by Park Honan
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
(II. vii. 163-6)
That might be a parody of the satiric mode of Jonson and Marston in the late 1590s: and Jaques's cynicism is punctured by the entry of the servant Adam, who, at 80, is defeated only by hunger and knows of 'unregarded age in corners thrown'.
Yet here Shakespeare does not emphasize social issues. Lodge had imagined a 'Forest of Arden', and in the play the dramatist's Forest of Arden is a timeless place of random encounters, mainly happy debates and recollection. The word 'Arden' itself has a relation to the French Ardennes, to the Warwickshire Arden, and perhaps to the author's youth if he once heard folk-tales from the lips of Robert Arden's daughter. In the play's Arden the reality of death is not quite absent, and Touchstone is the first of the playwright's fools to have learned from death. 'But as all is mortal in nature', he tells Rosalind, 'so is all nature in love mortal in folly.' Shakespeare, nevertheless, evokes the dead poet Marlowe diffidently, or, perhaps, as a 'private rite of
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memory', as Anne Barton notices. Phoebe the shepherd-girl summons up Marlowe Hero and Leander (which had appeared in two editions in 1598) when she quotes a line of it --
Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?'
(III. v. 82-3) 36
And Rosalind alludes to the poem's subject (though Marlowe's Leander does not drown) in one of her best anti-romantic comments on love. ' Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club', she tells Orlando,
yet he did what he could do to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun if it had not been for a hot midsummer night, for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. (IV. i. 91-101)
Rosalind, as 'Ganymede', has a freedom from fixed personality and propriety alike in being of both sexes, but retains her vulnerability. In the green forest, where nature works its subtle change on everyone, she is the most theatrical of heroines with a mind no less winning because it resists flattery. 'I was never so berhymed', she says of Orlando's lyrics, 'since Pythagoras' time that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember' (III. ii. 172-4). Through her, the author brightly tests the sensitivity of comedy, as if the comic stage were not the worst means of postponing any accounting for real loss or distress. Yet 'The Forest of Arden' is a source of mythical truth as real as dearth, poverty, injustice, exile, or the blindness of the human spirit. It offers a romantic setting in which Shakespeare can exhibit an internalization of values such as fidelity and love, with strong and sharp emphasis on his lovers' psyches. He exteriorizes their most intimate, evolving feelings and perceptions, and in this respect at least he brings himself to the edge of the terrible introspections of tragedy.
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III
THE MATURITY OF GENIUS
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13
SOUTH OF JULIUS CAESAR'S TOWER
Ho no, no, no, no! My meaning in saying he is a good man-7 is to have you understand me that he is sufficient. Yet his means are in supposition. He hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies. I understand moreover upon the Rialto he hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England, and other ventures he hath squandered abroad. But ships are but boards, sailors but men. There be land rats and water rats, water thieves and land thieves -- I mean pirates -- and then there is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks. The man is, notwithstanding, sufficient. Three thousand ducats. I think I may take his bond.
( Shylock, The Merchant of Venice)
Ben Jonson's thumb
Late in Elizabeth's reign -- on St James's Day, 25 July 1601 -- two men of the theatre went to Bricklayers Hall near Aldgate in the capital to pay dues to one of the city's guilds, the Worshipful Company of Tilers and Bricklayers. Both workers paid in arrears -- 2s. for the first, and 3s. for the second. The first was Richard Hudson, a building worker who loyally aided the Burbage family from the 1570s to the time of the second Globe on Bankside. 1 The other was a gaunt, muscular Londoner who in June 1572 was baptized Benjamin Johnson, but styled himself ' Ben Jonson'.
No doubt Ben Jonson had learned to hate bricklaying, but he took it up when in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes. After army service in the Lowlands he had married, become a strolling actor, and then a
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playwright. There is a story (told by Rowe) that he was 'altogether unknown' when one of his scripts came to the Lord Chamberlain's men, who treated it 'carelessly and superciliously' and were about to reject it, 'when Shakespear luckily cast his Eye upon it, and found something so well in it as to engage him first to read it through, and afterwards to recommend Mr Johnson and his Writings to the Publick'. 2 The story has little to recommend it, since Jonson was not 'unknown' when the troupe first produced one of his Humour plays in 1598. A strong demand for new, playable scripts was a fact of life. But whether or not he saved Johnson from a rejection, Shakespeare must have approved the play: he acted in its early version set in Italy; and no doubt also in Jonson's 'Londonized' revision (the one often acted today). A stylish comedy, in which everyone is under the sway of a leading trait, or 'humour', Every Man in his Humour pits the brashness of youth against obsessions of age. It is smart, funny, and lifelike: any troupe would have prized it.
Soon after its debut, Jonson displayed a tragic humour of his own. In a duel on 22 September at Shoreditch he killed Gabriel Spencer, an actor who had been in the Marshalsea prison with him the year before as a result of the government's outrage over Jonson's and Nashe's The Isle of Dogs. This time, to escape the gallows, Jonson pleaded benefit of clergy: he read his 'neck verse' to prove he knew Latin, and received a brand with a hot iron at the base of his left thumb, 'T', for Tyburn, to identify him if he killed again.
Then he returned to bricklaying -- but not for long. In the Induction of his next work for the troupe, Every Man Out of his Humour, he mentions his taking 'a good meal among Players' once a fortnight, though living on 'beans and buttermilk' at home. 3 He must have supped with those who acted in his two Humour plays, and seen their regular poet. At 26, Jonson was a tall man, thin and scrawny for his height, with no trace yet of a 'mountain belly'. He was said to dress in 'rug' (a coarse woollen fabric) and favour a coat 'with slits under the armpits'. He clearly loomed over Shakespeare, who is not described as tall, and whose normal attire escaped comment, although that may suggest that he wore the predictable, neat silk doublet of an actor-manager. With the oddity of a high, slightly perpendicular fore-
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head if one can trust his portraits, Shakespeare by report was 'a handsome well shap't man: very good company, and of a verie readie and pleasant smooth Witt'. 4 What was vital to Jonson was that the 'well shap't man' was potentially a munificent buyer of scripts, and in his mid-thirties the most famous playwright in London. Shakespeare, at their early meetings, was confronted with a thin, odd, brilliant, voluble scarecrow, and Jonson, if haughtily obsessed with himself, remembered the older poet's naturalness and candour. 'Hee was (indeed) honest', Jonson recalled of his Stratford friend, 'and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions'. Such phrases slide vaguely between memories of the man and of his verse; but Jonson claimed in his elegy that the 'father's face lives in his issue', as if Shakespeare's affable manners still lived in his 'well-turnèd and true-filèd lines'. 5
Nevertheless as Jonson's art matured, he viewed Shakespeare as his principal rival and became by turns awestruck and obsessed, puzzled and dismissive: ' Shakespeare wanted art', he told William Drummond in 1619, and in retrospect he tri
ed to sum up his friend's chief defect. 'I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare', noted Jonson, 'that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn'd), hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech'. 6 He invented, with a little help from his friends, the image of a poorly schooled, naturally gifted Stratford poet who, with 'small Latine and lesse Greeke', had committed silly, egregious faults in a spume of words. Julius Caesar irked him for more than two decades, because the play should have been more foolish than it was, to judge from his comments in The Staple of News ( 1626) and in Discoveries (probably written after the fire that burned Jonson's papers in November 1623) -- yet at his best he judged Shakespeare's merits acutely.
Legends of their 'wit combats' at the Mermaid tavern on Bread Street are unsound, 7 though Jonson was fond of the Mermaid despite its high prices, and Shakespeare knew its landlord William Johnson by 1613. Once at such a tavern, when the two poets were in their cups, Jonson supposedly jotted his mock-epitaph, 'Here lies
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Ben Jonson, | That was once one [?one's son]', and Shakespeare obliged by completing it:
Who while he lived was a slow thing
And now being dead is no thing.
In another story, the older poet had to be godfather to a Jonson son, and after racking his brains to think of a christening gift came out of a 'deep study' inspired. 'I'll e'en give him a dozen good latten spoons', he told Ben, 'and thou shalt translate them.' (The weak pun is on latten, a brass, or brass-like alloy, often used in church utensils.) 8
The facts suggest that Shakespeare took pains to oblige the tall, intellectual young poet by acting in his Humour play and later in his Roman tragedy Sejanus His Fall, in 1603. And Jonson's early allusions to his rival are in turn good-natured, neutral, or mildly satirical, with none of the cutting force of his attacks on other poets. Sooner or later Jonson offended every troupe he worked for, but he was a writer the Chamberlain's men tried to please. If the brand on his thumb was a badge of apartness, he was agreeable when he left his beans and buttermilk and sought friends among wild-heads, poetizers, and law students of the Inner Temple: he dedicated his second Humour play to the Inns of Court. He knew poets such as John Donne of Lincoln's Inn and Francis Beaumont of the Inner Temple, or Donne's confidant Henry Goodere and the sharp-minded parliamentarian and essayist Francis Bacon of Gray's Inn. He had connections with men who helped to form taste among the gentry. Even younger spirits at the Inns were influential, and the Chamberlain's actors could lose vital prestige if the gentry ever defected.
Furthermore, Jonson not only admired new satirists at the Inns, but expanded on their precedents. He had a friendly enemy in John Marston of the Middle Temple, born in 1576, whose poems in Scourge of Villainy set a precedent in snapping at the city's idle, privileged dandies as in 'Cynic Satire' written at 22:
These are no men, but apparitions,
Ignes fatui, glowworms, fictions,
Meteors, rats of Nilus, fantasies,
Colosses, pictures, shades, resemblances.
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Ho, Lynceus!
Seest thou yon gallant in the Sumptuous clothes,
How brisk, how spruce, how gorgeously he shows?
Note his French herring-bones: but note no more,
Unless thou spy his fair appendant whore. 9
Having caught the acid note of classical Latin verse, even as satires were banned in 1599, Marston had begun to bring his sharp talents to play-writing.
Fresh young intellects in these years upset any notion of the merely entertaining play or a quiescent theatre. Shakespeare, for his part, had little to gain from vying openly with littérateurs, and might have seemed lacking in competitiveness. It is likely that that aspect of the man struck, if it did not unnerve, the voluble, truculent Jonson. In talk and demeanour, Shakespeare might have seemed unconcerned with his worth, or, at least, been lightly facetious about his real or imaginary detractors. His jokes might suggest that he was troubled by his ease, or facility, or by a demon that let him do anything with words; the difficulty of his projects, even his punning, can look like retorts upon the demon. With joking gravity, he put himself down, as if glad of a delicious chance to do so, as in the implicit view of himself in the Poet of the Sonnets. His Poet is 'tongue-tied' at the notion of a rival, certain that another poet is a 'better spirit', or that his own 'saucy bark' is 'inferior far'. 10 The Poet of Sonnet 78, uneasy among the learned, asks his lovely friend to advance 'as high as learning my rude ignorance'.
One sign that Shakespeare made no claim for his erudition is that Jonson denied he had any, but his friend found the Stratford poet no meek soul. Shakespeare saw himself as a useful, practical poet working up chronicle or story material into new forms for the sake of proficient actors: he was a supplier, leaving within the text of a play broad guidelines for the actors' interpretation of the work, so he neither insisted upon a limited view of his meanings nor abrogated responsibility for what he wrote. Jonson, in contrast, was throwing the onus of interpretation upon an audience, and writing mainly sourceless comedies of social insight while driving at the pride, greed, and chicanery of the age.
Shakespeare was less well attuned to Jonson's self-assertive, cynical
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audacity than to an imaginative meeting of a troupe's needs. Fashions in play-writing changed, and he tried to stay ahead. Yet Jonson's cutting edge, his free, attacking mind, his trenchant mockery and tireless intellectual zeal for demolition might implicitly have accused the older poet of tameness. Shakespeare was repeating himself in new romantic comedies, doing so with exceptional artistry, but relying on his own older, well-tried situations, on worn devices, and mild versions of often Tarltonesque clowns. It is not that he sedulously imitated Jonson or anyone else, though he plucked twigs off a forest of trees. But his new, lying or boasting railers such as Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, Lucio in Measure for Measure, or Parolles in All's Well have a relation to such a depraved clown as Carlo Buffone in Jonson's Every Man Out of his Humour. The intellectual quotient rises, and Jonson's example and influence, among other factors, led Shakespeare to such a difficult, self-trapping, self -- challenging exploit as inventing a Prince Hamlet whose mind holds the stage for five acts in which 'revenge' is suspended. Jonson's examples also encouraged a new, hard-edged realism in Shakespeare's so-called 'problem comedies' and other new works ahead.
Anecdotes of their friendship say little of the poets' awarenesses, and Jonson was competitive, restless, nervily ambitious. His Sejanus implicitly attacks Julius Caesar, and in condemning heroic action and exposing a state's pervasive corruption Jonson's play was surely remembered by the author of King Lear. Jonson saved most of his outright criticism of his rival for prologues, prefatory verses, or reminiscences dating from about 1614. In retrospect, he implies that 'three rusty swords' and 'Lancaster's long jars' are not enough to show political realities in Henry VI, or that a chorus as in Henry Vthat 'wafts you o'er the seas' is foolishly artificial. As for Shakespeare's stage properties and the imitation of nature an audience needs neither
rolled bullet heard
To say, it thunders; nor tempestuous drum
Rumbles, to tell you when the storm doth come. 11
For Jonson, Pericles is a glib, mouldy tale that wants art. As for The Winter's Tale or The Tempest, a good neo-classical poet must be
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'loath to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries'. 12 And Jonson is loose enough with a notion of dates in the Bartholomew Fair Induction to show how outmoded his rival is. Those souls who praise Titus Andronicus have a taste which has stood still 'these five and twenty, or thirty years', he says in 1614. 13 All of this is offset by his critical views in the elegy of 1623, when Shakespeare is judged without an inhibiting sense of the troubling, creating presence of the living man; there is scant attention to the man in this int
elligent elegy. But in these years Jonson's main struggle to adjust his own views lay ahead, and in new works the Stratford poet, though by no means oblivious to Jonson and Marston, and in fact learning from them, sharply impressed and irked a man of 'humours'.
Shylock, the troubled Merchant of Venice, and Francis Meres
Just before Hamnet Shakespeare died, Londoners had had bracing news from the sea. An English attack on Cadiz harbour resulted in the capture of two opulently laden Spanish galleons. One of them, the San Andrés -- renamed the Andrew, becomes a byword for sea-wealth in The Merchant of Venice in Salerio's phrase, 'my wealthy Andrew docks in sand' (I. i. 27). 14 That helps to date the Merchant, which Shakespeare appears to have written after July 1596, when news of the ship's capture reached London, and before 22 July 1598 when the play was registered.
In the Midlands this was a period of harvest dearth, famine, and widespread social unrest; it was also a period in which the poet lost his only son, and made a large, showy investment in New Place. For all the claims on his energies and the financial exigencies of his troupe, one might expect that his mood, at times, was more introverted than usual in these months. There is a committed inwardness in the Merchant with its emphatic moral themes, its pictures of a spiritual malaise, and its remarkable characterization. The play has compelling argumentative speeches, but its last act is evasively aestheticized -- so that issues of justice and mercy, raised earlier, are left unresolved.