Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  In taking over Blackfriars, the King’s Men also took on board playwrights who had made their reputations writing for its coterie audiences. The company could now boast that the five leading playwrights in the land – Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont – were now writing for them. Biographical critics like to imagine that some mid-life crisis or a longing to reunite with his wife and daughters led Shakespeare to turn to tragicomedy at this time. It’s more likely that his turn to romance and tragicomedy in his late and collaborative plays was dictated by the popularity of these kinds of plays at Blackfriars, amounting to a house style.

  By 1610, then, Shakespeare was writing for a new group of actors and alongside (as often as not collaboratively) a new generation of playwrights. And he was doing so in a new playing space. He had always written plays that could be converted from one venue to another, expecting that many of the plays first performed at the outdoor amphitheatres would be restaged at various royal palaces, at aristocratic houses and in touring provincial productions in all kinds of venues. That’s one reason that there are so few props and so little fancy stage business in his plays. But Blackfriars brought a particular set of challenges. Gone are the fight scenes – like the thrilling duel at the end of Hamlet. The cramped stage at Blackfriars, crowded with playgoers on stools, couldn’t accommodate them (which explains why, for example, a much anticipated fight at the end of The Two Noble Kinsmen is only reported, not staged). Another great difference had to do with lighting. While Blackfriars plays were performed in the afternoon, the playhouse windows didn’t admit enough light. So performances were illuminated by candlelight. In addition to creating a different mood in the intimate space, the candles needed to be trimmed in the course of a three-hour performance. This was handled at Blackfriars by intermissions between the acts, a far cry from the situation at the Globe, where action onstage was uninterrupted. By the time he wrote The Winter’s Tale, with its sudden passage of sixteen years in mid-play, Shakespeare had clearly begun to make creative use of these breaks.

  Audiences at Blackfriars expected to be entertained during the time it took to trim or replace candles. So when the King’s Men took over from the children’s company, they wisely acquired the skilled musicians who had accompanied them at Blackfriars. As a result, the plays that Shakespeare was now writing for the company included a great deal more music. Gone, then, from Shakespeare’s works from 1610 on, are the trumpets and drums of his earlier plays from Titus Andronicus onward, instruments which the actors themselves could easily handle, replaced by far more subtle musical effects. You can hear it in Cymbeline’s call for ‘solemn music’, the music that awakens Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, the ‘sad and solemn music’ in Henry the Eighth, the ‘sudden twang of instrument’ in The Two Noble Kinsmen, and especially in The Tempest, with its repeated calls for ‘solemn and strange music’ and ‘soft music’. Dancing, too, began to figure regularly in Shakespeare’s plays. Only six of his first thirty-three plays incorporated dancing scenes; after the move to Blackfriars, dancing would figure in all of Shakespeare’s plays.

  Most of these dance sequences revolve around a formal masque, a court-centred art form that drew together dance, music and the spoken word. Ben Jonson, one of the innovators of this genre, was also the first to introduce elements of the Jacobean court masque onto the Blackfriars stage in 1605. Shakespeare’s first attempt at a masque, written not long after, appeared in Timon at the Globe. After the move to Blackfriars they start appearing with surprising regularity, in Cymbeline, The Tempest, Henry the Eighth and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

  The Jacobean court masques attracted some of the most talented artists in the land. Shakespeare never wrote a masque for court, but as his late works make clear, he had a keen eye for the form, and members of his company were familiar enough with the genre, having been recruited to play the part of anti-masquers at court performances after 1609. It wouldn’t be long before Shakespeare offered his own version of the anti-masque, which Caliban and his mates provided after the dance of the Spirits in The Tempest, a play aptly described by Stephen Orgel as ‘the most important Renaissance commentary’ on the masque. Playgoers at Blackfriars may have been privileged relative to those at the Globe, but only a small number of playgoers at either theatre had the chance to witness the lavish masques performed before King James’s court; the masques Shakespeare incorporated into his plays were the next best thing.

  *

  The move to Blackfriars coincided with and may have accelerated what critics have long characterised as Shakespeare’s turn to a distinctive late style – though the reasons for the changes in his verse habits cannot simply be attributed to the new venue or the kinds of plays he was writing. I’m as wary of developmental or evolutionary arguments about style as I am about the life-stages of Shakespeare’s career, but there’s no getting around the evidence offered by the plays themselves after 1608 or so. The change in how he composed blank verse marks a watershed, excluding potential candidates like Oxford who died long before Shakespeare’s style took this turn.

  One of the curious things about his late style is that most critics (and I suspect most actors) don’t like it much: it’s often too difficult, too knotty, and for some too self-indulgent on Shakespeare’s part. Here’s a brief example from the opening scene of the late play Henry the Eighth, where Norfolk defends a seemingly hyperbolic description:

  As I belong to worship and affect

  In honour honesty, the tract of every thing

  Would by a good discourser lose some life

  Which action’s self was tongue to.

  (1.1.39–42)

  Even the best Shakespeare editors throw up their hands in despair at passages like this. With patience, the sense of it can be unpacked. Norfolk has taken a very roundabout way of saying, ‘Look, I’m noble and bound to tell the truth; but no matter how well a skilled reporter can describe something, it would fall short of what those who were there experienced.’ For Frank Kermode, whose ear for Shakespearean language is as keen as anyone’s, the ‘personification of action’ in this passage, as well as ‘the redundant affirmation of his honour and honesty, the affected “tract”’ are all ‘typical of the muscle-bound contortions of the late Shakespeare’s language’. It feels more like prose than blank verse, an effect in part achieved by abandoning a regular pause or breath at the end of lines.

  Russ McDonald, who has treated this subject elegantly in Shakespeare’s Late Style, runs through all the tricks that make up this new sound, and his account dovetails with Kermode’s. Shakespeare’s verse is now a lot more clipped and elliptical. It’s much tougher to follow because he removes the connections between clauses, wreaks havoc with conventional syntax and keeps interrupting speeches (and lengthening them) with parenthetical thoughts or qualifiers. Metaphors spill over one another, and letters, sounds, words and phrases re-echo. As scholars as long ago as Malone were quick to note, rhyme is all but banished, in its place far more enjambment and lines that have what’s called an extra-metrical or eleventh unstressed syllable.

  Here’s another example, from one of the last scenes Shakespeare ever wrote, Arcite’s speech to his knights in The Two Noble Kinsmen, which contains in abundance almost all of these stylistic innovations:

  Thou mighty one, that with thy power hast turned

  Green Neptune into purple;

  Whose approach in vast field comets prewarn,

  Unearthed skulls proclaim; whose breath blows down

  The teeming Ceres’ foison; who dost pluck

  With hand armipotent from forth blue clouds

  The masoned turrets that both mak’st and break’st

  The stony girths of cities: me thy pupil,

  Youngest follower of thy drum, instruct this day

  With military skill, that to thy laud

  I may advance my streamer and by thee

  Be styled lord o’th’day.

  (5.1.49–60)

  These l
ines are a nightmare to annotate or even paraphrase. Yet, as with even the knottiest passages from the late plays, playgoers don’t seem to object. Shakespeare somehow writes lines that sound pleasing enough to the ear when delivered at full speed in the theatre, yet defy easy analysis in the study. ‘Masoned turrets’ is a compressed way of describing who built them. City walls are now ‘stony girths’. ‘Unearthed’ in the sense of excavated had never been used this way before in English literature. Shakespeare’s eye drifts toward strange words, such as the one he lifts from Chaucer – ‘armipotent’ – who in a similar way had lifted it from his source, Boccaccio. It’s hard to disagree with Kermode’s conclusion that at this point in his career Shakespeare ‘is simply defying his audience, not caring to have them as fellows in understanding’.

  Lytton Strachey noted another change in these late plays: Shakespeare is no longer as interested in ‘who says what’. He’s right. There’s clearly a shift away from individuated voices in these works. By 1610 or so giving each speaker a distinctive voice seemed to stop mattering so much to Shakespeare, or perhaps other things just mattered more. Anyone who wants to claim that Shakespeare can write in such radically distinct styles simultaneously – that, say, he composed Henry the Eighth and Henry the Fifth at the same time, or The Winter’s Tale and As You Like It – is to my mind proposing the impossible. Nobody was writing in this often impenetrable style during the Elizabethan years; during the Jacobean period, many would, as admirers of Chapman and Fletcher can attest. It was a period style as much as a personal one.

  By March 1613, Shakespeare felt comfortable enough in the Blackfriars neighbourhood to purchase lodgings a hundred yards from the indoor theatre, though whether he saw this as a long-term residence, an investment or simply a place to stay in London while commuting from Stratford, we don’t know. Whatever his intentions, they probably changed three months later, when at the end of June disaster struck. The thatch of the Globe caught fire by accident during what several contemporaries tellingly described as a new play, Henry the Eighth, and the theatre quickly burned to the ground. The Globe was rebuilt, this time with tiles rather than the more flammable thatch roofing, but a year would pass before the new structure was finished. In the meantime, Shakespeare would write his last two collaborative plays, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the now lost Cardenio, exclusively for Blackfriars. No playwright who had died in 1604 could have anticipated or responded to these unfolding opportunities and events as Shakespeare did.

  *

  When I began teaching in the early 1980s, I didn’t know that three of the plays on my Shakespeare syllabus – Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens and Pericles – were co-authored. I never taught Henry the Eighth or The Two Noble Kinsmen so didn’t give much thought to the extent to which they were collaborative efforts as well. Like many other Shakespeareans at the time, I also didn’t pay much attention to the largely forgotten attribution studies of the nineteenth century. Serious work in that field had all but died out after the greatest Shakespeare scholar of the twentieth century, E. K. Chambers, had roundly dismissed the enterprise as the work of ‘disintegrators’. The leading authorities on whose judgement in these matters I relied, especially the editors of the authoritative Arden, Oxford and Cambridge series, all agreed with Chambers and firmly rejected the possibility that Shakespeare collaborated in any significant way.

  That now seems very long ago. A revolution has since occurred in how Shakespeare professors think about collaboration, largely as a result of the investigations of a new and creative generation of scholars interested in attribution, especially MacDonald Jackson, Ward Elliott, Jonathan Hope, David Lake and Gary Taylor. Working for the most part independently, they established irrefutable cases for Middleton’s, Wilkins’s and Fletcher’s contributions to Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays, as well as for George Peele’s hand in the much earlier Titus Andronicus. They did so by painstakingly teasing out the habits, conscious and unconscious, that characterise each writer’s style. Some of these researchers focused on versification, others on vocabulary, still others on the minutest of verbal tics, the kind of thing you would never catch while reading or watching a play, such as the use of auxiliaries, a preference for contractions, and so on. Following their analyses and statistics can be mind-numbing, but there’s no denying their conclusions about Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights’ stylistic preferences. Look closely enough at each writer’s body of work and then turn to their collaborative efforts, and their differences leap out. These studies also reached nearly identical conclusions about which parts of plays were Shakespeare’s and which his coauthors’. Building on these findings, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor’s 1986 Oxford edition of Shakespeare’s Works broke new ground by acknowledging almost all these collaborations. And in 2002, the scattered insights of various editors and researchers were collected and freshly set forth in Shakespeare Co-Author by Brian Vickers, who took delight in mocking editors who had ignored these studies or continued to insist in defiance of the evidence that Shakespeare had worked alone.

  By the time that Vickers’s book came out, a few editors had already begun to acknowledge on title pages that a given play was by ‘Fletcher and Shakespeare’ or ‘Shakespeare and Middleton’. But this news has barely begun to trickle out of the academic world. It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare’s collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thought we knew all along. Right now, though, for those who teach the plays and write about his life, it hasn’t been easy abandoning old habits of mind. I know that I am not alone in struggling to come to terms with how profoundly it alters one’s sense of how Shakespeare wrote, especially toward the end of his career when he co-authored half of his last ten plays. For intermixed with five of those that he wrote alone, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest, are Timon of Athens (written with Thomas Middleton), Pericles (written with George Wilkins), and Henry the Eighth, the lost Cardenio and The Two Noble Kinsmen (all written with John Fletcher).

  I don’t want to exaggerate what these attribution studies have achieved. They certainly haven’t brought us any closer to unravelling Shakespeare’s literary DNA. While we now have a pretty clear sense of which scenes were first drafted by Shakespeare and which by his co-authors – and all of those knotty passages I quoted above were written by Shakespeare – we are still in the dark about some of the most pressing questions about the nature of each collaborative effort. Did Shakespeare invite others to work together on a play, or did they approach him? Who worked out the plot? Why do these collaborations seem inferior to Shakespeare’s solo-authored plays? The new attribution studies also aren’t of much help when collaborations became more intensive, when playwrights engaged in give-and-take over a particular passage or simply borrowed from or imitated each other’s styles, perhaps unconsciously.

  One of the great challenges, then, to anyone interested in the subject is that we know so little about how dramatists at the time worked together. We just know – primarily from Philip Henslowe’s accounts of theatrical transactions from 1591 to 1604 – that they did, and that in the companies that performed in his playhouses, it was the norm, not the exception. But it is risky to extrapolate too much from that evidence how Shakespeare himself worked. And it seems obvious that collaborations during his early years were significantly different from those after 1605 or so, when he seemed to have resumed the practice after a long hiatus (perhaps best explained by the fact that he was no longer acting, so had both mornings and afternoons now free to engage in more sustained collaborations). We don’t even have an adequate language to describe co-authorship (‘collaboration’ still carries a whiff of co-operating with the enemy). Writers at the time aren’t much help either, even Ben Jonson, a veteran collaborator, who boasts in the Preface of his Volpone how he wrote the play by himself in only five weeks,

&
nbsp; fully penned it

  From his own hand, without a coadjutor,

  Novice, journeyman, or tutor.

  While we don’t know precisely what each of these terms means, it seems pretty clear that there was a pecking order, based on experience, among writers who worked together.

  Only a few other scraps of information have come down to us, such as Nathan Field’s letter in 1614 pitching a new play to Henslowe, where he writes that ‘Daborne and I have spent a great deal of time in conference about this plot, which will make as beneficial a play as hath come these seven years’. A richer anecdote was recorded by Thomas Fuller in 1684, who had heard that John Fletcher and one of his fellow authors had met ‘in a tavern, to contrive the rude draft of a tragedy; Fletcher undertook to kill the king therein, whose words being overheard by a listener (though his loyalty not to be blamed herein), he was accused of high treason’. Luckily for Fletcher and his collaborator, the felony charges were dropped after it became clear ‘that the plot was only against a dramatic and scenical king’, and ‘all wound off in merriment’. The story, fictional or not, allows us a fleeting glimpse of what is otherwise almost entirely lost to us – writers working out a plot together. But how, when and where Shakespeare conferred about the plot and characters of Pericles, Henry the Eighth, The Two Noble Kinsmen or Timon of Athens we’ll never know.

  Attribution studies are good at telling us how evenly the labour was divided as well as what parts of plays each dramatist preferred to write. The evidence suggests that most of Shakespeare’s joint efforts were equal, active partnerships. The most evenly split play was Pericles, with Wilkins contributing 835 lines and Shakespeare 827. Fletcher was responsible for a slightly larger share of both Henry the Eighth and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1,604 lines to Shakespeare’s 1,168 in the former; 1,398 to 1,124 in the latter). And Shakespeare was responsible for the lion’s share of both Titus Andronicus (1,759 to Peele’s 759) and Timon of Athens (1,418 to Middleton’s 897). Again, though I’m using Vickers’s precise figures, these numbers need to be taken as approximations, as the odds are high that collaboration extended further, to the point where two writers may have been responsible for parts of individual speeches, and perhaps, depending on whether one was responsible for smoothing out the final version, even lines.