30 Great Myths about Shakespeare

by Laurie Maguire

  Nor did he ally himself with the dominant comic genre of the late 1590s and early seventeenth century—city (London) comedy. City comedy is a branch of satire caricaturing the foibles and eccentricities of London's middle-class citizens; London is obviously an essential ingredient in this genre. The prologue to Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour (1598) proclaims: “Our scene is London, 'cause we would make known, / No country's mirth is better than our own.” William Haughton's Englishmen for my Money (1598) relies on the audience's detailed knowledge of London topography and landmarks. The plot concerns three daughters who are wooed by three foreign and three London suitors; the London suitors trick the foreigners by giving them directions which take them in the opposite direction from that which they requested. Full of meaningful geographical references, the play is a veritable Elizabethan A–Z (a modern edition provides a map to enable non-Londoners to follow the plot). The closest Shakespeare came to writing in this satiric city genre is Merry Wives of Windsor, a city comedy of c.1597 in which Falstaff is tricked by the merry wives of the title. But the play is set in Windsor—hardly the typical city location of the genre. Shakespeare was not a London playwright.

  In another sense, of course, he was. All his plays were performed in London; arguably, they are all also set in London. He may call the city Venice or Padua or Rome (republican or imperial) but the coloring is recognizably English. When shipwrecked in Illyria (modern Croatia), Twelfth Night's Antonio recommends that Sebastian lodge “in the south suburbs at the Elephant” (3.3.39). Southwark (London's south suburbs) did indeed have an inn called the Elephant, at the end of Horseshoe Lane. This allusion may be more than just a local reference, constituting what we would now call “product placement”: Antonio actually says “In the south suburbs, at the Elephant, / Is best to lodge” (3.3.39–40, our italics) and when Sebastian leaves him, Antonio reminds him: “To th'Elephant”; Sebastian reassures him, “I do remember” (3.3.48). The reminiscences of Falstaff and Justice Shallow in the English world of 2 Henry IV naturally include London landmarks (the Inns of Court, Turnbull Street, the Tilt-yard) but they also include a known Southwark tavern (or brothel): “the Windmill in Saint George's Field” (3.2.192). The penthouse (lean-to roof projecting from a building) under which Borachio and Conrade converse in Much Ado About Nothing is both Italian and recognizably English, and they shelter for a familiar English reason: “it drizzles rain” (3.3.101).

  Shakespeare lodged in London. For four years (between approximately 1592 and 1596) his parish church was St Helen's Bishopsgate (the church is beautifully intact, having escaped both the Great Fire of London and the Blitz, although it was partially damaged—and then restored—by an IRA bomb in 1992). Shakespeare performed on stage in London; he rented rooms in Bishopsgate, in Southwark, and in St Giles Cripplegate; eventually he bought a house in London, just three years before he died, in 1613. But there are hardly any walking tours of Shakespeare's London; no advertising of St Helen's as Shakespeare's church. Shakespeare has become for us a Stratford playwright, as Cole Porter's lyrics to “Brush up Your Shakespeare” attest:

  But the poet of them all

  Who will start 'em simply ravin'

  Is the poet people call

  The bard of Stratford-on-Avon.

  Part of the attraction of Stratford (see titles such as The Man From Stratford) is the romantic story of small-town boy makes good in the big city. It is Dick Whittington, a version of the rags-to-riches story. Someone who went to Westminster School or was taught by William Camden ought to be successful, it is thought (this was Ben Jonson's pedigree). (Of course, that Shakespeare's grammar-school education was equivalent is testimony to the pedagogical vision of the sixteenth-century humanists; see Myth 2.) But while it is true to say that Shakespeare was and remained a Stratford man, we ought perhaps to separate Stratford man from Stratford playwright (“the bard of Stratford-on-Avon”). Shakespeare's plays are as neutral geographically (Stratford/London) as they are in terms of religion (Protestant/Catholic) or politics (conservative/radical).

  There is no doubt that Shakespeare the actor in London was the same person as the man from Stratford. In fact, as we saw in Myth 2, there is nothing in Shakespeare's plays that cannot be attributed to an author who simply had very close powers of observation. As we discuss in Myth 16, one of the reasons we have very little sense of Shakespeare's personality (unlike that, say, of the flamboyant, iconoclastic, irascible Marlowe) is that Shakespeare seems to have been the kind of person who sat in the corner and watched people.

  And he watched people in both Stratford and in London.

  Notes

  1 For a history of the town's festival attempts from Garrick's bicentenary celebration onwards, see ‘The Borough of Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespearean Festivals and Theatres’, in A History of the County of Warwick, vol. 3: Barlichway Hundred, ed. Philip Styles (1945), pp. 244–7; http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=57017 (accessed 10 July 2012).

  2 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. xciii.

  Myth 15

  Shakespeare was a plagiarist

  The first recorded reference to Shakespeare as a writer is in a pamphlet called Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (it purports to be by Robert Greene but many scholars now believe Henry Chettle actually wrote it): “there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”1 The tiger's heart alludes to the line in 3 Henry VI when the captured York replies to the taunting Queen Margaret that she is “a tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide” (titled Richard Duke of York in the Oxford Shakespeare, following its initial publication title in 1595; 1.4.138). Like all the documentary allusions to Shakespeare, this one has been pored over and subjected to a range of interpretations, but one idea in particular has stuck: it is often assumed that the author of the pamphlet is accusing Shakespeare, like a crow who has the power to mimic but not invent, “beautified with our feathers,” of something like plagiarism.

  The charge is a difficult one to discuss, not least because ideas of plagiarism and literary property have undergone such a sea-change since Shakespeare's time. Whereas we might now identify “originality” as a compelling literary feature, Renaissance writers learned the importance of imitatio—the copying of fine examples from classical and modern sources. Seneca advised the writer to consider “the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey,” and although ancient apian knowledge was not sufficiently advanced to understand quite how pollen was converted to honey, this process of “transformation” was nevertheless cited as exemplary.2 As Ben Jonson put it, appropriately, drawing on Seneca, the poet must “be able to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use … Not as a creature that swallows what it takes in crude, raw, or indigested, but that feeds with an appetite, and hath a stomach to concoct, divide, and turn all into nourishment”: “observe how the best writers have imitated, and follow them.”3

  Jonson's metaphor of imitation as nourishment—the ingestion and transformation of nutritional material—suggests that imitatio is not mechanical but organic, creative rather than repetitive—in short, it is far from the unthinking attempt to pass off others' work as your own that marks the modern concept of plagiarism. T.S. Eliot, writing of Shakespeare's near-contemporary Philip Massinger in The Sacred Wood, puts it more quotably: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”4

  Let's look, then, at Shakespeare's transformative use of his sources. There are some books of source material that Shakespeare clearly must have had open on his writing desk as he worked on the relevant play: Raphael Holinshed's book of E
nglish history, his Chronicles, for the English history plays, for instance. If we look at the long description of the Salic law, the arcane genealogy barring women from ruling in France adduced by the wily Archbishop of Canterbury to persuade the young King Henry V to war, for instance, we can see that Shakespeare reproduces errors of arithmetic and of history verbatim from his source.5 In Titus Andronicus the source—Ovid's Metamorphoses—is brought on stage: in this play playwright and characters alike know their Ovid. In Pericles, the author of Shakespeare's source, the medieval poet John Gower, becomes a chorus to the action. A more famous example comes from Antony and Cleopatra, where the description by the usually laconic Roman soldier Enobarbus of the Egyptian queen is taken directly from Shakespeare's source, Sir Thomas North's translation of the historian Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. On page 981, Shakespeare found North's description; we have placed Shakespeare's reworking below it so you can decide for yourself whether his borrowing here is plagiarism:

  Therefore when she was sent unto by divers letters, both from Antonius himself, and also from his friends, she made so light of it, and mocked Antonius so much, that she disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, hautboys, citherns, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of her self: she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus, commonly drawn in picture: and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. Her Ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the nymphs Nereides (which are the mermaids of the waters) and like the Graces, some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge, out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweet savour of perfumes, that perfumed the wharfside, pestered with innumerable multitudes of people. Some of them followed the barge all alongst the rivers side: others also ran out of the city to see her coming in. So that in the end, there ran such multitudes of people one after another to see her, that Antonius was left post alone in the market place, in his Imperial seat to give audience: and there went a rumour in the peoples' mouths, that the goddess Venus was come to play with the god Bacchus, for the general good of all Asia.

  Maecenas: She's a most triumphant lady, if report be square to her.

  Enobarbus: When she first met Mark Antony, she pursed up his heart upon the river of Cydnus.

  Agrippa: There she appeared indeed, or my reporter devised well for her.

  Enobarbus: I will tell you.

  The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne

  Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;

  Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that

  The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver,

  Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

  The water which they beat to follow faster,

  As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,

  It beggared all description. She did lie

  In her pavilion—cloth of gold, of tissue –

  O'er-picturing that Venus where we see

  The fancy outwork nature. On each side her

  Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,

  With divers-coloured fans whose wind did seem

  To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,

  And what they undid did.

  Agrippa: O, rare for Antony!

  Enobarbus: Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,

  So many mermaids, tended her i'th'eyes,

  And made their bends adornings. At the helm

  A seeming mermaid steers. The silken tackle

  Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands

  That yarely frame the office. From the barge

  A strange invisible perfume hits the sense

  Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast

  Her people out upon her, and Antony,

  Enthroned i'th' market-place, did sit alone,

  Whistling to th'air, which but for vacancy,

  Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,

  And made a gap in nature.

  (2.2.191–225)

  The similarities are easy to see here, but so too are the differences: in particular, Shakespeare's version of the scene draws out its eroticism and sensuality. The winds are “love-sick,” the water “amorous,” the tackle is “silken,” hands are “flower-soft,” and where Plutarch busies the scene with props, Shakespeare's focus is on Cleopatra as its animating deity. And there is a crucial difference between the scene in prose and in verse. We see in Shakespeare's writing a metrical equivalence to the excesses of the scene: form and content are inseparable. A number of his lines end in an additional, unstressed syllable, known at the time, appropriately, as a “feminine ending” (see Myth 11)—“vacancy,” “tackle”—and some lines have a complete extra foot. “The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver” and “As amorous of her strokes. For her own person” are both hexameters, standing out from the more usual pentameter rhythm. Put less technically, they are longer, spilling over, depicting in their form the impossibility of conveying the description of a Cleopatra who “beggared all description.” Shakespeare hasn't just cut-and-shut Plutarch: he has created a version of Cleopatra in which the verse form itself contributes to the scene's excesses. He has also transformed a simile in Plutarch with spectacular effect. When Plutarch compares Cleopatra to Venus, it is a straightforward image of equivalence: “attired like the goddess Venus.” In Shakespeare it becomes multi-layered. Cleopatra “o'er-pictur[es] [goes beyond] that Venus [a specific Venus: a painting] where we see / The fancy [imagination] outwork [go beyond] nature”; Cleopatra outdoes that famous painting of Venus in which the artist outdoes nature. The sequence is dizzying: Nature→Venus→Art→Cleopatra. (Tom Stoppard took the joke one step further in Arcadia [1993] when the tutor, Septimus Hodge, tells his pupil to put some passion in her translation of Plutarch's Cleopatra and shows her how—by passing off Shakespeare's version of this speech as his own improvised poetic translation.)

  This Plutarch passage is an exception, and more often a look at Shakespeare's plays alongside their sources reveals how he has radically reshaped them. The opening of King Lear transforms the old play King Leir that was one of Shakespeare's sources: instead of beginning with the newly widowed king worried for his daughters without a mother's care and wearied with grief of the cares of state, Shakespeare creates an air of uncertainty about his king's behavior. Opening with an oblique look from Gloucester and Kent which also establishes the interplay between the story of Gloucester's sons and Lear's daughters, Shakespeare moves to the love-test without any real explanation: like Cordelia we are uncertain what is being requested and why. More dramatically, though, Shakespeare has transformed the ending of his play from the outcome of the story in his sources. The story of Lear has its antecedents in Holinshed's history, as well as in more distant folkloric stories of the Cinderella type (Goneril and Regan as the Ugly Sisters?), in other texts of the period by Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, and even, perhaps, in the contemporary court gossip around the elderly Sir Brian Annesley, whose elder daughter was attempting to have him declared insane (and thus to sequester his property), against the will of his loyal younger daughter, suggestively named Cordell. In all of these stories, though, Cordelia survives her father to become queen after him. Shakespeare's twist to a well-known story gives the play its bleak punch: the expectations of the audience, fanned by the joyous reunion of father and daughter in Act 4, are cruelly dashed. Dr Johnson famously professed himself “so shocked by Cordelia's death” that he was unwilling to reread the play's conclusion, but he does not seem to have wanted to believe that his outrage at a play “in which the wicked prosper,
and the virtuous miscarry” was entirely Shakespeare's design.6

  Sometimes Shakespeare's changes to his source are small but revealing details. In the pastoral romance from which he took As You Like It, it is a lion who menaces the sleeping Orlando. For his play in which Rosalind so dominates her suitor, Shakespeare's change to a “lioness, with udders all drawn dry” (4.3.115) seems telling. In the sources for Othello the couple made by Shakespeare into Iago and Emilia have a little daughter, who unwittingly distracts Desdemona while her father takes the fateful handkerchief. It adds to the sterility of the passions of the play that Shakespeare has removed this humanizing aspect, leaving Iago's own generative impulses directed towards the perverse “child” of his plot against Othello: “I ha't. It is ingendered. Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light” (1.3.395–6). Shakespeare's Hamlet is even more psychically overshadowed by his father than his source story equivalents: only in this play do the haunted prince and ghostly father share a name (echoed in the two Fortinbras). Shakespeare characterizes the formidable mother Volumnia in Coriolanus, the zany Mercutio of Romeo and Juliet, fat Falstaff in 1 and 2 Henry IV, and the charismatic bastard Philip Faulconbridge in King John, either from minimal details in his source material or entirely from his own imagination. At other times, the ghostly shape of the source is still incipient in Shakespeare's own drama. The tragi-comic or “problem play” structure of Measure for Measure, for instance, may owe something to the influence of George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra (1582), a two-part play in which the first part corresponds to a tragedy and the second to a comedy. Part of the difficulty in the multiple reunions at the end of The Winter's Tale may be the dark shadow of Robert Greene's Pandosto, in which the eponymous Leontes-figure falls in love with his long-lost daughter and commits suicide in shame and remorse for his transgressive desire. Oh, and Greene doesn't bring Hermione back to life either.