It is, however, harder to be more specific. Almost no one who went to the theater at this time wrote about what they had gone to see. John Manningham, a legal student who saw Twelfth Night at Middle Temple in February 1602 is a rare exception, noting that it was “a good practice in it to make the steward believe his lady-widow was in love with him, by counterfeiting a letter as from his lady, in general term telling him what she liked best in him and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparel, etc. and then, when he came to practice, making him believe they took him for mad.”2 Manningham enjoys the situational humor of the trick on Malvolio, but frustratingly has nothing to say about Viola's male disguise as Cesario or the representation of fraternal twins: the glimpse of what was memorable, or popular, about the play is fleeing. Something similar could be said of the Jacobean accounts of performances of The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, and Cymbeline by the astrologist/doctor Simon Forman (see Myth 13). The only sustained details we have about the economics of the Elizabethan theater come from the rival company the Admiral's Men, and from papers associated with their entrepreneurial manager Philip Henslowe. These papers suggest that Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, with its dynamic and amoral central character Barabas, was among the most frequently performed plays, with a schedule including ten performances in six months, far in excess of records for any Shakespeare play. When Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess, a sharp satire on Anglo-Spanish relations, hit the Globe in 1624, it was such a sensation that it played for nine consecutive performances: no play of Shakespeare can claim anything like that box-office success. While our iconic reference point for classical literary drama is probably the image of Hamlet holding the skull of the jester Yorick (see Myth 27), for the early modern period the most instantly recognizable drama was not Shakespeare, but the bloody revenge tragedy by Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (written around 1590). Kyd's play spawned a prequel, a ballad version, was reworked by later playwrights to extend its stage life, and was quoted, parodied, and generally riffed upon by writers up to the closing of the theaters. There is no contemporary evidence that any of Shakespeare's plays had this reach, although we do know that other writers copied and reworked his plays: for example Hamlet echoes are evident in two almost contemporary plays, John Marston's Antonio's Revenge and Henry Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman, and early in the seventeenth century John Fletcher wrote The Woman's Prize, a sequel to Shakespeare's battle-of-the-sexes comedy The Taming of the Shrew.
There is one particular aspect of Shakespeare's dramatic work where we can see significant contemporary popularity: the characterization of the disreputable, lovable, and obese knight Sir John Falstaff. Falstaff first appears in a play apparently called Henry IV, where he is a distinctly unheroic and satiric counterpart to the play's depiction of noblemen fighting in the aftermath of the deposition of King Richard II. As the companion of King Henry's eldest and rather prodigal son, Prince Hal, Falstaff offers an alternative world of tricks and taverns which draws both the heir to the throne and the play's audience away from the play's political content. Falstaff's popularity seems to have been immediate. A sequel was written—Henry IV Part II—and Falstaff was also transplanted into a quite different locale, the bourgeois town of Windsor, in the comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor (see Myth 28). There is evidence in letters from the period that his name had become a popular type. As the index to the classic collection of contemporary references to the plays, The Shakspere Allusion-Book, notes, “for the purposes of this index, Falstaff is treated as a work,” and references to Falstaff far outnumber allusions to any other aspect or play. Among the entries are comments in plays by Massinger, Middleton, and Suckling, as well as private references including the Countess of Southampton's gossipy postscript to a letter to her husband: “All the news I can send you that I think will make you merry is that Sir John Falstaff is by his Mrs Dame Pintpot made father of a goodly miller's thumb.”3 Falstaff can also be said to have inaugurated Shakespeare scholarship: debates over his characterization developed into one of the earliest books on Shakespeare, Maurice Morgann's 1777 defense, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff.
Some of the plays we know to have been popular in the theater are lost because they were apparently never printed: The Wise Man of West Chester, for example, had repeated performances over a long period in 1594–7.4 The question of how Shakespeare's plays came to be printed is discussed in detail in Myth 4. In trying to use the evidence from Shakespeare in print to pin down his contemporary popularity, it is interesting to note that only half of his plays were published during his lifetime: there was no market for, say, a quarto of Macbeth, but this fact might be explained by saying the play was not popular (no one wanted to buy it) or that it was (the theater company therefore did not want to sell it). Lukas Erne has argued that in 1600, the year in which Shakespeare was most visible in the print marketplace, his works account for about 4 percent of that year's published output across all genres. Erne identifies forty-five separate editions of Shakespeare's plays in print during his lifetime, more than for any other contemporary playwright: particularly popular in terms of the number of editions were the early history plays Richard II (six editions before 1616), Richard III (five) and, thanks to Falstaff, Henry IV (like many sequels, Part II does not seem to have been such a success).5 For comparative purposes, The Spanish Tragedy also had six print editions over the same period; the bestselling play by reprints is the anonymous pastoral romance Mucedorus (first published 1598) which has more than a dozen editions over three decades. The attribution in print to Shakespeare or, more allusively, to “W.S.,” of plays not now generally thought to be Shakespearean, including the mythical story of the founding of London Locrine (1595), the city comedy The London Prodigal (1605), and the true-crime murder story The Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), may point to the fact that Shakespeare's name sells.
Additionally, there is evidence of an inverse relationship between the historical survival of texts and their contemporary popularity. Some printed texts do seem to have been read to death. There are, for instance, only two extant copies, neither complete, of the first edition of Hamlet (1603), and just one copy of the first, 1593, edition of Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis: his first entry into print, and the work, along with the tragic narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece (first printed in 1594), for which he was probably best known during his lifetime. The majority of contemporary references to Shakespeare are to him as the author of these two popular poems, which went into nine and five further editions respectively before 1616. The dictionary derivation of “popular” is “belonging to the people as a whole”: it's hard to state that any writer in the Elizabethan period was popular in this sense, where, as David Cressy has estimated, literacy rates may have been around 30 percent for men and less than 10 percent for women in 1600.6 In addition, no print run of any book in the period was allowed to exceed 1,500 copies (the Globe theater, remember, could take 3,000 spectators). Literary works in any case were only a small part of the print market, which was dominated by religious works—sermons, prayer books, bibles, commentaries, and psalm translations—and by household manuals—conduct books and “how-to” works: within this restricted sphere, however, Shakespeare was certainly a significant player.
Popularity and personal renown or artistic recognition are not necessarily the same thing: if we were looking at bestselling books from our own period we would probably not expect that category to overlap extensively with critically acclaimed or “classic” literary works. There is evidence that Shakespeare's works were valued by contemporaries. Francis Meres, writing in 1598, identifies Shakespeare's predominance:
As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love labours lost, his Love labours won, his Midsummers night dream, & his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy his Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry the 4.
King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.
The identity of “Love labours won” is unclear. Elsewhere in his analysis, though, he seems to identify Shakespeare as on a par with contemporary writers rather than exceeding them in quality or popularity. For example, here is his list of “the best for Comedy amongst us”:
Edward Earl of Oxford, Doctor Gager of Oxford, Master Rowley once a rare Scholar of learned Pembroke Hall in Cambridge, Master Edwards one of her Majesty's Chapel, eloquent and witty John Lyly, Lodge, Gascoigne, Greene, Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Heywood, Anthony Munday our best plotter, Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathway, and Henry Chettle.7
This is a roll-call of theatrical writers of the time, not a selective pantheon. The existence of the posthumously printed edition of Shakespeare's collected dramatic works (1623), in an expensive, high-status folio format more usually associated with bibles and serious works of history or topography, is evidence less for his popularity than for his literary—and financial—value. And even as the Folio's editors address it to “the great variety of readers,” “from the most able, to him that can but spell,” and joke that they wish the readership were weighed rather than numbered, they do so at the head of a volume whose cost pushes it well beyond anything that might be called “popular” in its true sense—“of the people.”
Notes
1 http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Was_shakespeare_popular_in_his_day
2 Quoted in Emma Smith (ed.), Blackwell Guides to Criticism: Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 1.
3 F.J. Furnivall, C.M. Ingleby, and L.T. Smith, The Shakspere Allusion-Book (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), vol. 2, p. 536; vol. 1, p. 88.
4 http://www.lostplays.org
5 Lukas Erne, “The Popularity of Shakespeare in Print,” Shakespeare Survey, 62 (2009), pp. 12–29 (pp. 13–14).
6 David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 177.
7 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury (London, 1598), pp. 282, 284 (sigs. 2O2r, 2O3v).
Myth 2
Shakespeare was not well educated
The idea of the untutored genius or the self-made man or woman is irresistibly attractive. For Milton, Shakespeare was “Fancy's child, / Warbl[ing] his native wood-notes wild” (L'Allegro); the concept of the inspired rustic held sway to the Romantics and beyond. At the other end of the spectrum sits Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson, who noted Shakespeare's “small Latin and less Greek.” Out of context it is easy to interpret Jonson's phrase as meaning “almost no classical knowledge” and, by extension, “uneducated.” In fact, the phrase is part of an extended compliment to Shakespeare who, Jonson says, eclipses not only his contemporaries but the ancients. Shakespeare outshines Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe, and, “though [he had] small Latin and less Greek” he stands “alone” in comparison for comedy and tragedy with “all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome / Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.” (Call you this railing?) And we must note a further context: Jonson himself. Most authors have small Latin and less Greek when compared with Jonson's prodigious classical learning. Nonetheless Jonson's remark is constantly quoted out of context and so the myth of the poorly educated Shakespeare continues.
There are many ways of testing such a myth. First, let us think about the sixteenth-century humanist educational atmosphere into which Shakespeare was born. “Humanism” is the name we give to the post-medieval scholarly drive that recovered ancient texts. But humanism was ambitiously multi-layered. It was ethical, aiming to marry the highest ideals of pagan classical thinking to a Christian universe. It was stylistic: humanists studied the ancients not just for what they said but for how they said it; they thought about what a vernacular English literature might look and sound like; they experimented with the English language, importing words from Greek and Latin (see Myth 21). It was pedagogical: humanists wrote textbooks and founded schools and colleges, passing their ideals to the coming generations. It was scholarly: humanists translated texts, edited them, indexed them, made dictionaries. And it was positively secular, not rejecting a theocentric world view but placing man and his potential at the center of it with questions about government, nobility, court, the commonwealth, kings, and tyrants. (Humanist texts often foreground an individual in their title: Sir Thomas Elyot's The Governor, Castiglione's The Courtier, Machiavelli's The Prince.) The invention of the printing press—the internet of its day—enabled humanist ideas and values to spread with enormous speed.
This is a simplified summary, but the essential point is that humanism had practical effects, not least on the Elizabethan educational system and the development of the grammar school. A sixteenth-century schoolboy (only very few girls, such as Margaret, daughter of Henry VIII's lord chancellor, Thomas More, were formally educated, and then at home rather than in school) was the beneficiary of a new nationwide system of education—a national curriculum. Although Ben Jonson was educated at Westminster, where he studied under the antiquarian and historian William Camden, and Thomas Kyd was educated at Merchant Taylor's school under educationalist and writer Richard Mulcaster, their education would not have been substantially different from Shakespeare's in Stratford-upon-Avon. We don't have any records showing that Shakespeare attended the local grammar school—they are missing for that period—but it would be odd if he hadn't.
Grammar schools were so called because what they taught was grammar. The grammar taught was Latin. (The standard grammar book was William Lyly's—this is the book William Page is studying, not very well, in The Merry Wives of Windsor.) School started at 6 a.m. and continued until 6 p.m., followed by homework, and, as the boys moved into the higher forms, the language in which they conversed and in which they were instructed was Latin. It is often said, without exaggeration, that by the time a grammar-school boy left school he had as much classical education as a university student of Classics today.
But grammar meant much more than just the parsing of sentences. Grammar was a part of rhetoric; and rhetoric had many branches, all rooted in stylistic awareness. Exercises ranged from copia (saying the same thing in various ways) and imitatio (trying to emulate the style of a revered author) to double translation—from Latin to English then back again to Latin, to see if one's own composition in Latin could approach the elegance of the original (see Myth 15). These exercises were designed to prepare boys for professions that required rhetorical skills: the church or the law or local government. They were also ideal training for a writer, fostering in Shakespeare a love of language, of stylistic variation, of the sounds of words—precisely the qualities we value in his writing today.
So Shakespeare left school well equipped. But education does not stop with formal schooling (although belief in this myth seems to imply that it does). Although Shakespeare did not attend university (neither did Thomas Kyd or Ben Jonson), he did not stop reading. The sources of his plays show that Shakespeare read medieval poetry (Chaucer, Gower), Italian fiction (Boccaccio, Cinthio), contemporary history (Raphael Holinshed, 1577, 1587), ancient history (Plutarch), contemporary romance (Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Greene), Greek romance (Apollodorus), contemporary continental philosophy (the essays of the French humanist Montaigne). He read French and Italian, using sources in these languages when they had not yet received an English translation. (Jonson spoke neither modern language, according to his friend William Drummond of Hawthornden.) He read Latin. Yes, he made mistakes. He twice confuses Pluto (god of the underworld) with Plutus (god of wealth). This is hardly a hanging offense, nor is he the only one to confuse the two—ancient Romans did so too. Lois Potter points out that differences in scansion of the classical name Pirithous in the co-authored play Two Noble Kinsmen may suggest that one author (Fletcher) knew more Greek than the other (Shakespeare).1 But this play was written in 1613—over thirty years after Shakespeare had left school. This is evidence of rusty memory, not of lack of education.
Multi-volume books were expensive. Shakespeare may have read them through the auspices of the printer Richard Field in London. Field was a Stratford contemporary of Shakespeare and the printer of his first poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594). Field had been apprenticed to the Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier. When Vautrollier died, Field married his widow in 1588, inherited the business, and continued the specialism in foreign works. Field first introduced Ariosto's epic Orlando Furioso to an English-speaking audience through the translation by Sir John Harington in 1591. But his list is also impressive for its collection of what are now classics of English literature and Latin-translated-into-English literature. In 1587, Field printed Raphael Holinshed's magisterial three-volume History of England, Ireland and Scotland; in 1589, he printed George Puttenham's Art of English Poesie, a seminal humanist text about English writing, and Thomas Lodge's hexameter translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In 1595 he printed Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives (reprinted in 1603). In 1596 he printed Edmund Spenser's epic poem, The Faerie Queene, and in 1598 Sir Philip Sidney's prose epic, the Arcadia. It is remarkable how many sources of Shakespeare's plays were printed by Field: Ovid, Plutarch, and Holinshed are probably Shakespeare's three favorite texts.
30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Page 2