In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  But then comes a slowdown. As far as we know, Shakespeare was writing for another seven years after the summer of 1607. But in that time he wrote only three plays on his own, and four more with collaborators. The inference is that he ceased to do his two contracted pieces a year, and perhaps that he was beginning to phase himself out of writing for the stage altogether. Had he perhaps lost the fierce creative energy that had driven him to such spectacular results in the late 1590s and early 1600s? It is not that he was old: he was only forty-three in 1607, and still under fifty when he did his last work. Was he burnt out? Was this a long-planned retirement? Had Anne finally put her foot down? Or did he simply not want to work so hard? Realistically, this last is as good a guess as any.

  Two of the late plays, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, are among his masterpieces. A new kind of drama blending comedy, romance and tragedy, and featuring music very prominently, they represent no diminution of his talent. Nor do they look as if they were written simply to fulfil a contract, as some of his lesser plays do. Their language is the extension and culmination of what is, by now, his very personal style (on which he had mocked himself ruefully in Sonnet 76 – why does everything I write always sound like me?). In addition, their themes of forgiveness, reconciliation and redemption touch on some of his most characteristic concerns, which hark right back to early works, such as The Comedy of Errors. In short, the plays still look like writing to satisfy an inner need.

  LONDON: THE DEATH OF BROTHER EDMUND

  Performing those plays continued as ever, despite the by now all too familiar severity of the winter. Christmas 1607 was bitter, with heavy snowfalls, and the Thames froze over. The agile turned arabesques on skates of bone and wood, while out-of-work boatmen crowded round the braziers at the hot chestnut stalls below Overy Stairs. The King’s Men performed at court on 26, 27 and 28 December, and, despite the cold, probably played the Globe on the afternoon of the 31st. That morning, however, some of them had attended the funeral in Southwark of Shakespeare’s younger brother, Edmund.

  Of the poet’s siblings, Joan had stayed in Stratford, married a local hatter and lived modestly all her life in the familiar surroundings of Henley Street. Gilbert was now forty-one: a haberdasher, he divided his life between London and Stratford, just like William. Of Richard, who would have been thirty-two at this time, there is little trace. But Edmund, the youngest, had followed William to London and on to the stage as an actor. In 1607 he was living close to Silver Street in the Cripplegate area, where that summer he had buried an illegitimate infant son, Edward. He was only twenty-seven when he died. The register at St Saviour’s notes a payment of 20 shillings for the funeral, with ‘the ringing of the great bell’: clearly an expensive ceremony when one could purchase a basic funeral for 2 shillings. Someone cared, and it was probably Edmund’s rich and famous eldest brother.

  PERICLES: OLD FABLE INTO NEW GENRE

  After the service, on his way out of the church, Shakespeare would have passed the tomb of the fifteenth-century poet John Gower. In the literary world of Jacobean London Gower was old hat, but Shakespeare clearly had a soft spot for his poetry. Perhaps it was the kind of thing he had loved from his childhood. At any rate, the next extraordinary shift in Shakespeare’s artistic career was to take Gower’s old tale of Prince Pericles of Tyre and turn it into a new kind of play, influenced by the current fashion for masques but harking back to the romantic fables of fifteenth-century Catholic England.

  Pericles is a romantic fairy tale, a morality play in which good triumphs mysteriously over evil, in which husbands are reunited with their lost wives and parents with their lost children; it depicts a world in which gods still appear and the miraculous can still happen. This antique air is deliberately accentuated by bringing old John Gower on stage as the narrator, speaking comically old-fashioned choruses in an affectionate parody of himself, which helps lend the whole tale the wide-eyed air of a childhood fable.

  By May 1608 Shakespeare had written and staged Pericles, which introduces us to the magnificent verse and magical phrasing of his late period:

  A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear;

  No light, no fire: the unfriendly elements

  Forgot thee utterly; nor have I time

  To give thee hallow’d to thy grave, but straight

  Must cast thee, scarcely coffin’d, in the ooze;

  Where, for a monument upon thy bones,

  And aye-remaining lamps, the belching whale

  And humming water must o’erwhelm thy corpse,

  Lying with simple shells.

  The imagery behind this is Christian, although it comes from a pagan source. It announces the great theme of the last plays: redemption through the divine, and through nature and children. That February his first grandchild, Susanna’s daughter Elizabeth, was born. Was the proud grandfather in Stratford on the 21st for the christening? In any event, daughters and babies would loom large in his last plays.

  Not surprisingly, Pericles has been seen by some as tinged with Catholic imagery. In fact, Shakespeare was ever the sponge, soaking up tales, metaphors and thought worlds and blending and interweaving them to create something of his own. The play appealed to Catholics, to be sure, but also to James’s court. Shakespeare still had a foot in both worlds psychologically: at the end the virgin goddess Diana of Ephesus appears on stage in a manner recalling the humanist allegories of the Virgin Mary but perhaps owing as much to the plot resolutions of Euripides, which Shakespeare certainly read in Latin:

  My temple stands in Ephesus: hie thee thither,

  And do upon mine altar sacrifice …

  Awake and tell thy dream.

  There are, however, problems with Pericles. The play was omitted from the collected works by Hemmings and Condell, which is surely telling us something. The first two Acts don’t look like Shakespeare at all. Some have argued that he is writing a deliberately inept pastiche, but this seems hard to credit. The first part in fact was written by a Catholic hack, George Wilkins, who kept a tavern in Turnmill Street, the notorious brothel area in Clerkenwell by today’s Farringdon Station. Wilkins had already written The Miseries of Enforced Marriage for Shakespeare’s company, so he was in their pool of jobbers. An unsavoury character, separated from his long-suffering wife Margaret, he was involved in many court cases as a result of his violent and abusive behaviour to women. He knew the Mountjoys in Silver Street, and evidently knew Shakespeare himself; much has been made of this recently, suggesting that ‘gentle Shakespeare’ was a womanizing misogynist and habitué of brothels. Yet it seems hard to believe that the creator of Beatrice, Rosalind and Hermione was a misogynist, even though he had been brought up in the male-dominated world of Tudor England and often sought patriarchal solutions in his plays. His ideal concept of love is held to the end, even though the ideal nuclear family has a poor record of success in his plays and is tortured almost to death on stage in The Winter’s Tale.

  Shakespeare was older now, of course, and marked by life. His last romances are characterized by redemptive mothers and daughters, but he adopts a puritanical view of the sexuality of his young heroines. The brothel scene in Pericles and its brutal male language are indeed horribly misogynistic, but surely this is intentional, to make his audiences feel disgust and identify with the purity of his heroine Marina. And in any case, it is by no means certain that Shakespeare formally collaborated with Wilkins, let alone had a close relationship with him. The last three Acts certainly contain some of his most affecting writing, and the scene in which the prince finally recognizes his lost daughter is one of the great moments in drama.

  Pericles was a hit. A novel was even written as a spin-off, just as might happen today. To a world gradually being drained of a sense of the supernatural the play brought back a sense of enchantment, and its first audiences surely responded to that. Its imagery seeped into their psyche, stirring up halfforgotten tales, rituals, beliefs and feelings. Ever the prickly classicist Ben Jonson called Pericl
es a ‘mouldy old tale’, sneering at all these late romances as ‘Tales, Tempests and other such Drolleries’. But then he was no doubt jealous: he didn’t have Shakespeare’s near-perfect talent for picking the right plot.

  THE SONNETS PUBLISHED: ‘WRETCHED INFIDEL STUFF’

  Just a few months later, in August 1608, the theatres closed again because of a new outbreak of plague. They would not reopen until late 1609 or even early 1610, imposing a very long break in Shakespeare’s professional career, which may have come at a significant time in his life. It was as good a reason as any to get out of town, and there is some evidence that Shakespeare left London soon afterwards. On 17 August 1608 he had a legal case coming to court in Stratford, which he may have attended in person. Then, in early September, his mother, now possibly in her seventies, died and was buried at Holy Trinity. The family’s last link with the age of the Catholic Queen Mary had gone. On the 23rd, his sister Joan’s son, Michael Hart, was christened, and on 16 October Shakespeare stood godfather to William Walker, the son of an old friend of his father who had become town bailiff the previous year. Godparenting was regarded as an important commitment, and Shakespeare would certainly have been present at the baptism.

  But even though the theatres were shut and Shakespeare was perhaps now spending more time in the country, work from his hand was still forthcoming. On 20 May 1609 a new book was advertised in the Stationers’ Register, to be published later that year. It was called Shake-speares Sonnets, to which the publisher, Thorpe, added on the title page ‘Never before Imprinted’, as if to suggest a frisson of notoriety. Inside, in often graphic detail, was the tale of the poet’s beautiful boy and the Dark Lady. Despite many later critics’ prudish hopes that the sonnets were pirated, the current consensus is that they were taken from Shakespeare’s own manuscript and were published with his authorization. His friend Thomas Heywood says plainly that he published them in his own name, and Ben Jonson’s friend Drummond later heard the same. This seems conclusive, even though Shakespeare seems not to have been around to supervise the proofreading.

  So what had led him to publish these very personal and revealing poems more than ten years after most of them were written? It was surely not just to make a little money on the side, even though his main income, from the stage, had temporarily dried up. Although ‘never before imprinted’, some of the poems had long circulated among his ‘private friends’, who had admired at least the ‘sugar’d’ ones. And friends with true literary judgement must have seen that the poems, even the dark ones about lust, were great, and must have told him so. He knew himself how good they were (he knew that, he tells us, when he wrote them); and no doubt he had tinkered with them over the years, as he did with all his work, ordering them, shaping them into a more formed and ‘literary’ collection, playing teasingly with the autobiographical tale they seem to reveal. He knew he ought to publish them. The problem, of course, was the content.

  Shakespeare, then, was responsible for the selection, punctuation, italicization, and, crucially, the order of the 154 sonnets, of which the last two are versions of the same one; 153 is the number of prayers in the Catholic rosary, and, although any relationship is distant (if anything, these are really a secular parody of the sacred), some numberings do shadow the old prayers he must have known as a child. The sonnets probably span a lengthy period and it is not possible to say how far they were revised as his plays were. Of the first 120 or so, many seem to have been written to the beautiful boy over several years; some, as we have seen, depict a love triangle, apparently with the boy and the poet’s mistress; several are about the individual and politics; and the last group, the most unsparing in their depiction of physical passion, are to the Dark Lady (although there is no evidence of them ever being given to her – few women, one imagines, would have been pleased to receive such bitter verses). Placing them in a sequence that appears to constitute a single tale, he makes the sonnets end regretfully in the defeated poet-lover seeking love’s remedial bath. He even slips in his marriage sonnet, 145, out of the way near the end. Whether the collection includes other poems to his wife, or to anyone else, has never been discerned. But the order is evidently his: who else would have given ‘Full many a glorious morning’, with its allusion to the death of Jesus, the number 33? Who else would have inserted his youthful sonnet to Anne between the strongly religious 144 and 146, with their visions of heaven and hell?

  So how were the sonnets received by the reading public? The poems to the boy are unlikely to have seemed as scandalous then as they did to nineteenth-century readers, who wished he had never written them. The idea that they were pirated came from Victorian editors unwilling to take their ostensibly homosexual love at its face value. After all, in an age that criminalized homosexual acts – in the days of Wilde and Bosie – the ‘gentle bard’ would have been sentenced to hard labour. The real contemporary scandal, so modern scholars think, was the graphic portrayal of the sexual power of an independent and even predatory woman. Raw, self-lacerating, subverting the Petrarchan sonnet tradition by talking overtly about lust, erections and genitalia: even today, verse of such coarse sexuality from a leading poet might not go down well with the reviewers in some of the quality broadsheets. And, of course, the mainstream choice, and that of his anthologizers, is still ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ rather than ‘Lust in action’.

  The sonnets may not have sold too well. Shakespeare perhaps overestimated the open-mindedness of even his most discerning readers in 1609. ‘Wretched infidel stuff,’ scribbled one exasperated early reader. William Herbert’s cousin George was dismayed by their mixture of religious imagery and explicit sexual content. And within a year, strangely enough, Emilia Lanier registered her own religious poems, which would be prefaced with a cry from the heart about men’s abuse of women.

  PRINCE HENRY: A NEW COURT CULTURE

  Meanwhile, the world of the arts and patronage in London was changing fast. A new wave of style and taste was bringing about changes in the theatre as visible as the shift from the improvising clowns to the tragedians back in the 1590s. King James’s fifteen-year-old son Prince Henry now announced his arrival on the public stage with his own court – a new arbiter of taste, who in his short life would pioneer what was almost England’s lost Renaissance.

  Under Elizabeth the country had been somewhat archaic in its culture, with a deeply nostalgic strain. Now the prince and his entrourage encouraged an influx of new ideas in art, music and literature. Henry was a great patron and collector, and Florentine artists, Dutch portrait painters and Italian architects were invited to London. English collectors began to visit Italy to collect classical sculpture; copies were commissioned of the Uffizi series of panels that depicted famous figures in modern literature and the arts. At the centre was Henry’s court, modelling itself on the great European Renaissance courts of the sixteenth century.

  Henry was fascinated by the tradition of festivals at the Florentine Medici court, in which elaborate masques were seen as essential adjuncts of princely magnificence. Huge resources were now put into such spectacles to dramatize the ideals of the New Age ‘so that the World might know, what a brave prince they were like to enjoy’. These shows needed authors of real erudition, and Ben Jonson, who was already a writer of royal masques, now rose to prominence, with the architect Inigo Jones responsible for set and costume design. In summer 1609 a series of lavish entertainments was staged for the investiture of Henry as Prince of Wales, and it seems that Shakespeare’s Cymbeline was specifically written for this occasion. Long and intricate, it is a play of its time with its allusions to royal myths, its masque-like devices and its courtly nonsense. Its plot twists are so silly that Shakespeare has to send himself up to get away with them – though no doubt that made his royal and noble patrons laugh too. But all the same, the play carried a serious point. It is about British myths and Virgilian prophecies: Cymbeline lived at the time of Christ; and the plot is resolved by a landing at Milford Haven, mirror
ing Henry Tudor’s arrival by ship at the same auspicious place before his defeat of Richard III at Bosworth, which inaugurated the Tudor dynasty. So a Roman version of the Tudor advent myth makes a bizarre foretelling of James’s united Christian Britannia.

  ‘SACRED THINGS MUST NEEDS BE WRAPPED IN FABLE AND ENIGMA’

  But the different uses to which Shakespeare’s drama could be put are dramatically revealed in a case that ended up in the Court of Star Chamber. While Cymbeline was getting laughs in Whitehall, up in the wilds of Yorkshire a local acting company founded by Sir Richard Cholmeley was playing to very different audiences. Formed around a local family of artisans, the Simpsons of North Egmont, near Whitby, this was a travelling company of thirteen men and two boys who worked in the north for the last fifteen years of Shakespeare’s life. They found an audience in most towns in the shire and played at a dozen or so great houses every year, acting one or more plays and staying a night or two in each place. But they were a Catholic company.

  Towards Christmas 1609 these strolling players performed at Sir John and Dame Julian Yorke’s house at Gowthwaite in Nidderdale, where government informers reported a scandal. That night a comic ‘interlude’ had taken place: during a disputation between a ‘popish priest’ and an English minister the Protestant had been humiliated and hauled off stage by the devil, leaving an angel holding the hand of the priest. The play, it was asserted, had been wildly applauded – the audience had ‘mocked and derided’ the state religion. As a result the Lord Chief Justice declared the Yorkes guilty of defamatory libel and fined the couple the enormous sum of £1000 each, Sir John’s brothers £350 apiece, and the small audience of local friends collectively £300. The extraordinary thing about this story is that the interludes on the Cholmley players’ tour were merely satirical burlesques in between the main entertainment, which consisted of full-length plays: King Lear and Pericles.