Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Will may have watched these pieces of his own local culture staged for the grand visitors. He would at the very least have heard the events described in loving detail, and he is also likely to have encountered an elaborate written description of them in a marvelous long letter by a minor official—“clerk of the council chamber door”—Robert Langham, or Laneham. The letter, inexpensively printed and widely circulated, would have been useful reading for anyone who was in the business of trying to entertain the queen—and Shakespeare was shortly to go into that business.

  Langham’s letter makes clear that the performance of the Hock Tuesday play was a carefully stage-managed piece of cultural politics. Certain “good-hearted men of Coventry,” led by a mason named Captain Cox, had learned that their neighbor, the Earl of Leicester, was entertaining the queen. Knowing that he was eager to make his sovereign “gladsome and merry” with all pleasant recreations, the Coventry artisans petitioned that they might renew their old show. They thought that the queen would particularly enjoy the commemoration of the ancient massacre because it showed “how valiantly our English women for love of their country behaved themselves.” This appeal to the queen’s special interest was part of a defensive strategy that Langham conveniently summarizes: “The thing, said they, is grounded on story, and for pastime wont to be played in our city yearly, without ill example of manners, papistry, or any superstition, and else did so occupy the heads of a number that likely enough would have had worse meditations.” The claims here turn out to be ones that would be repeated again and again throughout Shakespeare’s lifetime, both in the justification of particular plays and in defense of the stage in general: the play in question is based on history (“grounded on story”), it is a traditional form of entertainment, it is free from ideological contamination and immorality, and it is a distraction from potentially dangerous thoughts, “worse meditations.” That is, members of the audience who might otherwise be plotting mischief—brooding on injustice, for example, or longing for the old religion, or hatching rebellion—would have their minds safely occupied by the spectacle of the ancient massacre of the Danes.

  What was the problem, then? Why did the Hock Tuesday play, which had “an ancient beginning and a long continuance,” need to be defended at all? Because, the artisans acknowledged, it had been “of late laid down”—that is, banned. The men scratched their heads and said they could not quite understand it: “They knew no cause why.” Then, as if it suddenly occurred to them, they came up with an explanation: “unless it were by the zeal of certain of their preachers, men very commendable for behavior and learning, and sweet in their sermons, but somewhat too sour in preaching away their pastime.” The performance at Kenilworth, then, was not simply a way of amusing the queen; or rather, in any attempt to amuse the queen there was always a half-hidden agenda. Here the agenda was to get the queen to pressure the local clergy to halt the campaign against a beloved local festivity: “they would make their humble petition unto her highness that they might have their plays up again.”

  Despite the careful planning for the Hock Tuesday performance—the show took place directly below the queen’s window—the occasion was botched. Too many things were going on at once—the bridale and the dancing drew away the queen’s attention, and she was further distracted by “the great throng and unruliness” of the crowd that had been allowed into the courtyard (into which an eleven-year-old boy may have made his way). Elizabeth managed to see only a bit of the play. After all their rehearsals and strategizing, the men of Coventry must have been crushed. But then, unexpectedly, all was saved—the queen commanded that the performance be repeated on the following Tuesday. It was a success: “Her Majesty laughed well.” The town players, rewarded with two bucks upon which to feast and with five pieces of silver, were ecstatic: “What, rejoicing upon their ample reward, and what, triumphing upon the good acceptance, they vaunted their play was never so dignified, nor ever any players afore so beatified.” And in the Coventry records for the next year there is a crucial confirmation of their triumph: “Thomas Nicklyn Mayor. . . . This year the said mayor caused Hock Tuesday, whereby is mentioned an overthrow of the Danes by the inhabitants of this city, to be again set up and showed forth.”

  “Her Majesty laughed well.” Said to have cost Leicester the staggering sum of a thousand pounds a day, the Kenilworth festivities were an enormous machine designed to produce those laughs—along with admiration, wonder, and delight—from the remarkable, unpredictable, dangerous woman who ruled the country. The spectacles were elaborate and arresting, but the attention of the Earl of Leicester—and no doubt of many others in the crowd—would have been intensely focused on a single person. If a wide-eyed young boy from Stratford did see her, arrayed in one of her famously elaborate dresses, carried in a litter on the shoulders of guards specially picked for their good looks, accompanied by her gorgeously arrayed courtiers, he would in effect have witnessed the greatest theatrical spectacle of the age. As the queen once candidly remarked of herself, “We princes are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world.”

  Shakespeare continued to be fascinated throughout his entire career by the charismatic power of royalty—the excitement awakened in crowds, the trembling in otherwise strong men, the sense of awesome greatness. Long after he had come to understand the dark sides of this power; long after he had taken in the pride, cruelty, and ambition that it aroused, the dangerous plots that it bred, the greed and violence that it fostered and fed upon, Shakespeare remained in touch with the intoxicating pleasure and excitement royalty aroused. At the close of his creative life, in the play originally called All Is True and known today as Henry VIII, he still drew on this excitement, imagining the birth of the radiant queen whom he may have first glimpsed at Kenilworth in 1575. For there was a first time that he glimpsed her—if not at Kenilworth, then somewhere else, in a procession or a grand entertainment or a court reception—and his imagination was certainly fired by what he saw. And the events at Kenilworth, whether young Will saw them for himself or listened to eyewitness accounts of them or simply read Langham’s letter, seem to have left traces in his work.

  In the single most extravagant entertainment Leicester staged for the queen during her long stay, a twenty-four-foot-long mechanical dolphin rose up out of the waters of the lake adjacent to the castle. On the back of the dolphin—in whose belly was concealed a consort of wind instruments—sat the figure of Arion, the legendary Greek musician, who sang, as Langham put it, “a delectable ditty” to the queen. “The ditty in metre so aptly endited to the matter,” Langham recalled,

  and after by voice so deliciously delivered; the song by a skilful artist into its parts so sweetly sorted; each part in its instrument so clean and sharply touched; every instrument again in its kind so excellently tunable; and this in the evening of the day, resounding from the calm waters, where presence of her Majesty and longing to listen had utterly damped all noise and din; the whole harmony conveyed in time, tune, and temper thus incomparably melodious. With what pleasure . . . with what sharpness of conceit, with what lively delight this might pierce into the hearers’ hearts, I pray you imagine yourself as you may, for so God judge me, by all the wit and cunning I have, I cannot express, I promise you.

  Years later, Shakespeare seems to have remembered this luminous spectacle in Twelfth Night, when the sea captain tries to reassure Viola that her brother may not have drowned in the shipwreck: “like Arion on the dolphin’s back,” he tells her, “I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves” (1.2.14–15).

  More strikingly, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (written in the mid-1590s, when Shakespeare was about thirty), the playwright’s imagination drew on the scene at Kenilworth in crafting a gorgeous compliment to Elizabeth. The queen probably attended one of the early performances of the comedy—perhaps the earliest, if, as many scholars think, it was written for an aristocratic wedding that she graced with her presence—and the company obviously felt that a piece of flattery wa
s called for. But Shakespeare did not simply break the illusion and have the players turn to address the queen. Instead, he slipped in a passage of prince-pleasing mythology that takes the form of a memory. The memory—of an occasion when Cupid took aim at the “fair vestal thronèd by the west” (2.1.158)—clearly alludes to Leicester’s attempt, some twenty years earlier, to charm the queen. “Thou rememb’rest,” the Fairy king Oberon asks his principal assistant, Puck,

  Since once I sat upon a promontory

  And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back

  Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath

  That the rude sea grew civil at her song

  And certain stars shot madly from their spheres

  To hear the sea-maid’s music?

  (2.1.148–54)

  It is worth reading the last three lines aloud for oneself to see how perfectly they serve as an exquisite instance of “dulcet and harmonious breath.” Eerily beautiful, they conjure up, across the gap in time, the fireworks visible from afar—as far as twenty miles away, according to one observer—along with a fantastical version of the water pageant. The speech goes on to bow graciously toward the aging Elizabeth’s cult of virginity: Cupid’s arrow missed its mark, and “the imperial vot’ress passèd on, / In maiden meditation, fancy-free” (2.1.163–64). Having delivered this exquisite compliment to the queen, the play resumes its momentarily suspended plot. The arrow intended for the fair vestal, Oberon explains to Puck, fell instead on a little western flower. When placed on the eyelids of a sleeping man or woman, the juice of this flower will make the person dote on the next live creature that he or she sees. It is this device, love juice, mistakenly applied to the wrong eyelids, that occasions the wild confusions of the play.

  The glimpse of the dolphin’s back is only an isolated moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a decorative flourish. But the lines about the mermaid’s song, though irrelevant to the plot, speak to something deeply important in the play and in the playwright’s imagination. The memory of Kenilworth served to evoke the power that song has to create hushed order and to excite an almost frenzied attention. This paradox—art as the source both of settled calm and of deep disturbance—was central to Shakespeare’s entire career. As a dramatist and a poet, he was simultaneously the agent of civility and the agent of subversion. This double vision in him might well reach back to the astonishing spectacle, mounted close to his home when he was eleven years old: a huge, restive sea of spectators quieted by the queen’s presence, with everyone straining intently to listen to the song of Arion, the primordial poet.

  What Shakespeare articulated in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a deep cultural fantasy that Leicester’s entertainments extravagantly tried to embody. The fantasy was of a world of magical beauty, shot through with hidden forces and producing a free-floating, intense erotic energy to which all creatures, save one alone—the “fair vestal thronèd by the west”—had to succumb. Reality could never have approached this dream: the fireworks were hardly stars starting from their spheres; there was no sea, only an unruly crowd by the castle lake; the fair vestal was a middle-aged woman with rotting teeth; the mechanical dolphin would have looked no better than expensive floats usually look; and the figure on the dolphin’s back was neither Arion nor a mermaid but a singer named Harry Goldingham. As an unpublished contemporary account of the festivities relates, the singer was not in good voice:

  There was a Spectacle presented to Queen Elizabeth upon the water, and amongst others, Harry Goldingham was to represent Arion upon the Dolphin’s back, but finding his voice to be very hoarse and unpleasant when he came to perform it, he tears off his Disguise, and swears he was none of Arion, not he, but even honest Harry Goldingham; which blunt discovery pleased the Queen better than if it had gone through in the right way.

  The queen’s gracious response managed to salvage the enchantment of the afternoon, even in the face of its apparent crumbling. Something similar could be said about any production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the spectators do not see fairies flying through the moonlit woods near Athens; they see a troupe of all-too-human actors tramping about onstage. But the risk of disillusionment only seems to enhance the experience of wonder.

  Leicester got the effect he wanted by means of an enormous capital outlay. Shakespeare offered a vastly less expensive magic: the players in A Midsummer Night’s Dream entertain the wild hope that they might be rewarded with a pension of sixpence per day apiece. For the playwright relied not on elaborate machinery but on language, simply the most beautiful language any English audience had ever heard:

  I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

  Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

  Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,

  With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.

  There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

  Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.

  (2.1.249–54)

  Shakespeare, who had already written such plays as The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III, was capable of a very different kind of dramatic speech, altogether tougher and leaner, but in A Midsummer Night’s Dream he gave full scope to what is, to borrow one of the adjectives he uses here, luscious poetry.

  Among Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the very few for which scholars have never located a dominant literary source; its vision of moonlit, fairy-haunted woods evidently sprang from more idiosyncratic and personal imaginative roots. Shakespeare was able to tap into his close-up knowledge of “the barky fingers of the elm” or “a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle” (4.1.41, 11–12). He was also, if this account of his childhood is correct, able to tap into firsthand experiences of the swirling delights of May Day and Hock Tuesday and into memories of the lavish, visionary entertainments Leicester staged in order to please his royal guest.

  If Shakespeare’s sense of the transforming power of theatrical illusions may be traced back to what he heard about or saw for himself in 1575 at Kenilworth, his sense of the coarse reality that lies beneath the illusions may very well go back to the same festive moment. Virtually the whole last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is given over to a hilarious parody of such amateur theatrical entertainments, which are ridiculed for their plodding ineptitude, their naïveté, their failure to sustain a convincing illusion. The Hock Tuesday play, performed by the Coventry artisans for the queen and her courtiers, is transmuted into “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisbe: very tragical mirth” (5.1.56–57), performed by the Athenian artisans for the highborn couples joining in wedlock. The newlyweds, and the audience of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, take pleasure in laughing at the grotesque absurdities of the play and the spectacular incompetence of the players, “Hard-handed men that work in Athens here, / Which never laboured in their minds till now” (5.1.72–73). One of the blundering artisans in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Snug the Joiner, even seems to mimic Harry Goldingham’s “blunt discovery” of his actual identity. The dim-witted Snug, cast as a lion, has from the start been worried about the role, and all of the players are concerned that he will frighten the ladies. Hence, when he plays his part, he pulls a Harry Goldingham:

  You, ladies, you whose gentle hearts do fear

  The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor,

  May now perchance both quake and tremble here

  When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.

  Then know that I as Snug the joiner am

  A lion fell. . . .

  (5.1.214–19)

  Sure enough, the comic ineptitude pleases the ruler. “A very gentle beast,” says Duke Theseus, “and of a good conscience” (5.1.222). The performance gets what these performances always longed to get: the smile of the great. “Her Majesty laughed well.”

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream—written some twenty years after the Kenilworth festivities—marks the adult playwright’s access to some of the most memorable scenes of his child
hood, and at the same time it marks the distance he had traveled from home. By 1595, Shakespeare clearly grasped that his career was built on a triumph of the professional London entertainment industry over traditional amateur performances. His great comedy was a personal celebration of escape as well as of mastery. Escape from what? From tone-deaf plays, like Thomas Preston’s A Lamentable Tragedy, Mixed Full of Pleasant Mirth, Containing the Life of Cambises, King of Persia, whose lame title Shakespeare parodied. From coarse language and jog trotting meter and rant pretending to be passion. From amateur actors too featherbrained to remember their lines, too awkward to perform gracefully, too shy to perform energetically, or, worst of all, too puffed up with vanity to perform anything but their own grotesque egotism. The troupe of artisans who perform “Pyramus and Thisbe”—the weaver Nick Bottom, the bellows-mender Francis Flute, the tinker Tom Snout, the joiner Snug, the tailor Robin Starveling, and their director, the carpenter Peter Quince—are collectively an anthology of theatrical catastrophes.

  The laughter in act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—and it is one of the most enduringly funny scenes Shakespeare ever wrote—is built on a sense of superiority in intelligence, training, cultivation, and skill. The audience is invited to join the charmed circle of the upper-class mockers onstage. This mockery proclaimed the young playwright’s definitive passage from naïveté and homespun amateurism to sophisticated taste and professional skill. But the laughter that the scene solicits is curiously tender and even loving. What saves the scene of ridicule from becoming too painful, what keeps it delicious in fact, is the self-possession of the artisans. In the face of open derision, they are unflappable. Shakespeare achieved a double effect. On the one hand, he mocked the amateurs, who fail to grasp the most basic theatrical conventions, by which they are to stay in their roles and pretend they cannot see or hear their audience. On the other hand, he conferred an odd, unexpected dignity upon Bottom and his fellows, a dignity that contrasts favorably with the sardonic rudeness of the aristocratic spectators.