In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  THE END OF HISTORY?

  In one stroke the balmy time of Sonnet 107 was no more. The plotters had hoped to recover the past, to restore the Old Faith; in fact, they had shattered all hope of a return to older days. James announced he had had a premonition of the plot. On 9 November, before Parliament, the king gave his scriptural interpretation, which next day was underlined in a sermon at St Paul’s. His was a straight theological argument. The plot was the devil’s work. God had saved him. And in foreseeing it, the king had underlined his status as the Lord’s Anointed – he had been saved by his prophetic soul. (The document still hangs in the Noes voting lobby, and even today Yeomen of the Guard still ritually inspect the cellars before every State Opening of Parliament.)

  The next year the government mobilized opinion. The show trials of the conspirators in January and March drove home the official version: the assassination plot had been the work of a group of fanatics spurred on by the Jesuits. James intended this interpretation to become central to England’s sense of identity, emphasizing the kingdom’s place in God’s providence. National identity was perceived to be at stake now and a liturgical celebration was provided to commemorate it. Powder Day would imprint its significance on the national psyche: a watershed in the Reformation from which there would now be no going back. In terms of Reformation politics it marked the end of history – or, at least, the old version of it. Powder Day – transformed into Bonfire Night – is still celebrated by the British. And even today some of the old bonfire societies burn effigies not just of Fawkes but also of Catesby and the pope. As we approach the 400th anniversary, each November in Lewes, Rye and other towns in the south of England, the parades, banners, bonfires and burning effigies remind us that the dust has not yet quite settled on the religious struggles of the sixteenth century.

  WITCHES AND PLOTS: THE THEATRE CASHES IN

  It is probable, though not certain, that Shakespeare finished King Lear during the aftermath of the plot in the winter of 1605–6. The trials were avidly followed by the public, and, as it would in similar circumstances today, the entertainment industry hurried to respond. There are several Gunpowder Plot plays, including Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon, Marston’s Sophonisba and Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter. All of them are packed with antipapist rhetoric, as were poems such as Dekker’s Double P, the anonymous Devil of the Vault and The Jesuit’s Miracles. Dekker’s play is overt: his Whore sends Jesuit assassins, Protean jugglers, from Rome to kill Elizabeth:

  He’s brown, he’s grey, he’s black, he’s white

  He’s anything! A Jesuite!

  In Barnes’s play, which was composed for Shakespeare’s company, Pope Alexander VI makes a contract with the devil to destroy all powers opposed to his rule in Rome. In this Punch and Judy show for grown-ups, Barnes brings the devil himself on stage to confront the pope after necromancy, exorcisms and elaborate stage business with ‘exhalations of lightning and sulphurous smoke’.

  Grab them in the first minute! On one level this was just to give the audience what they wanted. In its aggression, social realism and sexual politics Elizabethan theatre always reflected the anxieties and tastes of the day, just as the extreme passions and violence of popular drama do on present-day television. But on another level the language of these plays, which include Shakespeare’s Powder play, Macbeth, bristles with the ideological controversies of the period.

  Written through the summer of 1606, with final tinkerings in late autumn, Macbeth rides the hysteria, just as Measure for Measure had ridden the euphoria surrounding the arrival of the scholar king who would usher in a new religious age. But as always Shakespeare is more ambiguous and oblique than his fellow dramatists.

  Macbeth has tremendous pace and attack. The three witches and their terrible brew, the storm, the omens, the murder, the throat-grabbing panic and suppressed hysteria of the aftermath – all the work of a master working in swift, bold strokes. And again it is a play for James. Scottish themes were already in vogue in the London theatre, and Macbeth plays on specific royal interests. Witchcraft was one: James had even written a book on the subject. Scottish royal pedigree was another: the king believed that he was descended from Banquo, and Shakespeare makes much of this in the witches’ prophecy (his specialist reading here included the Latin texts of two modern Scottish histories by Leslie and Buchanan). So there was plenty to make the king sit up and watch – and even to flatter him. As for the general mood of terror and threat, this is less specific. Unlike Barnes and Dekker, Shakespeare does not write anti-Catholicism into the play, although he drags in the trial of the Jesuit Henry Garnet in the gatekeeper’s famous speech on ‘equivocation’ in Act II, Scene I. This amazing and daring piece of theatre breaks into the excruciating tension after Macbeth’s murder of King Duncan with a drunken stream of consciousness based on one of the oldest of English children’s jokes (‘Knock, knock, who’s there?’). But here it is miraclemongers and dead terrorists at the door:

  Enter a porter. Knocking within.

  PORTER: Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate he should have old turning the key. [Knocking] Knock, knock, knock. Who’s there, I’th’ name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer that hanged himself on th’expectation of plenty: come in time; have napkins enough about you; here you’ll sweat for’t. [Knocking] Knock, knock! Who’s there, in’ th’other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, equivocator. [Knocking] Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there? Faith, here’s an English tailor come hither, for stealing out of a French hose: come in, tailor, here you may roast your goose ….

  The porter is the guardian of hell’s gate from the medieval mystery plays Shakespeare had seen as a child. The main references are to the now condemned and executed Garnet (whose alias was Farmer). The mysterious English tailor is an absolutely contemporary image from late November or early December, only a month or so before Macbeth was first performed. In London a tailor had been arrested for claiming a miracle had taken place by means of a straw dipped in Garnet’s blood (napkins dipped in his blood were already coveted by the faithful). The reference to equivocation concerns the Jesuit practice of avoiding lying but being economical with the truth so as not to incriminate oneself under interrogation. Garnet had refused to reveal what he knew of the Gunpowder Plot, in order to protect what he had heard in the privacy of the confessional.

  The transcripts of Garnet’s interrogations survive in the public records. The shadow text behind the porter scene is a series of dramatic exchanges, a theatrical dialogue then well known in London:

  ‘Were you not asked by Catesby for some great attempt, either by gunpowder or otherwise, for the Catholic cause … How say you, Mr Garnet, did Mr Tresham equivocate or no?’

  ‘I know not.’

  [And then, written in his own shaking hand]: ‘I have remembered something which because they were long before my knowledge of the powder plot, I had forgotten …’

  So it was Garnet who had not been able to equivocate himself to heaven. The ‘Scottish play’ is still an object of superstition among actors, a reputation no doubt born in part out of the grim subject matter. It is also one of the shortest of the plays: the additions for later performances were not by Shakespeare, and it may be that what we have is a cut-down version of his original script, with added songs. This perhaps helps explain why, great as some of the writing is, the play, lacking parallel plots, is thin compared with others of this period.

  Whatever Shakespeare’s private sympathies, it is hard to imagine the person who wrote this being committed to Garnet’s side. The fact was that both Bloody Mary and Protestant Elizabeth had unleashed terrible cruelties on to the people of England because of matters of conscience. We have no reason to think that, like most patriotic English people, Shakespeare did not believe the plot to be horrendous in its magnitude. But as he says in Sonne
t 124, he was standing above it now, ‘hugely politic’; he was living in a Huguenot household, only rarely, perhaps, attending Protestant church, and he certainly never held any office in his local London parishes. He was staying out of it. Perhaps living between two places made that easy to do.

  OLD LOYALTIES IN WARWICKSHIRE

  In a small town like Stratford, though, it was less and less easy to stay out of it. The Powder Plot ended a period of several years during which anti-Catholic persecution had lightened. Until then, church papists could satisfy their consciences and still avoid fines by attending ordinary services, only drawing the line at holy communion. In Elizabeth’s early years, as a foreign visitor noted, there had been virtual ‘freedom of worship’ in the privacy of one’s own home, and the queen had wisely refused to allow her subjects to be forced to take communion as a test of loyalty, keeping closed the ‘window into people’s souls’. This status quo had continued in the early years of James. But after the plot, the government clamped down on church papists. An Act of Parliament was now passed mentioning particularly those ‘who adhere in their hearts to the popish religion’ but ‘do nevertheless the better to hide their false hearts repair sometimes to the church to escape the penalty of the law’. Everyone now had to receive holy communion at least once a year, or pay a huge £20 fine in the first year, £40 in the second and £60 in each succeeding year. Local constables had to give the justices of the peace the names of all papists absent from communion.

  Easter was the most important Church festival, when it would have been unthinkable for a Catholic to take Protestant communion. And it is in this light that we must view the remarkable list of twenty-one persons brought before Stratford’s church court in May 1606 for not receiving communion on Easter Day, 20 April. For among them, now aged twenty-three, was the poet’s daughter Susanna.

  In the charged aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Susanna didn’t attend Easter service in Stratford church, and refused even to respond to her first summons. Significantly, among the other recusants on the list were old neighbours, such as the Wheelers, the Reynoldses and the Cawdreys, all former aldermen and high bailiffs, and all avowed Catholics. Here too were family friends, such as Hamnet and Judith Sadler, the godparents of Shakespeare’s twins. They were old people now, and clearly still committed to the Old Religion. Speaking for himself and his wife, and faced now with being compelled to take Protestant communion, Hamnet petitions time ‘to cleanse his conscience’ – confirming that they had abstained on principle. Only discovered in 1964, this list is an important testimony to the family’s long-term affection for the Old Faith.

  THE TIMON MYSTERY

  Back in the capital the Powder plays were packing them in. The London stage was at its peak of production, and Shakespeare’s company faced a constant demand for new plays. But a good one took several months to write, and it was necessary to plan programmes maybe half a year ahead. In 1606, while writing Macbeth, Shakespeare was also re-reading Plutarch with a view to a show based on the story of Antony and Cleopatra. Like many great writers, he had more than one project in mind at any one time, and Plutarch’s Lives would give him two of his next three. Interestingly enough, the story for the other play he wrote at this moment, Timon of Athens, is also in Plutarch, as a digression within the life of Antony. So it sounds very much as if he wrote these plays from late 1606 into 1607: Antony and Cleopatra was in performance by early 1607. A collaboration with Middleton, Timon was inserted into the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works only at the last minute, and the text we have looks unfinished. There is no evidence that the play was ever performed, so it may offer an intriguing glimpse into a full-scale Shakespearean work in progress.

  Timon is not tragedy – it’s satire. It’s the tale of a man who had it all: a Jacobean ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ in which greed is good. The focus is not so much on money itself and its corrupting power, but on the colluding attributes of greed and guile – the mainspring of many Jacobean city comedies, but not of Shakespeare’s shows. It doesn’t quite come off. By his standards, the writing is at times forced, uneven and repetitive, while the characters are masque-like, lacking the rich mental hinterland that he gives, say, Shallow and Silence. The fool is his dullest and most unfunny. And the tone does not suggest a soul standing back, ‘hugely politic’. The violence of the language, the anger and aggression suit the plot, but an author still needs to be capable of feeling it in order to analyse it: and clearly Shakespeare was. Genteel critics of an older era than our own thought he must have had a nervous breakdown to have written such bitter stuff, but anger, aggression and malice are always latent in his make-up, and throughout his career he worked them out in his art.

  Why was Timon never finished? Unusually, Shakespeare had chosen a plot with fantastic emblematic power but insufficient movement, which is perhaps why he felt it didn’t work. But maybe the real reason for leaving it uncompleted was psychological rather than dramatic. Satire was not Shakespeare’s natural bent, and he himself was not a misanthrope. So far was he from hating mankind that for once his ability to imagine the other, his chameleon-like empathy, what Keats called his ‘negative capability’, got in the way. His heart was simply not in it.

  COLLABORATION: SHAKESPEARE AS SCRIPT EDITOR?

  The ceaseless pressure to produce new writing meant that new talent always had to be brought on. Co-authorship was common, and sometimes freelancers were hired. Among them was Thomas Middleton. Born in 1580, the son of a wealthy London bricklayer and a moderate Puritan, he had been a student at Oxford in the late 1590s but left without a degree, desiring, like any number of ambitious and attractive young men, ‘to be with the players daily’.

  Apprenticeship covered a multitude of sins, and Middleton’s career shows how a young writer worked his way up. In his first collaborations, with Dekker, he wrote for the Admiral’s Men and the Children of St Paul’s; then, in 1605, he worked on scripts for the King’s Men, and his hand has been recognized in Macbeth, possibly as reviser, and extensively in Timon of Athens. In his role as writer-in-chief, overseer and shareholder, Shakespeare was responsible for bringing on new writers such as Middleton. It would be especially so from mid-1606, when he was suddenly faced with the major task of revising his old shows in response to new censorship legislation.

  The working relationship with Middleton gives us an insight into Shakespeare’s role now as the company’s chief writer-in-residence. About thirty new shows were written for the Globe repertoire between 1599 and 1606 and, as we have seen, this included many by other playwrights: Jonson, Dekker, Wilkins and Middleton with his scorching Revenger’s Tragedy. Others were anonymous. But among the plays performed then by the King’s Men are some that, intriguingly, were printed at that time with Shakespeare’s byline: The London Prodigal of 1605 and A Yorkshire Tragedy of 1608. The popular tragi-comedy The Merry Devil of Edmonton was later also credited to him.

  A Yorkshire Tragedy, a dramatic murder story based on actual contemporary events, is less than a third the length of a big tragedy and was staged as one of four short pieces. Its main protagonists, the Calverleys, were recusants living near Wakefield. The father murders his young son and attempts to murder his wife and their other child. Despite the quarto of 1608 being published as by Shakespeare, there is no doubt that Middleton wrote most, if not all, of it, just as he wrote all of The Puritan, published ‘by WS’ in 1607. But there are also traces of two other hands. One was possibly that of George Wilkins, who at that time wrote a show for the King’s Men entitled The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, which dealt with the background to the Calverleys’ story. Wilkins collaborated with Shakespeare on Pericles very soon afterwards. But the other hand, which retouched only a page or two, could just be Shakespeare’s. It can be detected in the harrowing scene of the little boy’s murder, a script fit to grace the most violent episode of EastEnders today. Since the play is unaware of the outcome of the affair, it was almost certainly put together in a few weeks to take advantage of what w
e might call a tabloid sensation.

  This example tells us something about collaboration, too. Another aspect of Shakespeare’s role as writer-in-chief was to ‘augment’, ‘correct’ and ‘oversee’ other scripts. A third of all shows in this period were joint efforts, and with Henslowe the proportion creeps up to a half. It is quite possible, for instance, that the collaboration of Wilkins and Shakespeare on Pericles involved a script submitted to the company which Shakespeare read and was interested enough to take over, retouching Acts I and II and completely rewriting the last three.

  In the past this kind of thing has been hard for us to accept – in matters of ‘genius’ we all like to believe in sole authorship. Working in tandem with less talented jobbers doesn’t fit with our idealization of Shakespeare as the lone creator. But anyone involved today in scriptwriting for movies, comedy or television knows what it is like to work in a high-pressure entertainment business. Often ‘authorship’ doesn’t exist. It may take several writers to get a film on; a senior house writer may simply retouch someone else’s work, and the executive producer may take credit for something that he or she had little or nothing to do with. Alternatively, the senior writer may supply the original concept and pass it over to another hand for development, but still take a fee and a credit. This is especially likely when writers reach middle age. What is interesting in Shakespeare’s career is that it happens relatively early, at the age of forty-two. Of the dozen plays he wrote after King Lear, half were collaborations. Was this company policy? Was he running out of steam? Was something amiss (for example, had he been ill)? Or had he realized he ought to find the time to enjoy the fruits of his labours? To these questions we will return.