With sixteen uses of the word “will” in fourteen lines, this poem rings the changes on the multiple meanings of “will” as wish, obstinacy, sexual desire, slang for the penis and the vagina, as well as a male name. It is impossible to separate these puns from the name of the author. In fact, punning on one's name or the name of one's beloved was a poetic fashion in the period. Astrophil and Stella—star-lover and star—are Philip Sidney's fictional names for himself and his inaccessible inamorata, Lady Penelope (inaccessible because she was the wife of Lord Rich); her real-life identity is acknowledged in a concentrated sequence of puns in Sonnet 37 which play on her married name: she is rich in all things (beauty, virtue), but the poet's tragedy is that she is Rich.
“Hate away” and “Will” in Shakespeare's Sonnets 145 and 135 are clear in their referents. Less clear, because unnamed, is the presence of one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, perhaps George Chapman, in the “rival poet” sonnets, which may reflect Shakespeare's professional despair in the late 1590s. In 1598 Chapman had just published his translation of part of Homer's Iliad—a section of Book 18 he called Achilles' Shield; in the same year Marlowe's erotic epyllion, Hero and Leander, was published; furthermore, it was reprinted the same year with a continuation by Chapman. These works were not just a literary success, highly popular and (in the case of Chapman's translation) high in prestige (Achilles' Shield was dedicated to a patron whom Chapman flatteringly compared to Achilles); they were also a literary gauntlet—a challenge to find Marlowe's successor. Chapman's continuation of Hero and Leander blatantly announced that he viewed himself as that successor. In Sonnet 86 Shakespeare compares his poetic success (or lack of it) with another poet's achievements. Chapman is a logical contender for comparison. Shakespeare laments that he has mismanaged his literary career, not winning the patronage that Chapman has managed (“the proud full sail of his great verse / Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you”) or able to compete with his classical knowledge (“by spirits taught to write”—the ancients; “his compeers by night”—his nocturnal study; “that affable familiar ghost / Which nightly gulls him with intelligence”—Chapman claimed inspiration from Homer). In fact, there may be more than one rival poet in this sonnet if the ghost is Marlowe inspiring Chapman rather than Homer.1
It is perhaps no coincidence that it is at this time that Shakespeare first mentions Marlowe (twice) in a play, As You Like It (1599). In the Forest of Ardenne the love-struck shepherdess, Phoebe, says: “Dead shepherd [i.e. dead lyricist: “shepherd” was shorthand for a pastoral poet], now I find thy saw [= saying] of might: ‘Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’” (3.5.82–3). Her rhetorical question is a direct quotation from Marlowe's Hero and Leander. The play's other reference to Marlowe comes when the clown, Touchstone, in a speech about the frustrations of having one's poetry underappreciated, says “It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room” (3.3.11–12). Marlowe was killed in 1593 over an argument about the bill (reckoning) in a boarding house where he and three others had spent the day. (The Reckoning is the title of Charles Nicholl's biography of Marlowe.) The death of London's most famous dramatist had clearly shocked the theater world. As Katherine Duncan-Jones points out, the qualification in Touchstone's “it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room” is illogical. Death cannot be modified; there are no degrees of deadness; one is either dead or not.2 Unless, of course one is talking about literary life and death where reputation can be seen relatively. A poet's work can be alive or dead or anywhere on the spectrum between. In Sonnet 86 the poet laments that the rival poet's success “struck me dead.” The sentiments in As You Like It, written in the year in which Marlowe continued to live poetically through the publication of Hero and Leander, link to the anxieties in Sonnet 86 about literary reputation and comparisons. Shakespeare is worried that he, a living poet, may be more dead in literary terms than the dead Marlowe. Such expressions of anxiety also help to date this sonnet by locating it in the literary world of the 1590s.
Whether these readings of the “name” sonnets or the “rival poet” sonnets mean that we can read all of Shakespeare's sonnets autobiographically is a moot point. Collectively the sonnets tell a story every bit as dramatic as the plots of Shakespeare's plays: a plot in which two men compete for the favors of one woman, in which the woman rejects the poet, in which the poet expresses his love for a young man, in which the poet experiences rivalry in love as well as in poetry. The poems were not written as a narrative sequence (they were composed over a period of about sixteen years). Although some of them function sequentially (several begin with the contrasting or continuative conjunctions “But” or “So,” continuing a line of thought from the previous sonnet), others (such as 153 and 154, a story of Cupid) duplicate each other, and look like experimental variations on a theme. The fact that one or more poems can be read autobiographically does not mean that all 154 sonnets or their cumulative story are autobiographical. In fact, as Dympna Callaghan notes, the collection as a whole is remarkably unspecific as to the time and place of events (she contrasts the detail of Petrarch or Samuel Daniel) and Lois Potter points out that whereas other Elizabethan sonneteers leave no doubt as to the persons they are talking about, Shakespeare's sonnets name only mythical figures: Adonis, Helen, Eve, and Time.3
Nevertheless it is true that the title page of the 1609 volume foregrounds Shakespeare the author. These, the title page proclaims, are “Shakes-peare's Sonnets,” the possessive linking author and creation in a way not typical of published sonnets of the period. The only other sonnet title page to use a possessive is “Sir P[hilip] S[idney] His Astrophel and Stella” (1591). Thomas Lodge's Phillis (1593) does not name the poet on the title page. Neither does Richard Barnfield's Cynthia (1595). A notable contrast is Thomas Watson's Hekatompathia (1582): The Hekatompathia or Passionate century of love divided into two parts: whereof, the first expresseth the author's sufferance in love: the latter, his long farewell to love and all his tyranny. Composed by Thomas Watson Gentleman. But Watson is unusual: he is following a continental tradition of sonnet presentation, seen also in his headnotes to each of his poems; the fashion did not catch on in England.
No wonder, then, that William Wordsworth, writing in an age when sonnets (and poetry generally) were instruments of self-expression, wrote that “with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart” (“Scorn Not the Sonnet”). But why, we might ask, do we not assume that Shakespeare unlocked his heart in his plays? To a certain extent, of course, we do. Hamlet is often seen as Shakespeare's working through his grief at the death of his son Hamnet in 1596 (see Myth 12). The Tempest, a play in which a father loses a daughter in marriage and abandons his theatrical powers, is often taken to reflect Shakespeare's personal and professional circumstances in 1610 (see Myth 20). Orsino's advice in Twelfth Night, in which he recommends that the woman should always “take / An elder than herself” (2.4.28–9), is frequently read as Shakespeare's personal regret at having done the opposite in his own marriage: he was eight years Anne Hathaway's junior (see Myth 10). Shakespeare's use of plots with twins is viewed as an expression of his own personal fascination, as a father of fraternal twins, with twins generally (Comedy of Errors has two sets of identical twins, Twelfth Night one set of fraternal twins). But we never assume that Shakespeare experienced shipwreck or travelled to Illyria or was pursued by the wrong person under the influence of magic (although the plot of Midsummer Night's Dream does sometimes lead to the question, “Did Shakespeare believe in fairies?”). In other words, we read sentiments biographically but not plots—except in the case of the sonnets, where we do both.
In 1912 a Cambridge psychologist, Edward Bullough, wrote that the “self-expression of an artist is not such as the self-expression of a letter-writer or a public speaker: it is not the direct expression of the concrete personality of the artist; it is not even an indirect expression of his concrete personality.”4 Bullough acknowledges that a writer's times and
personal experience are indeed reflected in his or her works but adds that readers can only find these once they know what reflected experiences to look for. In other words, we can read backwards from Shakespeare's life into the sonnets but not forwards from the sonnets into his life.
Renaissance literature does not lack self-portraits: Montaigne's Essays (translated into English in 1603) and Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (published 1643) are obvious examples. But for Bullough even works which are unquestionably autobiographical are artistic productions which are “the indirect formulation of a distanced mental content.”5 That is, self-portraits need not be direct expressions of the self because of the mediating factor of artistic shaping. (Today's genre of the “memoir” provides many examples of this—see, for example, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.) As Bullough brilliantly puts it, “the idea may be suggested by an actual experience” but “the idea itself is an actual experience.”6 In this sense, all of Shakespeare's works are personal autobiographical reflections (in both senses) of the artist.
Let us return to the sonnets. Peter Holbrook points out that “one of the most astonishing things about them is the audacity and recklessness of their self-exposure.” The poet is anguished, worthless, dismayed, mistrustful, self-loathing, envious, pained, humiliated, outranked, and “out-poetized.”7 What is distinctive about the sonnets, Holbrook concludes, is their portrayal of a defective human in a variety of experiences, and the “implicit claim in the poems that this experience is valuable because it is his.”8 This accords with Shakespeare's interest in the individual elsewhere in the canon; “I am that I am” (Sonnet 121) is not far removed from the similar existential self-assertions of Richard III or Aaron the Moor (Titus Andronicus) or Paroles (All's Well That Ends Well) or Iago (Othello): it's striking that none of these characters is an admirable parallel.
But we must not forget that Richard III and Aaron and Paroles and Iago are fictions and the poetic “I” of the sonnets may be equally fictional. Nor should we forget that, as originally printed, the sonnets were followed by a narrative poem, The Lover's Complaint. In this poem a narrator sees an anguished weeping country maid who subsequently narrates her story of betrayed love to an aged man, a former city resident who is now a farmer (“A reverend man that grazed his cattle nigh, / Sometime a blusterer that the ruffle knew / Of court, of city”; ll. 57–9). The old farmer indicates that his experience might enable him to assuage the maid's sufferings. Thus encouraged, she tells her story of wisdom gained; but then she offers the startling conclusion that were the situation to occur again she would respond to her faithless lover in the same way and allow herself to be betrayed as before. The poem ends here. We are left with the painful paradox of the young woman's admission, a sentiment at once intensely personal (it is her story) and general: she moves from the first to the third person (the lover's attractions “would yet again betray the fore-betrayed / And new pervert a reconcilèd maid”; ll. 328–9). And this distancing maneuver is placed within a narrative structure of tripartite distancing—a story within a story within a story—which leads to a tantalizing and frustrating (in)conclusion in which we hear no more from the old man of stanza 9 or the narrator of stanza 1. We are never told what the old farmer's response was or what relevant experience or wisdom he had to offer, or why the narrator, who observed and overheard the young maid telling her story to the old man, was there in the first place.
And this is the experience of reading the sonnets. The personal and the universal coexist; multiple persons take center stage; time and place and persons are unspecified. As a result, we are no longer sure whose story this is.
Notes
1 Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan, 1592–1623 (London: A. & C. Black, 2011), pp. 140–6.
2 Ibid.
3 Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Blackwell Introductions to Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), p. 3; Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 414.
4 Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology, 5 (1912), pp. 87–118 (p. 113).
5 Ibid., p. 115.
6 Ibid.
7 Peter Holbrook, Shakespeare's Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 193–4.
8 Ibid., p. 194.
Myth 19
If Shakespeare were writing now, he'd be writing for Hollywood
A new and quickly developing technology, which controlled production and distribution of plays, and released a large number of new products every year. A dream factory, shaping the imagination of generations of theatergoers. A commercial entertainment business located just beyond the reach of the authorities. An industry that shook off its dubious early associations to address monarchs and the court, as well as the man in the street. It's easy to hear the echoes between the early modern theater and twentieth-century Hollywood, and we all know the pedagogue's favorite justification, that Shakespeare was the popular entertainment of his day. So is it reasonable to suppose that a modern-day Shakespeare would be writing for Hollywood?
The parallels between these two entertainment spheres are extensive and suggestive. Just as the early modern theater industry grew up on the South Bank of the Thames to avoid the censure of the London civic authorities, so Hollywood developed close to the Mexican border so that there was a nearby extrajudicial bolt-hole. Both industries reach a wide audience (see Myth 1) and are commercially, as well as aesthetically, successful, making some of their key players rich (including Shakespeare, a share-holder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men). Arguments about the morality of these representational media are also adjacent. The Hays Code imposed on Hollywood from 1930 onwards aimed to ensure that “no picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it” and took as a governing precept that films “affect the moral standards of those who, through the screen, take in these ideas and ideals.” Writing in 1583 Philip Stubbes railed against the theater in similar, if more colorful, terms:
You say there are good examples to be learned in them [plays], truly so there are, if you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the hypocrite, to cog, to lie and falsify; if you will learn to jest, laugh and fleer, to grin, to nod, and mow; if you will learn to play the vice, to swear, tear, and blaspheme both heaven and earth; if you will learn to become a bawd, unclean and to divirginate maids, to deflower honest wives; if you will learn to murder, slay, kill, pick, steal, rob, and rove: if you will learn to rebel against princes, to commit treasons, to consume treasures …1
And so on. That the immediacy of seeing actions played out—on stage or screen—might prompt spectators to imitative immorality emerges strongly as a shared concern.
The defenders of both media have tried to suggest that the opposite is true: that films/theater can teach positive behavior. Linda Ruth Williams collected observations of the behavior of audiences at the erotic thriller Fatal Attraction (dir. Adrian Lyne, 1989), which seem to show that both men and women reacted strongly against the depiction of an extra-marital affair. One of the critics she cites wrote, “If Aids doesn't stop you, this movie will.”2 It's not a million miles away from Thomas Heywood's anecdote about a Norfolk woman watching a play about an adulterous wife who murders her husband, and “suddenly screeched and cried out Oh my husband, my husband! I see the ghost of my husband fiercely threatening and menacing me.” It transpires that the woman had herself poisoned her husband, and after her “voluntary confession,” prompted by the play, she is condemned to death.3
Just as rival studios became associated with particular stars and a particular style of film, so the effective duopoly between the Admiral's Men and the Lord Chamberlain's Men during the 1590s drew its commercial and artistic strength from the two companies' contrasting personnel and house style. For example, the Admiral's Men appear to have capitalized on the fur
or over their rivals' 1 Henry IV, when the descendants of Sir John Oldcastle objected to his disrespectful presentation as the fat braggart soldier (the name was changed to the now-familiar Falstaff); their play Sir John Oldcastle is a sycophantic portrait of their proto-Protestant ancestor. In turn the Admiral's Men's backlist of Marlowe favorites was imitated in the Chamberlain's repertoire. Like Hollywood stars, Edward Alleyn, famous for his central roles in Marlowe's big, booming dramas, and Richard Burbage, the first Richard III and Hamlet, became well known. An anecdote in the diary of the law student John Manningham attests to this:
Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night with her by the name of Richard III. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard III.”4
At Burbage's death an elegy mourned multiple losses:
He's gone, and with him what a world is dead.
No more young Hamlet, old Hieronimo5
Kind Lear, the grievèd Moor, and more beside
That lived in him have now for ever died.
Comic actors, including the clown Richard Tarlton, famous for his grimaces and “his metatheatrical talent as a maker of exits and entrances,”6 and Will Kempe, whose name substitutes for that of the buffoonish constable Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing in the play's first printing, were also hugely popular. At the turn of the century a Cambridge student play presented Burbage and Kemp as modern celebrities.
And while the role of the playwright in the early modern theater was not quite equivalent to the role of the screenwriter in Hollywood, the parallel is a provocative one. Many of Shakespeare's early plays were printed with reference to the acting company but not their author, such as the extensive title page of the first edition of Richard III: “The Tragedy of King Richard the third. / Containing His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephews: his tyrannicall usurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserved death. As it hath beene lately Acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his servants.” Like an iconic Hollywood product such as, say, Casablanca (1942)—most of us could probably approximate its most famous line, and name its romantic leads, and some might even identify its director, but few would be able to name its writer—who's performing this play and what it's about seem more significant to potential buyers than who has written it.
30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Page 16