In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  For Shakespeare (as for the modern reader) it seems to have been a disturbing text, only lightened by Harsnett’s breezy showman’s patter. The testimonies are gruelling, and the cumulative effect is both compelling and revolting; after a while the reader’s mind reels at the smell of the potions used as emetics, the needles in legs, the acrid incense and the gruesome relics. Although the concepts behind the cult of exorcism were not so alien to a seventeenth-century person as they are to us, the words and images convey a sense of stumbling into another world. Troops of devils come forward one after another – Pippin (who makes his victims ‘to lie in fields and gape at the Moone’), Hilco, Smolkin, Lustie huffe-cap, Hiaclato (‘the monarch of the world … whose only followers were two men and an urchin boy’) and the extraordinary gang of devils who torment poor Sara Williams: ‘Maho, Killico Hob and these four, Frateretto, Fliberdigibbet, Hoberdidance, Tocobatto, were devils of the round or Morrice whom Sara in her fits tuned together in measure and sweet cadence’ (‘lest you should conceive that the devils had no musicke in hell’, adds Harsnett, helpfully).

  Here, in short, was a documentary record of what it is like to be mad: a graphic depiction of physical and mental torment and a conjuring of the archaic imaginal world that the ideologues of the Protestant Reformation sought to do away with. To a professional writer interested in the pathology of possession it was a gift. The tale is a series of short dramas, and Harsnett tells it with stage directions, using all the theatrical metaphors from comedy and tragedy to the farcical and the grotesque. Here literally, was the incoherence of which John Donne would write. And Shakespeare’s use of the text suggests that he did not just skim it, as he sometimes did. He read it with deepening fascination, perhaps noting down phrases and ideas in his commonplace book; digesting it before he wrote his play. In the storm scene in Lear, for example, he uses the names of the devils who appeared to the serving woman Sara Williams; except that this is a world, he will show us, where there are no devils. Inhumanity is the real evil, and he is going to show us what happens when human beings ‘shark on each other’.

  Many of the words and phrases he borrows from Harsnett he had never used before – ‘playing bo-peep’, for instance. Outlandish ones especially caught his eye: ‘auricular’, ‘apish’, ‘gaster’, ‘asquint’ and ‘pendulous’ are just a few. His borrowings, though, concentrate on Harsnett’s vicious lexicon of pain: images of the human body beaten, pierced, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured, pierced and finally broken on the rack. In the exorcisms, for example, one particular action is repeated as each of the victims is bound tightly in a chair, sick on magic potions, choking on incense, grim relics stuffed in their mouths. Anne Smith tells how three times ‘they did bind her so fast … in a chair as they almost lamed her arms and so bruised all parts of her body with holding tying and turmoiling of her’. Another old lady is ‘an old body unapt and unwieldy, as an old dog to a dance … to teach an old corkie woman to writhe and tumbel’. And just as the devils come back in the gobbledegook of Poor Tom in the storm in Lear, so does this image. Shakespeare uses the word ‘corky’ for the first and only time in his plays in the horrific scene when Gloucester is tied to a chair and blinded:

  GONERIL: Pluck out his eyes ….

  CORNWALL: Bind fast his corky arms … Bind him I say.

  REGAN: Hard, hard! O filthy traitor! …

  CORNWALL: To this chair bind him ….

  Harsnett’s book, of course, must have been all the more affecting to Shakespeare given his Catholic upbringing. It was a kind of sadistic blockbuster, surreal, savage, literary, full of black humour, and it stuck with him. There are strong echoes of its language in three of his late plays, and also in his revision of Othello. So the book penetrated Shakespeare’s imagination deeply, its contents transmuted into the much bigger canvas he was creating, with its iterative imagery of human suffering. Nor was it just a question of borrowing words, names and images. For out of it seems to have emerged the central metaphor of the play: the storm as a kind of exorcism (indeed, the play as a kind of exorcism?). In mulling over Harsnett, then, he seems to have found a key to transform the old story, and the old source play, into metaphor: creating the terrible apocalyptic surge to which the play rises in the middle, when the bonds are loosed and the storm of man-made evil and cruelty engulfs humankind so that human life becomes as cheap as that of beasts in the face of pitiless gods: ‘As flies to wanton boys … they kill us for their sport.’

  WHAT IS LIFE?

  We are left with the same question as at the end of Euripides’s greatest tragedies: if that is all life is, what is life? Lear was, in a sense, Shakespeare’s answer to Harsnett. Or at least to the culture, the mind-set and the structures of power that produced it, and to the events it describes. Wherein lies authority? Can the principle of nature be elicited and defined by reason? Is humanity on its own? Is authority an attribute of the divine, its exercise – as James himself declared – an aspect of the supernatural? Are there still miracles and prophecies? Or is the age of miracles dead?

  The language in which he does this was the culmination of the style he had developed since Hamlet. A fantastically rich vocabulary drew on everything from popular song and madmen’s jingles to Latinisms, French words and his own coinages. But the crucial emotional tone of the play comes from good old English words – often monosyllables. ‘See’ and ‘feel’, for example, are at the heart of the play (‘I see it feelingly,’ says Lear towards the end.) ‘Kin’ and ‘kind’ form another favourite semantic cluster, which opens up rich possibilities of meaning: spreading from its basic linguistic root, which defines a relationship between human beings, to become an expression of the most important necessary human quality of those relationships, kindness. Such words he worries like a dog (as in Hamlet: ‘a little more than kin, and less than kind’). And in Lear always it is these monosyllables that carry meaning most feelingly:

  Thou knowst the first time that we smell the air

  We wawl and cry …

  Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! …

  Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones! …

  For as I am a man I think this lady to be my child ….

  And so I am, I am ….

  It is tempting, too, to look back to the plain language he heard in the streets of Stratford: the words his mother and father spoke, and those of the peasants in the fields. To simple country people words are like physical objects: things to touch and see. Indeed, in their simplicity there is almost a moral value, and in Shakespeare the strongest emotions are expressed not in Latin or French words, or in scholastic phrases – resonant though they sometimes are in the mouths of kings or upper-class Roman heroes – but in old English monosyllables: kith, kin, kind, hate, kill, live, die, good, love ….

  And so in Lear, with such a range of language, he takes us into the world of horrors and the dispossessed. Here are the kind of people we have met in the town books of Warwickshire in the 1580s, the blind ‘idiot’ child, the Bedlam beggars, the people he rubbed shoulders with in the plague-ridden streets by his London lodgings. These are the people the king has not cared for as he should:

  Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

  That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

  How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

  Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

  From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

  Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp,

  Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

  That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,

  And show the heavens more just.

  Plainly this has not just been written to please the nobs, to get bums on seats, or as a quick rewrite of an old play to discharge a contract. It is as demanding as popular entertainment can get – a testimony to the intelligence of his audience, to their capacity for language and to their range of response. Shakespeare turns a sectarian rant into a tale
of people trapped by the evil of the times, an evil that is man-made. In the end, in Lear’s speech to Cordelia he seems to remember Robert Southwell’s meditation on prison, liberty and the divine mysteries from the Epistle of Comfort, with its image of birds in a cage:

  LEAR: Come, let’s away to prison;

  We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.

  When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,

  And ask of thee forgiveness; so we’ll live,

  And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

  At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

  Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too,

  Who loses, and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;

  And take upon’s the mystery of things,

  As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,

  In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones

  That ebb and flow by the moon.

  EDMUND: Take them away.

  LEAR: Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,

  The gods themselves throw incense. Have I caught thee?

  He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,

  And fire us hence like foxes. Wipe thine eyes;

  The good years shall devour them, flesh and fell,

  Ere they shall make us weep: we’ll see ’em starve first.

  Come.

  Under what circumstances a person writes verse like this we can only guess. Even in its moments of tenderness, the amplitude of the language in King Lear is violently, outrageously indecorous. Did he really come up with this sort of thing in the back room of a crowded ‘ordinary’? Does this not feel more like solitary, midnight writing?

  Nor does a dramatist write like this without the actors to perform it: the text always has to be tailored to the company. After the demise of Kemp, there are no parts for clowns in Henry V and Julius Caesar. Female characters grow in stature after the arrival of John Rice and William Ostler. And here is the old team, together for so long, mature, able to do anything – and evidently with total faith in their writer: Burbage as Lear, Hemmings with his fussy old courtier parts as Gloucester, Armin as the Fool singing his weird rhymes, jingles and songs.

  Shakespeare was a great comedy writer: he had a natural feel for it (did that come from his ‘merry-cheeked’ father?) and for the poignant way the comic intermingles with the tragic, to say nothing of his natural comic verve. But he also knew that destruction is the nature of the angel of history. Old worlds are destroyed, new ones come into being; our dearest things are lost, but the wounds heal in time. Some of them.

  THE POINT OF TRAGEDY

  Aristotle, in his famous definition of Greek tragedy in the Poetics, says that tragic drama is an imitation of life: ‘an imitation of an action which is serious and complete, and which has a kind of magnitude. Its language is well seasoned, with each of the kinds of seasoning used separately in its different parts. It is dramatic, not narrative form. And through pity and fear it accomplishes a purgation of the emotions.’ It was a definition of a Greek art form, of course, not an English one; but in his greatest plays, such as Lear, Shakespeare does this. He shows us the worst and offers us, through tragic catharsis, a retrospect of life and a foretaste of death, heartening us through our survival to take an ethical stance and to ‘bear us like the time’. As we have discovered from his family background, his childhood and schooldays, he learned to see from both sides in a time when coherence had gone and chaos had come. And he makes his greatest drama about that, almost deliberately piling on the suffering for the audience. And yet, as is the nature of tragic drama, the play’s nihilism is softened by the ultimate destruction of the wicked, and by some strange consoling force of what can only be called providence.

  But is it a Christian providence, or is it more like the Greeks would have understood it? The play has been variously labelled Christian, pre-Christian and even post-Christian. And although the story is safely located in British myth and pagan prehistory, there is an element of truth in all three. Lear is Christian in the sense that this is art created for a Christian audience, art whose author has quarried religious imagery, words and stories. This is as one might expect from a lifetime Bible reader like Shakespeare (the Book of Job, for example, is another obvious influence hovering in the play’s background). But what kind of Christianity? The play is not Protestant, of course, but it is not Catholic either, although there is evidence that Catholics saw it as a commentary on their times.

  But Lear cannot be forced into such particular distinctions. A sprawling, indecorous, prophetic miracle play with religious and political subject matter, it harks back to the mystery plays Shakespeare saw on carts in Coventry as a kid, to the old Queen’s Men’s play with its happy ending. At times realistic, satirical, obscene and scatological, with its snatches of songs, mad rhymes, devils’ names, jigs and street slang, this is a tale situated in a landscape of violence and alienation. It is easy to see why it so appealed to twentieth-century writers, such as Samuel Beckett. And whether we read it as pre- or post-Christian, it spoke about the spiritual condition of Shakespeare’s England.

  One last point remains, and it is about the author’s intentions. This is a play for the king by the King’s Men: a play that passed the red pen of the Master of the Revels (although some differences between the two versions of Lear are now thought to be due to censorship). It is a play about a king and the disastrous division of his kingdom. There were things put in it to flatter and interest the royal patron. But at the same time, in its subtext the drift of the play is oppositional, and it is hard to believe that this was not intentional.

  Four hundred years on, perhaps we delude ourselves in thinking that we can really get close to Shakespeare as he composes a work such as this. But maybe we can get an inkling of the way his mind was working when we remember his obsession with the Lear tale going back to the old Queen’s Men’s play. It was a story he had first alluded to years before, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona; a tale that flickers through his career (it crops up again in The Merchant of Venice and Richard II); and he would revise it later, rewriting Lear’s most famous scene for even more power and nuance, a sure sign that the play really mattered to him.

  Ben Jonson attacked him for having no moral stance, as did Samuel Johnson two centuries later. In the twenty-first century we know that he is always true to life. Lear gives the lie to the idea that Shakespeare’s art is not in some sense oppositional. He is not didactic, like Sidney or Jonson. He doesn’t tell you what he thinks, or what you should think, and he never preaches. Rather he sets up oppositions, multiple viewpoints, and then holds his mirror up to nature. So in Lear, in his topicality, in his use of such loaded and contemporary sources, maybe we can get a glimpse of a Jacobean public artist working at the very highest level. And here we can sense, too, underneath his customary reserve, Shakespeare’s deadly seriousness as an artist: what one modern critic has called ‘his cool and cunning authority in the face of his times’.

  His company performed Lear before the King and court at Whitehall on St Stephen’s Day 1606, the year after the Gunpowder Plot and on one of the few old saints’ days still observed in the Anglican Church. This gives us a measure of how far he felt he could go with his patrons, and how far his patrons felt they could go with him. Seen in that light, the show that night at Whitehall is as emblematic a moment in the history of Western culture as Michelangelo’s last working day, breaking the Rondanini pietà, in the spring of Shakespeare’s birth, or Descartes’ dream of the union of all science in a wall stove in Ulm three years after Shakespeare’s death. It is a bridge between the old and the new, between the no longer and the not yet.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  GUNPOWDER, TREASON AND PLOT

  THE ASTROLOGICAL ALMANACS had prophesied terrible things for 1605, focusing with uncanny precision on the autumn. The forty-year prognostication of 1567 foresaw disasters following eclipses predicted for September and October: ‘Charity shall wax col
de, truth and justice shal be oppressed’. Shakespeare’s writing of King Lear during the autumn of 1605 dramatizes this mood, and while the play was still on his desk came the defining event of James’s reign, the moment that changed everything: the Gunpowder Plot.

  THE POWDER PLOT

  On 5 November the government made the sensational discovery of a Catholic attempt to blow up the king and all his Parliament. The principal conspirators – Catesby, Tresham, Winter – all had Stratford connections; indeed, the Catesbys were distantly related to Shakespeare through his mother. The plot was Warwickshire- and Worcestershire-based, and their safe house, the home of the Grant family, lay a mile outside Stratford at Clopton House near Snitterfield. The head of the Jesuits in England, Henry Garnet, had stayed there a little earlier while on pilgrimage to St Winifrid of Holywell. The next day he had moved on to Huddington in Worcestershire, the home of the Winters. Here, then, was a web of intrigue with deep roots in the poet’s part of the world.

  After the arrest of their hit man, Guy Fawkes, the masterminds were hunted down through rain-sodden country lanes, past Stratford into Worcestershire. Panic-stricken, the Grants, John Shakespeare’s old business partners, sent a messenger to the Badgers in Henley Street with ‘a cloakbag full of copes, vestments, crosses, and other relics.’ The Grants’ house was raided and razed to the ground – today the only sign of it is a line of grassy humps by the present farm. At Huddington they took their last supper, and in the middle of the night held mass, ashen-faced, before the final headlong flight. In their haste their powder was ruined as they crossed the flooded river Stour. Tresham and Catesby were eventually trapped at Henlip Hall in Staffordshire, and, like Macbeth, Catesby died fighting. The house is still there, in a wooded hollow – an old people’s home today, but with shot holes still visible on the façade. They are weathered and fading now, disappearing into the grain of the old stone, just as the violent passions that ignited this tragic history are themselves beginning at last to recede.