In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  Too hot, too hot!

  To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.

  I have tremor cordis on me, – my heart dances;

  But not for joy, – not joy ….

  There follows a succession of rippling speeches that, within the constraints of ten-beat lines, magically conjure the free association of a paranoid mind obsessed by sexual jealousy:

  Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a fork’d one! –

  Go, play, boy, play: – thy mother plays, and I

  Play too; but so disgrac’d a part, whose issue

  Will hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamour

  Will be my knell. – Go, play, boy, play. – There have been,

  Or I am much deceiv’d, cuckolds ere now;

  And many a man there is, even at this present,

  Now while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm,

  That little thinks she has been sluic’d in his absence,

  And his pond fish’d by his next neighbour, by

  Sir Smile, his neighbour ….

  The punctuation gets freer and freer, suggesting a mind falling over itself with horrible imaginings.

  Most dear’st! my collop! – Can thy dam? – may’t be?

  Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:

  Thou dost make possible things not so held,

  Communicat’st with dreams; – how can this be? –

  With what’s unreal thou co-active art,

  And fellow’st nothing: Then ’tis very credent

  Thou may’st co-join with something; and thou dost, –

  And that beyond commission; and I find it, –

  And that to the infection of my brains

  And hardening of my brows.

  As with King Lear, we wonder how he wrote this – the rhythms, the associative chains, the violent metaphors, the mix of controlled Latinisms (‘credent’, ‘co-active’) with earthy vernacular (‘collop’, ‘dam’). Was it alone late at night? With drink?

  It contrasts strongly with the rest of the play, which concerns Leontes’ redemption by his daughter, Perdita, who represents the healing power of romantic sexual love. With her language Shakespeare brings into play all his old lyric skills and, of course, takes from his beloved Ovid. He draws on the tale of Persephone and Pluto’s chariot (though Shakespeare uses the Roman equivalents Proserpina and Dis), the classical myth of spring coming to the earth with which the young Perdita identifies. Despite the rather puritanical attitude to the sexuality of young women, typical of him at this stage, Perdita has an instinctive feeling for pure sexual joy and a oneness with ‘great creating nature’:

  PERDITA: O Proserpina,

  For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou lett’st fall

  From Dis’s waggon! – daffodils,

  That come before the swallow dares, and take

  The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,

  But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes

  Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses,

  That die unmarried ere they can behold

  Bright Phoebus in his strength, – a malady

  Most incident to maids; bold oxlips, and

  The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds,

  The flower-de-luce being one! – O, these I lack,

  To make you garlands of; and, my sweet friend,

  To strew him o’er and o’er!

  FLORIZEL: What, like a corpse?

  PERDITA: No; like a bank for love to lie and play on ….

  This is all drawing on the mainstream of classical poetry and the Neo-Platonic themes that run through Renaissance art.

  A third stylistic contrast is the rogue Autolycus, ‘son of Mercury’, pick-pocket, tinker, and balladeer; mercurial, earthy, a man who cares nothing for the soul, preferring gambling and whores (‘die and drab’) and who says so in vigorous prose:

  My traffic is sheets; when the kite builds, look to lesser linen. My father named me Autolycus; who being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. With die and drab I purchased this caparison; and my revenue is the silly-cheat: gallows and knock are too powerful on the highway; beating and hanging are terrors to me; for the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it ….

  The countryman of Launce and ‘Henry Carre with his pedlar’s pack’ in the Warwick town book, Autolycus is a man who knows ‘court contempt’. He sings country songs about daffodils and larks, and gives sales pitches in Elizabethan rap (‘come to the pedlar, money’s a meddler’). A man who would cheerfully rob you and ‘do you in’, he is imaginatively the necessary snake in Perdita’s garden:

  Pins and poking-sticks of steel,

  What maids lack from head to heel.

  Tonally, the jagged syntax of ‘Inch-thick’, the Ovidian lyricism of ‘O Proserpina’ and Autolycus’s bawdy swagger show Shakespeare at his widest-ranging. This is total mastery. Nobody had taken the English language further, and nobody has done so since. And he performs his old tricks, too, above all in the daring scene where Leontes, still stricken by grief and guilt sixteen years on from the family catastrophe, recovers his wife and child in that strange, affecting, yet not entirely happy ending, when the ‘statue’ of his wife (whom he thinks dead) comes alive like an alabaster effigy on a Jacobean monument suddenly rising from the tomb.

  The statue story hints at Italian art and the sculpture galleries created by collectors such as the Earl of Arundel – all very current in 1610 with the Italian connections of Prince Henry’s court. But a fascinating analogue for this scene has recently been discovered in a play published in 1605, in which, curiously enough, one of the romantic leads is an Earl of Pembroke. In The Trial of Chivalry, two close male friends fight over a lady, after which each thinks the other to be dead. Here, too, a statue is supposed to have been made of the dead lover (‘A cunning carver cut out thy shape in white alabaster’) so that prayers may be offered daily at its feet. In the climax the lover pretends to be the statue and is reunited with his lady: the one clear contemporary instance of a statue that comes alive on stage, and one that Shakespeare might well have seen.

  LOVE AND RESURRECTION

  And last of all there is the psychology of it: what are we to make of the death of the young son and the rediscovery of the wife and daughter after so many years? The tale is in his source, but we may still wonder why Shakespeare chose this particular story, and why he chose to tell it in the way he did. And in the statue scene, what is he thinking of? For a seventeenth-century viewer it had a clear religious undertow with an unmistakably Catholic resonance. Leontes is led by Paulina through a sculpture galley into what suddenly becomes a chapel. Given the touchy nature of proceedings for a Jacobean audience, Shakespeare carefully has Paulina insist that she is not assisted by ‘wicked powers’, that what will happen is ‘holy’, and that her actions are ‘lawful’.

  It is requir’d

  You do awake your faith. Then all stand still;

  Or those that think it is unlawful business

  I am about, let them depart ….

  Music, awake her: strike! –

  ’Tis time; descend; be stone no more;

  approach;

  Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come;

  I’ll fill your grave up: stir; nay, come away:

  Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him

  Dear life redeems you ….

  The language, it need hardly be stressed, is religious. This is precisely the kind of ‘prelatical trash’ that Protestant radicals of the Civil War generation saw in Shakespeare. The scene brings together all the great themes of his late plays: reconciliation; recognition; redemption through children, through ‘great creating nature’, and through ‘the gods’. He is reaching beyond realism, indeed beyond the insufficiencies of art itself, for things that were once the preserve of religion – ideas of love and resurrection.

  But is the subtext actually religious? Or is Shakespeare, with his chameleon-lik
e empathy, still doing what he does best – quarrying any thought or image system that serves his purpose and piecing together his borrowings to produce high-churchy art for a court (with a Catholic queen) that liked that kind of tone? The psychology is in the end impossible to pin down, and an analyst would have a field day trying to untangle it. On one level it is a rattling good yarn that ‘should be hooted at like an old tale’ – lost babies, storms, a bear, comedy, songs – which ends happily ever after, give or take a few deaths and a weight of loss and guilt that cannot quite be lifted. On another level, as modern audiences have rediscovered, its final image of a wounded family reunited after so many years makes it one of his most powerful and moving plays.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  TEMPESTS ARE KIND

  THE AUTUMN OF 1610 was rainy, and, as usual, the Oxford road would have been thick with mud. On 22 November Sir Dudley Digges MP, brother of Shakespeare’s friend Leonard, the poet and translator, rode to Warwickshire to visit friends. Here was a man for the new age. Founder of the first national lottery, and a passionate patron of exploration, he had raised money to fund Henry Hudson’s voyage to discover the Northwest Passage; with William Herbert and the Globe trustee William Leveson he was a member of the Council of the Virginia Company; he had even tried to drum up interest in an expedition to the North Pole. But now Digges was on his way to Aldington, just outside Stratford, to stay with his stepfather, Thomas Russell, a close and trusted friend of Shakespeare’s, who would be the executor of the poet’s will. So it was a good occasion for a meeting of old friends. Only days before, in London, Digges had entered for publication at the Stationers’ Hall an extraordinary tale of shipwreck and survival in the Bermudas: a tale to set the imagination afire. And that November, as the fire burned low at Aldington, Digges told them the strange and romantic story of the Sea Adventure. Shakespeare would turn it into his last masterpiece.

  ‘SUPERIOR NOVELTIES’ IN A FAST-CHANGING WORLD

  By the time The Winter’s Tale was staged in the summer of 1610 at the Globe, Shakespeare was forty-six and had ceased to act. Christmas that year saw the usual exhausting run of fifteen plays at court. Still a company shareholder, Shakespeare was now writing little, except revisions, although perhaps playing a role as executive producer, script supervisor and editor for Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, who were taking over as principal writers.

  Times had changed. The world of the poet’s childhood in the late 1560s and early 1570s was a memory. Despite being, in our terms, only in early middle age, he was an old Elizabethan now. And how fast the world was changing. To the survivors of his parents’ generation, the days of Queen Mary must have felt like another age. There was now a younger generation who saw England’s Catholic past as not their own, but as that of another country. For them these were times not for looking back, but for looking forward to expanding horizons; it was an age of exploration in the macrocosm and the microcosm. The royal physician William Harvey, now working at St Bartholomew’s Hospital by Smithfield, would soon propound his theory of the circulation of the blood. Henry Wotton’s dispatch of March 1610 to King James from Italy told of the great astronomical discoveries that Galileo had made with the newly invented telescope. Everywhere was full of the news of these ‘superior novelties’.

  It has long been part of the myth of Shakespeare’s biography that he made his farewell in The Tempest: it represents the journey home, the comforting idea that after all the storms he returns to his garden and has a last few happy years in retirement, the great soul at peace. Yet we have no evidence for his state of mind at this moment, and strictly speaking The Tempest was not his last play, for three collaborations followed. Nonetheless, it was his last work as sole author; and it seems to have been written at the time when evidence from a London court case establishes his address as Stratford-upon-Avon. And for a writer as intelligent, and as conscious of the illusion of theatre, as he was, it is hardly possible that an autobiographical edge to the plot was not in his mind. If The Tempest didn’t exist, we would have had to invent it.

  DEPOSED DUKES

  A tale of shipwreck, sea changes and metamorphoses, The Tempest is a fable of redemption through children. It is also the tale of a Renaissance magus, Duke Prospero of Milan, who, having found more consolation in his library, neglected his duties and was overthrown by his enemies and exiled on a magical island. The plot stands out as one of the few that Shakespeare made up rather than borrowed. But several texts went into it, and they give us a fascinating glimpse into the bold and playful sweep of his imagination at the end of his career.

  For example, in an anthology of modern Italian poets by Toscano, a book known in Jacobean England, he seems to have come across poems about, and by, a real-life Duke Prospero of Milan. A man ‘possessed of great knowledge, the most versed in the universal understanding of history’, this Prospero ‘had a most noble and most extensive library where could be found books in all the sciences’. The lines about the duke ‘on whose dynasty the goddess Fortune once smiled’, but who was now deposed, closely shadow Shakespeare’s tale:

  Now the wheel of Fortune has turned

  Oh hateful villainy! Their power fell into the abyss.

  But you Prospero, of that noble line of Dukes, the Muses

  Serve, the most noble of all occupations

  So despite the constant turning and changing of

  Impious Fortune, she could not deprive you of your

  dignity.

  Perhaps the story lodged in his magpie memory: ‘My library was dukedom large enough … volumes I prize above my Dukedom,’ says Shakespeare’s Prospero as he tells the story of his exile from Milan.

  The plot of the play is simple. Duke Prospero lives on the island of his exile with his teenage daughter. Through his books he possesses magical and occult powers and can control the nature-spirit of the island, Ariel, and its brutish inhabitant, Caliban. When the play opens, the enemies who long ago deposed him have sailed away to a distant wedding and on their return voyage are wrecked on the island in a magically conjured tempest. (The storm as an emblem of Fortuna was a staple Renaissance theme, from Giorgione’s great painting to engravings by Hollar and the emblem books that Shakespeare read and used, for example, in Pericles.)

  Thus far, it could almost have been a revenge play. Prospero is a control freak, with lots of bottled-up aggression, and wants to take revenge on his enemies. But then he forgives them, and reconciliation takes place through the marriage of his daughter to the son of his enemy. That accomplished, the magician throws away his supernatural gifts as ‘plotter’ and stage manager, a magus of words and magic.

  Like the other late plays, the tale also touches on contemporary concerns. The story of a deposed duke was current news in the summer of 1611 when the play was first shown: the overthrow of the scholarly Rudolph of Prague had aroused great interest in London. But in the writing, one text seems to have been especially important – not narrowly as a source, but as a wide inspiration – and it was another favourite from his schooldays.

  SHADOW TEXTS: VIRGIL

  The Tempest is usually seen as related to the New World, especially in modern anti-colonial interpretations. But it is really a Mediterranean play. Its shadow text is Virgil’s Aeneid, as Shakespeare tells us very clearly in Act II. The nobles who deposed Prospero are on their way back from Tunis to Naples – the same route Aeneas takes after his fateful encounter with Dido of Carthage. This we learn from a mysterious and seemingly irrelevant exchange between the perplexed survivors of the shipwreck:

  ADRIAN: Tunis was never graced before with such a paragon to their queen.

  GONZALO: Not since widow Dido’s time.

  ANTONIO: Widow? a pox o’ that! How came that widow in? Widow Dido!

  SEBASTIAN: What if he had said, widower Aeneas too? good lord, how you take it!

  ADRIAN: Widow Dido, said you? you make me study of that: She was of Carthage, not of Tunis.

  GONZALO: This Tunis, sir, was Carthage.
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  ADRIAN: Carthage?

  GONZALO: I assure you, Carthage.

  In the mouth of Gonzalo, the honest old counsellor, Shakespeare is letting us know that our guide is Virgil. In the Aeneid his hero landed on an island where rites of purification take place and he is released from the burden of guilt for his past deeds. And Shakespeare’s play essentially follows Virgil in its pivotal scenes: the wreck, the ordeal of Ferdinand, the vision of the gods, the purgation and the marriage. The wrongdoers will achieve understanding and be purified, hatred will be overcome and reconciliation will take place. Shakespeare’s audience – at least at the Blackfriars – would have got the point straightaway, for they were more versed in Latin literature than we are today.

  ‘A DREADFULL STORM AND HEDEOUS’

  So The Tempest is a quintessential Renaissance transformation of a great classical theme. But although the setting is in the Mediterranean, Shakespeare, magpie-like as always, uses contemporary anthropological literature on the New World (such as Montaigne’s essay on cannibals) to open up a secondary discourse about colonialism and imperialism. He was interested, too, in the idea of Prospero as a magus, an occult scientist like John Dee, Elizabeth’s astrologer. All of which shows how dazzlingly and how playfully he could take the stories and intellectual currents of the day and turn them into popular entertainment. (The colonial debate in The Tempest continues to set up resonances, from Aimé Césaire in the Caribbean to Nelson Mandela and his fellow ANC prisoners on Robben Island – Caliban’s ‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother’ is underlined in their precious copy, which eluded their jailers.)

  The question of New World voyages in The Tempest brings us back to Dudley Digges and his circle. Since the early 1590s, through his London contacts Shakespeare had known men such as John Florio, the translator of Montaigne; he had met foreign scholars and intellectuals, and had been in contact with explorers and magi at court. There is a long-standing myth, though direct evidence is lacking, that he belonged to a literary and scientific group that the antiquarian John Aubrey called ‘the Club at the Mermayd in Fry day Street’. The Mermaid, close to the Blackfriars theatre, certainly was a literary meeting place. According to the great walker Thomas Coryate (who wrote to them from Aleppo in 1614 and from India in 1616), the ‘company of right worshipful Sirenaicall Gentlemen’ met on the first Friday of every month. Playwrights were among them, as Francis Beaumont confirms in verses to Ben Jonson in 1613: