In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  That same winter the storm clouds rumbling over the Netherlands were echoed in England. In Stratford national and international politics continued to make themselves felt. A massive swoop on Baddesley Clinton in October had narrowly failed to net all the main Jesuits with their local supporters. In late November 1591 the government announced new laws against Catholics, inflamed by the writings of hardliners such as Robert Persons, who hated the queen, and William Allen, whose printed diatribes called her a heretic, an antichrist and criminally insane. It was easy, of course, for men such as Allen, safe in exile, to use such inflammatory language. For those on the ground, however, it only worsened the intolerable situation in which the English Catholic community found itself. The Jesuit missionaries themselves now lived in permanent fear of the terrible fate that awaited them. The queen’s agents in the shires stepped up the pressure on recusants; the safe houses were all under surveillance by informers; in a desperate letter the head of the Jesuits, Henry Garnet, wrote: ‘There is nowhere left to hide.’

  Early in 1592 the government began a new squeeze of the disaffected. Recusancy lists were drawn up in every town, and in March John Shakespeare was named in a list of Stratford citizens who had ‘obstinately’ refused to go to church for Easter communion, although his excuse – that he had absented himself because he feared being served with a writ for debt – was accepted. It was an old excuse: John clearly still had friends in the town. But the battle for the soul of old England was almost lost. It would be left to John’s son to carry it down in a different guise to later generations.

  THE BIG TIME

  Back in London, safe in the thronging masses of the big city, William Shakespeare’s work was now rapidly broadening out to include richly comic and romantic pieces, often about men and women who fall in love despite the pressures of society, family and convention. One early show, The Taming of the Shrew, represented his first foray into a favourite area, the battle of the sexes. In this reworking of an older comedy, he questioned some of the patriarchal assumptions of Tudor society, but in the ending rather lamely (to our taste at least) acquiesced in the male view. But throughout the 1590s he would quarry these themes with increasing assurance and humour and write great women’s parts that pricked the pretensions of men. The many women in his audience would surely have expected no less.

  His early history plays reveal other characteristic preoccupations. He was obsessed with justice, aggression, the violence of the state, the battle of conscience and power – not to mention his fascination with role playing, with people who are other than they appear. All these were threads that would run through his plays until the end. And whether the drama was about love between men and women, or about the affairs of state, things were seen from a multiple perspective. He was always setting up opposed worlds, characterized by contrasting image systems. This kind of rhetorical exercise went back to the curriculum at school, but it became one of his entrenched writing habits. All writers, of course, have their tricks, structural and verbal, as he was later to remark ruefully:

  Why write I still all one, ever the same

  And keep invention in a noted weed

  That every word doth tell my name

  Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?

  In April 1592 Henry VI Part 1, the prequel to his Contention of the Houses of York and Lancaster and Richard Duke of York, was acted at the Rose on Bankside. It continued through May and June with fifteen shows, and Henslowe’s account book shows that 16,344 people paid to see it from the galleries alone – a figure that should be more than doubled to calculate the total box office. So he was pulling in between 2000 and 3000 a performance. Shakespeare had a big hit on his hands. At this very moment an English army was fighting in Normandy, on the old battlefields of the Hundred Years War, and there was huge public interest in the unfolding events. A play on the last great war fought by the English abroad could hardly have been better timed, and in August the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe wrote about the great popular success of the English hero Talbot in Henry VI:

  How it would have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least … (at several times) who in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.

  It was what one might call Shakespeare’s first rave review History, comedy, English, Italian – he could do it all. And to some in the literary establishment that was cause enough to accuse him of being a conceited upstart, and even a plagiarist.

  SUCCESS BREEDS ENVY

  In late summer 1592, for the second time in six months, the commissioners in Stratford were adding Shakespeare’s father’s name to a list of ‘obstinate recusants’. In London, we can imagine William working on Richard III in his room in Bishopsgate. Around that time the pamphleteer and Queen’s Men writer Robert Greene, now dying, wrote an embittered open letter to three leading lights of the theatre, the university wits Marlowe, Nashe and Peele. At the centre of it was an extraordinary attack on young Shakespeare.

  In words livid with resentment Greene started by disparaging actors, mean players with no loyalty who will sell writers down the river, ‘puppets that spake from our mouths, those antics garnished in our colours’. Then he turned to the chief object of his fury in the most famous passage written about Shakespeare during his lifetime:

  There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes Factotum [Jack of all trades, universal genius, a Mr Do-it-all], is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.

  That it is Shakespeare who is under attack is plain from the pun on his name and from the allusion to the scene in Henry VI Part 3 (italicized by Greene to make sure his readers got the point) where Richard of York taunts Queen Margaret as a ‘tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide’. As far as Greene was concerned, Shakespeare was an upstart actor who had the effrontery to emulate authors who were his betters. Implied here too perhaps was the charge that he had been plagiarizing their scripts (which in this context would suggest the Queen’s Men’s plays – and it was true that a number of Shakespeare’s plays had plots lifted from the Queen’s Men’s shows).

  We know that Shakespeare was upset at Greene’s attack on his talent and integrity. As Spenser perhaps had suggested, it may even have made him want to hide away But one thing was clear from such a high-profile attack. He had made it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE DUTY OF POETS

  GREENE’S PAMPHLET LAMBASTING Shakespeare came on to the bookstalls in Paul’s Yard in autumn 1592, soon after Greene’s death. In December his printer, Henry Chettle, published a fulsome apology for the slanders, accompanied by an elegant compliment to Shakespeare’s character. The inference is that Shakespeare now had influential friends who could demand a retraction. This, our first account of what the poet was actually like, is particularly interesting as it is absolutely contemporary, whereas the tributes in the Folio were written posthumously.

  About three months since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers in sundry booksellers’ hands, among others his Groatsworth of Wit, in which a letter written to divers play-makers, is offensively by one or two of them taken … With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never be [Marlowe?]: the other [Shakespeare], whom at that time I did not so much spare, as since I wish I had, for that as I have moderated the heat of living writers, and might have used my own discretion … that I did not, I am as sorry, as if the original fault had been my fault, because myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than in the quality he professes [i.e. in his professional life] besides divers of worship [i. e. several high-ranking personages] have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, a
nd his facetious [polished] grace in writing that approves his art …

  Chettle’s carefully chosen words offer a fascinating insight into the young Shakespeare: upright in his dealings and honest, with a happy grace, in life as well as in art, prefiguring Jonson’s tribute years later to Shakespeare’s ‘free and open nature’.

  ANOTHER ATTACK?

  But some of the mud stuck, if a commemorative volume for Greene, published in 1593, is anything to go by: it speaks of the men who ‘eclipsed his fame and Purloined his plumes’. And the satirical barbs continued, if a curious passage in a play of that year, which pokes fun at someone from provincial Warwickshire, is about Shakespeare. And it comes in, of all plays, a merry version of the old tale of Guy of Warwick:

  SPARROW: I’faith Sir I was born in England at Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire.

  RAINBORNE: Wer’t born in England? What’s thy name?

  SPARROW: Nay I have a fine finical name. I can tell ye, for my name is Sparrow; yet I am no house Sparrow, nor no hedge Sparrow, nor no peaking Sparrow, nor no sneaking Sparrow, but I am a high mounting lofty minded Sparrow, and that Parnell knows well enough, and a good many more of the pretty Wenches of our Parish i’faith.

  ‘Sparrow’ in Elizabethan English is a cant term for a lecher, a womanizer. Parnell is his Stratford wife, his ‘sweet wench’ whom he got with child before leaving Warwickshire. The key to the joke is the pronunciation of spear and sparrow, which sounded very similar in sixteenth-century English. ‘Finical’ was a pejorative word favoured by Greene’s friend, the journalist Nashe, and means excessively fastidious – ‘finicky’ today. So, with his ‘finical name’, Sparrow the Warwickshire clown comes from Stratford-upon-Avon and describes himself as ‘a bird of Venus and a Cock of the game’, which sounds like a tilt at the author of the newly published Venus and Adonis (the sparrow is the bird of Venus). If this is getting at Shakespeare – and it is difficult to imagine otherwise – it is worth pointing out another odd detail: the Stratford Sparrow has abandoned his wife.

  PLAGUE AND PATRONAGE: SOUTHAMPTON AND HIS CIRCLE

  On 2 February 1593 the public theatres in London were closed by the plague, and would stay shut until June 1594. By the summer Pembroke’s Men had collapsed, forced ‘to pawn their apparel and to stay at home’. While the epidemic raged, Shakespeare was obliged to seek an income elsewhere. Although it was still possible to perform plays at court, in private noble houses and outside London, Shakespeare swiftly turned to other means of support for there were mouths to feed back in Stratford. He found a patron.

  Patronage was the key for an ambitious poet: it supplied a source of income and social advancement. Chettle’s apology had demonstrated that by the winter of 1592 Shakespeare already had friends among the well-to-do who would act for him to bring pressure against a publisher. Spenser’s earlier remark – if it is about him – shows he had broken into literary circles. ‘Our Willy’ was now well known and moving among the great and the good. To have poets in your entourage, to sponsor poetry and to have poems dedicated to you was one way for a nobleman to become a Renaissance prince in late sixteenth-century London. Poetry, then, could be turned by its creator into gold.

  Shakespeare’s choice of patron was a pointed one. The Earl of Southampton was literary, beautiful, bisexual and from a Catholic dynasty, with estates in Hampshire at Titchfield and Beaulieu. By 1592 the young earl had replaced Philip Howard, the imprisoned Earl of Arundel, as the great hope of English Catholics. Southampton’s father had been the most illustrious Catholic in England: a strong supporter of the Old Faith who had famously said that it was better to lose all he had than submit. He had died in mysterious circumstances soon after aiding the Jesuit Edmund Campion. Southampton’s mother, a Montague, continued to maintain sanctuaries for priests at her house in Sussex and in London at Southampton House in Holborn, the centre of a highly cultured circle that patronized not only poets but also musicians such as the Catholic William Byrd. It was not surprising, then, that Southampton had been in the guardianship of Elizabeth’s chief minister, Lord Burghley – effectively a hostage – from the age of nine to twelve.

  There may even have been family connections between Southampton and the Warwickshire Shakespeares. Back in 1583, members of the Arden family had been found sheltering in Southampton’s houses. The contacts that led to Shakespeare seeking Southampton’s patronage would no doubt be revealing, but it is in the nature of the times that we are never likely to know about them: these were not the sort of things people talked about.

  So, not quite twenty, with a large disposable income to look forward to on his majority, Southampton would be quite a catch for a poet. It was to him that Shakespeare dedicated his first published poem, Venus and Adonis, which was registered six weeks or so into the plague outbreak in April 1593. Written perhaps during the previous year or two, it may have circulated first in manuscript; printing was not usually the first sight of a work of poetry.

  VENUS AND ADONIS

  The publisher of Venus and Adonis was Richard Field, a Stratford contemporary a couple of years older than Shakespeare. It was nicely produced with ornamental motifs, and very carefully proofread, so Shakespeare must have stood in Field’s shop in the Blackfriars and corrected the poem off the first printed sheets – taking care perhaps to iron out his idiosyncratic spellings. He called it the ‘first heir of my invention’, which may mean a work he had had in draft since Stratford, but more likely that this was his first poem in print. Quoting Ovid, he announced his intent in a motto:

  Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo

  Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua

  Let what is cheap excite the wonder of the common herd;

  For me may golden Apollo minister full cups from the spring of the Muses

  His ambition was to be an English heir to Ovid, as critics of the day would soon point out. The poem was prefaced by a letter from Shakespeare to Southampton, ‘the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield’. It does not prove, however, that he was already a member of the earl’s circle: poets did not always ask their dedicatees in advance to use their name, and not all were impressed or grateful. This dedication, one of only two surviving letters written by Shakespeare, exhibits the self-effacing class-consciousness that runs right through his career.

  Right Honourable,

  I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden. Only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear [plough] so barren a land for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your honour to your heart’s content, which I may wish may always answer your own wish, and the world’s hopeful expectation.

  Your honour’s in all duty,

  William Shakespeare

  To us the tone is a little smarmy, but excessive self-deprecation was fitting in his day for a lower middle-class writer seeking noble patronage. Whatever Southampton felt about it, the poem was a big hit. It went through ten printings up to 1617, most copies of which were read to destruction: very few examples survive. Among its first readers was a madman, William Reynolds, who fantasized that Queen Elizabeth loved him and that the poem was a coded ‘secret hope of some great love in the queen towards me’. It would prove especially popular among students, who liked a polished bit of high-class erotica. ‘I’ll worship sweet Mr Shakespeare,’ wrote one, ‘and to honour him will lay with his Venus and Adonis under my pillow.’ Like a lot of country boys, Shakespeare was good on sex.

  Here is the goddess pulling her boy lover into her ‘ivory pale’, the white circle of her arms:

  I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer:

  Feed w
here thou wilt, on mountain or in dale;

  Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,

  Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

  Within this limit is relief enough,

  Sweet bottom grass, and high delightful plain,

  Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough …

  The luscious topography of Venus’s body is obvious: fountains, hillocks and dales; the grass in the bottom of a valley, of course, is the most succulent; the brakes (thickets) are her pubic hair. So the Bird of Venus and Cock of the Game sought to titillate students (and young lords like Southampton, who seems to have liked erotica). But in the charged political and religious atmosphere of the early 1590s, was this the kind of verse that a self-respecting poet should have been writing? There were some who thought not.

  EROTICS VERSUS THE PURSUIT OF VIRTUE

  In his Defence of Poesie, written in 1582, Philip Sidney had already linked the creative art of the poet with the pursuit of virtue: ‘Since our erected wit maketh us to know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it’. The idea behind this was religious. The modern reader, of course, would not see moral improvement – or, for that matter, political education – as the reason to read a poem. Today we would rather agree with Keats, that poetry is about feeling – the ‘fine excess’ of poetry that stretches minds and sensibility with an inventiveness outstripping our expectation. We look to a great poet to see more than an ordinary person. As Seamus Heaney puts it, ‘This is how poems help us live … They take and give our proper measure.’