30 Great Myths about Shakespeare

by Laurie Maguire

  Similar concerns apply to updates of Much Ado About Nothing. The sticking point in modern-dress productions comes in Act 5 when Hero passively accepts in marriage the man who has hastily and untrustingly rejected her at the altar in Act 4. When Nicholas Hytner directed the play (National Theatre, 2007), he created a Hero with attitude (an embryonic Beatrice) who had to be convinced of Claudio's genuine repentance before she would consent to the wedding going ahead. This was achieved by the economic addition of Hero as eavesdropper in Act 5, scene 3. She witnessed a sackclothed Claudio read the epitaph for his dead (as he thinks) bride and prostrate himself on her grave—whereupon she signaled permission to her father and the friar to proceed with Shakespeare's plot. When the BBC Shakespeare Retold updated Much Ado in 2005 to a contemporary newsroom setting (Bea and Ben the news anchors, Claude on the sports desk, Hero the weathercaster), everything worked except a career-girl Hero taking back Claude at the end. (So the BBC gave us the following dialogue: Claude. But when you've had some time, maybe you would think about carrying on where we left off? Hero. What get married to you? Never in a million years. Claude. OK, maybe not in the short term, but …). The fact that the stage production had to add something at this stage to indicate a psychological repentance for Claudio and to motivate Hero's acceptance of him, and that the television production had to adapt it, indicates the difficulty that this plot moment causes when removed from its 1600 setting.

  Shakespeare's political and historical plays often update very successfully, perhaps because transposing periods is already built into them. Elizabethan dramatists were prevented from writing about contemporary politics; the consequences of doing so were dire (Jonson was imprisoned for co-writing the comical satire the Isle of Dogs because the inclusion of a character with a Scottish accent was deemed disrespectful to England's royal neighbor (soon to be England's king) James VI). When Jonson published his Roman tragedy Sejanus (1603), it had copious marginalia showing his source material in Tacitus. Scholars see this as yet another example of Jonson's self-conscious advertising of his scholarly credentials. It may also be evidence of his instinct for self-protection. “Look,” the notes proclaim, “I'm not stimulating political foment: all I'm doing is translating Tacitus.”

  The Elizabethans had no newspapers with a letters-to-the-editor page in which to express their political opinions. (They were not supposed to have political opinions: the state had those for them.) Elizabethan drama was the journalism of its day. And like any other kind of writing in a non-democratic state, it was censored. (All plays had to be officially approved prior to performance.) So the easiest way to write about contemporary politics—in fact, the only way to write about contemporary politics—was to write about history—until that, too, was censored, along with satire and other dangerous forms, in the Bishops' Ban of 1599.

  Shakespeare had no permitted way of talking about a republic—unless he wrote about republican Rome. He had no permitted way of talking about government or monarchy—unless he wrote plays like Julius Caesar (which debates prospective tyranny) or Macbeth (which depicts a tyrant) or Measure for Measure (which begins with “Of government the properties to unfold …” as the duke hands over power to his deputy) or Henry V (which depicts a rhetorically skilled monarch using ethically dubious means—the invasion of a foreign country—for a nationalistic end). Henry V comes into its own at times of foreign invasions. Olivier's positive view of Henry (achieved only by extensive strategic cutting of Shakespeare's text) was an important contribution to the Allied war effort in 1944, and Olivier was seconded from Fleet Air Arm duties for this different war work. In 1986, shortly after the Falklands war (1982), Michael Bogdanov directed Henry's army as a crowd of football hooligans, going to war with tuneless football chants and an offensive jingoistic banner (“Fuck the frogs”) whose style reflected similarly offensive headlines from one of the UK's tabloid newspapers. These tabloid headlines had themselves made headlines in the broadsheets as the offending newspaper's non-readers debated the appropriate attitudes with which to go to war. The gentlemanly attitude and tone of Bogdanov's French scenes—one of them staged as an Impressionist painting—could not have provided a greater contrast. Olivier's modernized production was pro-English, Bogdanov's was critical of the English (it was, as one critic observed, the first production in which you actually wanted the French to win). But in both cases, Shakespeare's politics were contemporary.

  Shakespeare's plays were, for Shakespeare as for his audience, dramas debating contemporary issues of crucial importance: the status of women, the role of marriage, the responsibilities of the monarch, the duties of citizens, the dangers of civil war, the ethics of foreign invasion. Whether we clothe the actors in modern dress or Elizabethan costume makes little difference; we cannot disguise the plays' contemporary applicability. After all, that is why we still perform them.

  Notes

  1 Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. Richard Harp (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001).

  2 R.A. Foakes, Illustrations of the English Stage 1580–1642 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 48.

  3 Gabriel Egan, “Theatre in London,” in Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin (eds.), Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 20–32 (p. 28).

  4 Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today (London: The Women's Press, 1988), p. 3.

  Myth 4

  Shakespeare was not interested in having his plays printed

  Enter any bookshop today and you will notice that Shakespeare has an entire section to himself. Every year editions of individual Shakespeare plays or of the Complete Works proliferate in a highly competitive (and lucrative) publishing market. Although, unlike a novelist, the dramatist's destination is performance not print, for today's dramatists publication is a highly desirable end-product, a confirmation of theatrical presence and literary prestige. The two are related: drama is literature. This was not yet the case in Shakespeare's England, although it may be that the period bears witness to the process whereby one was developing into the other. Thus, thinking about Shakespeare's plays in print involves thinking about literary identity, the concepts of career and canon, and what it meant to be an “author.” All these were new issues for anyone writing drama in the late sixteenth century.

  England did not have professional dramatists (or drama) before the sixteenth century. Medieval drama was amateur. The mysteries (the noun “mystery” means “trade”) were short biblical plays forming part of a long cycle, staged annually by trade guilds. (For a wonderful modern take on the medieval process, see Anthony Minghella's play, Two Planks and a Passion.) Non-biblical morality plays and interludes toured, but the players were not professionals as we understand the term. They were attached to a lord's household, and they toured when he did not need them; the tour both enhanced his cultural prestige and saved him their living expenses. But in-house entertainment was not always dependent on a resident company. In the early sixteenth century, Henry Medwall's play Fulgens and Lucres was performed as an after-dinner entertainment by members of Henry VIII's household at Hampton Court. The first secular comedies, the mid-century Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle, were written, respectively, for schoolboys and for university students to play.

  It was 1576 before London had its first purpose-built playhouse, The Theatre, built by James Burbage on the north side of the River Thames in Finsbury Fields, Shoreditch (today it's on the Islington–EC1 border). It was followed within a year by the Curtain Theatre, in the same location, and then, on the south side of the river, the Rose in Southwark, in 1587. With permanent playhouses came professional players, in large companies (a minimum of twelve, sometimes as many as twenty) under the nominal patronage of a lord: Worcester's Men, Derby's Men, Sussex's Men, the Chamberlain's Men. With daily performances (except during Lent or when plague closed the theaters) opportunities arose for writers to provide over forty different plays per year (this figure from Henslowe's Diary refers to the
period 27 December 1593 to 26 December 1594; see Myth 17). But the concept of the dramatist as a respectable profession was not yet in place. Marlowe was described as a “poet and a filthy playmaker”: playwriting has a disparaging adjective; poetry does not.

  The concept of the literary career, soi-disant, at this time was poetic, and often based on the model of the classical writer Virgil. Young men circulated poetry at court; it was read by their friends, not published. Or rather, it was published (made public: the literal meaning of “publish”) in manuscript circulation. This was true lower down the social scale too. Some of Shakespeare's sonnets were evidently in circulation by 1598 when Francis Meres praised Shakespeare as a new Ovid: “witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, &c.”1 Venus and Adonis and Lucrece were in print by this time, but the sonnets were not; Meres could only have known them in manuscript.

  Print complicated the question of “literature” because with it poetry entered the marketplace. Poetry was sullied by “filthy lucre,” by indiscriminate availability, by promiscuous circulation, by commodification. As an Elizabethan proverb has it: “Manuscript is a virgin, the printing press a whore.”2 The same negativity attached itself to drama as performed. Because the public paid to see it, it was a commercial transaction—worlds away from the private, gentlemanly world of court poetry. One version of the 1609 text of Troilus and Cressida carried a prefatory letter, probably by its publisher, promising “a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar”: that the play had not been performed (this is probably untrue, and the alternative version has on its title page “as it was acted by the Kings Majesties servants at the Globe”) is presented here as attractive to potential readers, who are implicitly distinguished from “vulgar” playgoers.

  Many Elizabethan poetry collections reached print posthumously, the author thereby innocent of self-promotion. Sir Philip Sidney died in 1586; his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella was published in 1591. Other collections reached print with prefatory material indicating the author's reluctance to publish, having eventually yielded to friends' entreaties. The title page of Thomas Watson's sonnet sequence Hekatompathia, published in 1582, tells us that the poems were “Composed by Thomas Watson Gentleman; and published at the request of certain gentlemen his very friends.” Others contained dedications and elaborate prefatory epistles, thus making the volume a tribute to an aristocrat, a gift to a patron, not a publishing enterprise. Shakespeare's first two published efforts were poems and they come into this last category: Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594) were both dedicated to the Earl of Southampton (see Myth 16). Neither title page identifies the author, but the dedicatory letters to the patron are signed “Your Honour's [Lucrece: Lordship's] in all duty, William Shakespeare.” So although the title pages are anonymous, the volumes are not.3

  When Shakespeare's plays reached print, they contained no authorial prefatory epistles. Prefatory epistles to drama were not typical but nor were they unusual. Webster wrote a prefatory letter to the White Devil (1612) in which he offers his views on tragedy and gives the history of this play's reception; Jonson wrote prefatory letters to Volpone (1606) and Catiline (1611), among others. Other kinds of pre-play matter indicate an author's involvement in the printing process or their attitude to it. John Marston dedicated his play The Malcontent to Ben Jonson; when Jonson published Sejanus in 1605, Marston contributed a prefatory poem to the edition; John Ford wrote commendatory verses for plays by Massinger, Webster, and others. Shakespeare's plays have nothing comparable. If Shakespeare had been interested in his plays reaching print, mightn't we expect to find him providing some critical commendations as he did with his poems or as other dramatists did with their plays?

  Not necessarily. The statistics tell an interesting story. Dedications preface only five of the plays printed between 1583 and 1602 (5 percent); between 1603 and 1622 the number rises to twenty-two plays (19 percent of printed drama); and between 1623 and 1642 it jumps to seventy-eight (58 percent).4 The figures are similar for other paratextual material—lists of characters, for instance. Drama was developing a printed identity—but slowly.

  This fledgling identity perhaps also explains the stuttering way in which title pages identify authors of plays. The first Shakespeare plays to reach print did not have his name on the title page. The selling point of a play was its theater company: the marketing point that promised success for a printed play was the stage on which it had already been successful. Titus Andronicus was published in 1594, followed by Richard II, Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet in 1597; none of these identifies Shakespeare as the author but all of them name the theater company that had performed the play. In 1598 a change creeps in. When Richard II and Richard III were reprinted that year, they advertised Shakespeare as the author; so too did the 1598 reprint of Love's Labour's Lost (the first edition has not survived) although its phrasing “newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare” is ambiguous about whether Shakespeare wrote the original or just revised it. But the introduction of Shakespeare's name on title pages is not consistent. In Shakespeare's lifetime there were thirty-nine editions of sixteen of his plays: only 66 percent of these editions say “Written by William Shakespeare” or “Newly corrected by …” or “Newly augmented by William Shakespeare.” The concept of the author was not yet a title-page requirement. Anonymity cannot be taken as reliable evidence of Shakespeare's lack of interest in publication any more than the absence of prefatory material can.

  Playwrights had little control over printing their plays. A dramatist who sold a play to a theater company had no subsequent rights over it. Authorial copyright is a development of the eighteenth century. Thus an Elizabethan playing company could do as it pleased with the text of plays that it owned. The issue is complicated by the fact that Shakespeare was a shareholder in the Globe. In this capacity, though not as a playwright, he would have shared in decisions the company made about buying and selling property (and a playbook was property).

  The issue of whether Shakespeare was interested in seeing his plays printed is further complicated by the existence of variant versions of some of Shakespeare's plays. When Romeo and Juliet was first printed in 1597 it was in a relatively short version (2,225 lines, just about feasibly “the two-hours' traffic of our stage,” Prologue 12); reprinted in 1599 the title page advertised it as “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended,” and it runs to over 3,000 lines. Similarly, the first published version of Hamlet (1603) is short (2,155 lines), blunt, and at times even ungrammatical; within a year, a longer, more philosophically poetic version with subtler characterization was printed. The title page advertised the new edition as “newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy,” and the figures bear this out (3,660 lines). The vocabulary of correction and enlargement suggests that someone in authority is replacing an unauthorized version—and this may reflect a Shakespeare concerned about damage to his literary reputation and hence keen to publish a creditable version.

  Figure 2 This lurid description of the events of the play gives away a lot about its plot, but doesn't mention an author.

  ©The British Library Board, Huth 47, title page.

  Trying to deduce the source of these “short” quartos has occupied critics for a century. Most agree that these versions indicate theater practice or intent. Stage directions choreograph the action: Nurse offers to goe in and turns again (Romeo and Juliet 1597, sig. G2r); Fryer stoopes and looks on the blood and weapons (Romeo and Juliet 1597, sig. K2r); Leartes leapes into the grave … Hamlet leapes in after Leartes (Hamlet 1603, sig. G1v). Did Shakespeare write a long version that the company cut down for performance? The argument against this is that it seems profligate for a writer regularly to write 3,000 lines if he knows a company will only play 2,000. Did Shakespeare write a short version for performance, then later expand it? Against this view comes the argument that some of the
short quartos are distinctly unpoetic, linguistically divorced from anything we would expect that a Shakespeare might write.

  However, Lukas Erne champions the idea of the longer versions as reading texts developed by Shakespeare from the shorter playing versions: Erne argues that the greater length, the subtler characterization, and the longer speeches are aimed not at a playhouse audience but at a reader, one who has the leisure to ponder.5 If so, this is evidence of a Shakespeare who wrote for the theater but was also interested in publication: interested enough to revise some of his plays for print.

  Although Erne's narrative fits the relative quality of short and long quartos (i.e. the differences between them), it does not fit the absolute quality of most play printing. Although short quarto versions are problematic, the longer quartos are far from perfect. Thus, Erne's theory obliges us to postulate a Shakespeare concerned enough with his reputation in print to want to present a fuller text but not so concerned as to oversee the quality of that replacement.