Shakespeare

by Bill Bryson

  What Shakespeare did, of course, was take pedestrian pieces of work and endow them with distinction and, very often, greatness. Before he reworked it Othello was insipid melodrama. In Lear’s earlier manifestation, the king was not mad and the story had a happy ending. Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing were inconsequential tales in a collection of popular Italian fiction. Shakespeare’s particular genius was to take an engaging notion and make it better yet. In The Comedy of Errors, he borrows a simple but effective plot device from Plautus—having twin brothers who have never met appear in the same town at the same time—but increases the comic potential exponentially by giving the brothers twin servants who are similarly underinformed.

  Slightly more jarring to modern sensibilities was Shakespeare’s habit of lifting passages of text almost verbatim from other sources and dropping them into his plays. Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra both contain considerable passages taken with only scant alteration from Sir Thomas North’s magisterial translation of Plutarch, and The Tempest pays a similar uncredited tribute to a popular translation of Ovid. Marlowe’s “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?” from Hero and Leander reappears unchanged in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and a couplet from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine—

  Hola, ye pampered jades of Asia

  What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?

  —finds its way into Henry IV, Part 2 as

  And hollow pampered jades of Asia

  Which cannot go but thirty miles a day.

  Shakespeare at his worst borrowed “almost mechanically,” in the words of Stanley Wells, who cites a passage in Henry V in which the youthful king (and, more important, the audience) is given a refresher course in French history that is taken more or less verbatim from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles. Coriolanus, in the First Folio, contains two lines that make no sense until one goes back to Sir Thomas North’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans and finds the same lines and the line immediately preceding, which Shakespeare (or more probably a subsequent scribe or compositor) inadvertently left out. Again, however, such borrowing had ample precedent. Marlowe in his turn took several lines from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and dropped them almost unchanged into Tamburlaine. The Faerie Queene, meanwhile, contains passages lifted whole (albeit in translation) from a work by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto.

  In the rush to entertain masses of people repeatedly, the rules of presentation became exceedingly elastic. In classical drama plays were strictly either comedies or tragedies. Elizabethan playwrights refused to be bound by such rigidities and put comic scenes in the darkest tragedies—the porter answering a late knock in Macbeth, for instance. In so doing they invented comic relief. In classical drama only three performers were permitted to speak in a given scene, and no character was allowed to talk to himself or the audience—so there were no soliloquies and no asides. These are features without which Shakespeare could never have become Shakespeare. Above all, plays before Shakespeare’s day were traditionally governed by what were known as “the unities”—the three principles of dramatic presentation derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, which demanded that dramas should take place in one day, in one place, and have a single plot. Shakespeare was happy enough to observe this restriction when it suited him (as in The Comedy of Errors), but he could never have written Hamlet or Macbeth or any of his other greatest works if he had felt strictly bound by it.

  Other theatrical conventions were unformed or just emerging. The division of plays into acts and scenes—something else strictly regulated in classical drama—was yet unsettled in England. Ben Jonson inserted a new scene and scene number each time an additional character stepped onstage, however briefly or inconsequentially, but others did not use scene divisions at all. For the audience it mattered little, since action was continuous. The practice of pausing between acts didn’t begin until plays moved indoors, late in Shakespeare’s career, and it became necessary to break from time to time to trim the lights.

  Almost the only “rule” in London theater that was still faithfully followed was the one we now call, for convenience, the law of reentry, which stated that a character couldn’t exit from one scene and reappear immediately in the next. He had rather to go away for a while. Thus, in Richard II, John of Gaunt makes an abrupt and awkward departure purely to be able to take part in a vital scene that follows. Why this rule out of all the many was faithfully observed has never, as far as I can make out, been satisfactorily explained.

  But even by the very relaxed standards of the day, Shakespeare was invigoratingly wayward. He could, as in Julius Caesar, kill off the title character with the play not half done (though Caesar does come back later, briefly, as a ghost). He could write a play like Hamlet, where the main character speaks 1,495 lines (nearly as many as the number spoken by all the characters combined in The Comedy of Errors) but disappears for unnervingly long stretches—for nearly half an hour at one point. He constantly teased reality, reminding the audience that they were not in the real world but in a theater, as when he asked in Henry V, “Can this cockpit hold the vastie fields of France?” or implored the audience in Henry VI, Part 3 to “eke out our performance with your mind.”

  His plays were marvelously variable, with the number of scenes ranging from seven to forty-seven, and with the number of speaking parts ranging from fourteen to more than fifty. The average play of the day ran to about 2,700 lines, giving a performance time of two and a half hours. Shakespeare’s plays ranged from fewer than 1,800 lines (for Comedy of Errors) to more than 4,000 (for Hamlet, which could take nearly five hours to play, though possibly no audience of his day ever saw it in full). On average his plays were made up of about 70 percent blank verse, 5 percent rhymed verse, and 25 percent prose, but he changed the proportions happily to suit his purpose. His history plays aside, he set two plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor and King Lear, firmly in England; he set none at all in London; and he never used a plot from his own times.

  Shakespeare was not a particularly prolific writer. Thomas Heywood wrote or cowrote more than two hundred plays, five times the number Shakespeare produced in a career of similar length. Even so, signs of haste abound in Shakespeare’s work, even in the greatest of his plays. Hamlet is a student at the beginning of the play and thirty years old by its end, even though nothing like enough time has passed in the story. The Duke in The Two Gentlemen of Verona puts himself in Verona when in fact he can only mean Milan. Measure for Measure is set in Vienna, and yet the characters nearly all have Italian names.

  Shakespeare may be the English language’s presiding genius, but that isn’t to say he was without flaws. A certain messy exuberance marked much of what he did. Sometimes it is just not possible to know quite what he meant. Jonathan Bate, writing in The Genius of Shakespeare, notes that a glancing six-word compliment to the queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“fair vestal enthroned by the west”) is so productive of possible interpretation that it spawned twenty pages of discussion in a variorum edition* of Shakespeare’s works. Nearly every play has at least one or two lines that defeat interpretation, like these from Love’s Labour’s Lost:

  O paradox! black is the badge of hell,

  The hue of dungeons and the school of night.

  What exactly he meant by “the school of night” is really anyone’s guess. Similarly uncertain is a reference early in The Merchant of Venice to “my wealthy Andrew docked in sand,” which could refer to a ship but possibly to a person. The most ambiguous example of all, however, is surely the line in King Lear that appeared originally (in the Quarto edition of 1608) as “swithald footed thrice the old, a nellthu night more and her nine fold.” Though the sentence has appeared in many versions in the four centuries since, no one has ever got it close to making convincing sense.

  “Shakespeare was capable of prolixity, unnecessary obscurity, awkwardness of expression, pedestrian versifying and verbal inelegance,” writes Stanley Wells. “Even in his greatest plays we sometimes sense him str
uggling with plot at the expense of language, or allowing his pen to run away with him in speeches of greater length than the situation warrants.” Or as Charles Lamb put it much earlier, Shakespeare “runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched out and clamorous for disclosure.”

  Shakespeare was celebrated among his contemporaries for the speed with which he wrote and the cleanness of his copy, or so his colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell would have us believe. “His mind and hand went together,” they wrote in the introduction to the First Folio, “and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” To which Ben Jonson famously replied in exasperation: “Would he had blotted a thousand!”

  In fact he may have. The one place where we might just see Shakespeare at work is in the manuscript version of a play of the life of Sir Thomas More. The play was much worked on, and is in six hands (one of the authors was Henry Chettle, the man who apologized abjectly to Shakespeare for his part in the publishing of Greene’s Groat’s-Worth). It was never performed. Since its subject was a loyal, passionate Catholic who defied a Tudor monarch, it is perhaps a little surprising that it occurred as a suitable subject to anyone at all.

  Some authorities believe that Shakespeare wrote three of the surviving pages. If so, they give an interesting insight, since they employ almost no punctuation and are remarkably—breathtakingly—liberal in their spelling. The word sheriff, as Stanley Wells notes, is spelled five ways in five lines—as shreiff, shreef, shreeve, Shreiue, and Shreue—which must be something of a record even by the relaxed and imaginative standards of Elizabethan orthography. The text also has lines crossed out and interlineations added, showing that Shakespeare did indeed blot—if indeed it was he. The evidence for Shakespeare is based on similarities in the letter a in Shakespeare’s signature and the More manuscript, the high number of y spellings (writing tyger rather than tiger, for instance, a practice thought to be old-fashioned and provincial), and the fact that a very odd spelling, scilens (for silence), appears in the manuscript for Thomas More and in the quarto version of Henry IV, Part 2. This assumes, of course, that the printer used Shakespeare’s manuscript and faithfully observed its spellings, neither of which is by any means certain or even compellingly probable. Beyond that, there is really nothing to go on but a gut feeling—a sense that the passage is recognizably the voice of Shakespeare.

  It is certainly worth noting that the idea that Shakespeare might have had a hand in the play dates only from 1871. It is also worth noting that Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, the man who declared the passages to be by Shakespeare, was a retired administrator at the British Museum, not an active paleographer, and was in any case not formally trained in that inexact science. At all events nothing from Shakespeare’s own age links him to the enterprise.

  Much is often made of Shakespeare’s learning—that he knew as much as any lawyer, doctor, statesman, or other accomplished professional of his age. It has even been suggested—seriously, it would appear—that two lines in Hamlet (“Doubt that the stars are fire / Doubt that the sun doth move”) indicate that he deduced the orbital motions of heavenly bodies well before any astronomer did. With enough exuberance and selective interpretation it is possible to make Shakespeare seem a veritable committee of talents. In fact a more sober assessment shows that he was pretty human.

  He had some command of French, it would seem, and evidently quite a lot of Italian (or someone who could help him with quite a lot of Italian), for Othello and The Merchant of Venice closely followed Italian works that did not exist in English translation at the time he wrote. His vocabulary showed a more than usual interest in medicine, law, military affairs, and natural history (he mentions 180 plants and employs 200 legal terms, both large numbers), but in other respects Shakespeare’s knowledge was not all that distinguished. He was routinely guilty of anatopisms—that is, getting one’s geography wrong—particularly with regard to Italy, where so many of his plays were set. So in The Taming of the Shrew, he puts a sailmaker in Bergamo, approximately the most landlocked city in the whole of Italy, and in The Tempest and The Two Gentlemen of Verona he has Prospero and Valentine set sail from, respectively, Milan and Verona even though both cities were a good two days’ travel from salt water. If he knew Venice had canals, he gave no hint of it in either of the plays he set there. Whatever his other virtues, Shakespeare was not conspicuously worldly.

  Anachronisms likewise abound in his plays. He has ancient Egyptians playing billiards and introduces the clock to Caesar’s Rome 1,400 years before the first mechanical tick was heard there. Whether by design or from ignorance, he could be breathtakingly casual with facts when it suited his purposes to be so. In Henry VI, Part 1, for example, he dispatches Lord Talbot twenty-two years early, conveniently allowing him to predecease Joan of Arc. In Coriolanus he has Lartius refer to Cato three hundred years before Cato was born.

  Shakespeare’s genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering—things that aren’t taught in school. He had a kind of assimilative intelligence, which allowed him to pull together lots of disparate fragments of knowledge, but there is almost nothing that speaks of hard intellectual application in his plays—unlike, say, those of Ben Jonson, where learning hangs like bunting on every word. Nothing we find in Shakespeare betrays any acquaintance with Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, or others who influenced Jonson and were second nature to Francis Bacon. That is a good thing—a very good thing indeed—for he would almost certainly have been less Shakespeare and more a showoff had he been better read. As John Dryden put it in 1668: “Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn’d.”

  Much has been written about the size of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. It is actually impossible to say how many words Shakespeare knew, and in any case attempting to do so would be a fairly meaningless undertaking. Marvin Spevack in his magnificent and hefty concordance—the most scrupulous, not to say obsessive, assessment of Shakespearean idiom ever undertaken—counts 29,066 different words in Shakespeare, but that rather generously includes inflected forms and contractions. If instead you treat all the variant forms of a word—for example, take, takes, taketh, taking, tak’n, taken, tak’st, tak’t, took, tooke, took’st, and tookst—as a single word (or “lexeme,” to use the scholarly term), which is the normal practice, his vocabulary falls back to about 20,000 words, not a terribly impressive number. The average person today, it is thought, knows probably 50,000 words. That isn’t because people today are more articulate or imaginatively expressive but simply because we have at our disposal thousands of common words—television, sandwich, seatbelt, chardonnay, cinematographer—that Shakespeare couldn’t know because they didn’t yet exist.

  Anyway, and obviously, it wasn’t so much a matter of how many words he used, but what he did with them—and no one has ever done more. It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work—every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career—is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language. A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few would argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behavior. What it does do is take, and give, a positive satisfaction in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression.

  And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways that had not been tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not grammatically have existed before—such as “b
reathing one’s last” and “backing a horse,” both coined by Shakespeare—were suddenly popping up everywhere. Double negatives and double superlatives—“the most unkindest cut of all”—troubled no one and allowed an additional degree of emphasis that has since been lost.

  Spelling was luxuriantly variable, too. You could write “St Paul’s” or “St Powles” and no one seemed to notice or care. Gracechurch Street was sometimes “Gracious Steet,” sometimes “Grass Street”; Stratford-upon-Avon became at times “Stratford upon Haven.” People could be extraordinarily casual even with their own names. Christopher Marlowe signed himself “Cristofer Marley” in his one surviving autograph and was registered at Cambridge as “Christopher Marlen.” Elsewhere he is recorded as “Morley” and “Merlin,” among others. In like manner the impresario Philip Henslowe indifferently wrote “Henslowe” or “Hensley” when signing his name, and others made it Hinshley, Hinchlow, Hensclow, Hynchlowes, Inclow, Hinchloe, and a half dozen more. More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been recorded, from “Shappere” to “Shaxberd.” (It is perhaps worth noting that the spelling we all use is not the one endorsed by the Oxford English Dictionary, which prefers “Shakspere.”) Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled “words” two ways on the title page.

  Pronunciations, too, were often very different from today’s. We know from Shakespeare that knees, grease, grass, and grace all rhymed (at least more or less), and that he could pun reason with raisin and Rome with room. The first hundred or so lines of Venus and Adonis offer such striking rhyme pairs as satiety and variety, fast and haste, bone and gone, entreats and frets, swears and tears, heat and get. Elsewhere plague is rhymed with wage, grapes with mishaps, Calais with challice. (The name of the French town was often spelled “Callis” or “Callice.”)