In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  PURITANS AND PLAYERS: MORE BATTLES

  Meanwhile, the fall-out from the Powder Plot went across the board. There had long been pressure against the theatre from Puritans; from Paul’s Cross sermons were regularly preached on the immorality of the players, who were condemned as ‘schoolmasters of vice and provocations to corruption’. In May 1606 an Act of Parliament to ‘Restrain the Abuses of Players’ became law. Designed to curb profanity in the theatre, it imposed a fine of £10 for every transgression. Profanity – irreverent and blasphemous language – isn’t defined in the Act. It was left to the eye (or ear) of the beholder and hence cunningly demanded selfcensorship. In the case of royal servants regularly playing at court, discretion was all the more necessary.

  What Shakespeare and his colleagues feared is revealed by a comparison of the Quarto of Othello, which is thought to be a pre-1606 text, and the revised Folio text, published after his death. The first version contains more than fifty oaths and profanities, especially in the racist misogynist rants of Iago; the Folio text has none. The oaths are mainly old English ones using the name of God, such as ‘Zounds’ (God’s wounds) and ‘Sblood’ (God’s blood), although the fact that ‘Tush’ is dropped from the play’s opening line suggests the company were jumpy about what might be thought profane – as well they might be at £10 a throw.

  So, soon after May 1606, Othello and other plays were systematically trawled to remove oaths. The necessary rewrites involved changes of sense, metre, syntax and rhythm, which could hardly have been left to the actors or the prompt boy, and helps to explain why Shakespeare might have farmed out some work that year. Sometimes lines are rewritten, or new ones substituted. Shakespeare used the opportunity to tinker with Othello, making significant cuts and adding 150 lines, including a powerful new speech for Emilia at the end of Act IV which asserts the rights of women against the unkindness of men:

  Let husbands know

  Their wives have sense like them: they see, and smell,

  And have their palates both for sweet and sour,

  As husbands have. What is it that they do

  When they change us for others? Is it sport?

  I think it is: and doth affection breed it?

  I think it doth: is’t frailty that thus errs?

  It is so too. And have not we affections,

  Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?

  Then let them use us well: else let them know

  The ills we do, their ills instruct us to.

  Some changes, on the other hand, are tiny details, such as Othello’s interjection (italicized here), which breaks Desdemona’s original single line in the terrible exchange before she is murdered.

  DESDEMONA: Kill me tomorrow; let me live tonight!

  OTHELLO: Nay, an you strive, –

  DESDEMONA: But half an hour!

  OTHELLO: Being done, there is no pause.

  DESDEMONA: But while I say one prayer!

  OTHELLO: It is too late.

  Here we see the sharpest brain in the theatre scrutinizing a script and tweaking it to get even more power out of the text in performance: a sure sign that this was a work to which he felt particularly committed.

  THE END OF THE LINE FOR TRAGEDY?

  The shows put on at court by the King’s Men at Christmas 1606 included King Lear and probably Macbeth. By early 1607 Antony and Cleopatra, which contains some of Shakespeare’s most gorgeous and assured poetry, was also in the repertoire. A dynamic, complex, four-hour marathon, it marks a major shift in tone.

  Antony and Cleopatra is about a famous passion, the theme of many contemporary poems and plays, including works by Mary Herbert and Samuel Daniel. But in Shakespeare’s hands the tale is also about a turning point in history – the fall of the Roman republic and the rise of the empire. It dramatizes two opposed world views, those of Rome and Egypt, which he conjures with image systems of a cynical politic Rome and a reckless perfumed Egypt crushed by the remorseless power of events. So it shares with many other plays a sense of the loss of an old world and the beginning of a new one. And where Timon is a failure, this is the work of a master absolutely on top of his game: as Coleridge put it, the work of a ‘giant power’.

  At the same time it marks a shift away from the painful inner struggles of Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. This play is about human actions on the stage of history. And, of course, whereas Shakespeare was able to invent freely in Hamlet, Othello and King Lear, here he has to stay close to the story. So the shift is partly in subject matter, but perhaps partly also a conscious choice by the artist. Shakespeare was not some natural untutored genius. Since his talent blossomed in the mid-1590s, with Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he had always been a conscious artist. Cunning and guarded, he knew what he was doing and where he was going. The world view sustained through Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear and Macbeth had been founded on the thought world he had grown up with: the Christian imaginal universe, its value system and its idea of nature. The absence of this theme from Antony and Cleopatra suggests that for him, at least in tragedy, it was exhausted. He was satisfied as an artist: in King Lear especially he had said what he wanted to say.

  Shakespeare clearly felt free now to look at a classical story and do it straight; Antony and Cleopatra gives the impression of being a technical tour de force, which he may have enjoyed doing for its own sake (sometimes he recycles the prose in North’s translation of Plutarch with only the necessary changes to turn it into verse). So on this occasion he may have delivered his contracted piece without having sweated blood emotionally. But it still exhibits that quality seen throughout his writing career: the constant capacity for self-renewal. Even in a failure like Timon of Athens, Shakespeare never does anything without magic and surprise. In Antony and Cleopatra the master of his craft makes his own accommodation to Jacobean tastes. And in few, if any, of his plays do we get a greater sense of the presence of the angel of history.

  The return to Plutarch raises another interesting question. His Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans are models for life: Shakespeare was drawn to them throughout his career. Wonderful texts for a professional writer, they had great appeal to the older generation of Renaissance humanists. Plutarch is a pagan priest and moralist; fair, calm, reasonable and humane. As their author intended, it is impossible to read such lives and not see the curve of your own.

  BACK IN STRATFORD: A WORLD ELSEWHERE

  The bitter winters of the early years of the seventeenth century left their trace in Shakespeare’s work at this time: the image of ‘wind fanned snow’ crops up more than once. While the King’s Men were busy at court over Christmas and the New Year of 1606–7, Warwickshire was in the grip of the ‘Great Frost’. On rutted, frozen roads travel proved very difficult. The dramatist John Marston describes noble ladies in their carriages struggling across the countryside, their hair shining with ‘glittering icicles all crystalline … periwigged with snow, russet mantles fringed with ice stiff on the back …’. And all the while Shakespeare was increasing his holdings in the Stratford area.

  In those days investing in land was the best way to build up a nest egg. The previous summer he had invested £440 – a very large sum indeed – on a stake in the revenues from the tithes in the common fields at Welcombe just outside the town. His gradual accumulation of land – including an extension of the garden at New Place – must have focused his mind more and more on home.

  He was surely back in Stratford in June 1607, when his daughter Susanna married Dr John Hall. Hall was not a local man and, interestingly, he was a moderate Puritan; but Shakespeare evidently trusted him and came to lean on him – they went to London together on Stratford business in the last year of the poet’s life. A casebook of Hall’s survives – a mine of information, still largely unexploited, about the family connections. In it he treats Catholics and Protestants impartially – even ‘Romish priests’; so he was the opposite of a fanatic, as one might expect in a doctor. So maybe, as in so
many families in England, the theme of reconciliation was underlined at home. Times change; the beliefs, customs and ideals that made William, that he had imbibed with his mother’s milk, were no doubt still there, part of the family myth. But England was now a Protestant country, and there was to be no going back to his father’s England.

  Perhaps Shakespeare was now spending more time away from the theatre. In this later period of his career, he seems to have undertaken a number of private commissions. For the Earl of Rutland, one of Essex’s friends and a devoted theatregoer, he devised a shield with a motto and wrote accompanying verses for a royal knightly pageant. Such emblems, which Shakespeare uses in a number of plays, were much cultivated in Renaissance culture: the more riddling they were the better. They had long fascinated Shakespeare and he uses them in several of his plays. At this pageant it was the emblems of the Pembroke brothers that attracted most attention: William Herbert’s showed a gleaming white pearl, with a motto from Ovid – ‘My strength comes only through integrity’. Given Shakespeare’s intimacy with Herbert, is it possible that he composed this too?

  RURAL REVOLT: THE OLD COUNTRYSIDE IN FLAMES

  But while the better-off were partying, the countryside was beginning to burn. A string of bad harvests had brought the rural poor in the Midlands to their knees; rain-sodden 1607 was already shaping up to be grim, and the following year would be worse still. There had been sporadic violence in Midlands towns against recent enclosures as avaricious landlords bought up freehold strips in the common fields, rearranged them into blocks and enclosed them – all for private profit, in particular sheep farming. In the first week of June 1607, while preparations were under way for Susanna’s marriage in Stratford, riots flared up across Warwickshire and Northamptonshire as several thousand peasants demonstrated against the enclosers. In north Warwickshire 3000 rebels gathered at Hill Morton to protest against ‘the incroaching tyrants who grind the faces of the poor’. The smell of burning was in the air.

  Shakespeare, of course, was a landowner now; a poacher turned gamekeeper. Although his interests were in maintaining the common field strips, and not in digging them up, he would have a stake in both sides when the enclosing mania reached Welcombe, as it did in 1615. But he was not oblivious to the risings of 1607, as we know from an intriguing source that he read for his next play.

  That summer he was reading Plutarch again and writing his second late Roman play, Coriolanus. Like Antony and Cleopatra, it follows North’s Plutarch very closely. Both Antony and Coriolanus were cited by sixteenth-century moralists as notable examples of pagan Romans who lacked patience – the one committing suicide, the other rebelling against his country. Both stories turn on powerful women, too – Antony’s on his black lover and her passionate life; Coriolanus’s on his faithful wife and dominant mother. Out of the latter tale Shakespeare constructed a brilliant, hard-edged political thriller, again leaving aside the multi-layered Christian preoccupations of his tragedies for a classical narrative of personal political destiny, laced with a strong dose of homoerotic bonding. The play again represents a drawing back from the intensity of the earlier tragedies, but there is no denying the fierce artistic input, and it has found many advocates in modern times. Bertolt Brecht’s brilliant analysis of the opening scene’s class divisions – obvious for the political-theatrical agenda of the East German Berliner Ensemble in the early 1950s – underlines the key element of class struggle that was present in the Jacobean original.

  THE DIGGERS’ MANIFESTO

  So the wedding celebrations took place against a background of social revolt, and hard on their heels came grim news. The day after the marriage, over the county border at the village of Newton in Northamptonshire, a crowd of between 2000 and 3000 peasants had been attacked by a private army of local landowners and justices of the peace. The rebels were easily dispersed, leaving fifty or so dead. Their leaders were hauled off to Northampton, where they were summarily condemned to death, then hanged, drawn and quartered on a scaffold in the centre of the town. It was the same punishment that had been meted out to Campion and Southwell, but now there was a different enemy.

  The so-called Diggers of Warwickshire had drawn up a manifesto to put their case to the local authorities, the JPs and freeholders, and Shakespeare managed to obtain a copy. Like the peasants in the great revolt of 1381, the Diggers still have faith in the king and his goodwill; they still want a king. Shakespeare would have agreed with that. And they go on to use the metaphor of the body politic: ‘Loving friends and subjects under one renowned prince, for whom we pray long to continue in his royal estate … his most true hearted Commonalty …. We as members of the whole, do feel the smart of these encroaching tyrants, which would grind our flesh upon the whetstone of poverty …’. This same metaphor, with its arms and members, Shakespeare would use, memorably, in the opening scene of Coriolanus. As they marched, the Diggers had sung a song brimming with workers’ patriotism: ‘From Hampton-field in haste/we rest as poor delvers and day labourers/for the good of the Commonwealth till death ….’ And death it was to be. Across the Midlands, many were shocked by the brutality of the retribution. On 21 June a sermon was preached in Northampton by Robert Wilkinson, who again used the Diggers’ image of the body politic to preach against all violence, including that perpetrated by rulers ‘who reformed wickedness with a greater wickedness’.

  So history’s battles were moving on, from religion to the rights of the common people; but there were still those confrontations of individual conscience and power, and of rights and duties, that had always so engaged Shakespeare. One would guess that, like any middle-class property owner, he looked on such events with mixed feelings. Sympathy for the downtrodden, the stranger’s case, is clearly present in his psychological make-up, but so too is an abhorrence of lack of order and a mistrust of the uncontrolled mob, which came naturally to any Elizabethan. But politics were becoming more and more complicated: the voice of the rural poor, suppressed in Elizabeth’s day, was clamouring to be heard. Civil war was on the horizon. And in Coriolanus, taking a lead from the real-life struggles around him, Shakespeare coolly juxtaposed it with the brutal self-interest of the patrician military class.

  With Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare had found his distance; as an artist he had satisfied himself, and he now left these themes behind. In the last phase of his career he would be trying for a very different kind of play. The scholars of Elizabeth’s Protestant Reformation had believed it was possible to get back to a pristine Church of England purged of the influence of Rome. The Diggers hoped to retrieve an older England, purged of Norman law and even of the French language. But once a thing is gone, it is irretrievable. What has gone is not a veneer, but the thing itself, the system of belief that gives meaning to everything, including language itself. That is why, after the revolution, a new language must come too. And in his next plays Shakespeare seems to be looking for a new language for a new time.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  LOST WORLDS, NEW WORLDS

  WE DON’T KNOW what Shakespeare was doing on the early morning of 5 September 1607. Perhaps he was lying in bed in an Oxford inn – that week the King’s Men were on tour, and we know they played Oxford on the 7th. But as he said in Coriolanus, there is a world elsewhere.

  Far away that morning – ‘jump upon that hour’, as he would have put it – imagine a very different scene. A swollen estuary fringed with tropical forest opens out into a wide bay where a ship with furled sails lies at anchor. On deck a crowd has gathered under an awning; among them an English naval officer and several Africans in blue cotton robes, with heavy gold anklets and ritual face scars. The sun is not yet scorching, though there are soon damp patches on the visitors’ shirts as sweat runs down under their doublets. The call of colobus monkeys echoes across the water. Two men come on to the quarter deck, halberds in hand:

  BERNARDO: Who’s there?

  FRANCISCO: Nay, answer me: stand and unfold yourself.

 
BERNARDO: Long live the king!

  FRANCISCO: Bernardo?

  BERNARDO: He.

  FRANCISCO: You come most carefully upon your hour.

  BERNARDO:’Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.

  FRANCISCO: For this relief much thanks: ’tis bitter cold, And I am sick at heart.

  A few minutes later, as the sun rises higher above the forest and screeching grey parrots swoop downriver, the hero appears:

  HAMLET: Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

  It’s an extraordinary idea – a fantasy worthy of a post-modern film-maker. But the story is true.

  On 5 September 1607 Hamlet was performed on board the Dragon, anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone in West Africa. Among the audience were African dignitaries following a running paraphrase in Portuguese. The players did Richard II, too, further down the coast, before sailing on to India; unfortunately, there is no record of these Jacobean precursors of the ‘Shakespeare Wallah’ performing before the Great Moghul on his marble throne.

  LAST PHASES: BURN-OUT OR RETIREMENT?

  In his less exotic world on Bankside, since the building of the Globe, Shakespeare had enjoyed a period of wonderful creativity, through Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Between 1599 and 1606 he had written at least fourteen plays, among them some of the greatest works of literature. He was a man confident in his powers, responsive to the time and the art. He could write for the groundlings at the Globe and yet also find the right tone for the inns of court, for provincial town councils and for aristocratic houses, not to mention his royal patron.