Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

  The sexual taunt half-hidden in these words is the crucial note that Lady Macbeth strikes again and again. It is the principal means by which she gets her wavering husband to kill the king:

  When you durst do it, then you were a man;

  And to be more than what you were, you would

  Be so much more the man.

  (1.7.49–51)

  If these taunts work on Macbeth, it is because husband and wife know and play upon each other’s innermost fears and desires. They meet on the ground of a shared, willed, murderous ferocity:

  I have given suck, and know

  How tender’tis to love the babe that milks me.

  I would, while it was smiling in my face,

  Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

  And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn

  As you have done to this.

  (1.7.54–59)

  Macbeth is weirdly aroused by this fantasy:

  Bring forth men-children only,

  For thy undaunted mettle should compose

  Nothing but males.

  (1.7.72–74)

  The exchange takes the audience deep inside this particular marriage. Whatever has led Lady Macbeth to imagine the bloody scene she describes and whatever Macbeth feels in response to her fantasy—terror, sexual excitement, envy, soul sickness, companionship in evil—lie at the heart of what it means to be the principal married couple conjured up by Shakespeare’s imagination.

  What is startling about this scene, and about the whole relationship between Macbeth and his wife, is the extent to which they inhabit each other’s minds. When Lady Macbeth first appears, she is reading a letter from her husband that describes his encounter with the witches who have prophesied that he will be king: “‘This have I thought good to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou mightst not lose the dues of rejoicing by being ignorant of what greatness is promised thee.’” He cannot wait until he gets home to tell her; he needs her to share the fantasy with him at once. And she, for her part, not only plunges into it immediately but also begins almost in the same breath to reflect with studied insight upon her husband’s nature:

  It is too full o’th’ milk of human kindness

  To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great,

  Art not without ambition, but without

  The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly,

  That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,

  And yet wouldst wrongly win. Thou’dst have, great Glamis,

  That which cries ‘Thus thou must do’ if thou have it,

  And that which rather thou dost fear to do

  Than wishest should be undone.

  (1.5.9–11, 15–23)

  The richness of this account, the way it opens up from the first simple observation to something almost queasily complicated, is vivid evidence of the wife’s ability to follow the twists and turns of her husband’s innermost character, to take her spouse in. And her intimate understanding leads her to desire to enter into him: “Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear” (1.5.23–24).

  Shakespeare’s plays then combine, on the one hand, an overall diffidence in depicting marriages and, on the other hand, the image of a kind of nightmare in the two marriages they do depict with some care. It is difficult not to read his works in the context of his decision to live for most of a long marriage away from his wife. Perhaps, for whatever reason, Shakespeare feared to be taken in fully by his spouse or by anyone else; perhaps he could not let anyone so completely in; or perhaps he simply made a disastrous mistake, when he was eighteen, and had to live with the consequences as a husband and as a writer. Most couples, he may have told himself, are mismatched, even couples marrying for love; you should never marry in haste; a young man should not marry an older woman; a marriage under compulsion—“wedlock forcèd”—is a hell. And perhaps, beyond these, he told himself, in imagining Hamlet and Macbeth, Othello and The Winter’s Tale, that marital intimacy is dangerous, that the very dream is a threat.

  Shakespeare may have told himself too that his marriage to Anne was doomed from the beginning. Certainly he told his audience repeatedly that it was crucially important to preserve virginity until marriage. Though she calls the vows she has exchanged in the darkness with Romeo a “contract,” Juliet makes it clear that this contract is not in her eyes the equivalent of a marriage (as some Elizabethans would have held) and that she must therefore on that night leave Romeo “unsatisfied” (2.1.159, 167). Once protected by the wedding performed by the friar—not a social ritual in Romeo and Juliet but a sacrament hidden from the feuding families—Juliet can throw off the retiring coyness expected of girls. The young lovers are splendidly frank, confident, and unembarrassed about their desires—they are able, as Juliet puts it, to “Think true love acted simple modesty” (3.2.16)—but their frankness depends upon their shared commitment to marrying before enacting these desires. That commitment confers upon their love, rash and secret though it is, a certain sublime innocence. It is as if the formal ceremony of marriage, performed as the condition of sexual consummation, had an almost magical efficacy, a power to make desire and fulfillment, which would otherwise be tainted and shameful, perfectly modest.

  In Measure for Measure, written some eight years after Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare came closer to depicting the situation in which he may have found himself as an adolescent. Claudio and Juliet have privately made solemn vows to one another—“a true contract,” Claudio calls it—and have consummated their marriage without a public ceremony. His wife is now visibly pregnant—“The stealth of our most mutual entertainment / With character too gross is writ on Juliet” (1.2.122, 131–32). When the state embarks on a ruthless campaign against “fornication,” Claudio is arrested and condemned to die. What is startling is that he seems ready to concede the point. Without the public ceremony, his “true contract” appears worthless, and in lines saturated with self-revulsion, he speaks of the fate that looms over him as the result of unrestrained sexual appetite:

  Our natures do pursue,

  Like rats that raven down their proper bane,

  A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die.

  (1.2.108–10)

  The natural desire that can be so frankly and comfortably acknowledged within the bounds of marriage becomes a poison outside of it.

  The intensity of the dire visions of premarital sex and its consequences may have had much to do with the fact that Shakespeare was the father of two growing daughters. His most explicit warnings about the dangers of premarital sex take the form, in The Tempest, of a father’s stern words to the young man who is courting his daughter. Yet in Prospero’s lines from this play, written late in his career, there is a sense that Shakespeare was looking back at his own unhappy marriage and linking that unhappiness to the way in which it all began, so many years before. “Take my daughter,” Prospero says to Ferdinand, and then adds something halfway between a curse and a prediction:

  If thou dost break her virgin-knot before

  All sanctimonious ceremonies may

  With full and holy rite be ministered,

  No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall

  To make this contract grow; but barren hate,

  Sour-eyed disdain, and discord, shall bestrew

  The union of your bed with weeds so loathly

  That you shall hate it both.

  (4.1.14–22)

  These lines—so much more intense and vivid than the play calls for—seem to draw upon a deep pool of bitterness about a miserable marriage. Instead of a shower of grace (“sweet aspersion”), the union will inevitably be plagued, Prospero warns, if sexual consummation precedes the “sanctimonious ceremonies.” That was precisely the circumstance of the marriage of Will and Anne.

  Even if these bleak lines were a summary reflection on his own marriage, Shakespeare was not necessarily doomed to a life without love. He certainly knew bitterness, sourness, an
d cynicism, but he did not retreat into them, nor did he attempt to escape from them by renouncing desire. Desire is everywhere in his work. But his imagination of love and in all likelihood his experiences of love flourished outside of the marriage bond. The greatest lovers in Shakespeare are Antony and Cleopatra, the supreme emblems of adultery. And when he wrote love poems—among the most complex and intense in the English language, before or since—he constructed a sequence of sonnets not about his wife and not about courtship of anyone who could be his wife but about his tangled relationships with a fair young man and a sexually sophisticated dark lady.

  Anne Hathaway was excluded completely from the sonnets’ story of same-sex love and adultery—or at least almost completely. It is possible, as several critics have suggested, that sonnet 145—“Those lips that love’s own hand did make”—alludes to her in its closing couplet. The speaker of the poem recalls that his love once spoke to him the terrible words “I hate,” but then gave him a reprieve from the doom that the words seemed to announce:

  “I hate” from hate away she threw,

  And saved my life, saying “not you.”

  If “hate away” is a pun on Hathaway, as has been proposed, then this might be a very early poem by Shakespeare, perhaps the earliest that survives, conceivably written at the time of his courtship and then casually incorporated into the sequence. Such an origin might help to explain its anomalous meter—it is the only sonnet in the sequence written in eight-syllable, rather than ten-syllable, lines—and, still more, its ineptitude.

  He could not get out of it. That is the overwhelming sense of the bond that rushed the marriage through. But he contrived, after three years’ time, not to live with his wife. Two days’ hard ride from Stratford, at a safe distance from Henley Street and later from New Place, he made his astonishing works and his fortune. In his rented rooms in London, he contrived to have a private life—that too, perhaps, is the meaning of Aubrey’s report that he was not a “company keeper,” that he refused invitations to be “debauched.” Not the regular denizen of taverns, not the familiar companion of his cronies, he found intimacy and lust and love with people whose names he managed to keep to himself. “Women he won to him,” says Stephen Daedalus, James Joyce’s alter ego in Ulysses, in one of the greatest meditations on Shakespeare’s marriage, “tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully tapsters’ wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.”

  Sometime around 1610, Shakespeare, a wealthy man with many investments, retired from London and returned to Stratford, to his neglected wife in New Place. Does this mean that he had finally achieved some loving intimacy with her? The Winter’s Tale, written at about this time, ends with the moving reconciliation of a husband and wife who had seemed lost to one another forever. Perhaps this was indeed Shakespeare’s fantasy for his own life, but if so the fantasy does not seem to correspond to what actually happened. When Shakespeare, evidently gravely ill, came to draw up his will, in January 1616, he took care to leave virtually everything, including New Place and all his “barns, stables, orchards, gardens, lands, tenements” and lands in and around Stratford, to his elder daughter, Susanna. Provisions were made for his other daughter, Judith; for his only surviving sibling, Joan; and for several other friends and relatives, and a modest donation was made to the town’s poor, but the great bulk of the estate went to Susanna and her husband, Dr. John Hall, who were clearly the principal objects of the dying Shakespeare’s love and trust. As he left the world, he did not want to think of his wealth going to his wife; he wanted to imagine it descending to his eldest daughter and thence to her eldest son, yet unborn, and thence to the son of that son and on and on through the generations. And he did not want to brook any interference or hindrance in this design: Susanna and her husband were named as the executors. They would enact the design—so overwhelmingly in their interest—that he had devised.

  To his wife of thirty-four years, Anne, he left nothing, nothing at all. Some have argued in mitigation of this conspicuous omission that a widow would in any case have been entitled to a life interest in a one-third share of her deceased husband’s estate. Others have countered that thoughtful husbands in this period often spelled out this entitlement in their wills, since it was not in fact always guaranteed. But as a document charged with the remembering of friends and family in the final disposition of the goods so carefully accumulated during a lifetime, Shakespeare’s will—the last trace of his network of relationships—remains startling in its absolute silence in regard to his wife. The issue is not simply that there are none of the terms of endearment—“my beloved wife,” “my loving Anne,” or whatever—that conventionally signaled an enduring bond between husband and wife. The will contains no such term for any of those named as heirs, so perhaps Shakespeare or the lawyer who penned the words simply chose to write a relatively cool, impersonal document. The problem is that in the will Shakespeare initially drafted, Anne Shakespeare was not mentioned at all; it is as if she had been completely erased.

  Someone—his daughter Susanna, perhaps, or his lawyer—may have called this erasure, this total absence of acknowledgment, to his attention. Or perhaps as he lay in his bed, his strength ebbing away, Shakespeare himself brooded on his relationship to Anne—on the sexual excitement that once drew him to her, on the failure of the marriage to give him what he wanted, on his own infidelities and perhaps on hers, on the intimacies he had forged elsewhere, on the son they had buried, on the strange, ineradicable distaste for her that he felt deep within him. For on March 25, in a series of additions to the will—mostly focused on keeping his daughter Judith’s husband from getting his hands on the money Shakespeare was leaving her—he finally acknowledged his wife’s existence. On the last of the three pages, interlined between the careful specification of the line of descent, so as to ensure that the property would go if at all possible to the eldest male heir of his daughter Susanna, and the bestowal of the “broad silver-gilt bowl” on Judith and all the rest of the “goods, chattel, leases, plate, jewels, and household stuff” on Susanna, there is a new provision: “Item I gyve vnto my wife my second best bed with the furniture.”

  Scholars and other writers have made a strenuous effort to give these words a positive spin: other wills in this period can be found in which the best bed is left to someone other than the wife; the bequest to Anne could have been their marriage bed (the best bed possibly being reserved for important guests); “the furniture”—that is, the bed furnishings, such as coverlets and curtains—might have been valuable; and even, as Joseph Quincy Adams hoped, “the second-best bed, though less expensive, was probably the more comfortable.” In short, as one biographer in 1940 cheerfully persuaded himself, “It was a husband’s tender remembrance.”

  If this is an instance of Shakespeare’s tender remembrance, one shudders to think of what one of his insults would have looked like. But the notion of tenderness is surely absurd wishful thinking: this is a person who had spent a lifetime imagining exquisitely precise shadings of love and injury. It is for legal historians to debate whether by specifying a single object, the testator was in effect attempting to wipe out the widow’s customary one-third life interest—that is, to disinherit her. But what the eloquently hostile gesture seems to say emotionally is that Shakespeare had found his trust, his happiness, his capacity for intimacy, his best bed elsewhere.

  “Shine here to us,” John Donne addressed the rising sun, “and thou art every where; / This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.” Donne may have been the great Renaissance exception to the rule: he seems to have written many of his most passionate love poems to his wife. In “The Funeral,” he imagines being buried with some precious bodily token of the woman he has loved:

  Who ever comes to shroud me, do not harm

  Nor question much

  That subtle
wreath of hair, which crowns my arm.

  And in “The Relic” he returns to this fantasy—“A bracelet of bright hair about the bone”—and imagines that whoever might open his grave to add another corpse will let the remains alone, thinking “that there a loving couple lies.” For Donne, the dream is to make it possible for his soul and that of his beloved “at the last busy day” to “Meet at this grave, and make a little stay.”

  Shakespeare’s greatest lovers—Romeo and Juliet, in the sweet frenzy of adolescent passion, and Antony and Cleopatra, in the sophisticated, lightly ironic intensity of middle-aged adultery—share something of the same fantasy. “Ah, dear Juliet,” poor, deluded Romeo muses in the Capulet tomb,

  Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe

  That unsubstantial death is amorous,

  And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps

  Thee here in dark to be his paramour?

  For fear of that I still will stay with thee,

  And never from this pallet of dim night

  Depart again.

  (5.3.101–8)

  When Juliet awakes and finds Romeo dead, she in turn hastens to join him forever. So too, feeling “Immortal longings” in her, Cleopatra dresses to meet and to marry Antony in the afterlife—“Husband, I come” (5.2.272, 278)—and victorious Caesar understands what should be done:

  Take up her bed,

  And bear her women from the monument.

  She shall be buried by her Antony.

  No grave upon the earth shall clip in it

  A pair so famous.

  (5.2.346–50)

  So much for the dream of love. When Shakespeare lay dying, he tried to forget his wife and then remembered her with the second-best bed. And when he thought of the afterlife, the last thing he wanted was to be mingled with the woman he married. There are four lines carved in his gravestone in the chancel of Stratford Church: