In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  But it was never so simple, one imagines, for the mature Shakespeare, to settle just for pleasing. None of the plays of this period is a throwaway as, say, The Merry Wives of Windsor was. Measure for Measure, his first play for James, is a characteristic meditation on morality, sex and lust, with a pronounced Catholic colour, catching the mood of 1604 when the Puritans attempted to push James further to the right in religious policy. Even his least successful show from this time, All’s Well That Ends Well – a strange satire of human manners, as if in response to Jonson’s manifesto for comedy – has its moments. All the plays of 1604–6 grapple with serious moral themes; but the best are the greatest of all works of drama.

  A PRIVATE CHRISTIAN

  Questions of morality, then, were clearly at the front of Shakespeare’s mind at this time. But as for where his religious faith was, this is impossible to answer with any certainty. The plays don’t betoken a religious trajectory: some have a broadly religious resolution, of course, and in this phase religious imagery is thicker on the ground – not only did he recall old things such as prayers, rituals and texts, but his current reading included Catholic material. Recently it has been strongly argued that the mature Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic – some have even painted him in his youth as well nigh a trainee Jesuit. But this seems overstated. The reality is likely to be less dramatic, and more consonant with the history of so many English people of his time. By 1603–4, after all, Shakespeare could be criticized by a Catholic writer (‘I C’) in a text published by a secret Catholic press, for being a secular poet, not Christian or edifying enough. Is there a suggestion here too that he was a former Catholic who had betrayed the cause?

  Shakespeare was born of a Catholic family, but perhaps lost his parents’ religion as an adult, although what he imbibed with his mother’s milk and through his Warwickshire roots stayed with him in his heart, as those things shaped by childhood almost always tend to. The thin evidence for his private life in London suggests that he was not a regular churchgoer, and perhaps even avoided going to church; unlike Hemmings and Condell, he never belonged to a London parish; and he lived for some time with Huguenots, who attended the French church and were not obliged to obey the Church of England rules on Sabbath-breaking. Most curious is the fact that, although his name appears in a tax demand dated 6 October 1600 as a resident of the Liberty of the Clink, and he may well have lived there from 1599 to 1602, he has not been found in any of the annual lists of residents of the local parish, St Saviour’s, compiled by the church officers who collected tokens purchased by churchgoers for compulsory Protestant Easter communion. This is intriguing, and perhaps significant. Did he tell the churchwardens that he had taken Easter communion in Stratford? Such hints might tend to suggest that the absence of personal revelation in his works, which has so exercised his modern readers, and fuelled the fantasies of the conspiracy theorists, is no accident but a deliberate act of self-concealment on his part. This would make complete sense in someone of his background, whose family religion was defined by the law as treason, and whose father was pursued by the government’s bounty hunters and thought police. In this world of ‘suborned informers,’ as he put it, the stoic poet stood aloof.

  What we know of his inner life looks the same. He listened to Protestant sermons, and he also knew about the ‘touch of the holy bread’ and the ‘evening mass’. He read both Henry Smith and Robert Southwell, and probably took both with a pinch of salt. Along with Ovid and Plutarch, the Bible was still his book. Now he probably owned the Protestant Geneva version; but there are echoes in his plays of Tyndale, the old Bishops’ Bible (used at church and school when he was young) and the Catholic Rheims version. In short, as one would expect, he was a Christian, but his mind was wide and his scepticism of any system of power was pronounced. Conscience was a personal matter. If he retained in his heart a sympathy for the Old Faith of his parents, he kept his cards close to his chest. That this was his character he tells us in Sonnet 48: ‘How careful was I when I took my way’, that is, when he started out on his journey. ‘Each trifle under truest bars to thrust … From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust … Within the gentle closure of my breast.’

  So during his life, like many of his generation Shakespeare found himself moving between these worlds, with friends, sympathies and loyalties in both. Brought up in a Catholic family, his habits of mind (his use of allegory and symbolism, for example) never resemble those of a Protestant writer. We will never know how he saw himself, but one would guess that, like the former Catholic John Donne, he came to feel that the points of difference between the Roman and Reformed churches were not sufficient to justify killing and persecution. ‘The channels of God’s mercies run through both fields,’ wrote Donne, ‘they are sister teats of his graces … and the issues between them are all of things not essential to salvation.’

  One’s feeling – and it can only ever be a feeling – is that William would have agreed.

  THE REPERTOIRE

  With the plague contained, if not entirely over, the theatres reopened in 1605 and Shakespeare found himself back in the old routine: acting at the Globe in the afternoons, rehearsing new plays and revivals in the mornings. They probably rehearsed the first scenes on Monday morning, the next ‘act’ on Tuesday, and so on through the week – the custom in repertory in England up to the 1920s. Their role as the King’s Men put more pressure on this already tight schedule. With a new court establishing new canons of taste, but also curious to see old plays, revivals were in demand: Merry Wives and The Comedy of Errors were put on before Christmas 1604, for example, and Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merchant of Venice (a favourite of James’s) early in 1605.

  It would be fascinating today to see the shows that the King’s Men played alongside Lear and Macbeth when Shakespeare was at his peak as the company’s writer-in-chief. We would surely see his own plays more in context, and maybe also understand his audience better. Non-Shakespeare shows at the Globe between 1604 and 1606 included A Larum for London, a grim anti-Spanish diatribe about the siege of Antwerp; a social comedy, The London Prodigal; the controversial Gowry, about the Gowrie conspiracy; a very popular older show, The Merry Devil of Edmonton; and The Fair Maid of Bristol, one of the best-loved romances of the time; and, to ring the changes, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, which offered social realism with domestic violence and murder. It is always instructive to remember that the great Burbage had to learn these kinds of parts as well as Lear and Antony. And although Shakespeare’s plays were surely the main draws, the rest of the repertoire offers a revealing insight into the company’s judgement of their audience, and into the artistic compromises that they had to make to ring the changes. Some shows, like Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy are lurid, fast-moving théâtre noir with sparkling, hard-edged poetry; but others, like Rich’s Devil’s Charter, were second-rate stuff; and at least one, Thomas Lord Cromwell, was a third-rate work by third-rate jobbers.

  The nature of the repertoire suggests how competitive the professional theatre must have been. A dozen or more London playhouses, four of them huge places that could each hold between 2000 and 3000 people, and three of them within sight of each other on Bankside, all vied for trade. And that is not to take into account bull- and bear-baiting and the other attractions of the south bank. On top of this the King’s Men were playing at court, sometimes in the evening, and doing special runs for big court occasions. They kept on touring, too – in October 1605 going all the way down to Devon, for example. With an active repertoire of twenty or thirty shows – of which they might be called on to perform a dozen or more over Christmas for the King – this constitutes a workload that could only be achieved by a company strong on flexibility and multi-skilling and with formidable esprit de corps.

  So time for new writing – and reading – had to be found when and where it could. Nor can there have been many opportunities to nip off home for a few days. It is easy to believe John Aubrey when he says that Shakespeare only
went ‘home to his own country’ once a year. Anne brought up the children on her own.

  THINKING OF LEAR

  On 29 October 1605, if you had strolled down from Silver Street to the conduit at St Michael le Querne, you would have seen Cheapside thronged with people. Every casement and balcony on the five- and six-storey shops and merchants’ houses was bursting with spectators, for this was the day of the Lord Mayor’s pageant. The theme this year was of the moment: ‘The triumphes of re-united Britania’.

  In a series of tableaux in the streets, with kingdoms personified and Neptune on a lion, the entertainment told the mythic history of ancient Britain with its capital, New Troy, by the Thames, ‘which was once one sole monarchy, but now divided into three several estates with hurt and inconvenience ensuing’.

  It was a political parable for the time. Ideas about the unification of Britain and of Britishness – and, conversely, of the threat of division of the kingdom – were in the air. In Parliament King James had outlined his views on the advisability of making one ‘Great Britain’, and a stream of pamphlets and historical treatises had followed. So artists, poets and playwrights were naturally also thinking about these themes. And that autumn Shakespeare himself was working on a play about the dismemberment of Britain and the collapse of rulership.

  The initial optimism at James’s accession had not endured. Catholic hopes of religious reform, now seen to have been misplaced, were supplanted by hopes that the unjust ruler might be overthrown. The almanacs for 1605 prophesied dramatic change, eclipses ‘presaging greevous and wretched accidents’. And that sense of spiritual crisis permeated Shakespeare’s writing too that autumn. The ‘late eclipses of the sun and moon’ to which he refers took place in September and October, and chimed with the ‘Wonderful Predictions’ which prophesied that ‘piety and charity shall wax colde, truth and justice shal be oppressed … and nothing shall be expected but the spoyle and ruine of the common society’.

  It nearly happened. That November saw the great crisis of the reign, the Gunpowder Plot, when the whole body politic was almost upturned. So Shakespeare’s latest play was written during a time of sensational and fateful events, and it brings the trajectory of his career to an amazing climax. The play was King Lear.

  The story begins with the time-honoured love test. The old king foolishly asks his daughters how much they love him: the two wicked sisters are good at deceit and first flatter, then ruin, him. The youngest, Cordelia, loves him but refuses to enter into such a charade. From there Shakespeare remorselessly takes us into horrors, almost cruelly insisting that we watch them. Lear’s world falls apart; the kingdom is dismembered; order is turned upside down; children destroy their parents. In the end the wicked die, but only after the characters we care about most die too. Lear’s beloved Cordelia is killed, and the old king dies of a broken heart. Clutching at straws, it might be said that love conquers, even in death, but the play is exacting, harrowing and staggering in its range.

  The tale itself was a very old one, appearing in the work of the twelfth-century romancer Geoffrey of Monmouth, and more recently in Sidney’s Arcadia. But most important to Shakespeare as a source was an old play based on the Lear story. Only published in late 1605, the play – no tragedy but with jigging rhymes and a happy ending – had been in the repertoire of the Queen’s Men way back in the 1580s. So Shakespeare had known it twenty years earlier; maybe he had even acted in it. And it was a tale that had nagged at him all through his career.

  So one day in the autumn of 1605, let us imagine, Shakespeare wandered down Cheapside, past St Paul’s churchyard, and browsed in John Wright’s shop at Christ Church door by Newgate Market. There, in a freshly inked pile of quartos on the flap board of the shop, lay this old favourite, now available for the first time in print: ‘The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters … As it hath been divers and sundry times lately acted’. Given his long fascination with the tale, Shakespeare could not have resisted it. Of the new Lear play he wrote based on it, two versions have come down to us. One is Shakespeare’s first draft, printed by Nathaniel Butter in 1608 ‘for his shop at the Sign of the Pied Bull in Pauls churchyard’. Butter was not a good printer and it’s a bad text, but he seems to have had an unusually difficult manuscript to work from, as if for once the author’s rethinks and changes had blotted more than a line or two. A second version, printed in the 1623 Folio by his colleagues, seems to represent the author’s considered revisions after the experience of watching it on stage. So he committed much thought to the play; and it shows. In the eighteenth century it was deemed so horrible that it was regarded as unplayable; prevailing taste demanded a happy ending. In modern times it is often called the greatest of all dramas.

  The text of Lear contains tiny hints that seem to find echoes in the Silver Street neighbourhood. For example, on 1 December the christening took place in St Olave’s Church of a baby girl, the daughter of his neighbour, the well-to-do embroiderer William Taylor. She was baptized Cordelia: the first appearance of the name in this form. Did Shakespeare, one wonders, stand godfather to her?

  Near neighbours, too, were the doctors Palmer and Gifford. Both Lear and Macbeth, the other play written in 1605–6, include doctors among their characters. Interesting, then, is Lear’s grim reference to dissecting Regan to find out why she is so cruel: ‘Let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes this hardness? what is it breeds around her heart?’ Might this have been suggested by the public dissections carried out 50 yards away from Shakespeare’s house by his surgeon neighbours?

  SHADOW TEXTS: SAMUEL HARSNETT AND THE DEVILS OF DENHAM

  So, like any professional writer, Shakespeare was a sponge: stories of the street, things he saw, people he met, news of the day, sermons and tracts, all went into the mix. But he was a voracious reader, too, and books played their part. On his desk that autumn, for example, was John Florio’s translation of Montaigne, which he often used. This time his attention focused on the essay ‘On the Affections of Fathers to Their Children’. He looked back, as he often did, at Erasmus, whose Praise of Folly he mined for the Fool’s deconstructions of power. He also dipped into Sidney’s Arcadia for his version of the Lear story. But one book he read at that time over-reached them all psychologically, and offers a striking insight into how he thought about a source and appropriated its ideas for his art. It concerned the bizarre case of the Jesuits and the Devils of Denham.

  The book had been printed in the last month of Elizabeth’s reign by an acquaintance of his, James Roberts, whose printing house lay over the wall beyond Cripplegate in the Barbican. It was a Protestant polemic sponsored at the highest level of government: ‘A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, to with-draw the harts of her Majesties Subjects from their allegeance, and from the truth of the Christian Religion professed in England, under the pretence of casting out Devils’.

  This nasty piece of anti-Catholicism contains a sensational account of a series of exorcisms performed by Jesuit priests many years before at a house in Denham in Buckinghamshire. It includes a documentary appendix of verbatim confessions and interrogations of those exorcized, many of them poor people: serving women like Sara Williams and her sister Fidd. The author, Samuel Harsnett, was a Privy Councillor and chaplain to the Bishop of London: a learned and cultivated man of taste and imagination, but with that streak of cruelty often found among people in power at those times when the theologian and the executioner go hand in hand. His book was intended as part of a national campaign against belief in the spirit world, possession and exorcism – one of the atavistic holds the Catholic priesthood was felt still to possess over its naive and old-fashioned adherents in the countryside. But it also raised much wider questions about the nature of power and authority, the existence of spirits and miracles. So the story was of peculiar significance to those in power. And it was of additional interest to Shakespeare since the text mentions the executions of people he k
new – his kinsmen Edward Arden and John Somerville, and his teacher’s brother Thomas Cottam.

  One of the exorcizing priests, Robert Debdale of Shottery, must, in fact, have been known to him personally. Years before, Debdale had gone to Rome with Shakespeare’s schoolmaster Simon Hunt. He had returned with Campion and died on the scaffold in 1586. During his time underground, Debdale had been chaplain of a Catholic recusant family in Denham, the Peckhams. (Tucked away in a leafy suburb by the river Colne, their house is still there, though recently restored as a golf clubhouse – any remaining ghosts have surely departed now.)

  The exorcisms had been performed in 1586, in the frightening build up to the Babington Plot. Using the interrogations of the participants with the eye of a dramatist, Harsnett tears the actions and beliefs of the Jesuit exorcists to pieces. Conjuring up spirits, like praying for the dead and ‘incantation’, was a papist charade. As far as he and his sponsors were concerned, the age of ghosts and devils was over.