In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  At eleven yesterday morning the king left the Tower.

  He was preceded by the magistrates of the City, the court officials, the clergy, Bishops and archbishops, Earls marquises Barons and Knights, superbly apparelled and clad in silk of gold with pearl embroideries; a right royal show! The prince was on horseback, ten paces ahead of the king, who rode under a canopy borne over his head by twenty-four gentlemen, splendidly dressed, eight of whom took it, turn and turnabout [author’s italics]. The Queen followed with her maids of honour, and seventy ladies mounted splendidly dressed. In this order the procession moved from the Tower to Westminster, a distance of three miles all through the City.

  Even a well-travelled diplomat like Molin was swept up in the mood of optimism that heady day. Among those riding behind the King were Shakespeare’s old patrons, the Earl of Pembroke and, newly released from the Tower, a relieved and chastened Earl of Southampton. But in his two sonnets reflecting on the occasion Shakespeare, at this moment forty years old and worldly wise, was strangely cool, notably so in a specific reference in Sonnet 125 to the role of royal servants holding the canopy in the procession:

  Were’t aught to me I bore the canopy,

  With my extern the outward honouring,

  Or laid great bases for eternity

  Which prove more short than waste or ruining?

  Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour

  Lose all, and more, by paying too much rent ….

  Which is to say, it’s all spin – it’s all show. The line about carrying the canopy does not necessarily mean that the King’s Men were among the gentlemen bearers, but the use of the procession as a metaphor seems plain. The ‘great bases’ are perhaps the huge wooden arches with their brightly painted plaster figures, garish temporary stage sets for the royal show. These constructions with their obelisks (‘pyramids’ to contemporaries) had the crowds gawping. But in Sonnet 123 Shakespeare is again ambivalent:

  Thy pyramids built up with newer might

  To me are nothing novel, nothing strange,

  They are but dressings of a former sight.

  Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire

  What thou dost foist upon us that is old;

  And rather make them born to our desire

  Than think that we before have heard them told.

  Thy registers and thee I both defy,

  Not wondering at the present nor the past,

  For thy records and what we see doth lie,

  Made more or less by thy continual haste.

  This I do vow, and this shall ever be,

  I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.

  The use of ‘foist’ tells its own story (and he would soon mock the novelty of ‘pyramids’ again in an extended joke in Antony and Cleopatra). ‘What we see doth lie’, then, means not only the illusion of the world but the outward show of power. Measured and allusive, both these sonnets are shot through with an inwardness worthy of Hamlet, but also with a disdain for public honour, for the pretensions of the rich and for the elaborate show of state. At the end of Sonnet 125, connecting the outer world of politics with the inner world of conscience, Shakespeare draws a powerful and startling metaphor from contemporary politics:

  Hence, thou suborn’d informer! a true soul,

  When most impeach’d, stands least in thy control.

  Ever sceptical of power and mistrustful of those who use it, our Mr Shakespeare. And if we had any doubt what he is thinking about in this cluster of poems, in the contemporary Sonnet 124 – a brilliant poem that melds the personal and the political, and in which the word ‘love’ almost seems to stand for ‘faith’ – he announces to our surprise what sounds like a personal credo. This is about as far as he ever shows his hand. Whether he is protesting too much, given his liveried role at the heart of the ceremonial, is for the reader to judge:

  If my dear love were but the child of state,

  It might for Fortune’s bastard be unfather’d,

  As subject to Time’s love, or to Time’s hate,

  Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather’d.

  No, it was builded far from accident;

  It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls

  Under the blow of thralled discontent,

  Whereto th’inviting time our fashion calls:

  It fears not policy, that heretic,

  Which works on leases of short-number’d hours,

  But all alone stands hugely politic,

  That it nor grows with heat nor drowns with showers.

  To this I witness call the fools of time,

  Which die for goodness, who have liv’d for crime.

  In the last couplet ‘witness’ is generally taken as referring to religious martyrs (as the scholar John Foxe had pointed out, ‘martyr’ is from the Greek word for ‘witness’), and this meaning is also supported by his use of ‘heretic’ to describe ‘policy’, that is, government. But this poem is not meant to be closely pinned down. It is an enigmatic, dense meditation on politics and individual conscience, the ‘child of state’ and the martyrs, criminals who died for goodness; vague and unspecific, it nevertheless evokes a world in which values are topsy-turvy, in which people of different religious faiths die horribly for their beliefs. These, for an old Elizabethan poet, were the terrible real-life pressures on love and conscience. And if this is not delusory, don’t these sonnets show us the same personality we have seen earlier? He is guarded and sceptical of power; a man who believes that conscience is an individual matter; who is diffident and self-deprecating (was that a class thing?) and yet is confident in his own great powers; a writer and observer who stands apart from the pageant and outward gloss of political power and stands ‘hugely politic’, sure that his verse will outlive this show. And with all this, is there not also a faint suggestion of contempt (or even malice?) for those who enjoy it so ostentatiously?

  A ROYAL SERVANT

  So, as always, Shakespeare leaves us with ambiguities. Public and private, conscience and power: antitheses that are at the very core of the sonnets – and, indeed, of the great tragedies. And, as always, there is the multiple viewpoint, even (or especially) when looking at himself. He had achieved high status, he was a royal servant wearing the king’s livery, he was a gentleman with a coat of arms. He had coveted this, and he surely celebrated it, even though he wrote such words in private.

  The appointment as a King’s Man and as a Gentleman Groom of the Most Honourable Privy Chamber marked the achievement of those social ambitions he had left Stratford to fulfil; ambitions stemming from his father, who had first applied for a coat of arms before the collapse of his business in 1576. Shakespeare had craved acceptance and status, and now he had it: the coat of arms, the royal livery, Clopton’s house. There were those who were pleased for him, who felt that his kind, though not high-born, were of an instinctive, natural gentility that marked them out. But, needless to say in such a class-conscious city, there were also those who mocked. Ben Jonson’s ‘gentle Shakespeare’ was always a double-edged compliment, part felt, part needling. Others, though, were more direct: in the College of Arms a rival colleague of the herald Dethick marked the poet down in a list of those unworthy to be gentlemen, among the self-made, upwardly mobile ‘new people’ of James’s London. A mere ‘player’. And in a play of this time, an ambitious young gentleman playwright, Francis Beaumont, threw a wounding sneer at him, using John Shakespeare’s former trade to mock the pretensions of his courtier son. In a speech condemning social climbing in the new courtly world of James he refers to excessive bowing and scraping: all those bending legs, ‘some of which once so poor they were sockless … and one pair, that were heir apparent to a Glover, these legs hope shortly to be honorable’.

  Given the acute sensitivity to class inferiority that runs undisguised through the sonnets, this was maybe not shrugged off quite as easily as water from a duck’s back. But, resplendent in scarlet, the King’s Men now found themselves with roles
to play in the ceremonies, as well as in the entertainments that studded James’s first exciting months in London.

  An unmartial prince, who hated war, James made an ambitious start, hopeful that after years of international tensions in Europe he could initiate a ‘peace process’ that might procure a lasting settlement. In the early summer of 1604 the Spanish were invited to send an embassy to London, and the royal accounts show that Shakespeare and the King’s Men were in attendance on the Spanish ambassador from 9 to 27 August at the end of the peace treaty negotiations at Somerset House. This time they were not to be actors, but to play courtiers: to wait on the visitors and stand around looking good in their scarlet cloaks and breeches. Plenty of bowing and scraping for Shakespeare and Burbage, then, and a lot of hanging about. Chafing to be back on stage, perhaps: it is easy to imagine that this time of enforced lay-off might have prompted the odd verse expressing disenchantment with pomp.

  WRITING FOR JAMES

  Among Catholics there were at first high hopes for the new reign: James was canny, clever, could hold his own in university debate; and he made all the right moves, among them freeing Southampton. Many people, including Catholics who had been frozen out in the stifling favouritism of Elizabeth’s later years, now re-emerged into public life. Fascinating new light on James and Anne of Denmark’s private views has recently emerged from the record of their conversation ‘in the privacy of their bedchamber’. He was Protestant (but with a Catholic mother, of course), she Catholic, which he had no problems with, so long as she was discreet. James loved plays, loved the King’s Men (and young men, of course, too!). And from now on the court calendars recorded regular performances by the King’s Men. James’s ambitions in the diplomatic field meant a constant crowd of ambassadors at court and the demand for shows shot up: sometimes fourteen, fifteen or even twenty in one Christmas season.

  One of the hazards of the job – as with the entertainments presented to Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Master of the Revels, Philostrate – was that a play the King’s Men had ready might not be ‘preferred’. Sometimes the court went for something popular but less demanding, especially masques, which on occasion the King’s Men performed, although the courtiers themselves loved to dress up and act in them. These elaborate poetic allegories with music and stage effects, scripted by top writers like Jonson and designed by the most talented artists and craftsmen, such as the architect Inigo Jones, were not, however, always edifying occasions. One entertainment for the King of Denmark in 1606 included a masque of noble ladies who became so inebriated that the ‘Queen of Sheba’ fell into the king’s lap; the royal visitor himself had to be carried to bed drunk, ‘not a little defiled with the presents of the Queen, which had been bestowed upon his garments; such as wine, cream jelly and cakes’. For a King’s Man such things, it would appear, went with the job.

  IN FULL POWERS

  Shakespeare the writer – as opposed to the courtier-player – was now in a phenomenally creative period, driven by the possibilities of the new age; by fears and hopes; by artistic maturity – the ability to write what he wanted; and by his relationship with his audience and the skill and experience of his company. In short he was, in Pablo Neruda’s felicitous phrase, in full powers.

  Where did Shakespeare do his writing? Alone with an oil lamp in an upstairs room in Silver Street? Or in a crowded ‘ordinary’ nearby – the Mitre, say, in Bread Street, where two pence bought a table and food, and candles were free? Or perhaps at a favourite small local tavern, in a back room through the main taproom and beyond the kitchen? Recently he has been portrayed as a frequenter of brothels, who wrote about the seedy world of Turnmill Street from first-hand experience. But the seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey records a story to the contrary: that ‘he was not a company seeker’. That he was a drinker is more likely, especially after what he describes as his ‘hell of time’ in the late 1590s. Ale was an important part of the diet in his day, even for children; he had vintners as friends; and, as now, his was a very stressful profession and its members were no doubt high in the league table of drinkers (Ben Jonson wrote whole poems about his favourite inns). Again, we don’t know, but he writes drink scenes with unerring realism, and, as we shall see, there is a story that it was drink that got him in the end.

  And what of his writing habits and discipline? With morning rehearsals and afternoon shows at the Globe, when did he write? At night? Or did he get up at six and do three hours before breakfast? This again we shall never know; but, remarkably, we do have an example of his writing in progress.

  These pages, apparently in his own hand, form part of the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, a play about the scholar and former Lord Chancellor executed by Henry VIII and later sanctified by the Catholic Church. There is still some dispute over this, and it is not clear why Shakespeare should have done something for another company at this point in his career. But collaboration in his theatrical world was frequent and casual, and the writing of the More scenes, the imagery, the grammar and spelling, are all characteristically his. Handwriting experts also confirm that the hand matches the few known specimens of Shakespeare’s signature. If so, it is interesting that he should have been approached about a play on More just after Elizabeth’s death: this would have been a problematic subject while she was alive. More was revered among Catholics for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church in England, and the first draft (even though it omitted this crucial motivation) had been cut short by the censor in the early 1590s with a string of interventions that still mark the manuscript, including a curt ‘Leave this in at your peril!’

  The manuscript is the work of five writers: a typical collaboration of the period. Three pages only are in Shakespeare’s hand; a fourth page by him was written out by a professional scrivener. What is fascinating is that in this draft we can see his corrections, his second thoughts, a hint of the way he worked, enabling us to understand better the famous remark by his colleagues that ‘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’. It may be only a draft, but it is impressive stuff: a classic Shakespearean analysis of order. In this scene More faces the mob on the so-called ‘Ill May Day’ of 1511, when London was convulsed by an anti-immigrant riot: the kind of thing still grimly familiar in our own time, it was a little local attempt at ethnic cleansing. More confronts the crowd with an appeal to reason, to God and to their common humanity. In what follows the punctuation is Shakespeare’s (three commas only), except for a question mark added to help the sense. Apart from a slip in line six, Shakespeare’s only change of thought was to put ‘with’ instead of ‘and’ in line two.

  imagine that you see the wretched strangers

  their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage

  plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation

  and that you sit as kings in your desires

  authority quite silenced by your brawl

  and you in ruff of your opinions clothed

  what have you got? I’ll tell you, you had taught

  how insolence and strong hand should prevail

  how order should be quelled, and by this pattern

  not one of you should live an aged man

  for other ruffians as their fancies wrought

  with self same hand self reasons and self right

  would shark on you and men like ravenous fishes

  would feed on one another

  It is a classic Renaissance image; a classic case, too, of Shakespearean empathy; the ‘stranger’s case’, the idea of putting ourselves in the shoes of the persecuted, feeling for the suffering of the downtrodden victims of prejudice and violence – and the further idea of seeing beyond the immediate hot prejudice of rival groups and imagining ourselves as strangers in a world where such things are the norm. It is a lesson we have still not learned 400 years on; in our news bulletins we have all seen the wretched strangers w
ith babies at their backs in Bosnia or Rwanda. In the end More asks the mob to consider where would they go if they were in the strangers’ shoes, what they would do if they were thrown out of England.

  Why you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased

  To find a nation of such barbarous temper

  That breaking in hideous violence

  Would not afford you an abode on earth,

  Whet their detested knives against your throats,

  Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

  Owed not nor made not you …

  … What would you think

  To be thus used? This is the strangers case,

  And this your mountainish inhumanity

  NEVER BLOTTED A LINE?

  Sir Thomas More remained a draft – the play was never staged. A quick rewriting job for someone else: a favour, perhaps, during the period when the theatres were closed by the plague? But for a draft it is awesomely coherent. All writers are different, of course, and technology, then as now, influences the means of production (for one thing, paper was expensive). But with the stress in sixteenth-century education on memory training and oration, perhaps pre-modern habits of organizing thoughts and constructing speeches were more disciplined than ours.

  Hemmings and Condell say Shakespeare never blotted a line, to which Jonson responded that he wished Shakespeare had blotted a few more, criticizing him for not crafting more carefully. However, Jonson also says that Shakespeare was a poet ‘not born but made’, that he was a craftsman who would ‘strike the second heat/upon the Muse’s anvil, turn the same/(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame’.

  So he didn’t often blot, but he also struck the second heat. Perhaps in the end these two ideas are not contradictory: from the manuscript of More it is clear that the act of writing itself served to prompt thoughts and changes (in one passage he replaces unconvincing ‘watery pumpkins’ with ‘sorry parsnips’!). These are the nuts and bolts of the creative process: he puts it on paper, crosses out and improves. But the draft is still well ordered, the sequence of thought and image worked out. Perhaps, as befits one working in an oral medium, he shaped the structures of verse speeches in his mind even when there was no paper in front of him, as he walked about the city. And one assumes his habits of thought were more disciplined than, say, those of Proust, who rewrote even his proofs. There is, after all, a world of difference between a ten-volume novel drawing on memory, in which the very act of proofreading elicited still more remembrance, and the construction of a tightly knit verse play of maximum three hours’ length for a demanding mass audience of whom a lot was expected in terms of understanding and concentration. Even if, as Shakespeare puts it in the epilogue to The Tempest, the chief goal of his ‘project’ was simply ‘to please’.