In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  Then let us have our Libertie againe,

  And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie;

  You came not in the world without our paine,

  Make that a barre against your cruel tie;

  Your fault being greater, why should you disdaine

  Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny.

  The idea that Shakespeare’s lover might have written such verses is almost too good to be true. The poems are indebted especially to Samuel Daniel, the Pembrokes’ house poet, but she had possibly also read Shakespeare. Her remarks about blackness are particularly interesting, as, for instance, when she calls Cleopatra: ‘as faire/As any Creature in Antonius’ eyes/… as rich, as wise as rare/As any pen could write … Yet though a blacke Egyptian do’st appeare …’. This focus perhaps owes more to Samuel Daniel and Mary Herbert than to Shakespeare, but it is fascinating nonetheless since, like Shakespeare, she insists on Cleopatra’s blackness. Curious, too, are her games with the word ‘will’:

  If twere his Will that Cup might passe away.

  Saying Not my will but thy will Lord be done …

  Loe here his Will, not thy Will Lord …

  CONVERSION

  One further clue is given by Emilia’s poem. Its title is ‘Hail God King of the Jews’: it is a poem about religious conversion which tells the tale of the conversion of a ‘Moor’ – the assimilation of the daughter of a Venetian Jew into the English Protestant state. As her father and his brothers remained conscious of their Jewish roots, it is ironic that her move for social acceptance finally led her to write a Christian poem (whose aim was to gain the patronage of noble women, including Pembroke’s mother). It suggests she has gone through a violent conversion: Christ’s passion is at the hands of ‘Jewish wolves’, and since she is writing about her own conversion, the poem’s title would have little point unless she were a Jew. This brings into the picture an area of hot debate in the 1590s: the question of Jewish women’s conversion and their marriage to Christians. And if Emilia Bassano was indeed Shakespeare’s mistress, it is interesting that in that same autumn of 1597 he should have written a play about Venetian Jews which includes a character by the name of Bassanio (pronounced, as hers, with three syllables, not four). The curious emphasis of Sonnet 134 on transaction, payment and forfeit is also noteworthy. His lover is accused of using love like a moneylender, seducing the boy who had come ‘surety-like … under a bond’, as a ‘debtor’ for the sake of the poet who is ‘mortgaged’ to her will; he speaks of a woman who is ‘covetous’ and a ‘usurer’. In Elizabethan England, the words ‘Jew’ and ‘usurer’ were synonymous.

  Throughout his career Shakespeare maintained a deep interest in Italian culture, and especially in Venice: he probably read an Italian source for The Merchant in the original; he had access to Lewis Lewkenor’s book on Venice in manuscript, and would read his new book on the city a couple of years later. His Jews are Venetian, although the London Jewish colony, with which we would expect him to be more familiar, was Spanish and Portuguese. If Shakespeare had a mistress who was the daughter of a Venetian Jew, it would add a further fascinating detail to the crises in both his professional and personal lives in the year after his son’s death.

  THE END OF THE AFFAIR: ‘MY HONEST FAITH IN THEE IS LOST’

  As published twelve years later, in the order in which Shakespeare chose to arrange them, the sonnets tell the tale of a journey of the heart, a relationship with a beginning and an end. And in the end he leaves us with the image of himself demoralized by the affair with the Dark Woman, unable to stop wanting her but knowing it is ruining him. Obsessed with sex and bodily decay, accusing her of breaking her bed vow to her husband and her promise of love to him, in Sonnet 152 he declares ‘my honest faith in thee is lost’, as if honesty between two people married to others had been a possibility. In a telling and pathetic image, in Sonnet 143 he sees himself as a ‘neglected child’ running after his mother who has other things on her mind:

  Whilst I thy babe, chase thee afar behind.

  But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,

  And play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind:

  But his tough-minded and worldly-wise mistress, one imagines, did not wish to be his mother. Like the musician Whythorne, the poet Shakespeare found himself out of his depth. The last few sonnets in the sequence are livid with the sense of the poet’s ‘nobler part’, his soul, betrayed by his bodily desire. He seems to tell us that he has venereal disease and fears that sooner or later his young friend may catch it too. Love is a fever and his reason has left him:

  Past cure I am, now reason is past care,

  And frantic mad with ever more unrest …

  For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

  Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

  However self-deluding, he wants his reader (or himself?) to believe that this is a tale of lost faith; that he believed she would be true, that they made promises to each other, and swore ‘deep oaths’. What such promises meant between two married people is left unsaid. The last of the sonnets, 153 and 154, are two versions of the same poem, which perform a distancing trick after the anguished revelations of the previous poems. They are about the cooling of the heat of sexual passion; and now the previous hints at venereal disease are out in the open:

  … a seething bath, which yet men prove

  Against strange maladies a sovereign cure.

  I, sick withal, the help of bath desir’d,

  And thither hied, a sad distemper’d guest

  The model for this pair of poems is an epigram in the widely read Greek Anthology, probably from the 1603 edition, a copy of which was owned by Ben Jonson; perhaps Shakespeare knew it through him. This sonnet may, then, have been written after 1603, looking back on events as he shaped the collection into a literary form. The poem connects the cure for love with the seething baths for the relief of sexual diseases. Its ‘strange maladies’ may refer to syphilis, which was believed by the Elizabethans to be a foreign, ‘French disease’. ‘Love’s fire heats water’ in 154 suggests burning urine, a common symptom. As regards ‘the help of bath’ in 153, it is possible that the reader would hear this (and was meant to) as the town of Bath, where in his time hot mineral baths were taken for the relief of sexually transmitted diseases. Curiously enough, Shakespeare’s company’s tour that summer took them to Bath in late September.

  For Shakespeare the affair had evidently been a deeply wounding experience – especially, for a man who was so guarded, because it laid him bare. And yet, as happens time and again with great artists, out of loss came art.

  CHRISTIANS, ALIENS AND JEWS

  Things alien fascinated Shakespeare. His plays abound with references to distant lands, foreign commodities, strange artefacts and exotic cultures. Falstaff imagines the sky raining potatoes, then an exotic new arrival from Peru via Virginia. On stage Shakespeare represents Moroccan and Russian ambassadors, and Caliban the Carib islander. He talks of the perfumes of Arabia, Lapland sorcerers and the veils of Indian women. Through these shards of alien worlds, he explored the distortions and caricatures that cultures create of each other. Repeatedly he represented cultures that define themselves as ideological opposites engaged in a dynamic process of interaction: Rome and Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra; the indigenous islander and the colonist in The Tempest; the fissured Christian world of the eastern Mediterranean, of white and Moor in Othello. And one of his early explorations of the Other was The Merchant of Venice, on which he had been busy before the theatres reopened in late 1597.

  The story of the bond of a pound of flesh was an old folk tale, but Shakespeare used an Italian story called Il Pecorone, published in 1558, for which no Elizabethan translation is known; so presumably he read it in Italian. He was also much indebted to Marlowe’s powerful and grotesque The Jew of Malta, revived in 1594 during the trial of Ruy Lopez, a Portuguese Jewish physician convicted of attempting to poison the queen.

 
; ‘There shall be no mercy for me in heaven,’ Shylock’s daughter Jessica says, ‘because I am a Jew’s daughter …. I shall be saved by my husband; he hath made me a Christian.’ More than with most of the plays, interpretation of The Merchant of Venice has been in the eye of the beholder. By the late 1590s there was a small colony of Christianized Jews in London, with a few more in Bristol and Oxford. The Jews of London outwardly practised Christianity but privately held synagogue in their houses, and maintained their rituals, including circumcision. Stow, in his history of London, says that the community was centred on Houndsditch at the end of Bishopsgate, where Shakespeare and the Bassanos lived up to 1596, and that they were mostly pawnbrokers and sellers of old clothes. There were only a couple of hundred, but their small number bore no relation to the threatening aura that attached to them – the product of a long history of anti-Semitism in England going back to the blood libels of the Middle Ages.

  Like all English people of his age, Shakespeare was brought up in an anti-Semitic culture and must have imbibed such tales as a child. His subsequent experience of Jews may have been somewhat different, but in the plays he sometimes reflects the prevailing view, using the word ‘Jew’ as an oath or in jokes that suggest the deprecating attitude to them that was part of normal Christian speech. The play puts Machiavellian and anti-Semitic politics in the mouths of some characters and elsewhere engages the audience’s sympathies for Jews (‘does not a Jew bleed?’). And although his new play was in no way designed to comment on the Jewish ‘question’, it still touches on critical issues such as conversion to Christianity. The result is, to us, an extremely uncomfortable mix of romance and racism, in which the quality of mercy is decidedly strained.

  Like Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, it had wide relevance as part of the artist’s response to the Elizabethan state’s treatment of outsiders. But is it anti-Semitic? Some characters support the removal of strangers, but others reject it. Perhaps such theatrical conflict was what he was aiming for. But then again, this was drama written for a popular audience, and Shakespeare typically harnessed the dramatic excitement of anti-alien feelings and therefore ran the risk of inflaming anti-alien and anti-Semitic sentiment.

  For a modern audience this feeling is exacerbated by several failures in the play. In crucial areas it is surprisingly lacking in psychology, which is unusual in plays of this period. Jessica, the daughter of the Jew Shylock, exhibits no moral scruples as she helps to destroy her father and is one of the least delineated major characters in Shakespeare. Shylock’s final exit is very hastily managed in Act IV, in a cheap plot device in which the tables are turned on him: the Jew can keep half his goods on condition that he converts. Having agreed, he exits with just three words: ‘I am content.’ The verdict arrived at by conniving lawyers is unpleasant, perhaps deliberately so, but it is unsatisfying to today’s audiences. Finally, Shylock’s conversion, the marriage of his daughter to a Christian and the giving of his property to her and her husband leave us – for all the fine speech about the quality of mercy – with the uncomfortable sense that the Jew himself has been very swiftly erased from the history of this particular fictional Venice.

  In the end, too many unresolved questions are left hanging in the air. Perhaps for personal reasons Shakespeare’s eye was not quite on the ball – the play written swiftly to fulfil his contract while working on a more important project, Henry IV Part 2? But still The Merchant leaves behind an uneasy edge, a sense of unresolved tension. Perhaps it embodies more of his personal experience than has been thought. In that light it might be worth looking at the merchant Antonio, a character which, it has been suggested, Shakespeare himself played, and the only one in his entire output who suffers from depression throughout. It doesn’t happen often with him, but something is not quite right about The Merchant of Venice. Fairy tales can be more dangerous than they seem. Perhaps, with this one, being all things to all people was simply not possible.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SHAKESPEARE’S DREAM OF ENGLAND

  SO THE YEAR after his son’s death was one of extreme emotional ups and downs, and one of tremendous creativity. In the autumn of 1597, having written The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare was also finishing Henry IV Part 2, the core of his second great tetralogy on English history, a project very close to his heart. And where The Merchant was about the stranger, the second Henry IV play was about his vision of old England. That he could have written it through his ‘hell of time’ is a sure indicator of the solace he took in writing, and demonstrates again how creativity can come out of loss. In the Henry IV plays he created what is perhaps his greatest character, Sir John Falstaff. But Falstaff didn’t start off as Falstaff, and the story is a fascinating insight into the way Shakespeare’s life and his art were always feeding off each other.

  THE OLDCASTLE SCANDAL

  We need to backtrack for a moment. At Christmas 1596, Shakespeare’s company were probably playing at the Swan in Paris Garden, and they also played two dates at court in late December. Among their shows that season was no doubt the first part of Henry IV, which he had written that year, and in which the character Falstaff makes his appearance – though called Sir John Oldcastle. Oldcastle had been a character in the original Queen’s Men’s play, now at least ten years old; but Shakespeare turned him into a lying braggart and a hard-drinking habitué of brothels. The show was an instant success. But there was a problem. Oldcastle was a historical figure who had rebelled against Henry V and been executed: but in the new Protestant revision of English history, which had been set in stone by John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Oldcastle was not a traitor but an early Protestant martyr. Unfortunately, the recently deceased Lord Hunsdon had been replaced as chamberlain by Lord Cobham, whose family, the Brookes, were descended from Oldcastle. In the winter of 1596 the Brooke family protested at Oldcastle being slandered as a fat old reprobate, and Shakespeare was forced to take the play off.

  Was the insult deliberate? Or was it a simple boob on the part of the writer, taking over a name from his sources without thinking? Maybe. But it is hard to imagine that a working playwright in nineties’ London, aware of the pitfalls of the censor, didn’t known what he was doing by using a name so prominent in John Foxe’s book. Cannily, Shakespeare simply changed Oldcastle’s name to Falstaff. It was a good demonstration of the difficulties a playwright could run into, and probably reveals something of the poet’s sympathies too – it is unlikely a Protestant writer would have used the name in the first place.

  In early spring 1597 old James Burbage died. It had been a rough winter for him, aggravated perhaps by the mental distress he had suffered at the hands of the Blackfriars residents and the landlord of the Theatre. He left his long-running troubles with the Theatre and the Blackfriars to his sons Cuthbert and Richard. It was with good reason that, many years later, Cuthbert remarked that the ultimate success of the London theatres had ‘been purchased by the infinite cost and pains of the family of Burbages’.

  But they all stuck together. When, luckily, that spring Lord Cobham also died suddenly, the furore over Falstaff began to cool. The new chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon’s son, brought Shakespeare’s company back into favour. Next month the Chamberlain’s Men performed at the Garter Celebrations what has long been assumed to be The Merry Wives of Windsor, a domestic comedy based on the fat knight (by now tactfully renamed).

  A seventeenth-century story claims that Queen Elizabeth herself had requested ‘one more play’ about Falstaff, this time showing him in love; Shakespeare, it is said, dashed off the piece in two weeks. But new evidence suggests that Merry Wives cannot have been written until much later, after Henry V (1599), in which Falstaff dies. This clearly disappointed his many fans, including, it seems, the queen herself. It is now thought that the masque at the end of Merry Wives was the show performed to celebrate the election of new Knights of the Garter (including the new Lord Hunsdon) on 23 April 1597. It was only subsequently (at the queen’s request?), with the typical economy of a prof
essional writer, that Shakespeare expanded it into a full-length play.

  Not perhaps one of his most convincing works, Merry Wives bears the marks of a quick job: all prose, lots of wordplay, a throwaway plot. But it is a thoroughly professional job, and if it was really done to such a tight deadline, one can only take one’s hat off to him. And was his use of the name Brooke for the cuckolded gull a deliberate two fingers to the late Lord Cobham and the Brooke family?

  FALSTAFF: THE MAKINGS OF AN ELIZABETHAN HIT

  But from the first night of Henry IV Part 1 in the winter season of 1596 it must have been clear that in Falstaff Shakespeare had a great success on his hands. He probably wrote Part 2 in 1597. That autumn the Burbages’ lease expired on the Theatre, the haggling went on, and they found themselves without a home. Back in Shoreditch they leased the Curtain for a season and it was here, in the lead-up to Christmas 1597, that they put on the further adventures of Falstaff, Henry IV Part 2, in which Shakespeare underlined his status as the most popular writer of the day.

  The character of Falstaff was the hit of the end of Elizabeth’s reign. In a memorial poem in the First Folio of 1623, one of his friends describes the audience packing the galleries and the boxes to see him. Forget Ben Jonson and the others, they said, ‘let but Falstaff come, Hal/Poins, the rest, you scarce shall have a room’. This is borne out by contemporary evidence. In February 1598 the Earl of Essex, a devoted theatregoer, added a gossipy postscript about a Cobham marriage in a letter to a friend: ‘tell him for newes his sister is married to Sir John Falstaff’. The Countess of Southampton, writing to her son in Ireland about the birth of an illegitimate Cobham, is even more mischievous: ‘all the news I can send you I think will make you merry is that Sir John Falstaff is by his Mrs Dame Pintpot made father of a goodly miller’s thumb, a boy thats all head and very little body, but this is a secret.’ (This is another Cobham joke – a cob is a small fish with a big head, also called a miller’s thumb. Evidently, though Shakespeare had caused trouble, there were many who saw his side of the joke.) Within two or three years, tours had also made Falstaff a favourite in the provinces. In December 1600 Sir Charles Percy, a member of the great Northumberland family and a friend of the Earl of Essex, wrote from his home in Worcestershire saying that people in the metropolis ‘will think me as dull as a Justice Shallow or Silence’, knowing his correspondent would know just what he meant.