30 Great Myths about Shakespeare

by Laurie Maguire

  These parallels may or may not be substantive, but in any case the argument rests on an erroneous assumption that Shakespeare's works are biographical. The same is true of the case for other candidates: Sir Henry Neville is proposed because his imprisonment after the Essex rebellion in 1601 explains the move towards darker comedies and tragedies in Shakespeare's writing around that date (this shift is something of an exaggeration and, in any case, more likely to be connected to audience tastes than to authorial mood); the Earl of Rutland is proposed because he visited Denmark just before the publication of Hamlet (in fact the prompt for the play may be nearer home: the written sources for the play also set the story in Denmark). If we believed the plays were autobiographical, we might as well be looking for a soldier (Macbeth, Coriolanus, Titus, and Othello are all soldiers), a female transvestite (women dress as men in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline) or a father of adult daughters (see Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, King Lear, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Cymbeline) (just a minute: Shakespeare was the father of adult daughters …). To be serious, though, the idea that literary texts, particularly early modern plays, encode biographical data is as far from an understanding of them as literature as the Baconian idea that they are codes to be broken.

  Literary theorists have been proclaiming the “death of the author” since the 1960s (the phrase is Roland Barthes'), and the bankruptcy of biographical readings long before that. It oughtn't, therefore, to matter whether Shakespeare or someone else (of the same name, as Mark Twain mischievously put it) wrote the plays attributed to him. But of course it does matter. We have seen in recent years that when a play is newly attributed to Shakespeare—as for example Edward III—this results in new editions, new performances, and new scholarship, forms of attention that invent, or at least reinforce, the literary quality they purport to describe. Edward III was not previously an unknown play but it was in the critical graveyard marked “Anon.” Jonathan Bate has admitted that, when editing Titus Andronicus, a play previously considered aesthetically defective, “I so wanted to praise the play, instead of burying it as the Arden editor of the previous generation had done, that I uncritically accepted the arguments for solo authorship”: here again authorship and literary value are connected (see Myth 17).6

  To be sure, there is a mystery about Shakespeare's authorship. How did he write it all? How is it that his works have been so endlessly adaptable, so susceptible to readings and sensibilities and ways of thinking very different from the culture out of which they were written? It's a mystery that is only deferred, not solved, by attaching a different name to the works, since the problem is not “How did he write it since he never went to university?” but the more fundamental “How did he write it?” Jonathan Bate argues that “‘genius’ was a category invented in order to account for what was peculiar about Shakespeare.”7 No wonder that Superman (in a DC comic of 1947) and Doctor Who (in an episode aired in 2007) have been imagined as Shakespeare's time-traveling collaborators: if Shakespeare didn't write the works, perhaps only a super-hero could have.

  If you look up some of the books and websites cited for this myth, you will see that one of the main argumentative tools of the anti-Stratfordians is detail: “Polonius in Hamlet refers to ‘young men falling out at tennis,’ which most likely refers to the infamous Oxford-Sidney tennis-court quarrel”; instances of “every” and “ever” are coded references to De Vere (the Earl of Oxford); Francis Bacon's commonplace book contains phrases also found in Shakespeare's plays.8 It is hard not to see this barrage of detail and the partisanship of the debate as an unconscious smokescreen, a diversionary tactic, to avoid thinking about the bigger questions this myth throws up: questions of genius, canon, class, literary value—and of who owns “Shakespeare”: the academics or the enthusiasts?

  Notes

  1 http://doubtaboutwill.org/declaration

  2 http://www.marlowe-society.org/reading/info/hoffmanprize.html

  3 James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 109.

  4 Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 406–7.

  5 Ibid., p. 568.

  6 Jonathan Bate, “In the Script Factory,” review of Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author, Times Literary Supplement, 18 April 2003.

  7 Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), p. 163.

  8 http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/

  Coda

  One of the questions we are most often asked as Shakespeare researchers and teachers is: surely there is nothing new to be said about Shakespeare? Given that Shakespeare is the most researched author in the world, with thousands of publications about him each year, this is an entirely reasonable question. In fact, there is a great deal more to be learned and said about Shakespeare.

  In 1823 the first quarto of Hamlet (published in 1603) was discovered. (To this day, only two copies of this quarto have been found.) This short text, with variant action and language, changed what we knew and thought we knew about how Hamlet was first staged, about how texts are transmitted, and about what Shakespeare or his company may or may not have altered in the play. Answers to the questions raised by the existence of Q1 Hamlet are still disputed—but no one disputes that Q1 Hamlet is an important piece of evidence in the ongoing search for an answer.

  New discoveries like this don't come along every day. But small incremental steps are just as important as paradigm shifts. Many of these steps are taken by studying Shakespeare's contemporaries and Shakespeare's contexts.

  Ten years ago MacDonald Jackson pointed out All's Well's unusual identification of a character in the Spinii Italian regiment as “one Spurio.” He is named twice (2.1.41, 4.3.166) although he does not appear in the play. The name is unusual and occurs only once elsewhere in Renaissance drama—in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), where it makes symbolically appropriate sense as the name of the Duke's bastard (spurious) son. This led Jackson to conclude that the name originated with Middleton and was subsequently picked up by Shakespeare. This gives us a date of post-1606 for All's Well rather than the usual 1602. There may even be an in-joke in Shakespeare's use of the name. Although Spurio is the name of the Duke's bastard son in Middleton, he is never named in the dialogue of The Revenger's Tragedy (his name occurs only in stage directions); Shakespeare's Spurio, on the other hand, is named in the dialogue but does not feature in the play's action. This indicates Shakespeare's familiarity with a written text of The Revenger's Tragedy, either in manuscript form (Gary Taylor has suggested Shakespeare may have acted in the Middleton tragedy1) or in its first printed edition of 1607/8. Redating All's Well by five years removes it from the group of three “problem plays” in 1601–4 in which it never properly fitted (the other two are Troilus and Cressida [1602] and Measure for Measure [1604]) and makes it one of the first of the last plays (a category also under interrogation: see Myth 20). The important point here is: reading a Middleton play changes our understanding of Shakespeare's career.

  Digital projects are also changing our landscape in leaps and bounds: statistics about Shakespeare's vocabulary and that of his contemporaries are no longer dependent on the Shakespeare-centric first edition of the OED (see Myth 21). Private letters have now been digitalized; so too has women's manuscript writing. Our contexts for Shakespeare are consequently hugely expanded.

  We are confident that much new factual information remains to be uncovered about the Elizabethans we love to study. The United Kingdom is full of untapped archives waiting for patient researchers and digitalization: the London livery companies for instance. Although Shakespeare was not a member of a livery company, many of his contemporaries were; each livery company has extensive records, most of them unpublished or only published selectively. David Kathman has uncovered actors' names in livery records, adding to our
knowledge of their biographies and activities. The same promise is held by funeral rolls. Held in the College of Heralds, these are extensive lists and diagrams of who marched in an important person's funeral: they thus enable us to see networks of who knew whom.

  Outside London, the teams of scholars from the REED project in Toronto (Records of Early English Drama) have been working their way through county records, transcribing documents (payments to players, names of visiting theater companies), giving us a rich picture of the interaction between London drama and the provinces. The award-winning book The Queen's Men, by Sally-Beth Maclean and Scott McMillin, for instance, was enabled by REED's research; in their book the authors analyze the regular touring routes of the Queen's Men and argue that touring was a prestigious activity and not, as previously thought, something players only fell back on when the plague prevented them from performing in London. (Denigrating the provinces is a nineteenth-century attitude, the product of the long-run system which made London the capital of British theatrical culture.)

  Stately homes, and houses that have been in the same family for generations, tend to have large collections of manuscript documents. An example from recent literary history will serve to show how rich these private repositories are. Vita Sackville-West wrote in longhand and kept all her manuscripts: “books published and unpublished, the notebook in which she recorded her dreams, her gardening articles, her juvenilia, poems, stories, plays, and reviews in quantity. The total amounts to some 9,000 pages.”2 This archive lay in Sissinghurst for forty years until her son, Nigel Nicholson, sold it at Sotheby's on 10 July 2002. There are archives that have lain unsold for over 400 years. In 2010 Katherine Duncan-Jones made a key discovery in the archives of Berkeley Castle, a piece of evidence suggesting that William Kemp, Shakespeare's company's famous clown of the 1590s, was alive and still performing as late as November 1610. Duncan-Jones's discovery was in the household accounts of Henry, seventh Baron Berkeley (1534–1613), whose steward records that in late November 1610 “my Lord lay in London” where he paid “in reward to William Kempe, my Lady Hunsdons man, 4s. 4d.”3 Retired from the public stage, Kemp had apparently found a patron in a private household. This theatrical nugget lies in a household's financial accounts.

  In addition to domestic manuscripts, stately homes often have extensive libraries. Although their book collections are catalogued, not all these books have been opened and every page perused. Scholars are still finding books with Ben Jonson's signature in the flyleaf. One day we will find books with Shakespeare's signature.

  However, many new findings come not from factual discoveries but from a change in scholarly attitude. Early twentieth-century Shakespeare articles modeled themselves on scientific procedures, concluding with a triumphant “Thus it can be seen that …” as if the Shakespeare litmus paper had decisively changed color. Today's literary scholars see the value in posing questions without needing to formulate neat answers; we are more comfortable at pointing out contradictions and gaps; we have become adept at dealing with sums that don't add up. This enables us to consider negative evidence: for instance, why did Shakespeare not write religious poetry (see Myth 7)? Important research often begins with changing the kinds of questions that we ask.

  If academics profitably spend time in archives, they derive equal benefit from visits to the theater. You will have noticed how often in this book we have turned to theater productions for proof of principle—how an idea worked or was discovered in performance. Far from being enemy territory, theater is on an equal footing with academia; productions, like books, are interpretations of Shakespeare based on a close study of the text. And the traffic is two-way. The 2011 production of Cardenio at Stratford-upon-Avon is one such case. We mentioned in Myth 17 that this collaborative play, written by Shakespeare with Fletcher late in his career, 1613, is lost. (The manuscript existed until the eighteenth century, when William Warburton's cook used it as baking parchment.) We know its source (Cervantes' Don Quixote) and we know that Lewis Theobald had adapted the Fletcher–Shakespeare play in 1727 as Double Falsehood. Since we have b1 the source and the adaptation—and some of the music, found recently by the historian Michael Wood4—it should be possible to create an approximation of the missing middle link. In 2011 Greg Doran did just this, working with the source, the adaptation, a scholar, and a playwright to produce a stageable version of the lost play.5 So there is still much to be discovered about Shakespeare—factually, in archives and interpretatively, in the theater. Note how all the exciting developments we cite here have taken place in the last ten years: the Middleton edition, the Kemp reference, the redating of All's Well (and of Sir Thomas More, see Myth 17), and the Robert Johnson music for a lost play. Clearly, the field of Shakespeare studies still has major surprises.

  Future discoveries also involve understanding past and present beliefs—what we have called “myths”—the cultural work these assumptions do for us and our national poet. In this book we have tried to foreground the journey towards discoveries rather than the destination, the reading rather than the conclusion. Throughout these thirty chapters we have been interested in how interpretative meaning is made and remade; how the same evidence can be used in different ways; the investment we have in the stories we tell; and how these stories or myths arose, what appeal they exercise, what evidence can be used to challenge or confirm them. Perhaps the ultimate myth, however, is one our book also perpetuates—except in this final injunction. Myths about Shakespeare can often displace the Shakespeare texts themselves. In the nineteenth century Hazlitt distinguished between Shakespeare's texts and commentaries on them: “If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.”6 His binary is extreme—genius versus insignificance—but his general principle is sound: there is no substitute for close acquaintance with the text. Heminge and Condell introduced their collected edition of the plays in 1623 with the command: “read him, again and again.” Four hundred years later it is hard to find better advice.

  Notes

  1 Gary Taylor, “Divine [ ]sences,” Shakespeare Survey, 54 (2001), p. 24 n.53.

  2 Nigel Nicholson, “A Place of Greater Safety for Vita's Work,” The Times, 2 July 2001.

  3 Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Shakespeare's Dancing Fool: Did William Kemp Live On as ‘Lady Hunsdon's Man’?”, Times Literary Supplement, 11 August 11 2010.

  4 Wood's discovery followed his assumption that the songs for Cardenio were probably composed by the man who composed the music for the other late romances, Robert Johnson: In Search of Shakespeare (London: BBC Books, 2003), pp. 363–5.

  5 Later that year, Shakespeare's Globe staged Gary Taylor's version as part of its Read Not Dead series (November 2011); Stephen Greenblatt had worked with the American playwright Charles Mee to create a modern version in 2008.

  6 William Hazlitt, “On the Ignorance of the Learned,” first published in the Edinburgh Magazine, July 1818.

  Further Reading

  A new book or article on Shakespeare comes along every hour of every day. You're not going to be able to read them all; nor can we. How, then, to choose what to read? We have offered a selection of further reading in narrative form to give a sense of the content of the books we are recommending, and why they appeal to us critically.

  Shakespeare's Life

  The standard life of Shakespeare is still Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975; there's also a Compact Documentary Life, 1987): Schoenbaum gives the documentary evidence and assesses difficult questions with even-handed restraint. His Shakespeare's Lives (1991; paperback 1993) is a perfect supplement, taking as its subject the history of Shakespearean biography, and enjoying many of the more eccentric interpretations of Shakespeare's life. Other recommended biographical works include James Shapiro on Shakespeare's most productive year, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005; paperback 2006), Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: Ho
w Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004; paperback 2005), and Michael Wood's book accompanying his television series In Search of Shakespeare (2003). We quote often from the detailed work of our colleague Katherine Duncan-Jones: her biography of a less than likeable Shakespeare is Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (2010—a revised edition of her 2001 Ungentle Shakespeare), and her account of Shakespeare's immediate reputation is Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan, 1592–1623 (2011). Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life (2000) is especially good on the early years in Stratford; Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (2008; paperback 2009) looks at Shakespeare and his context through the life-stages identified by Jaques in As You Like It (“All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players”; 2.7.139–40). Charles Nicholl's in-depth analysis of a court case in which Shakespeare was called as a witness (a somewhat evasive one, it has to be said) is in The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (2008). Lois Potter's The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (2012) is not just (just!) a biography of Shakespeare: it is a biography of his theater world, informed by Potter's unrivaled theatrical understanding.