In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  What things have we seen,

  Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been

  So nimble, and so full of subtle flame

  Shakespeare may not strike us as a clubby sort of person, but he knew many of the group very well, and in 1613 the Mermaid’s owner witnessed a lease for him.

  These connections are still little explored, but they open up fascinating possibilities. People like Digges, Coryate, Jonson, John Donne, Inigo Jones, the antiquarian Robert Cotton (who lent Ben Jonson books from his great library), the translator Holland, the publisher Edward Blount and the Levant Company’s Richard Martin made up a formidable bunch of literary, artistic, scientific and mercantile figures encompassing all shades of opinion and belief. The story of one of the sources for the shipwreck in The Tempest is a fascinating example of the way the poet used contacts such as these for his plots.

  On 2 June 1610 a ship named the Sea Adventure, backed by a consortium that included the Digges brothers, sailed for America. On the 24th the vessel was wrecked in a great storm off the Bermudas. The survivors returned home in September with tales of terrifying experiences and strange visions; that autumn their account was written up and circulated privately among the shareholders. It is an attractive speculation that Shakespeare might have obtained the manuscript of the story from Dudley Digges, stepson of his Stratford friend Thomas Russell. It was perhaps at Russell’s house near Stratford that November that he held in his hands the account of William Strachy, dated 15 July 1610: ‘A dreadfull storm and hedeous began to blow, which swelling and roaring as it were by fits, at length did beat all light from heaven: which like a hell of darkness turned black upon us, so much the more fuller of horror … and over mastered the senses of all …’ After four days of terror they observed ‘An apparition of a little round light, like a faint Starre trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze, half the height upon the mainmast and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud ….’

  The apparition the sailors had seen was, of course, the natural phenomenon known as St Elmo’s Fire. Strachy’s eyewitness account gave Shakespeare the detail he was looking for: the electric in-the-mouth fear as the ship splits; the uncertainty of perception in a world where nothing is quite what it seems. And so, armed with this tale, plus Virgil, Ovid and other old favourites such as Montaigne, he wrote The Tempest that winter, turning the spirits and voices imagined by Stratchy’s sailors into Ariel, an airy progeny of Jonson’s masques, and the frightened natives of the ‘vex’d Bermudas’ into Caliban (an anagram of cannibal), a child of Montaigne but also a Native American of a kind one could have met on the streets of London at that time.

  ‘LET YOUR INDULGENCE SET ME FREE’

  At the end of the play, when the old enemies are reconciled and their children betrothed, Prospero makes a wonderful speech, which draws heavily on the passage in Ovid in which Medea mixes the dreadful potion to poison her children but which Shakespeare turns into a fabulous image of unearthly magic:

  Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,

  And ye that on the sands with printless foot

  Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him

  When he comes back; you demi-puppets that

  By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make

  Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime

  Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice

  To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid, –

  Weak masters though ye be, – I have bedimm’d

  The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,

  And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault

  Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder

  Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak

  With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory

  Have I made shake: and by the spurs pluck’d up

  The pine and cedar: graves, at my command,

  Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth

  By my so potent art. But this rough magic

  I here abjure: and, when I have required

  Some heavenly music, – which even now I do, –

  To work mine end upon their senses, that

  This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,

  Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

  And deeper than did ever plummet sound

  I’ll drown my book.

  Since the eighteenth century this speech has been seen as Shakespeare’s farewell. The Prospero magic of course has precise affinities with the author and director who orchestrates the plot, plays with his characters to produce the desired effect, and then quits the stage. From a dramatist so conscious of theatrical illusion it is hard not to see this in some sense as a valediction (and was this why his colleagues pointedly opened his posthumous collected works with this play?). This conclusion gains conviction with Prospero’s epilogue to his audience, which again lifts the veil on the illusion of acting. But here there is a twist: the flow of power is reversed. The spell is mutual, and it is the audience’s belief that gives life to the illusion:

  Now my charms are all o’erthrown,

  And what strength I have’s mine own, –

  Which is most faint: now ’tis true,

  I must be here confined by you,

  Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

  Since I have my dukedom got,

  And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell

  In this bare island by your spell;

  But release me from my bands

  With the help of your good hands.

  Gentle breath of yours my sails

  Must fill, or else my project fails,

  Which was to please. Now I want

  Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

  And my ending is despair

  Unless I be relieved by prayer,

  Which pierces so, that it assaults

  Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

  As you from crimes would pardon’d be,

  Let your indulgence set me free.

  He waits for applause, then exits. How typical of Shakespeare, the brilliant plotter of Romeo and Juliet; the illusionist of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the cajoling ‘debtor’ of Henry IV Part 2; the stage exorcist of King Lear. A professional man of the theatre, he knows exactly how to work us. This is the last of his many comments on the relationship between author/actor and audience. The actor puts the audience under a spell; but it is the audience’s joining with the players that creates the atmosphere of enchantment in which the actors do their work. If they do not, then his ‘project’ will fail – ‘Which was, to please’.

  TIME’S SCYTHE

  In February 1612 Shakespeare’s brother Gilbert, the nearest to him in age, died in Stratford. He was forty-five. Private mourning in Warwickshire was soon to be echoed by grief on a nationwide scale. That autumn a sea of optimism surrounded King James’s two oldest children. In October Prince Henry held grand revels at court. He had already attracted high hopes as the focus of widespread expectation that a united Britain might overcome the religious conflicts of the older generation. This new arbiter of taste and patron of the arts had youth, beauty, talent and an ambition to play a part on the European stage. At the same time it was announced that Henry’s sister Elizabeth would be marrying Frederick of Habsburg, the Elector Palatine. But on 6 November, after a short illness, Prince Henry, the Renaissance prince who had promised a new golden age, died.

  His death had a profound effect: as with Diana, Princess of Wales, there was a magnificent funeral with extravagant expressions of public grief. After some deliberation the court decided to go ahead with Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, and Shakespeare’s company were hired to put on no fewer than fourteen plays the following February before a galaxy of foreign dignitaries in the Banqueting House in Whitehall.

  Among old favourites and fashionable new pieces was the mysterious Cardenio, the one certain Shakespeare play that has not survived. It appears to be
his first collaboration with the rising young star of the King’s Men, John Fletcher. Written the previous year, Cardenio was played at court in February 1613 and again in June before the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador in Greenwich; in the 1650s it was registered for publication in the names of both authors.

  The play was evidently based on a story in Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote, published in 1612. It is easy to see why Cervantes’ post-medieval satire of the knightly quest should have attracted the creator of the old knight Falstaff for whom, famously, honour was but a word: ‘Air, a mere scutcheon’. All that survives now is a 1727 adaptation, which in places seems to contain fossils of Jacobean verse, some very muscular and idiosyncratic:

  I do not see the Fervour in the Maid.

  Which Youth and Love should kindle. She consents,

  As ’twere to feed without an Appetite:

  Tells me she is content; and plays the coy one,

  Like Those that subtly make their Words their Ward,

  Keeping Address at Distance. This Affection

  Is such a feign’d One, as will break untouch’d;

  Dye frosty, e’er it can be thaw’d; while mine,

  Like to a Clime beneath Hyperion’s Eye,

  Burns with one constant Heat

  If Shakespeare does not lie behind that, it is hard to think who else might – certainly not Fletcher. That a genuine manuscript was available to the eighteenth-century adaptor is proved by the survival of some of Robert Johnson’s music with lyrics based on Shelton.

  The play contains characteristic Shakespeare gags, such as when the villainous Don Henriquez pursues Leonora into a nunnery by pretending to be a corpse in a coffin (just as in Cymbeline Iachimo is smuggled into Imogen’s chamber in a chest). This is not in the Cervantes tale and must be Shakespeare’s own idea. But the main similarity is to the late plays, especially Cymbeline: the wronged heroine, the reconciling of young and old in a family reunion, the opposition of court and country, and the key role given to music. It is a great pity that the play is lost because of the fascinating possibilities offered by the meeting of Shakespeare and Cervantes, the progenitor of the modern novel.

  While Cardenio and other pieces were in rehearsal for the royal wedding celebrations, Richard, the most elusive member of the Shakespeare family, died. He was thirty-eight. All three of William’s younger brothers had now gone. None had married, left children or lived to a good age. The four Shakespeare boys did not turn out to be good home-makers. By Tudor standards, an unusual family. And more intimations of mortality.

  THE BLACKFRIARS HOUSE: A MYSTERIOUS PURCHASE

  In spring 1613 Shakespeare was back in London. On the morning of 10 March he signed the deeds to buy the gatehouse at Blackfriars, adjacent to the indoor theatre. The owner of the Mermaid, the vintner John Jackson, was a witness. Many questions still surround the purchase of this property. It was a place long known to the government’s thought police as a Catholic safe house – its warren of tunnels had been the despair of Elizabeth’s priest-hunters. So why did Shakespeare buy it so late in his career, and after he had retired to Stratford? Was it just an investment, or was there something more to it?

  The poet’s will, drawn up in early 1616, mentions a John Robinson living in the house at that point, and someone of that name appears as a witness of the will, although he did not sign it in person. It would seem that Robinson was a London man, but his identity is still a mystery. The surname appears among the stewards of the Fortescues, the former owners, who were obstinate recusants, but it is also the name of a young Catholic priest, who was living in London at that time and later became a Jesuit. The house appears in the poet’s will among the property conveyed to his daughter Susanna but with special conditions attached, and two years after his death it was conveyed to John Greene and Matthew Morris ‘in accordance with the true intent of Mr Shakespeare’s will’. Stranger still, one Sunday years later, a floor in the main upstairs chamber of the adjacent building collapsed, killing a Catholic priest and ninety of his 300-strong congregation, among them Warwickshire folk, including a Tresham. So the place was still a secret mass house, just as it had been in Elizabeth’s day. Shakespeare was a cunning and discreet person: the purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse and its later history may yet throw new light on his business dealings, and perhaps his religious sympathies, at the end of his life.

  HEALING THE WOUND OF ENGLAND

  Now, right at the end of his career, we come to a move that is intriguing in its implications. Early in 1613 the King’s Men put on a play based on the tale of Henry VIII – the split with Rome, his divorce from Katherine of Aragon and relationship with Anne Boleyn. It was to be performed in the Blackfriars, where Henry’s ecclesiastical court had sat, in its days as a monastery, to hear the divorce case. In this room, then, the schism had begun. What a theme to choose – and what a place to play it!

  Shakespeare sets out the way he wants it to be understood in an enigmatic prologue, another example of his cunning:

  I come no more to make you laugh: things now

  That bear a weighty and a serious brow,

  Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,

  Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow,

  We now present. Those that can pity here

  May, if they think it well, let fall a tear;

  The subject will deserve it. Such as give

  Their money out of hope they may believe,

  May here find truth too ….

  On the surface it might be thought that such a theme would have to be developed in an anti-Catholic way. Not at all: the key message is one of reconciliation. Henry is oafish; Katherine of Aragon, the mother of Queen Mary, the heroine.

  Any play concerned with the controversies of Henry VIII’s reign had, of course, been impossible to stage in Elizabeth’s lifetime. And although this one is often looked on as an anticlimax to Shakespeare’s career, it is fascinating that he should now complete his cycle on English history with the instigator of the great schism. Over eighty years on, the scars were healing. For a comparison, one would have to go to Calderon’s great Love after Death, about the suppression of Moorish culture in Spain, written seventy years after Philip II’s edict against Muslim customs. The wound of Spain, as this was of England.

  Henry VIII was one of the most repellent rulers in English history, and he isn’t airbrushed in the play. But it is Shakespeare’s treatment of Katherine, one of his great women’s roles, which most clearly reveals his approach. Her defence speech – a mirror of Hermione’s in The Winter’s Tale, right down to her citing of her father’s rank – leaves a strong impression of the nobleness of the old generation of Catholics. Castigating the ‘hearts crammed with arrogancy’ of her accusers, Katherine appeals in ‘the name of God’ in the most plain and measured language:

  Sir, I desire you do me right and justice;

  And to bestow your pity on me: for

  I am a most poor woman, and a stranger,

  Born out of your dominions; having here

  No judge indifferent, nor no more assurance

  Of equal friendship and proceeding. Alas, sir,

  In what have I offended you? what cause

  Hath my behaviour given to your displeasure,

  That thus you should proceed to put me off,

  And take your good grace from me?

  Once more, we hear the stranger’s case. And remember, this was delivered in the very hall where it had happened seventy years before. Is there a sense here that history has moved on – the clock cannot be turned back? As in The Winter’s Tale, Pericles and The Tempest, the theme is recognition and forgiveness; here, however, it is not in fiction but in English history. The way is prepared immediately after her trial by the boy singing a beautiful Johnson song on Orpheus, and then fully expressed in the mystical scene of Katherine’s dying vision, when to ‘sad and solemn music’ she falls asleep to see, in one of Shakespeare’s longest stage directions, six angels descend ‘clad
in white robes, wearing on their heads garlands of bays, and … branches of bays or palm in their hands Neo-Platonist balm applied to the wound of England.

  At the end, as in other late plays, a baby is brought on stage to be the agent of reconciliation. This one is Elizabeth herself. But that scene, with its slightly nauseating eulogy of the golden time she would inaugurate (in marked contrast to the tight-lipped epitaph, if such it is, in Sonnet 124), was written by his collaborator, Fletcher. With that, Shakespeare backs gently out. But, as always, he keeps his cards close to his chest. We call the play Henry VIII today, as the Folio editors chose to do. But this is not the author’s title. Through the mouthpiece of his stage chorus, in a typical sleight of hand, Shakespeare gives us the most teasing of all his titles: All Is True.

  It was during a performance of this play, on 29 June 1613, that the Globe burned down. Henry Wotton saw it happen:

  The kings players had a new play, called All is true, set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty Now … certain chambers [cannon] being shot off … some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light upon the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric ….

  The Globe would be rebuilt, but perhaps for Shakespeare the fire drew a line under the era. It has been conjectured that at this point he sold his share in the company. The physical fabric could be restored, but what of time?