Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard

by Ben Crystal

  Context is everything, because no one knows who Shakespeare (the man) really was. Some of the very few absolute facts about the man himself that we know for definite are that

  There was once a man called William Shakespeare.

  He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon.

  He married Anne Hathaway, a girl at least seven years older than him, from his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon; they had three children together.

  He is buried in Stratford-upon-Avon.

  A number of really quite wonderful plays have been written under this name.

  Add to that a few details of property we know he owned, of legal issues he was involved in, and half a dozen signatures. And that’s all we’ve got. But no manuscripts – with the exception of a small part of a play, Sir Thomas More, thought to be written by Shakespeare – no notes, or diaries. Nothing of consequence, in fact, that gives any indication as to what kind of man he was. Except his writing.

  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as far as we’re concerned. It doesn’t matter who Shakespeare might have been, because who he was isn’t as important to us as when he was and what he did. But because so little about the man has been discovered, his life has become a bit of an enigma. And this seems to make people doubt that he wrote the plays.

  This is not a rare thing. Almost nothing is known about the legendary blues guitarist and singer Robert Johnson (1911–38). Many consider him to be the king of the Delta blues singers, yet there are only two photos of him in existence, almost nothing is known about his early life, there are varying stories surrounding his death (the most popular being that his whisky was poisoned by a jealous juke joint owner, who’d caught Johnson flirting with his wife), and there are three different ideas about where he’s buried. All we really have to go on are the 29 songs and a handful of alternative takes that he recorded. But he was so good, a legend has developed around him that he wasn’t able to play the guitar until he went to a crossroads at midnight and the devil tuned his guitar for him. Not happy with the idea that he could naturally be that talented, people developed a magical reason for his talent. Just like Shakespeare.

  Because the plays are held in such high regard, it’s natural that we want to reveal the man behind them. So a lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to divine the man from his work, to find out who he was and what made him tick, in order to shed more light on the plays.

  A number of authorities on Shakespeare alive today think Shakespeare’s plays were written by ‘someone else’. There’s a comfort to be had from the idea that the mind behind greatness is regal, or rich – or better, a group of people. The contenders for authorship include Queen Elizabeth I, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford, and Sir Francis Bacon. A couple of these contenders were, categorically, dead while Shakespeare was still writing, but I’m really not going to get into all that.

  But I’d say there’s a greater deal of comfort to be had from the idea that normal people can be geniuses. Can a desk clerk called Albert possibly be the father of the theory of relativity? Or a non-university-educated son of a glover be the world’s greatest playwright? Surely not. That would make these people human, take the sheen off the lustre of their greatness, and stop them from being accessible only to the great and the good.

  Not surprisingly then, considering this great point of discussion among Bard-lovers, one of the most frequent questions I get asked when people discover I’m into Shakespeare is: Who do you think really wrote the plays? My answer is always the same:

  I don’t care who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

  There are 39 plays and 154 sonnets ascribed to someone called Shakespeare. I’d be the first to admit that some of the writing isn’t so hot, but most of it is absolutely jaw-droppingly, ground breakingly breathtaking, I mean really, really quite brilliant, and the plays are what bake my cake, not so much the man and his life.

  With 39 known plays and a collection of sonnets, Shakespeare may not be the most prolific Elizabethan writer (Thomas Heywood, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, claimed to have a hand in over 200 works), but his plays were loved then, and 400 years on, whoever he was, he is now generally considered to be the greatest writer of the English language.

  Beyond that, most of everything else ‘known’ about him is speculation, so I’m not going to discuss whether his birth and death dates are actually the same, where he might have gone during his ‘lost’ years, where he lived in London, whether or not he ate toast, and whether or not he was Catholic or Protestant, gay or straight. No one knows any of these things about him for sure, and we probably never will, but there are plenty of fascinating books out there that try to guess.

  If some part of Shakespeare’s life is relevant, I’ll mention it, but I say again, a good solid part of Shakespeare’s life is a mystery to us. With the smattering of signatures and legal papers that we have, we actually know more about him than we do about many of his contemporaries, but that still isn’t very much to go on. Perhaps 90 per cent of his life is shrouded in mystery.

  See, I just used the word ‘perhaps’. So much of this man is guesswork.

  So instead, I’m going to concentrate on what Elizabethan life was like, what it would have been like going to the theatre in Shakespeare’s time, how different an experience it would have been compared to our time, why Shakespeare wrote in poetry, and exactly why all of that is so very important in getting into his plays.

  Scene 5

  An Elizabethan theatre

  While we may not know much about the man, we know quite a lot about the time he wrote in, and the plays themselves:

  Incredibly, virtually every word he wrote was penned over the course of twenty years, from about 1590 to 1610, during which time there were some huge changes in Elizabethan society.

  Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne until 1603, then King James VI of Scotland succeeded her, but the period is still usually referred to as Elizabethan.

  Going to the theatre in Shakespeare’s time was a very different experience from going to the theatre nowadays; it was probably more like a modern football match. We know from diaries of visitors to London that the theatres were rowdy, drunken places, so …

  … there was no ‘theatre etiquette’ that made the audience sit or stand still quietly. That air of formality seems to have developed only in the last couple of hundred years.

  In Elizabethan times, rarely would a play be repeated – rarely would you have the luxury of being able to see it twice – as there was usually a new play on every day. That never happens now …

  … but even if a play was repeated, if you’d seen it once you wouldn’t be likely to pay to see it again (see the box).

  Consequently, the demand for new plays was, as you might imagine, huge. Everyone would be writing them, much like it seems everyone in Hollywood has written a screenplay. Thirty-nine of Shakespeare’s plays have survived the last four centuries – more might well have been lost to time – but that still means he must have been writing at least a couple of new plays every year. (Compare that to modern playwrights, who might write and get a new play produced perhaps every two years or so.)

  The plague (or the Black Death, to give its more fun title) hit London many times during Shakespeare’s life. When it hit, the playhouses and theatres were closed – the disease was so contagious and the audiences were packed in so tightly that the theatres would have been a real breeding ground for the plague to spread – and the demand for new plays disappeared overnight.

  * * *

  How much did it cost to go to the theatre in Elizabethan times?

  A typical wage in 1594 was 8 old pence a day; in Shakespeare’s Globe you had the choice of several places to watch and hear a play.

  For a penny, you could stand in the yard around the stage, as a ‘groundling’.

  For twopence, you could sit on a wooden seat in a covered gallery set out in a semi-circle around the yard. There were three tiers of galleries.

  For anot
her penny, you could hire a cushion to make the seats a little more comfortable (despite the fleas).

  For sixpence, you could sit in the Lords’ Gallery – seats placed at either side of the balcony at the back of the stage, which meant you were facing the audience, and looking down on the play from behind. Like the boxes of modern theatres, it was more for people who wanted to be seen rather than see.

  Sunlit, rowdy, drunken, elaborately built places for the most part, the playhouses would have been a popular destination – a circular, hemmed-in, almost secret world away from the rest of the city – but more on this in Act 2 …

  * * *

  With the theatres closed, the theatre companies and the playwrights were out of work, and needing money (imagine the hordes of TV writers looking for work if TV was banned for two years …).

  Theatre companies could make money by selling a printer manuscripts of the plays they’d performed, but printing was still a relatively new thing. William Caxton had brought the printing press to England only a hundred years beforehand, and the process was still fairly complicated. A page of text would be set using letter blocks, and it wasn’t unknown for the printer to run out of blocks or space, so spellings would vary depending on how many e’s he had to hand, as well as how much space was left on the page. Once set, the page would be pressed, then the blocks would be broken up and used to make another page. It would have been a loooong process.

  Copyright law was a little different back then, and it worked like this: once a playwright had finished writing, he’d sell his play (and its copyright) to the theatre company for performance. The theatre company could then make money by selling the play to the printer, but the playwright wouldn’t see a single penny of that sale. Likewise, any money the printer made from sales of copies of that play would never be seen by the theatre company or the playwright.

  In times of plague, with the theatres shut, selling plays to a printer was often a theatre company’s only way of making money. Playwrights, however, were left with the option of either trying to print unused manuscripts of their own, or writing poetry. Or, unthinkable though it might be, getting a proper job.

  * * *

  Change of hands

  * * *

  Selling unused manuscripts would have been hard – selling copies of plays that had been performed was hard enough – as there just wasn’t the demand. Paper was expensive, 80 per cent of Elizabethans couldn’t read, and, after all, plays were written to be performed, not read.

  The lack of demand, the loss of the copyright, and the fact that more fame and money would come from performance, meant that even during plague epidemics, writers in Elizabethan times weren’t interested in having their plays printed – if there isn’t any money in it, what’s the point?

  Shakespeare seems to have been no different. During the plague years of 1593–94, when work and money would have been scarce to non-existent, a couple of his plays were published in quarto (see box), but it appears that he spent most of his time concentrating on writing, rather than publishing.

  In 1599, he became a shareholder of the newly built Globe Theatre, and so would have received 10 per cent of any profits the theatre made, including any monies from printing plays. There would have been bills to pay from the building of the new Globe too, but still no major printing of his works took place while he was alive.

  Despite the fact that eighteen of his plays were published in quarto (mostly unofficially) during his lifetime, there’s no record of Shakespeare being involved in their printing; indeed, many are thought to have been undertaken by rival companies, copying the plays down while watching them, and printing the results. They’re often referred to as ‘bad quartos’, and they certainly vary greatly in quality. (Ben Jonson was the first playwright who took an interest in printing his own plays, and supervised the publication of his Works in 1616.)

  For most of us, 400 years on, our first meeting with Shakespeare is in a book and on a page, which is ironic, as all evidence points towards the fact that this would be far from the way Elizabethan audiences would have received them – and more to the point, given that he didn’t seem to want them printed, far from the way Shakespeare would have intended them to be received.

  I like the idea that Shakespeare wasn’t interested in having his plays printed. It makes sense. Nowadays we get caught up reading the plays and not watching them so much, something Shakespeare seems to have practically barred his audience from doing. Don’t read my plays, come and see them!

  The result of this printing reticence, though, is that we nearly lost them all to history. Original single publications of Shakespeare’s plays are incredibly scarce, and no one yet has discovered a treasure chest of original manuscripts that Shakespeare locked away for safe-keeping.

  Half of Shakespeare’s plays, like many of those of his contemporaries, might have disappeared entirely were it not for two of his actors who took it upon themselves to bring all his works together and print them. Seven years after Shakespeare died, they published a book called the First Folio – which became one of the most important books printed in theatre, literary, and linguistic history.

  * * *

  Folio or quarto?

  A play would be printed on paper, which at the time was very expensive to make. To save money, a piece of paper would be either

  folded into quarters – these editions were known as quartos and were much cheaper to produce, and therefore to buy, as you’d get eight pages from one piece;

  or folded in half – these editions were known as folios and were more expensive, as you’d have only four sides to print on.

  Plays weren’t usually printed in folio, so for Shakespeare to have his plays collected in this way meant that people (a) felt his plays was really rather good, and (b) were willing to fork out a fairly hefty sum for a copy, which may not have been the case when he was alive, but certainly seemed to be the case seven years after his death …

  * * *

  If this little book hadn’t been published in 1623, we would have lost eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays – including The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors, Macbeth and Twelfth Night – and, as the other eighteen were only scattered about in quarto, we might have lost them too (this count excludes the three plays that have been acknowledged in recent times as being written, at least in part, by Shakespeare: Cymbeline, Edward III, and The Two Noble Kinsmen).

  Of the thousands of plays written over those times, only 230 are still in existence: 39 of them – 17 per cent – are Shakespeare’s.

  Henry Condell and John Hemmings had acted and worked with Shakespeare during much of his writing career, and they got together after Shakespeare died to set the record straight. Too many versions of his plays had been printed full of mistakes by rival theatre companies trying to steal Shakespeare’s plays. There were quarto editions without Shakespeare’s name on them, editions of Hamlet missing chunks of the text … The new folio edition would address all that.

  * * *

  The (bad) First Quarto of Hamlet …

  This was written in 1603, probably from memory, and we should be thankful that Shakespeare’s most famous speech didn’t survive only in this incarnation:

  To be, or not to be, I [ay] there’s the point,

  To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:

  No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary [marry] there it goes,

  For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,

  And borne before an euerlasting iudge,

  From whence no passenger euer retur’nd,

  The vndiscovered country, at whose sight

  The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d …

  As opposed to the version known and loved by all:

  To be, or not to be – that is the question;

  Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

  And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep –

&
nbsp; No more, and by a sleep to say we end

  The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

  That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation

  Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep –

  To sleep – perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub …

  There are three known editions of Hamlet – the First Quarto of 1603, the Second Quarto of 1604, and the Folio version. Other editions were published, but these are considered to be amalgamations of the first three. The First Quarto wasn’t discovered until 1823, and while being shorter than the other two, it does include an entire scene and many interesting stage directions that the others don’t have. When the editors of the First Folio came to Hamlet, it looks as if they used a combination of manuscript and Second Quarto. With so many versions, each so different from the other, determining the ‘authentic’ text of Hamlet, as Shakespeare intended, has proved somewhat difficult.

  * * *

  So now, thank goodness, we have the plays. We’re able to watch and read them over and over and over. Not only can we read or see them performed as much as we like, we have the luxury of being able to come to them with over 200 years of study behind us.

  I say 200 years rather than 400, because after the Puritan movement took Shakespeare and many other writers out of the common eye, he didn’t really became popular again until the late 18th century, largely thanks to the actor David Garrick and his Stratford-upon-Avon festival – but more on this in Act 5. Still, 200 years of study is an awful lot, and by standing on the shoulders of giants, the depth of analysis we can now put Shakespeare’s plays under is limitless.

  But because we hold Shakespeare in such regard – as high art and important Literature – and scrutinise his plays so intensely, we forget that reading them is simply not the way they would have originally been received.