30 Great Myths about Shakespeare

by Laurie Maguire

2 Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as a Stage (London: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 7.

  3 Colin Burrow, “Who Wouldn't Buy It?,” review of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, London Review of Books, 20 January 2005.

  4 Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), ch. 3, citing David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 74.

  5 Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life, Arden (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), p. 91; Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare, p. 59.

  6 Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare, p. 48.

  7 Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Co. (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 129.

  8 William Urry, Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 28; Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus: The A-Text, ed. Roma Gill, New Mermaids (London: A. & C. Black, 1989), p. 2, quoting Urry, “Marlowe and Canterbury,” Times Literary Supplement, 13 February 1964.

  9 The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J.B. Leishman (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1949).

  10 Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare, pp. 235–6.

  11 Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare, p. 109.

  12 Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare, p. 404.

  13 Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett, Arden (London: A. & C. Black, 2011).

  14 Peter Whelan, The School of Night (London: Warner Chappell Plays, 1992), pp. 57–8.

  Myth 17

  Shakespeare wrote alone

  We tend to see genius as a solitary art: the writer alone in a garret. Shakespeare in Love shows Shakespeare at various stages of writer's block—practicing his signature, speaking to his therapist, making a false start (Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter)—before covering page after page in a love-inspired white-hot creative frenzy. Whether in success or in failure, the writer writes (or fails to write) alone. The paradigm certainly holds true in other art forms such as music. We cannot imagine Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as composed by “Beethoven and his collaborator and his revisers.” (Our phrasing comes from the Revels edition of Dr Faustus, edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, whose title page advertises the multiple hands in “Marlowe”'s play.) Mozart's Requiem is still so called despite our knowledge that it was unfinished at Mozart's death and that much—perhaps the larger part—was contributed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr.

  But if genius is solitary, theater is by definition collaborative. It requires the input and coordination of many groups of people: actors, costume designers, and musicians (to name but three). These are the collaborative partners (or at least, some of them) at point of production. What were the circumstances at point of composition?

  The Elizabethan theater impresario Philip Henslowe regularly records payments to teams of writers. Extant manuscript plays often show more than one hand. The most famous is Sir Thomas More, which has five authors/revisers (one of the revisers was Shakespeare). When Thomas Middleton and Samuel Rowley co-authored The Changeling (1622), Rowley wrote the comic subplot, Middleton the tragic main plot. When Robert Daborne was behind on a commission for Philip Henslowe in 1613, he subcontracted an act to speed things up. Clearly, there were many models of collaboration in the Elizabethan theater.

  But if it is clear that collaboration was not unusual, it is equally clear that many authors wrote alone, and preferred to write alone. Anthony Burgess plays on this in Enderby's Dark Lady when he depicts the Jacobean writing duo, Beaumont and Fletcher, who not only shared a study but, it was reported, a mistress. Burgess's Shakespeare enters a tavern and sits down “not far from Beaumont and Fletcher with their one doxy who, being born under the sign of Libra, was fain to bestow kisses and clips equally on both.” Beaumont hails Shakespeare:

  “Master Shakespeare,” said Frank Beaumont timidly, “there is a matter we would talk of, to wit a collaboration betwixt you and us here.”

  “She hath enough to do fumbling two let alone three.”

  Burgess's Shakespeare shuns collaboration of any kind, but the evidence tells a different story.

  The bulk of Shakespeare's work is single-authored in all genres: comedies, histories and tragedies. Of the thirty-eight plays in the Shakespeare canon, only six are accepted to be collaborations: 1 Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and All Is True (Henry VIII). (The figure rises to eight if we include 2 and 3 Henry VI, about which there is no consensus.) For comparison: almost half of Thomas Middleton's canon is collaborative; over 50 percent of Elizabethan plays were collaborative.1

  We have long known that Shakespeare collaborated late in his career. In 1634 The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play not included in the 1623 Folio, was published with two names on the title page: “Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. William Shakspeare, gentlemen.” Both authors were dead by 1634 (Fletcher had died in 1625, Shakespeare in 1616); the title page describes them as “the memorable Worthies of their time.” Fletcher had been one of the King's Men's most successful dramatists for two decades, and his plays continued to be printed and reprinted. Between 1620 and 1634 there were ten editions of six of his plays, including Two Noble Kinsmen. 1634 saw the publication not only of Two Noble Kinsmen but of Fletcher's single-authored The Faithful Shepherdess; the following year saw two more Fletcher titles reach print for the first time. Thus Fletcher's name alone was a guaranteed selling point in 1634. There could only be one reason to put Shakespeare's name on the title page of Two Noble Kinsmen and that is that he was indeed a co-author.

  One of the ways we can identify shares in collaborative works is by authors' linguistic fingerprints: verbal tics that work at a subconscious level. So, for instance, Fletcher prefers the elided pronominal form “'em”; Shakespeare prefers “them.” In Two Noble Kinsmen scenes with these different forms are fairly clearly demarcated. But some scenes have both forms. The collaborators obviously read each other's scenes and contributed to them.

  Two Noble Kinsmen was written in 1613. The partnership was successful: Fletcher and Shakespeare worked together again the same year on All Is True (Henry VIII) and Cardenio (now lost). Although Shakespeare had begun his late romances collaboratively, writing Pericles (1607) with George Wilkins,2 the partnership with Wilkins was not repeated. And the collaboration worked differently: Shakespeare seems to have been responsible for Acts 3–5 of Pericles, with Wilkins writing the first two acts.

  Let us go back to the start of Shakespeare's career since it has some points of contact with the collaborative method with Wilkins. Critics have long suspected a different hand in Act 1 of 1 Henry VI and in Act 1 of Titus Andronicus. Identifying the hand(s) has been difficult. The favored candidate for Titus is George Peele. The issue of collaboration in 1 Henry VI is complicated by where one places it chronologically in the sequence now known as 1–3 Henry VI. Many critics believe 1 Henry VI to have been written after 3 Henry VI, as a prequel: having written a two-part sequence about York and Lancaster, Shakespeare came across a play (by Peele? by Nashe?) and adapted it. However, this theory does not take adequate account of the linguistic simplicity (even inferiority) of 1 Henry VI in comparison to the other Henry VI plays. 1 Henry VI is one of the easiest Shakespeare plays to read. One line equals one thought; there are no complicated syntactical structures or images or ideas. It is hard to see this as the work of someone who had just written 3 Henry VI and was about to write Richard III.

  The dates of these plays are pertinent (late 1580s or early 1590s for 1 Henry VI, early 1590s for Titus): they are not just early in Shakespeare's career but early in the life of the professional Elizabethan theater. There are good practical reasons for collaboration. It is speedy. Two are better than one; three or four may be better still. The newly professional theater needed new plays. Between 27 December 1593 and 26 December 1594 Philip Henslowe's Diary records 206 performances of forty-one different titles; if his marginal “ne” means “new,” then fifteen of these were brand new plays. Dramati
st Robert Daborne outsourced when he needed to meet a deadline. So too do Burgess's fictional Beaumont and Fletcher. Beaumont corrects Shakespeare's sexual (mis)interpretation of his proposed collaboration: “I mean with Jack here and myself. A comedy called Out on You Mistress Minx which must be ready for rehearsing some two days from now and not yet started though the money taken.” A second practical consideration applies: collaboration worked as a kind of apprentice system in which inexperienced dramatists learned from—by working with—others. In 1612–13, Shakespeare may have been training his successor (John Fletcher became the King's Men's “attached” (i.e. contracted) dramatist after Shakespeare).

  What about the middle of Shakespeare's career? In 1607 he collaborated with Thomas Middleton on the satire Timon of Athens. The play may be unfinished (it contains loose ends) although it is certainly stageable. (Middleton later adapted Macbeth and Measure for Measure after Shakespeare's death; see Myth 24.) We are just beginning to explore the extent of the working relationship between Middleton and Shakespeare at this period. Middleton's city comedy, A Mad World My Masters (1607), written immediately before Timon, has as one of its central characters an over-hospitable knight by the name of Sir Bounteous Prodigal. Given that Timon is a tragic Sir Bounteous Prodigal, it may be that the collaborative Timon of Athens was actually initiated by Middleton as a generically logical next step, following on from his exploration of prodigality in comic form.3 We have recently offered evidence to suggest that Middleton was a co-author with Shakespeare on the comedy, All's Well That Ends Well (c.1607). Critics have long noted oddities in the first printed text of this play (the Folio of 1623)—variations in how characters are designated in speech prefixes, in stage directions, and in dialogue; curiously narrative stage directions that promise dialogue that does not then occur; an un-Shakespearean urban grittiness of tone, and so on. Many of the play's textual, tonal, and stylistic features match up with the known preferences and habits of Thomas Middleton; they are particularly concentrated in certain scenes—the comic subplot with Paroles, for instance—but they feature in some of the Helen scenes too.4 So we need to modify the conventional story about co-authorship in Shakespeare's career, a story in which he collaborated, briefly but successfully, at the beginning and then, more regularly, at the end of his career but not successfully or regularly in the middle. It now looks like collaboration was a palatable and practical activity for him throughout, successful enough for him to want to work with two authors (Middleton and Fletcher) again.

  So far we have been considering jointly authored plays. But there is another kind of collaboration in which an author contributes a speech or a scene or a short sequence to another's play. This is the case in the manuscript of John of Bordeaux, a sequel to Robert Greene's popular comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589) where Henry Chettle wrote one speech (a large blank space was left for the purpose). It is the case in the anonymous history play Edward III, for which Shakespeare wrote the Countess of Salisbury scenes (in about 1596). It is the case for Sir Thomas More where Shakespeare added speeches in which More addresses and calms the rioters. This is an especially interesting case and it is worth pausing over it.

  Sir Thomas More dramatizes two key events of recent history: the “evil May Day” riots of 1517, and More's refusal to subscribe to Henry VIII's divorce articles in 1532 (conflated in the play with his refusal to subscribe to the Act of Succession in 1534). The play links the two by having More talk the rioters into obedience in the first half while himself refusing obedience to his king in the second half. The manuscript of the play contains seven hands: five authors/revisers, a scribe, and the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, who censored the play so severely that many critics believe it was abandoned. At some later stage the play was revised. The questions that have always dogged criticism of the play are: Why would you write it at all given that it dramatizes material that could not be openly discussed in the sixteenth century? When was the play written? Why would Munday, one of the authors, a rabid anti-Catholic, write a play sympathetic to a Catholic martyr? Were the revisions made immediately following Tilney's censorial prescriptions, or later? Who are the seven hands and five authors?

  John Jowett's magisterial Arden edition (2011) steers a clear line through these questions.5 The original play was written by Munday and Chettle, censored by Tilney, and an unknown playhouse scribe coordinated revisions by Chettle and three additional authors: Dekker, Heywood, and Shakespeare. Jowett places the play's composition in the late Elizabethan period, c.1600 (plays about Henry VIII's reign were coming into companies' repertoires then) and the revision in 1603–4. Jowett feels “more secure” in his suggested date for the revision than in that for the original composition. His date of 1603/4 supports the new perspective on Shakespeare as collaborator. Instead of confining collaboration to the start and end of his career, we now have a scenario in which he is writing with and for others in the middle. (It was a contractual obligation to “patch” other men's plays or provide new prologues and epilogues. In 1602 Ben Jonson was paid for additions to Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, although the case has been made that Shakespeare is the author of the published additions.6 In the same year Samuel Bird and William Rowley were paid for additions to Marlowe's Dr Faustus.)

  The deployment of so many hands is usually a sign that a revised text was urgently needed (especially given that the revisers worked simultaneously, not sequentially, as the manuscript shows). Jowett's dating of the revisions at the start of James's reign might help us supply the occasion. One of the perplexing questions about Shakespeare's career is: why did he not write city pageants (see Myth 14)? Lord Mayor's annual processions (and, in 1604, James's coronation festivities) were occasions when the city brought out its heavy hitters. Munday, Middleton, Jonson, Heywood, Dekker, and Peele were all commissioned to write pageants for the city. Why not Shakespeare? Shakespeare knew all these writers and worked with some of them at various stages in different ways (he acted in Jonson's plays, for instance, and collaborated with Peele on Titus). The revision of More in a hurry in 1603/4 may have been related to some London event.

  Jowett's dating argument about Shakespeare's addition to More c.1604, plus our suggestion about the collaborative nature of All's Well c.1607, dislodges many of our assumptions about Shakespeare's mid-career: we have known that he worked collaboratively but not at that time or in that way. Perhaps we can extend the field of consideration. Giorgio Melchiori sees a court connection in Merry Wives of Windsor (1597). He argues that this was not just a play performed at court, as many of Shakespeare's plays were, but a play developed from a court masque that Shakespeare wrote specially for the second Lord Hunsdon (Shakespeare revised the masque into a longer version of the Herne's Oak scene, printed subsequently in the 1623 Folio).7 Like Jowett's edition of Sir Thomas More, Melchiori's edition of Merry Wives opens the door for us to think about other kinds of writing that Shakespeare was involved in. Together these editions expand our concept of the social circumstances, in the city and at court, in which Shakespeare was writing and being commissioned to write.

  Notes

  1 Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Co. (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 248 n. 40, citing Eric Rasmussen, “Collaboration,” in Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  2 For an account of this insalubrious character see Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (London: Penguin, 2008).

  3 See Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, “‘Time's Comic Sparks’: The Dramaturgy of A Mad World My Masters and Timon of Athens,” in Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 181–95.

  4 Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, “Many Hands—A New Shakespeare Collaboration?”, Times Literary Supplement, 20 April 2012, pp. 13–15.

  5 Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett, Arden (London: A. & C. Black, 2011).

  6 Brian Vickers surveys a numbe
r of important new studies on Shakespeare's authorship in his “Shakespeare and Authorship Studies in the Twenty-First Century,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 62 (2011), pp. 106–42.

  7 The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgio Melchiori, Arden (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 2000).

  Myth 18

  Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical

  Are Shakespeare's sonnets autobiographical? The short answer is: undoubtedly, some of them are; some of them are not; and some of the latter have the appearance (or are designed to have the appearance) of the former.

  Sonnet 145 has a strong claim to be autobiographical or self-referential. It turns (quite literally) on a pun on hate away/Hathaway and is often thought to be a love poem written early in Shakespeare's career to his bride-to-be Anne Hathaway (see Myth 10). For twelve lines the poet documents the lady's hatred; then in the concluding couplet the sentence structure offers both a delayed negative and an unexpected object (or non-object):

  “I hate” from hate away she threw,

  And saved my life, saying “not you.”

  Given that the conjunction “And” is a near-homophone of “Anne,” the last line can also read, “Anne saved my life.” The poetic simplicity (some say, triviality) of this poem, and its unusual tetrameter structure (each line has four stresses; the other 153 sonnets are in five-stressed pentameter lines: see Myth 11), may also indicate its composition early in Shakespeare's career (or, perhaps more accurately, early in Shakespeare's life, before he had a career).

  In Sonnet 135 Shakespeare puns more obviously, this time repeatedly, on his own given name as the poet begs the dark lady to include him among her lovers:

  Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

  And Will to boot, and Will in overplus.

  …

  Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,

  Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?