Before the plays could be arranged chronologically the order of their composition needed to be worked out. Nobody had ever done this and it’s unclear when anyone first thought it worth doing. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe wondered which was Shakespeare’s first play – he couldn’t even hazard a guess – but thought it a mistake to assume that Shakespeare necessarily improved over time: ‘We are not to look for his beginnings in his least perfect works.’ A half-century later, Edward Capell, who was also curious about how Shakespeare had ‘commenced a writer for the stage, and in which play’, took things a step further, proposing that someone ought to investigate ‘the order of the rest of them’. Capell was well aware of how daunting a task this would be, requiring comprehensive knowledge of everything from versification to the printing history of the plays and the sources that Shakespeare drew upon. While Capell himself in his Notes and Various Readings broke fresh ground in this field, it would be left to Malone to attempt a full account of the plays’ chronology.
Malone made a fair number of mistakes in his Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays of Shakespeare Were Written in 1778, dating several plays far too early (his claim that The Winter’s Tale was written in 1594 was off by nearly twenty years) while placing others too late. But after a decade of additional research he was able to fix some of his more glaring errors, and his efforts spurred others to improve upon his chronology. It’s next to impossible to arrange plays in their order of composition without seeing a pattern, and the one that Malone believed in superseded the open-minded one offered by Rowe. Citing the authority of Pope and Johnson, Malone offered his readers a more comforting Enlightenment portrait, one in which an industrious Shakespeare steadily ‘rose from mediocrity to the summit of excellence; from artless and sometimes uninteresting dialogues, to those unparalleled compositions, which have rendered him the delight and wonder of successive ages’. Malone hastened to add that he wasn’t really arguing for ‘a regular scale of gradual improvement’, only that Shakespeare’s ‘knowledge increased as he became more conversant with the stage and with life, his performances in general were written more happily and with greater art’.
A few – surprisingly few – lines in Shakespeare’s plays refer explicitly to contemporary events, such as the allusion in Henry the Fifth to the Earl of Essex’s Irish campaign in the spring and summer of 1599, which allowed Malone to date that play with considerable precision. They were so few in number that their absence seems to have been a deliberate choice on Shakespeare’s part. But once Malone began sifting the plays for allusions to contemporary events and court intrigue, he found many more of them, or thought he did, reinforcing in a circular fashion his account of the plays’ chronology. While his primary aim was a working chronology, his sense of what counted as topical allusions, as well as his interpretation of them, led readers to believe that specific political messages were encoded in the plays.
So, for example, when Malone came upon the comic scene in Antony and Cleopatra where the Egyptian queen strikes a servant who brings her news of Antony’s remarriage, he recalled reading in Elizabethan chronicles that Queen Elizabeth had once boxed the Earl of Essex on the ear for turning his back on her. Malone decided that Shakespeare may have been attempting in this scene to ‘censure’ Elizabeth – who at this point had been dead for three or four years – ‘for her unprincely and unfeminine treatment of the amiable Earl of Essex’. Why stop there? A few scenes later, when the same servant describes to Cleopatra her rival’s features, Malone interprets it as ‘an evident allusion to Elizabeth’s inquiries concerning the person of her rival, Mary Queen of Scots’. There’s so much wrong about this it’s hard to know where to begin. For one thing, it implies that conversations onstage shouldn’t be taken at face value; they are really about something else, if only we could connect the dots and identify that something. For another, why Shakespeare, a member of the King’s Men, would want to alienate his monarch by introducing into this scene a discussion of how unattractive James’s dead mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been is unfathomable, though it didn’t give Malone pause.
Reductively identifying topical moments as Malone had, a by-product of trying to line up the life, works and times, became an easy and tempting game. Malone’s obsession with the Earl of Essex carried over into his interpretation of Hamlet. He had read the penitent earl’s last words from the scaffold, before Essex was beheaded in 1601 for treason: ‘send thy blessed angels, which may receive my soul, and convey it to the joys of heaven’. The dying man’s conventional prayer sounded to Malone sufficiently like Horatio’s words spoken over the dying Hamlet: ‘flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’. Malone suspected that Hamlet had been staged before Essex was executed, but even that didn’t stop him. So eager was he to suggest that ‘Lord Essex’s last words were in our author’s thoughts’ that Malone supposes that the ‘the words here given to Horatio may have been one of the many additions to the play’. Are we then to conclude that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s secret lament for the defeated earl, who, like his play’s protagonist, would be king? This is shoddy criticism and bad editing. Moreover, the history that Malone draws upon in making these topical correspondences was limited to chronicles, centred on the court, mostly from the reign of Elizabeth. That’s understandable enough: he didn’t have access to the kind of gritty social history that’s now a bedrock on which our understanding of Shakespeare’s drama and culture rests. But it badly skews the plays, turning them into court allegories, in which a Jacobean Shakespeare seems stuck in an Elizabethan past, unable to get out of his mind a slap administered by his queen, in a very different context, many years earlier.
I dwell on this at such length because Malone helped institutionalise a methodology that would prove crucial to those who would subsequently deny Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays (after all, the argument runs, how would anybody but a court insider know enough to encode all this?). First, however, this approach would influence traditional accounts of the plays, such as George Russell French’s Shakespeareana Genealogica (1869), which assures us that ‘nearly all Shakespeare’s dramatis personae are intended to have some resemblance to characters in his own day’. Such readings turned the plays into something other than comedies, histories and tragedies: they were now coded works, full of in-jokes and veiled political intrigue for those in the know. And given the great number of characters in Shakespeare’s plays and the many things that they say and do, the range of topical and biographical applications was nearly limitless. I don’t think that Malone really thought this through – he was just trying to bolster a shaky chronology and show off his knowledge of Elizabethan culture. But in doing so he carelessly left open a fire door.
The problems with Malone’s topical assumptions pale in comparison with those precipitated by his biographical ones. Until Malone had established a working chronology of Shakespeare’s plays, no critic or biographer had ever thought to interpret Shakespeare’s works through events in his life. About the closest anyone had come to reading the plays biographically was suggesting that Shakespeare had modelled comic characters such as Falstaff and Dogberry on local folk he had known. But such claims were never meant to reveal anything about Shakespeare’s character, other than perhaps suggesting that he had a bit of a vindictive streak.
Where earlier eighteenth-century editors such as Nicholas Rowe and Alexander Pope had prefaced the plays with a brief and anecdotal ‘Life’, Malone chose to fuse life and works through extended notes that appeared at the bottom of each page of text. So, for example, when Malone first discovered in the Stratford archives that Shakespeare’s son Hamnet had died in 1596, he thought it likely that Constance’s ‘pathetic lamentations’ about the loss of her son Arthur in King John (which Malone dated to this same year) were inspired by Shakespeare’s own recent loss. Perhaps they were. Perhaps the play had been written before Shakespeare learned of his son’s death. Perhaps he waited until composing Hamlet to unpack his heart. Or perhaps Shakespeare had been thinking
of something else entirely when he wrote these lines. We’ll never know.
Malone’s argument presupposed that in writing his plays Shakespeare mined his own emotional life in transparent ways, and for that matter, that Shakespeare responded to life’s surprises much as Malone and people in his own immediate circle would have. So that for Malone, Shakespeare was not the kind of man who could suffer such a loss without finding an outlet for his grief in his work: ‘That a man of such sensibility, and of so amiable a disposition, should have lost his only son, who had attained the age of twelve years, without being greatly affected by it, will not be easily credited.’ There was no corroborating evidence in any case to confirm or refute Shakespeare’s amiability (an anachronistic term, not used in this sense until the mid-eighteenth century), how hard the death of his son hit him, and how or even whether he transmuted loss into art. Indeed, there was no effort to consider that even as literary culture had changed radically since early modern times, so too had a myriad of social customs, religious life, childhood, marriage, family dynamics and, cumulatively, the experience of inwardness. The greatest anachronism of all was in assuming that people have always experienced the world the same way we ourselves do, that Shakespeare’s internal, emotional life was modern.
Malone’s decision to include the Sonnets and other poems alongside the plays proved even more consequential. As Margreta de Grazia has eloquently put it,
Malone’s pursuit from the externally observed to the inwardly felt or experienced marked more than a new type of consideration: it signalled an important shift in how Shakespeare was read. Shakespeare was cast not as the detached dramatist who observed human nature but as the engaged poet who observed himself.
Nowhere was this revised portrait of the artist more apparent than in the notes Malone first appended to the opening lines of ‘Sonnet 93’ in 1780, which set the direction of Shakespeare biography – and debates over authorship – on a new and irreversible course.
‘Sonnet 93’ begins with its speaker comparing himself to a familiar type, the cuckolded spouse: ‘So shall I live, supposing thou art true, / Like a deceived husband’. There’s nothing especially difficult in the meaning of these opening lines that warrants an explanation; Malone’s interest in providing an explanatory note was solely biographical. To this end, he collapses the very real distinction between the elusive persona of the speaker and Shakespeare himself (for we have no idea to what extent Shakespeare is writing out of his own experience or simply imagining a situation involving two fictional characters). By doing so, Malone gives himself licence to treat the sonnet as something that gave him direct and unmediated access into Shakespeare’s emotional life.
Malone tried to justify his novel approach by explaining that he had come across a manuscript of the biographer William Oldys, who had written that these lines ‘seem to have been addressed by Shakespeare to his beautiful wife on some suspicion of her infidelity’. That’s not actually something that Oldys had uncovered in some now lost papers. Oldys’s manuscript notes on Shakespeare, now housed in the British Library, are almost all dryly factual and bibliographic, except for one stray and gossipy remark that ‘Shakespeare’s poem called A Lover’s Affection seems to be written to his beautiful wife under some rumour of inconstancy’. Oldys was clearly misled by the title under which ‘Sonnet 93’ had appeared in John Benson’s 1640 edition of the Sonnets: ‘A Lover’s Affection though his Love Prove Unconstant’. Seizing on this hint, though knowing it’s the only one like it in Oldys’s notes, Malone wondered whether ‘in the course of his researches’ Oldys had ‘learned this particular’ about Shakespeare’s marriage – intimating that there was some archival underpinning here, though it’s obvious to even a casual reader of his notes that Oldys couldn’t be less interested in Shakespeare’s marriage or inner life. Malone then offers a few scraps of supporting evidence, including that contested will in which Shakespeare had chosen his daughter Susanna as his executor and had further slighted his wife by bequeathing her ‘only an old piece of furniture’. Early biographers were so disturbed by what they interpreted as Shakespeare’s graceless decision to leave his widow a ‘second best bed’ that when reprinting the document some silently emended the phrase to ‘brown best bed’.
Malone found further evidence of Shakespeare’s jealous resentment of his wife – expressed in the will and confirmed in ‘Sonnet 93’ – in several of the dramatic works, for ‘jealousy is the principal hinge of four of his plays’, especially Othello, where ‘some of the passages are written with such exquisite feeling, as might lead us to suspect that the author had himself been perplexed with doubts, though not perhaps in the extreme’. A mistaken identification of the Sonnets’ author with their speakers, a strained reading of a poem’s opening lines and a fundamental misunderstanding of the conventions of early modern wills, confirmed, if further confirmation were needed, by what occurred in play after play, added up for Malone to a convincing case.
Knowing that his account crossed a boundary, one that had been strictly observed by every previous editor and critic of Shakespeare’s plays, Malone retreated a half-step, admitting that the case was built on ‘an uncertain foundation’ and explaining that all he meant ‘to say is, that he appears to me to have written more immediately from the heart on the subject of jealousy, than on any other; and it is therefore not improbable that he might have felt it’. Recognising that this semi-retraction didn’t go quite far enough, he added: ‘The whole is mere conjecture.’ But he refused to reword or remove what he had written.
As noted earlier, Malone’s annotations appeared in an edition of Shakespeare’s Works edited by George Steevens. Steevens, an established scholar, had warmly welcomed the younger Malone into the world of Shakespeare editing three years earlier, even as Dr Johnson had welcomed him; but when he read Malone’s note to ‘Sonnet 93’, he insisted on adding a rejoinder. Steevens knew and feared where this kind of speculation could lead. It was a very slippery slope, with conjecture piled upon conjecture. He too had consulted Oldys’s notes and saw through Malone’s ploy, insisting that whether ‘the wife of our author was beautiful or otherwise was a circumstance beyond the investigation of Oldys’. Steevens added that whether ‘our poet was jealous of this lady is likewise an unwarrantable conjecture’. Steevens was especially offended by Malone’s reductive view that just because one of Shakespeare’s characters experienced something, the poet must have felt it too: ‘That Shakespeare has written with his utmost power on the subject of jealousy is no proof that he ever felt it.’ For if this were so, given the nearly limitless range of Shakespeare’s characters, it would be possible to claim virtually anything and everything about Shakespeare’s own feelings. Because Timon of Athens hates the world, Steevens asked, does it follow that Shakespeare himself ‘was a cynic or a wretch deserted by his friends’? And because Shakespeare so vividly conveys the ‘vindictive cruelty of Shylock’, he added, driving the point home, ‘are we to suppose he copied from a fiend-like original in his own bosom?’
Steevens was unforgiving. He recognised that Shakespeare scholarship stood at a crossroads, foresaw that once Malone pried open this Pandora’s box it could never be shut again. He would not have been surprised to learn that two centuries later a leading scholar would write (and a major university press publish) a book called Shylock Is Shakespeare that answered his rhetorical question in the affirmative. Steevens’s response to the kind of biographical flights of fancy Malone was both engaged in and inviting could not have been clearer:
As all that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare is – that he was born at Stratford upon Avon – married and had children there – went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays – returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried – I must confess my readiness to combat every unfounded supposition respecting the particular occurrences of his life.
Malone, more comfortable criticising others than being taken to task himself, was stung by
Steevens’s response. Steevens was clearly threatened by his upstart collaborator and now rival, and the wounds opened in this latest exchange would never heal. When Steevens died in 1800, Malone didn’t even attend his funeral and continued to harp on the ‘incessant malignity and animosity’ that Steevens had directed at his annotations years earlier.
An overlong note to ‘Sonnet 93’ got longer still when Malone again insisted that the works described what Shakespeare himself had gone through: ‘Every author who writes on a variety of topics will have sometimes occasion to describe what he has himself felt.’ He then turned on Steevens for imagining that Shakespeare could have shared Timon’s cynicism, let alone ‘the depravity of a murderer’. To argue this ‘would be to form an idea of him contradicted by the whole tenor of his character’. Since Malone knew what Shakespeare’s character was like, he had no difficulty identifying which of his dramatic creations embodied it.
The unprofitable game of profiling what could or couldn’t be true of Shakespeare’s character, based on what his characters said or did, had begun. So too had the baseless tradition that Shakespeare was unhappily married. Trying to extricate himself from charges that this was idle speculation, Malone further entangled himself in the intricacies of Shakespeare’s love-life. While willing to concede that ‘it does not necessarily follow that because he was inattentive to her in his Will, he was therefore jealous of her’, Malone didn’t believe that Anne Hathaway was good enough for Shakespeare: ‘He might not have loved her; and perhaps she might not have deserved his affection.’ Malone was a bachelor when he wrote these words – in fact, he would never marry, though he wanted to (he seems to have wooed far too aggressively, and two years after this edition appeared would write to a woman he had wanted to marry but who had rejected him, words that echo his sentiments here: ‘How, my dear,’ he complained, ‘have I deserved that you should treat me with such marked unkindness?’). Malone’s biographical note to ‘Sonnet 93’ thus introduced yet another centrepiece of modern Shakespearean biography: the tendency to confuse the biographical with the autobiographical, as writers projected onto a largely blank Shakespearean slate their own personalities and preoccupations.
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