30 Great Myths about Shakespeare

by Laurie Maguire

  Let us turn to the concept of a canon. In 1616 Ben Jonson printed his collected works (plays, poems, court masques, entertainments) in a large folio volume. The notion of a collected canon including plays was not new: in 1570 Thomas Norton's Treatises included his collaborative play with Thomas Sackville, Gorboduc;6 in 1573 George Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundry Flowers included two plays.7 What was new was the format (folio was a form reserved for serious works such as the Bible) and the title: Works (“Pray tell me, Ben, where doth the mystery lurk, / What others call a play you call a work?” wrote one wit.) Despite such derision, the idea was attractive enough to prompt two of Shakespeare's actor-colleagues, John Heminge and Henry Condell, to collect Shakespeare's plays and publish his Folio in 1623 (the volume took two years to go through the press).

  The Folio collection of plays may have been Shakespeare's idea. In their letter addressed “To the great variety of readers,” Heminge and Condell wrote:

  It had been a thing we confess worthy to have been wished that the author himself had lived to have set forth, and overseen, his own writings. But since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he, by death, departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their care and pain to have collected and published them.

  Does this suggest that Shakespeare intended to “set forth” and “oversee” his own collected writings before he died? This could fit with what we know of Shakespeare's biography in his last years. Although he reduced his activities for the King's Men he does not seem to have severed his links with them (his purchase of the Blackfriars Gatehouse in 1610, his first purchase of London property, is not the action of a man who is retiring to Stratford). If, as we explore in Myth 20, Shakespeare is retiring from acting but not from writing in 1610, he may have done so to provide time for editing.

  One more consideration needs to be factored into our discussion. In 1612 Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Oxford library that bears his name, told his librarian to exclude plays because it was not fitting that so noble a library should house “idle books and riff-raffs … baggage books.” Eleven years later, the Bodleian acquired from the Stationers' Company a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio and sent it to an Oxford binder (books were mostly sold unbound). Perhaps attitudes to plays had changed; or perhaps a folio collection of plays was viewed differently from the “almanacs, plays and proclamations” printed in separate small-format editions that Bodley objected to.8 If so, Shakespeare may well have been interested in publishing his plays collectively while displaying no interest in individual volumes.

  This myth actually splits into several: Shakespeare was interested in publishing his plays; Shakespeare was interested in publishing his poems. But the drama component itself subdivides: Shakespeare wanted his plays printed individually; Shakespeare wanted a Complete Works. Shakespeare himself left us no evidence to adjudicate these matters.

  Notes

  1 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury (London, 1598), pp. 281–2 (sigs. 201v–202r).

  2 The Latin is “Est virgo haec penna, meretrix est stampificata,” quoted by Douglas Brooks in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 4.

  3 The letter to Southampton appears in the 1594 reprint of Venus and Adonis.

  4 Benedict Scott Robinson, “Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections,” Studies in English Literature, 42/2 (2002), pp. 361–80 (p. 366), citing Peter W.M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in John D. Cox and David S. Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 383–422.

  5 Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  6 Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 38.

  7 This edition was produced without Gascoigne's knowledge; he issued an authorized edition in 1575.

  8 Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, ed. G.W. Wheeler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), letters 220 and 221.

  Myth 5

  Shakespeare never traveled

  We know that Shakespeare did travel: while the journey from Stratford-upon-Avon (where he was born) to London (where he worked) is now a smooth couple of hours' travel by the M40, at the end of the sixteenth century it was a considerable trek. According to late-seventeenth-century folklore, Shakespeare traveled via Banbury, and met in Grendon Underwood in Buckinghamshire a malapropistic constable on whom he modeled Much Ado About Nothing's Dogberry.1 Another story had him traveling via Oxford, enjoying the hospitality of the Taverne (later named the Crown), where he met the infant William Davenant, who, according to later rumor reported by John Aubrey, claimed “that he wrote with the very spirit that Shakespeare [wrote], and seemed contented enough to be thought his son.”2 Neither the route—nor this myth of paternity—can be confirmed, but either journey would have been four or five days by foot: presumably as he became more prosperous, Shakespeare would have hired a horse, halving his journey time. We do not know how often he returned to Stratford from his playwriting base in London (see Myth 14).

  But when it is said that Shakespeare never traveled, it is usually meant that he did not travel outside England. There is, indeed, no evidence that he did, and, indeed, it is unlikely that he would have, since foreign travel required official permission. The other writers of his era who travelled in Europe tended to do so in a professional diplomatic or military capacity. We know from a Privy Council letter that as a Cambridge student Christopher Marlowe had “gone beyond the seas to Reames [Rheims],”3 probably on government service; Ben Jonson joined English expeditionary forces to the Low Countries in the early 1590s; and books by Thomas Coryate (Coryat's Crudities of 1611) and Fynes Moryson (An itinerary … containing his ten years' travel through the twelve dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Switzerland, Netherland, Denmark, Poland, Italy, Turkey, France, England, Scotland, and Ireland, published in three volumes in 1617) document their travels in Europe. Of course, that Shakespeare traveled to Europe is one of the suggestions that usefully fills in the so-called “lost years” between 1588 and c.1591, where no documentary evidence attests to his whereabouts or activities.

  If Shakespeare didn't travel outside England, the question might seem to be: how did he get his knowledge of, in particular, Italy—the setting for Romeo and Juliet, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Othello—and also of Illyria (modern-day Croatia and Slovenia) for Twelfth Night, Denmark for Hamlet, Sicily and Bohemia for The Winter's Tale, Ephesus (in the modern state of Turkey) for The Comedy of Errors, Vienna for Measure for Measure, Cyprus for Othello, and the Mediterranean for Pericles, not to mention the “uninhabited isle,” located in a place to which a voyage between Naples and Tunisia could be diverted, in The Tempest? We don't even know whether Shakespeare went to Windsor. But the answer, of course, to the question of how Shakespeare got his knowledge of these places is the same as the answer to a related puzzle—how did he “travel” to ancient Greece (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida), to ancient Rome (Julius Caesar, Coriolanus), to ancient Egypt (Antony and Cleopatra), ancient Britain (King Lear and Cymbeline), or to the England of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (the history plays from Richard II to Richard III)? Answer: he traveled through reading, conveyed by books. He didn't go to these places; he read about them.

  Nothing in Shakespeare's use of foreign locations requires more knowledge of these nominal settings than might be easily gained from reading, or than is part of a source story used by Shakespeare. Take Romeo and Juliet, for instance, and its relation to “fair Verona, where we lay our scene” (Prologue, 2). In the northern Italian city of Verona you can now find a popular tourist destination of “Juliet's house,” complete with balcony, making it look as if the events of the play might really have happened there, and as if Shakespeare might have learned about them from visiting. But the
tourist spot postdates Shakespeare's play, rather than predating it: it cashes in on the literary associations of Verona rather than prompting them. In 2009 the city council launched a project “marry me in Verona,” allowing couples to have their wedding on Juliet's balcony, apparently undeterred by the rather inauspicious precedent in the play.4 Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet in Verona because that is where Arthur Brooke set the poem that is the play's main source: The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, first published in 1562 and reissued in 1587; Brooke, in his turn, got the setting from his source, a novella by the Italian writer Matteo Bandello. Shakespeare has made many significant changes to Brooke's poem, particularly in its moral temper. Brooke's prefatory letter states that this is a didactic story of the consequences of disobedience to one's parents, youthful lusts, and undue reliance on “drunken gossips and superstitious [i.e. Catholic] friars.” The “evil man's mischief warneth men not to be evil”: it would be hard to emerge from Shakespeare's play on the side of the feuding parents. Shakespeare also adds the character of Mercutio, Romeo's witty friend whose death in Act 3 cursing “both your houses” seems to render the tragedy inevitable. But one thing Shakespeare does not change is the setting.

  The same is true for the sources for many of the other plays with Italian settings. Shakespeare took the Sicilian setting for Much Ado About Nothing from Bandello (although the Watch is his own invention); Fiorentino's Il Pecorone gave Shakespeare a plot about a Jewish moneylender in Venice; in Cinthio's Hecatommithi he found the story of a Moor of Venice who married Disdemona which became Othello.

  For the most part, the plays contain relatively scanty particularizing local details. The apparently knowing familiarity of Shylock's “What news on the Rialto?” (1.3.36), a reference to the business district of early modern Venice, must be set alongside the absence of any references to the city's ghetto for Jewish residents in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare does not seem to be well versed in Venetian locations or customs, nor is it necessary for the play that he is. We might compare Ben Jonson's contemporaneous rewrite of his own play, Every Man In His Humour: reworking its original location in Florence to London, scene of the popular contemporary city comedies, required only the most superficial of changes, and, were Shakespeare to have relocated his plays, we might anticipate similarly minor reworkings. Often, Shakespeare's places seem barely or only intermittently disguised versions of more familiar locations. Despite being set on the Adriatic coast, Twelfth Night, for example, has the distinctly English-sounding Sir Toby Belch mentioning “the bed of Ware,” a contemporary four-poster bed famed for its huge size (his afterthought “in England” [3.2.45–6] leans on the knowingness of the London audience, just as they would have enjoyed the jokes about England being full of madmen in the ostensibly Danish environs of Elsinore at the end of Hamlet). The name of the inn at which Antonio and Sebastian are staying, the Elephant in the “south suburbs” (Twelfth Night 3.3.39) must have recalled the Bankside tavern of the same name (see Myth 14). Dogberry and his band of watchmen in Much Ado About Nothing parody English, not Sicilian, constables.

  Although Shakespeare never sets a play in contemporary England except, perhaps, the provincial comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, we might argue that none of his plays has a clearly foreign setting. Just as his temporal anachronisms give the plays a timeless air—the ancient Romans are ruled by a clock striking (Julius Caesar 2.1), or Cleopatra whiles away the time playing billiards (see Myth 3)—so this geographical vagueness means their settings can stand for the familiar world of early modern London. Shakespeare sees these settings in terms of his own location. Some settings are deliberately ambiguous: is the forest in As You Like It the French Ardenne, as in Shakespeare's pastoral source story, Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (1590), or is it the more immediate forest of Arden in Warwickshire? At times Shakespeare's depiction of the forest seems to emphasize its Englishness: the exiled Duke is a kind of Robin Hood, surrounded by a rustic band of merry men, and Audrey, William, and Sir Oliver Martext, the unnecessary priest, seem distinctly English. But Orlando “is the stubbornest young fellow of France” (1.1.133–4), Jaques and Le Beau have French names, and when the forest produces a “green and gilded snake,” escalating to “a lioness, with udders all drawn dry” (4.3.109, 115) and reaching a fantastical climax with the appearance of Hymen, goddess of marriage, its location becomes a composite no-place of wonder and make-believe, rather than a real place one might travel to.

  We can see this, perhaps, in the subsequent stage history of some of his plays. Illyria, for instance, the setting for Viola's adventures in Twelfth Night, has been variously imagined by directors and designers. In Regent's Park in 1973, Robert Lang used an eighteenth-century Venetian setting to stress the commedia dell'arte characteristics of the comic plot; the BBC television film (directed by David Giles, 1974) used Castle Howard, a Baroque country house designed by John Vanbrugh, to bring out the wealth and luxury of the households. Terry Hands' wintery setting at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979 reminded one reviewer of “a deserted Parisian square with a blurred, watery full moon above”; the following year for television the inspiration was Dutch Old Masters, with Sir Toby dressed to recall Rembrandt portraits. Director John Caird chose a “romantic craggy Athenian coast” dominated by a single venerable tree: one reviewer designated this Illyria “a Neverland for a Duke who declines to grow up,” suggesting a parallel with Alain-Fournier's Lost Domain (in the classic French novel Le Grand Meaulnes, first published in 1913) and expanding, “Illyria is in each of us.” For Nancy Meckler's production at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester (1984) Dermot Hayes' set suggested a decaying Elizabethan playhouse, complete with rotting galleries and warped woodwork. “A dinky Greek island setting of sun-baked white walls … suitable for holiday madness and sexual escapade” was the Illyria of Bill Alexander's 1987 RSC production; the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, imagined “a lazy decadent Illyria in the last days of the British raj”; for John Godber's Hull Truck Theatre Company, Illyria was set in a cloistered academic world (1989); Pip Broughton washed up her Viola on “a shore fringed with banana palms” (Birmingham Rep, 1989); one reviewer was not impressed by Orsino's court as “a mixture of H.M.S. Pinafore and the Ruritanian Navy circa 1900”; at Stratford in 1994 Ian Judge pictured Illyria as an echo of Shakespeare's own Stratford; Propeller played Illyria as “a purgatorial limbo where the characters are garbed in funereal black” (1999); one Washington, DC, production directed by Douglas C. Wager had a “gorgeous decayed Greco-Roman temple site, with crumbled ionic columns and fallen monumental statuary” and another had “snow falling gently” on a “warped hilly landscape set about with pianos in various states of collapse”; at the Colorado Shakespeare festival in 2000, the word “Illyria” glowed in red neon light in a 1930s Hollywood design.5 This sampling of various directorial interpretations indicates that the setting of Twelfth Night is ultimately a fiction and that the play can be located in whatever setting, realistic or expressionistic, that best brings out its director's view of its themes and characters.

  When Shakespeare does change the settings for his plays he occasionally betrays geographical ignorance. Ben Jonson was the first to complain of the fallacy in The Winter's Tale where the landlocked Bohemia is given a coast, but this is in part due to the fact that Shakespeare has chosen to swap the two locations from his source, Robert Greene's prose romance Pandosto, or the Triumph of Time (1588). Greene sets the court of the jealous and tyrannical king (Shakespeare's Leontes) in Bohemia and the pastoral escape of Perdita in Sicily, but, probably for political rather than topographical reasons, Shakespeare switches them: King James had strong political connections with the Protestant court of Emperor Rudolf II in Bohemia. Jonathan Bate suggests that it would have been “politic” to switch the monarchs and make the Catholic, Sicilian king the one marked as “irrational, cruel, and blasphemous” (although Polixenes, King of Bohemia, is not saintly either).6 In changing the location of the action of The Comedy of Errors from E
pidamnus, as in Plautus's Menaechmi, to Ephesus, Shakespeare activates a set of biblical associations with Paul's epistle to the Ephesians, and in particular its strictures on marriage, as well as the magical associations of Ephesus. Again, Ephesus is a literary source derived from reading rather than a geographical one derived from traveling.

  What has been at the root of this question about Shakespeare is not really the nature of his geographical realism or otherwise. Rather, it has become a bone of contention in the “authorship question” (see Myth 30). Anti-Stratfordians have often claimed that Shakespeare's plays require direct knowledge of foreign locations, and that, since there is no evidence that Shakespeare had such experience, it is more likely that an alternative candidate who traveled in Europe wrote the plays. That Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, traveled as a young man in the 1570s is often cited as crucial to his claims to authorship of the Shakespeare canon; more difficult to explain is how he achieved this with his negligible poetic skill. If Shakespeare's career suggests it is possible to write great plays set in foreign locations without traveling, then Oxford's gives us the corroborating suggestion: the experience of travel does not necessarily lead to great writing.

  Notes

  1 Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 118–19.

  2 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Richard Barber (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1982), p. 90.

  3 See Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), p. 92.