Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Myth 1: Shakespeare was the most popular writer of his time
Myth 2: Shakespeare was not well educated
Myth 3: Shakespeare's plays should be performed in elizabethan dress
Myth 4: Shakespeare was not interested in having his plays printed
Myth 5: Shakespeare never traveled
Myth 6: Shakespeare's plays are politically incorrect
Myth 7: Shakespeare was a Catholic
Myth 8: Shakespeare's plays had no scenery
Myth 9: Shakespeare's tragedies are more serious than his comedies
Myth 10: Shakespeare hated his wife
Myth 11: Shakespeare wrote in the rhythms of everyday speech
Myth 12: Hamlet was named after Shakespeare's son
Myth 13: The coarse bits of Shakespeare are for the groundlings; the philosophy is for the upper classes
Myth 14: Shakespeare was a Stratford playwright
Myth 15: Shakespeare was a plagiarist
Myth 16: We don't know much about Shakespeare's life
Myth 17: Shakespeare wrote alone
Myth 18: Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical
Myth 19: If Shakespeare were writing now, he'd be writing for Hollywood
Myth 20: The Tempest was Shakespeare's farewell to the stage
Myth 21: Shakespeare had a huge vocabulary
Myth 22: Shakespeare's plays are timeless
Myth 23: Macbeth is jinxed in the theater
Myth 24: Shakespeare did not revise his plays
Myth 25: Boy actors played women's roles
Myth 26: Shakespeare's plays don't work as movies
Myth 27: Yorick's skull was real
Myth 28: Queen Elizabeth loved Shakespeare's plays
Myth 29: Shakespeare's characters are like real people
Myth 30: Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare
Coda
Further Reading
Shakespeare's Life
Shakespeare at Work
Shakespeare in the Theater
Interpreting Shakespeare
Index
For Katherine Duncan-Jones
This edition first published 2013 © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maguire, Laurie E.
30 great myths about Shakespeare / Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-65850-5 (hardback : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-470-65851-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616— Criticism and interpretation. I. Smith, Emma (Emma Josephine) II. Title. III. Title: Thirty great myths about Shakespeare.
PR2976.M36 2013
822.3′3— dc23
2012026659
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This memorial monument in the garden of the church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, London, is actually a double tribute. It commemorates Shakespeare and the two editors who collected his plays in the posthumous memorial volume of Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623).
Photo: Col. Peter J. Durrant MBE.
Introduction
This book attempts to interrogate the things we think we know about Shakespeare, and we have called this body of knowledge “myths.” Why “myths”? We were drawn to this term for the Shakespeare content in each of our chapters because “myth” foregrounds the act of storytelling; because it underlines the cultural work these stories do rather than their accuracy; because it is not about a specific point of origin but about accepted beliefs; because it is about the people who accept or invent or need these stories as much as it is about the stories themselves. Not all of our myths are untrue: in calling these beliefs “myths” we are less interested in stigmatizing them as foolish or unsubstantiated than we are concerned to understand how they become ossified and block, rather than enable, our interpretation of Shakespeare's works.
Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth (2005) offers some pithy observations. Myths are dynamic: they change over time, they adapt themselves to cultural and historical developments, they have accretions and deletions, they iron out—or accumulate—contradictions. Myths are not historically accurate: they do not work by being factual; they are interested in what an event meant, not in what actually happened; they are designed to be effective, not true. Myths provide explanations for something we might not otherwise be able to make sense of; they give us comfort. Myths serve different purposes at different times, being factored into a culture's national or religious or political history. And, she argues, humans are myth-seeking creatures.1 That is to say, we are creatures drawn to stories. Myth, from the Greek muthos, means something that is told, a speech, a narrative, a fiction, a plot. From here it comes to mean a set of beliefs (personal or collective).
Myths abound about Shakespeare in part because of half-remembered or out-of-date scholarship from schooldays, because Shakespeare the man is such an elusive and charismatic cultural property, and because interventions in Shakespeare studies, particularly biographical and theatrical ones, make headline news: witness the “authorship question” (Myth 30) or speculation about Shakespeare's beliefs or sexuality (Myths 7 and 18). Put simply, myths are told and retold about Shakespeare because no other writer matters as much to the world: nineteenth-century Germany had a flourishing academic Shakespeare criticism before England did; India had a Shakespeare Society before England; Shakespeare is regularly performed at amateur and professional levels, in trans
lation, worldwide. Shakespeare is not just English (as Germany's “unser [our] Shakespeare” attests). Thus myths about Shakespeare go some way toward telling us stories about ourselves.
As Armstrong details, myths can be fictional and erroneous—and many, but not all, of these Shakespeare myths are—but more often they turn out, in important and revealing ways, to follow two related definitions of the word “myth” from the Oxford English Dictionary. The first is
A traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon.
While Shakespeare is not quite a “supernatural” being, many of the myths we discuss explain or justify widely held, often unexamined, beliefs about art, authorship, and cultural value. The second relevant definition of myth is “a popular conception of a person or thing which exaggerates or idealizes the truth.” Many of our myths are just that: popular, often reiterated ideas which may have a basis in fact, but which over-emphasize the available evidence or speculate to fill in gaps in the documentary record. Often the honest answer to our questions about Shakespeare has to be that we are unsure: in place of that uncertainty, myths provide comforting and positive “truths” about the subject. In this book we try to peel our collective fingers from this comfort blanket, even though sometimes the unsettling outcome is that we know less than we thought we did.
This book arose from our interest in a related book in a different field: Fifty Great Myths of Popular Psychology (2009). The book includes such familiar propositions as: opposites attract; we use only 10 percent of our brain power; playing Mozart to babies boosts their intelligence; it's better to express anger than to hold it in. These are myths that have become traditional truths; in fact, they have attained proverbial status, as the epigrammatic chapter headings show. The book's subtitle, Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior, indicates its purpose: it is a demythologizing book. The authors explain: “In this book, we'll help you to distinguish fact from fiction in popular psychology, and provide you with a set of myth-busting skills for evaluating psychological claims scientifically.”2 What, we wondered, were the equivalent myths that populate popular understanding of Shakespeare?
A book exploring this question already exists: Stanley Wells' Is it True What They Say about Shakespeare?3 Wells' encyclopedic Shakespeare knowledge is here put to the service of eighty-nine myths about Shakespeare's life and authorship. He considers whether Shakespeare “had a shotgun wedding,” “was gay,” “died of syphilis,” “wrote a play called Cardenio,” “portrayed himself as Prospero,” or “uses an exceptionally large vocabulary.” Like Fifty Great Myths of Popular Psychology, Wells' is a myth-busting book. Wells interrogates the categories with invigorating briskness, and ends each chapter with a verdict: “unlikely,” “maybe,” “I remain sceptical.” Although we investigate many of the same categories as Wells, it is not because we disagree with his conclusions but because we are interested in different things. When we consider the question of whether “Shakespeare was the most popular writer of his day,” for instance, we are interested in the daunting question of how one would even begin to evaluate such a proposition, where one might go for evidence to support or refute it, in fact, what constitutes “evidence” (print runs? reprints? references to Shakespeare? audience attendance?); we are not interested in reaching a Yes or No conclusion.
The number of essays in this book—thirty to the eighty-nine of Wells' book or the fifty of the Psychology book—illustrates our different focus. Many of Wells' myths are summarized in one paragraph or, memorably, even one sentence. We have given ourselves 2,000–2,500 words for each of our myths. It is no coincidence that this is the length of the standard undergraduate essay (or newspaper article). As academics we are accustomed to writing in chapter-chunks of 8,000-12,000 words. Here we are interested in seeing just how much one can do in the shorter essay format, how much information a 2,000-word essay can develop, how many turns of an argument it can make; in short, how it can pursue evidence without getting too bogged down in detail. We have learned a lot from this exercise; and it is our hope that students may learn from reading our examples of the format in which they conduct all their arguments.
This is not to say that we have written this as a composition textbook. We hope, equally, that the general Shakespeare reader and lover will find much of interest in the material we cover, and will find a path from well-known and often-repeated ideas into plays, approaches, and angles with which he or she is less familiar. In each chapter we aim to give authoritative, up-to-date, and even-handed treatments of controversies and scholarly disagreements. Our approach is interrogative, not prescriptive. We are interested in assessing the evidence for both sides of a dispute and seeing how cases can be or are made. We are interested in the historical moments at which tentative speculations ossify into self-evident truths. More importantly, we also try to understand the appeal of the myths and their power to attract passionately partisan proponents. The book evaluates evidence for and against myths to show not just how historical material—and the lack of it—can be interpreted and misinterpreted, but what these processes reveal about our own personal investment in the stories we tell about our national (and international) poet. Nor do we even attempt to hover, omniscient, above these stories: we are as implicated as all of Shakespeare's readers in presupposition, and in trying to understand these myths we may well have promulgated some others. We are grateful to Wiley-Blackwell's anonymous reader who pointed out a number of these contradictory moments, and forced us to acknowledge more directly our own positions.
The temptation for a book of this sort is to focus on Shakespeare's biography. Shakespeare biography is a fruitful field for myths, from the youthful deer-poaching episode (described by Nicholas Rowe at the beginning of the eighteenth century) to the technicalities of the marriage (attested by the record books) to the missing years (documented nowhere). Inevitably, we have included some of these examples but we have tried, wherever we can, to move the discussion on to the plays and poems themselves. Whereas most of our myths involve layers of interpretative accretion between us and the Elizabethan period, reading Shakespeare's works themselves can shortcut some of this narrative padding. But in the analysis of Shakespeare's words, too, there are few certainties. We can never know how realistic Shakespeare's acting company was in performance, for instance, because “realism” is a relative concept. Nor can we say what was the experience of watching Twelfth Night in 1601, but we can suggest ways that more recent, and attestable, productions give us access to some of its performance possibilities. In resituating Shakespeare's works, rather than his personal beliefs or his private life, as the most fruitful and provocative territory for multiple interpretations, we try to suggest some of the ways that an openness to different meanings meets these complicated texts on their own terms.
We have imagined each myth as a self-contained story, even as we have attempted to keep repetition to a minimum. Conscious that overwrought academic prose often obscures as well as illuminates, we have tried to do justice to the material in a readable style, and not to get snagged in a web of references. We offer extensive, guided reading suggestions at the end of the book for readers to investigate further. We hope that, cumulatively, these essays offer the set of “myth-busting skills” we found such an attractive model in the psychology book, and that readers will turn these skills to critique our own blindspots and assumptions.
We have used the Oxford edition, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) for all quotations from Shakespeare. Where the Oxford edition prints two texts of King Lear (The History of King Lear and The Tragedy of King Lear), we have quoted from the Tragedy unless otherwise indicated. For unedited quotations from Shakespeare quartos we have used the facsimiles at http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html. Spelling from
other Renaissance texts has been modernized.
This book is dedicated to one of the most accomplished interrogators of Shakespeare myths, Katherine Duncan-Jones. We do not expect her to agree with all of our discussions in this book but we wish to acknowledge how much our thinking here, as elsewhere, has been stimulated and shaped by conversation with her over many years.
Laurie Maguire
Emma Smith
Oxford, 2012
Notes
1 Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005).
2 Scott Lilienfield, Steven Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry Beyerstein, Fifty Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 3.
3 Stanley Wells, Is It True What They Say about Shakespeare? (Ebrington, Glos.: Long Barn Books, no date).
Myth 1
Shakespeare was the most popular writer of his time
One popular website in which users ask and answer each other's questions poses this question: “Was Shakespeare popular in his day?” The entire answer posted by a reader states “Yes he was Shakespeare!”1 It's a fair summary of general assumptions: how could Shakespeare be Shakespeare—read and performed 400 years after his death and translated across languages, media, and hemispheres—had he not been popular in his own time? But the question of how we define popularity and whether the evidence about Shakespeare confirms this myth need a little more probing, and we need also to separate popularity in the theater from popularity in print.
First, to the theater. From 1594 onwards, when he joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men as both sharer (part-owner) and resident playwright, Shakespeare's own popularity is intrinsically related to that of the company. Thus, while the development of the Chamberlain's Men and the company's increasing dominance in the London theater economy cannot be solely attributed to Shakespeare's plays, nor can it be separated from them. The Globe theater on Bankside, built by the Chamberlain's Men in 1599, could take over 3,000 spectators; in 1608 the company opened an additional indoor theater, Blackfriars, for winter performances. In 1603 it received the patronage of the new king, James, becoming the King's Men and performing regularly at court. Shakespeare's own wealth also grew over this period: in 1596 his family acquired a coat of arms and with it the right to be styled “gentlemen”; a year later he bought a large five-gabled house in Stratford-upon-Avon, New Place, reputedly the town's second-largest. All these economic and prestige indicators suggest that the company and its house dramatist were thriving, and this in turn suggests that Shakespeare's works, like the plays the company performed by other dramatists including Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, were popular.
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