The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  The question of order and disorder, of the need for authority, is as alive in The Tempest as in any of the chronicle plays. There is no reason why Shakespeare should be more willing to accept authority at this point than ten years before – and no reason why he should be more willing to dismiss Caliban’s claims against it, and his claim to life, than Falstaff’s. Prospero seems to me to share with other such authority figures a quality that makes him not quite human enough – though Shakespeare makes him as human as he can be made.

  And the difficulty is not resolved, here or anywhere else. Not resolved because for Shakespeare to remain truthful to the facts, about society, about man, it cannot be resolved. What we get instead are questions that go unanswered on the level of real life while the part of our mind that demands resolution is satisfied by the shape of the comedy itself.

  The Tempest is a hard-headed and realistic picture of what man is and all that he aspires to. It is also a piece of magic – a fantasy world that reflects our world and its problems but is free, in a way the real world never can be, to find its own conclusion. Here drowned men reappear with not a hair of their head hurt; lost fathers and sons are reunited; lovers discover one another without misunderstanding; old crimes are forgiven and redeemed; tables appear and disappear to music; the gods come down to bless a purely mortal union; Ariel works his way to freedom, Caliban gets his island back.

  And at the end, all these characters who have strayed from the way go back to Naples or Milan to live out day by day, in the ordinary world, what they have discovered on their magic island; as we, surely, are asked to translate what Shakespeare has revealed to us in the free world of comedy into the conditional world of the here and now. It is no accident that what carries the characters in The Tempest back to their real world is supplied by us. We too have our part in the play.

  Admitting as we do that what we have been watching is a play we are invited to step across the gap between illusion and reality and create, with the clapping of our hands, the breeze that will fill the ship’s sails and drive Prospero and the others home. Our hands, as Prospero tells us, must set them free.

  Free. It comes to us as the last word of all. And what a lovely conceit it is that we are invited to act out as our applause ends the performance and breaks its spell, bringing the inhabitants of this enchanted world back to our own unfree world, that has been transfigured, while the spell lasts, by a marvellous vision of what it means to exist for a time in a state of more than human possibility.

  Address for the English Association,

  Sydney University, May 1973

  ‘AUTHOR, AUTHOR!’

  I SOMETIMES AMUSE MYSELF by imagining a balmy night, somewhere in the eternal afterlife, when at the end of an ideal performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, say, or Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet, the audience springs spontaneously to its feet shouting ‘Author, author!’, and what follows is an unseemly scramble as the usual contenders make a rush for the stage. I also imagine our man from Stratford remaining quietly in his place; enjoying, with a smile, something he has always had an eye for, the excesses of human folly, but feeling no push, this late in the piece, to jump in and stake his claim.

  With half a dozen books on the market in which every fugitive appearance of the name Shakespeare or Shakspere or Shaxpere in the world of documents has been uncovered and explored, the claimants keep coming. Last year a Neville, this year a woman, ‘Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother’, Mary Countess of Pembroke, thrust forward now to join Bacon, Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford and the Earl of Derby, all of whom it might seem have better credentials than Will Shakespeare, Gent., the grammar-school boy of Stratford, to be the creator of the forty or so plays we are familiar with, but also, as Dryden called him, ‘the largest and most comprehensive soul among all Modern and perhaps Ancient poets’.

  The stumbling-block, for those who find one here, is how such a very common person, the son of a minor official in a small country town, a glovemaker and sometime illegal speculator in wool, could acquire the experience – of the court and its manners, the law, the life of a soldier in the field, of foreign places – that would allow him to produce such a body of work, and, considering the limits of his education, to call on allusions from such a range of contemporary and classical culture.

  It is easy for scholars who are themselves the products of a good formal education to exaggerate just how much schooling a writer, even a superlatively great one, might need. Easy as well to be misled about the kind of education a writer can best make use of. Henry James, who knew something about writers and the way they work, has this to say in a famous passage from ‘The Art of Fiction’. After accepting the commonplace assertion that a writer should write out of his experience, he asks: ‘What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end?’ He is particularly interested in what might appear to be unlikely cases, the writer who has a grasp of experiences he – or especially she – might seem to have no opportunity for acquiring. ‘The young lady living in a village,’ he offers as his extreme case, ‘has only to be a damsel on whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say of the military’; and he goes on to state the general principle that we might apply to our man:

  The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it – this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town and in the most differing stages of education.

  James’ conclusion is that what really matters is that the writer should be one of those ‘on whom nothing is lost’: that is, an observer, a listener, a close attendant on the world’s smallest affairs, a scavenger, a snapper-up of otherwise unconsidered trifles; and that everything he sees, and hears and overhears, should be laid down in his memory, taken into the spider-web of the consciousness and kept there to await the moment when, transformed by imagination, it finds its use.

  With almost 150 years of general literacy behind us, it is hard to imagine a time when everything we might need to get hold of in the way of know-how was acquired not through books and reading but through listening, and learned not in the classroom but on the job; when all our beliefs and views were picked up at our parent’s knee, or at mealtimes, or through gossip, rumour, hearsay, or from long Sunday sermons at church, or from town-criers or street ballads.

  One must have learned very early to be a keen listener, and to be more skilled than we are at holding meaning in suspension to the end of a complex sentence; more alert as well to double meanings and word play, especially when the fine line of meaning might also be a line between beliefs – affiliations – that could get you into serious trouble with the authorities, whose spies were also skilled at eavesdropping and interpreting, and were everywhere. All this is what the complex syntax of Elizabethan sermons suggests, but also the language of the public theatre, even if we allow for different levels of skill in the listener that would require preachers, and playwrights, to provide different levels of meaning in what they had to say: a general one, easily caught, and a little lower layer, more challenging or subversive, for the discerning.

  The point I mean to make is that in an age when some 90 per cent of women and 75 per cent of men were still illiterate, coming to your experience orally, or by direct observation, must still have been the prevailing method, even for those who could read.

  A Shakespeare for instance; growing up in a household that was in close contact with such trades as leatherworking, tanning, dyeing, along with other small-town industries such as weaving, brewing, pottery-making, joinery, tiling, thatching, and also, because of his father’s dabbling in the wool-trade, with shearing, drenching, dagging, and all the seasonal activities, but all the gossip as well, of such small out-lying communities as Snittersfield, Shottery and the ‘pelting
farms’ beyond.

  Village life anywhere is slow, but offers its own absorbing spectacles: recruitment for the various wars, assizes, civic processions and other ceremonies, village games, the visits of travelling players, and all the customs associated with such seasonal festivities as Yuletide, Easter, spring planting and harvest. Rich material for anyone who might have a use for it.

  As for the use to which the young Shakespeare put it – we have a very lively picture of what that was when we consider Sir Philip Sidney’s attack on the English stage in his Apologie of c. 1580.

  Standing, as he puts it, ‘on the authority of the Romans, and before them the Greeks’, Sidney mocks the native drama for its crude mixing of the genres – of ‘hornpipes and funerals’; for its naivety, its preference, in comedy, for a ‘scurrility unworthy of chaste ears’ – all deficiencies that make it impossible for a man of his sort to take it seriously.

  As for its plots and conventions:

  Now we shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage is a garden. By and by we hear news of a shipwreck in the same place, and then we are to blame as we accept it not for a rock … Two young princes fall in love; after many traverses she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy, he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is ready to get another child – and all this in two hours space.

  Sidney is not a pedant, or not quite. But limited by his higher education, the fineness of his sensibility, his seriousness, and also perhaps his class, he sees in this popular entertainment only what is low and uncultivated, and in the readiness of its audience to go along with it only an ignorant willingness to be entertained at any price.

  But suppose he had been less ready to defer to classical authority. Mightn’t he have seen something different? An original and entirely English form of playmaking, with a preference for modes that were mixed rather than pure and could be played off one against the other to provide contrast. A form based, in a very Anglo-Saxon way, on practice – what can be made to work – rather than the application of principle. Mightn’t he have been led to praise the form for its openness, its capacity to let richness in? Mightn’t he have found praise, as well, for the responsiveness of its audience? To surprise, wonder, variety of tone and effect?

  All this is what the young Shakespeare found himself happily working with – and I say ‘found himself’ because he must simply have set himself to work at first with what he was given: an eclectic mix of traditional and folk material, of slapstick, Senecan horror, Italian or Spanish romance, for an audience that was prepared to be transported wherever the play might take them; with an ear for language that was elevating and rich, but a taste as well for the scurrilous that was almost the equal of Shakespeare’s own. With no qualms, or so it appears, about the purely commercial nature of what he was engaged in, the young Shakespeare simply set himself to do as good a job as his talent, his interest, his experience allowed him to do.

  Like his great Spanish contemporary, Lope de Vega, he made a distinction between his poems, which do aim to be literature, and the plays, which do not. He does not lack ‘immortal longings’, and in the sonnets makes his own high claim: ‘So long as man can breathe or eyes can see / So long live this, and this gives life to thee.’ He was proud of the sonnets, and passed them round, as gentlemen did, ‘among his friends’; he even allowed them to be published. The plays were something else. Not Works, but work. If he worked on them to the top of his bent it was because he was by temperament the complete professional and could do no less. But what they belonged to was not literature but the lively and engaging world of entertainment: in a continuum with such other forms of popular diversion as bull-baiting, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and in its darker aspects, the spectacle provided by exhibitionary torments and executions, the state’s own theatre of cruelty and last words. Anything he hit upon and drew out of himself, in the way of originality and daring, must have emerged in the heat of the work itself, as his talent and interest, both of which as it happens were prodigious, discovered possibilities in the material before him that till he conceived of them, ‘in the quick forge and working-house of thought’, had no existence.

  Language itself teaches him what he has to say. He gives a Falstaff or a Hamlet, or a Rosalind or Mercutio, their head, and puts at their disposal, as language-creatures, his fund of words and allusions, his fantasy, his humour, his capacity to break through to those revelations of insight and feeling that we call ‘Shakespearian’. And none of it is fixed. The language-world of Romeo and Juliet – and of Romeo or Capulet or Mercutio or the Nurse within it – is not the language-world of As You Like It, or of Henry IV Part I or Hamlet.

  Language leads him, as it does any writer. No question of that, but what of his fellow players? Having in sight, as he wrote, the strong physical presence of a Burbage or the inspired clowning of a Will Kemp, was he also inwardly listening to them? Was it their voices in his head that carried the words he was setting down, and to this extent transformed what he was creating, as what he was demanding of them must have transformed and extended them?

  Consider what Burbage would have been forced to discover in himself as he moved from declarative performance, all exterior gesture, in Richard III, where to be is to act and power over others means quite literally acting them off the stage, to the anxious self-awareness of Hamlet, who moves back and forth between performing to a watching audience inside the play and thinking aloud to an audience outside it.

  Did Shakespeare conceive this new focus of drama, and the new style of acting that could represent it, out of the material itself and his own imagination, or was he responding as well to something he saw in Burbage? A capacity for suggesting inner states; for entering the mind as well as capturing the eye and ear of an audience.

  These are questions we cannot answer. But given what we know of the collective way in which these companies worked, we in no way diminish Shakespeare’s genius by raising them.

  Play-going in the 1590s, like cinema-going in the 1930s, was cheap popular entertainment with no pretensions to being more; and Hollywood in the thirties, with its studio and star system, might be as good a model as we can light on for the theatre Shakespeare worked in: plays rapidly produced week in week out to serve a regular audience; most of them got together by groups working in collaboration, most of them dispensable and soon lost. Scripts owned by the companies, and the more popular among them jealously guarded in an atmosphere of close rivalry and a scramble to reproduce one another’s successes. A general contempt, on the part of the best minds of the day, a Sidney in the 1580s, a Virginia Woolf or F. R. Leavis in the thirties, for a phenomenon that was the preserve of wastrels and apprentices in one case and shopgirls and secretaries in the other. Then, three decades later, the extraordinary discovery that this, at its best, had all along been the great expressive art of the age, and the recognition that what had been taken as routine market products of an industry were in some cases what Jonson called Works, and what the French New Wave critics called the highly individual productions of an ‘auteur’.

  Difficult to see perhaps at the time because genuine masterpieces like Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or The Palm Beach Story or Double Indemnity, were produced by the same system, and for the same audience, as Mucedorus and The Stepmother’s Tragedy, or the Hopalong Cassidy or Mexican Spitfire series, and audiences, in each case, were both discriminating and not. But what we know of film-going tells us something very useful about how an audience educates itself into the subtleties of a form. Going to the movies was its own crash-course in movie-going. After just a decade of sound, how skilful an audience had to be to keep up with a fast-moving, fast-talking comedy like His Girl Friday or the narrative techniques of a Citizen Kane. And all this in the case of an audience that could read but was hardly what we, or a Virginia Woolf, might call literate. Only avid for diversion, for experience, and the rewards, if they learned quickly enough, of laughter, action, spectacle, suspense, tea
rs, surprise, illumination.

  Shakespeare has high expectations of his audience. He asks them, as seasoned playgoers, to pick up references to earlier styles and to participate in the high level of by-play this produces – comic in some cases, in others deadly serious.

  In Act V, Scene III of Henry IV, Part II, Silence, Falstaff and old Justice Shallow have retired to Shallow’s orchard for a late drink in what Silence calls ‘the sweet of the night’. Suddenly Pistol arrives, hotfoot from the court, knocks at the gate and bursts in among them with his ‘good tidings’. But the language in which he delivers them – the bombastic high style of a messenger in an old play – is incomprehensible to his listeners. ‘I pray thee now,’ Falstaff urges, ‘deliver them like a man of this world.’ But Pistol cannot be brought to earth, and Falstaff sees that if he is to get anything sensible out of him, he must enter Pistol’s own language world. ‘O base Assyrian knight,’ he begs, ‘what is thy news? / Let King Cophetua know the truth thereof.’

  Shakespeare’s point – comic in this case – is that if characters are to communicate with one another they must speak the same language and be in the same play. If they are not the result can be comically absurd but may also, in other circumstances, be fatal.

  In Othello, for example, the hero’s integrity, both dramatically and in his own view of himself, depends on the fixity of his stance and the exalted ‘nobility’ of his language. In no way analytical as Hamlet is in one way and Macbeth in another – in fact self-regarding rather than self-aware – the language Othello uses is stately, representative, full of the assurance (false as it happens) that words have a fixed and accepted meaning. This is the language of an earlier dramatic style, and by the first decade of the new century was as outdated in its way as Pistol’s.