to be sycophantic while sounding sincere: in this era of humanist self-conscious rhetoric, plain style is a style as artfully constructed as any other. The voice that sounds most like Shakespeare's may be least his own.

Perhaps the reason we so desperately want the plays to speak to us, is that the story the legal documents tell us is not always the story we want to hear. Many biographers have been troubled by Shakespeare's lack of civic or institutional philanthropy (given his affluence) in his will or by the evidence of Shakespeare hoarding grain in 1599, at a time when a series of bad harvests meant that many of Stratford's poor were starving, especially as he writes about exactly this scenario at the beginning of Coriolanus.[11] Or by the fact that in a Stratford protest against proposed land enclosures by William Combe in 1614–15, Shakespeare hired a lawyer to protect his own land and appears to have supported Combe. The case is well documented and Lois Potter speaks for many when she writes, “Combe's behaviour … seems thoroughly obnoxious, and it is depressing to find Shakespeare on his side.”[12] History is full of examples of creative artists who were not the nicest of people (Mozart is one such example, the Elizabethan playwright Anthony Munday another). But literary creation complicates acceptance of the paradox. It is (perhaps) one thing to make sublime music and behave un-sublimely; but to put the human and the compassionate at the center of one's dramatic world (as Shakespeare does) and then not to enact it in one's own life or to persecute Catholics (as Munday did) and then write a play sympathetic to Sir Thomas More …[13]

Thus it is not just William Shakespeare that we do not know; we do not know how real lives and artistic creation interact or overlap or contradict. And the person who bears the brunt of our frustration is the shadowy figure of Anne Hathaway whose marital history bears more relation to Steevens's simple factual narrative than does Shakespeare's: she married, she bore three children, she died. We lack any sustained sense of Shakespeare's personality and it is this lack, Germaine Greer argues in Shakespeare's Wife (2008, see Myth 10), that fuels anti-romantic and fundamentally misogynist readings of Anne Hathaway as a husband-trapper rather than as (say) an emotional support or an enabler of Shakespeare's career. What lies behind this, Greer implies, is envy. We envy Anne Hathaway because she has something we don't: closeness to Shakespeare, an understanding of who he was, knowledge of what he thought and felt.

There is one advantage to our uncertainty about Shakespeare's personality: it leaves the way clear for creative writers to fill the gap. Anthony Burgess's 1964 novel Nothing Like the Sun captures not just Shakespeare's love life but Elizabethan life itself through his plausible Elizabethan prose (a feat he repeated for Marlowe's life in A Dead Man in Deptford, 1993). John Madden's film foregrounds the love life of the naïf and hapless playwright in his title—Shakespeare in Love (1998)—and works at the opposite end of Burgess's historical spectrum with wittily modern takes on Elizabethan life (a waterman, the Elizabethan equivalent of a taxi driver, presses his own scripts on theater people; and a waiter explains “The special today is a pig's foot marinated in juniper-berry vinegar served on a buckwheat pancake”). But both writers present Shakespeare as someone ruled by his heart. So too does Peter Whelan in his play The School of Night (1992), which has Marlowe and Shakespeare discuss their theories of comedy. For Marlowe, humans are vulnerable when they laugh; laughter is “the fish opening its mouth”; and comedy is “the bait that hides the hook.” With such a philosophy Marlowe is inevitably disturbed by Shakespeare's question: “But what if you only want to feed the fish … not catch them?”[14] Shakespeare is compassionate; and his compassion is for humanity.

Christopher Rush's Will offers a different approach: from six legal pages in the National Archives, Rush fashions a fictional autobiography in which a bedridden Shakespeare dictates his will. A man's last will and testament, Shakespeare's lawyer observes, has nothing in common with a Shakespeare play: it has no emotion, no ambiguity. On the contrary, responds his client: there is plenty of sentiment and “a little drama” tucked away between the neutral lines. Shakespeare's explanations of his will's bequests lead to plausible reminiscences about his relationships in Stratford and London (of his rivalry with Marlowe: “he was even born in front of me, beating me by two months”). There are plenty of creatively adapted lines from Shakespeare and others: Anne Hathaway is his “muse of hellfire,” “this long disease, my wife.” If marriage is an affliction, writing is also an illness (“happy men don't write plays. Happy men play bowls”), and we glimpse Shakespeare's sense of failure as husband, father, tradesman, scholar, and martyr. All the myths we discuss in this book are dealt with creatively in Rush's novel.

Just as Falstaff is not only witty in himself but “the cause that wit is in other men” (2 Henry IV 1.2.9–10), so Shakespeare's life has fueled other lives, fictional lives. And fictions have a way of becoming truths. We see this from Juliet's balcony in Verona (the real balcony of a fictional character) to Laurence Olivier's film of Henry V, set in an Elizabethan theater, which becomes for many of us, in moments of weakness at least, tantamount to proof of what happened in the Elizabethan theater. (Elizabethan prompters were visible on stage. How do we know this? We saw it in Olivier's film.)

Negotiating Shakespeare's life, its (sometimes dispiriting) facts and its frustrating gaps, forces us to think about myths. In our introduction we cited the OED definitions of myth. Here, Ambrose Bierce's satiric definition in The Devil's Dictionary (1906) is salutary:

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later. (our italics)

“Truth” and “invention” go hand in hand in all biographies; biographies are stories that we tell. The biographies of a Christopher Rush or an Anthony Burgess are just as much a myth—a true invention—as those of Peter Ackroyd or Charles Nicholl.

Notes

[1] This quotation, and variants of it, appear in print and on the web.

[2] Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as a Stage (London: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 7.

[3] Colin Burrow, “Who Wouldn't Buy It?,” review of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, London Review of Books, 20 January 2005.

[4] Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), ch. 3, citing David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 74.

[5] Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life, Arden (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), p. 91; Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare, p. 59.

[6] Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare, p. 48.

[7] Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Co. (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 129.

[8] William Urry, Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 28; Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus: The A-Text, ed. Roma Gill, New Mermaids (London: A. & C. Black, 1989), p. 2, quoting Urry, “Marlowe and Canterbury,” Times Literary Supplement, 13 February 1964.

[9] The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J.B. Leishman (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1949).

[10] Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare, pp. 235–6.

[11] Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare, p. 109.

[12] Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare, p. 404.

[13] Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett, Arden (London: A. & C. Black, 2011).

[14] Peter Whelan, The School of Night (London: Warner Chappell Plays, 1992), pp. 57–8.

Myth 17

Shakespeare wrote alone

We tend to see genius as a solitary art: the writer alone in a garret. Shakespeare in Love shows Shakespeare at various stages of writer's block—practicing his signature, speaking to his therapist, making a false start (Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter)—before covering page after page in a love-inspired white-hot creative frenzy. Whether in success or in failure, the writer writes (or fails to write) alone. The paradigm certainly holds true in other art forms such as music. We cannot imagine Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as composed by “Beethoven and his collaborator and his revisers.” (Our phrasing comes from the Revels edition of Dr Faustus, edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, whose title page advertises the multiple hands in “Marlowe”'s play.) Mozart's Requiem is still so called despite our knowledge that it was unfinished at Mozart's death and that much—perhaps the larger part—was contributed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr.

But if genius is solitary, theater is by definition collaborative. It requires the input and coordination of many groups of people: actors, costume designers, and musicians (to name but three). These are the collaborative partners (or at least, some of them) at point of production. What were the circumstances at point of composition?

The Elizabethan theater impresario Philip Henslowe regularly records payments to teams of writers. Extant manuscript plays often show more than one hand. The most famous is Sir Thomas More, which has five authors/revisers (one of the revisers was Shakespeare). When Thomas Middleton and Samuel Rowley co-authored The Changeling (1622), Rowley wrote the comic subplot, Middleton the tragic main plot. When Robert Daborne was behind on a commission for Philip Henslowe in 1613, he subcontracted an act to speed things up. Clearly, there were many models of collaboration in the Elizabethan theater.

But if it is clear that collaboration was not unusual, it is equally clear that many authors wrote alone, and preferred to write alone. Anthony Burgess plays on this in Enderby's Dark Lady when he depicts the Jacobean writing duo, Beaumont and Fletcher, who not only shared a study but, it was reported, a mistress. Burgess's Shakespeare enters a tavern and sits down “not far from Beaumont and Fletcher with their one doxy who, being born under the sign of Libra, was fain to bestow kisses and clips equally on both.” Beaumont hails Shakespeare:

“Master Shakespeare,” said Frank Beaumont timidly, “there is a matter we would talk of, to wit a collaboration betwixt you and us here.”

“She hath enough to do fumbling two let alone three.”

Burgess's Shakespeare shuns collaboration of any kind, but the evidence tells a different story.

The bulk of Shakespeare's work is single-authored in all genres: comedies, histories and tragedies. Of the thirty-eight plays in the Shakespeare canon, only six are accepted to be collaborations: 1 Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and All Is True (Henry VIII). (The figure rises to eight if we include 2 and 3 Henry VI, about which there is no consensus.) For comparison: almost half of Thomas Middleton's canon is collaborative; over 50 percent of Elizabethan plays were collaborative.[1]

We have long known that Shakespeare collaborated late in his career. In 1634 The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play not included in the 1623 Folio, was published with two names on the title page: “Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. William Shakspeare, gentlemen.” Both authors were dead by 1634 (Fletcher had died in 1625, Shakespeare in 1616); the title page describes them as “the memorable Worthies of their time.” Fletcher had been one of the King's Men's most successful dramatists for two decades, and his plays continued to be printed and reprinted. Between 1620 and 1634 there were ten editions of six of his plays, including Two Noble Kinsmen. 1634 saw the publication not only of Two Noble Kinsmen but of Fletcher's single-authored The Faithful Shepherdess; the following year saw two more Fletcher titles reach print for the first time. Thus Fletcher's name alone was a guaranteed selling point in 1634. There could only be one reason to put Shakespeare's name on the title page of Two Noble Kinsmen and that is that he was indeed a co-author.

One of the ways we can identify shares in collaborative works is by authors' linguistic fingerprints: verbal tics that work at a subconscious level. So, for instance, Fletcher prefers the elided pronominal form “'em”; Shakespeare prefers “them.” In Two Noble Kinsmen scenes with these different forms are fairly clearly demarcated. But some scenes have both forms. The collaborators obviously read each other's scenes and contributed to them.

Two Noble Kinsmen was written in 1613. The partnership was successful: Fletcher and Shakespeare worked together again the same year on All Is True (Henry VIII) and Cardenio (now lost). Although Shakespeare had begun his late romances collaboratively, writing Pericles (1607) with George Wilkins,[2] the partnership with Wilkins was not repeated. And the collaboration worked differently: Shakespeare seems to have been responsible for Acts 3–5 of Pericles, with Wilkins writing the first two acts.

Let us go back to the start of Shakespeare's career since it has some points of contact with the collaborative method with Wilkins. Critics have long suspected a different hand in Act 1 of 1 Henry VI and in Act 1 of Titus Andronicus. Identifying the hand(s) has been difficult. The favored candidate for Titus is George Peele. The issue of collaboration in 1 Henry VI is complicated by where one places it chronologically in the sequence now known as 1–3 Henry VI. Many critics believe 1 Henry VI to have been written after 3 Henry VI, as a prequel: having written a two-part sequence about York and Lancaster, Shakespeare came across a play (by Peele? by Nashe?) and adapted it. However, this theory does not take adequate account of the linguistic simplicity (even inferiority) of 1 Henry VI in comparison to the other Henry VI plays. 1 Henry VI is one of the easiest Shakespeare plays to read. One line equals one thought; there are no complicated syntactical structures or images or ideas. It is hard to see this as the work of someone who had just written 3 Henry VI and was about to write Richard III.

The dates of these plays are pertinent (late 1580s or early 1590s for 1 Henry VI, early 1590s for Titus): they are not just early in Shakespeare's career but early in the life of the professional Elizabethan theater. There are good practical reasons for collaboration. It is speedy. Two are better than one; three or four may be better still. The newly professional theater needed new plays. Between 27 December 1593 and 26 December 1594 Philip Henslowe's Diary records 206 performances of forty-one different titles; if his marginal “ne” means “new,” then fifteen of these were brand new plays. Dramatist Robert Daborne outsourced when he needed to meet a deadline. So too do Burgess's fictional Beaumont and Fletcher. Beaumont corrects Shakespeare's sexual (mis)interpretation of his proposed collaboration: “I mean with Jack here and myself. A comedy called Out on You Mistress Minx which must be ready for rehearsing some two days from now and not yet started though the money taken.” A second practical consideration applies: collaboration worked as a kind of apprentice system in which inexperienced dramatists learned from—by working with—others. In 1612–13, Shakespeare may have been training his successor (John Fletcher became the King's Men's “attached” (i.e. contracted) dramatist after Shakespeare).

What about the middle of Shakespeare's career? In 1607 he collaborated with Thomas Middleton on the satire Timon of Athens. The play may be unfinished (it contains loose ends) although it is certainly stageable. (Middleton later adapted Macbeth and Measure for Measure after Shakespeare's death; see Myth 24.) We are just beginning to explore the extent of the working relationship between Middleton and Shakespeare at this period. Middleton's city comedy, A Mad World My Masters (1607), written immediately before Timon, has as one of its central characters an over-hospitable knight by the name of Sir Bounteous Prodigal. Given that Timon is a tragic Sir Bounteous Prodigal, it may be that the collaborative Timon of Athens was actually initiated by Middleton as a generically logical next step, following on from his exploration of prodigality in comic form.[3] We have recently offered evidence to suggest that Middleton was a co-author with Shakespeare on the comedy, All's Well That Ends Well (c.1607). Critics have long noted oddities in the first printed text of this play (the Folio of 1623)—variations in how characters are designated in speech prefixes, in stage directions, and in dialogue; curiously narrative stage directions that promise dialogue that does not then occur; an un-Shakespearean urban grittiness of tone, and so on. Many of the play's textual, tonal, and stylistic features match up with the known preferences and habits of Thomas Middleton; they are particularly concentrated in certain scenes—the comic subplot with Paroles, for instance—but they feature in some of the Helen scenes too.[4] So we need to modify the conventional story about co-authorship in Shakespeare's career, a story in which he collaborated, briefly but successfully, at the beginning and then, more regularly, at the end of his career but not successfully or regularly in the middle. It now looks like collaboration was a palatable and practical activity for him throughout, successful enough for him to want to work with two authors (Middleton and Fletcher) again.

So far we have been considering jointly authored plays. But there is another kind of collaboration in which an author contributes a speech or a scene or a short sequence to another's play. This is the case in the manuscript of John of Bordeaux, a sequel to Robert Greene's popular comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589) where Henry Chettle wrote one speech (a large blank space was left for the purpose). It is the case in the anonymous history play Edward III, for which Shakespeare wrote the Countess of Salisbury scenes (in about 1596). It is the case for Sir Thomas More where Shakespeare added speeches in which More addresses and calms the rioters. This is an especially interesting case and it is worth pausing over it.

Sir Thomas More dramatizes two key events of recent history: the “evil May Day” riots of 1517, and More's refusal to subscribe to Henry VIII's divorce articles in 1532 (conflated in the play with his refusal to subscribe to the Act of Succession in 1534). The play links the two by having More talk the rioters into obedience in the first half while himself refusing obedience to his king in the second half. The manuscript of the play contains seven hands: five authors/revisers, a scribe, and the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, who censored the play so severely that many critics believe it was abandoned. At some later stage the play was revised. The questions that have always dogged criticism of the play are: Why would you write it at all given that it dramatizes material that could not be openly discussed in the sixteenth century? When was the play written? Why would Munday, one of the authors, a rabid anti-Catholic, write a play sympathetic to a Catholic martyr? Were the revisions made immediately following Tilney's censorial prescriptions, or later? Who are the seven hands and five authors?

John Jowett's magisterial Arden edition (2011) steers a clear line through these questions.[5] The original play was written by Munday and Chettle, censored by Tilney, and an unknown playhouse scribe coordinated revisions by Chettle and three additional authors: Dekker, Heywood, and Shakespeare. Jowett places the play's composition in the late Elizabethan period, c.1600 (plays about Henry VIII's reign were coming into companies' repertoires then) and the revision in 1603–4. Jowett feels “more secure” in his suggested date for the revision than in that for the original composition. His date of 1603/4 supports the new perspective on Shakespeare as collaborator. Instead of confining collaboration to the start and end of his career, we now have a scenario in which he is writing with and for others in the middle. (It was a contractual obligation to “patch” other men's plays or provide new prologues and epilogues. In 1602 Ben Jonson was paid for additions to Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, although the case has been made that Shakespeare is the author of the published additions.[6] In the same year Samuel Bird and William Rowley were paid for additions to Marlowe's Dr Faustus.)

The deployment of so many hands is usually a sign that a revised text was urgently needed (especially given that the revisers worked simultaneously, not sequentially, as the manuscript shows). Jowett's dating of the revisions at the start of James's reign might help us supply the occasion. One of the perplexing questions about Shakespeare's career is: why did he not write city pageants (see Myth 14)? Lord Mayor's annual processions (and, in 1604, James's coronation festivities) were occasions when the city brought out its heavy hitters. Munday, Middleton, Jonson, Heywood, Dekker, and Peele were all commissioned to write pageants for the city. Why not Shakespeare? Shakespeare knew all these writers and worked with some of them at various stages in different ways (he acted in Jonson's plays, for instance, and collaborated with Peele on Titus). The revision of More in a hurry in 1603/4 may have been related to some London event.

Jowett's dating argument about Shakespeare's addition to More c.1604, plus our suggestion about the collaborative nature of All's Well c.1607, dislodges many of our assumptions about Shakespeare's mid-career: we have known that he worked collaboratively but not at that time or in that way. Perhaps we can extend the field of consideration. Giorgio Melchiori sees a court connection in Merry Wives of Windsor (1597). He argues that this was not just a play performed at court, as many of Shakespeare's plays were, but a play developed from a court masque that Shakespeare wrote specially for the second Lord Hunsdon (Shakespeare revised the masque into a longer version of the Herne's Oak scene, printed subsequently in the 1623 Folio).[7] Like Jowett's edition of Sir Thomas More, Melchiori's edition of Merry Wives opens the door for us to think about other kinds of writing that Shakespeare was involved in. Together these editions expand our concept of the social circumstances, in the city and at court, in which Shakespeare was writing and being commissioned to write.

Notes

[1] Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Co. (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 248 n. 40, citing Eric Rasmussen, “Collaboration,” in Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

[2] For an account of this insalubrious character see Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (London: Penguin, 2008).

[3] See Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, “‘Time's Comic Sparks’: The Dramaturgy of A Mad World My Masters and Timon of Athens,” in Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 181–95.

[4] Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, “Many Hands—A New Shakespeare Collaboration?”, Times Literary Supplement, 20 April 2012, pp. 13–15.

[5] Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett, Arden (London: A. & C. Black, 2011).

[6] Brian Vickers surveys a number of important new studies on Shakespeare's authorship in his “Shakespeare and Authorship Studies in the Twenty-First Century,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 62 (2011), pp. 106–42.

[7] The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgio Melchiori, Arden (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 2000).

Myth 18

Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical

Are Shakespeare's sonnets autobiographical? The short answer is: undoubtedly, some of them are; some of them are not; and some of the latter have the appearance (or are designed to have the appearance) of the former.

Sonnet 145 has a strong claim to be autobiographical or self-referential. It turns (quite literally) on a pun on hate away/Hathaway and is often thought to be a love poem written early in Shakespeare's career to his bride-to-be Anne Hathaway (see Myth 10). For twelve lines the poet documents the lady's hatred; then in the concluding couplet the sentence structure offers both a delayed negative and an unexpected object (or non-object):

“I hate” from hate away she threw,

And saved my life, saying “not you.”

Given that the conjunction “And” is a near-homophone of “Anne,” the last line can also read, “Anne saved my life.” The poetic simplicity (some say, triviality) of this poem, and its unusual tetrameter structure (each line has four stresses; the other 153 sonnets are in five-stressed pentameter lines: see Myth 11), may also indicate its composition early in Shakespeare's career (or, perhaps more accurately, early in Shakespeare's life, before he had a career).

In Sonnet 135 Shakespeare puns more obviously, this time repeatedly, on his own given name as the poet begs the dark lady to include him among her lovers:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

And Will to boot, and Will in overplus.

…

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,

Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

With sixteen uses of the word “will” in fourteen lines, this poem rings the changes on the multiple meanings of “will” as wish, obstinacy, sexual desire, slang for the penis and the vagina, as well as a male name. It is impossible to separate these puns from the name of the author. In fact, punning on one's name or the name of one's beloved was a poetic fashion in the period. Astrophil and Stella—star-lover and star—are Philip Sidney's fictional names for himself and his inaccessible inamorata, Lady Penelope (inaccessible because she was the wife of Lord Rich); her real-life identity is acknowledged in a concentrated sequence of puns in Sonnet 37 which play on her married name: she is rich in all things (beauty, virtue), but the poet's tragedy is that she is Rich.

“Hate away” and “Will” in Shakespeare's Sonnets 145 and 135 are clear in their referents. Less clear, because unnamed, is the presence of one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, perhaps George Chapman, in the “rival poet” sonnets, which may reflect Shakespeare's professional despair in the late 1590s. In 1598 Chapman had just published his translation of part of Homer's Iliad—a section of Book 18 he called Achilles' Shield; in the same year Marlowe's erotic epyllion, Hero and Leander, was published; furthermore, it was reprinted the same year with a continuation by Chapman. These works were not just a literary success, highly popular and (in the case of Chapman's translation) high in prestige (Achilles' Shield was dedicated to a patron whom Chapman flatteringly compared to Achilles); they were also a literary gauntlet—a challenge to find Marlowe's successor. Chapman's continuation of Hero and Leander blatantly announced that he viewed himself as that successor. In Sonnet 86 Shakespeare compares his poetic success (or lack of it) with another poet's achievements. Chapman is a logical contender for comparison. Shakespeare laments that he has mismanaged his literary career, not winning the patronage that Chapman has managed (“the proud full sail of his great verse / Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you”) or able to compete with his classical knowledge (“by spirits taught to write”—the ancients; “his compeers by night”—his nocturnal study; “that affable familiar ghost / Which nightly gulls him with intelligence”—Chapman claimed inspiration from Homer). In fact, there may be more than one rival poet in this sonnet if the ghost is Marlowe inspiring Chapman rather than Homer.[1]

It is perhaps no coincidence that it is at this time that Shakespeare first mentions Marlowe (twice) in a play, As You Like It (1599). In the Forest of Ardenne the love-struck shepherdess, Phoebe, says: “Dead shepherd [i.e. dead lyricist: “shepherd” was shorthand for a pastoral poet], now I find thy saw [= saying] of might: ‘Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’” (3.5.82–3). Her rhetorical question is a direct quotation from Marlowe's Hero and Leander. The play's other reference to Marlowe comes when the clown, Touchstone, in a speech about the frustrations of having one's poetry underappreciated, says “It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room” (3.3.11–12). Marlowe was killed in 1593 over an argument about the bill (reckoning) in a boarding house where he and three others had spent the day. (The Reckoning is the title of Charles Nicholl's biography of Marlowe.) The death of London's most famous dramatist had clearly shocked the theater world. As Katherine Duncan-Jones points out, the qualification in Touchstone's “it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room” is illogical. Death cannot be modified; there are no degrees of deadness; one is either dead or not.[2] Unless, of course one is talking about literary life and death where reputation can be seen relatively. A poet's work can be alive or dead or anywhere on the spectrum between. In Sonnet 86 the poet laments that the rival poet's success “struck me dead.” The sentiments in As You Like It, written in the year in which Marlowe continued to live poetically through the publication of Hero and Leander, link to the anxieties in Sonnet 86 about literary reputation and comparisons. Shakespeare is worried that he, a living poet, may be more dead in literary terms than the dead Marlowe. Such expressions of anxiety also help to date this sonnet by locating it in the literary world of the 1590s.

Whether these readings of the “name” sonnets or the “rival poet” sonnets mean that we can read all of Shakespeare's sonnets autobiographically is a moot point. Collectively the sonnets tell a story every bit as dramatic as the plots of Shakespeare's plays: a plot in which two men compete for the favors of one woman, in which the woman rejects the poet, in which the poet expresses his love for a young man, in which the poet experiences rivalry in love as well as in poetry. The poems were not written as a narrative sequence (they were composed over a period of about sixteen years). Although some of them function sequentially (several begin with the contrasting or continuative conjunctions “But” or “So,” continuing a line of thought from the previous sonnet), others (such as 153 and 154, a story of Cupid) duplicate each other, and look like experimental variations on a theme. The fact that one or more poems can be read autobiographically does not mean that all 154 sonnets or their cumulative story are autobiographical. In fact, as Dympna Callaghan notes, the collection as a whole is remarkably unspecific as to the time and place of events (she contrasts the detail of Petrarch or Samuel Daniel) and Lois Potter points out that whereas other Elizabethan sonneteers leave no doubt as to the persons they are talking about, Shakespeare's sonnets name only mythical figures: Adonis, Helen, Eve, and Time.[3]

Nevertheless it is true that the title page of the 1609 volume foregrounds Shakespeare the author. These, the title page proclaims, are “Shakes-peare's Sonnets,” the possessive linking author and creation in a way not typical of published sonnets of the period. The only other sonnet title page to use a possessive is “Sir P[hilip] S[idney] His Astrophel and Stella” (1591). Thomas Lodge's Phillis (1593) does not name the poet on the title page. Neither does Richard Barnfield's Cynthia (1595). A notable contrast is Thomas Watson's Hekatompathia (1582): The Hekatompathia or Passionate century of love divided into two parts: whereof, the first expresseth the author's sufferance in love: the latter, his long farewell to love and all his tyranny. Composed by Thomas Watson Gentleman. But Watson is unusual: he is following a continental tradition of sonnet presentation, seen also in his headnotes to each of his poems; the fashion did not catch on in England.

No wonder, then, that William Wordsworth, writing in an age when sonnets (and poetry generally) were instruments of self-expression, wrote that “with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart” (“Scorn Not the Sonnet”). But why, we might ask, do we not assume that Shakespeare unlocked his heart in his plays? To a certain extent, of course, we do. Hamlet is often seen as Shakespeare's working through his grief at the death of his son Hamnet in 1596 (see Myth 12). The Tempest, a play in which a father loses a daughter in marriage and abandons his theatrical powers, is often taken to reflect Shakespeare's personal and professional circumstances in 1610 (see Myth 20). Orsino's advice in Twelfth Night, in which he recommends that the woman should always “take / An elder than herself” (2.4.28–9), is frequently read as Shakespeare's personal regret at having done the opposite in his own marriage: he was eight years Anne Hathaway's junior (see Myth 10). Shakespeare's use of plots with twins is viewed as an expression of his own personal fascination, as a father of fraternal twins, with twins generally (Comedy of Errors has two sets of identical twins, Twelfth Night one set of fraternal twins). But we never assume that Shakespeare experienced shipwreck or travelled to Illyria or was pursued by the wrong person under the influence of magic (although the plot of Midsummer Night's Dream does sometimes lead to the question, “Did Shakespeare believe in fairies?”). In other words, we read sentiments biographically but not plots—except in the case of the sonnets, where we do both.

In 1912 a Cambridge psychologist, Edward Bullough, wrote that the “self-expression of an artist is not such as the self-expression of a letter-writer or a public speaker: it is not the direct expression of the concrete personality of the artist; it is not even an indirect expression of his concrete personality.”[4] Bullough acknowledges that a writer's times and personal experience are indeed reflected in his or her works but adds that readers can only find these once they know what reflected experiences to look for. In other words, we can read backwards from Shakespeare's life into the sonnets but not forwards from the sonnets into his life.

Renaissance literature does not lack self-portraits: Montaigne's Essays (translated into English in 1603) and Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (published 1643) are obvious examples. But for Bullough even works which are unquestionably autobiographical are artistic productions which are “the indirect formulation of a distanced mental content.”[5] That is, self-portraits need not be direct expressions of the self because of the mediating factor of artistic shaping. (Today's genre of the “memoir” provides many examples of this—see, for example, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.) As Bullough brilliantly puts it, “the idea may be suggested by an actual experience” but “the idea itself is an actual experience.”[6] In this sense, all of Shakespeare's works are personal autobiographical reflections (in both senses) of the artist.

Let us return to the sonnets. Peter Holbrook points out that “one of the most astonishing things about them is the audacity and recklessness of their self-exposure.” The poet is anguished, worthless, dismayed, mistrustful, self-loathing, envious, pained, humiliated, outranked, and “out-poetized.”[7] What is distinctive about the sonnets, Holbrook concludes, is their portrayal of a defective human in a variety of experiences, and the “implicit claim in the poems that this experience is valuable because it is his.”[8] This accords with Shakespeare's interest in the individual elsewhere in the canon; “I am that I am” (Sonnet 121) is not far removed from the similar existential self-assertions of Richard III or Aaron the Moor (Titus Andronicus) or Paroles (All's Well That Ends Well) or Iago (Othello): it's striking that none of these characters is an admirable parallel.

But we must not forget that Richard III and Aaron and Paroles and Iago are fictions and the poetic “I” of the sonnets may be equally fictional. Nor should we forget that, as originally printed, the sonnets were followed by a narrative poem, The Lover's Complaint. In this poem a narrator sees an anguished weeping country maid who subsequently narrates her story of betrayed love to an aged man, a former city resident who is now a farmer (“A reverend man that grazed his cattle nigh, / Sometime a blusterer that the ruffle knew / Of court, of city”; ll. 57–9). The old farmer indicates that his experience might enable him to assuage the maid's sufferings. Thus encouraged, she tells her story of wisdom gained; but then she offers the startling conclusion that were the situation to occur again she would respond to her faithless lover in the same way and allow herself to be betrayed as before. The poem ends here. We are left with the painful paradox of the young woman's admission, a sentiment at once intensely personal (it is her story) and general: she moves from the first to the third person (the lover's attractions “would yet again betray the fore-betrayed / And new pervert a reconcilèd maid”; ll. 328–9). And this distancing maneuver is placed within a narrative structure of tripartite distancing—a story within a story within a story—which leads to a tantalizing and frustrating (in)conclusion in which we hear no more from the old man of stanza 9 or the narrator of stanza 1. We are never told what the old farmer's response was or what relevant experience or wisdom he had to offer, or why the narrator, who observed and overheard the young maid telling her story to the old man, was there in the first place.

And this is the experience of reading the sonnets. The personal and the universal coexist; multiple persons take center stage; time and place and persons are unspecified. As a result, we are no longer sure whose story this is.

Notes

[1] Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan, 1592–1623 (London: A. & C. Black, 2011), pp. 140–6.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Blackwell Introductions to Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), p. 3; Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 414.

[4] Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology, 5 (1912), pp. 87–118 (p. 113).

[5] Ibid., p. 115.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Peter Holbrook, Shakespeare's Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 193–4.

[8] Ibid., p. 194.

Myth 19

If Shakespeare were writing now, he'd be writing for Hollywood

A new and quickly developing technology, which controlled production and distribution of plays, and released a large number of new products every year. A dream factory, shaping the imagination of generations of theatergoers. A commercial entertainment business located just beyond the reach of the authorities. An industry that shook off its dubious early associations to address monarchs and the court, as well as the man in the street. It's easy to hear the echoes between the early modern theater and twentieth-century Hollywood, and we all know the pedagogue's favorite justification, that Shakespeare was the popular entertainment of his day. So is it reasonable to suppose that a modern-day Shakespeare would be writing for Hollywood?

The parallels between these two entertainment spheres are extensive and suggestive. Just as the early modern theater industry grew up on the South Bank of the Thames to avoid the censure of the London civic authorities, so Hollywood developed close to the Mexican border so that there was a nearby extrajudicial bolt-hole. Both industries reach a wide audience (see Myth 1) and are commercially, as well as aesthetically, successful, making some of their key players rich (including Shakespeare, a share-holder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men). Arguments about the morality of these representational media are also adjacent. The Hays Code imposed on Hollywood from 1930 onwards aimed to ensure that “no picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it” and took as a governing precept that films “affect the moral standards of those who, through the screen, take in these ideas and ideals.” Writing in 1583 Philip Stubbes railed against the theater in similar, if more colorful, terms:

You say there are good examples to be learned in them [plays], truly so there are, if you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the hypocrite, to cog, to lie and falsify; if you will learn to jest, laugh and fleer, to grin, to nod, and mow; if you will learn to play the vice, to swear, tear, and blaspheme both heaven and earth; if you will learn to become a bawd, unclean and to divirginate maids, to deflower honest wives; if you will learn to murder, slay, kill, pick, steal, rob, and rove: if you will learn to rebel against princes, to commit treasons, to consume treasures …[1]

And so on. That the immediacy of seeing actions played out—on stage or screen—might prompt spectators to imitative immorality emerges strongly as a shared concern.

The defenders of both media have tried to suggest that the opposite is true: that films/theater can teach positive behavior. Linda Ruth Williams collected observations of the behavior of audiences at the erotic thriller Fatal Attraction (dir. Adrian Lyne, 1989), which seem to show that both men and women reacted strongly against the depiction of an extra-marital affair. One of the critics she cites wrote, “If Aids doesn't stop you, this movie will.”[2] It's not a million miles away from Thomas Heywood's anecdote about a Norfolk woman watching a play about an adulterous wife who murders her husband, and “suddenly screeched and cried out Oh my husband, my husband! I see the ghost of my husband fiercely threatening and menacing me.” It transpires that the woman had herself poisoned her husband, and after her “voluntary confession,” prompted by the play, she is condemned to death.[3]

Just as rival studios became associated with particular stars and a particular style of film, so the effective duopoly between the Admiral's Men and the Lord Chamberlain's Men during the 1590s drew its commercial and artistic strength from the two companies' contrasting personnel and house style. For example, the Admiral's Men appear to have capitalized on the furor over their rivals' 1 Henry IV, when the descendants of Sir John Oldcastle objected to his disrespectful presentation as the fat braggart soldier (the name was changed to the now-familiar Falstaff); their play Sir John Oldcastle is a sycophantic portrait of their proto-Protestant ancestor. In turn the Admiral's Men's backlist of Marlowe favorites was imitated in the Chamberlain's repertoire. Like Hollywood stars, Edward Alleyn, famous for his central roles in Marlowe's big, booming dramas, and Richard Burbage, the first Richard III and Hamlet, became well known. An anecdote in the diary of the law student John Manningham attests to this:

Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night with her by the name of Richard III. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard III.”[4]

At Burbage's death an elegy mourned multiple losses:

He's gone, and with him what a world is dead.

No more young Hamlet, old Hieronimo[5]

Kind Lear, the grievèd Moor, and more beside

That lived in him have now for ever died.

Comic actors, including the clown Richard Tarlton, famous for his grimaces and “his metatheatrical talent as a maker of exits and entrances,”[6] and Will Kempe, whose name substitutes for that of the buffoonish constable Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing in the play's first printing, were also hugely popular. At the turn of the century a Cambridge student play presented Burbage and Kemp as modern celebrities.

And while the role of the playwright in the early modern theater was not quite equivalent to the role of the screenwriter in Hollywood, the parallel is a provocative one. Many of Shakespeare's early plays were printed with reference to the acting company but not their author, such as the extensive title page of the first edition of Richard III: “The Tragedy of King Richard the third. / Containing His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephews: his tyrannicall usurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserved death. As it hath beene lately Acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his servants.” Like an iconic Hollywood product such as, say, Casablanca (1942)—most of us could probably approximate its most famous line, and name its romantic leads, and some might even identify its director, but few would be able to name its writer—who's performing this play and what it's about seem more significant to potential buyers than who has written it.

Finally, Hollywood and Shakespeare's theater share a penchant for make-believe and fantasy: neither is drawn to grittily realistic drama. Just as the historians of the future would gain a very strange view of early twenty-first-century culture from, say, reading the Harry Potter films or the Bourne Trilogy or Sex in the City as mirror-images of everyday life, so too it is over-simplistic to look for direct reflections of Elizabethan or Jacobean experience in the drama of the period. Early modern women did not dress in men's clothing to resolve difficulties, nor did all couples fall in love at first sight, nor did family disputes end in carnage, or women substitute for each other in a man's bed, any more than men have asses' heads or identical twins wheel round a city ignorant of each other's existence. The body-strewn stage at the end of Hamlet or Titus Andronicus is an indication of the literary genre of tragedy, not of a more violent society.

Drama, like Hollywood, is the world of pretense. People went to the theater not to see realist or familiar worlds represented, but rather to experience strange things: as Thomas Platter, himself a tourist visiting the Globe theater in 1599 observed, “the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home.”[7] Like Hollywood, the theater district of Bankside was a sort of dream factory: as Puck tells the audience at the very end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, “think … you have but slumbered here, / While these visions did appear; / And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream” (Epilogue, 2–6). Apart from The Merry Wives of Windsor and the induction to The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare never set a play in contemporary England, and never in the metropolitan London of his audiences. In this he bucked the fashion for the so-called ‘city comedy’ of Thomas Middleton or John Marston, a genre still shaped by conventions and stock motifs, but one taking the morals and locale of London itself as its main theme. Instead, Shakespeare's plays draw extensively on literary sources and generic models, and almost all of his drama could be broadly classified as “adaptation,” reworking existing texts, omnivorously transforming his material into the new medium of theater.

The similarities between Hollywood and the early modern theater may seem to make this myth true: were Shakespeare writing now he would be writing for films. But there is one major difference between these two media that compromises this conclusion. The early modern theater was, particularly in the first half of Shakespeare's career, a theater of words, in which verbal artistry was more important than visual artistry (see Myth 8). The phrasing is indicative when, in The Taming of the Shrew the tinker Christopher Sly is persuaded he is a lord and is to be shown a play: “your doctors … thought it good you hear a play / And frame your mind to mirth and merriment” (Induction 2, 127–31). The opposite is true of Hollywood cinema, where images—locations, expressions, interactions—are more significant than dialogue in conveying meaning. Budding screenwriters are advised to keep their scripts short, at about a page a minute, averaging around 20,000 words. Only The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare's shortest play, is anywhere near the length of script required by a film. Shakespeare's plays move along at about 800–900 lines an hour in the modern theater, and thus they are around three hours long. Perhaps it is this relative unimportance of the script in Hollywood cinema that would make it ultimately impossible for a modern Shakespeare to choose this medium. So what would he write? Not novels (too directive); not poetry or theater (too elite). Maybe radio? The pictures, as they say, are better.

Notes

[1] Tanya Pollard, extracting Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) in Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 121.

[2] Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 52–4 (p. 52).

[3] Quoted in Pollard, Shakespeare's Theater, p. 245.

[4] John Manningham's Diary, 1602, quoted in King Richard III, ed. Janis Lull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 24.

[5] The revenging father in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy; see Myth 1.

[6] Peter Thomson, “Tarlton, Richard (d. 1588),” Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[7] http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/16century/topic_4/tplatter.htm

Myth 20

The Tempest was Shakespeare's farewell to the stage

In 1740 a life-size statue commemorating Shakespeare was erected in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The dramatist leans his elbow on a pile of books, and points to a scroll on which is written a variant of Prospero's valedictory lines in The Tempest (4.1.152–6): “The Cloud capt Tow'rs, / The Gorgeous Palaces, / The Solemn Temples, / The Great Globe itself, / Yea all which it Inherit, / Shall Dissolve; And like the baseless Fabrick of a Vision / Leave not a wreck behind.”[1] The text serves as an epitaph for the playwright, and their original speaker in the play becomes a transparent mask for Shakespeare himself: the myth that Shakespeare wrote his own farewell in The Tempest here receives concrete—or rather marble—form.

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare's last plays. It tells the story of a magician, Prospero, who lives on an island with his daughter Miranda, having been exiled from his dukedom in Milan by his brother Antonio. Prospero causes Antonio, his friend Sebastian and ally Alonso, together with Alonso's son Ferdinand, to be shipwrecked on his island. With the help of his airy spirit-servant Ariel, Prospero subjects his enemies to various magical punishments, brings Ferdinand to woo Miranda, and finally confronts his brother, whom Ariel prompts him to forgive rather than chastise: “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (5.1.27–8). Vowing, in elegiac tone, to give up his powers and to drown his books of sorcery, Prospero prepares to return to Milan to take up his dukedom.

That this play might serve as a kind of allegory for Shakespeare as playwright is an interpretation with a long critical history—dating back to the first adaptation of The Tempest by John Dryden and William Davenant, Restoration dramatists adept in reworking Shakespeare's plays for the tastes of the late seventeenth century. Writing in the Prologue to their The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (1667), they acknowledge “Shakespear's Magick” as the equivalent of Prospero's. The analogy is developed through eighteenth-century criticism, which entrenched the view of Prospero as a portrait of the artist as an old man, and, necessarily, constructed a highly positive reading of Prospero's character. Edward Dowden, writing at the end of the nineteenth century in an influential intellectual biography of Shakespeare, is exemplary:

It is not chiefly because Prospero is a great enchanter, now about to break his magic staff, to drown his book deeper than ever plummet sounded, to dismiss his airy spirits, and to return to the practical service of his Dukedom, that we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakespeare himself. It is rather because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his self-mastery, his calm validity of will, his sensitiveness to wrong, his unfaltering justice, and, with these, a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world, are characteristic of Shakespeare as discovered to us in all his latest plays.[2]

Dowden's argument is beautifully circular, even syllogistic. Prospero reminds us of Shakespeare because his character constructs our idea of what Shakespeare must have been like: 1. Prospero is a good guy. 2. Shakespeare is a good guy. 3. Therefore Prospero is Shakespeare. (Or perhaps it is 1, 3, 2; or even 3, 2, 1.)

Despite the logical fallacy of Dowden's argument, there are, as Davenant and Dryden identified, parallels between Prospero's art of magic and the art of the theater. The play's first scene is a good example. The dramatic opening stage direction, A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard: Enter a Ship-master and a Boatswain, pitches us into the pitch and roll of the eponymous tempest, as the bewildered passengers on the storm-tossed ship listen to the mariners exchanging increasingly desperate and technical instructions: “take in the topsail” (1.1.6), “down with the topmast! Yare” (1.1.33), “we split, we split” (1.1.59). We think we are in the middle of a “real” storm, but the next scene reveals that this was a theatrical illusion, magicked up by Prospero from the island to bring his enemies into his power. The seafarers were never in danger: the events looked believable but were created out of a few props and a believable script. As in a play, events happen, controlled by an unseen dramatist, to further a yet unknown plot. Throughout the play Prospero controls the other characters like a playwright, filling out their back-stories, creating encounters by bringing them together or keeping them apart, and creating a denouement in which all is revealed. He refers to his magic as “mine art” (1.2.292) and uses theatrical props—a disappearing banquet table, a line of glistering apparel (stage direction, 4.1.193), a play-within-a-play for the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda. And when he vows to give up his magic the speech, represented on the Poets' Corner monument, seems to draw on the language of theater, in particular in its evocation of the “great globe” (4.1.153; the name of the Shakespeare company theater on Bankside).

Saying that Prospero's role in the play is akin to that of a dramatist does not, however, mean he is a Shakespearean self-portrait. Other figures elsewhere in the canon share these qualities—Iago, the arch-plotter of Othello; the Duke who manipulates events in the guise of a friar in Measure for Measure; Paulina, the keeper of secrets in The Winter's Tale—and we might see the self-reflexivity of The Tempest alongside that of Hamlet or A Midsummer Night's Dream, both of which perform inset plays which occasion commentary on the nature of theater and the blurred lines between illusion and reality. But the idea that Prospero is a picture of Shakespeare has drawn strength from the persistent claim that The Tempest is the playwright's final play before retiring to Stratford. Prospero's farewell to his magic becomes Shakespeare's to the theater, and the Epilogue's poignant appeal for “release” (Epilogue, 9), forgiveness, and applause a final curtain-call for the King's Men's superannuated playwright.

In fact we do not know that The Tempest, written and performed in 1610–11, is Shakespeare's final play: no reliable external evidence can guarantee its order alongside the other late plays The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline. It is because we want the Epilogue to read as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage that we place The Tempest at the end of Shakespeare's career, and then use that position to affirm that the play must dramatize Shakespeare's own feelings. We know that he worked on Two Noble Kinsmen and All Is True with John Fletcher afterwards, so it was certainly not his last writing for the stage. In fact his last performed words may have been Theseus's rather unsonorous “Let's go off / And bear us like the time” (5.6.136–7) at the end of Two Noble Kinsmen (most scholars attribute the Epilogue to that play to Fletcher as co-author). And we also know that in 1613 Shakespeare bought property in Blackfriars near to the theater—the first time he appears to have purchased in London—thus giving the lie to the sentimental idea that he was withdrawing from the hurly-burly to the quiet of Stratford (and setting aside that the movement for Prospero is quite the opposite: he is returning from retirement to active life as Duke of Milan). It has been suggested that Prospero is Shakespeare the actor, retiring from the fray to concentrate on writing, perhaps on preparing his own complete works like his rival Ben Jonson (see Myth 4); relatedly, the position of The Tempest as the first play in the First Folio (1623) has been read as a recognition that in it Shakespeare asserts an authorial identity. But even if external evidence did not compromise the reading of Prospero as Shakespeare, it is still an anachronistic assumption that any early modern dramatist ever wrote autobiographically (see Myths 7, 10, and 18). Instead, as we have repeated in the essays in this book, the ability to see issues from multiple perspectives and to make competing world views equally compelling is intrinsic to successful dramaturgy, is encouraged by the rhetorical training of the Elizabethan grammar schools, and is appropriate to a culture in which literary expression was public and participatory rather than private and confessional.

The readings of The Tempest that draw on the play's place in an assumed chronology of Shakespeare's writings are not, however, unique to this play. Writing early in the twentieth century, Lytton Strachey argued strenuously against the chronological assumptions of Victorian scholarship. Strachey countered the general idea that the mind of the artist could be deduced from the character of the art, and in particular scorned the narrative that “after a happy youth [the writing of the comedies] and a gloomy middle age [the tragedies] he reached at last—it is the universal opinion—a state of quiet serenity in which he died.”[3] The implications of Strachey's trenchant rejection of this explanatory framework are far-reaching. If The Tempest has benefited from assumptions about the aesthetic values of “lateness,” so too have other plays been pigeonholed though chronological evaluation. As one critic pointedly asks: “how many unexpected virtues would suddenly appear in The Two Gentlemen of Verona if it were proven to date from 1597, or … 1603? Its reliance on duologues and soliloquy, for example, no longer a mark of immaturity, might emerge rather as a strategically disintegrative gesture functioning as a check on conventional romantic momentum”: the counterfactual scenario here sardonically reveals that apparently chronological words like “early,” “late,” and “mature” carry implicit value judgments and predetermine our critical response.[4] We prefer a chronology that places the mechanicals' bathetic love tragedy of “Pyramus and Thisbe” (the inset play in A Midsummer Night's Dream), in which the lovers mistakenly kill themselves each believing the other to be dead, after its more somber equivalent of Romeo and Juliet, but there is no external evidence to certify this order. We expect the earliest history plays, 2 and 3 Henry VI, to show immaturity when compared with the later ones, and, lo and behold, the plays' depiction of claim and counter-claim in the Wars of the Roses seems to support that expectation. Modern collected editions of Shakespeare's plays, in particular the Oxford Shakespeare (edited by Wells and Taylor) and the Norton Shakespeare which followed its text, often order the plays by presumed chronology. While this gives readers used to the generic divisions of the First Folio of 1623 some unexpected and fruitful juxtapositions—attitudes to battle and to courtship in the adjacent Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V, for instance, or the bleak fairy-tale of the revised King Lear (see Myth 24) alongside Cymbeline—it ultimately privileges an implicitly biographical reading: the chronology is that of the author's life.

Strachey proposes commercial rather than autobiographical imperatives: attentive to the fairy-tale aspects of Shakespeare's last plays, he argues that their happy endings show an awareness of genre rather than “serene tranquillity on the part of their maker.” If they reveal anything about Shakespeare's mind, it is that “he was getting bored”; “he is no longer interested, one often feels, in what happens, or who says what, so long as he can find place for a faultless lyric or a new, unimagined rhythmical effect, or a grand and mystic speech.”[5] Whereas many scholars wanted to establish The Tempest as Shakespeare's last play and to read into that position a corresponding and culminatory wisdom, the play as the benign and humane pinnacle of his dramatic career, Strachey sees it here as a decline. Shakespeare is losing his touch, rather than ascending some mystical poetic throne. It's a view echoed in more prosaic terms a hundred years later in a newspaper article by Gary Taylor. Under the headline “Shakespeare's Midlife Crisis,” Taylor argued that after a period of high commercial popularity in the 1590s, Shakespeare's career after 1600 was in the doldrums. “Like many other has-beens,” Taylor continues provocatively, “Shakespeare in his 40s tried to rescue his sinking reputation by recycling his 20s and 30s.”[6] His collaborations with John Fletcher become, in this revisionist argument, a desperate attempt by a worn-out writer to piggy-back on a younger one (rather than, as they have tended to be seen, the work created by an apprentice working under the supervision of the old master: see Myth 24).

So, reading The Tempest as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage is not supported by the evidence about Shakespeare's career, and imposes an anachronistically autobiographical framework on dramatic writing. It is also, as noted above, crucially dependent on a reading of Prospero's character as benevolent sage, attentive to his only daughter, using his learning to bring about harmony and reconciliation, forgiving rather than punishing those who have done him wrong. In fact, this positive interpretation overlooks problematic aspects of Prospero's characterization, and these can be discussed in relation to his “slave” Caliban.

Since at least the late nineteenth century when the scholar Sidney Lee discussed knowledge of the New World in early modern England, The Tempest has been connected with stories of exploration and, more distantly, with the early colonization of the Americas. This reading of the play has gained ground, particularly because of significant post-colonial rewritings—among them the Martinique poet Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête (1969)—of its parable of language, domination, and defeat. When the French/Madagascan psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni's book Psychologie de la colonalisation was translated into English in 1956, it had the title Prospero and Caliban. We might sum up the shift in criticism by pointing to the difference between Frank Kermode, introducing the second Arden edition of the play in 1954 with the brisk “it is as well to be clear that there is nothing in The Tempest fundamental to its structure of ideas which could not have existed had America remained undiscovered,” and Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan's perspective in the third edition of the Arden series in 1999: “the extensive and varied discourses of colonialism, many critics argue, are deeply embedded in the drama's language and events” such that the play is “a theatrical microcosm of the imperial paradigm.”[7] A similar shift in interpretative priorities has taken place in the theater. After Jonathan Miller's 1970 staging of the play it has been hard to recover a sympathetic Prospero unmarked by colonial guilt. As reviewers described that landmark production, Prospero was “a solemn and touchy neurotic, the victim of a power complex” who “has arrogated to himself the god-like power of the instinctive colonist … by the end the cycle of colonialism is complete: Ariel, the sophisticated African, picks up Prospero's discarded wand, clearly prepared himself to take on the role of bullying overlord.”[8] Recent Prosperos have tended to be so unpleasant that any association with Shakespeare would reflect very badly on the playwright himself.

Notes

[1] The lines in Shakespeare read: “The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.”

[2] Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1875), pp. 319–20.

[3] Lytton Strachey, “Shakespeare's Final Period,” in Literary Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), p. 2.

[4] Anthony B. Dawson, “Tempest in a Teapot: Critics, Evaluation, Ideology,” in Maurice Charney (ed.), “Bad” Shakespeare: Reevaluations of the Shakespeare Canon (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 1988), p. 62.

[5] Strachey, “Shakespeare's Final Period,” pp. 11–12.

[6] Gary Taylor, “Shakespeare's Midlife Crisis,” Guardian, 3 May 2004.

[7] The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1954; repr. 1958), p. xxv; The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, Arden (London: A. & C. Black, 2001), pp. 39–40.

[8] Reviews by Eric Shorter and Michael Billington, excerpted in John O'Connor and Katharine Goodland, A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance 1970–2005, vol. 1: Great Britain, 1970–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1357–8.

Myth 21

Shakespeare had a huge vocabulary

We all know that Shakespeare's verbal creativity is a major part of his reputation and his ongoing appeal. His works—in particular the popular narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece—began being anthologized during his lifetime: Robert Allot's book of quotations England's Parnassus (1600) includes extracts from Love's Labour's Lost, Richard II, Richard III, 1 Henry IV, and, especially, Romeo and Juliet. The project of anthologizing has continued ever since. Alexander Pope's 1725 edition of Shakespeare provided a useful service to its readers: “Some of the most shining passages are distinguished by commas in the margin, and where the beauty lay not in particulars but in the whole a star is prefixed to the scene”: passages so marked included Portia's speech on mercy in the courtroom of The Merchant of Venice (4.1.181–202) and Mercutio's flight of fancy on Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet (1.4.55–96). Shakespeare—or his publishers (see Myth 4)—had already anticipated this kind of highlighting: early printed texts also use the inverted comma in the left-hand margin to identify quotable passages. Polonius's advice to Laertes in Hamlet in both the 1603 (where Polonius is called Corambis) and 1604 texts is marked in this way (1.3.58–81). And his lines about borrowers and lenders were, of course, already proverbial: productions of the scene today often have the two adult children rolling their eyes over the familiarity of their father's list of old saws. Lists of phrases which we owe to Shakespeare are easily found on the internet and in print, and many of them are so familiar that they have lost their initial contact with their context in Shakespeare's plays: more sinned against than sinning, tongue-tied, flesh and blood, without rhyme or reason, laughing stock, more in sorrow than in anger, short shrift, Greek to me, world is your oyster, cold comfort, bated breath, discretion is the better part of valor (or Valerie, as Roger McGough memorably wrote in his Watchwords [1969]). So Shakespeare, perhaps the world's greatest wordsmith, must have had a huge vocabulary, no?

This is a difficult question to answer, since opinions vary on how a person's vocabulary should best be quantified. But David Crystal, the expert on this question, cites a figure for Shakespeare's vocabulary of 20,000 separate words (so that doesn't double-count plural forms or tenses: “hawk” and “hawks” count as one word, not two; “fly,” “flew,” “flown” count as one word). This compares with an available vocabulary of words in English at the time Shakespeare was writing of around 150,000 words. By comparison with other writers of the time, Shakespeare has a large recorded vocabulary, but that is at least in part because he wrote across different genres which required different registers, and because his extant work is substantial: he wrote a lot. For contrast, Crystal proposes 50,000 words as an average active vocabulary for an educated person at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with an available vocabulary in English of around 600,000, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). So Shakespeare's vocabulary is less than half of your own, and represents a slightly lower proportion of the available words than yours does.[1]

So what about Shakespeare as a coiner of words? Here, the OED—which is currently being revised—has been a rather misleading source. Shakespeare has been credited with the first usage of many words that are now common, among them “inauspicious,” to “embrace,” “sanctimonious.” Many of the words he apparently invented have not taken off, for example “allottery,” meaning a share (in As You Like It 1.1.69) or the word “fleshment” in King Lear (2.2.120) which the OED defines as “the action of ‘fleshing’; hence, the excitement resulting from a first success.” Crystal lists over 2,000 words from the OED in which Shakespeare is the first or only recorded user, or for which Shakespeare is credited with a different meaning.[2] But these examples may be deceptive. The lexicographers who compiled the entries for the dictionary in the era before digitized and searchable texts were more familiar with Shakespeare's works than with works by contemporaries such as Thomas Nashe, and therefore they tended to overstate Shakespeare's neologisms (new words) in the dictionary. Jürgen Schäfer showed this in a landmark study published in 1980, and subsequent scholars have developed his findings, with the result that the number of new words which can be attributed with certainty to Shakespeare has substantially decreased.

This discussion can helpfully be situated in a historical context. There is a big spike in the number of new words during the century from 1550 to 1650. The stimulus to the vernacular given by Reformation Bible translations and by the rapid expansion of print culture, by the influx of new things and their attendant words from other cultures due to exploration and trade, and by the development of specialist languages for scientific discovery—all these factors made for exponential linguistic growth. Newly Latinate vocabulary—words such as “temperature” or “atmosphere” or “malignant”—rubbed up against words from Italian (often associated with culture: “concerto,” “sonnet,” “stanza”), from Spanish or Portuguese (often associated with New World exploration: “hurricane,” “tobacco,” “hammock”), and from other languages, often registering the import of exotic commodities (“coffee,” from Turkish, or “bazaar,” from Persian) or new ways of seeing things (“landscape,” from the Dutch). Borrowings gave early modern English a structure of lexical twins or triplets—near-synonyms acquired through borrowing from other languages. So English has a large number of related words with Old English/French/Latin derivations: rise/mount/ascend; end/finish/conclude; two/second/dual; fear/terror/trepidation; kingly/royal/regal. Using near-synonyms, in the rhetorical figure known as copia, is a Shakespearean technique enabled by this lexical density: “‘Romeo is banishèd’—/ There is no end, no limit, measure, bound, / In that word's death” (Romeo and Juliet 3.2.124–6); “The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved, and loosed” (Troilus and Cressida 5.2.159).

Something of the strangeness of this influx of vocabulary is captured in the first English dictionary aimed at its native speakers. Robert Cawdray's 1604 volume suggests on its busy title page that the English language has become strange to its own people through the importation of foreign words:

A Table Alphabetical, containing and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usual English words, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latin or French &c. With the interpretation thereof by plain English words, gathered for the benefit & help of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other unskillful persons. Whereby they may the more easily and better understand many hard English words, which they shall here of read in scriptures, sermons or elsewhere, and also be made able to use the same aptly themselves.

It would not have been seemly, given his high-status target audience, had Cawdray suggested it, but plays were also both a source of new words and a means by which words could become better understood. We see this in Shakespeare's works often, when an unfamiliar word or neologism is glossed, as in the dictionary, by a “plain English word”: Timon of Athens glosses “decimation” with “tithèd” and “destined tenth” (5.5.31–3). Shakespeare's characters take repeated delight in new words. Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the hapless suitor of Twelfth Night, has an ear for fine words, and gathers up “odours, pregnant, and vouchsafed” (3.1.89–90) for future use; the grandiloquent soldier Pistol in 2 Henry IV quotes Marlowe's mighty lines (2.4.160–5) and Nim in Henry V uses the word “humour” as a kind of fashionable linguistic tic (2.1.52, 57); Polonius is preoccupied by Hamlet's word “beautified” in his letter to Ophelia: “that's an ill phrase, a vile phrase” (2.2.111). These characters all—perhaps like Shakespeare himself reading Florio's Montaigne (see Myth 2)—ignore plot and content for a moment in their plays to concentrate on verbal details. And there are those characters, like Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing or Elbow in Measure for Measure, who misuse Latinate vocabulary to comic effect: what would come to be called, after the character in Sheridan's play The Rivals (1755), malapropisms.

But Shakespeare, unlike other of his contemporaries, was not noted in the period for his eccentric vocabulary. The description of “honey- tongued” Shakespeare suggests an ease with language. (The adjective is an interesting example of the OED problem: its earliest recorded usages are in the same year, 1598, in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (5.2.334) and in Francis Meres' description of Shakespeare in his Palladis Tamia. Is Meres using one of Shakespeare's mellifluous—Latin for “honey-tongued”—phrases back at him, or are both writers recording a word in current usage?) We might compare this with the case of contemporary dramatist John Marston, figured as Crispinus in Ben Jonson's play Poetaster (1601): Crispinus is given a purge and forced to vomit up his outlandish vocabulary on stage: up come “retrograde—reciprocal—incubus” and “glibbery—lubrical—defunct” in a scene of linguistic emesis which includes words we now take for granted—reciprocal, defunct—alongside the forgettable “glibbery” and “lubrical.” Jonson's satire shows that contemporary culture was alert to excessive coinages: a scornful riff on so-called “inkhorn” terms is a common feature of many early modern texts, as the debate raged over what John Cheke called English “clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues.” Although we have thought of Shakespeare as the most active coiner of new words of the period, it is striking that in an environment in which linguistic choices were pointedly ideological, none of his contemporaries picks him out either for praise or blame in this regard.

One way in which Shakespeare's lexical richness does manifest itself is in the manipulation of existing words. Using verbs as nouns, and vice versa—“dog them at the heels” (Richard II 5.3.137), for example—exploits the resources of a language which has not settled into its more restricted and rule-bound form. Early modern English has nuances we have since lost: the difference between “you” and “thou” forms of second-person address, for instance, allowed the depiction of finely shaded relationships of power, solidarity, and intimacy (the use of the pronouns in the love-test at the beginning of King Lear is a good test-case). Compounds yoke words together in powerfully abbreviated form, linked with a hyphen, as in “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” (Romeo and Juliet 3.2.1) or “summer-seeming lust” (Macbeth 4.3.87). The Tempest makes extensive use of compounds, enacting at the microcosmic level of individual words the structural and thematic compression that characterizes the whole play: “still-vexed,” “sea-change,” “urchin-shows” (1.2.230 and 403, 2.2.5).

Elsewhere it is lexical variety that makes for memorable phrases. Charmian's epitaph on Cleopatra as a “lass unparalleled” (Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.310) gets its touching combination of intimacy and regal grandeur from the unexpected juxtaposition of the Middle English, monosyllabic, northern “lass” and the less familiar polysyllabic, Latinate “unparalleled” (the OED dates the word from 1605; the play is only a couple of years later). An unfamiliar word can use its strangeness to denote something about the thing it signifies: Macbeth's use of the word “assassination” (1.7.2; the first citation in the OED) registers that what he is contemplating—the murder of a king—is so outside normal behavior as to need an estranged word, rather as Richard II mockingly coins the verb “unking” to point out the unnaturalness of his deposition by his cousin Bullingbrook (4.1.210, 5.5.37). Sometimes Shakespeare uses deliberately unfamiliar words that are difficult to pronounce to indicate mental disturbance: Leontes' cluster of hard-consonant “c” words, which do not appear elsewhere in Shakespeare's work, depicts a mind ranging crazily through its own dark imaginings: “With what's unreal thou [affection] coactive art, / And fellow'st nothing. Then 'tis very credent / Thou mayst co-join with something, and thou dost—/ And that beyond commission” (The Winter's Tale 1.2.143–6). Something linguistically similar happens in a soliloquy by Angelo, experiencing sexual desire apparently for the first time, in Measure for Measure (2.4.1–17). If we find such passages difficult, that's surely the point: language—both syntax and vocabulary—is at breaking point as Leontes tumbles into the abyss of his own jealousy and Angelo into the pit of his own lust.

We can see Shakespeare's enjoyment of what D.H. Lawrence called “such lovely language” in a play which seems almost to be about language itself: Love's Labour's Lost. The play opens with the King of Navarre declaring he and his three lords will live in “a little academe” (1.1.13), devoting themselves to study and abjuring female company for three years. Enter, right on cue, the Princess of France, visiting the court with her three ladies. As well as these symmetrically matched nobles, the play is peopled with a linguistically diverse population. First is Don Armado, a “man of fire-new words” (1.1.176), a Spaniard addicted to rhetoric: his letter to the king is nonsensically pompous in its combination of archaism and copia: “Now for the ground, which—which, I mean, I walked upon. It is yclept thy park. Then for the place, where—where I mean, I did encounter that most obscene and preposterous event, that draweth from my snow-white pen the ebon-coloured ink which here thou viewest, beholdest, surveyest, or seest” (1.1.234–9). Next is Costard, a quick-tongued peasant with a line in sexual innuendo, which earns him the reproach: “you talk greasily, your lips grow foul” (4.1.136). Holofernes is labeled “Pedant” in the First Folio text: his is the prissily expansive language of the schoolroom: “Novi hominum tanquam te. His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behaviour vain, ridiculous and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it” (5.1.9–14). Nathaniel, the egregious curate, eggs him on, praising that final silly adjective as “a most singular and choice epithet” (5.1.15). Linguistic variety, and a satiric self-consciousness about linguistic fashion, is one of Love's Labour's Lost's most prominent themes, as Shakespeare simultaneously exhibits and deflates his own verbal dexterity.

Assessing Shakespeare's contribution to the language should be qualitative rather than quantitative, therefore. If the number of Shakespearean coinages and the size of Shakespeare's vocabulary are smaller than previously thought, his influence remains. But it is worth recalling that linguistic studies have shown that Shakespeare—after all, a provincial grammar-school boy who learned his language away from the more standardized London forms of English—“tended to lag behind grammatical change”: far from being always in the vanguard of linguistic novelty, Shakespeare's language might have been experienced by early audiences as slightly old-fashioned even as it is so endlessly inventive.[3]

Notes

[1] David Crystal, Think on my Words: Exploring Shakespeare's Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 2–3.

[2] The list is under ‘Additional Material’ at www.thinkonmywords.com

[3] Jonathan Hope, “Shakespeare's ‘Natiue English’,” in David Scott Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 253.

Myth 22

Shakespeare's plays are timeless

One undeniable fact about Shakespeare is that his plays have been popular in many countries in most centuries. Certain plays come in and out of fashion, of course, but generally speaking Shakespeare the playwright has always been popular, both in print and performance. Ben Jonson was prescient when he wrote in a tribute to Shakespeare, published in the First Folio of 1623, that he was “not of an age but for all time.” From Jonson in 1623 to nineteenth-century Germany (“unser [our] Shakespeare”) to today's translation industry (Shakespeare is published in eighty different languages), Shakespeare's plays have stood the test of time.

It is worth asking why some writers stand the test of time and others do not. An easy but misguided answer to the question of Shakespeare's success is: because he was Shakespeare (see Myth 1). Gary Taylor has explored the longevity or loss of cultural achievements generally. His book title says it all: Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of Time—And Others Don't).[1] In this immensely accessible study he offers a complex combination of circumstances: for example, contingency (the educational system that we examined in Myth 2, a system ideally suited, although never designed, to produce dramatists), collaborative curatorial forces (editors), and many more. Anne Coldiron has asked the question not of culture generally but of Shakespeare specifically, and in her essay she adds a number of extra ingredients to Taylor's book-long list. Shakespeare's survival has been helped, she argues, by his large canon and by his writing across many genres; this enables his reputation to survive unsullied even as individual plays rise and fall in estimation. She identifies Shakespeare's metatextual tendencies (the way he likes self-reflexively to refer to his own drama as fiction) as a factor in his survival: “The one text we know future readers will have in mind is the one they're reading or hearing.”[2] Shakespeare's adaptability to different media (different kinds of theaters, radio, film) has been a key ingredient. So too has his plurality and inclusivity: his works “treat sympathetically the concerns of more than one kind of audience. Shakespeare gives sympathetic voice to the viewpoints of rich and poor, old and young, female and male, rogue and princess, allowing many kinds of audience members and readers the pleasure of identifying with his characters.”[3] These two critics' analyses show the importance of luck in an artist standing the test of time: there is no single inherent aesthetic quality responsible for Shakespeare's transhistorical and transnational success.

But standing the test of time and being timeless are not the same thing (although they overlap). Let us take Thomas Middleton as a test case for comparison. Middleton was undoubtedly one of the most talented dramatists of his time, with an extant canon of thirty-two plays (excluding masques, civic pageants, and adaptations of Shakespeare); his plays are as generically diverse as Shakespeare's. Yet apart from two or three great tragedies—The Revenger's Tragedy, The Changeling, and perhaps Women Beware Women—few of his plays are performed today. This is partly because nearly half of his plays are in a very local, topical genre—satire—and in particular the form of satire known as city (i.e. London) comedy. Plays such as Michaelmas Term and Your Five Gallants satirize Londoners' appetite for litigation and for get-rich-quick schemes. These appetites are not limited to London or to the seventeenth century, but Middleton's plays are so firmly located in local references and details, with characters often appearing as types, that it is harder for them to travel outside their own period. Your Five Gallants opens by introducing the gallants:

Passing over the stage; the bawd-gallant, with three wenches gallantly attired; meets him the whore-gallant, the pocket gallant, the cheating-gallant … Now, for the other, the broker- gallant, he sits at home yet. (Prologue, 1–6)

The gallants are introduced as types. Although they are later given names, they are type names: Frip (the broker-gallant), Tailby (the whore-gallant), Pursenet (the pocket-gallant). When Shakespeare uses type-names the character usually acts against type. Thus, Francis Feeble is brave (2 Henry IV), Silence becomes garrulous when drunk (2 Henry IV), Speed is tardy (Two Gentlemen of Verona). The type asserts his individuality.

Back to our comparative test case, Thomas Middleton. Middleton's The Witch (1616) is a tragicomedy based on scandalous contemporary events: the convictions of Frances Howard and her second husband Robert Carr for their part in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. The story is complex and involves an arranged marriage (between the 13-year-old Frances and the 14-year-old Earl of Essex), subsequent adultery, accusations of impotence and witchcraft (the former caused by the latter), a virginity test, divorce, poisoning and murder of the powerful man who opposed the second marriage (Overbury), and remarriage with unseemly haste (Frances Howard obtained a divorce from Essex in September 1613 and married Carr three months later). In 1616, accused of involvement in Overbury's death, Howard and Carr were sent to the Tower. In the same year Middleton wrote The Witch, a misogynist play about female sexual voraciousness, with a central character whose name—Francisca—sounds like Frances Carr.[4] As the Oxford editor comments, “So topical a dramatic text has a short theatrical shelf-life.”[5]

Interestingly, Middleton revisited this material in 1622 when he wrote The Changeling—a play that has not had a short theatrical shelf-life. (In the twentieth century it was the biggest Renaissance box-office success after Shakespeare.) The story of Frances Carr was made newly topical in 1622 by her release from prison. In The Changeling the heroine, Beatrice-Joanna, undergoes a virginity test and, knowing that she cannot pass it, enlists the help of her waiting-woman. (Frances Carr attended her virginity test—which took the unstageable but more reliable form of a gynecological examination—veiled, fueling rumors that she had suborned someone to take the test on her behalf.) But now Middleton's topical material rises above its local reading. This is a tragedy not a scandal; and it is a tragedy of entrapment, of arranged marriage, and of moral degeneration, what T.S. Eliot, William Empson, and Helen Gardner saw as habituation to crime; Gardner described Beatrice-Joanna as a soul not bad but “deformed” by “its own willed persistence in acts against its nature.”[6] In these respects the play sounds like Macbeth or Marlowe's Dr Faustus, to which Gardner compares it.

The Shakespeare and Marlowe comparisons are apposite. Macbeth is not just a ruler of eleventh-century Scotland but a soldier who fails to see that killing in civilian life is different from killing in military life. As such he is like Brutus in Julius Caesar (a noble character called upon to do an ignoble deed) or Hamlet in Hamlet (a thinker called upon to do a violent act): the wrong man for the job. Faustus is based on a combination of two magus figures; however, he is not just a sixteenth-century necromancer but any ambitious person who feels disillusioned by what life has offered and is driven to traffic with illicit or forbidden activities. Comparing The Witch with The Changeling can help us see how the topical can become the timeless.

Shakespeare's plays do not avoid the topical. But they deal with it differently from Middleton. Although Shakespeare's investigations are frequently contemporary—the position of women in Comedy of Errors or Midsummer Night's Dream, dividing or uniting a kingdom in King Lear, definitions of borders and shores in Pericles, the status of lies in Othello—Shakespeare confines topicality to simple references or allusions. Queen Elizabeth is complimented in a speech of a dozen lines in Midsummer Night's Dream (Oberon's description of the origin of the flower love-in-idleness at 2.1.155–68: see Myth 28); Henry V is optimistically compared to the Earl of Essex (“the general of our gracious Empress” coming triumphant from Ireland, 5.0.30) in the Chorus to Act 5 of Henry V (Essex returned far from triumphant, so this reference helps us date Henry V, or at least, this Chorus, very precisely); the Porter's references to equivocation in Macbeth (2.3.7–11) are a topical allusion to “Catholics who used equivocation in court as a way of escaping prosecution”;[7] The Comedy of Errors has a punning reference to the Protestant revolt in the Netherlands (“making war against her heir/hair”; 3.2.127); King John refers to the Spanish Armada; the unseasonable summers of 1594–6 are described by Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream; the 1608 grain riots feature in Coriolanus; Sonnet 107 refers to Queen Elizabeth's death; the “little eyases” (2.2.340) passage in the 1604 text of Hamlet is a reference to the boys' theater companies in London whose resurgence threatened commercially the adult companies (hence the players traveling to Elsinore)—it was dropped by the Folio when it was no longer topical; Malvolio may satirize Puritans in Twelfth Night (“he is a kind of precisian”—Folio reading, 2.3.135, emended to “puritan” by the Oxford editors) and Orsino may refer to Don Virginio Orsini who made an official visit to Elizabeth and who saw a performance of Twelfth Night on Twelfth Night 1601 (however, the point of this reference is hard to understand since the portrait of the lovesick Orsino is hardly complimentary). Most of these (and other) allusions are easily extractable or ignorable; Twelfth Night's puncturing of Malvolio's pretensions works whether one sees him as a Puritan or not; Macbeth is Shakespeare's most topical play throughout, but it does not stand or fall on its parallels or compliments to James (see Myth 28); Coriolanus appeals whether or not one sees the plot's corn riots and grain hoarding as reflecting those of 1608.

In fact Shakespeare goes out of his way to avoid the topical. He never wrote religious poetry.[8] When Marlowe deals with recent French politics in The Massacre at Paris (the St Bartholomew's Day slaughter of Protestants in 1572) it is an explicitly contemporary play, as the title indicates. When Shakespeare handles the same material he carefully depoliticizes it: Love's Labour's Lost turns war between France and Navarre into a romantic comedy, leaving only the names to do the work (all the main characters are named after contemporary French figures). And this work is not political but literary: an interest in genre and generic conflict (not political conflict).[9]

Politics, of course, are, or can be, timeless. But Middleton's Game at Chess (1624) or Dekker's Whore of Babylon (1607) are not. This may be due to genre (political satire and religious allegory respectively). Part of Shakespeare's timelessness may be due to the fact that he embedded local politics in transcendental forms—tragedy, comedy (comedy, we might note, without any restrictive qualifying adjective such as city comedy or satirical comedy). In fact, satire was not Shakespeare's most successful genre if the histories of Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens are any indication. The printer's epistle to one of the quartos of Troilus and Cressida reveals that it was a failure on stage; Timon of Athens may be an unfinished play (see Myth 17).

Certainly Shakespeare's plays reflect local issues. That is why dramatists write plays. Henry VI is about fifteenth-century history but it is also about fear of civil war. Hamlet is about usurpation but it is also about bereavement. Macbeth is about political disloyalty and about political succession but it is also about influence and imagination (positive and negative) and definitions of manhood. And that is why later centuries revive older plays: their topicality is newly applicable, their material is renewably, and in some cases ubiquitously, endlessly topical. It is no coincidence that Pericles was one of the first Shakespeare plays to be revived in the Restoration in 1660: its plot of an exiled monarch, restored, had special resonance for the returning cavaliers.[10]

But there is more to timelessness than relevance. Or rather there is a difference between relevance and timelessness. It is worth pausing here to think about some differences between Shakespeare's plays and those of his contemporaries. Take Marlowe's Edward II for instance. The background to this play comes from Holinshed's Chronicles of England which depict the agricultural, financial, and topographical devastation at the start of the fourteenth century. Northern England was ravaged by constant raids from the Scots; there had been annual agricultural failures; herds had suffered sickness and been depleted by death; the people were physically weak, struggling for survival, and in their famine resorted to eating “horses, dogs and other vile beasts.”[11] None of this makes its way into Marlowe's play. As Roma Gill observes, “The common man was Shakespeare's concern, not Marlowe's.”[12]

Although the “common man” is the subject matter of the dominant genre of the seventeenth century—city comedy—Shakespeare was not drawn to this topical satirical writing. One of the reasons may be that it requires a different kind of characterization from the kind he was writing. Actors often notice the difference between Shakespeare's characters and those of his contemporaries. Marlowe's characters are created by ironic distancing; their speeches are full of asides as they knowingly construct a persona for themselves. One director observes that Marlowe's plays are “fairly intractable material for anyone determined to approach the text with a ‘naturalistic’ or ‘realistic’ methodology.”[13] Soliloquies in Shakespeare rarely advance plot, but they often add complexity to character. Shakespeare's style of characterization is particularly congenial to the kind of preparation made standard in the twentieth century at the Moscow Arts Theatre by the director Konstantin Stanislavsky's “method acting” (in which actors construct a pre-history, an inner life, and motivations for a character).

It is Shakespeare's interest in interiority that perhaps accounts for his timelessness. Politics change, the position of women changes, but the human heart does not change. At the center of every Shakespeare play is a human being. King Lear is a father first and a king second. Furthermore, he is a father facing empty-nest syndrome, on the verge of losing his last daughter in marriage; and he is a ruler on the point of taking early retirement. Hamlet is a prince whose uncle has murdered Hamlet's father and usurped his throne; but he is also a university student who cannot come to terms with the loss of his father (he is inconsolable long before he hears about the murder). Losing a throne is a rarefied predicament; losing a parent is not. These are human situations, not confined to monarchs or princes. The human is a timeless category.

Notes

[1] New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

[2] A.E.B. Coldiron, “Canons and Cultures: Is Shakespeare Universal?”, in Laurie Maguire (ed.), How To Do Things with Shakespeare (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) pp. 255–79 (p. 261).

[3] Ibid.

[4] See The Witch, ed. Elizabeth Schafer, New Mermaids (London: A. & C. Black, 1994), p. xvi.

[5] Marion O'Connor in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 1128.

[6] Helen Gardner, “Milton's ‘Satan’ and the Theme of Damnation in Elizabethan Tragedy,” in F.P. Wilson (ed.), English Studies 1948 (London: John Murray, 1948), pp. 46–66 (p. 47).

[7] Note to Macbeth 2.3.8, in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007).

[8] Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion, Arden (London, 2010).

[9] 9 Gillian Woods, “Catholicism and Conversion in Love's Labour's Lost,” in Maguire (ed.), How To Do Things with Shakespeare, pp. 101–30.

[10] Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: Vintage, 1991), pp. 21–2.

[11] Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 4 (1587): see the Oxford Holinshed Project, http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/texts.php?text1=1577_5319

[12] Edward II, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967; repr. 1978), p. 19.

[13] Stevie Simkin, Marlowe: The Plays (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 66–7.

Myth 23

Macbeth is jinxed in the theater

In 1898 Max Beerbohm reviewed a production of Macbeth at the Lyceum for the Saturday Review. He had recently taken over the role of theater reviewer from George Bernard Shaw and this was only his second essay for the paper. His first, the inauspiciously titled “Why I ought not to have become a drama critic,” explained that “I am not fond of the theatre. Dramatic art interests and moves me less than any of the other arts. … I am innocent of any theories on the subject.” His second essay begins with a polemical plea to theater managers to stop staging Shakespeare stalwarts such as Hamlet because “when a play has become a classic in drama, it ceases to be a play. … The play is dead.”[1] He then turns to one of these unstageable classics: Macbeth. He cites two authors of seventeenth-century criticism (thus giving the lie to his earlier pronouncement that he is innocent of dramatic theory or history): John Aubrey (1626–97), whose biographical researches were gathered into a posthumous volume called Brief Lives, and the Restoration diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703). To Aubrey, he tells us, we are indebted for the information that “Hal Berridge, the youth who was to have acted the part of Lady Macbeth, ‘fell sudden sicke of a pleurisie, wherefor Master Shakespeare himself did enacte in his stead’.” Beerbohm's regret that Aubrey did not give “some account of the poet's personation” leads to a discussion of acting styles, cemented by a second piece of historical evidence: a lengthy quotation from Pepys' Diary in which Pepys describes Mrs Knipp (his mistress) playing Lady Macbeth in 1667.

Aubrey's anecdote about Hal Berridge's illness is the origin of the myth that Macbeth is unlucky in the theater. The boy-actor's name has a nicely Shakespearean flavor, sharing its first part with Henry IV's wayward son. The actor, however, is entirely fictional. So too is the incident—no actor was taken ill, and Shakespeare was never forced to step into the role. Aubrey made no such comment as the one quoted. Nor did Pepys, who although he saw Macbeth three times in 1667–8 (once in Dryden and Davenant's version) made only brief remarks on it, commenting on the music and dancing, and criticizing the understudy who replaced Betterton. Beerbohm's extended quotation in which Pepys compares Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking to his wife's, and credits Mrs Knipp in the role, does contain real characters (Mrs Pepys and Mrs Knipp) but has no place in the Diary. The series of tongue-in-cheek statements that begins with the disavowal of dramatic knowledge and the proposal to abolish Shakespeare favorites on stage continues with this citation of fabricated evidence. Beerbohm never acknowledged his hoax, and it lay unexposed until ten years ago when Stanley Wells thought to check Aubrey and Pepys.[2]

And so Beerbohm inaugurated a tradition in which it is unlucky to play in, or be associated with, a production of Macbeth. Actors consider it bad luck even to refer to the play by name, preferring instead the descriptive euphemism “The Scottish Play.” If the name is uttered in the theater, actors resort to cleansing rituals (Horatio's line from Hamlet, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us” [1.4.20], is one of several thought to counter the bad luck). Many films and television shows, from Blackadder to The Simpsons, parody this thespian superstition. In “The Regina Monologues” episode of The Simpsons Ian McKellen utters the play's title only to be struck by lightning. The Simpsons extends the Macbeth joke to another theater superstition (that it is bad luck to say “Good luck,” and so one should attract good luck by invoking its opposite: “Break a leg”). Marge Simpson inadvertently wishes McKellen “Good luck,” after which he is felled by a piece of falling masonry. J.L. Carrell's detective novel, The Shakespeare Curse (2010), outdoes Beerbohm's invention by having Shakespeare take over from Berridge while touring in Scotland where he inadvertently witnesses a black magic rite he works into his play: her dustjacket has the lurid promise of “a sickening modern killer—driven by a centuries-old curse.”

But although there is no historical basis for the belief that Macbeth is jinxed, erroneous beliefs have a habit of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. The myth itself is somehow enough to jinx the play, and anecdotes abound of Macbeth-related disasters, from actors' injuries to collapsing sets to onstage death (caused by real weapons instead of props), to rioting audiences.[3]

One disastrous production became a commercial hit: Peter O'Toole's Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1980, directed by Bryan Forbes. Everything about this production aroused the critics' (satirical) ire. “Eradicating the unnecessarily tragic aspects that have always weighed the play down, the cast sent the first-night audience home rocking with happy laughter,” wrote one reviewer. Robert Cushman wrote: “Chances are he likes the play, but O'Toole's performance suggests that he is taking some kind of personal revenge on it.” When O'Toole appeared after the offstage murder, he was so covered in red that one reviewer said that he looked like Santa Claus. So great were the quantities of stage blood that the production was dubbed “Macdeath.” The lighting design caused practical problems: “it was, of course, the rottenest luck for [O'Toole] to run smack into a wall on his third bravura exit (so much of the play takes place in the dark)” wrote the Daily Mail reviewer in mock-sympathy. The London Evening News criticized Frances Tomelty's athletic Lady Macbeth who “greeted her husband by leaping at him and achieving a leg-encircling embrace of the kind which illustrates helpful sex manuals.” The witches, Shakespeare's “secret, black and midnight hags” (4.1.64), were sartorially chic in white chiffon, prompting one reviewer to speculate that they shopped in the West End. John Peters wrote that the play was not as bad as other critics made out: it was much worse. The artistic director of the Old Vic, Timothy West, had a public argument with the play's director: West disowned the production and Forbes went on stage to defend it. Crowds arrived in droves and the production sold out for its entire run.[4]

Actors attribute Macbeth's reputation for bad luck to the play's plot: when witches cast spells on stage they somehow transcend fiction and the curses have a real effect. They are what the philosopher of language J.L. Austin calls “performatives” or “speech-acts”: words which themselves enact their content. In short, don't play with magic. In the 1590s it was believed that the spells in another play that staged magic, Dr Faustus, had real consequences. Faustus conjures and raises the devil. When the theater company was on tour in Exeter in 1593, the actors suddenly noticed that there was one devil too many on stage. The cast and the audience fled in terror and “the players (as I heard it), contrary to their custom spending the night in reading and prayer, got them out of town the next morning.” A similar story attached itself to a performance of Dr Faustus in London about 1588/9.[5] These anecdotes notwithstanding, Dr Faustus has not gained a reputation for attracting bad luck in the theater. Neither has Verdi's opera Macbeth (1842–50). Beerbohm aside, why should Shakespeare's play attract such a mythology?

Macbeth is one of the shortest plays in the Shakespeare canon—fewer than 2,500 lines. (It is often played without an interval.) Its rapidly moving plot and its lack of subplot give it a concentrated intensity. It is full of spectacle: the spell-making (spell-binding) witches, the “blood-boltered” (4.1.139) ghost of the murdered Banquo who appears to Macbeth at a banquet, the eerie sleepwalking and compulsive handwashing of Lady Macbeth, the unnatural sight of Birnam Wood moving to Dunsinane Castle, the witches' staged visions of the Stewart king's descendants via Banquo in an endless line: A show of eight kings, the last with a glass [mirror] in his hand; and Banquo (stage direction, 4.1.127). The play's political matter reflects Shakespeare's company's desire to flatter the new monarch (who claimed descent from Banquo—see Myth 28); James also had a documented interest in magic (he had published a book on Demonology in 1597). The play may have had a court performance in 1606; if so, its brevity may cater to James I's alleged aversion to long plays. But it is impossible to know if the brevity reflects abridgement for James's short attention span or if it was written as a deliberately short play. If the former, it is hard to imagine what has been cut out, although sometimes a scene in the English court of the “good king” who cures sickness with his “healing benediction” (4.3.148, 157) is proposed.

The play was popular throughout the Jacobean period. It was revised in 1616 (presumably for a stage revival) by Thomas Middleton, who added the Hecate scenes and marked some speeches for deletion. Middleton also adapted Measure for Measure, written by Shakespeare in 1604 (the Oxford editors date the adaptation to 1621). Like Macbeth, Measure for Measure reflects James's interests. It is a play about authority and royal rule. James had published a book on kingship, Basilikon Doron, in 1599, revised and reprinted in 1603 when he assumed the throne of England. Many of Duke Vincentio's sentiments and images in Measure for Measure coincide with those in James I's book—the image of a ruler as one placed upon a stage, meeting and spying on one's subjects incognito, King James's and Duke Vincentio's love of theatrical coups, and their paranoia about slander, for instance.[6]

In production, and especially with Middleton's additions, the supernatural aspects of Macbeth eclipse the political, making it easy to see this as a drama about evil rather than about government. This is also true of its generic placing in the First Folio. Despite having the same historical source as the English history plays (Raphael Holinshed's multi-volume History of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1587), Macbeth appears in the collected Folio edition of 1623, prepared by Shakespeare's fellow actors and company manager, Henry Condell and John Heminge, in the section of tragedies. Obviously, to Englishmen, only English histories qualify as “history.” But Macbeth's sweep is also larger: the battlegrounds of the play are not (just) England and Scotland but heaven and hell, apocalyptic territory. We can see this in the play's debts to its medieval predecessors. In the scene in which the Porter opens the castle door to dawn visitors, he compares Macbeth's castle to hell mouth (hell was represented as a castle on the medieval stage). The speech in which Lennox describes the unnaturalness of the previous night's storm—“the earth / Was feverous and did shake”—prompts Macbeth's laconic response, “'Twas a rough night.” Lennox continues, “My young remembrance cannot parallel / A fellow to it” (2.3.58–63). But as Glynne Wickham pointed out long ago, “an older memory might”: Lennox's speech corresponds to the descriptions of phenomena which preface disaster in the medieval Harrowing of Hell plays.[7]

But if the play is medieval in literary influences and historical setting (the historical Macbeth reigned c.1005–57), in the Shakespeare canon it also anticipates the late romances to which it is close in date. (Macbeth was written in 1606, Pericles in 1607.) Macbeth is presented “through theatrical means that belong to the traditions of masque, romance, and folk-tale, the tradition of Shakespeare's last plays. Spectacle and ceremony, processions and banquets, riddles and prophecies, idealized visions of a golden world under a perfect king …”[8] None of the late plays has the jinxed associations of Macbeth. This may be because their supernatural forces are positive: the appearance of the goddess Diana to Pericles in a vision; the descent of Jupiter on an eagle in Cymbeline to reassure Posthumus; the theatrical conjurations of the magician Prospero in The Tempest; the spirits who accompany Queen Catherine to heaven in Henry VIII. For comparable malign supernatural conjurings we must look to 2 Henry VI, but, far from being jinxed, this play has enjoyed a very successful performance history, on stage and television, in our own time (although the fact that it is not performed as often as Macbeth prevents meaningful comparison).

Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, chose Macbeth to open the newly restored Memorial Theatre in 2011. Boyd replaced the three witches with three children—the children of Macduff—and the play became a proleptic revenge tragedy in which the as-yet-unmurdered children manipulated Macbeth to his destruction. If Macbeth's jinx is associated with the play's witchcraft, this (highly successful) de-witched production seemed to have broken the association—at least, until Jonathan Slinger (Macbeth) had a traffic accident and broke his arm in two places. One producer of an earlier production attributed its accidents to the fact that it had cut Middleton's Hecate scenes. Clearly, witchcraft works two ways—it operates when staged or when cut—perhaps appropriately in a play structured round double meanings, riddling prophecies, and misleading, double-edged statements.

Notes

[1] Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953), pp. 1–2, 8–9.

[2] Stanley Wells, “Shakespeare in Max Beerbohm's Theatre Criticism,” Shakespeare Survey, 29 (2001), pp. 133–45.

[3] For a selection of cursed productions, including several with fatalities, see Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers (London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 88–9. See also Richard Huggett, The Curse of Macbeth with Other Theatrical Superstitions and Ghosts (London: Picton Publishing, 1981).

[4] Stephen Pile, Cannibals in the Cafeteria (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 17.

[5] John Jump (ed.), Dr Faustus, Casebook series (London: Routledge, 1965), p. 43.

[6] Harriet Hawkins, Measure for Measure, New Critical Introductions (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), pp. 33–5.

[7] Glynne Wickham, “Hell-Castle and its Door Keeper,” Shakespeare Survey, 19 (1966), pp. 68–76 (p. 73).

[8] Alexander Leggatt, “Macbeth and the Last Plays,” in J.C. Gray (ed.), Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), pp. 189–207 (p. 206).

Myth 24

Shakespeare did not revise his plays

In the twentieth century a prominent textual critic, W.W. Greg, wrote that revision is “probably not found in Shakespeare's plays though it is well known elsewhere.”[1] This pronouncement is both cavalier—note its basis in assumption (“probably”)—and bardolatrous in that, although it acknowledges that revision is an Elizabethan phenomenon, this known practice does not apply to Shakespeare. Shakespeare is a god; a god does not have second thoughts; ergo, Shakespeare does not revise.

Almost no Shakespeare critic would now assent to this view; indeed, there is abundant evidence to the contrary. Let us look at some of this evidence before we consider why it seemed unpalatable to a previous generation of scholars.

Revision in Shakespeare can be plotted on a spectrum from immediate second thoughts by Shakespeare to later adaptation by someone else (see Myth 17). Although we do not have any complete Shakespeare manuscripts, Romeo and Juliet gives us two examples of immediate self-correction (we can deduce what was in Shakespeare's manuscript because the compositor has typeset both the first and second thoughts). Romeo enters the Capulet tomb where the dead body of Juliet lies. Addressing the corpse (as he thinks), Romeo muses on his wife's beauty:

Ah, dear Juliet,

Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe

That unsubstantial death is amorous,

And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps

Thee here in dark to be his paramour?

(5.3.101–5)

(A paraphrase of these lines might run: how can you still be so beautiful? Shall I believe that the figure of Death is in love with you and keeps you in this vault as his mistress?)

Here's how the passage looks in the 1599 quarto, printed from Shakespeare's manuscript (we have modernized the spelling for ease of comparison but have not made any other changes):

Ah, dear Juliet,

Why art thou yet so fair? I will believe,

Shall I believe that unsubstantial death is amorous,

And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps

Thee here in dark to be his paramour?

(sig. L3r)

You can immediately see two problems. The first is the stutter of “I will believe” / “Shall I believe.” What we are looking at is a false start. Shakespeare first wrote a future-tense statement, then decided it would be better as a rhetorical question (and presumably forgot to delete the first phrase). Although we might be tempted to argue that this duplication is deliberate—that it is rhetorically effective, registering the escalation of Romeo's incredulity—the second problem argues against this. And that problem is that the next line is hypermetrical: “Shall I believe that unsubstantial death is amorous” has twelve iambic feet instead of ten (see Myth 11). “I will believe” is clearly superfluous.

Something similar happens earlier in the play, this time extended over four lines. In the 1599 quarto, Romeo leaves the Capulet orchard after the ball, en route to visit Friar Laurence; he exits with a lyrical four lines about the dawn. Friar Laurence begins the next scene with the same speech. We have placed the two speeches in parallel columns. Again, we take the speeches from the 1599 quarto, changing only the spelling.

Romeo

Friar

The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,

The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,

Chequering the Eastern clouds with streaks of light,

Checking the Eastern clouds with streaks of light,

And darkness fleckled, like a drunkard reels

And fleckled darkness like a drunkard reels

From forth day's pathway made by Titan's wheels.

From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels.

Shakespeare presumably wrote this speech for Romeo, then decided to give it to the Friar. When he reassigned it to Friar Laurence he extended it: the four lines continue with the Friar saying that he must collect medicinal herbs from his garden before the sun gets too high. Thus, the speech seems to “belong” more to the Friar in that he has a reason for talking about the time. (The fact that it is moveable should perhaps be factored into our discussion of character in Myth 29: does Shakespeare think of the speech first and the character second?)

In fact, in Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare did more than simply swap the speaker. He tinkered with the speech in aesthetic ways: “chequering” and “checking” are variant forms of a verb meaning to “variegate with rays or bands of different colours” (OED 2). He changed the word order from “darkness fleckled” to “fleckled darkness.” The biggest change affects the last line, where in Friar Laurence's version the sun god's chariot has acquired an adjective, “fiery”; this then forces the rearrangement of the meter and the separation of one image into two (path and wheels rather than a wheel-created path). Whether Shakespeare failed adequately to signpost his deletion of Romeo's speech or the compositor misread the signs is unknowable. But the printshop compositor's error in setting both versions enables us to look over Shakespeare's shoulder and watch him at work—revising.

We see the same thing again in a comedy written about the same time: Love's Labour's Lost (1595), whose first printed edition of 1599 has two sequential versions of the dialogue in which Rosalind imposes tasks on Berowne. The second dialogue was clearly intended to replace the first; instead they are printed sequentially, and the result is duplication but with variant phrasing. However, in Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare's second thoughts are not confined to expression but extend to plot. Shakespeare first intended that Berowne should woo Katherine, not Rosaline: Berowne's first sparring dialogue in 2.1 takes place with the character called “Katherine” (seven speeches); later in the same scene he questions Boyet about “Katherine.” In the rest of the play the plot links him with Rosaline and by the time the text was reprinted in 1623, the red herrings of 2.1 had been cleared up: the speech prefixes and dialogue references to “Katherine” have been replaced by “Rosaline.”

These are obviously revisions that took place while Shakespeare was actually composing; they concern small units of text, and both versions coexist in a single text. When we find differences of large episodes across texts (as when a scene is present in one printed text but not in another), questions arise as to whether Shakespeare made this excision, when he made it (immediately or later), or whether it was made (subsequently) by someone else. In the 1604–5 text of Hamlet, for example, Horatio has a long speech in Act 1, scene 1, just before the Ghost's appearance, in which he describes portents in ancient Rome before Caesar's death; later in the play, Fortinbras's brisk and brief crossing of the stage to invade Poland prompts a soliloquy from Hamlet in which he reproaches himself for delay. Neither of these moments appears in the Folio. The reasons for the cuts are conceivably theatrical. It is essential that the Ghost seem scarily supernatural; if spectators watch him walk on (as they might do if their attention wandered during a long speech) the ghostly impact of his surprise appearance is lessened. Preventing audience attention flagging may also lie behind the removal of Hamlet's soliloquy in Act 4. (Interestingly, when Shakespeare texts exist in plural versions, there is a high concentration of cuts in the fourth act when spectator stamina—or is it actor stamina?—can wane.)

We need to remember that Shakespeare is a dramatist as well as a poet; sometimes poetry has to be sacrificed to drama. The need for such cuts may not have been apparent until the play was staged. Who made the cuts? Maybe they were obvious to Shakespeare after a run through, or after the first performance. But if they were suggested by the actors, they presumably had Shakespeare's approval (he was a shareholder in his own company). Theater is a collaborative art (see Myth 17).

We see revision for theatrical reasons time and again in Shakespeare. Act 3, scene 6 of King Lear is a lengthy scene in which the mad Lear conducts a mock-trial of his two ungrateful daughters. In the Folio of 1623 this scene is reduced by 160 lines. But the traffic is not one-way. Although the first printed version of Lear in 1608 contains many lines that are not in the Folio, the Folio has many lines not in the quarto. So while Shakespeare the dramatist was making or sanctioning large cuts for theatrical purposes, the poet in him could not stop tinkering with small moments and single words

Plays are also revised to accommodate changes in theater circumstances. For instance, the scene in which Gloucester is blinded is concluded in the 1608 quarto of Lear by a compassionate dialogue between two unnamed servants who plan to help the wounded earl. This dialogue does not exist in the Folio. As such it is part of a pattern of excisions in the Folio whose version presents a bleaker, more hostile world. However, the dialogue's original raison d'être may have been practical rather than thematic. Having been blinded and thrown out to “smell / His way to Dover” (The History of King Lear, 14.91–2; the dialogue is cut in the Tragedy), Gloucester exits, only to enter nine lines into the next scene, by which time he needs to have his gory eyes cleaned up and a bandage wrapped round his head. Without the servants' eight-line dialogue, this change is rather tight. By 1608 the King's Men had acquired the indoor Blackfriars theater and plays had consequently acquired intervals between the acts (act breaks were needed to change the candles which lit the indoor theater). The act break in Folio Lear enables the change that previously required dialogue.

This poses a critical conundrum: when we look at those playtexts which exist in variant versions, how can we tell the difference between cause and effect? The effect of a revision (the reduction of compassion in the world of King Lear, for example, by cutting the two servants) and the reason for the revision (the servants' eight lines rendered superfluous by new theater conditions) may not be one and the same. Theater is a flexible form, continually adjusting itself to new topical/practical/political circumstances.

So far we have discussed revision in a way that implies two relatively stable texts: one version rejected and replaced by another version. But Shakespeare's plays may have accommodated regular ad hoc alteration: that is, they may have been flexibly variant at many stages. In Act 5 of Hamlet Osric tells Hamlet about Laertes' arrival at court. Lois Potter notes that Hamlet does not need this information “since Laertes had been trying to throttle him in the previous scene.”[3] She concludes that the graveyard scene was not included in every performance. She lists a host of other moments, across the canon, which bear signs of adjustment, large and small, for a variety of purposes (political, regional, topical, practical). It is too easy for us to think of Shakespeare texts as sacrosanct because for us Shakespeare is “Shakespeare.” But to his company he was not yet England's National Poet; he was a working playwright (see Myth 4).

Let us return to the quotation from W.W. Greg with which we began. Greg was part of a generation of critics who were implacably, ideologically opposed to revision. This was in part because their textual training conditioned them to think in binary terms of right and wrong, good and bad texts. They were able to tolerate the idea of local revision where one reading is immediately rejected for another (as in the example from Romeo and Juliet, above). But when presented with the idea of play-length revision or two readings of potentially equal validity, they ran into trouble: “faced with two sheep, it is all too easy to insist that one must be a goat.”[4]

Faced with the taxing problem of variants between two texts of Troilus and Cressida Greg contemplated the possibility of revision in the Folio text but hesitated: “besides the more general objections there is the difficulty of deciding in which text revision is to be supposed. It is an assumption that I think the critic should avoid if possible.”[5] From this, it seems, we are to understand that because the critic cannot make a value judgment, cannot decide which text is “better,” she or he must put aside all thoughts of revision. Greg here faces the dilemma articulated by the poet, classical scholar, and acerbic textual critic A.E. Housman, in 1922:

If Providence permitted two manuscripts to be equal, the editor would have to choose between their readings by considerations of intrinsic merit, and in order to do that he would need to acquire intelligence and impartiality and willingness to take pains, and all sorts of things which he neither has nor wishes for; and he feels sure that God, who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, can never have meant to lay upon his shoulders such a burden as this.[6]

Housman's dig at his colleagues satirically anticipates the wind of textual and theoretical change that blew in at the end of the century. This change of attitude showed that we do not need to choose between texts. Instead we can treat each on its own merits and investigate the circumstances that produced it. Whereas earlier editions of King Lear, for example, produced a single text from a combination of elements of the two distinct versions (the editorial practice known as “conflation”), there are now a number of Complete Works (the Oxford, for instance) which include the quarto and Folio texts as separate plays; the Arden Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor in 2006, has two volumes with three versions of the play (the quartos of 1603 and 1604–5, and the Folio of 1623).

The myth that Shakespeare did not revise comes partly from Heminge and Condell's praise of his manuscripts in their epistle “To the Great Variety of Readers” at the front of the First Folio in 1623: “His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”[7] Shakespeare's contribution to Sir Thomas More bears this out: his lines are fluent and unblotted. But unblotted papers do not mean unrevised papers (as the More example shows where Shakespeare corrected himself in the process of writing).

Grace Ioppolo has shown how frequent revision was among Elizabethan playwrights. Ernst Honigmann has analyzed revisions in manuscript poems by a large number of post-Renaissance writers. Vladimir Nabokov said that his pencils outlasted their erasers. Ernest Hemingway rewrote the end of Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. (“What was it that had stopped you?” an interviewer asked him. “Getting the words right,” replied Hemingway.[8]) It is rare to find authors who do not revise. Good writers are re-writers.

Notes

[1] W.W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), p. xix.

2 The quarto reads “flectkted,” a non-existent word that is clearly a misprint for “fleckled.”

[3] Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 283.

[4] Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 18.

[5] Greg, The Editorial Problem, pp. 111–12.

[6] A.E. Housman, “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” in The Classical Papers of A. E. Housman, vol. 3, ed. J. Diggle and F.R.D. Goodyear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 1058–69 (p. 1064).

[7] Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007), “Preliminary Pages of the First Folio,” ll. 83–5.

[8] Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); E.A.J. Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (London: Edward Arnold, 1965); interview with Vladimir Nabokov (1962) at: http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter01.txt (accessed 28 September 2011); Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction,” interview in The Paris Review, 21 (1956): http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway (accessed 12 July 2012).

Myth 25

Boy actors played women's roles

In 1602, Richard Vennar advertised an entertainment extravaganza at the Swan Theatre. England's Joy was to include a depiction of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, an allegorical representation of “Belgia” as a beautiful Lady left in “piteous dispoilment” by Spain, her tyrannical attacker, and “strange fireworks” from under the stage. In addition to these attractions, it was widely rumored that the play would be acted “by certain gentlemen and gentlewomen”:[1] the prospect of high-class women acting seems, like patriotic tableaux and pyrotechnics, to have been a real draw for late Elizabethan audiences. Unfortunately for the spectators gathered at the Swan, it was all a con. Vennar had taken their money and there were no fireworks, no joy, and definitely no performing women.

For historical reasons which are hard to uncover, the English stage was an entirely male space. No women acted in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and thus all female roles were taken by male actors. This was not the case in continental Europe. When Thomas Coryate traveled to Venice he described the new phenomenon of seeing female performers: “I saw women act, a thing that I never saw before, though I have heard that it hath been sometimes used in London, and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture, and whatsoever convenient for a player, as ever I saw any masculine actor.”[2] Coryate's hint that women have acted in London is tantalizing—but we don't know any more: it's just possible that he is referring to the legendary England's Joy. What's most interesting here is that for Coryate the experience of seeing women acting female roles is not revelatory—his tone of faint surprise is that they are as good as men, rather than, as we might expect, that they are so much more convincing as women than men are. Coryate's commentary on the Venetian theater gives us a way of thinking about the success of the transvestite theater for which Shakespeare wrote, in which a “masculine actor” presents the compelling “grace, action [and] gesture” of a woman.

That Shakespeare's female characters were played by males is not in doubt, but what has been more controversial is, first, the question of the age of these actors, and second, the dramatic effect of this theatrical cross-dressing. Our popular phrase “boy players” suggests youthful performers whose voices have not yet broken. Many references in Shakespeare's plays suggest that treble voices played women: Orsino tells Cesario his “small pipe / Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound” (Twelfth Night 1.4.32–3); Hamlet greets the players at Elsinore with special affection for “my young lady and mistress … Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring” (Hamlet 2.2.426–31). But it has sometimes been difficult for modern readers to imagine such pre-pubescent actors having the maturity and gravitas to play, for example, Cleopatra. Janet Suzman, herself a Cleopatra directed by Trevor Nunn in a version filmed for television in 1974, voices this skepticism: “I find it hard to think he wrote [Cleopatra] for a boy … there must have been some kind of prima donna in his company playing women's parts. It could never have been acted by a boy.”[3]

On the other hand, evidence from the period just after Shakespeare was writing gives us some suggestion that male actors in women's roles were typically teenagers under the age of 21.[4] It is one of the delicious ironies of the debates about theater in the early modern period that much of our evidence about theater practice comes from its fiercest moral detractors. Much of the disapproval of the theater in the period is focalized on male actors performing female roles. “All men are abominations that put on women's raiment,” wrote the Oxford theologian John Rainolds in 1599, and anti-theatricalist polemic stresses the youth of the cross-dressed actors. Defending the theater against these attacks, Thomas Heywood, himself a dramatist, also suggests that female roles are indeed taken by younger male actors, but tries to differentiate between cross-dressing in and out of the theater: “nor do I hold it lawful to beguile the eyes of the world in confounding the shapes of either sex, as to keep any youth in the habit of a virgin, or any virgin in the shape of a lad, to shroud them from the eyes of their fathers, tutors, or protectors, or to any other sinister intent whatsoever. But to see our youths attired in the habit of women, who knows not what their intents be.”[5] Because there is no “sinister intent” to deceive, Heywood argues, male actors in women's clothing is an understood theatrical convention outside the moral codes of the rest of society.

So the evidence identifies “young men,” “boys,” and “youths” as the actors likely to play women's parts—designations suggesting a range of ages through childhood towards maturity. Puberty, including the breaking of the voice, may well have been later in early modern England than today. One popular medical textbook suggests that boys are “apt to change their voice about 14 years of age” but there is evidence of even later maturation among choral school students, with the treble voice remaining to age 17 or 18.[6] David Kathman shows that the actors who performed female roles in Shackerley Marmion's Holland's Leaguer (1631) and Massinger's The Roman Actor (performed 1626) were all teenagers between 13 and 17 years old at the time of performance.[7] Richard Sharpe, the first Duchess of Malfi in Webster's play, was probably between 17 and 21 years old, and he later graduated to playing male roles with the company. Kathman's exhaustive examination of the named actors in the period up to the closing of the theaters shows that the adult male sharers (part-owners) in the theater companies never, so far as we can tell, acted female roles, and that instead young men aged between 13 and 21 took these parts. Kathman points out that “boy” also means “apprentice,” so perhaps the term “boy” needs to be seen in institutional terms—these were theatrical apprentices—rather than in terms solely related to age.

There is further evidence that young male actors were highly capable and popular. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, the biggest commercial and artistic threat to the Lord Chamberlain's Men was the newly formed boys' companies: Rosencrantz's report that “there is … an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for't. These are now the fashion” (2.2.340–2) was a topical one. Companies of teenage male actors were hugely successful, carrying complex, often saucy or satirical, plays without adult sharers, and the major dramatists wrote for them: Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Marston, and George Chapman among others.

As the resident playwright for a well-established and stable theater company, Shakespeare wrote with a keen eye for the personnel resources available for his plays. Almost all his plays require between two and four actors in female roles: Much Ado About Nothing, in which a cabal of four women meet as Beatrice is tricked in 3.1, is unusual. Stanley Wells suggests that the worry that he would run out of appropriate actors made Shakespeare scrap his original plan for a further female character in the play, Innogen, mother of Hero (her name appears in a couple of stage directions although she has no lines and is usually expunged by editors as an error in drafting: Josie Rourke's 2011 production reintroduced her and gave her the lines Shakespeare gives to Antonio). Wells suggests that the much-remarked absence of mothers in Shakespeare's plays (where is Queen Lear, or Duchess Prospero or Frederick or Senior, or Mrs Egeus? and look what happens to Thaisa and Hermione after they have given birth in Pericles and The Winter's Tale) may have practical theatrical, rather than sociological, reasons.[8] If he is right about Innogen, then more boys must have been available for Love's Labour's Lost (four women and two boy pages on stage in the final scene).

Heywood's common-sense defense of the practice of cross-dressing in the theater suggests it should be understood as convention: part of the make-believe of theater. But Shakespeare's plots seem often to be teasing us with the knowledge of the male actor underneath the female costume, particularly through the common plot-device of female characters dressing as men. When Rosalind in As You Like It takes on the male persona of Ganymede in the Forest of Ardenne (the name had strong associations of male homosexuality), there are numerous jokes about his/her ambiguous gender position. At the end of the scene in which Rosalind, dressed as Ganymede and pretending to be Rosalind, is mock-married to Orlando, Celia scolds her: “we must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest” (4.1.192–4). Within the fiction of the play what is beneath the doublet and hose is a female body, but within the theater? The joke, taken direct from the prose romance by Thomas Lodge that Shakespeare uses as his source for the play, has a double resonance on a transvestite stage. And, like other of Shakespeare's heroines dressed in male clothing (Viola in Twelfth Night, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona), it is not entirely clear that Rosalind appears back in her female clothing at the end of the play, although most modern productions have her do so. Her epilogue, however, teases the audience with the ambiguous sexual allure of the man-woman (it would send poor John Rainolds rushing for his smelling salts): “If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me …” (5.4.212–14). Stephen Orgel's ludic essay “Nobody's Perfect; or, Why Did the English Renaissance Stage take Boys for Women?” plays on the final elusive line of Billy Wilder's cross-dressing film comedy Some Like It Hot (1959): Rosalind's epilogue, like the film (which ends with one heterosexual couple, Joe and Sugar, and the phlegmatic Osgood apparently accepting the pragmatic “Daphne”) does not close down the “queer” sexuality indicated by cross-dressing.[9]

The dramatic effect of male actors in women's roles was not, then, neutral. Neither the plays themselves nor their moralistic detractors deny the erotic suggestiveness of the cross-dressed male actor, and Shakespeare frequently adds to this in his comedies by including transvestite disguise within the plot. The poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge formulated the notion of “willing suspension of disbelief” as a way to identify the implicit contract between the reader or viewer and non-realistic elements in literature, but although it is sometimes used of the Shakespearean theater, Coleridge's idea is not entirely appropriate. It is hard to suspend our disbelief about Viola's femininity in Twelfth Night when the plot keeps drawing attention to gender as performance, just as Francis Flute's unwillingness to play the female character of Thisbe in the play-within-the-play of A Midsummer Night's Dream draws attention to the male actors performing the “outer” play's Helena, Hermia, Hippolyta, and Titania. Rather than the “suspension of disbelief” it seems the plays require a kind of collusion from audiences willing to switch between an immersion in the fiction the play is presenting and a more self-conscious awareness of its material basis in the theater. On the other hand, describing the moving death of Desdemona in an Oxford production, one spectator uses the female pronoun without any awkwardness: the gender of the character and the gender of the actor could be held to be distinct.

Cleopatra gives us perhaps the most extreme version of this consciousness of theatrical gender. At the end of Antony and Cleopatra she imagines the shame that will befall her if she is captured by Caesar in strikingly self-reflexive terms:

The quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us, and present

Our Alexandrian revels. Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I'th'posture of a whore'

(5.2.212–17)

The fear of inadequate impersonation by a “boy” is a daring allusion to the artifice of theatrical representation: in the Jacobean theater, Cleopatra is already represented by a boy. That the performance can sustain this demystificatory moment so close to Cleopatra's final tragedy suggests something of the nuance and control Shakespeare could expect from the young actors playing women's roles.

Shakespeare, then, wrote the female roles in his plays for young male actors to inhabit. But when the theaters reopened after the hiatus of Cromwellian rule (1642–60), and women acted publicly for the first time, it was Shakespeare's roles for women, and in particular the so-called “breeches” or cross-dressed roles which allowed women to display their legs on stage, that were a major factor in the plays' revival: the first of the comedies to be put on was Twelfth Night. But it is a sign of Shakespeare's reiterability that for centuries his female roles have been taken by women actors who have inhabited them with the grace, action, and gesture of real women. Harriet Walter, who counts Cleopatra, Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing), Lady Macbeth, Viola, and Innogen (Cymbeline) among her Shakespearean roles, observes that “Shakespeare's verse is as dense and as beautiful, the emotional depth as great, the wit even more brilliant, the psychology as complex in the female characters as in the male,” although she adds: “I find it curious to think as a modern actress my opportunities in the Shakespearean repertoire have been determined by the limitations or excellences of two or three generations of Elizabethan boy players.”[10]

Notes

[1] John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), vol. 1, p. 172.

[2] A full text of Coryate's Crudities is available at www.archive.org

[3] Quoted by Marvin Rosenberg in his “The Myth of Shakespeare's Squeaking Boy Actor—or Who Played Cleopatra?”, Shakespeare Bulletin, 19 (2001), p. 5.

[4] David Kathman, “How Old Were Shakespeare's Boy Actors?”, Shakespeare Survey, 58 (2005), pp. 220–46 (p. 221).

[5] Tanya Pollard, Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 226.

[6] The Problems of Aristotle (1595), quoted in Kathman, “How Old Were Shakespeare's Boy Actors?”, p. 222.

[7] Kathman, “How Old Were Shakespeare's Boy Actors?”, pp. 224–5.

[8] Stanley Wells, “Boys Should Be Girls: Shakespeare's Female Roles and the Boy Players,” New Theatre Quarterly, 25 (2009), pp. 172–7 (p. 175).

[9] Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect; or, Why Did the English Renaissance Stage Take Boys for Women?”, South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1989), pp. 7–29.

[10] Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today (London: The Women's Press, 1988), p. xxiv.

Myth 26

Shakespeare's plays don't work as movies

Despite the parallels between the early modern theater and Hollywood (see Myth 19), it's often asserted that the plays cannot be translated into film. In some ways the film industry's own judgments reinforce this notion: the only Shakespeare film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture was Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948), and a perhaps apocryphal story about its movie magnate backer J. Arthur Rank being reassured that that the finished film was “wonderful: you wouldn't know it was Shakespeare” attests to the ambivalence of the relationship between Shakespeare and cinema.[1] Shakespeare has only once been nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay category (for Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet in 1996: it lost out to Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade). By Oscar standards, the only Shakespeare film to really succeed is not a play at all but the comic biography Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998): it won seven Oscars, including for the screenplay.

Writing of his preparations for his wartime propaganda film of Henry V (1944), Laurence Olivier suggested that Shakespeare's work anticipated the possibilities cinema might afford: “In Henry V more than any other, Shakespeare moans about the confines of his Globe Theatre … And all those short battle scenes, in a lot of his plays, are frustrated cinema.”[2] In fact it seems clear that the Chorus to Henry V speaks in a kind of litotes (the rhetorical figure of praising by understatement): the theater is supremely able to show whatever it wants, but then Olivier does have a film to sell. There are proto-cinematic aspects of Shakespeare's writing, though. Perhaps Antony and Cleopatra, with its aging celebrity protagonists and its extended cross-cutting between their two camps to depict the quick pace of military action, comes closest in Shakespeare's work to the kind of editing that constructs cinematic narration.

To be sure, there are difficulties in adapting Shakespeare's intensely verbal texts for a medium in which visual meanings are usually dominant. The Russian film director Grigori Kozintsev has discussed the necessary translation: “The aural has to be made visual. The poetic texture itself has to be transformed into a visual poetry.”[3] Kozintsev's own films show how this might work. The opening sequence of his Hamlet (1964) shows the Prince, played by Innokenti Smoktunovsky, an actor well known for having been imprisoned in Siberia, riding through the armored gate of the castle, which closes behind him: a visual image of Hamlet's observation that “Denmark's a prison” (2.2.246). Shostakovitch's stirring score counterpoints repeated visual images: billowing cloth, the surface of water, staircases, and low-angle shots, which give the film the poetic coherence that Shakespeare's play achieves through linguistic patterning.[4] The text of the play has been cut by around half, but what has been conceded in this verbal realm has been compensated in the visual. Orson Welles's Othello (1952) might offer another example: here the self-conscious use of black and white amplifies the play's own interest in racial and moral color binaries, shifting its chromatic emphasis away from the ethnic to the aesthetic. Welles's interest in images of entrapment, from the mesh on Desdemona's veil to the shadows cast by the grille bath-house windows in the attack on Cassio and the cage in which Iago is suspended, gives visual expression to Shakespeare's themes of imprisonment, as if the film is a long graphic exploration of Iago's sinister plan: “So will I turn her [Desdemona's] virtue into pitch, / And out of her own goodness make the net / That shall enmesh them all” (2.3.351–3). Welles, director of Citizen Kane, the film that most regularly tops all film-buff polls, is one of the most distinguished cineastes to tackle Shakespeare: his Macbeth (1948) splices Shakespeare's play with a depiction of morally ambiguous charismatic authority derived from wartime propaganda and a supernatural idea of voodoo witchcraft, and his reworking of the Henry IV plays as Chimes at Midnight (1965) reimagines the sequence as an elegiac biography of Falstaff, played by Welles himself.

In some ways the linguistic cuts necessary to create a filmic Shakespeare—Kenneth Branagh's epic, uncut Hamlet of 1996 is an industry exception at four hours' length—are relatively easily made. The opening scene of the play Hamlet, for example, serves as a kind of verbal “establishing shot,” in which the exchanges between the sentries establish for an audience watching the play in the bright afternoon light of the Globe that this scene takes place on the castle battlements at night. Location shooting can show this in a moment—so is the conversation between Barnardo and Francisco unnecessary? Perhaps: one of the criticisms of Branagh's Hamlet was its habit of both showing and telling—accompanying the verbal text of the play with extensive visual prompts seemed tautologous. Or perhaps not: as well as locating the scene in time and space, the opening of Hamlet also establishes an important mood of nervousness—and, as director Peter Brook found in a theatrical reworking of the play in 1996 called Qui va la?—the play's edgy opening question “Who's there?” (1.1.1) can move from its ostensible and pragmatic context into a more interrogative and synoptic take on the play's questioning of identity.

The extent of the reduction of the Shakespearean text in cinematic versions may seem problematic: Olivier's Hamlet cut half the lines, excising wholesale the characters of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Fortinbras; Zeffirelli's Hamlet had less than 40 percent of Shakespeare's text, and the majority of films of Shakespeare plays prune the lines to a similar degree. Our prevalent language of the “faithful” adaptation suggests that the closer a film is to the play, the better. In fact this is almost never the case. Instead, there is almost an inverse correlation between the “Shakespeare-ness” of a film and its cinematic value: Shakespeare works in the movies when the newer medium has the confidence to really rework the old. For many critics, the Japanese director Akiro Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957), a version of Macbeth, is the most successful film ever made of a Shakespeare play. Is this praise despite, or because, it has not a word of Shakespeare's text, translates the film into the context of samurai feudalism, and recreates the witches as a single spinning figure of destiny? The most successful filmic Shakespeares tend to have been those in which filmmakers have had the conviction radically to recast and to reimagine the plays as new creative artifacts; conversely, the least successful can be statically trapped in the conventions of theater (some of the studio-set BBC television Shakespeare series of the 1970s and 1980s fall into this category), even as these are more “faithful” to their originals.

There's a moment in Cymbeline when the god Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting on an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt (stage direction, 5.5.186). Twenty-one lines later he's winched up again: not really necessary to the plot, we might argue, but done because they could. Shakespeare is here using the special effects newly available to him as theater technology developed, and perhaps those effects are driving the narrative The same is sometimes true in Shakespeare films. Just because Roman Polanski can show us a floating dagger for Jon Finch to apostrophize in “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” (Macbeth 2.1.33–4) doesn't mean he should. The clunky visualization in his 1971 film spoils Macbeth's own delicate vacillation over whether the dagger is there or not, as well as being an effect whose technical execution quickly dates the film—nothing moves so quickly as special effects.

But many of the opportunities of Shakespeare in the cinema do come specifically from the interplay of Shakespeare with the technology, language, and grammar of film. The echoes of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986) in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989) situate the young hero king in a context of contemporary heroism. Lady Macbeth in Welles's Macbeth occupies the femme fatale role from the popular genre of film noir which also influenced Olivier's Hamlet. Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990) casts Mel Gibson as an unusually active Prince (“more macho than melancholy,” as the video advertising put it), whose character draws on Gibson's previous role in the Lethal Weapon cop series (Richard Donner, 1987), just as his co-star Glenn Close as Gertrude is sexualized from the beginning because of her history in erotic thrillers such as Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987). These are associations which work in the cinema when the film is being understood in relation to other films, rather than in relation to the Shakespearean text. Sometimes these associations are deliberately played up in the marketing of Shakespeare films, with a corresponding under-emphasis on “Shakespeare.” For example, the trailer for Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night (1996), advertised as “in the tradition of Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, and Priscilla Queen of the Desert comes the classic romantic comedy that proves that sometimes clothes really do make the man”; promotional taglines for Richard Loncraine's Richard III (1995)—“what is worth dying for … is worth killing for”—or Oliver Parker's Othello (1995)—“envy, greed, jealousy, and love”—seem deliberately to avoid the potentially off-putting associations of Shakespeare.[5] A similar interchange is seen in theater, as in 1994 when the poster for the Royal Shakespeare Company's Coriolanus advertised the hero as “A natural born killer,” drawing on the title of Oliver Stone's 1994 film. The most successful Shakespearean film, in box-office terms, is Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996)—and here the full title, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, flaunts rather than hides those associations. During the 1990s, more than twenty films of Shakespeare were released, building on the success of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V; a further twenty titles in which Shakespearean plots provide a substantial element of the narrative—such as the high-school retelling of The Taming of the Shrew as 10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Langer, 1999)—made this the most prolific decade ever in Shakespearean film production. But Luhrmann's was the only film version of a Shakespeare play to be a real commercial hit. It is successful because its teenage audience is directly addressed by its pop-video style of editing, its youth soundtrack, and its stars Claire Danes and, in particular, Leonardo di Caprio. Luhrmann updates the story from Renaissance Verona to “Verona Beach,” a modern cityscape dominated by the corporate headquarters of the two family businesses and a huge statue of Christ—the film's incorporation of a kitsch Catholicism of morbidity, shrines, and tattoo art is part of its inventive visual palette. An arresting opening sees a television screen crackle into life as a newscaster reads Shakespeare's prologue: “Two households, both alike in dignity” (Prologue, 1) as a deadpan report of another urban clash between Montague and Capulet youth, with “Captain Prince,” the chief of police, trying to keep the peace. Title cards naming the film's characters, soap-opera-style, are intercut with the spoken and written words of the play's Prologue, as the film's characteristically rapid pace crosscuts with images from the narrative. As Samuel Crowl identifies, “Luhrmann is clearly creating a version of Romeo and Juliet for the MTV generation and he speaks their cinematic language.”[6] This play about the high emotional timbre of adolescence, where “violent delights have violent ends” (2.5.9) is translated into a fast-living and unchecked contemporary setting, counterpointed by the fatalistic lyrics of pop culture and the material decadence and emotional chill of modern wealth. Luhrmann's film therefore manages to appeal to its audience without patronizing them, even as it, like all the best critical or theatrical readings of Romeo and Juliet, provides a thoughtful interpretation of the play. In details it is particularly enjoyable: the fancy-dress party at the Capulets, for example, sees Juliet dressed as an angel and Romeo as a knight, signifying the fairy-tale quality of their relationship. Paris's costume as a spaceman happily conveys his insulation from what is really going on, as he beams benignly from behind the visor in his clumsy helmet; Capulet is dressed as a depraved Roman emperor; Mercutio is in drag. The Friar's letter to Romeo, in exile in a Mantuan trailer park, goes astray because there is no one home to take the courier's delivery. A moody Romeo hangs about the beachfront snooker halls and bars dreaming of Rosaline. The film's ending constructs an operatic Liebestod from the confusion of Shakespeare's tomb, with Romeo and Juliet united alone together in the chapel amid a profusion of candles, visualizing the play's suggestions that their death is the ultimate marriage.

Luhrmann reinvents Shakespeare's best-known play, the teenage romance of Romeo and Juliet for late twentieth-century cinema audiences—just as Zeffirelli had done with his version three decades previously. But there are successful filmed Shakespeares which address much less familiar texts. Julie Taymor's Titus (1999), based on the early, bloody tragedy Titus Andronicus, creates a film which visualizes the play's verbal stylization in a range of non-naturalistic cinematic techniques. Beginning with a prologue in which a young boy plays increasingly violent games with toy soldiers and ketchup-blood, the film pans out to a balletic march of muddied Roman legionaries, returning with their war dead. It is the first of a memorable series of images by which Taymor translates, but does not attempt to regularize, the play's own tone, a “tightrope,” as one stage actor put it, “of absurdity between comedy and tragedy.”[7] Anthony Hopkins as Titus draws on his sinisterly violent persona in Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), as well as his pedigree as a classical actor on stage and film. Taymor uses collage sequences to interrupt naturalistic representation and depict the subjective perspectives of her characters, brings on the young Lucius as a witness and mute chorus to the play's atrocities, and, at the end, has him carry Aaron's baby on a long, slow walk out of the ruined Coliseum into a pink dawn. The film sequence in which the fresh pies baked from Tamora's sons cool appetizingly as muslin curtains waft in the breeze against a jaunty Italian song soundtrack epitomizes its assured and unsettling clash of tones. We already knew that Shakespeare's romantic comedies could work in the movies—the Italianate holiday-villa Much Ado About Nothing (Kenneth Branagh, 1993)—and all those Hamlets and Romeo and Juliets indicate some of the ways tragedy might work on the silver screen. What Taymor achieved with Titus, however, was a film that does not simplify or explain the play, nor make it suitable for the classroom, nor shy away from its difficulties: a film, in short, that meets the challenge of Shakespeare head on.

Notes

[1] Quoted in Richard Cavendish, “Five Oscars for Olivier's Hamlet,” History Today, 49 (1999); http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/five-oscars-oliviers-hamlet (accessed 12 July 2012).

[2] Laurence Olivier, On Acting (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), p. 186.

[3] Grigori Kozintsev (1967), quoted in Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (Harlow: Pearson/Longman, 2005), p. 4.

[4] See Neil Taylor, “The Films of Hamlet,” in Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (eds.), Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 180–95.

[5] http://uk.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1608515865/

[6] Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2008), p. 109.

[7] Brian Cox (Titus in the Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Deborah Warner, 1987), in Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (eds.), Players of Shakespeare 3: Further Essays in Shakespearian Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 175.

Myth 27

Yorick's skull was real

In Act 5 of Hamlet the Prince encounters a gravedigger preparing a new grave. The grave has had previous occupants: as he digs, the gravedigger throws up skulls of the already-buried. This is not an unusual occurrence. The graves of commoners were unmarked (a practice unchanged until the early seventeenth century) and so the chances of reuse were high; and corpses were buried in sheets, not coffins, so if the grave was redug the sexton's spade would unearth bones rather than wood. Dislodged remains were removed to the charnel house—a bone house or ossuary within church grounds and therefore a consecrated space. (After death, a consecrated space was more important than personal space.)

Shakespeare's gravedigger identifies one of the skulls as that of the court jester, Yorick: “a mad rogue—'a poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once!” (5.1.174–5). Hamlet remembers him as “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy” and recalls childhood play with the jester: “he hath borne me on his back a thousand times” (5.1.181–2). (The Victorian artist Philip Calderon depicts this piggy-back riding in his painting The Young Lord Hamlet (1868), and Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film inserts flashbacks of Yorick [comedian Ken Dodd] entertaining the court.) Although Shakespeare does not provide a stage direction instructing Hamlet to pick up the skull, all modern editions insert one: Takes the skull. Since Hamlet addresses the skull for ten lines it is logical that he should do so with it in his hand—he tells the gravedigger “Let me see” (5.1.179), obviously an instruction to pass the skull to him. This has become one of the most iconic moments in Shakespeare, appearing in adverts for films and stage productions, in cartoons and parodies (usually about Yorick's dental records or pencil lead), and, most recently, in a Royal Mail stamp of 2011: a photograph of David Tennant's Hamlet holding Yorick's skull is superimposed over the first line of the Prince's “To be or not to be” soliloquy, the play's other defining moment.

Figure 5 This twenty-first-century play based on Hamlet explores death and memory. The skull (the “laughing boy” of the title) is central to the action, and even Ophelia gets to address it. Designed by Ian Pape. Skull image by iStockphoto.

Figure 6 David Tennant as Hamlet contemplates Yorick's skull in Greg Doran's production at the RSC Courtyard in 2008.

Malcolm Davies Collection © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

The image was already iconic before Shakespeare staged it. Skulls were part of the memento mori (remembrance of death) tradition. This reminder of one's future death had a didactic purpose: don't act sinfully lest you be taken unawares, like old King Hamlet, “cut off even in the blossoms of [his] sin,” with “all [his] imperfections on [his] head” (1.5.76, 79). In 2 Henry IV the prostitute Doll Tearsheet asks her friend (presumably also her client) the slothful fat old knight Sir John Falstaff, “when wilt thou leave fighting o'days, and foining o'nights, and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven?” Falstaff rebuffs this suggestion that he alter his lifestyle, saying “do not speak like a death's-head, do not bid me remember mine end” (2.4.233–7). “Death's head” is an alternative phrase for “skull” or memento mori. In Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy (published 1611) it occurs in no fewer than three stage directions: To get into the charnel house he takes hold of a death's head; They lie down with either of them a death's head for a pillow; starts at the sight of a death's head.

Portraits celebrating the sitter's success often contained memento mori skulls, reminders that the sitter's achievements were earthly and would one day be undermined by death. Hans Holbein the Younger's The Ambassadors (1553), now in the National Gallery, London, depicts two ambassadors at Henry VIII's court surrounded by the trappings of their cultured and civilized lives, as well as coded symbols of the political disquiet over Henry's divorce that had brought them to England: scientific instruments (globes, a sundial, a quadrant), a musical instrument (a lute), textiles (oriental carpets), and open books (symbols of knowledge, education, religion). When viewed obliquely a blur in the foreground rearranges itself as a skull. Similarly, portraits of young men or women often showed them holding or contemplating a skull, reminding them (and us) that, as Gertrude says, “all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity” (1.2.72–3).

Hamlet is a young man holding a skull in a play about death. The play begins with Hamlet disabled by grief from his father's death. He continues to wear mourning clothes long after the official period of court mourning has ended. (The stage picture is striking: a figure, apart from the others, distinguished sartorially by his “inky cloak.”) In the first court scene, Act 1, scene 2, Claudius offers Hamlet conventional memento mori wisdom, reminding him that “your father lost a father; / That father lost, lost his”; Nature's “common theme / Is death of fathers, and … still hath cried, / From the first corpse till he that died today, / ‘This must be so’” (1.2.89–90, 103–6). But Hamlet is too crippled by grief to accept that “this must be so,” that life has 100 percent mortality, that death is the inevitable conclusion. The contrast with Act 5, then, is remarkable, when, holding Yorick's skull, he recognizes the skull-object's function as a memento mori symbol. Addressing it, he says, “Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour [face] she must come. Make her laugh at that” (5.1.188–90). In other words: remind her that no matter how much make-up she applies, she cannot avoid the fact that one day she will die, and then cosmetics will be of no help.

The importance of this moment in the play has been noted by many critics (Marjorie Garber and Roland M. Frye, for instance) but the most astute observation comes from Elizabeth Maslen. Maslen points out that not only does Yorick serve the traditional fool's function in Shakespeare, that of a balancing act, realigning the hero's moral coordinates, but that in this play of grief and mourning the fool's function could only be served by a dead fool.[1]

Yorick's skull did not attract a great deal of attention as a prop in modern productions until 2008 when the Royal Shakespeare Company used a real skull in a production directed by Greg Doran. The pianist André Tchaikowsky, who died of cancer in his forties, bequeathed his skull to the RSC in 1982. Although the skull was used in a photo shoot with Roger Rees when he played Hamlet in 1984, and was used in rehearsals when Mark Rylance played Hamlet in 1989, it did not appear in public performances until Doran's production with David Tennant in the summer of 2008. The unusual prop received so much media attention in newspapers and on television news that it was considered a distraction for audiences; consequently it was removed from use when the production transferred to London. (At least, it was reported to have been removed; it was actually retained in both the Stratford and London runs.) Nonetheless, questions had been raised about the role of illusion in drama, with Claire van Kampen noting that using a real skull was as inappropriate as using real blood.[2]

The Elizabethan theater did use real blood (not human blood but animal blood, supplied in bladders from the nearby slaughterhouses). Did it also use real skulls? Skulls are an infrequent stage prop. In Dekker and Middleton's The Honest Whore (1604) a servant sets out a table, on which he places a skull, a picture, a book and a Taper; in Webster's White Devil (1612) the ghost carries a pot of lily-flowers with a skull in it. Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy (1607) offers a perverse and extended variant when the hero, who has kept the skull of his beloved for nine years, now places it atop a dummy, dresses it/her up, and applies toxic lipstick to enact revenge on her priapic killer. When in 1598 Philip Henslowe took an inventory of props for the Admiral's Men, his list did not include any skulls. This is not surprising: all the examples of skulls in stage directions are concentrated in the first decade of the seventeenth century, suggesting that this was a temporary vogue.

In 1602 or thereabouts Henry Chettle wrote The Tragedy of Hoffman. In scene 1 Hoffman reveals that he previously rescued his father's body from the gibbet where he was unfairly hanged. He displays this skeleton, which he has concealed for years, to the audience. By the end of the scene he has managed to kill the prince whose father was responsible for the hanging (thereby achieving in just one scene the revenge that takes Hamlet five acts). Hoffman strips the new corpse to the bone, a “fair anatomy” and “image of bare death” (1.3.10, 16) (“presumably with some considerable effort,” observes Richard Sugg wryly[3]).

The play now has two skeletons. Producing a skeleton onstage (let alone two) is an order of magnitude different from staging a skull. One would dearly like to know if Hoffman predates Hamlet or was written as a response to it. There are many points of contact between the two revenge tragedies, and critics have often noted the ways in which Hoffman seems to compete with and outdo Hamlet. One of the intertextual moments relates to props: Elisabeth Dutton, who directed the play in 2010, said, “Hamlet may have a skull but Hoffman has the whole skeleton.”[4] Henslowe, who managed the company that staged this play, entered no payment for skeletons in his accounts, but his Diary stops at the end of 1602, just on the cusp of the date when Hoffman would have been staged, so his silence is inconclusive.

Given that life was cheap in Elizabethan London, that deaths from plague epidemics occurred suddenly and in vast quantity, that burials were hurried and in mass graves, and that graves were reused, a real skull would have been a familiar object, an object capable of reuse or misuse. After all, the skulls in portraits come from somewhere—perhaps the same place as skulls in plays. Procuring a real skull (as for Yorick) seems far less challenging than procuring a real skeleton. But since skeletons, not just skulls, were removed to the charnel house, perhaps it was as easy to steal one as the other? The records of the Company of Barbers and Surgeons often refer to the production of fake skeletons; if the prop can be made for anatomical study, surely it can also be made for stage use.

Shakespeare's plays are not heavily prop-dependent. There are good practical reasons for this. Plays that require props (in Comedy of Errors a bag of ducats, a rope's end, and a gold chain are crucial) require impeccable backstage coordination. Without the handkerchief for Othello there is no tragedy and no play. (The 1960s playwright Joe Orton said that his earlier work as an assistant stage manager helped him as a writer because it taught him not to write in too much business with telephones.)

The genre that is most reliant on props is romance. Romance plays—the kind Shakespeare wrote late in his career—traditionally hinge on the reunion of separated families via an identifiable token, often a piece of jewelry that was left with the foundling child. In The Winter's Tale, the baby Perdita is abandoned in her basket with “the mantle of Queen Hermione's, her jewel about the neck of it” (5.2.32–3). But Shakespeare does not write in reunions that are dependent on these props qua props. In The Winter's Tale the Third Gentleman narrates the reunion. In Twelfth Night the twins recognize each other not through props but through memories of their father and through shared bodily marks that they narrate. In Pericles it is Marina's narrative of suffering that prompts Pericles to recognize her as his daughter (“I will believe you by the syllable / Of what you shall deliver”; 21.155–6). In The Tempest the reconciliation of brothers is rooted in Prospero's live body. When Alonso is embraced by Prospero at the end—“I embrace thy body”—he knows the body is real and not another “enchanted trifle” because “thy pulse / Beats as of flesh and blood” (5.1.111, 114–16).

A parody of theatrical romance by Michael Frayn illustrates the pitfalls of props. Frayn imagines a play called Error for Error in which the Duke's long-lost son, carried off at birth, proves his heritage by a prop—a locket—which he throws to the Duke. The Duke drops it; the actors have to improvise:

Duke: Alas! Methinks I have misfinger'd it!

Ferdinand: Sire, bend thou down thy aged frame

And do thou smartly pick it up again.

Duke: Bend me as I might I cannot see the thing.

My lords, do you explore your cloggy beard.

No sign? Ah me, I fear it must have roll'd

Amid this mazy grove of cardboard trees.

Ferdinand: Was not one glance as it came winging by

Enough to grasp the general sense of it?

– That here before thee stands thy long-lost son?

Duke: A fig for your problems—what worries me

Is how I speak my major speech, which starts:

“Come locket, let me kiss thee for thy pains

And taste the savour of fidelity”

Without the bloody locket. Come, let's shift

This forest. Take the yonder end and heave.

Ferdinand: Is this meet welcome for a long-lost son?

Duke: Meet welcome for a long-lost son, forsooth!

What kind of long-lost son is this, that chucks

Essential props outside my senile reach

And cuts his long-lost father's longest speech?

Lose thee again, son, till thou learn at last

The art of throwing props and not the cast.

Frayn's parody incidentally reveals the way in which Shakespeare's plays set up romance prop conventions only to shy away from using them.[5]

When Shakespeare's plays do demand props, the props demand attention. The mirror in Richard II, for instance, is probably anachronistic (glass mirrors were unusual in England at the time of Richard II) and it is not found in Shakespeare's sources. It is therefore a hugely symbolic item in which King Richard (soon to be ex-king Richard) contemplates the way his reflection does not mirror his sufferings. The language of the scene suggests that Richard dramatically smashes the mirror on stage—“there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers” (4.1.279), although this would be an expensive gesture in the theater. In Othello, the circulating handkerchief—it moves from Desdemona to Emilia to Iago to Cassio—starts to take on a life of its own. It becomes “not merely a sign but a performer in the play's action.”[6]

Stage props are not simply material properties. They have back stories (Yorick's skull prompts anecdotes about the Fool's activities; Othello's handkerchief is given two contradictory stories about its origins; we are told about the pre-play commission for the gold chain in Comedy of Errors). They cue emotions and associations. They function as go-betweens (we pay as much attention to their movements as to characters'). They are symbols (all the skulls in Jacobean drama have a conventional memento mori function). They have to be read and interpreted like every other stage picture. And in their concrete presence they negotiate the boundary between the fictional world and the material real world (so, too, do costumes). With its material onstage existence, Yorick's skull is as present as the physical body of a living actor. In this sense, Yorick's skull, like all stage props, is “real.”

Notes

[1] Elizabeth Maslen, “Yorick's Place in Hamlet,” Essays and Studies, 36 (London: John Murray, 1983), pp. 1–13 (p. 12).

[2] Quoted in Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 86–7.

[3] Richard Sugg, Murder after Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 20.

[4] A video of this staged reading of Chettle's Tragedy of Hoffman, directed by Elisabeth Dutton, is available at bit.ly/hoffman2010

[5] Michael Frayn, “Business Worries,” in Collected Columns (London: Methuen, 2007), pp. 44–7 (pp. 46–7).

[6] Andrew Sofer, “Felt Absences: The Stage Properties of Othello's Handkerchief,” Comparative Drama, 31 (1997), pp. 367–94 (p. 367).

Myth 28

Queen Elizabeth loved Shakespeare's plays

Two examples. First, a caustically wise Queen Elizabeth enters the Curtain theater at a performance of Romeo and Juliet to stop the Master of the Revels from revealing that one of the actors is in fact a woman. Dispensing money and persons, she invites Shakespeare for future discussions at Greenwich, while sending his lover back to her husband and thence to the New World. Second, a letter discovered and published at the end of the eighteenth century sees the queen addressing Shakespeare in terms of warm appreciation: “Wee didde receive youre prettye Verses goode Masterre William … and wee doe complemente thee onne theyre greate excellence.”[1]

Both these encounters between monarch and playwright are fictional. The first is the denouement of John Madden's hugely enjoyable film Shakespeare in Love (1998) with Oscar-winning Judi Dench as the queen. The second is a fake by the noted eighteenth-century forger William-Henry Ireland, part of a sheaf of documents he claimed to have discovered in the private library of the mysterious “Mr H.” These two fictions, 200 years apart, attest to the vitality of the myth that the queen was Shakespeare's biggest fan. And they give us two indicative assertive strategies, recognizable from some of our other myths: where the required evidence is lacking, it must be invented—within the fictional genre of romantic comedy in the film, in scholarly hoaxes for Ireland.

Most specifically, since Shakespeare's first biographers writing in the early eighteenth century, it has been traditionally asserted that The Merry Wives of Windsor was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth, who wished for a revival of Falstaff, corpulent star of 1 and 2 Henry IV that would “shew him in Love.” “Without doubt,” Nicholas Rowe observed in 1709, Elizabeth “gave him many gracious Marks of her Favour,” although he does not offer any proof.[2] While it is impossible that Elizabeth would have attended the disreputable public theater, she did have the theater come to her. Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, performed at court every Christmas season, and although the specific plays performed are not recorded, it seems likely that many of them would have been by the resident playwright, Shakespeare. The title page of Love's Labour's Lost, printed in 1598, describes the play “as it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas”; The Merry Wives of Windsor, first published as “Syr John Falstaffe, and the merrie Wives of Windsor” in 1602, also claims it was “divers times Acted … Both before her Majestie, and else-where.” As many critics have noted, Elizabeth's own sense of monarchical power, in an age of stage kings, was highly theatrical: as she recognized, “We princes, I tell you, are set upon stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed: the eyes of many behold our actions.”[3]

Unlike many of his contemporaries, including Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare does not seem to have depicted Elizabeth directly in his writing. Not for him the epilogue that Jonson addressed to her in his Every Man Out of His Humour, or Dekker in his Old Fortunatus. Only in A Midsummer Night's Dream might Elizabeth be glanced at. In that play, Oberon's description of a “mermaid on a dolphin's back / Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath / That the rude sea grew civil at her song” (2.1.150–2) has been plausibly connected to the Earl of Leicester's lavish entertainments for Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle in 1575. It seems likely that this extravagant spectacle, with its gunfire and fireworks seen and heard over twenty miles away, would have involved the inhabitants of nearby Stratford, perhaps including the 11-year-old Shakespeare.[4] Oberon's identification of a “fair vestal” or “imperial votress … In maiden meditation, fancy-free” (2.1.158–64) may well be a reference to the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. There are more buried allusions in the play, too: Titania, queen of the fairies, must have recalled Edmund Spenser's influential contemporary epic which addressed Elizabeth as “The Faerie Queene.” A production directed by Peter Hall at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames, in 2010 visualized this association between the queens, as Judi Dench reprised in her performance of Titania something of her bewigged and stately role in Shakespeare in Love, recalling elaborate paintings of the jeweled Elizabeth. But while the connection was strikingly visual, it was also rather neutered: in the play Titania, doctored with a love potion as part of a quarrel with her lover Oberon, falls in love with the lower-class Bottom, who has been transformed with an ass's head, and takes him off to her fairy bower. We do not see what transpires, but Bottom's delicious insinuations afterwards—“Methought I was, and methought I had—” (4.1.206) give plenty of room for speculation that more than ear-stroking took place. If this is a disguised portrait of Elizabeth, its implications are not very flattering: in the production Peter Hall did not put either Judi Dench, or Elizabeth herself, to such scandal, merely bestowing some dowager-chaste kisses on Bottom's long asinine nose.

Figure 7 Judi Dench playing Titania as Queen Elizabeth at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames (2010). Photo: Nobby Clark / ArenaPAL.

Elsewhere Shakespeare refers to our “gracious Empress” in Henry V, when he likens Henry's historical victory at Agincourt to the topical and anticipated success of the Earl of Essex in quelling rebellion in Ireland (5.0.30), in a passage convincingly described as “the only explicit, extra-dramatic, incontestable reference to a contemporary event anywhere in the canon.”[5] Perhaps it is significant that the idealized king of the play is likened not to the queen herself but to her general, Essex. This theme is evident elsewhere in connections between Shakespeare and Elizabeth. The story of Richard II, for instance—a weak king's deposition by his cousin Henry Bullingbrook—took on a topical relevance amid the tensions of the end of Elizabeth's reign, and one writer, John Hayward, was imprisoned for dedicating his prose history of Henry IV to the Earl of Essex, seen as a challenger to Elizabeth. In a conversation with the antiquary William Lambarde in 1601, Elizabeth is reported to have likened herself to Richard II—the monarch, rather than the play. And when the supporters of the Earl of Essex paid for a play to be performed on the eve of their rebellion, it was perhaps inevitable they would pick Richard II, although it is not absolutely certain that this was Shakespeare's play. Members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men were called before the Privy Council to answer for this particularly political scheduling. (Their spokesman, Augustine Philips, claimed innocence: the company was simply well paid to put on an “old play.”[6])

So far, Shakespeare's literary depictions of Elizabeth do not suggest that her favor was of particular concern to him. His response to her death in 1603 is also revealing. Amid the outpouring of poetic tribute to the dead queen and the new Scottish king, Shakespeare is conspicuous by his absence. Henry Chettle, writing his elegiac England's Mourning Garment of 1603, criticizes Shakespeare under the name of Melicert for his failure “To mourne her death that graced his desert”: the suggestion that Elizabeth has “graced” Shakespeare is a tantalizing one, anticipating Nicholas Rowe's later assumption about the relationship between monarch and playwright.

Shakespeare's most extensive description of Elizabeth comes long after her death. What has been identified as Jacobean nostalgia for the golden age of Elizabeth is a feature of a number of plays of the early seventeenth century, including Samuel Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me, based on the events of Henry VIII's reign, and Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, a popular dramatic account of Elizabeth's life. Shakespeare's contribution to this genre is his late romance-history, Henry VIII or All Is True, co-authored with John Fletcher. This pageant-like play ends with the spectacular staging of the infant Elizabeth's christening, at which Archbishop Cranmer heralds “this royal infant” as a “maiden phoenix,” who “promises / Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings / Which time shall bring to ripeness.” With a weather eye to the current monarch, however, and the patron of the company now known as the King's Men, Shakespeare writes, as the climax of Cranmer's speech, of Elizabeth's successor James: “Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, / His honour and the greatness of his name / Shall be, and make new nations.” (5.4.17–52).

In fact James's direct patronage of the theater company marks a significant new phase in the relationship between Shakespeare and the monarchy, and a number of the plays of the early years of his reign, including Macbeth and King Lear, can be seen to speak directly to James's interests. James was a published writer—of poetry, including sonnets, and of tracts on witchcraft, on political philosophy, and on the newfangled import tobacco. We can see Shakespeare tracking this published output very attentively in his plays for the newly christened King's Men. In Measure for Measure, for instance, the retiring Duke's dislike of the city crowds echoes the new king's own reported shyness. In Othello, Shakespeare relocates the general and his bride to Cyprus, scene of the sea battle of Lepanto between the Ottoman Empire and a coalition of Catholic states about which James had written a long poem. In Macbeth Shakespeare quarries and reshapes one of the few episodes of Scottish history that could be acceptable both to London theater audiences used to anti-Scottish sentiment and to the Scottish king. His alterations to his source material develop the role of the witches—a topic fascinating to James—and establish a detoxified Banquo as the moral counterweight to Macbeth's ambition—James traced his own ancestry from Banquo who, in the historical sources, was originally Macbeth's murderous accomplice. In King Lear James's attempts to unite England and Scotland are shadowed in the play's concern with the “division of the kingdom” (1.1.3–4). In Antony and Cleopatra the concern with royal female tombs may be influenced by James's commissioning of monuments to Elizabeth and to his mother Mary Queen of Scots in Westminster Abbey.

Just as Shakespeare the playwright showed a great interest in his royal patron, there is far more evidence that James was actively interested in drama than that Elizabeth was, although he was reputed to enjoy only short plays. In addition to his patronage of the playing company, masques, the elaborately operatic and allegorical dramatic form so enjoyed by the court, flourished during his reign. Why, then, do we not have the myth that James loved Shakespeare's plays? Simply because James is a less iconic figure. If the myth about Elizabeth's court is about the patriotic Golden Age of the Virgin Queen, James's court has been caricatured as sleazy, rife with sexual and political scandal, and structured around the monarch's close relationships with male favorites. Our investment in the frisson of romance between dashing male playwright and passionate Virgin Queen has made a more attractive Elizabethan myth, and, despite the fact that half of Shakespeare's career was under James's rule, Shakespeare tends always to be seen as an Elizabethan phenomenon, along with Drake playing bowls as the Armada approaches and gallant gestures with cloaks over puddles. No one has made a film about the relationship between Shakespeare and James, or forged letters between them, although Ben Jonson's elegy on Shakespeare apostrophizes that “Sweet swan of Avon! What a sight it were / To see thee in our waters yet appear. And make those flights upon the banks of Thames / That so did take Eliza and our James.”

But, like the film director John Madden and the forger William-Henry Ireland, we are still on the lookout for evidence of the bond between Shakespeare and Elizabeth. The 2007 Royal Shakespeare Company Collected Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, was the first major edition to include a poem titled in its manuscript form “To ye Q. by ye players,” an epilogue to a court performance of an unknown play in 1599. The eighteen-line poem begins “As the dial hand tells o'er / The same hours it had before,” and addresses the “mighty Queen” as a perpetual presence with the wish: “That the children of these lords / Sitting at your council boards, / May be grave and aged seen, / Of her that was their fathers' queen.” Bate describes the attribution of the poem as “absolutely secure,” and in a newspaper trail for the edition, under the winning headline “Is There a Lost Shakespeare in Your Attic?,” judges it “a gorgeous little court epilogue” with an “assurance that is unique to the mature Shakespeare.”[7] The trochaic meter of the poem certainly is one used by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the evidence that the “Dial Hand” poem is by Shakespeare is far from “absolutely secure,” and scholars, as Helen Hackett has recently reviewed, have been generally skeptical about this attribution (Hackett convincingly proposes Thomas Dekker as a more likely author[8]). The desire for a tangible connection between playwright and queen, however, will not go away.

Notes

[1] Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 39–40. See also Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[2] Nicholas Rowe, “Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear,” in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the first (London, 1709), pp. ix–x.

[3] Holinshed (1587), p. 1583 (www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed).

[4] Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life, Arden (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), p. 9.

[5] Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), p. 7.

[6] Blair Worden, “Which Play Was Performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?”, London Review of Books, 10 July 2003, doubts the play was Shakespeare's, and indicts Shakespeareans for so wanting their author to be involved in this political controversy that they have overlooked the evidence. Paul J. Hammer, “Shakespeare's Richard II, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 59/1 (2008), pp. 1–35, reassesses that evidence, and agrees with Worden's claim about Shakespeareans' over-reading of the incident while arguing that the play performed was indeed Shakespeare's Richard II.

[7] Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007), p. 2395; Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2007

[8] Helen Hackett, “‘As the diall hand tells ore’: The Case for Dekker, Not Shakespeare, as Author,” Review of English Studies, 63 (2012), pp. 34–57.

Myth 29

Shakespeare's characters are like real people

One of the traditional hallmarks of successful art is that people take it for real. Pliny describes a famous painting competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius in the fifth century BCE. Zeuxis unveiled his painting of a still life in which the grapes were so tempting that a bird came to peck at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to draw the curtain to reveal his painting; Parrhasius explained that the curtain was itself a painting.

Analogous stories occur in the realm of literature. When Sir Thomas More's Utopia was published in the sixteenth century, a priest asked his bishop to send him to Utopia. (Utopia is a fictional island—its name in Greek means “no place”—but the characters in the book share their names with real people and so perhaps are real, and one describes his visit to Utopia.) On his deathbed Balzac called for Dr Bianchon, one of his fictional creations. Before Freud had a sizable body of patients on which to base case studies, he turned to realist drama—Shakespeare, Ibsen, Greek tragedy—to analyze its characters. It may sound odd to talk of Greek drama with its masks and formal choruses as “realistic,” but Freud was responding to the plays' emotional realism.

“Lifelike” and “realistic” are always compliments, the barometers by which we judge how (or whether) a play has worked.[1] But lifelike in a sixteenth-century play is not the same as lifelike in the twenty-first century. In the UK of the 1950s, the queen's Christmas Day broadcasts undoubtedly seemed lifelike to viewers, but in 2012 they seem stilted, not at all related to anything we recognize as natural. As Edward Pechter points out, questions about what is lifelike in Renaissance drama confuse means and effects. The actor Thomas Betterton “may have chanted—that is, have sounded like chanting to us if we were able to travel back in time to the Theatre Royal in the late seventeenth century … but to his audience, tuned to a different frequency, his performance might have seemed like life itself” (our italics).[2] So negotiating this myth is tricky because it involves a concept—lifelike/realistic—which is not constant. Let us try to deal with this myth by dividing it in two parts: characters and real people.

First, characters. At the end of the fourth century BCE, the Greek writer Theophrastus wrote a book of thirty character sketches (Characters). Although Theophrastus was not translated (into Latin) until 1592, the form was influential. In England, Thomas Wilson's Art of Rhetoric (1553) provides a short character sketch as an example of the rhetorical term descriptio; Sir Thomas Overbury wrote a book of Characters, published in 1614 (so popular that there were five reprints that year), reprinted again in 1615 and 1616 (three editions), with further reprints in 1618, 1622, 1626, 1627, 1628, and 1630. Part of the initial commercial prominence of Overbury's book may have been due to the sensational nature of his death in 1613 (he was murdered in the Tower of London) and to his involvement in a court scandal of divorce and remarriage (see Myth 22) which made the original volume's raison d'être—a verse character of “a wife”—resoundingly topical. But the subsequent volumes (regularly enlarged by others) were entirely in prose and comprised one- to two-page depictions of character: a wise man, an elder brother, a canting rogue, an ostler. Many of these characters are closer to caricature than to psychological individuals (the drunken Dutchman and braggadocio Welshman are clearly stereotypes), but subtle psychological aspects are nonetheless in evidence. Overbury notes gradation of character: there is a difference between “a whore” and “a very whore,” between “a vertuous widow” and “an ordinary widow.” His portrayal of a creditor moves from costume to attitude to custom.[3] The sympathetic depiction of a franklin contrasts the man's external with his internal attributes, and notes the significance of speech patterns: “Though he be master, he says not to his servants ‘Go to field’ but ‘Let us go’.”[4] Overbury's imaginative detail extends even to the reading matter of a chambermaid: “She reads Greene's works over and over [the prose romances of Robert Greene] but is so carried away with the Mirror of Knighthood, she is many times resolved to run out of her self and become a lady errant.”[5] It is a short step from here to Stanislavsky's An Actor Prepares.

The purpose of Theophrastus's Characters has never been entirely clear, but classicists now think that it has a legal aim. One of the required rhetorical skills of a lawyer is to build up or demolish the character of the defendant or witness. Similarly, critics such as Lorna Hutson and James McBain have recently explored the English Inns of Court rhetorical traditions that fed into mid-sixteenth-century drama and thence to the commercial theater of the late sixteenth century. Character it seems, from classical times to Shakespeare's, is a rhetorical construct.

But character is also a psychological construct, at least for Shakespeare. One of the things Shakespeare's characters do is try to read and understand other fictional characters. The opening line of King Lear gives us Kent's surprise that he has misread Lear: “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall” (i.e. “hmm … I got that wrong”; 1.1.1–2). In Othello Lodovico attributes Othello's untypical behavior to the stress of Venetian business: “Maybe the letter moved him” (4.1.232). Hamlet tries to read himself: having seen Fortinbras's purposefulness, Hamlet says:

Now, whether it be

Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple

Of thinking too precisely on th'event –

…

– I do not know

Why yet I live to say “This thing's to do”,

Since I have cause, and will, and strength, and means,

To do't.

(4.4.30–2, 34–7[6])

The dominant question of twentieth-century criticism—why does Hamlet delay?—is a question Hamlet actually asks of himself. It is a question that assumes he has agency, choice, emotions, motivation: in other words that he is a real being.

If Shakespeare characters assume that they, and other Shakespeare characters, are real beings, so too did their earliest readers and audiences. Shakespeare criticism begins with character: Margaret Cavendish's Sociable Letters (1664) and Maurice Morgann's Essay on the Dramatick Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777). From early on, Shakespeare characters also had a life outside their plays. Tiffany Stern has found Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Germany in a composite play of the seventeenth century that has nothing to do with Twelfth Night. In her recent book on the novel, Maria di Battista distinguishes characters in plays from characters in novels—to the detriment of the former. Dramatic characters, she says, are “confined” to the stage.[7] But when Sir Andrew Aguecheek goes to Germany in a play that is not Twelfth Night it is hard to see him as “confined” in any way.

It is worth asking at this stage how Shakespeare creates the illusion of lifelike characters. The word “character” has its roots in the Greek for “writing,” and this was the meaning still uppermost in Shakespeare's day. Character is something that is written down. But it is this prescription of identity that Shakespeare characters resist; in the process they become individuals trying to have a life outside fiction. The most obvious example is Troilus and Cressida where, as Linda Charnes brilliantly pointed out in 1989, the predicament of the titular characters is their attempt to break out from the already-written associations of their names in literature (Troilus as betrayed lover, Cressida as faithless woman). Shakespeare's Troilus wants to be “authentic author” of his own story (3.2.177). But how can he be when his story is already written for him?[8] This predicament is not confined to fictional/historical/mythical/famous characters. It applies to anyone who defies family expectations, as we see in Coriolanus's case when he wishes to be author of himself, denying his kin (he does not succeed in asserting his autonomy and the play ends tragically). It is this quest for individual freedom that gives Shakespeare characters their lifelike appearance as individuals not types. Juliet has a balcony in Verona despite never having had an existence beyond fiction. No Jonson or Middleton character has anything like this afterlife.

Another answer to the question of how Shakespeare creates lifelike characters is: by calling attention to gaps. When Prospero says he will retire to Milan where “every third thought shall be [his] grave” (5.1.315), it begs the question: what are his first and second thoughts? As Tony Dawson writes, “We feel we know these characters because we do not know them”; this creates the illusion that these characters are like people, that they are knowable.[9]

There is a further twist here in that Shakespeare characters disavow their fictional status by calling attention to it. Cleopatra seems real to us because she disdains boy actors who might play Cleopatra (see Myth 25). Othello seems real because if it were his cue to fight he would have known it without a prompter. Fabian seems real in Twelfth Night because he wouldn't believe the gulling of Malvolio if it were played on a stage. These characters know what plays are, so by definition are not in one.

Let us turn to the second part of this myth: real people. We need to remember that most character criticism is based on the novel. Although the novel is a mediated form, it has no physical mediator. Drama, on the other hand, does: it is mediated by the body of the actor. Thus at a very basic level it is hard for audiences not to view Shakespeare's characters as real people because on stage they are real people. Mistaking the play and its characters as real is both parodied and celebrated in The Taming of a Shrew (printed in 1594), a play which derives in some way from Shakespeare's similar plot in The Taming of the Shrew. In both plays Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker, watches his first play. In A Shrew, however, he interrupts the action, demanding that the constable should not arrest a character and take him to prison (obviously an experience a bit close to home for Sly). Sly mistakes what he sees for real. He is both a naïf audience member and the ideal audience member.

Another way of approaching this myth is to say that Shakespeare doesn't create characters, lifelike or otherwise. He simply writes roles; it is actors who create characters. Thus when Taffeta in Lording Barry's play Ram Alley (1607) defines “a complete gallant,” she says, “A mercer formed him [i.e. provided the raw material], a tailor makes him [i.e. provides the shape] / And a player gives him spirit [brings him to life]” (F3v). This is the topic negotiated in Woody Allen's 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo. A depression-era housewife, Cecilia (Mia Farrow), seeks solace in repeat cinema visits. The hero, Tom Baxter (Jeff Bridges), notices her frequent viewings, falls in love, and leaves the screen to be with her. Because the film cannot continue without him, the actor, Gil Shepherd (Jeff Bridges again), who created the character arrives to persuade Baxter to return. A discussion ensues as to who created the character. “Didn't the man who wrote the movie do that?” asks the perplexed Cecilia. “Yes, technically,” says Shepherd. “But I made him live. I fleshed him out.”

A measure of the “life-likeness” of fictional characters is the way they assume an afterlife, independent of the play in which they initially served a plot function. Sir John Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor is one such example (see Myth 28); Sir Andrew Aguecheek in seventeenth-century Germany is another; Juliet's balcony in Verona is yet another. But Shakespeare characters are not unique in this afterlife. Mythological characters and Chaucerian characters give their names to behaviors, attitudes, situations, and syndromes: Gordian knot, Oedipus complex, Herculean task, January–May marriage. That drama has a long history of being lifelike is seen in nineteenth- and twentieth-century attempts to disrupt it: in the symbolist drama of Maeterlinck and others and in Brecht's alienation technique for instance.

Talking about characters as if they were real has been out of fashion among literary critics for several decades. Instead, criticism has ventured into new terrain—the invigorating challenges of structuralism, poststructuralism, new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism. These innovative critical schools have brought with them new discoveries but also a new danger: their specialist vocabularies have made Shakespeare criticism inaccessible to the ordinary reader and playgoer, and, as Alan Sinfield puts it, threatened to “make character a wholly inappropriate category of analysis.”[10] Heather Dubrow writes that “character has virtually become a dirty word.”[11] And if character is no longer a relevant category for consideration, “lifelike” is no longer a relevant term for analysis.

Part of the reason for this paradigm shift may be English literature's professional development as a subject for academic study. The study of English in universities is only a century old, and it had uneasy beginnings: it was seen as the poor man's Classics; it had a nonspecialized, nontechnical vocabulary; insufficient on its own, it had to bolster itself through alliances with other departments (history, Scandinavian studies). One of the problems with thinking about characters as lifelike (or thinking about characters at all) is that this is what amateurs do (“amateur” in the literal sense of lovers: audiences or readers who enjoy the plays). How can one justify a university department of English if what it does is what recreational readers do—without training, without payment? So the exile of character from academic discussions of the last four decades may be linked to the turf war between professional academics and general readers (see Myth 30).

Recent years show signs of a revival of interest in Shakespearean character. Not in the old-fashioned way, treating fictional characters as real people, but in a more nuanced way, trying to understand the boundaries between lifelike characterization and representation, and the artifice that makes the latter look like the former. We now realize that an interest in lifelike characterization is one of the things that differentiates Shakespeare from his contemporaries. As such it is a category that demands attention.

Notes

[1] Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (eds.), Shakespeare and Character (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 8.

[2] Edward Pechter, “Othello” and Interpretive Traditions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), p. 188.

[3] Sir Thomas Overbury, Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse, ed. Edward F. Rimbaut (London: Reeves & Turner, 1890), p. 160.

[4] Ibid., p. 149.

[5] Ibid, p. 101.

[6] This scene is omitted from the Folio text; it is printed as an additional passage on p. 689 of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor's Oxford edition.

[7] Maria di Battista, Novel Characters (Oxford; Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 9.

[8] Linda Charnes, “‘So unsecret to ourselves’: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), pp. 413–40 (p. 416).

[9] A. B. Dawson, “Is Timon a Character?”, in Yachnin and Slights (eds.), Shakespeare and Character, pp. 197–213 (p. 210).

[10] Alan Sinfield, Faultlines (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 58.

[11] Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 17.

Myth 30

Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare

If you already think Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, then you will be bracing yourself for yet another establishment cover-up; if you already think Shakespeare did write Shakespeare, then this myth will be one you do not bother to read. Of all our myths, this is the most intractable because it is the one where positions are most entrenched. Put crudely, the academic establishment maintains that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon did write the plays attributed to him in the First Folio in 1623 (and perhaps some others too, although the consensus breaks up a bit there). And a coalition of interested parties who are not professional Shakespeareans, including a good showing from the legal and theatrical professions and some notables including Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, and Henry James, believe he did not, either because they believe that someone else wrote them, or because they believe there is, in the words of one online petition, “reasonable doubt” about the attribution.[1] Outbreaks of hostilities, when a newspaper reports the controversy, a new book proposes a new candidate, or something like Roland Emmerich's film Anonymous (2011; tagline: “Was Shakespeare a Fraud?”) enters the debate, pit implacable and sometimes complacent scholars who merely discount, rather than disprove, the apparently detailed knowledge and interrogation of their amateur opponents. Sometimes this is extremely heated: writing to the New York Times in 2005, Harvard Shakespeare professor Stephen Greenblatt suggested that “the demand [for discussion about Shakespeare's authorship] seems harmless enough until one reflects on its implications. Should claims that the Holocaust did not occur also be made part of the standard curriculum?” If the rhetoric of the argument can equate the fact of Shakespeare's authorship of his plays with the fact of the Holocaust, it's clearly going to be difficult to have a balanced discussion.

In this short account we can't work through all the arguments and all the candidates, but we can try to set out why and how this controversy has arisen, and some of the issues about the evidence on both sides. First, although Shakespeare's name does not always appear on the title pages of his plays published during his lifetime (see Myth 4), his fellow King's Men actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, who put together the posthumous collected edition, were in no doubt about who wrote the plays. The title page of the First Folio (1623) boasts “Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies,” and the iconic engraving of a balding Shakespeare, head awkwardly atop a starched ruff, emphasizes the man behind the works (unlike, say, the collection of Ben Jonson's Works in 1616, which is illustrated with an allegorical, architectural frontispiece suggesting the book's classical antecedents). Heminge and Condell knew Shakespeare over decades—in his will he left them money for mourning rings—so unless they were part of a conspiracy, there seems little doubt about their testimony.

In fact, this notion of conspiracy is key to the authorship question. No one expressed any doubt or suspicion about the authorship of the plays in the early modern period, nor until the nineteenth century. According to the frantic logic of conspiracists, the wealth of contemporary evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford did indeed write the plays we attribute to him must be discounted as planted (“that's what they want you to believe”), and, perversely, it is the absence of evidence that really counts. Or, to put that another way, in order to question that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, we need to discount a large amount of evidence that he did, and search out the possibility that someone else did. So, that Shakespeare is listed as an actor and as a playwright in numerous contemporary sources, and that there is ample evidence to link this man with the man born, married, and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon is of no more relevance than the fact that potential alternative authors Christopher Marlowe died in 1593 and the Earl of Oxford in 1604, long before many of the plays were written: these historical facts are simply ignored, or, rather, reconstructed as contingent parts of a conspiracy. The Marlowe Society even succeeded in having a question mark after Marlowe's death date in the memorial window placed in Westminster Abbey in 2002, to leave open the possibility that Marlowe wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare, and the society administers a large prize for the scholar who “furnishe[s] irrefutable and incontrovertible proof and evidence required to satisfy the world of Shakespearian scholarship that all the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare were in fact written by Christopher Marlowe.”[2] The prize is unclaimed.

The authorship question is a curious ideological mismatch. On the one hand, it had its roots in a fundamental re-examination of the philosophical tenor of Shakespeare's plays. In part it was their newly perceived political radicalism that made it conceivable that their author might wish to hide his identity. The American writer and scholar Delia Bacon established this interpretative tradition in her opaque book The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857), a book that drew Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson to her cause. Bacon, and her successors in this vein, argued for the plays' relation to contemporary politics in ways which have anticipated much later scholarship concerned with the place of the stage in early modern England as socially transgressive and politically provocative (James Shapiro, in an extensive recent study of the authorship question from a critical and sociological viewpoint, remarks that were these ideas not linked to the question of authorship, Bacon “would be hailed today as the precursor of the New Historicists, and the first to argue that the plays anticipated the political upheavals England experienced in the mid-seventeenth century”[3]).

Against this radical and politicized reading of the plays, however, the authorship question has a strongly socially conservative cast: its adherents cannot believe that the son of a glover from a provincial market town and without a university education could possibly have written the works attributed to him. It is no accident that the alternative candidates for their authorship are all noblemen: Francis Bacon, Sir Henry Neville, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Derby, even Queen Elizabeth, supported by ingenious computer-generated graphical disintegration to reveal an image of the Virgin Queen disguised as Shakespeare on the front of the First Folio. The only other “commoner” in the list is the Cambridge-educated Christopher Marlowe. But there's no reason, other than social snobbery, to associate literary ability with rank or birth, particularly in the world of the theater where a playwright was an artisan, a new word for a new occupation (see Myth 21) imagined by analogy with skilled craftsmen such as wheelwrights or shipwrights. The claims either that the writer of the plays must have been a courtier or that their aristocratic author could not have sullied himself to enter the common marketplace of print are assertions rather than evidence. Elsewhere in this book we have shown that Shakespeare's education was extensive (Myth 2) and that he did not need to have traveled abroad to write his plays (Myth 5). What we do know about Shakespeare—and what is amply attested by his contemporaries—is that he could write imaginative and compelling drama, which involved inhabiting the world view and linguistic competence of different speakers from different social classes.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the preferred candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays was Francis Bacon, and the preferred method for asserting this “truth” was cryptography. Bacon was believed to have placed ciphers in the plays that could be cracked to reveal his own signature. A rash of titles promised explication. Ignatius Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888) applied a number of code-breaking stratagems to produce a secret message announcing “Shak'st spur never writ a word of them,” but his methods were lampooned by unconvinced humorists and Stratfordians in parodic applications of his method to his own work, and to other pages of Shakespeare, “revealing,” for example, that “Master WillI a Jack Spur writ this play”;[4] undeterred, Elizabeth Gallup published her The Bi-Literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in his Works (1899); some judicious alterations of the nonce-word “honorificabilitudinitatibus” from Love's Labour's Lost (5.1.40) led Sir Edwin Dunning-Lawrence to a Latin sentence announcing “These plays F. Bacon's offspring are preserved for the world” in his Bacon is Shakespeare (1910); by overlaying a cosmographical diagram on the Epilogue to The Tempest in her Bacon's Dial in Shakespeare (1922), Natalie Rice Clark uncovered the helpfully explicit declaration “I, W.S. Am F. Bacon.”

But Bacon's star has waned, and the most active contender for the authorship of Shakespeare's works is now Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Oxford's claims are largely biographical: the argument is that his life fits more closely the life perceived to be expressed through the plays than does the biography of Shakespeare. There is no external evidence to link Oxford with the works of Shakespeare. Samuel Schoenbaum, still Shakespeare's best and most cautious biographer, describes the problem of writing Shakespeare's life as that of bridging “the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record”;[5] for Oxfordians, Shakespeare's documented life is not only mundane but wretched, devoid of the social advantages necessary to write the plays and marked instead by suspicions of parsimony, social climbing, profiteering, and the abandonment of his wife and children. By contrast, Oxford's life could have furnished the details for Hamlet (although not the ending): he had traveled in Europe, he was well connected at Elizabeth's court, his own father-in-law Lord Burghley was supposed to be the model for Polonius, and he knew Arthur Golding, translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses (used in Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Titus Andronicus among others).

These parallels may or may not be substantive, but in any case the argument rests on an erroneous assumption that Shakespeare's works are biographical. The same is true of the case for other candidates: Sir Henry Neville is proposed because his imprisonment after the Essex rebellion in 1601 explains the move towards darker comedies and tragedies in Shakespeare's writing around that date (this shift is something of an exaggeration and, in any case, more likely to be connected to audience tastes than to authorial mood); the Earl of Rutland is proposed because he visited Denmark just before the publication of Hamlet (in fact the prompt for the play may be nearer home: the written sources for the play also set the story in Denmark). If we believed the plays were autobiographical, we might as well be looking for a soldier (Macbeth, Coriolanus, Titus, and Othello are all soldiers), a female transvestite (women dress as men in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline) or a father of adult daughters (see Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, King Lear, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Cymbeline) (just a minute: Shakespeare was the father of adult daughters …). To be serious, though, the idea that literary texts, particularly early modern plays, encode biographical data is as far from an understanding of them as literature as the Baconian idea that they are codes to be broken.

Literary theorists have been proclaiming the “death of the author” since the 1960s (the phrase is Roland Barthes'), and the bankruptcy of biographical readings long before that. It oughtn't, therefore, to matter whether Shakespeare or someone else (of the same name, as Mark Twain mischievously put it) wrote the plays attributed to him. But of course it does matter. We have seen in recent years that when a play is newly attributed to Shakespeare—as for example Edward III—this results in new editions, new performances, and new scholarship, forms of attention that invent, or at least reinforce, the literary quality they purport to describe. Edward III was not previously an unknown play but it was in the critical graveyard marked “Anon.” Jonathan Bate has admitted that, when editing Titus Andronicus, a play previously considered aesthetically defective, “I so wanted to praise the play, instead of burying it as the Arden editor of the previous generation had done, that I uncritically accepted the arguments for solo authorship”: here again authorship and literary value are connected (see Myth 17).[6]

To be sure, there is a mystery about Shakespeare's authorship. How did he write it all? How is it that his works have been so endlessly adaptable, so susceptible to readings and sensibilities and ways of thinking very different from the culture out of which they were written? It's a mystery that is only deferred, not solved, by attaching a different name to the works, since the problem is not “How did he write it since he never went to university?” but the more fundamental “How did he write it?” Jonathan Bate argues that “‘genius’ was a category invented in order to account for what was peculiar about Shakespeare.”[7] No wonder that Superman (in a DC comic of 1947) and Doctor Who (in an episode aired in 2007) have been imagined as Shakespeare's time-traveling collaborators: if Shakespeare didn't write the works, perhaps only a super-hero could have.

If you look up some of the books and websites cited for this myth, you will see that one of the main argumentative tools of the anti-Stratfordians is detail: “Polonius in Hamlet refers to ‘young men falling out at tennis,’ which most likely refers to the infamous Oxford-Sidney tennis-court quarrel”; instances of “every” and “ever” are coded references to De Vere (the Earl of Oxford); Francis Bacon's commonplace book contains phrases also found in Shakespeare's plays.[8] It is hard not to see this barrage of detail and the partisanship of the debate as an unconscious smokescreen, a diversionary tactic, to avoid thinking about the bigger questions this myth throws up: questions of genius, canon, class, literary value—and of who owns “Shakespeare”: the academics or the enthusiasts?

Notes

[1] http://doubtaboutwill.org/declaration

[2] http://www.marlowe-society.org/reading/info/hoffmanprize.html

[3] James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 109.

[4] Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 406–7.

[5] Ibid., p. 568.

[6] Jonathan Bate, “In the Script Factory,” review of Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author, Times Literary Supplement, 18 April 2003.

[7] Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), p. 163.

[8] http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/

Coda

One of the questions we are most often asked as Shakespeare researchers and teachers is: surely there is nothing new to be said about Shakespeare? Given that Shakespeare is the most researched author in the world, with thousands of publications about him each year, this is an entirely reasonable question. In fact, there is a great deal more to be learned and said about Shakespeare.

In 1823 the first quarto of Hamlet (published in 1603) was discovered. (To this day, only two copies of this quarto have been found.) This short text, with variant action and language, changed what we knew and thought we knew about how Hamlet was first staged, about how texts are transmitted, and about what Shakespeare or his company may or may not have altered in the play. Answers to the questions raised by the existence of Q1 Hamlet are still disputed—but no one disputes that Q1 Hamlet is an important piece of evidence in the ongoing search for an answer.

New discoveries like this don't come along every day. But small incremental steps are just as important as paradigm shifts. Many of these steps are taken by studying Shakespeare's contemporaries and Shakespeare's contexts.

Ten years ago MacDonald Jackson pointed out All's Well's unusual identification of a character in the Spinii Italian regiment as “one Spurio.” He is named twice (2.1.41, 4.3.166) although he does not appear in the play. The name is unusual and occurs only once elsewhere in Renaissance drama—in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), where it makes symbolically appropriate sense as the name of the Duke's bastard (spurious) son. This led Jackson to conclude that the name originated with Middleton and was subsequently picked up by Shakespeare. This gives us a date of post-1606 for All's Well rather than the usual 1602. There may even be an in-joke in Shakespeare's use of the name. Although Spurio is the name of the Duke's bastard son in Middleton, he is never named in the dialogue of The Revenger's Tragedy (his name occurs only in stage directions); Shakespeare's Spurio, on the other hand, is named in the dialogue but does not feature in the play's action. This indicates Shakespeare's familiarity with a written text of The Revenger's Tragedy, either in manuscript form (Gary Taylor has suggested Shakespeare may have acted in the Middleton tragedy[1]) or in its first printed edition of 1607/8. Redating All's Well by five years removes it from the group of three “problem plays” in 1601–4 in which it never properly fitted (the other two are Troilus and Cressida [1602] and Measure for Measure [1604]) and makes it one of the first of the last plays (a category also under interrogation: see Myth 20). The important point here is: reading a Middleton play changes our understanding of Shakespeare's career.

Digital projects are also changing our landscape in leaps and bounds: statistics about Shakespeare's vocabulary and that of his contemporaries are no longer dependent on the Shakespeare-centric first edition of the OED (see Myth 21). Private letters have now been digitalized; so too has women's manuscript writing. Our contexts for Shakespeare are consequently hugely expanded.

We are confident that much new factual information remains to be uncovered about the Elizabethans we love to study. The United Kingdom is full of untapped archives waiting for patient researchers and digitalization: the London livery companies for instance. Although Shakespeare was not a member of a livery company, many of his contemporaries were; each livery company has extensive records, most of them unpublished or only published selectively. David Kathman has uncovered actors' names in livery records, adding to our knowledge of their biographies and activities. The same promise is held by funeral rolls. Held in the College of Heralds, these are extensive lists and diagrams of who marched in an important person's funeral: they thus enable us to see networks of who knew whom.

Outside London, the teams of scholars from the REED project in Toronto (Records of Early English Drama) have been working their way through county records, transcribing documents (payments to players, names of visiting theater companies), giving us a rich picture of the interaction between London drama and the provinces. The award-winning book The Queen's Men, by Sally-Beth Maclean and Scott McMillin, for instance, was enabled by REED's research; in their book the authors analyze the regular touring routes of the Queen's Men and argue that touring was a prestigious activity and not, as previously thought, something players only fell back on when the plague prevented them from performing in London. (Denigrating the provinces is a nineteenth-century attitude, the product of the long-run system which made London the capital of British theatrical culture.)

Stately homes, and houses that have been in the same family for generations, tend to have large collections of manuscript documents. An example from recent literary history will serve to show how rich these private repositories are. Vita Sackville-West wrote in longhand and kept all her manuscripts: “books published and unpublished, the notebook in which she recorded her dreams, her gardening articles, her juvenilia, poems, stories, plays, and reviews in quantity. The total amounts to some 9,000 pages.”[2] This archive lay in Sissinghurst for forty years until her son, Nigel Nicholson, sold it at Sotheby's on 10 July 2002. There are archives that have lain unsold for over 400 years. In 2010 Katherine Duncan-Jones made a key discovery in the archives of Berkeley Castle, a piece of evidence suggesting that William Kemp, Shakespeare's company's famous clown of the 1590s, was alive and still performing as late as November 1610. Duncan-Jones's discovery was in the household accounts of Henry, seventh Baron Berkeley (1534–1613), whose steward records that in late November 1610 “my Lord lay in London” where he paid “in reward to William Kempe, my Lady Hunsdons man, 4s. 4d.”[3] Retired from the public stage, Kemp had apparently found a patron in a private household. This theatrical nugget lies in a household's financial accounts.

In addition to domestic manuscripts, stately homes often have extensive libraries. Although their book collections are catalogued, not all these books have been opened and every page perused. Scholars are still finding books with Ben Jonson's signature in the flyleaf. One day we will find books with Shakespeare's signature.

However, many new findings come not from factual discoveries but from a change in scholarly attitude. Early twentieth-century Shakespeare articles modeled themselves on scientific procedures, concluding with a triumphant “Thus it can be seen that …” as if the Shakespeare litmus paper had decisively changed color. Today's literary scholars see the value in posing questions without needing to formulate neat answers; we are more comfortable at pointing out contradictions and gaps; we have become adept at dealing with sums that don't add up. This enables us to consider negative evidence: for instance, why did Shakespeare not write religious poetry (see Myth 7)? Important research often begins with changing the kinds of questions that we ask.

If academics profitably spend time in archives, they derive equal benefit from visits to the theater. You will have noticed how often in this book we have turned to theater productions for proof of principle—how an idea worked or was discovered in performance. Far from being enemy territory, theater is on an equal footing with academia; productions, like books, are interpretations of Shakespeare based on a close study of the text. And the traffic is two-way. The 2011 production of Cardenio at Stratford-upon-Avon is one such case. We mentioned in Myth 17 that this collaborative play, written by Shakespeare with Fletcher late in his career, 1613, is lost. (The manuscript existed until the eighteenth century, when William Warburton's cook used it as baking parchment.) We know its source (Cervantes' Don Quixote) and we know that Lewis Theobald had adapted the Fletcher–Shakespeare play in 1727 as Double Falsehood. Since we have b1 the source and the adaptation—and some of the music, found recently by the historian Michael Wood[4]—it should be possible to create an approximation of the missing middle link. In 2011 Greg Doran did just this, working with the source, the adaptation, a scholar, and a playwright to produce a stageable version of the lost play.[5] So there is still much to be discovered about Shakespeare—factually, in archives and interpretatively, in the theater. Note how all the exciting developments we cite here have taken place in the last ten years: the Middleton edition, the Kemp reference, the redating of All's Well (and of Sir Thomas More, see Myth 17), and the Robert Johnson music for a lost play. Clearly, the field of Shakespeare studies still has major surprises.

Future discoveries also involve understanding past and present beliefs—what we have called “myths”—the cultural work these assumptions do for us and our national poet. In this book we have tried to foreground the journey towards discoveries rather than the destination, the reading rather than the conclusion. Throughout these thirty chapters we have been interested in how interpretative meaning is made and remade; how the same evidence can be used in different ways; the investment we have in the stories we tell; and how these stories or myths arose, what appeal they exercise, what evidence can be used to challenge or confirm them. Perhaps the ultimate myth, however, is one our book also perpetuates—except in this final injunction. Myths about Shakespeare can often displace the Shakespeare texts themselves. In the nineteenth century Hazlitt distinguished between Shakespeare's texts and commentaries on them: “If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.”[6] His binary is extreme—genius versus insignificance—but his general principle is sound: there is no substitute for close acquaintance with the text. Heminge and Condell introduced their collected edition of the plays in 1623 with the command: “read him, again and again.” Four hundred years later it is hard to find better advice.

Notes

[1] Gary Taylor, “Divine [ ]sences,” Shakespeare Survey, 54 (2001), p. 24 n.53.

[2] Nigel Nicholson, “A Place of Greater Safety for Vita's Work,” The Times, 2 July 2001.

[3] Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Shakespeare's Dancing Fool: Did William Kemp Live On as ‘Lady Hunsdon's Man’?”, Times Literary Supplement, 11 August 11 2010.

[4] Wood's discovery followed his assumption that the songs for Cardenio were probably composed by the man who composed the music for the other late romances, Robert Johnson: In Search of Shakespeare (London: BBC Books, 2003), pp. 363–5.

[5] Later that year, Shakespeare's Globe staged Gary Taylor's version as part of its Read Not Dead series (November 2011); Stephen Greenblatt had worked with the American playwright Charles Mee to create a modern version in 2008.

[6] William Hazlitt, “On the Ignorance of the Learned,” first published in the Edinburgh Magazine, July 1818.

Further Reading

A new book or article on Shakespeare comes along every hour of every day. You're not going to be able to read them all; nor can we. How, then, to choose what to read? We have offered a selection of further reading in narrative form to give a sense of the content of the books we are recommending, and why they appeal to us critically.

Shakespeare's Life

The standard life of Shakespeare is still Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975; there's also a Compact Documentary Life, 1987): Schoenbaum gives the documentary evidence and assesses difficult questions with even-handed restraint. His Shakespeare's Lives (1991; paperback 1993) is a perfect supplement, taking as its subject the history of Shakespearean biography, and enjoying many of the more eccentric interpretations of Shakespeare's life. Other recommended biographical works include James Shapiro on Shakespeare's most productive year, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005; paperback 2006), Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004; paperback 2005), and Michael Wood's book accompanying his television series In Search of Shakespeare (2003). We quote often from the detailed work of our colleague Katherine Duncan-Jones: her biography of a less than likeable Shakespeare is Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (2010—a revised edition of her 2001 Ungentle Shakespeare), and her account of Shakespeare's immediate reputation is Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan, 1592–1623 (2011). Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life (2000) is especially good on the early years in Stratford; Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (2008; paperback 2009) looks at Shakespeare and his context through the life-stages identified by Jaques in As You Like It (“All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players”; 2.7.139–40). Charles Nicholl's in-depth analysis of a court case in which Shakespeare was called as a witness (a somewhat evasive one, it has to be said) is in The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (2008). Lois Potter's The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (2012) is not just (just!) a biography of Shakespeare: it is a biography of his theater world, informed by Potter's unrivaled theatrical understanding.

Shakespeare at Work

The conditions of writing and printing drama are well covered by the contributors to David Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), and Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book (2001) is a readable account of changes in editing and bibliography and why they matter. The British Library's digital quartos website (http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html) allows access to all the early printed editions of Shakespeare: you can view a number of digital facsimiles of the First Folio online via the Folger Shakespeare Library (www.folger.edu). Lukas Erne's controversial Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2007) has turned old notions of the relation between long and short versions of Shakespeare's plays on their head; he posits a Shakespeare who was interested in the publication of his plays.

John Jowett's Shakespeare and Text (2007) is accessible and learned; his editions of Timon of Athens (2004) and Thomas More (2011) extend the discussion of collaborative working practices. Andrew Gurr's The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (2004) studies Shakespeare's works from the point of view of the structure and methods of the Chamberlain's, later King's, Men. Tiffany Stern's Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (2009) is one of those books that changes totally how you think about the early modern play—she shows it not to be a unified text as published by Arden or World's Classics, but rather an assemblage of fragments: songs, letters as props, parts, epilogues, prologues. David Crystal is the expert on Shakespeare and language, in a vast array of works including Shakespeare's Words (with Ben Crystal, 2002) and “Think on My Words”: Exploring Shakespeare's Language (2008); Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language (2001) is a more evocative and associative take on Shakespeare's poetic use of rhetoric and vocabulary.

Shakespeare in the Theater

Classic books on the Elizabethan theater are by Andrew Gurr again: The Shakespearean Stage, (4th edn., 2009) and Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (3rd edn., 2004). Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper's Shakespeare's Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (2008) is full of insights from a decade of productions in the rebuilt Globe on London's Bankside. Tiffany Stern's Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (2004) understands the literary and theatrical contexts for Shakespeare's work, and her Shakespeare in Parts (with Simon Palfrey, 2007) is a groundbreaking study of the way Shakespeare's actors understood their roles. Martin Wiggins's Shakespeare and the Drama of his Time (2000) is recommended as a way to counter the myopia with which we often consider Shakespeare, and Arthur Kinney's Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments (2nd edn., 2005), is the best place to sample contemporary writers.

Cambridge University Press's series Players of Shakespeare (6 vols., 1985–2004), supplemented by Michael Dobson's Performing Shakespeare's Tragedies Today (2006), provide a series of unique perspectives. Written by actors reflecting on their roles, these essays combine sophisticated analysis of individual actors' roles with a deep understanding of the play in which they perform. Carol Rutter's Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today (1988) gives Shakespeare's female characters the same treatment: conversations between actors about their interpretation of, for example, Measure for Measure's Isabella or As You Like It's Rosalind, are revelatory about the sexual politics of specific productions at specific historical moments. Barbara Hodgdon, W.B. Worthen, Carol Rutter, and Bridget Escolme are all writers on Shakespeare in the theater who are methodologically sophisticated and genuinely revealing about performance: any of their works is well worth reading.

Interpreting Shakespeare

There is no single way of interpreting Shakespeare: here we propose some recent survey volumes, all of which introduce a range of interpretative methods and frameworks and offer extensive suggestions in turn for further reading. Finally, we highlight some specific critical works to which we find ourselves returning for their acumen and provocation.

There are any number of guides to Shakespeare: particularly useful are Robert Shaughnessy's The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare (2011), which works through the plays and their historical, theatrical, and critical contexts; Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin's Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide (2003), which tries to set out, with detailed examples, different interpretative approaches; and The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2011), edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, which covers different historical and critical aspects and has good suggestions for further reading. Russ McDonald collects significant twentieth-century criticism in his Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000 (2003). There are two excellent series, the Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford University Press) and Arden Critical Companions (Arden, Bloomsbury), giving up-to-date interventions in a range of topics, from biography to religion to literary theory. Works such as Dympna Callaghan (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (2000), Sonia Massai (ed.), World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (2005), and Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds.), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (1998), give a sense of how the field has changed. We, and our students, love Doing Shakespeare, Simon Palfrey's brilliant book of close reading (2nd edn., 2011); Marjorie Garber's collection of provocative essays, Profiling Shakespeare (2008), is similarly lively. Michael Neill's Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama (2000) offers lucid, humanely historicist arguments.

Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (1990; paperback 1991) reads like a critical version of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando, in which our hero morphs through centuries. Anything by Taylor is well worth reading: here he combines performance history, publication history, and political history; as an added bonus, each chapter is written in the style of the period it chronicles. Alexander Leggatt has published on every Shakespeare genre over thirty years: Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (1974, reprinted 2005), Shakespeare's Political Drama (1988), and Shakespeare's Tragedies (2005). His critical interpretations are based on the words in the play and the play's theatrical effects: no other critic could get away with this limited focus, but Leggatt's critical insights show you why he can. A.D. Nuttall's Shakespeare the Thinker (2007) and Tony Tanner's Prefaces to Shakespeare (2010) each offer a play-by-play approach, highly recommended if you require a refresher before going to the theater. Nuttall focuses on Shakespeare's ideas; Tanner on the language in which those ideas are expressed.

Our final injunction was to read Shakespeare himself: there is a plethora of available editions, each aimed at a particular readership. Although publishers offer Shakespeare series in individual volumes, it's hard to recommend any one series uniformly: you will have your own criteria—portability, price, font size, electronic or paper, amount of intrusive explanation, page design—for choosing. We are drawn to different editions for different reasons: New Penguin for carrying to lectures, with their up-to-date and crisp introductions; Bedford St Martin's “Texts and Contexts” series for its inclusion of historical material to contextualize each play; Arden series 3 for extensive scholarship and annotation. The “Shakespeare in Production” series from Cambridge University Press does not cover every play in the canon, but for those currently available in this series it gives a reading experience referenced to the myriad interpretations on stage: each line is keyed to how it has been interpreted by actors and directors, thus offering a quickly accessible range of interpretative possibilities. Elizabeth Schafer's The Taming of the Shrew (2002), for instance, is a particularly good volume to start with. You may wonder whether or why you would need to buy a new edition: is not a text from school or college days adequate? But interpretation of Shakespeare has developed, and new things are being discovered, as this book has shown: these changes and developments also affect the text we read. Publishers therefore are constantly updating and recommissioning editions to reflect this evolution.

Three academic journals dominate the market for new work: Shakespeare Quarterly, published by the Folger Shakespeare Library, Shakespeare Studies (Farleigh Dickinson University Press), and Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge University Press); Shakespeare (Routledge) is a relatively new entrant. The professional association in the USA is the Shakespeare Association of America: there are Shakespeare associations in India, Japan, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, Norway, Korea, Southern Africa, and many other countries. The British Shakespeare Association (http://www.britishshakespeare.ws/) has a wide base of teachers, theater practitioners, academics, and enthusiasts: the website highlights new work, Shakespeare in the news, and events and recordings.

Index

Admiral's Men

Alleyn, Edward

Allot, Robert

Aristotle

Asquith, Clare

Attridge, Derek

Aubrey, John

Bacon, Delia

Bacon, Francis

Barnfield, Richard

Barry, Lording

Barthes, Roland

Bate, Jonathan

Bearman, Robert

Beaumont, Francis

Beerbohm, Max

Beerbohm Tree, Herbert

Bergson, Henri

Berry, Cicely

Betterton, Thomas

Bierce, Ambrose

Blackfriars Theatre

Bodleian Library

Bodley, Thomas

Bogdanov, Michael

Boyd, Michael

Branagh, Kenneth

Bridges, Robert

Brook, Peter

Brooke, Arthur

Browne, Sir Thomas

Bryson, Bill

Bullough, Edward

Burbage, James

Burbage, Richard

Burgess, Anthony

Burrow, Colin

Callaghan, Dympna

Campion, Edmund

Cavendish, Margaret

Cawdray, Robert

Césaire, Aimé

Chapman, George

Charnes, Linda

Cheke, John

Chettle, Henry

Coldiron, Anne

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Cook, Ann Jennalie

Coryate, Thomas

Cressy, David

Crowl, Samuel

Crystal, David

Curtain Theatre

Daborne, Robert

Daniel, Samuel

Davenant, William

Day, John

de Quincey, Thomas

de Vere, Edward, Earl of Oxford

Dekker, Thomas

Dench, Judi

Desan, Philippe

Doran, Greg

Dowden, Edward

Dryden, John

Dubrow, Heather

Duffy, Carol Ann

Duncan-Jones, Katherine

Dutton, Elisabeth

Eagleton, Terry

Eco, Umberto

Eliot, T.S.

Elizabeth I

Erasmus, Desiderius

Erne, Lukas

Essex, Earl of

Field, Richard

Fletcher, John

Florio, John

Ford, John

Forman, Simon

Frayn, Michael

Freud, Sigmund

Gammer Gurton's Needle

Gascoigne, George

genre

Globe Theatre

Gosson, Stephen

Greenblatt, Stephen

Greene, Robert

Greer, Germaine

Gunn, Steven

Gurr, Andrew

Hackett, Helen

Hall, Edward

Hall, John

Hanmer, Thomas

Harbage, Alfred

Harington, Sir John

Hathaway, Anne (Anne Shakespeare)

Haughton, William

Hayward, John

Hazlitt, William

Hemingway, Ernest

Henslowe, Philip

Heywood, Thomas

Hobbes, Thomas

Holbein, Hans

Holbrook, Peter

Holinshed, Raphael

Honigmann, Ernst

Housman, A.E.

Howard, Jean

humanism

Hytner, Nicholas

Ireland, William Henry

Ioppolo, Grace

Jackson, MacDonald P.

James I

James, Henry

Johnson, Samuel

Jonson, Ben

Jowett, John

Joyce, James

Kahn, Coppélia

Kathman, David

Keats, John

Kemp, Will

Kermode, Frank

King Leir

King's Men

Kinnear, Rory

Kott, Jan

Kozintsev, Grigori

Kurosawa, Akira

Kyd, Thomas

Kyle, Barry

Lee, Sidney

literacy

Lodge, Thomas

Lord Chamberlain's Men

Luhrmann, Baz

Lyly, John

Malone, Edmund

Manningham, John

Marlowe, Christopher

Marston, John

Maslen, Elizabeth

Massinger, Philip

Mathiessen, F.O.

McGough, Roger

McKellen, Ian

Medwall, Henry

Melchiori, Giorgio

Meres, Francis

Middleton, Thomas

Miller, Jonathan

Milton, John

Minghella, Anthony

Montaigne, Michel de

More, Thomas

Morgann, Maurice

Mortimer, John

Moryson, Fynes

Mucedorus

Munday, Anthony

myths, definition of

Nabokov, Vladimir

Nashe, Thomas

Nicholls, Charles

Norton, Thomas

Nunn, Trevor

Olivier, Laurence

Orgel, Stephen

Orton, Joe

O'Toole, Peter

Ovid

Oxford, Earl of, see de Vere, Edmund

Platter, Thomas

Peacham, Henry

Pechter, Edward

Peele, George

Pepys, Samuel

Petrarch

Plutarch

Polanski, Roman

Pope, Alexander

Porter, Peter

Potter, Lois

printing

see alsoShakespeare, William: First Folio

Puttenham, George

Queen's Men

Rainolds, John

Ralph Roister Doister

Robinson, Benedict

Rose Theatre

Rourke, Josie

Rowe, Nicholas

Rowley, Samuel

Rowley, William

Rowse, A.L.

Rush, Christopher

Rylance, Mark

Santayana, George

Schäfer, Jürgen

Schoenbaum, Samuel

Scolaker, Anthony

Shakespeare, Hamnet

Shakespeare, John

Shakespeare, Judith

Shakespeare, Susanna

Shakespeare, William

anachronisms

‘authorship question’

blank verse

and Catholicism

collaboration

education

First Folio

life

‘lost years’

politics

popularity

reading

revision

sources

topicality

and travel

vocabulary

will

“W.S.”

works

All s Well that Ends Well

Antony and Cleopatra

As You Like It

Cardenio

The Comedy of Errors

Coriolanus productions of

Cymbeline

Edward III

Hamletproductions of

1 Henry IV productions of

2 Henry IV

Henry V productions of

1 Henry VI

2 Henry VI

3 Henry VI

Henry VIII (All Is True) productions of

Julius Caesar

King John productions of

King Lear

The Lover's Complaint

Love's Labour's Lost

“Love labours won”

Macbeth productions of

Measure for Measure

The Merchant of Venice productions of

The Merry Wives of Windsor

A Midsummer Night's Dream productions of

Much Ado About Nothing productions of

Othello productions of

Pericles

The Phoenix and the Turtle

The Rape of Lucrece

Richard II

Richard III productions of

Romeo and Juliet productions of

sonnets

The Taming of the Shrew productions of

The Tempest productions of

Thomas More

Timon of Athens

Titus Andronicus productions of

Troilus and Cressida

Twelfth Night productions of

The Two Gentlemen of Verona productions of

The Two Noble Kinsmen productions of

Venus and Adonis

The Winter's Tale productions of

Shakespeare in Love(dir. John Madden)

Shapiro, James

Shaw, George Bernard

Sheridan, Richard

Sidney, Sir Philip

Sinfield, Alan

Sir John Oldcastle

Sir Thomas Stukeley

Southampton, Earl of

Spenser, Edmund

stage directions

Stanislavsky, Konstantin

Steevens, George

Stern, Tiffany

Stoppard, Tom

Strachey, Lytton

Stratford-upon-Avon

Stubbes, Philip

Stubbs, Imogen

Sugg, Richard

Suzman, Janet

Swan Theatre, Bankside

Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (1987)

Tarlton, Richard

Taylor, Gary

Taylor, George Coffin

Taymor, Julie

Tennant, David

theater

audiences

boy companies

censorship

costume

medieval

props

scenery

Theatre, The

Theobald, Lewis

Theophrastus

Tourneur, Cyril

Vaughan, Alden T.

Vaughan, Virginia Mason

Vennar, Richard

Vickers, Brian

Virgil

Walter, Harriet

Warburton, William

Watson, Thomas

Webster, John

Welles, Orson

Wells, Stanley

Wesker, Arnold

Whelan, Peter

Whetstone, George

Wilkins, George

Wilson, Richard

Wilson Knight, G.

Zeffirelli, Franco