Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

  CHAPTER 11

  Bewitching the King

  HAMLET MARKED AN epoch for Shakespeare as a writer as well as an actor. With this play, he made a discovery by means of which he relaunched his entire career. Already, prior to 1600, he had amassed considerable experience as a writer of tragedy. In Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and Julius Caesar, he had explored the lust for revenge, the pathological ambition and fatal irresponsibility of monarchs, the murderous enmity of households, and the fatal consequences of political assassination. The crucial breakthrough in Hamlet did not involve developing new themes or learning how to construct a shapelier, tighter plot; it had to do rather with an intense representation of inwardness called forth by a new technique of radical excision. He had rethought how to put a tragedy together—specifically, he had rethought the amount of causal explanation a tragic plot needed to function effectively and the amount of explicit psychological rationale a character needed to be compelling. Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays, that he could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity. This opacity, Shakespeare found, released an enormous energy that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations.

  Shakespeare’s work had long been wryly skeptical of official explanations and excuses—the accounts, whether psychological or theological, of why people behave the way they do. His plays had suggested that the choices people make in love are almost entirely inexplicable and irrational, which is the conviction that generates the comedy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the tragedy in Romeo and Juliet. But at least love was the clearly identifiable motive. With Hamlet, Shakespeare found that if he refused to provide himself or his audience with a familiar, comforting rationale that seems to make it all make sense, he could get to something immeasurably deeper. The key is not simply the creation of opacity, for by itself that would only create a baffling or incoherent play. Rather, Shakespeare came increasingly to rely on the inward logic, the poetic coherence that his genius and his immensely hard work had long enabled him to confer on his plays. Tearing away the structure of superficial meanings, he fashioned an inner structure through the resonant echoing of key terms, the subtle development of images, the brilliant orchestration of scenes, the complex unfolding of ideas, the intertwining of parallel plots, the uncovering of psychological obsessions.

  This conceptual breakthrough in Hamlet was technical; that is, it affected the practical choices Shakespeare made when he put plays together, starting with the enigma of the prince’s suicidal melancholy and assumed madness. But it was not only a new aesthetic strategy. The excision of motive must have arisen from something more than technical experimentation; coming in the wake of Hamnet’s death, it expressed Shakespeare’s root perception of existence, his understanding of what could be said and what should remain unspoken, his preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled. The opacity was shaped by his experience of the world and of his own inner life: his skepticism, his pain, his sense of broken rituals, his refusal of easy consolations.

  In the years after Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote a succession of astonishing tragedies—Othello in 1603 or 1604, King Lear in 1604 or 1605, and Macbeth in 1606—that drew upon his discovery. Repeatedly, he took his source and deftly sliced away what would seem indispensable to a coherent, well-made play. Thus though Othello is constructed around the remorseless desire of the ensign Iago to destroy his general, the Moor, Shakespeare refused to provide the villain with a clear and convincing explanation for his behavior. That explanation would not have been difficult to find: it was already there, fully articulated, in Shakespeare’s source for his play, a short story by the Italian university teacher and writer Giambattista Giraldi (known to contemporaries as “Cinthio.”) “The wicked Ensign,” Cinthio writes of Iago, “taking no account of the faith he had pledged to his wife, and of the friendship, loyalty, and obligations he owed the Moor, fell ardently in love with Desdemona, and bent all his thoughts to see if he could manage to enjoy her.” Afraid to show his love openly, the ensign does everything he can to hint to the lady that he desires her, but Desdemona’s thoughts are entirely focused upon her husband. She does not merely reject the ensign’s advances; she does not even notice them. Incapable of conceiving such purity of love, Cinthio’s ensign concludes that Desdemona must be in love with someone else. The likeliest candidate, he concludes, is the Moor’s handsome corporal, and he plots to get rid of him. But that is not all, Cinthio explains: “Not only did he turn his mind to this, but the love which he had felt for the Lady now changed to the bitterest hate, and he gave himself up to studying how to bring it about that, once the Corporal were killed, if he himself could not enjoy the Lady, then the Moor should not have her either.” Everything neatly follows.

  But not in Shakespeare’s play. His villain does not dream of possessing Desdemona, nor is she the particular object of his hatred. To be sure, there is a moment in which he seems about to rehearse the motive that Cinthio had provided:

  That Cassio loves her, I do well believe it,

  That she loves him, ’tis apt and of great credit.

  The Moor—howbe’t that I endure him not—

  Is of a constant, loving, noble nature,

  And I dare think he’ll prove to Desdemona

  A most dear husband. Now I do love her too.

  (2.1.273–78)

  Since Shakespeare’s Iago thinks only that his slander will be a plausible one—“’tis apt and of great credit”—this is not quite Cinthio’s Iago, who genuinely believes that Desdemona must be in love with the handsome corporal. But the two versions of the villain seem to converge in those last words: “Now I do love her too.” Yet it is precisely here that Shakespeare can be caught in the act of creating his special effect:

  Now I do love her too,

  Not out of absolute lust—though peradventure

  I stand accountant for as great a sin—

  But partly led to diet my revenge

  For that I do suspect the lusty Moor

  Hath leapt into my seat, the thought whereof

  Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards.

  (2.1.278–84)

  What in Cinthio was simple and clear, in Shakespeare becomes opaque: “Not out of absolute lust.” A further motivation—Iago’s fear that he has been cuckolded by Othello—displaces the first, but neither is convincing, and the addition of further layers only weakens the explanatory force of all of them, leaving intact the terrible inner torment. Iago’s murky attempt to account for his obsessive, unappeasable hatred—in Coleridge’s memorable phrase, “the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity”—is famously inadequate. And, crucially, this inadequacy becomes an issue in the tragedy itself. Near the play’s end, when Othello has finally understood that he has been tricked into believing that his wife was unfaithful, that he has murdered the innocent woman who loved him, and that his reputation and whole life have been destroyed, he turns to Iago and demands an explanation. Exposed as a moral monster, caught, and pinioned, Iago’s terrible reply—his last utterance in the play—is a blank refusal to supply the missing motive:

  Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.

  From this time forth I never will speak word.

  (5.2.309–10)

  The words are specific to Othello and to the fathomless cruelty of its villain, but the opacity extends to crucial elements in each of Shakespeare’s great tragedies.

  Perhaps the greatest instance of strategic opacity comes in the play Shakespeare wrote shortly after Othello, King Lear. Lear’s story—his misguided anger at the one daughter who truly loves him; his betrayal b
y the two wicked daughters upon whom he has bestowed all of his wealth and power—had often been told before. Shakespeare could have heard it recounted from the pulpit or seen it mentioned briefly in Spenser’s Faerie Queene or read a fuller account in the chronicles to which he was addicted. He had almost certainly seen a version of it performed onstage. He could have been struck by its resemblance to one or more of the old folktales he clearly loved as a child: to “Cinderella,” perhaps, with its one sweet daughter set against her wicked sisters, and, still more, to the story of the virtuous daughter who falls into disfavor for telling her splenetic father she loves him as much as salt. But the fate of Lear was principally rehearsed in Shakespeare’s time both as a piece of authentic British history from the very ancient past (c. 800 B.C.E.) and as a warning to contemporary fathers not to put too much trust in the flattery of their children. Lear foolishly sets a love test: “Which of you,” he asks his three daughters, “shall we say doth love us most?” (1.1.49). In some versions of the story, including Shakespeare’s, this test occurs at the moment when the father feels he can no longer manage his affairs and decides to retire.

  But why does Lear, who has, as the play begins, already drawn up the map equitably dividing the kingdom among his three daughters, stage the love test at all? In Shakespeare’s principal source, an old Queen’s Men play called The True Chronicle History of King Leir (eventually published in 1605 but dating from 1594 or earlier), there is a gratifyingly clear answer. Leir’s strong-willed daughter Cordella has vowed that she will only marry a man whom she herself loves; Leir wishes her to marry the man he chooses for his own dynastic purposes. He stages the love test, anticipating that in competing with her sisters, Cordella will declare that she loves her father best, at which point Leir will demand that she prove her love by marrying the suitor of his choice. The stratagem backfires, but its purpose is clear.

  Once again, as he did in Hamlet and Othello, Shakespeare simply cut out the motive that makes the initiating action of the story make sense. Lear says he wants an answer to his question so that he can divide the kingdom according to the level of each daughter’s love, but the play opens with characters discussing the map of the division—it has already been drawn up—and noting that the portions are exactly equal. And Lear makes matters still stranger by proceeding to test Cordelia, as if there were something still at stake, after he has already given away, with a great show of precision, the first two-thirds of his realm.

  By stripping his character of a coherent rationale for the behavior that sets in motion the whole ghastly train of events, Shakespeare makes Lear’s act seem at once more arbitrary and more rooted in deep psychological needs. His Lear is a man who has determined to retire from power but who cannot endure dependence. Unwilling to lose his identity as absolute authority both in the state and in the family, he arranges a public ritual—“Which of you shall we say doth love us most?”—whose aim seems to be to allay his own anxiety by arousing it in his children. But Cordelia refuses to perform: “What shall Cordelia speak? Love and be silent” (1.1.60). Lear demands an answer: “Speak.” When she says “Nothing” (1.1.85–86), a word that echoes darkly throughout the play, Lear hears what he most dreads: emptiness, loss of respect, the extinction of identity.

  At the end of the play, extinction comes to Lear in a more terrible form than he had imagined. The old Queen’s Men play and all the other versions of the story concluded with Lear’s reconciliation with Cordelia and with his restoration to the throne. Shakespeare’s original audience must have expected some version of this upbeat ending, though perhaps they anticipated that the play’s final moments would show the death of the aged Lear and the ascent to the throne of his virtuous daughter. What they would not have foreseen was that Shakespeare would cut out the triumph of Cordelia—the vindication that made moral sense of the whole narrative—and instead depict the ruined king holding his murdered daughter in his arms and howling with grief. “Is this the promised end?” asks one of the bystanders, voicing what must have been the audience’s incredulity. In this unprecedented climax, the theatrical effect we have been calling opacity seems to be made literal—“All’s cheerless, dark, and deadly”—as the dying Lear swings wildly from the delusive hope that Cordelia is still alive to the impossibly bleak recognition that she is dead:

  No, no, no life!

  Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

  And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,

  Never, never, never, never, never!

  (5.3.262, 289, 304–7)

  These words, the tragedy’s climactic imagining of what it feels like to lose a child, are the most painful that Shakespeare ever wrote.

  They were written, however, not about Hamnet but about Cordelia, and not in the immediate wake of the playwright’s loss but almost a decade later, at a time of prosperity and success. Shakespeare’s career was flourishing. Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, bringing to an end a remarkable forty-five-year reign, had not harmed him or his company. Quite the contrary: within a matter of weeks the new ruler, James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England, acted to make the Lord Chamberlain’s Men his own theater company, the King’s Men.

  The king and his family evidently found his new troupe marvelously entertaining. The troupe performed eight plays at court in the winter of 1603–4. The next season, they had eleven court performances, including The Spanish Maze (now lost), two satiric comedies by Ben Jonson (Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour), and fully seven plays by Shakespeare: Othello, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, Henry V, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Merchant of Venice. Indeed, the king enjoyed The Merchant of Venice enough to order it performed twice in three days, on February 10 and 12, 1605. The late queen had taken pleasure in the theater, but this new royal patronage represented an unprecedented level of success, both for the company and for its principal playwright.

  Shakespeare not only had a share in the profits from all the company’s court and public performances, but as part owner of the Globe, he also received a portion of the rent that all of the sharers paid (that is, he was in effect in the happy position of paying rent to himself). Imagination, entrepreneurial skill, and unremitting labor had made him a wealthy man; he had, as Juliet’s nurse says, thinking of the sound of coins in money sacks, “the chinks” (Romeo and Juliet, 1.5.114). There is no evidence—as there is, for example, with Ben Jonson or John Donne—that Shakespeare laid out his money for books (let alone for paintings, or antique coins, or small bronzes, or indeed for any other object of learning or art). What interested him was real estate in and around Stratford.

  He could easily have afforded a place for his wife and children to live in London, but they—or he—evidently preferred that they remain in the country. In late 1597, about a year after Hamnet’s death, Shakespeare settled Anne and the two girls, fourteen-year-old Susanna and twelve-year-old Judith, at New Place, the large, three-story brick and timber house he had purchased in Stratford. The house had been built late in the fifteenth century by the town’s leading citizen, and though it was demolished in the eighteenth century, surviving sketches and other records suggest that it bore witness to the playwright’s remarkable success in the world. With five gables, ten rooms heated by fireplaces, gardens and orchards on three sides, two barns and other outbuildings, New Place was a residence fit for a gentleman of means. In May 1602 and again in July 1605, Shakespeare made very substantial investments in “yardlands” and leases of tithes in the Stratford area. He was now, in addition to a successful playwright and actor, a significant local rentier and one of Stratford’s leading citizens.

  Transactions of this size would have required one or more visits home, in addition to those he customarily made—once a year, the seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey noted—to see his family. The obvious place to break the long journey by horseback was in Oxford, where Shakespeare customarily frequented, according to early gossips, a wi
nehouse called the Taverne. The Taverne was owned by a vintner named John Davenant, who lived there with his wife, Jane, and a growing family, including the son William who later became the distinguished Restoration playwright. John Davenant was said to be an intensely serious fellow—no one ever saw him smile—but he was prosperous and highly respected, so much so that he was elected mayor of Oxford. Jane Davenant was said to be “a very beautiful woman, and of a very good wit and of conversation extremely agreeable.”

  Shakespeare seems to have been close to the family. William Davenant’s older brother Robert, a parson, recalled that when he was a child Shakespeare “gave him a hundred kisses.” William claimed that he was named after Shakespeare, and among his intimate friends he hinted that Shakespeare was something more than his godfather. It seemed to him, he would say over a glass of wine, that he wrote “with the very spirit” of Shakespeare. Then as now, ambitious playwrights in their most exuberant bursts of narcissistic self-confidence may have been tempted to make this extravagant claim, but Davenant’s drinking friends believed him “contented enough to be thought” Shakespeare’s son. It is perhaps the most striking tribute to Shakespeare’s exalted reputation in the late seventeenth century that a distinguished gentleman—William was an ardent royalist who was imprisoned during the Interregnum for his adherence to the monarchy and later knighted—would boast that he was a humbly born playwright’s illegitimate child. Certainly, some contemporaries were shocked: it seemed to them a bit much for Davenant to enhance his artistic reputation by making his mother, as they put it, a whore.