A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  She’s the most beloved of Shakespeare’s heroines and for good reason. It’s not just her intelligence and wit that account for this. Rosalind’s emotions are close to the surface, and we see—and are able to experience through her—an extraordinary range of feelings, from the exhilaration and pain of love to terror and embarrassment. Like Shakespeare’s other great creations—Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra—Rosalind loves to plot, to banter, to direct and play out scenes. And, like these other unforgettable characters, she begins to take on a life of her own and, in doing so, comes close to wresting the play away from her creator.

  IN SHAKESPEARE’S LANGUAGE, FRANK KERMODE RIGHTLY CALLS AS YOU Like It “the most topical of the comedies.” It’s not topical, though, in the transparent way that Henry the Fifth (and its allusion to Essex and Ireland) or Julius Caesar (and its concern with holiday and republicanism) had been. From its casual allusions to Ireland to its mention of the celebrated new fountain of Diana in West Cheap (4.1.145)—the one that was “for the most part naked,” John Stow writes, “with Thames-water pilling from her breasts”—there’s no mistaking that As You Like It is rooted in its place and time. But its real topicality resides elsewhere, in its attentiveness to evolving notions of Elizabethan comedy and pastoral. Comedy tends to have a briefer shelf life than other genres even as it’s more popular (there were, for example, as many comedies staged as histories and tragedies combined in 1599). What’s funny or delightful to one generation often feels pointless and strained to the next. When conventions and social expectations change, comedy must, too. Shakespeare didn’t need Marston or Jonson to remind him that it was no longer possible to write the kind of comedy that he had been writing for most of the past decade. In As You Like It, we can feel that a cultural page had turned, even if that page is no longer fully legible to us, and that Shakespeare knows it and moves to act on this knowledge.

  Frank Kermode is also on the mark when he concludes that the play “has too much to say about what was once intimately interesting and now is not,” for there “is no play by Shakespeare, apart perhaps from Love’s Labor’s Lost, that requires of the reader or spectator more knowledge of Elizabethan culture and especially of its styles of literature.” Even the play’s most devoted admirers must admit that Shakespeare’s often opaque reflections on literary matters are distracting. Few today read or see As You Like It for the pleasure of immersing themselves in literary issues that only matter now because they once mattered to Shakespeare. But this liability turns out to be a godsend for the literary biographer, for whom Shakespeare has left all too few clues about how and why he wrote what he did. That having been said, what clues there are often feel like riddles. When he does allude to another writer in As You Like It, it is to one who was no longer alive:

  Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might,

  “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”

  (3.5.80–81)

  The lines are spoken by Phoebe, a young shepherdess desperately in love with “Ganymede,” who quotes from Christopher Marlowe’s masterpiece Hero and Leander, posthumously published in 1598. It’s the word “now” in the first line that carries particular emphasis for Phoebe, dumbstruck in love, and for Shakespeare as well. The line recalls the time back then in the early 1590s when he was working on Venus and Adonis and Marlowe on Hero and Leander. Poetry would never be quite so simple or pure as that again. Shakespeare also goes out of his way to recall Marlowe as “Dead Shepherd,” the celebrated author of the pastoral lyric “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” That the misattribution of this poem in The Passionate Pilgrim is still on his mind appears likely from another passage in the play, though this one is so obscure that it’s unclear who would have caught the allusion. Shakespeare seems to be speaking to himself when he has Touchstone say: “When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room” (3.3.10–13). This oblique allusion to Marlowe’s violent death (stabbed over the “reckoning” or bill) and the echo of his famous line in The Jew of Malta about “infinite riches in a little room” seem to be linked here to how deadly it is to a writer’s reputation—Marlowe’s but undoubtedly Shakespeare’s as well—to be misunderstood. It’s hard not to feel that these recollections are but the tip of the iceberg. Lurking beneath the surface of the play is a decadelong struggle on Shakespeare’s part to absorb and move beyond his greatest rival’s work, an engagement that is at its most intense in 1598 to 1599 in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry the Fifth, As You Like It, and, finally, Hamlet. After that, the battle won, and Marlowe’s innovations and “mighty line” thoroughly absorbed, Shakespeare was troubled no longer.

  But Marlowe’s ghost still visited Shakespeare as he turned to pastoral in As You Like It—for Marlowe had been there before him, both in refashioning and debunking the genre. One of the lessons Shakespeare learned from Marlowe, which he puts to good use in As You Like It, is that the most effective way to talk about love without sounding clichéd is to turn what others have written into cliché. Rosalind does this in dismissing Marlowe’s tale of tragic lovers as a fiction. Leander didn’t die for love, as Marlowe had it, in a desperate attempt to swim the Hellespont to reach his beloved Hero, but drowned while bathing, victim of a cramp:

  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. (4.1.94–99)

  What Marlowe’s characters experienced was invented; what Rosalind feels in this most artificial of plays is real.

  As Shakespeare was caught up in writing As You Like It, pretty clearly by late summer 1599, he was more concerned with living rivals than dead ones, including those with a strongly satiric bent, like Jonson. Jonson was collaborating on plays at the Rose and working by himself on his best play yet, a comical satire called Every Man Out of His Humour. Espousing a coolly critical form of comedy devoted to exposing human foibles, Jonson offered Londoners a dazzling alternative to Shakespearean romantic comedy. Shakespeare would have had advance notice, having heard the gist of it when Jonson read or pitched the play to him and his fellow sharers, for the Chamberlain’s Men purchased it and staged it that autumn. Jonson took some clever swipes at Shakespeare in his play (at everything from his coat of arms to his recent Julius Caesar), but, for the Chamberlain’s Men, profits mattered more than personal slights. This was Jonson’s breakthrough play, and they were glad to have it.

  Jonson’s timing couldn’t have been better. The banning and burning of verse satire in early June had done nothing to sate the public’s hunger for this caustic stuff. Satire quickly found an outlet on the stage. Shakespeare, alert to the shift, offers a rare piece of editorializing about the ban and its aftermath in As You Like It: “Since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes a great show” (1.2.85–87). Whatever misgiving he may have had about the genre, Shakespeare, who would soon write the trenchantly satiric Troilus and Cressida, was motivated to try his hand at satire for the first time in As You Like It, in the person of Jaques.

  Jaques is something of an enigma. He has a significant presence in the play (speaking almost a tenth of its lines), but no effect on it. He changes nothing, fails to persuade or reform anyone. Mostly, he likes to watch. He’s melancholy, brooding, and sentimental, and some have seen in him a rough sketch for Hamlet; others find him little more than a self-deluding, jaundiced, onetime libertine. Shakespeare himself is careful to suspend judgment. For audiences at the Globe, whether or not they found Jaques sympathetic, his insistence that his aim was to “Cleanse the foul body of th’ infected world, / If they will patiently receive my medicine” (2.7.60–61), signaled unambiguously that he was cut from the same cloth as the satiric types popularized by Jon
son. Shakespeare even does his best to turn the type into a cliché, and other characters refer to Jaques generically as “Monsieur Melancholy” and “Monsieur Traveler” (3.2.290, 4.1.30).

  Jaques’s obsession with purging society helps explain the name Shakespeare gives him—pronounced like “jakes,” the Elizabethan word for privy or water closet, with a nod here at John Harington’s The Metamorphosis of Ajax (pronounced “a-jakes”). In case we miss Shakespeare’s joke, Touchstone is there to remind us, calling Jaques not by his distasteful name, but rather, out of a dignified politeness, “Master What-ye-call’t” (3.3.68). In portraying Jaques, Shakespeare manages to have it both ways, which wasn’t easy to do. He creates a memorable satirist who nonetheless finds himself trumped at every turn. Touchstone gets the better of him, as does Rosalind. Even Orlando vanquishes him in their verbal sparring. These encounters also make Rosalind and Orlando feel more human and believable.

  Jaques’s finest moment is his famous speech on the seven ages of man, the one that begins “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” (2.7.138–39). It ends with a grim portrait of old age:

  Last scene of all,

  That ends this strange, eventful history,

  Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

  Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

  (2.7.162–65)

  Just as we find ourselves nodding in agreement, Shakespeare reverses course, repudiating Jaques’s cynicism with the dramatic entrance of “Orlando with Adam.” What we witness at this moment—Orlando bearing his ancient servant Adam on his back—is no portrait of a toothless second childhood, or of the inevitability of isolation as we age, but an emblem of devotion between old and young.

  For Shakespeare, this undermining of the grim vision of Jonsonian comical satire was personal, and there’s a good chance that he wrote himself into this scene. An anecdote set down in the late eighteenth century records how a “very old man” of Stratford-upon-Avon, “of weak intellects, but yet related to Shakespeare—being asked by some of his neighbors what he remembered about him, answered—that he saw him once brought on the stage upon another man’s back.” Another independent and fuller version of this tradition from around this time provides more corroborating details, recalling how Shakespeare played the part of “a decrepit old man” in which “he appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some company, who were eating, and one of them sung a song.” The descriptions bear a close resemblance to Adam’s role. Scholars have long surmised that Shakespeare, not the finest actor in his company, may have taken “old man” parts for himself. There aren’t any other anecdotes quite like this that describe which roles Shakespeare created for himself, and, while there’s no way of authenticating this tradition, it sounds plausible.

  Jaques’s most poignant moment comes at the very end of the play. Though the Duke begs him to “stay, Jaques, stay” for the imminent wedding festivities, Jaques cannot find it in himself to join in the dance, that timeless symbol of communal harmony: “I am for other than for dancing measures” (5.4.192–93). Unable to change society, Jaques turns his back on it. While the others leave Arden and return to court, Jaques remains behind. Like Shylock before him and Malvolio not long after, he is an outsider whose isolation reminds us that Shakespearean comedy, too, can be harsh, and draws a sharp line between those it includes and those who remain outside its charmed circle.

  SHAKESPEARE FACED OTHER CHALLENGES IN THIS COMEDY, NOT LEAST OF which was satisfying his audience’s desire for a clown. As You Like It accommodates both clown and satirist, though their roles—exposing the foolishness of others—overlap considerably. As disappointed playgoers at the Globe had already discovered, Kemp was no longer with the company. However personally relieved Shakespeare may have been, he and his fellow sharers still needed to find a suitable replacement. By the time Shakespeare wrote As You Like It, Kemp’s successor, Robert Armin, had at last been found.

  The Chamberlain’s Men would have known Armin by reputation as a goldsmith turned ballad writer and pamphleteer who had then turned playwright and comedian. They may have seen him perform as a member of Chandos’s Men or attended one of his performances for private, aristocratic audiences (Armin seemed to do a good bit of freelancing). Had they seen an early version of Two Maids of More-Clack, they would have been impressed by his intellect and versatility, for Armin not only wrote it, he also starred in two comic roles. Armin may even have allowed the Chamberlain’s Men a look at his works in progress, a pair of books about the art of the clown, Fool upon Fool and Quips upon Questions, both about to be published. If he read the latter, Shakespeare would have seen that Armin was gifted at riddling and engaging others in witty, catechizing dialogue. It wasn’t long before Shakespeare was drawing on this particular skill, creating for him the memorable role of the riddling Gravedigger in Hamlet.

  Armin was everything Kemp was not. He couldn’t dance but he was a fine singer and mimic. Though a veteran performer, he was still young, having just turned thirty. He didn’t do jigs. He didn’t insist on being the center of attention. And he was physically unintimidating; a contemporary woodcut portrait suggests that he was almost dwarfish. He was someone Shakespeare could work with and learn from. Armin was more of a witty fool than a clown, though when called upon, he had no problem stepping into a role like Much Ado’s Dogberry, which Shakespeare had written specifically for Kemp. All told, Armin’s talents fit neatly with the trajectory of Shakespeare’s art and had a liberating effect on it, culminating in Armin’s role as the Fool in King Lear. It proved to be a good match. In the short term, however, it remained to be seen if audiences would embrace him as they had Kemp. It had taken several years for Shakespeare to write parts that fully capitalized on Kemp’s strengths; he would not have the same luxury in Armin’s case and must have felt considerable pressure to make Armin’s debut a success.

  The first role he would create for Armin would be Touchstone. Touchstones are literally objects that take the measure of things, tell us if they are real or fraudulent, which is very much Armin’s role in the play (there’s also a bit of a private joke here, given Armin’s training as a goldsmith, for London’s goldsmiths had a touchstone as their emblem). Breaking with the tradition of Kemp’s country fellows, Armin is cast as a court or professional fool, dressed in motley. He loyally accompanies Celia and Rosalind into the woods, though he misses life at court. Once in Arden, he’s a fish out of water, a situation that provides ample opportunity to show off Armin’s dry wit. He has an unusually large part for a fool; excepting Feste in Twelfth Night, his three hundred lines in As You Like It are the longest part Shakespeare wrote for any fool. Surprisingly, Shakespeare didn’t take advantage of Armin’s singing ability (unless, that is, Armin also doubled the part of the play’s professional adult singer, Amiens). Like any professional clown, Armin also had his set routines, and, when the play needs to stall for time near the end, he launched into one of them about the “Seven Degrees of the Lie” in act 5. Written specifically for Armin, it now feels dead on the page as well as in performance. Without his touch, its magic has evaporated.

  In contrast to Jaques, his opposite number and self-appointed commentator, Touchstone finds himself becoming more of a participant in Arden than an observer. The fool who holds his nose and announces upon entering the pastoral world (“Ay, now am I in Arden; the more fool I” [2.4.14]), eventually surrenders to the impulses he has ridiculed and at the end of the play marries a country wench, Audrey. How long this marriage will last is anyone’s guess (Jaques gives it two months, and he may be right). This, too, marked a signal change from Kemp, who consistently steered clear of romantic entanglements in his stage roles. Spectators still missed the charismatic Kemp, but from the perspective of the Chamberlain’s Men, and surely from Shakespeare’s, Armin was a welcome addition.

  SHAKESPEARE HAD MORE T
O WORRY ABOUT THAN CLOWNS AND FOOLS. HE knew that children’s companies were about to start attracting more privileged audiences in London. In early May a new choirmaster, Edward Pearce, had taken over at St. Paul’s, and it was under his tenure that the boys resumed playing for the first time in nearly a decade. Paul’s Boys had a great advantage, for they performed on the grounds of the centrally located cathedral, in the city itself, an area off limits to adult players. And their advertised “private” performances, limited to two hundred or so spectators, allowed them to operate independent of the licensing control of the master of the revels. They were therefore free to put on plays that were more daringly satiric and topical. They also had some powerful backers: Rowland Whyte would report in November that William Stanley, the sixth Earl of Derby “hath put up the plays of the children in Paul’s to his great pains and charge.” The success of Paul’s Boys soon led to creation of the Children of the Chapel, who began playing at the indoor Second Blackfriars by 1600.