Shakespeare

by Shakespeare

  Shakespeare, probably relieved of his acting duties, was certainly now considering a permanent removal to Stratford. His tenant or house-guest, Thomas Greene, was urgently enquiring whether a new house would be ready for him by the spring of 1610. This suggests that a date for Shakespeare’s return had been agreed. But in this year, too, Shakespeare had business finished and unfinished in Stratford. In June 1609, for example, he settled his dispute over debt with John Addenbrooke. In the records of the Stratford court Shakespeare himself is described as “generosus, nuper in curia domini Jacobi, nunc Regis Anglie.” 2 He was, in translation, a gentleman recently at the court of James, now King of England. His status as the king’s servant was very well known in Stratford. He was something of a resident dignitary. In this year, too, he and Thomas Greene sent a suit of complaint to the Lord Chancellor over some matters concerning the Stratford tithes which Shakespeare had been granted. Later in the year his brother, Gilbert, had to appear in court for some unspecified offence; to judge from those cited with him, he had some violent companions in the neighbourhood.

  Shakespeare had not finished accumulating land in the vicinity. In the following year he bought for £100 a further 20 acres from the Combe family, adding to his previous purchase of 127 acres eight years before. In this period his brother-in-law, Bartholomew Hathaway, paid £200 for the farm and farmhouse at Shottery where Anne Hathaway had been brought up. It was their real family home. It is likely that Shakespeare helped his relative to find that large sum. One astute scholar of Shakespeare’s imagery has noted that in Cymbeline, the play he was composing in this period, there is a continual vein of allusion to “buying and selling, value and exchange, every kind of payment,”3 as if Shakespeare’s mind was running upon such matters even without his realising it.

  He may also have needed the seclusion of New Place to arrange in shape and order the sonnets he had written on various occasions in the past. Now that his mother was dead, he may have felt able to publish their somewhat scandalous content. It is not certain whether he considered the sensibilities of his wife – unless he believed, as many scholars have since maintained, that the contents would be understood to be manifest fiction. Deprived of income from the closed theatres, he may also have considered this an opportune moment to sell the manuscripts to a publisher.

  They were duly published in 1609 under the title “SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS Neuer Before Imprinted.” They were printed by George Eld and were to be sold for 5d a copy, by John Wright whose shop was at Christ Church gate on Newgate Street. The dedication was signed by Thomas Thorpe, the publisher, rather than by Shakespeare himself. It must be the most famous dedication in all literary history, consisting of the mysterious and much debated lines.

  TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE INSVING SONNETS MR.

  W H ALL HAPPINESSE AND THAT ETERNITIE PROMISED BY

  OVR EVER LIVING POET WISHETH THE WELL-WISHING

  ADVENTVRER IN SETTING FORTH. TT.

  It is not at all clear what is meant by this. Who or what is the “begetter”? The inspirer of the sonnets, or the person who provided them to the publisher? And who is “Mr. W H”? Could it be Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? But then why are the initials reversed? Is it William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who may have been the recipient of the early sonnets? It is unlikely that a nobleman would be addressed as “Mr.” Could it be William Hathaway? Or might it be Sir William Harvey, who had previously been married to the Countess of Southampton? It might even be a misprint for “Mr. W SH.” It is also possible that Thorpe misunderstood Shakespeare’s original dedication to “W H,” and added “Mr.” as an afterthought. Like all good historical problems, the interpretations are endless and endlessly intriguing. Who is the “adventurer” and to what obscure or dangerous corner of the world is he “setting forth”? Could this also be another reference to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who in the spring of this year became a member of the consortium known as the King’s Virginia Company?

  It is sometimes suggested that Thomas Thorpe was a “pirate” printer who came across Shakespeare’s poems clandestinely and published them without authorisation. But there is no record of Shakespeare’s protest, and there is no sign that they were withdrawn from sale or subsequently “corrected” for an authorised edition. It is much more likely that Shakespeare himself was responsible for their collection and publication. The order of the poems is expertly arranged, and who else would have such a complete collection of the sonnets in manuscript? They were an enduring project, continued over several years. No one else would have owned all of the material available to the poet himself. In 1612, three years after publication, Thomas Heywood reported that Shakespeare had indeed published his sonnets “in his owne name.”4 Then, two years later, William Drummond recorded that Shakespeare had “lately published”5 his work on the subject of love.

  There is no reason to doubt this contemporary testimony. Thomas Thorpe himself was a respectable publisher who had issued works by Jonson and by Marston, and who also had close connections with the theatrical world. In recent years he had published authorised versions of Sejanus and Volpone, performed by the King’s Men, as well as Eastward Ho! It is most improbable that he would print a pirated edition of poems by the most famous dramatist of the age. It would have been a grave lapse of duty in the eyes of his colleagues in the Stationers’ Company, and open him to severe censure.

  It has been stated with some authority that by 1609 the fashion for sonnet sequences had passed, and that at this late date the passionate expression of even the most famous dramatist might not find favour. It is true that the early seventeenth-century world was fuelled by sudden fads and fashions. It was a time of constant novelty and inventiveness in which there was little room for old styles and old themes. But the first years of the reign of James had inaugurated a new range of sonneteering, and in particular a kind of roguish or epigrammatic “anti-poetry” of which the sonnets to the Dark Lady are a good example. It was not necessarily a bad time to be published.

  Edward Alleyn purchased a copy of the Sonnets in the summer of 1609 (if the reference is not a later forgery), but the little volume does not seem to have been overwhelmingly popular. There was to be no further edition until 1640, long after the death of the poet. In contrast, Michael Drayton’s sonnet sequence was reprinted on nine separate occasions. There was, however, some reaction to Shakespeare’s publication. The young George Herbert condemned the sequence for indecency, and one early reader appended in his first edition “What a heap of wretched Infidel Stuff.”6 The complaint has not been upheld by posterity, but at the time it may have been provoked by the unflattering references to the Dark Lady or to the homo-erotic tone of some of the earlier sonnets.

  However long Shakespeare remained in Stratford, he had returned to London for the Christmas season at court. He was no longer acting but he was still responsible for rewriting and general supervision of the plays set before the king. In the chamber accounts of Whitehall it is noted that the King’s Men played no less than thirteen times. One of those plays was the newly written Cymbeline.

  It is a play that might have been composed for the newly purchased Blackfriars Theatre which, after a respite in the plague, opened a few weeks later in February 1610. There were a number of stage devices, including the descent of Jupiter “in Thunder and Lightning, sitting vppon an Eagle: hee throwes a Thunder-bolt. The Ghostes fall on their knees.” There was no mechanism for these effects at the Globe, so we may assume the likely venue to have been the private playhouse. Such gaudy interventions emphasise how carefully and deliberately Shakespeare staged his dramas for the new conditions of performance. There is “Solemne Musicke” and a jaunty parade of spirits, all adding to the atmosphere of intimate spectacle that the Blackfriars playhouse encouraged. This is also the play in which Imogen wakes up beside a headless corpse, and believes it to be the body of her husband. No artifice is too obvious, no illusion too theatrical, in this most pantomimic of plays. Shakespeare has take
n a potential tragedy and elevated it to the status of melodrama. In this last phase of his career he was pre-eminently a showman.

  Samuel Johnson did not admire Cymbeline.

  To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.

  If we rename folly as fancy, and absurdity as deliberate farce, then we may come to a better understanding of the play than the eighteenth-century critic. Shakespeare delighted in its “impossibility” because he was writing a play which was in part masque and in part romance. It was entirely suited to its period, at a time when Jacobean spectacle had reached new heights of artificiality. It was a play without a subject, except that of its own intricacy.

  Shakespeare went back to the legendary history of Britain and to the plays of his childhood, even to the plays in which he had been cast as a young actor, summoning up the spirit of old romance; in the sequence of spectacle and vision towards the end of the play, he even employed an antique style in homage rather than in burlesque. Plays of this kind had become very popular on the London stage, with dramas such as Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s recent Philaster and the revival of the favourite Mucedorus. But, in Cymbeline Shakespeare out-runs them all with the sheer arbitrariness and extravagance of his invention. There was also a vogue for plays concerning the British past, perhaps reflecting the new king’s concern for a united Britain. Throughout this play, in fact, can be detected the pressure of James’s sovereignty in small allusions and details. There is one other detail. Imogen, disguised as a boy, claims that her master is one “Richard du Champ.” This is of course Richard Field in a French guise. Field had been the publisher of The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, in whose atmosphere of musical solemnity Cymbeline itself is bathed. Shakespeare here is making a playful allusion to his old friend.

  The presence of Imogen is a reminder that in Cymbeline for the last time Shakespeare uses the device of the girl dressed as charming boy, when in reality she is a boy actor all along, with an attendant atmosphere of sexual bawdry and innuendo; it is a transformation so much associated with his plays that with some justice we may call it Shakespearian. No other dramatist employed the devices of cross-dressing so frequently or so overtly as Shakespeare. It is clear why he was so enamoured of it. It is ingenious and strange, allowing much subtle play and allusiveness. It offers rich comic possibilities, but it also invokes the spirit of sexual liberty. It is perverse and pervasive, representing the licence of Shakespeare’s imagination.

  There are other echoes and allusions to his previous plays in Cymbeline, suggesting that the full force of his creation is deployed somewhere within it. There are invocations of Othello and Titus Andronicus, most strongly, but also of Macbeth and King Lear. A speech in the play closely parallels one of the sonnets which he was revising for publication.

  In these last plays (which he did not necessarily know were his last) he was opening the gates. What is important in Cymbeline is the note of sustained feeling, what Hazlitt describes as “the force of natural association, a particular train of thought suggesting different inflections of the same predominant feeling,”7 which is evidence of continuous excitement in the process of writing. He uses the broken language of passion and of intimate feeling with many asides and colloquialisms, ellipses and elisions; he even seems to transcribe the language of thought itself, as it is turning into expression. His language rises upwards in endless ascent, with the soaring of the cadence matched with aspiring feeling and unforced fluency. The Jacobean audiences were entranced by it. They sucked up extravagant words like sweets.

  The music for Cymbeline was especially written by the court lutanist, Robert Johnson, who had been brought in by the King’s Men to arrange the musical settings for the Blackfriars plays. One of the songs from the play, “Hark, hark, the lark,” survives in a manuscript score which may be Johnson’s own.

  Two brothers are about to sing a dirge, the justly celebrated “Feare no more the heate o’th’ Sun,” when one of them explains that “our voyces Haue got the mannish cracke”(2188). The other then adds, in parentheses, “I cannot sing: Ile weepe, and word it with thee”(2191). It is clear that the voices of the two child actors had unexpectedly broken and, without replacements for them, the apology was added at a late stage of rehearsal. Shakespeare was accustomed to last-minute revisions, and in this broken music we discern the circumstances of the time.

  CHAPTER 85. So There’s My Riddle, One that’s Dead Is Quicke

  In the spring of 1611 Simon Forman, the Elizabethan doctor and magus, made notes upon the productions he had seen recently. He was among the thousands at the Globe who had gone to performances of Macbeth, Cymbeline and a brand-new play entitled The Winter’s Tale. Of Macbeth Forman principally noted the supernatural events and the prodigies. It seems from his account that the most extraordinary and effective scene was that in which Banquo’s ghost appears at the banquet. The witches obviously had a sensational effect, too, but from Forman’s account it is clear that they were played as “3 women feiries or Nimphes,”1 perhaps by the boy actors. Forman made a professional note to himself when he observed “Also howe Makbetes quen did Rise in the night in her slepe, amp; walke and talked and confessed all, amp; the doctor noted her wordes.”2 Forman also watched Cymbeline, for which he gives a bald summary of events; the spectacle of “a cave” impressed itself upon his imagination, so it must have been a striking effect somewhere within the “discovery space” of the stage. Forman is circumspect about The Winter’s Tale, although it is clear that the character who most entertained him was Autolycus “the Rog that cam in all tattered like coll pixci.” The part was no doubt played to great effect by Robert Armin, and led to Forman appending a note to “beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellous.”3

  Shakespeare had been writing The Winter’s Tale in the preceding year, and its overwhelmingly pastoral setting has suggested to some critics that he wrote it at New Place in Stratford. The same reasoning would suggest that he wrote The Tempest while temporarily residing on an island in the Mediterranean. The Winter’s Tale is a play that could have been performed at the Blackfriars playhouse as well as the Globe; since they remained open for ten months of this year, 1611, it is likely to have been presented at both the indoor and outdoor theatres. The elaborately staged drama is crowned by the ultimate scene in which the supposed statue of Hermione is miraculously restored to life in front of her astonished husband and daughter. It is an exhilarating theatrical moment. Shakespeare may have previously seen it in action at two royal events. During the king’s entry into London in 1604, and during his opening of the New Exchange in 1609, statues also stirred into life and spoke. It may in fact have been one of the boys from the King’s Men who performed the feat at the New Exchange. Once Shakespeare had seen it, however, he had to use it.

  The play was closer to a musical comedy than any previously written by him; there are six songs, five of them sung by Armin as Autolycus, with Robert Johnson as the very likely composer of the music. One song demands a trio. There are also two elaborate dances, by satyrs and by shepherds, which would have been closer to masque than popular folk dance. Music would also have been heard as the enchanted statue begins to move. It is perhaps indicative of the play’s appeal that it was performed at court on an unprecedented six occasions. It was better than a masque. It was a full-scale entertainment, drama and ritual all in one. Yet, as Forman suggests, it also pleased the great crowds at the Globe. Many of the scenes relied upon spectacle as much as sense. One long scene, one of the longest in all of Shakespeare’s works, depicts a sheep-shearing festival which becomes an image of timeless popular ritual. And there is the famous stage-direction in the third Act (1309-10):

  This is the Chace,

  I am gone for euer.

  (Exit pursued
by a Beare)

  The bear was a familiar feature of Bankside, of course, and dancing or performing bears were also very common in the streets of London. But it is doubtful that the King’s Men used or borrowed a real animal from their colleagues in the baiting arena. It would have been more comic to have an actor in a costume. But the sudden and apparently random use of the animal testifies to Shakespeare’s extraordinary grasp of stage business. The appearance of the bear marks the transition in this play from the direst tragedy to the most whimsical comedy, and just such a diversion prepares the audience for the change in pace and tone. The pursuit of the old man by the bear is, of course, terrible and comic all at once. It is a symbol of the play itself.

  As in all romances, or musical comedies, the passions in The Winter’s Tale are strident and ill-concealed. The principal themes are of insane jealousy followed by guilt and remorse; the unhappy and separated protagonists are then reunited in a scene of ultimate forgiveness and reconciliation. It is a play that induces happiness, and awakens hope, in its spectators. It is perhaps not coincidental that it was performed on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, and then again after the catastrophic death of James’s elder son and heir. The Winter’s Tale was something of a public benefit, a device to remove mourning. In this play the human and the natural come together, in the great ongoing rhythm of life itself. The poetry of the dialogue follows the natural fluencies and hesitations of thought itself; it is instinct with the life of the mind.

  The principal source of the play is Robert Greene’s prose romance Pandosto, from which Shakespeare takes much of the material for his first three acts. It will be remembered that Greene was the author who, just before his death, had attacked “Shake-scene” in Groats-worth of Witte. Among other charges he accused him of plagiarism. Now, eighteen years later, Shakespeare was extracting matter from the dead man’s most popular work, making the whole plot more fanciful and more unreal. He may have permitted himself a moment of satisfaction. And then he called it a winter’s tale, an idle story, an old fable, a fireside extravagance. Shakespeare was not a sentimental man.