The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins
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I. A story not sufficiently verified relates that when a bottle of water was offered to the wounded Sidney, he handed it to a dying soldier nearby, saying, “Thy need is greater than mine.” (Fulke Greville, Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney.)27
CHAPTER IV
William Shakespeare
1564—1616
I. YOUTH: 1564–85
LET US, for the adequacy of this record, summarize what half the world knows about Shakespeare. Now that devout scholarship has rummaged among his relics for three centuries, it is remarkable how much we do know—far more than enough to set aside, as not meriting debate, all doubts about his authorship of nearly all the plays ascribed to his name.
However, we are not sure about his name. Elizabeth allowed more freedom of spelling than of religion; the same document might use different spellings of the same word, and a man might sign his name variously according to his haste or mood. So contemporaries wrote Marlowe as Marlo, Marlin, Marley, Morley; and Shakespeare’s six surviving signatures appear to read Will Shaksp, William Shakespē, Wm Shakspẽ, William Shakspere, Will Shakspere, and William Shakspeare; the now prevalent spelling has no warrant in his autographs. The last three signatures are all on the same will.
His mother was Mary Arden, of an old Warwickshire family. She brought to John Shakespeare, son of her father’s tenant, a goodly dowry in cash and land, and gave him eight children, of whom William was the third. John became a prosperous businessman in Stratford on Avon, bought two houses, served his town as ale taster, constable, alderman, and bailiff, and contributed liberally to the poor. After 1572 his fortunes fell; he was sued for thirty pounds, he failed to answer, and an order was issued for his arrest. In 1580, for reasons unknown, he was required by the court to give security against a breach of the peace. In 1592 he was listed as “not coming monthly to church according to her Majesty’s laws”; some have concluded from this that he was a “recusant” Catholic, others that he was a Puritan, others that he dared not face his creditors. William later restored his father’s finances, and when the father died (1601) two houses in Henley Street remained in the Shakespeare name.
The Stratford parish church registered William’s baptism on April 26, 1564. Nicholas Rowe, his first biographer, recorded in 1709 the Stratford tradition, now generally credited, that the father “bred him … for some time at a free school … But the narrowness of his circumstances, and the want of his assistance at home, forced his father to withdraw him from thence.”1 Ben Jonson, in the elegy prefixed to the First Folio edition of the plays, addressed his dead rival, “Thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.” Apparently the Greek dramatists remained Greek to Shakespeare, but he learned enough Latin to clutter his lesser plays with Latin odds and ends and bilingual puns. If he had learned more he might have become another scholar, laborious and unknown. London was to be his school.
Another tradition, recorded by Richard Davies about 1681, described young William as “much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir [Thomas] Lucy, who had him oft whipped and sometimes imprisoned.”2 On November 27, 1582, when said miscreant was eighteen, he and Anne Hathaway, then about twenty-five, obtained a marriage license. Circumstances indicate that Anne’s friends compelled Shakespeare to marry her.3 In May 1583, six months after the marriage, a daughter was born to them, whom they named Susanna. Later Anne presented the poet with twins, who were christened Hamnet and Judith on February 2, 1585. Probably toward the end of that year Shakespeare left his wife and children. We have no record of him between 1585 and 1592, when we find him an actor in London.
II. DEVELOPMENT: 1592–95
The first reference to him there is uncomplimentary. On September 3, 1592, Robert Greene issued from his deathbed a warning to his friends that they were being displaced in the London theater by “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde [parody of a line from 3 Henry VI] supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrey.”4 This morsel was prepared for the press as part of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit by Henry Chettle, who in a later epistle offered an apology to one of the two persons (probably Marlowe and Shakespeare) who had been attacked by Greene:
With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never be. [As to] the other … I am sorry … because myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than he was excellent in the quality [calling] he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious [agreeable] grace in writing, that approves his art.5
There seems no doubt that Greene’s attack and Chettle’s apology referred to Shakespeare. By 1592, then, the former poacher of Stratford had become an actor and playwright in the capital. Dowdall (1693) and Rowe (1709) related that he “was received into the playhouse as a servitor” in “a very mean rank,”6 which is probable. But he fretted with ambition, “desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,” with “not a thought but turned on dignity.”7 Soon he was acting minor parts, making himself “a motley to the view”;8 then he played the kindly Adam in As You Like It and the Ghost in Hamlet. Probably he rose to higher roles, for his name headed the list of actors in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598), and in Jonson’s Sejanus (1604) he and Richard Burbage were specified as the “principal tragedians.”9 By the end of 1594 he was a shareholder in the Chamberlain’s company of players. It was not as a dramatist, but as an actor and shareholder in a theatrical company, that Shakespeare made his fortune.
However, by 1591 he was writing plays. He seems to have begun as a play doctor, editing, touching up, and adapting manuscripts for his company. From such work he passed to collaboration; the three parts of Henry VI (1592) appear to have been such a composite production. Thereafter he wrote plays at the rate of almost two per year—thirty-six or thirty-eight in all. Several early ones, A Comedy of Errors (1592), Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594), and Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594) are lighthearted trifles, frothy with now tiresome badinage; it is instructive to see that Shakespeare had to grow into greatness by hard work. But the growth was rapid. Taking a hint from Marlowe’s Edward Il, he found in English history many a dramatic theme. Richard II (1595) equaled the earlier play; Richard III (1592) had already surpassed it. In some measure he fell into the fault of making a whole man out of one quality—the hunchback King out of treacherous and murderous ambition; but he lifted the play now and then out of Marlowe’s reach by depth of analysis, intensity of feeling, and flashes of brilliant phrase; soon “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” was a London cliché.
Then, in Titus Andronicus (1593), genius flagged; imitation took the lead and presented a repulsive dance of death. Titus kills his son, and others kill his son-in-law, on the stage; a bride, raped behind the scenes, comes on the boards with her hands cut off, her tongue cut out, her mouth bubbling blood; a traitor chops off Titus’ hand before the groundlings’ avid eyes; the severed heads of two of Titus’ sons are displayed; a nurse is killed on stage. Reverent critics have labored to burden collaborators with part or all of the responsibility for this slaughter, on the mistaken theory that Shakespeare could not write nonsense. He wrote reams of it.
It was at about this point in his development that he composed his narrative poems and his sonnets. Perhaps the plague that caused the closing of all London theaters between 1592 and 1594 left him with penurious leisure, and he thought it advisable to cast a hopeful line to some patron of poetry. In 1593 he dedicated Venus and Adonis to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. Lodge had adapted the tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Shakespeare adapted it from Lodge. The Earl was young, handsome, and addicted to venery; perhaps the poem was spiced to his taste. Much of it seems jejune to jaded years; but in this proliferated seduction there are passages of sens
uous beauty (e.g., lines 679–708) such as England had rarely read before. Encouraged by public applause and a gift from Southampton, Shakespeare issued in 1594 The Ravyshement of Lucrece, where the seduction was accomplished with a greater economy of verse. This was the last of his voluntary publications.
About 1593 he began to write, but kept from the press, the sonnets that first established his pre-eminence among the poets of his time. Technically the most nearly perfect of Shakespeare’s works, they borrow heavily from the Petrarchan treasury of sonnet themes—the transitory beauty of the beloved, her cruel hesitations and inconstancy, the dreary crawl of unused time, the jealousies and the panting thirst of the lover, and the poet’s boast that in his rhymes the lady’s loveliness and fame would shine forever. Even some phrases and epithets are appropriated from Constable, Daniel, Watson, and other sonneteers, who themselves were links in a chain of pilferings. No one has succeeded in arranging the sonnets in any consistent narrative order; they were the casual labor of scattered days. We must not take too seriously their hazy plot—the love of the poet for a young man, his passion for a “dark lady” of the court, her rejection of him and acceptance of his friend, the winning of that friend by a rival poet, and Shakespeare’s despairing dalliance with thoughts of death. It is possible that Shakespeare, acting before the court, cast looks of distant longing at the Queen’s ladies in waiting, so intoxicatingly perfumed and gowned; it is unlikely that he ever spoke to them or followed the scent to the prey. One such lady, Mary Fitton, became the mistress of the Earl of Pembroke. She appears to have been blond, but this may have been merely a passing dye. However, she was unmarried, whereas Shakespeare’s lady broke her “bed-vow” in loving the poet and his “boy.”10
In 1609 Thomas Thorpe published the sonnets, apparently without Shakespeare’s consent. As the author supplied no dedication, Thorpe provided one, to the puzzlement of centuries: “To the onlie begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr. W. H. all happinesse and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet, wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth.” The signature, “T. T.,” presumably meant Thomas Thorpe, but who was “W. H”? The initials might mean William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, who had seduced Mary Fitton and was destined, with his brother Philip, to receive the dedication of the posthumous First Folio as “the greatest Maecenas, to learned men, of any peer of his time or since.” Herbert was only thirteen when the sonnets began (1593), but their composition extended to 1598, by which time Pembroke was ripe for love and patronage. The poet speaks ardently of his “love” for the “boy”; “love” was then often used for friendship; but Sonnet 20 calls the lad “the master-mistress of my passion” and ends with an erotic play on words; and Sonnet 128 (apparently addressed to the “lovely boy” of 126) talks of amorous ecstasy. Some Elizabethan poets were literary pederasts, capable of winding themselves up to rapturous love for any man of means.
The important point about the sonnets is not their story but their beauty. Many of them (e.g., 29, 30, 33, 55, 64, 66, 71, 97, 106, 117) are rich in lines whose depth of thought, warmth of feeling, glow of imagery, or grace of phrase has made them ring for centuries through the English-speaking world.
III. MASTERY: 1595–1608
But the artifices and restraint of the sonnet clipped the wings of fancy, and Shakespeare must have rejoiced in the fluent freedom of blank verse when, still young and ardent, he let himself go in one of the great love poems of all time. The story of Romeo and Juliet came to England from the novelle of Masuccio and Bandello; Arthur Brooke rephrased it in narrative verse (1562); and Shakespeare, following Brooke and perhaps an earlier play on the subject, staged his Romeo and Juliet about 1595. The style is cloyed with conceits that may have clung to his pen from his sonneteering, the metaphors run wild, Romeo is weakly drawn beside the effervescent Mercutio, and the denouement is a concatenation of absurdities. But who that remembers youth, or has a dream left in his soul, can hear that honeyed music of romance without jettisoning all canons of credibility and rising breathless at the poet’s bidding into this world of precipitate ardor, trembling solicitude, and melodious death?
Almost yearly now Shakespeare won a dramatic victory. On June 7, 1594, Elizabeth’s Jewish physician, Rodrigo López, was executed on the charge of having accepted a bribe to poison the Queen. The evidence was inconclusive, and Elizabeth long hesitated to sign the death warrant; but the London populace took his guilt for granted, and anti-Semitism ran hot in the pubs.11 Possibly Shakespeare was moved or commissioned to tap this mood by writing The Merchant of Venice (1596?). He shared in some measure the feelings of his audience;I he allowed Shylock to be represented as a comic character in slovenly dress and with a vast artificial nose; he rivaled Marlowe in bringing out the moneylender’s hatred and greed; but he gave Shylock some lovable qualities that must have made the injudicious grieve, and he put into his mouth so bold a statement of the case for the Jews that competent critics still debate whether Shylock is pictured as more sinned against than sinning.12 Here, above all, Shakespeare showed his skill in weaving into one harmonious tapestry divers threads of story coming from the Orient and Italy; and he made the converted Jessica the recipient of such moonstruck poetry as only a spirit of supreme sensitivity could have conceived.
For five years Shakespeare gave himself chiefly to comedy; perhaps he had learned that our harassed species reserves its richest rewards for those who can distract it with laughter or imagination. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is powerful nonsense, only redeemed by Mendelssohn; All’s Well That Ends Well is not salvaged by Helena; Much Ado about Nothing lives up to its title; Twelfth Night is bearable only because Viola makes a very handsome boy; and The Taming of the Shrew is boisterously incredible; shrews are never tamed. All these plays were potboilers, sops to the groundlings, ways of keeping the herd in the pit and the wolf from the door.
But with the two parts of Henry IV (1597–98) the great magician rose again to mastery, and mingled clowns and princes—Falstaff and Pistol, Hotspur and Prince Hal—with a success that would have given Sidney pause. London relished this serving of royal history garnished with rogues and tarts. Shakespeare carried on with Henry V (1599), at once moving and amusing his audience with dying Falstaff’s “babbling o’ green fields,” rousing it with the fanfare of Agincourt, and delighting it with the bilingual courtship of Princess Kate by the invincible King. If we may believe Rowe, the Queen was not content to let Falstaff rest; she bade his creator revive him and show him in love;13 and John Dennis (1702), relating the same story, adds that Elizabeth desired the miracle to be accomplished in two weeks. If all this be true, The Merry Wives of Windsor was an astonishing tour de farce; for though the play is noisy with slapstick and punctured with puns, it has Falstaff at the height of his verve, until he is cast into the river in a hamper of wash. The Queen, we are told, was pleased.
It is startling to find a dramatist capable of producing in one season (1599–1600?) such nugatory nonsense as this and then so ethereal an idyl as As You Like It. Perhaps because it took a lead from Lodge’s novel Rosalynde (1590), the play has a music of refinement in it—still hobbled with arid badinage, but tender and delicate in feeling, gay and elegant in speech. What pretty friendship is here between Celia and Rosalind—and Orlando carving Rosalind’s name into the bark of trees, “hanging odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles”; what a Fortunatus’ fund of eloquence spilling immortal phrases on every page—and songs that have been welcome on a million lips: “Under the greenwood tree,” “Blow, blow, thou winter wind,” “It was a lover and his lass.” The whole outpour is such delectable foolery and sentiment as cannot be matched in any literature.
But amid this cornucopia of sweets Monsieur Melancholy Jaques mingles some bitter fruit, announcing that life’s “wide and universal theatre presents more woeful pageants than do the scene we play” upon the boards, that nothing is certain except death, usually after a toothless, eyeless, tasteless old age.
And so, from hou
r to hour we ripe and ripe,
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,
And thereby hangs a tale.14
So the Swan of Avon warned us that As You Like It was the swan song of his gaiety, and that thereafter, till further notice, he proposed to flay the surface of life and show us its bloody reality. Now he would open his vein of tragedy and mingle gall with his ambrosia.
In 1579 Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch exposed a treasure trove of drama. Shakespeare took three of the Lives and molded them into The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599?). He found North’s translation so spirited that he appropriated several passages word for word, merely measuring the prose into blank verse; however, the speech of Antony over Caesar’s corpse was the poet’s own invention, a masterpiece of oratory and subtlety, and the sole defense he allows to Caesar. His admiration for Southampton, Pembroke, and the young Essex may have moved him to see the assassination from the standpoint of endangered and conspiring aristocrats; so Brutus becomes the center of the play. We, who have Mommsen’s details as to the odorous corruption of the “democracy” that Caesar overthrew, are more inclined to sympathize with Caesar, and are taken aback to find the title character dead at the outset of Act III. The past is helpless in the hands of the present, which repeatedly remolds it to the hour’s whim.
In writing Hamlet (1600?), as in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare had the aid and challenge of an earlier play on the theme; a Hamlet had been performed in London only six years before. We do not know how much he took from that lost tragedy, or from François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (1576), or from the Historia Danica (1514) of the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus; nor can we say if Shakespeare read Of the Diseases of Melancholy, the recent English translation of a French medical work by Du Laurens. Doubting stoically every attempt to turn the plays into autobiography, we are yet warranted in asking whether some personal grief—in addition to the sobering of time—entered into the pessimism that cried out in Hamlet and grew bitterer in succeeding plays. It might have been a second disillusionment with love. Was it the first arrest of Essex (June 5, 1600), or the collapse of Essex’ revolt, the arrest of Essex and Southampton, the execution of Essex (February 25, 1601)? Presumably these events moved the sensitive poet who had so warmly praised Essex in the prologue to the last act of Henry V and, in the dedication to Lucrece, had pledged himself to Southampton forever. In any case, Shakespeare’s greatest plays were written during or after these calamities. They are subtler in plot, deeper in thought, more magnificent in language than their predecessors, but also they voice against life the bitterest reproaches in all literature. Hamlet’s vacillating will, and almost his “noble and most sovereign reason,” are disordered by discovering the reality and the nearness of evil, and by feeding on the venom of revenge till he himself sinks to feelingless cruelty, and sends Ophelia not to a nunnery but to madness and death. In the end the slaughter is general. Only Horatio survives, too simple to be mad.