The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  They had a daughter, Mary, but there seemed to be a problem marrying her off. Else why would so many “conferences” between William Shakespeare and Mrs. Lucy Mountjoy be required for them to form a plan wherein William Shakespeare would approach the servant and apprentice wigmaker and make him an offer of a generous settlement on behalf of Christopher Mountjoy if Belott married the daughter Mary? Shakespeare, in other words, did the financial wooing.

  We don’t know for sure why a servant and apprentice would require such blandishments, but the depositions indicate that Shakespeare was successful in his surrogate wooing on behalf of Mary, or at least his promises were. But what were Shakespeare’s promises? That was the issue of the lawsuit, although only long after the alleged promises were made.

  A few years after the marriage, there’s some split between the wigmaker and the son-in-law, and he and the daughter he married moved out; then they move back in with the Mountjoys, and then there’s this lawsuit—eight years later!—where the servant turned son-in-law declares that all that time ago he was promised by Mr. Shakespeare (on behalf of the wigmaker) a payment upon marriage and a substantial settlement—some two hundred pounds—after the wigmaker’s death. And that the wigmaker never gave him a penny.

  Again one of those affairs whose combinational and permutational possibilities “dizzy the arithmetic of memory.” Anthony Holden suggests an affair between the wigmaker’s wife and Shakespeare, the two of them scheming to get the prying daughter out of the house—or the prying apprentice. I personally suspect Shakespeare and the daughter herself—which would explain why there was some difficulty, some negotiations necessary, to get her married off to the servant. Of course, neither the estimable Holden nor I have any proof for our suspicions. But the raw material of Shakespearean comedy is there: the cynical go-between (Shakespeare as Pandarus), the scheming servant, the flighty daughter, the amorous mother, the foolish wigmaker.

  All this, a farce that could be called “Shakespeare and the Wigmaker’s Daughter,” lurks beneath the surface of the depositions of the wigmaker family and in particular the deposition of “William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon in the Countye of Waricke, gentleman of the age of xlviij [48] or thereaboutes.”

  At first when I got the University of Nebraska Studies version of the Shakespeare deposition I was slightly disappointed. The question had been, initially, did we have any indisputable instance of Shakespeare’s own voice, and yes this was Shakespeare’s own voice although slightly filtered through a kind of court reporter.

  As in: “To the second interrogatory this deponent [Shakespeare] sayeth he did know the complainant [the son-in-law] when he was servant with the defendant and that during the time of the complainant’s service with the said defendant he, the said complainant, to this deponent’s [Shakespeare’s] knowledge did well and honestly behave himself, but to this deponent’s remembrance he hath not heard the defendant confesses that he had got any great profit and commodity by the service of the said complainant, but this deponent saith he verily thinketh that the said complainant was a very good and industrious servant in the said service.”

  There’s a filter but it can’t filter out the patterned ambiguity, the alternation of assertions and retractions. Stephen was a good servant, says Shakespeare, but on the other hand he never heard the master say he got much from his service. But on the other hand he thinks he was a good servant.

  This ambivalence or ambiguity reaches a kind of fever pitch in the fourth interrogatory, where you stop wondering about whether Shakespeare was screwing the wigmaker’s daughter or wife or both and wonder if you are getting a glimpse of his mind at work doing something that is, in a primal way, Shakespearean: creating double meanings, revising himself, rewriting himself. I’m speaking of Shakespeare’s “Corrections.”

  The grail of recent textual scholarship has been to discover whether we can glimpse Shakespeare in the act of rewriting, rethinking his words. For the most part the debate has focused on his dramatic works, his playwriting, but here in the fourth interrogatory, because of the way the document has come down to us in the original—with handwritten cross-outs and substitutions—we get something even more unique and indisputable: Shakespeare rewriting not his plays but his own dialogue.

  It is in the fourth interrogatory that Shakespeare is pressed on the key question in the case: What exactly did he, Shakespeare, in his role of go-between, tell the servant that the master had promised as a payment in return for the hand of the daughter? It’s an interrogatory in which Shakespeare’s answer sounds as shaky and fungible as Falstaff describing the seven (or was it eleven) “men in buckram” who robbed his robbery. Here it is, beginning with the third interrogatory to put it in context:

  3. To the third Interrogatory this deponent [Shakespeare] sayethe that it did evydentlye appeare that the said defft [defendant, Christopher Mountjoy] did all the tyme of the said compltes [complainant’s, the servant, now son-in-law, Belott] service wth him beare and shew great good will and affeccion towardes the said complt, [the servant] and that he hath heard the defft and his wyefe diuerse and sundry tymes saye and reporte that the said complt was a very honest fellowe: And this depont [Shakespeare] sayethe that the said defendant [Mountjoy] did make a mocion vnto the complainant of marriadge wth the said Mary in the bill mencioned, beinge the said defftes sole chyld and daughter, and willing-lye offered to performe the same yf the said Complainant shold seeme to be content and well like thereof: And further this deponent [Shakespeare] sayethe that the said defftes wyeffe did sollicitt and entreat this deponent [Shakespeare] to moue and perswade the said Complainant to effect the said Marriadge, and accourdingly this deponent did moue and perswade the complainant therto: And more this in Interrogatorye he cann[ot depose].

  Now we come to the corrections: note carefully that which is “stricken out”:

  4. To the ffourth Interr[ogatory] this deponent [Shakespeare] sayth that the defend[an]t promised to geue [give] the said Complainant a porcion [“of monie and goodes”—those four words are stricken out in the original] in Marriadg wth Marye his daughter. but what certayne porcion he Rememberithe not. Nor when to be payed [“yf any summe weare promised”—(stricken out in the original)] nor knoweth that the defend[an]t promissed the [“defendt” (stricken out)] plaintiff twoe hundered poundes wth his daughter Marye at the tyme of his decease. But sayth that the plaintiff was dwelling wth the defendant in his house And they had Amongeste themselues manye Conferences about there Marriadge w[hich] [afterwardes] was Consumated and Solempnized. And more he cann[ot depose.]

  Consider the first instance in which Shakespeare turns a statement that might have been definitive evidence into utter ambiguity: “the defend[an]t promiced … a porcion of monie and goodes” becomes “the defend[an]t promiced … a porcion.”

  A portion of what, Mr. Shakespeare? By striking out “of monie and goodes” he leaves us with an abstraction, a “portion” that could be anything, any portion of anything, an infinite array of possible portions. The possibilities are now endless if not bottomless. It all depends on what portion you think portion should mean. A very Clintonian Bill Shakespeare here.

  And then he goes a little too far in the second statement. When he says not only doesn’t he remember what portion nor when to be paid nor “yf any summe weare promised” (stricken).

  Evidently he must have given this bit a rethink: Hmm, that’s going a bit too far, denying knowledge of any sum. There was some summe. And one begins to suspect that the landlord’s pledge of that sum—or the size of it—was a fiction Shakespeare fabricated to seal the deal.

  You can almost see and hear Shakespeare squirming. And then as a way to get out of it, almost as if he is sending a signal not to look too closely into how this marriage was arranged and what was really promised, he makes an apparently irrelevant addendum about the fact that the plaintiff was dwelling in the house: “And they had Amongeste themselues manye Conferences about there Marriadge w[hich] [afterwardes] was Con
sumated and Solempnized. And more he cann.” “Cann” is rendered as an abbreviation for “cannot” in the University of Nebraska edition, but by itself, it could also read “cann [tell].” Or even if it means “cannot,” cannot could mean could but isn’t willing to rather than can’t.

  Almost without meaning to—although who can know for sure?—Shakespeare seems to be creating himself or re-creating himself as a comic caricature with his transparent Falstaffian attempts to avoid being pinned down. He seems caught between two opposing factions (because of his fictions), each of whom he wants to please, because each of them, one imagines, has something on him.

  He’s Pandarus, the comic, lascivious go-between from Troilus and Cressida, he’s Slippery Will of the anecdote about William the Conqueror coming before Richard the Third, he’s the double-talking con man Autolycus, the ballad seller in The Winter’s Tale who serves as go-between as well.

  The biographers, needless to say, are attracted to the Mountjoy depositions because they suggest something juicy going on in Shakespeare’s life at a crucial point in his creative development, something that may have fed into his “problem” comedies, as they are called, a secret play on the order of Shakespeare and the Wigmaker’s Wife—or Daughter. Perhaps there is something irresistible about the juxtaposition of wigmaker and bald Shakespeare (there is even a scholarly book devoted, in a postmodern way, to the deeper meaning of Shakespeare’s Baldness). One begins to imagine scenes: Shakespeare and the wigmaker’s wife—or daughter—trying on hairpieces together.…

  All harmless fun, this speculation. The Wigmakers’ Lawsuit may seem like a digression but it could be taken as a token of a phenomenon in the work as well.

  In the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit we see Shakespeare almost literally, almost simultaneously, speaking out of both sides of his mouth, creating double meanings on the fly. He had apparently, on the one hand, convinced the servant there’s a rich dowry in prospect if he’ll marry the daughter, and he’s promised the master he hasn’t really promised much at all to get the servant to agree. Then in his deposition he compounds the doublespeak with another level of ambiguity and leaves a legible record of what he’s first advanced and then retracted. (His initial testimony isn’t erased—it’s crossed out in a way that makes it still readable.)

  So the statement and its negation are both present, almost like matter and antimatter, assertion and denial—much à deux of two contraries that adds up to be nothing. The dowry was both “to be” and “not to be.”

  Again let me make clear that this is not necessarily evidence that Shakespeare revised his work. As we’ll see in the next chapter the tide has begun to turn against the sweeping claims of the “Reviser” faction. But Shakespeare’s deposition is one of the few biographical fragments that suggest something one can find in the work: a predisposition to ambiguity, which is not the same as a predisposition to rewriting. Rewriting, or revision, in most cases changes one meaning to another meaning. Ambiguity endows one word with two meanings, sometimes multiple, multiplying, meanings. So that it’s always revising itself. Nonetheless Shakespeare’s shaky testimony has to be taken with a grain (a shaker?) of salt. Maybe he’d just flipped his wig.

  Chapter Four

  “Look There, Look There …”:

  The Scandal of Lear’s Last Words

  It is, to my mind, perhaps the most important, difficult, complex, embarrassing, humbling, scandalous, unresolved question in Shakespeare studies: the question of Lear’s last words. The fact, the veritable scandal, that we have two versions of those last words and can’t be sure which is the more “Shakespearean.”

  Two versions that differ more perplexingly, even profoundly to some, than the two versions of Hamlet’s last words. Those, you’ll recall, consist only of the addition (in the Folio version) of the four “O-groans.” And though the Hamlet question is not simple, the two versions don’t necessarily contradict each other.

  But with the two versions of Lear, one set of dying words replaces the other. There is, as well, a pronounced, undeniable difference in sentiment and significance between the last words in the 1608 Quarto and the last words in the 1623 Folio version. The Folio version of Lear’s last words is one of the most memorable passages in all Shakespeare. Lines that virtually define what we think of when we think of what is “Shakespearean.”

  They are the last lines a dying Lear utters while cradling the dead body of his daughter Cordelia and desperately hoping that she still has the breath of life in her. Hoping or deceiving himself that he sees the breath of life on her lips. Which prompts him to cry out:

  Do you see this? Look on her! Look her lips,

  Look there, look there.

  He then dies thinking (or deluding himself) that she lives. He dies, some say, with a redemptive, even hopeful vision emerging provisionally, perhaps delusively from the suffering of the tragedy. A redemptive potential far different from the unrelieved, unredeemed suffering in the Quarto version.

  In the Quarto last words, which have long been occluded by neglect, Lear cries out, apparently without hope of any kind, real or delusional:

  “Break, heart, I prithee break.” Words which some scholars see not just as a cry of brokenheartedness, but as a wish for self-annihilation.

  And judging from the ongoing argument among scholars, the difference in the last words makes a difference thematically as well. Poses a question about the poetic, emotional and thematic implications not just of Lear’s last words, but of Lear itself.

  The pronounced preference of scholars, actors and directors for the more obviously redemptive Folio version, and the favor it has received from readers and playgoers (most unaware of the alternative), has gone a long way to establish it as the only version of the last words. But one wonders if that preference has something to do with what seems to be the hope, the hint of redemptiveness those words bring to the unbearability of the end of Lear—“the most terrifying five minutes in literature” as Stephen Booth describes it.

  In its mixture of tenderness, tragedy, love and madness the Folio version is nigh unto irresistible. And yet are they Shakespeare’s words? Just about everyone likes them so much that we don’t like to linger on the question, on the doubts.

  I’d like to linger on the question, on the doubts, for a moment or two. After all it could be said the entire weight of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy comes to rest on those last words.

  Do we have a Lear who, in despair over the death of his daughter, and the morally bankrupt universe it betokens, cries out, “Break, heart, I prithee break,” and by some interpretations, in effect, brings on the death he cries out for?

  Or does Lear’s final impact rest on the Folio version of his last words, which have been interpreted as a moment of either real or imagined communion with his lost daughter, a delusion (or less pejoratively, a vision) based on the belief she is yet breathing:

  “Look on her! Look her lips,/Look there, look there.”

  As if the final mutual gaze, the one denied the dying Romeo and Juliet, is envisioned here—at least in Lear’s mind. Or—and not all interpretations of the Folio last words are redemptive—they could suggest something even more crushingly bleak: a grief-maddened tragic folly on the part of the foolish old man, whose earlier delusions about love and Cordelia plunged him and his kingdom into destruction and death.

  The possibilities engendered, the thematic, even theological implications, the question of which ending for Lear is more “Shakespearean,” encourage closer examination of what each choice could imply.

  Not just which is more Shakespearean, but whether either can be said to be with certainty. Or do they represent different stages in the evolution of Shakespeare as an artist and thus different versions that are both, in their way, “Shakespearean”? If it was he who made the change.

  It doesn’t mean the goal of such an examination must be to rule one implication in or others out. But it’s remarkable how often and how confidently people make allusions to the literary and e
xistential meanings of Lear without even an awareness that there’s a problem, a complication, a bit of uncertainty: two endings can imply two thematically differing narratives since the final words define the final shape of the play’s arc, the place to which all before has led. And we have two different places.

  The imperative which Philip Edwards (editor of the New Cambridge Hamlet) asserted about the differences in the Hamlet texts certainly applies to the endings of Lear: “Everyone who wants to understand” the play, “as reader, actor or director needs to understand the nature of the play’s textual questions and to have his or her own view of the questions in order to approach the ambiguities in the meaning.”

  All those who read Lear—most certainly everyone who stages it, acts it, everyone who alludes to Lear in their discussion of literature, in their discussion of the meaning of tragedy, the meaning of life, the meaning of meaninglessness—must think they know what they’re talking about, right? Which means they have a reasoned position on the two texts of Lear and in particular on the two versions of Lear’s last words, no?

  All those millions of words written about Lear can’t be based on a foundation that lacks certainty about Lear’s own final view of the cosmos, can they?

  All those thematic inferences, philosophic extrapolations, excursions about the redemptive or nihilistic nature of the cosmos are based on the choice of one set of those words or another—and that choice must rest on a solid foundation, no? It would be scandalous otherwise, wouldn’t it?

  That’s what I mean by the scandal of Lear’s last words. We talk about Lear as if we know for sure who he finally became.

  Believe me, I’ve wrestled with the question for some years and find the problem deepens the more one looks at it, involving questions of not just what we mean by “Shakespearean” but what we mean by an author’s intentions, and how much weight we should put on what we conjecture them to be. Are we reading ourselves into Shakespeare at some disputed points?