A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  The other shepherds come to Mak's cottage (like the three kings in the biblical story) to give the baby a silver piece – a very sizeable sum for them. After much comic knockabout they discover what exactly the ‘newborn’ in the crib is. Sheep-stealing was a capital crime, punishable by death (hence the proverb, ‘As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb’). But it is Christmas, a time for the forgiveness of sins. That mercy, the play implies, is what Christ died for. The shepherds merely toss Mak in a blanket.

  The play then reverts to familiar religious doctrine. The Angel of the Lord appears and instructs the three good shepherds to worship the true newborn, who is lying between two animals in a Bethlehem manger.

  The Second Shepherds' Play is a highpoint of this pioneering form of street theatre. But the same energy, vivacity and ‘voice of the people’ animates all the cycles. They died out, as a vital part of town life, in the late 1500s and there is some uncertainty as to why. One reason may be that reformers never liked them. Did they evolve into something much greater than themselves, the London theatre of the seventeenth century, dominated as it would be by Shakespeare? Or did they wither away under the pressures of urbanisation, mass movements of population, the decay of the guild system, the construction of permanent theatres (‘out of the wet’) in towns, and easier access to the Bible in its printed form? The Bible found other ways of getting to the people over the following centuries. Mystery plays were no longer needed.

  Whatever the answer, there is one important conclusion to be drawn from the two-centuries-long flowering of this street theatre. Namely the fact that the way in which we respond to literature on the stage – whether that stage is a trundling procession of carts or the boards of a modern theatre – is very different from the way in which we respond to printed literature on the page.

  You can pick up a book any time and put it down when you want. It is different in a theatre: the curtain goes up at a precise moment and comes down at specifically timed intervals. The audience does not move from its seats while watching the play. People, even in the twenty-first century, tend to ‘dress up’ to go to the theatre. They generally do not, as when watching TV, eat meals or talk during the performance; if you so much as rustle sweet wrappers, or, worse still, your mobile goes off, you will get furious glances. The audience tends to break into laughter at the same moments and they applaud at the end.

  Not to labour the point, but all this reminds us that we are in a kind of church. Congregation, audience – what's the difference? Reading – ‘curled up with a book’ – is one of our most private activities but in a theatre we consume literature publicly: as a community. We experience and respond collectively. That's a great part of the pleasure of theatre. We are in company.

  Some of the mystery plays that have come down to us, like the Second Shepherds' Play, are as great, in their way, as anything in the history of British drama. But most of the mystery-play material is, for the modern playgoer, of more historical than literary interest. Nonetheless, it has huge significance. It reminds us where theatre started and what fuels its lasting appeal. Even today, although we no longer have to stand out in the street to enjoy it, drama is ‘community’ literature. Literature of the people.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Bard

  SHAKESPEARE

  Any poll to decide the greatest writer in the English language would come up with the same result. No contest. But how did Shakespeare come to be so? A simple question, but it admits of no simple answer.

  Some of the best literary-critical minds in history (not to say generations of theatre-goers) have tried, but no one has been able to explain convincingly how an early school-leaver, the son of a high-street tradesman, born and brought up in the backwater of Stratford-upon-Avon, whose principal interest in his career seems to have been gathering enough money to retire, became the greatest writer the English-speaking world has known, and, many argue, ever will know.

  We shall never be able to ‘explain’ Shakespeare and it's foolish to try. But we can certainly appreciate his achievement and – although the picture is infuriatingly incomplete – we can trace the outline of his life for any hints it might give as to what made him the greatest writer in the English language.

  William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was born some six years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The England he grew up in was still in the throes of the turmoil left by the reign of the previous monarch, Mary I, nicknamed ‘Bloody Mary’. Under her it had been dangerous to be Protestant, under Elizabeth it was dangerous to be Catholic. Shakespeare, like others in his family, cautiously walked a tightrope between the two faiths (although some people want to claim him as a lifelong secret Catholic). He kept strictly off the subject of religion in his drama. It was literally a burning topic – say the wrong thing and you could burn at the stake.

  At the centre of this burning issue was the question of who would succeed to the throne. As Shakespeare entered the dramatic profession, Elizabeth, born in 1533, was an ageing monarch. The Virgin Queen had no heir elect nor even a clearly apparent heir. A vacuum in the succession was dangerous. Every thinking person in the country asked themselves the question, ‘What comes after Queen Elizabeth?’

  The most significant political question in much of Shakespeare's drama (particularly in the history plays) is: ‘What is the best way to replace one king (or, in Cleopatra's case, queen) with another?’ Different answers are examined in different plays: secret assassination (Hamlet); public assassination (Julius Caesar); civil war (the Henry VI plays); forced abdication (Richard II); usurpation (Richard III); legitimate bloodline succession (Henry V). It was a problem Shakespeare wrestled with until his last play (as we think it is), Henry VIII. England itself would wrestle with the problem a lot longer and would undergo the horrors of a civil war while trying to find a way through.

  Shakespeare's father was a moderately prosperous glove-maker and alderman in Stratford. He was probably more inclined to Catholicism than his son. William's mother, Mary, was higher-born than her husband. She, we may assume, planted a desire to rise in the world in the mind of her clever son. Young William attended the Stratford grammar school. Ben Jonson, a fellow dramatist (and friend) famously cracked that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin, and less Greek’. But by our standards he was formidably well educated.

  He left school in his teens and for a year or two probably worked for his father. He may have been arrested for poaching. Aged eighteen he married a local woman, Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older and several months pregnant. The marriage would produce two daughters and a son, Hamnet, who died in infancy and who is commemorated in Shakespeare's most famous, and gloomy, play.

  It has been argued that the Shakespeares' marriage was unhappy – the recurrence in the plays of difficult, cold and domineering women such as Lady Macbeth is cited as evidence, as is the fact that the couple had, for the time, few children (three). But the fact is we know little of Shakespeare's private life. Even more frustratingly, we know absolutely nothing about the remainder of his formative years, between 1585 and 1592. He may have left Stratford and found employment as a country schoolteacher. Another theory about the so-called ‘lost years’ is that he was in the north of England, working as a tutor for a noble Catholic family, absorbing their dangerous creed. A third speculation is that he joined a troupe of travelling players, and picked up the dramatic skills evident in even his very earliest plays.

  He resurfaces in the early 1590s as a rising figure in the London theatre scene, writing plays and acting. He found a medium suited to his extraordinary talent. There was a thriving network of theatres on the south bank of the Thames alongside the bullbaiting arenas and taverns – outlaw territory compared with the north bank, with its inns of court, St Paul's Cathedral, Parliament, and royal residences.

  Just as importantly, there was an existing, but still immature, literary medium for Shakespeare to adapt to his own huge talent. His predecessor Christopher Marlowe (1564–93), in plays such as Dr Faustus, h
ad innovated the so-called ‘mighty line’: blank verse. What is it? Consider the following lines – probably the most famous lines in English literature. (Hamlet is thinking about killing himself, unable to bring himself to do what the ghost, his father, has told him to do – kill his stepfather.)

  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 …

  The verse is unrhymed (hence ‘blank’). It has the suppleness of everyday speech, but the dignity (‘mightiness’) of poetry – tease out, for example, the complexity of ‘taking arms against a sea of troubles’. It's also something that Shakespeare handled particularly brilliantly – a ‘soliloquy’: that is, someone totally by themselves, talking to themselves. But is Hamlet actually talking, or thinking? In his 1948 film adaptation of the play, Laurence Olivier (the greatest Shakespearian actor of his time) did it as voice-over, his lips not moving, his face locked in a fixed expression. Shakespeare perfected this way of getting inside the minds of characters on stage. All his great plays – particularly the tragedies – hinge on soliloquy: what is going on inside.

  By 1594 Shakespeare had risen to the top of the London theatrical world – as an actor, a shareholder, but most spectacularly as a playwright who was changing the whole idea of what plays could do. He would go on to live for many years in London (his family meanwhile were kept out of the way in distant Stratford), dabbling at times in commerce and adding substantially to his net worth. Over a twenty-year career he penned some thirty-seven plays (occasionally with collaborators) as well as many poems. Notable among the latter is his sonnet sequence, composed in the 1590s – probably during a summer when the open-air theatres were shut, as they often were, during outbreaks of plague.

  The sonnets offer rare insights into Shakespeare the man. Many are addressed as love poems to a young man, others to a possibly married woman (‘the Dark Lady’). It's possible Shakespeare may have been bisexual, as – it is sometimes argued – he was both Catholic and Protestant in religion. That is something else we shall never be entirely sure about.

  Shakespeare's drama moves through identifiable phases, although exact dates of composition and performance of individual plays are uncertain; as are the texts of his plays – none was printed under his supervision in his lifetime. Earliest in his artistic career are the history plays, concerned primarily with the so-called ‘Wars of the Roses’, the previous century's conflict for the English throne that was finally won by Elizabeth's Tudor forebears.

  Shakespeare, in making brilliant drama (still in his twenties), falsifies history outrageously. His magnificent Macchiavellian Richard III, for example, is nothing like the actual historical monarch. ‘Good drama, bad history’ is the motto of the Shakespeare package. He was always aware, too, of pleasing the monarch: a Scottish king comes to the throne, on Elizabeth's death, in 1603? Soon after, Shakespeare produces a fine play about Scottish kings, Macbeth, pandering, at the same time, to James I's known fascination with witchery.

  Shakespeare's mid-career comedies are, all of them, set outside England. Italy and the imaginary Illyria are typical locations. They are, among much else, noteworthy for the space they give powerful women (Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing comes to mind). On the other hand there are things, even in the sprightly early comedies, which the modern audience finds hard to swallow. Along with feisty Beatrice there is Kate, in The Taming of the Shrew, who is humiliated and brutalised into wifely subservience (forced, publicly, once ‘tamed’, to be willing to place her hand beneath her husband's foot). Quite literally, trampled on.

  It's hard, too, to be entirely comfortable with the ‘happy ending’ of The Merchant of Venice in which the Jew, Shylock, finds his daughter abducted (by a gentile lover) and his wealth forfeited, and is forced to convert – in the face of losing everything – to Christianity. It takes some very fine poetry indeed to make us happy with those resolutions as good ones.

  Shakespeare was fascinated by the Roman Republic – a state without kings or queens. That particular issue (touching on his unceasing interest in monarchy) is chewed over – without easy solution – in Julius Caesar. Caesar seems likely to become ruler: to protect the republic, is Brutus (‘the noblest Roman of them all’) morally right to assassinate him? Coriolanus sets up a similar problem: would the warrior-hero be right to invade Rome in order to save Rome? Is rebellion right or wrong? Shakespeare never quite decided (it's right in Richard II, for example, but wrong in Henry IV). In Antony and Cleopatra Marc Antony gives up a world empire for love: is ‘the world well lost’, or is he a lovesick fool?

  So wonderful are Shakespeare's middle- and late-period plays – such as Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure, in which he seems to be redefining drama as well as writing it – that sceptics have wondered how a man who left school in his early teens (not a famous school, at that) could possibly have written them. Other candidates have been suggested, drawing on the little we know about Shakespeare's life. None of the ‘alternative Shakespeares’ is, however, plausible. The balance of proof remains in favour of the glove-maker's son from Stratford. The genres Shakespeare cultivated in his maturity – comedies, tragedies, problem plays, Roman plays and romances – show a gradual progression in language and plot complexity. And, in the comedies particularly, a darkening of mood.

  In 1610, at the height of his career (and still in his forties) Shakespeare, now wealthy, retired from London to live as a gentleman in his native Stratford, proudly displaying his family coat of arms. Alas, he did not live long. He died in 1616, probably of typhus – although a popular (and improbable) legend suggests alcohol as the cause of his premature demise.

  The towering achievement of Shakespeare's art are the four tragedies: Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet and Othello. Their greatness, too, is coloured by the ever darkening cloud of gloom that hangs over Shakespeare's late period, possibly the effect of having lost his only son, Hamnet, in 1596. Take, for example, Macbeth's final soliloquy, as he realises he faces his final battle:

  Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

  And then is heard no more. It is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  Signifying nothing.

  It's wonderfully complicated. Here is an actor telling us – as Shakespeare says elsewhere – that the world is a stage: just like the Globe. That bleak negativity of the last word (‘nothing’), which hits the ear like a door slamming, is echoed in the most tragic of the tragedies when the aged Lear – himself on the brink of death – comes on stage carrying the corpse of his beloved daughter, Cordelia, in his arms:

  And my poor fool is hang'd! 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!

  The five-times repeated word would, in other contexts, be wholly banal, banal, banal, banal, banal. The dreadful climax of King Lear it is so powerful that the greatest Shakespearian critic we have had, Samuel Johnson, could not bear to watch the scene in the theatre nor read it on the page.

  Is Shakespeare the greatest writer of the English-speaking world? Indubitably. But he is not, taken in the round, the easiest, or the most comfortable. That, of course, is part of the greatness.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Book of Books

  THE KING JAMES BIBLE

  Although we do not automatically think of it as literature, nor is it normally read in that spirit, the King James Bible is the most-read work in the English literary canon. (The word ‘canon’, incidentally, comes from the Roman Catholic Church's catalogue of ‘works which ought to be read’. The Church also drew up a stricter catalogue of books which must not be read – the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.)

&nb
sp; The King James Bible (KJB) is still, worldwide, the most popular version of the Bible. Every American motel has one, in the bedside drawer, thanks to the indefatigable Gideons Society. But it's not simply the fact that it is so easily come by. What has made the KJB a Bible of first choice is that it is so wonderfully written. It was first published in 1611 – around the same time as Shakespeare's great tragedies. It, like them, stands as an example of the English language at its highest pitch of eloquence, subtlety and beauty. It can be admired for that reason, even by those who are not religious, or even atheists. There have been many other translations of the Bible – some, admittedly, are more accurate than the KJB and more up-to-date in their vocabulary. But the KJB, uniquely, is the one version that has universally been valued for its expression. And that expression – even more than Shakespeare's – has soaked into our own expression and, it could be argued, even our ways of thinking.

  What is meant by the ‘literary quality’ of the KJB is easier shown than described. Compare the following lines – they are among the best known in the New Testament and come from the Lord's Prayer, as set down by Matthew. The first is from the KJB, the second from one of the most recent American translations of the Gospels.

  Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

  Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.