30 Great Myths about Shakespeare

by Laurie Maguire

  Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple

  Of thinking too precisely on th'event –

  …

  – I do not know

  Why yet I live to say “This thing's to do”,

  Since I have cause, and will, and strength, and means,

  To do't.

  (4.4.30–2, 34–76)

  The dominant question of twentieth-century criticism—why does Hamlet delay?—is a question Hamlet actually asks of himself. It is a question that assumes he has agency, choice, emotions, motivation: in other words that he is a real being.

  If Shakespeare characters assume that they, and other Shakespeare characters, are real beings, so too did their earliest readers and audiences. Shakespeare criticism begins with character: Margaret Cavendish's Sociable Letters (1664) and Maurice Morgann's Essay on the Dramatick Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777). From early on, Shakespeare characters also had a life outside their plays. Tiffany Stern has found Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Germany in a composite play of the seventeenth century that has nothing to do with Twelfth Night. In her recent book on the novel, Maria di Battista distinguishes characters in plays from characters in novels—to the detriment of the former. Dramatic characters, she says, are “confined” to the stage.7 But when Sir Andrew Aguecheek goes to Germany in a play that is not Twelfth Night it is hard to see him as “confined” in any way.

  It is worth asking at this stage how Shakespeare creates the illusion of lifelike characters. The word “character” has its roots in the Greek for “writing,” and this was the meaning still uppermost in Shakespeare's day. Character is something that is written down. But it is this prescription of identity that Shakespeare characters resist; in the process they become individuals trying to have a life outside fiction. The most obvious example is Troilus and Cressida where, as Linda Charnes brilliantly pointed out in 1989, the predicament of the titular characters is their attempt to break out from the already-written associations of their names in literature (Troilus as betrayed lover, Cressida as faithless woman). Shakespeare's Troilus wants to be “authentic author” of his own story (3.2.177). But how can he be when his story is already written for him?8 This predicament is not confined to fictional/historical/mythical/famous characters. It applies to anyone who defies family expectations, as we see in Coriolanus's case when he wishes to be author of himself, denying his kin (he does not succeed in asserting his autonomy and the play ends tragically). It is this quest for individual freedom that gives Shakespeare characters their lifelike appearance as individuals not types. Juliet has a balcony in Verona despite never having had an existence beyond fiction. No Jonson or Middleton character has anything like this afterlife.

  Another answer to the question of how Shakespeare creates lifelike characters is: by calling attention to gaps. When Prospero says he will retire to Milan where “every third thought shall be [his] grave” (5.1.315), it begs the question: what are his first and second thoughts? As Tony Dawson writes, “We feel we know these characters because we do not know them”; this creates the illusion that these characters are like people, that they are knowable.9

  There is a further twist here in that Shakespeare characters disavow their fictional status by calling attention to it. Cleopatra seems real to us because she disdains boy actors who might play Cleopatra (see Myth 25). Othello seems real because if it were his cue to fight he would have known it without a prompter. Fabian seems real in Twelfth Night because he wouldn't believe the gulling of Malvolio if it were played on a stage. These characters know what plays are, so by definition are not in one.

  Let us turn to the second part of this myth: real people. We need to remember that most character criticism is based on the novel. Although the novel is a mediated form, it has no physical mediator. Drama, on the other hand, does: it is mediated by the body of the actor. Thus at a very basic level it is hard for audiences not to view Shakespeare's characters as real people because on stage they are real people. Mistaking the play and its characters as real is both parodied and celebrated in The Taming of a Shrew (printed in 1594), a play which derives in some way from Shakespeare's similar plot in The Taming of the Shrew. In both plays Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker, watches his first play. In A Shrew, however, he interrupts the action, demanding that the constable should not arrest a character and take him to prison (obviously an experience a bit close to home for Sly). Sly mistakes what he sees for real. He is both a naïf audience member and the ideal audience member.

  Another way of approaching this myth is to say that Shakespeare doesn't create characters, lifelike or otherwise. He simply writes roles; it is actors who create characters. Thus when Taffeta in Lording Barry's play Ram Alley (1607) defines “a complete gallant,” she says, “A mercer formed him [i.e. provided the raw material], a tailor makes him [i.e. provides the shape] / And a player gives him spirit [brings him to life]” (F3v). This is the topic negotiated in Woody Allen's 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo. A depression-era housewife, Cecilia (Mia Farrow), seeks solace in repeat cinema visits. The hero, Tom Baxter (Jeff Bridges), notices her frequent viewings, falls in love, and leaves the screen to be with her. Because the film cannot continue without him, the actor, Gil Shepherd (Jeff Bridges again), who created the character arrives to persuade Baxter to return. A discussion ensues as to who created the character. “Didn't the man who wrote the movie do that?” asks the perplexed Cecilia. “Yes, technically,” says Shepherd. “But I made him live. I fleshed him out.”

  A measure of the “life-likeness” of fictional characters is the way they assume an afterlife, independent of the play in which they initially served a plot function. Sir John Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor is one such example (see Myth 28); Sir Andrew Aguecheek in seventeenth-century Germany is another; Juliet's balcony in Verona is yet another. But Shakespeare characters are not unique in this afterlife. Mythological characters and Chaucerian characters give their names to behaviors, attitudes, situations, and syndromes: Gordian knot, Oedipus complex, Herculean task, January–May marriage. That drama has a long history of being lifelike is seen in nineteenth- and twentieth-century attempts to disrupt it: in the symbolist drama of Maeterlinck and others and in Brecht's alienation technique for instance.

  Talking about characters as if they were real has been out of fashion among literary critics for several decades. Instead, criticism has ventured into new terrain—the invigorating challenges of structuralism, poststructuralism, new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism. These innovative critical schools have brought with them new discoveries but also a new danger: their specialist vocabularies have made Shakespeare criticism inaccessible to the ordinary reader and playgoer, and, as Alan Sinfield puts it, threatened to “make character a wholly inappropriate category of analysis.”10 Heather Dubrow writes that “character has virtually become a dirty word.”11 And if character is no longer a relevant category for consideration, “lifelike” is no longer a relevant term for analysis.

  Part of the reason for this paradigm shift may be English literature's professional development as a subject for academic study. The study of English in universities is only a century old, and it had uneasy beginnings: it was seen as the poor man's Classics; it had a nonspecialized, nontechnical vocabulary; insufficient on its own, it had to bolster itself through alliances with other departments (history, Scandinavian studies). One of the problems with thinking about characters as lifelike (or thinking about characters at all) is that this is what amateurs do (“amateur” in the literal sense of lovers: audiences or readers who enjoy the plays). How can one justify a university department of English if what it does is what recreational readers do—without training, without payment? So the exile of character from academic discussions of the last four decades may be linked to the turf war between professional academics and general readers (see Myth 30).

  Recent years show signs of a revival of interest in Shakespearean character. Not in the old-fashioned way, treating fictional characters as real people, b
ut in a more nuanced way, trying to understand the boundaries between lifelike characterization and representation, and the artifice that makes the latter look like the former. We now realize that an interest in lifelike characterization is one of the things that differentiates Shakespeare from his contemporaries. As such it is a category that demands attention.

  Notes

  1 Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (eds.), Shakespeare and Character (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 8.

  2 Edward Pechter, “Othello” and Interpretive Traditions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), p. 188.

  3 Sir Thomas Overbury, Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse, ed. Edward F. Rimbaut (London: Reeves & Turner, 1890), p. 160.

  4 Ibid., p. 149.

  5 Ibid, p. 101.

  6 This scene is omitted from the Folio text; it is printed as an additional passage on p. 689 of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor's Oxford edition.

  7 Maria di Battista, Novel Characters (Oxford; Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 9.

  8 Linda Charnes, “‘So unsecret to ourselves’: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), pp. 413–40 (p. 416).

  9 A. B. Dawson, “Is Timon a Character?”, in Yachnin and Slights (eds.), Shakespeare and Character, pp. 197–213 (p. 210).

  10 Alan Sinfield, Faultlines (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 58.

  11 Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 17.

  Myth 30

  Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare

  If you already think Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, then you will be bracing yourself for yet another establishment cover-up; if you already think Shakespeare did write Shakespeare, then this myth will be one you do not bother to read. Of all our myths, this is the most intractable because it is the one where positions are most entrenched. Put crudely, the academic establishment maintains that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon did write the plays attributed to him in the First Folio in 1623 (and perhaps some others too, although the consensus breaks up a bit there). And a coalition of interested parties who are not professional Shakespeareans, including a good showing from the legal and theatrical professions and some notables including Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, and Henry James, believe he did not, either because they believe that someone else wrote them, or because they believe there is, in the words of one online petition, “reasonable doubt” about the attribution.1 Outbreaks of hostilities, when a newspaper reports the controversy, a new book proposes a new candidate, or something like Roland Emmerich's film Anonymous (2011; tagline: “Was Shakespeare a Fraud?”) enters the debate, pit implacable and sometimes complacent scholars who merely discount, rather than disprove, the apparently detailed knowledge and interrogation of their amateur opponents. Sometimes this is extremely heated: writing to the New York Times in 2005, Harvard Shakespeare professor Stephen Greenblatt suggested that “the demand [for discussion about Shakespeare's authorship] seems harmless enough until one reflects on its implications. Should claims that the Holocaust did not occur also be made part of the standard curriculum?” If the rhetoric of the argument can equate the fact of Shakespeare's authorship of his plays with the fact of the Holocaust, it's clearly going to be difficult to have a balanced discussion.

  In this short account we can't work through all the arguments and all the candidates, but we can try to set out why and how this controversy has arisen, and some of the issues about the evidence on both sides. First, although Shakespeare's name does not always appear on the title pages of his plays published during his lifetime (see Myth 4), his fellow King's Men actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, who put together the posthumous collected edition, were in no doubt about who wrote the plays. The title page of the First Folio (1623) boasts “Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies,” and the iconic engraving of a balding Shakespeare, head awkwardly atop a starched ruff, emphasizes the man behind the works (unlike, say, the collection of Ben Jonson's Works in 1616, which is illustrated with an allegorical, architectural frontispiece suggesting the book's classical antecedents). Heminge and Condell knew Shakespeare over decades—in his will he left them money for mourning rings—so unless they were part of a conspiracy, there seems little doubt about their testimony.

  In fact, this notion of conspiracy is key to the authorship question. No one expressed any doubt or suspicion about the authorship of the plays in the early modern period, nor until the nineteenth century. According to the frantic logic of conspiracists, the wealth of contemporary evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford did indeed write the plays we attribute to him must be discounted as planted (“that's what they want you to believe”), and, perversely, it is the absence of evidence that really counts. Or, to put that another way, in order to question that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, we need to discount a large amount of evidence that he did, and search out the possibility that someone else did. So, that Shakespeare is listed as an actor and as a playwright in numerous contemporary sources, and that there is ample evidence to link this man with the man born, married, and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon is of no more relevance than the fact that potential alternative authors Christopher Marlowe died in 1593 and the Earl of Oxford in 1604, long before many of the plays were written: these historical facts are simply ignored, or, rather, reconstructed as contingent parts of a conspiracy. The Marlowe Society even succeeded in having a question mark after Marlowe's death date in the memorial window placed in Westminster Abbey in 2002, to leave open the possibility that Marlowe wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare, and the society administers a large prize for the scholar who “furnishe[s] irrefutable and incontrovertible proof and evidence required to satisfy the world of Shakespearian scholarship that all the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare were in fact written by Christopher Marlowe.”2 The prize is unclaimed.

  The authorship question is a curious ideological mismatch. On the one hand, it had its roots in a fundamental re-examination of the philosophical tenor of Shakespeare's plays. In part it was their newly perceived political radicalism that made it conceivable that their author might wish to hide his identity. The American writer and scholar Delia Bacon established this interpretative tradition in her opaque book The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857), a book that drew Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson to her cause. Bacon, and her successors in this vein, argued for the plays' relation to contemporary politics in ways which have anticipated much later scholarship concerned with the place of the stage in early modern England as socially transgressive and politically provocative (James Shapiro, in an extensive recent study of the authorship question from a critical and sociological viewpoint, remarks that were these ideas not linked to the question of authorship, Bacon “would be hailed today as the precursor of the New Historicists, and the first to argue that the plays anticipated the political upheavals England experienced in the mid-seventeenth century”3).

  Against this radical and politicized reading of the plays, however, the authorship question has a strongly socially conservative cast: its adherents cannot believe that the son of a glover from a provincial market town and without a university education could possibly have written the works attributed to him. It is no accident that the alternative candidates for their authorship are all noblemen: Francis Bacon, Sir Henry Neville, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Derby, even Queen Elizabeth, supported by ingenious computer-generated graphical disintegration to reveal an image of the Virgin Queen disguised as Shakespeare on the front of the First Folio. The only other “commoner” in the list is the Cambridge-educated Christopher Marlowe. But there's no reason, other than social snobbery, to associate literary ability with rank or birth, particularly in the world of the theater where a playwright was an artisan, a new word for a new occupation (see Myth 21) imagined by analogy with skilled craftsmen such as wheelwrights or shipwrights. The claims either that t
he writer of the plays must have been a courtier or that their aristocratic author could not have sullied himself to enter the common marketplace of print are assertions rather than evidence. Elsewhere in this book we have shown that Shakespeare's education was extensive (Myth 2) and that he did not need to have traveled abroad to write his plays (Myth 5). What we do know about Shakespeare—and what is amply attested by his contemporaries—is that he could write imaginative and compelling drama, which involved inhabiting the world view and linguistic competence of different speakers from different social classes.

  In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the preferred candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays was Francis Bacon, and the preferred method for asserting this “truth” was cryptography. Bacon was believed to have placed ciphers in the plays that could be cracked to reveal his own signature. A rash of titles promised explication. Ignatius Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888) applied a number of code-breaking stratagems to produce a secret message announcing “Shak'st spur never writ a word of them,” but his methods were lampooned by unconvinced humorists and Stratfordians in parodic applications of his method to his own work, and to other pages of Shakespeare, “revealing,” for example, that “Master WillI a Jack Spur writ this play”;4 undeterred, Elizabeth Gallup published her The Bi-Literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in his Works (1899); some judicious alterations of the nonce-word “honorificabilitudinitatibus” from Love's Labour's Lost (5.1.40) led Sir Edwin Dunning-Lawrence to a Latin sentence announcing “These plays F. Bacon's offspring are preserved for the world” in his Bacon is Shakespeare (1910); by overlaying a cosmographical diagram on the Epilogue to The Tempest in her Bacon's Dial in Shakespeare (1922), Natalie Rice Clark uncovered the helpfully explicit declaration “I, W.S. Am F. Bacon.”

  But Bacon's star has waned, and the most active contender for the authorship of Shakespeare's works is now Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Oxford's claims are largely biographical: the argument is that his life fits more closely the life perceived to be expressed through the plays than does the biography of Shakespeare. There is no external evidence to link Oxford with the works of Shakespeare. Samuel Schoenbaum, still Shakespeare's best and most cautious biographer, describes the problem of writing Shakespeare's life as that of bridging “the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record”;5 for Oxfordians, Shakespeare's documented life is not only mundane but wretched, devoid of the social advantages necessary to write the plays and marked instead by suspicions of parsimony, social climbing, profiteering, and the abandonment of his wife and children. By contrast, Oxford's life could have furnished the details for Hamlet (although not the ending): he had traveled in Europe, he was well connected at Elizabeth's court, his own father-in-law Lord Burghley was supposed to be the model for Polonius, and he knew Arthur Golding, translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses (used in Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Titus Andronicus among others).