Most specifically, since Shakespeare's first biographers writing in the early eighteenth century, it has been traditionally asserted that The Merry Wives of Windsor was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth, who wished for a revival of Falstaff, corpulent star of 1 and 2 Henry IV that would “shew him in Love.” “Without doubt,” Nicholas Rowe observed in 1709, Elizabeth “gave him many gracious Marks of her Favour,” although he does not offer any proof.2 While it is impossible that Elizabeth would have attended the disreputable public theater, she did have the theater come to her. Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, performed at court every Christmas season, and although the specific plays performed are not recorded, it seems likely that many of them would have been by the resident playwright, Shakespeare. The title page of Love's Labour's Lost, printed in 1598, describes the play “as it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas”; The Merry Wives of Windsor, first published as “Syr John Falstaffe, and the merrie Wives of Windsor” in 1602, also claims it was “divers times Acted … Both before her Majestie, and else-where.” As many critics have noted, Elizabeth's own sense of monarchical power, in an age of stage kings, was highly theatrical: as she recognized, “We princes, I tell you, are set upon stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed: the eyes of many behold our actions.”3
Unlike many of his contemporaries, including Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare does not seem to have depicted Elizabeth directly in his writing. Not for him the epilogue that Jonson addressed to her in his Every Man Out of His Humour, or Dekker in his Old Fortunatus. Only in A Midsummer Night's Dream might Elizabeth be glanced at. In that play, Oberon's description of a “mermaid on a dolphin's back / Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath / That the rude sea grew civil at her song” (2.1.150–2) has been plausibly connected to the Earl of Leicester's lavish entertainments for Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle in 1575. It seems likely that this extravagant spectacle, with its gunfire and fireworks seen and heard over twenty miles away, would have involved the inhabitants of nearby Stratford, perhaps including the 11-year-old Shakespeare.4 Oberon's identification of a “fair vestal” or “imperial votress … In maiden meditation, fancy-free” (2.1.158–64) may well be a reference to the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. There are more buried allusions in the play, too: Titania, queen of the fairies, must have recalled Edmund Spenser's influential contemporary epic which addressed Elizabeth as “The Faerie Queene.” A production directed by Peter Hall at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames, in 2010 visualized this association between the queens, as Judi Dench reprised in her performance of Titania something of her bewigged and stately role in Shakespeare in Love, recalling elaborate paintings of the jeweled Elizabeth. But while the connection was strikingly visual, it was also rather neutered: in the play Titania, doctored with a love potion as part of a quarrel with her lover Oberon, falls in love with the lower-class Bottom, who has been transformed with an ass's head, and takes him off to her fairy bower. We do not see what transpires, but Bottom's delicious insinuations afterwards—“Methought I was, and methought I had—” (4.1.206) give plenty of room for speculation that more than ear-stroking took place. If this is a disguised portrait of Elizabeth, its implications are not very flattering: in the production Peter Hall did not put either Judi Dench, or Elizabeth herself, to such scandal, merely bestowing some dowager-chaste kisses on Bottom's long asinine nose.
Figure 7 Judi Dench playing Titania as Queen Elizabeth at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames (2010). Photo: Nobby Clark / ArenaPAL.
Elsewhere Shakespeare refers to our “gracious Empress” in Henry V, when he likens Henry's historical victory at Agincourt to the topical and anticipated success of the Earl of Essex in quelling rebellion in Ireland (5.0.30), in a passage convincingly described as “the only explicit, extra-dramatic, incontestable reference to a contemporary event anywhere in the canon.”5 Perhaps it is significant that the idealized king of the play is likened not to the queen herself but to her general, Essex. This theme is evident elsewhere in connections between Shakespeare and Elizabeth. The story of Richard II, for instance—a weak king's deposition by his cousin Henry Bullingbrook—took on a topical relevance amid the tensions of the end of Elizabeth's reign, and one writer, John Hayward, was imprisoned for dedicating his prose history of Henry IV to the Earl of Essex, seen as a challenger to Elizabeth. In a conversation with the antiquary William Lambarde in 1601, Elizabeth is reported to have likened herself to Richard II—the monarch, rather than the play. And when the supporters of the Earl of Essex paid for a play to be performed on the eve of their rebellion, it was perhaps inevitable they would pick Richard II, although it is not absolutely certain that this was Shakespeare's play. Members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men were called before the Privy Council to answer for this particularly political scheduling. (Their spokesman, Augustine Philips, claimed innocence: the company was simply well paid to put on an “old play.”6)
So far, Shakespeare's literary depictions of Elizabeth do not suggest that her favor was of particular concern to him. His response to her death in 1603 is also revealing. Amid the outpouring of poetic tribute to the dead queen and the new Scottish king, Shakespeare is conspicuous by his absence. Henry Chettle, writing his elegiac England's Mourning Garment of 1603, criticizes Shakespeare under the name of Melicert for his failure “To mourne her death that graced his desert”: the suggestion that Elizabeth has “graced” Shakespeare is a tantalizing one, anticipating Nicholas Rowe's later assumption about the relationship between monarch and playwright.
Shakespeare's most extensive description of Elizabeth comes long after her death. What has been identified as Jacobean nostalgia for the golden age of Elizabeth is a feature of a number of plays of the early seventeenth century, including Samuel Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me, based on the events of Henry VIII's reign, and Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, a popular dramatic account of Elizabeth's life. Shakespeare's contribution to this genre is his late romance-history, Henry VIII or All Is True, co-authored with John Fletcher. This pageant-like play ends with the spectacular staging of the infant Elizabeth's christening, at which Archbishop Cranmer heralds “this royal infant” as a “maiden phoenix,” who “promises / Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings / Which time shall bring to ripeness.” With a weather eye to the current monarch, however, and the patron of the company now known as the King's Men, Shakespeare writes, as the climax of Cranmer's speech, of Elizabeth's successor James: “Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, / His honour and the greatness of his name / Shall be, and make new nations.” (5.4.17–52).
In fact James's direct patronage of the theater company marks a significant new phase in the relationship between Shakespeare and the monarchy, and a number of the plays of the early years of his reign, including Macbeth and King Lear, can be seen to speak directly to James's interests. James was a published writer—of poetry, including sonnets, and of tracts on witchcraft, on political philosophy, and on the newfangled import tobacco. We can see Shakespeare tracking this published output very attentively in his plays for the newly christened King's Men. In Measure for Measure, for instance, the retiring Duke's dislike of the city crowds echoes the new king's own reported shyness. In Othello, Shakespeare relocates the general and his bride to Cyprus, scene of the sea battle of Lepanto between the Ottoman Empire and a coalition of Catholic states about which James had written a long poem. In Macbeth Shakespeare quarries and reshapes one of the few episodes of Scottish history that could be acceptable both to London theater audiences used to anti-Scottish sentiment and to the Scottish king. His alterations to his source material develop the role of the witches—a topic fascinating to James—and establish a detoxified Banquo as the moral counterweight to Macbeth's ambition—James traced his own ancestry from Banquo who, in the historical sources, was originally Macbeth's murderous accomplice. In King Lear James's attempts to unite England and Scotland are shadowed in the play's concern with the “d
ivision of the kingdom” (1.1.3–4). In Antony and Cleopatra the concern with royal female tombs may be influenced by James's commissioning of monuments to Elizabeth and to his mother Mary Queen of Scots in Westminster Abbey.
Just as Shakespeare the playwright showed a great interest in his royal patron, there is far more evidence that James was actively interested in drama than that Elizabeth was, although he was reputed to enjoy only short plays. In addition to his patronage of the playing company, masques, the elaborately operatic and allegorical dramatic form so enjoyed by the court, flourished during his reign. Why, then, do we not have the myth that James loved Shakespeare's plays? Simply because James is a less iconic figure. If the myth about Elizabeth's court is about the patriotic Golden Age of the Virgin Queen, James's court has been caricatured as sleazy, rife with sexual and political scandal, and structured around the monarch's close relationships with male favorites. Our investment in the frisson of romance between dashing male playwright and passionate Virgin Queen has made a more attractive Elizabethan myth, and, despite the fact that half of Shakespeare's career was under James's rule, Shakespeare tends always to be seen as an Elizabethan phenomenon, along with Drake playing bowls as the Armada approaches and gallant gestures with cloaks over puddles. No one has made a film about the relationship between Shakespeare and James, or forged letters between them, although Ben Jonson's elegy on Shakespeare apostrophizes that “Sweet swan of Avon! What a sight it were / To see thee in our waters yet appear. And make those flights upon the banks of Thames / That so did take Eliza and our James.”
But, like the film director John Madden and the forger William-Henry Ireland, we are still on the lookout for evidence of the bond between Shakespeare and Elizabeth. The 2007 Royal Shakespeare Company Collected Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, was the first major edition to include a poem titled in its manuscript form “To ye Q. by ye players,” an epilogue to a court performance of an unknown play in 1599. The eighteen-line poem begins “As the dial hand tells o'er / The same hours it had before,” and addresses the “mighty Queen” as a perpetual presence with the wish: “That the children of these lords / Sitting at your council boards, / May be grave and aged seen, / Of her that was their fathers' queen.” Bate describes the attribution of the poem as “absolutely secure,” and in a newspaper trail for the edition, under the winning headline “Is There a Lost Shakespeare in Your Attic?,” judges it “a gorgeous little court epilogue” with an “assurance that is unique to the mature Shakespeare.”7 The trochaic meter of the poem certainly is one used by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the evidence that the “Dial Hand” poem is by Shakespeare is far from “absolutely secure,” and scholars, as Helen Hackett has recently reviewed, have been generally skeptical about this attribution (Hackett convincingly proposes Thomas Dekker as a more likely author8). The desire for a tangible connection between playwright and queen, however, will not go away.
Notes
1 Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 39–40. See also Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
2 Nicholas Rowe, “Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear,” in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the first (London, 1709), pp. ix–x.
3 Holinshed (1587), p. 1583 (www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed).
4 Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life, Arden (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), p. 9.
5 Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), p. 7.
6 Blair Worden, “Which Play Was Performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?”, London Review of Books, 10 July 2003, doubts the play was Shakespeare's, and indicts Shakespeareans for so wanting their author to be involved in this political controversy that they have overlooked the evidence. Paul J. Hammer, “Shakespeare's Richard II, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 59/1 (2008), pp. 1–35, reassesses that evidence, and agrees with Worden's claim about Shakespeareans' over-reading of the incident while arguing that the play performed was indeed Shakespeare's Richard II.
7 Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007), p. 2395; Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2007
8 Helen Hackett, “‘As the diall hand tells ore’: The Case for Dekker, Not Shakespeare, as Author,” Review of English Studies, 63 (2012), pp. 34–57.
Myth 29
Shakespeare's characters are like real people
One of the traditional hallmarks of successful art is that people take it for real. Pliny describes a famous painting competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius in the fifth century BCE. Zeuxis unveiled his painting of a still life in which the grapes were so tempting that a bird came to peck at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to draw the curtain to reveal his painting; Parrhasius explained that the curtain was itself a painting.
Analogous stories occur in the realm of literature. When Sir Thomas More's Utopia was published in the sixteenth century, a priest asked his bishop to send him to Utopia. (Utopia is a fictional island—its name in Greek means “no place”—but the characters in the book share their names with real people and so perhaps are real, and one describes his visit to Utopia.) On his deathbed Balzac called for Dr Bianchon, one of his fictional creations. Before Freud had a sizable body of patients on which to base case studies, he turned to realist drama—Shakespeare, Ibsen, Greek tragedy—to analyze its characters. It may sound odd to talk of Greek drama with its masks and formal choruses as “realistic,” but Freud was responding to the plays' emotional realism.
“Lifelike” and “realistic” are always compliments, the barometers by which we judge how (or whether) a play has worked.1 But lifelike in a sixteenth-century play is not the same as lifelike in the twenty-first century. In the UK of the 1950s, the queen's Christmas Day broadcasts undoubtedly seemed lifelike to viewers, but in 2012 they seem stilted, not at all related to anything we recognize as natural. As Edward Pechter points out, questions about what is lifelike in Renaissance drama confuse means and effects. The actor Thomas Betterton “may have chanted—that is, have sounded like chanting to us if we were able to travel back in time to the Theatre Royal in the late seventeenth century … but to his audience, tuned to a different frequency, his performance might have seemed like life itself” (our italics).2 So negotiating this myth is tricky because it involves a concept—lifelike/realistic—which is not constant. Let us try to deal with this myth by dividing it in two parts: characters and real people.
First, characters. At the end of the fourth century BCE, the Greek writer Theophrastus wrote a book of thirty character sketches (Characters). Although Theophrastus was not translated (into Latin) until 1592, the form was influential. In England, Thomas Wilson's Art of Rhetoric (1553) provides a short character sketch as an example of the rhetorical term descriptio; Sir Thomas Overbury wrote a book of Characters, published in 1614 (so popular that there were five reprints that year), reprinted again in 1615 and 1616 (three editions), with further reprints in 1618, 1622, 1626, 1627, 1628, and 1630. Part of the initial commercial prominence of Overbury's book may have been due to the sensational nature of his death in 1613 (he was murdered in the Tower of London) and to his involvement in a court scandal of divorce and remarriage (see Myth 22) which made the original volume's raison d'être—a verse character of “a wife”—resoundingly topical. But the subsequent volumes (regularly enlarged by others) were entirely in prose and comprised one- to two-page depictions of character: a wise man, an elder brother, a canting rogue, an ostler. Many of these characters are closer to caricature than to psychological individuals (the drunken Dutchman and braggadocio Welshman are clearly stereotypes), but subtle psychological aspects are nonetheless in evidence. Overbury notes gradation of character: there is a difference between “a whore” and “a very who
re,” between “a vertuous widow” and “an ordinary widow.” His portrayal of a creditor moves from costume to attitude to custom.3 The sympathetic depiction of a franklin contrasts the man's external with his internal attributes, and notes the significance of speech patterns: “Though he be master, he says not to his servants ‘Go to field’ but ‘Let us go’.”4 Overbury's imaginative detail extends even to the reading matter of a chambermaid: “She reads Greene's works over and over [the prose romances of Robert Greene] but is so carried away with the Mirror of Knighthood, she is many times resolved to run out of her self and become a lady errant.”5 It is a short step from here to Stanislavsky's An Actor Prepares.
The purpose of Theophrastus's Characters has never been entirely clear, but classicists now think that it has a legal aim. One of the required rhetorical skills of a lawyer is to build up or demolish the character of the defendant or witness. Similarly, critics such as Lorna Hutson and James McBain have recently explored the English Inns of Court rhetorical traditions that fed into mid-sixteenth-century drama and thence to the commercial theater of the late sixteenth century. Character it seems, from classical times to Shakespeare's, is a rhetorical construct.
But character is also a psychological construct, at least for Shakespeare. One of the things Shakespeare's characters do is try to read and understand other fictional characters. The opening line of King Lear gives us Kent's surprise that he has misread Lear: “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall” (i.e. “hmm … I got that wrong”; 1.1.1–2). In Othello Lodovico attributes Othello's untypical behavior to the stress of Venetian business: “Maybe the letter moved him” (4.1.232). Hamlet tries to read himself: having seen Fortinbras's purposefulness, Hamlet says:
Now, whether it be
30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Page 24