Did Field alert his countryman to exciting new authors and hot-off-the-press publications? Did Shakespeare buy them? Or did Field allow his printshop to function as an unofficial library with Shakespeare borrowing them or reading them on site? What is clear is that Shakespeare kept up with new ideas and new literary discoveries as they reached the English market.
It is often alleged that the level of technical knowledge of certain areas in Shakespeare's plays—such as law or the court—is incompatible with the knowledge of a grammar-school boy from Stratford. This assertion is behind the search for other candidates for authorship of Shakespeare's plays. Thus, the argument goes, the legal knowledge is such that the plays must have been written by a lawyer (enter Francis Bacon). The knowledge of court is such that they must have been written by an aristocrat (enter the Earl of Oxford). Similar points have been made about the plays' knowledge of botany or of seafaring or of birds. There are several problems with this kind of argument. First it assumes that authors are dependent on their own professional or emotional experiences. (It is this presumption of emotional experience that drives Myth 18, that the sonnets must be autobiographical.) One does not need to be a lawyer to acquire legal knowledge, and this was especially so in the Elizabethan period, which was surprisingly litigious (Peter Beal has shown that in one year George Puttenham had over seventy lawsuits in process, and Shakespeare himself was involved in half a dozen legal cases). The legal satires of Thomas Middleton's city comedies, such as Michaelmas Term, are effective because they target the familiarly quotidian not the esoterically specialized. Court life was also familiar to Shakespeare once the Chamberlain's Men were invited to perform there. But even before then, “what great ones do the less will prattle of” (Twelfth Night, 1.2.29). And to believe that only lawyers can command legal references or aristocrats courtly references misses a crucial concept: imagination. Imagination is the single most important qualification for being a writer.
If writers imagine, they also do research. Research takes many forms. It is clear that Shakespeare consulted multiple versions of history in the forms of prose (Holinshed's Chronicles), poetry (Samuel Daniel's The Civil Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York), and drama (the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth) when writing his history plays. But there is another form of research that has no technical name: human observation. There is nothing in Shakespeare's plays that could not have come from close observation of the world around him: observation of human idiosyncrasy, hypocrisy, humanity, compassion, hierarchy, politics, paradoxes.
Although libraries contain annotated books that belonged to Jonson and Milton, we have none of Shakespeare's. He left no books in his will; most scholars assume that he had already given them to his son-in-law, the physician John Hall. Thus, we know of Shakespeare's reading only from our knowledge of the sources of his plays. For a long time it was believed that a copy of Florio's translation of the French humanist Michel de Montaigne's Essays (1603), now in the British Library, belonged to Shakespeare: its flyleaf bears the signature “William Shakespeare.” The bibliographical history of this volume's front matter and endpapers (which have been rearranged at various times) is complex, but the indisputable fact is that the paper that carries the signature is late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century. Presumably someone thought that Shakespeare's signature would increase the value of the book. (The British Library owns Jonson's copy but, although Jonson was in the habit of annotating his books, this one has no marginalia.)
We have been thinking so far about what Shakespeare read; it is also worth thinking about how he read it. John Florio's translation of Montaigne may help us. Shakespeare is intellectually attuned with Montaigne. Both are interested in human identity. Montaigne is a “psychological philosopher” and Shakespeare is a “psychological dramatist.”2 We don't know how much Montaigne Shakespeare had read (there is a lot of it to read). Gonzalo's speech in The Tempest on the ideal commonwealth (2.1.153 onwards) comes from Montaigne's essay “On Cannibals.” There are general similarities in ideas elsewhere, but when two writers are interested in selfhood, inwardness, the individual, it is hard to distinguish confluence from influence. However, looking at Shakespeare's vocabulary, and in particular the effect on it of Florio's Montaigne, is instructive.
Montaigne's Essays were introduced to the English-speaking world through John Florio's translation of 1603. It was a massive enterprise: three volumes. Shakespeare clearly read it soon after it was published as it had a notable effect on his vocabulary from 1603 onwards. George Coffin Taylor first catalogued the parallels in 1925, identifying 750 words and phrases that were not in Shakespeare's vocabulary before 1603 but all of which appeared there after that date and are also in Florio's Montaigne.3 Taylor wrote in a period of obsessive parallel-hunting when critics pounced on parallel phrases of such ordinariness that it is as easy to imagine the authors hitting on them independently as it is to see one author influencing the other. But most of Taylor's words do not come into this category: “hugger-mugger” (Hamlet 4.5.82; this is its only appearance in Shakespeare), “marble-hearted” (King Lear 1.4.237—again its sole Shakespeare usage). Florio is fond of compound coinages, and they seem to have impressed Shakespeare. Thus, although “holy-water” is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1583, it is not used by Shakespeare until King Lear, where it appears in the phrase “court holy water” (3.2.10); Florio writes (in a similarly ironic context) “seeke after court holy-water and wavering-favours of princes” (this is his imaginative version of Montaigne's prosaic “c[h]ercer le vent de la faveur des Roys” [seek the wind of kings' favors]).4
Although OED researchers have since found earlier occurrences of words that Taylor claimed were introduced by Florio, these are not large in number and many of Taylor's distinctive words, first used by Florio, command attention: we find “concupiscible” in Florio and in Measure for Measure (5.1.98); “harping [up]on” in Florio and in Hamlet (2.2.189–90); and, close by, “pregnant wit” in Florio and “pregnant … replies” in Hamlet (2.2.210–11); “chirurgions” in Florio and “chirurgeonly” in The Tempest (2.1.146).When we come across “consanguinity” in Florio and in Troilus and Cressida (4.3.23, nowhere else in Shakespeare), we have to question the 1601–2 date of Troilus or assume that Florio's translation was circulating in manuscript.5 The same applies to Hamlet (1600–1), where the coincidence of the two phrases above, both in Florio and contiguous in Hamlet, invites attention.
F.O. Mathiessen notes that Shakespeare's use of Florio's Montaigne forms an interesting pattern. The new words are used often in Shakespeare's vocabulary in 1603 and immediately thereafter, then gradually taper off, before reappearing in The Tempest in 1610. This suggests how Shakespeare read and responded to Montaigne: an initial immersion, a gradual distancing, and then a later rereading. Philippe Desan is concerned that Shakespeare seems to have been more interested in Florio's coinages than in Montaigne's ideas.6 This, in fact, is precisely what interests us—what caught Shakespeare's ear when he read. Given his school training in rhetoric and his subsequent career as a poet, it is not surprising that he would react so enthusiastically to language.
So: was Shakespeare well educated? His schooling certainly gave him a substantial grounding in classical literature and in rhetorical structures; but he carried on building on this strong foundation himself.
Notes
1 Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 398.
2 Peter Holbrook, Shakespeare's Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 187.
3 G.C. Taylor, Shakspeare's Debt to Montaigne (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), p. 5.
4 F.O. Mathiessen, Translation: An Elizabethan Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1965), p. 143.
5 Philippe Desan suggests that “extracts of Florio's translation may have circulated in manuscript among the London literati as early
as 1597–8”. Cited in Richard Scholar, “French Connections: The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Montaigne and Shakespeare,” in Laurie Maguire (ed.), How To Do Things with Shakespeare (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), pp. 11–33 (p. 14).
6 Scholar, “French Connections,” p. 14.
Myth 3
shakespeare's plays should be performed in elizabethan dress
In Ben Jonson's comedy The Alchemist a character is asked to impersonate a Spanish count. He requires a Spanish suit (the dialogue makes clear that Spanish fashion differs from the English) and a temporary sartorial crisis occurs when no such costume is to hand. Another character proposes a solution: “Thou must borrow / A Spanish suit. Hast thou no credit with the players? … / Hieronimo's old cloak, ruff, and hat will serve” (4.7.67–71).1
The suggestion is satirical. It refers with parodic affection to one of the most popular stage-Spaniards—Hieronimo—in the most influential play of the Elizabethan period, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (see Myth 1). Costumes were a major expense. Theater companies did not rent them out. In fact, the traffic was in the other direction: many costumes came from real life. Expensive fashionable clothes were bequeathed to servants (for example) by rich employers. Sumptuary legislation prevented servants from wearing them (the legislation aligned social status with fabrics and accessories, dictating who could wear what; hence Faustus's anarchic vision of dressing the undergraduates in silk in Marlowe's Dr Faustus); and so the servants sold their inherited clothes to the players, turning their bequest into cash.
Jonson's The Alchemist is set in the period and location in which it was written—London in 1610. Like other city comedies, it depends on topicality: contemporary fashions are satirized in plays from Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) to Massinger's Caroline comedy The City Madam (1632). But there is some evidence to suggest that even historical plays were more conveniently contemporary than historically accurate in their costumes.
We have only one contemporary picture of a Shakespeare play: a sketch of Titus Andronicus, made c.1595 by the writer Henry Peacham (1578–1644). The drawing, often reproduced independently of the manuscript in which it appears, forms a horizontal band at the top of a manuscript page on which Peacham has written out forty lines from the play. The drawing depicts Tamora, queen of the Goths, pleading to Titus for the life of her sons. At the picture's far right stands the inked black figure of Aaron the Moor; at the picture's far left stand two soldiers; in the center are Titus and the kneeling queen. The drawing is unlikely to represent an actual performance (the prisoner Aaron freely brandishes a sword, for instance!), but it may combine Peacham's memory of a performance of Titus with his reading of the quarto published in 1594. Although the stage action at this point requires three of Tamora's sons, the stage direction (erroneously) provides an entry for only two (see Myth 8); the fact that Peacham draws two sons may suggest that he was illustrating a text he was reading rather than a performance he was remembering. However, the drawing's eclectic mix of styles and periods is more likely to derive from memory than from imagination. Consequently it is helpful in suggesting how one of Shakespeare's historical tragedies was costumed in the 1590s.
What is notable is that the costumes make no attempt at historical accuracy although there is considerable success in suggesting historical atmosphere. Tamora, fictional queen of a fifth-century people, wears a loose-bodied medieval- or Elizabethan-style gown. Titus wears a Roman toga and carries a spear, but the two soldiers behind him carry Tudor halberds, and one of them, perhaps both of them, also carries a scimitar (an Eastern curved sword). Both also wear wide, baggy pants—an Elizabethan fashion (called “Venetians”). They wear Elizabethan hats (one with a fashionable feather) and medieval body armor.2 Shakespeare's theater company did not have the resources costume designers use today (books of pictures of historical costumes illustrating changing fashions). This was not a handicap: they had no desire for such resources. What the Peacham sketch makes clear is that the theater company was aiming for accessibility.
This does not mean that they were careless or cavalier in costume choices. Costumes were their single biggest expense. The canopy over the Globe stage was to protect the costumes, not the actors. Philip Henslowe's Diary records lavish expenditure on satin doublets, taffeta cloaks, silver and copper lace, cloth of gold, velvet breeches, and shagged cloth (worsted cloth with a velvet nap on one side), and is detailed about cuts and linings and ornament and color and design (pinking, facing, spangling). Theater companies' “greatest accumulation of capital was in their clothing stock, which might easily be worth more than the theatre in which they were performing.”3
Figure 1 This drawing of characters from Titus Andronicus shows the Elizabethans' eclectic approach to historical costume.
Reproduced by permission of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire, Great Britain.
If Elizabethan costumes mixed the contemporary and the historical, so too did props and language. A clock strikes anachronistically in Julius Caesar, and the wakeful Brutus, inhabitant of a scroll culture, sees “the leaf turned down / Where I left reading” (4.2.324–5). Gloucester, resident in Lear's ancient Britain, makes a joke about spectacles, first known in medieval Italy. The medieval Hamlet attends a university (Wittenberg) not founded until 1502; in the Trojan war setting of Troilus and Cressida Hector quotes Aristotle, who lived and wrote many centuries after Hector (rather as the Fool in King Lear acknowledges, “This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time” [3.2.95–6]). Aristotle was standard academic reading in Shakespeare's day, just as clocks and books and spectacles were familiar objects. Shakespeare's plays are rooted in the present. If Shakespeare wrote about only one city—London (see Myth 14)—it was always contemporary London.
This is most obvious in the comedies. The Comedy of Errors changes the recognizably Roman slaves of its Plautine source to the more familiar Elizabeth servants. Elizabethan marriage conventions are very much to the fore in Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado about Nothing. In the comic-tragic world of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet leads the life of a typical cloistered wealthy Elizabethan daughter. It was natural for the Elizabethans to stage these plays in Elizabethan dress.
Is it therefore natural that we should do so? After all, in 1590 Elizabethan dress was modern dress. A logic of equivalence might dictate that today we should costume Shakespeare's plays in contemporary dress. Indeed, some very successful productions have done so. In 2004 Trevor Nunn directed Ben Whishaw as Hamlet for generation Y. A teenage student, wearing jeans and a beanie, this Hamlet contemplated suicide while staring at his bottle of prescription anti-depressants. Gertrude (Imogen Stubbs) was that new discovery of the 1990s, a Yummy Mummy. Ophelia, dressed in her school uniform, danced alone in her bedroom with her iPod and earphones (thus motivating Hamlet's later misogynist jibe, directed against all her sex, “You jig” (3.1.147; Whishaw's emphasis).
Both Rory Kinnear's Hamlet (2010) and David Tennant's (2008) were placed in similarly effective modern-dress settings. When Ophelia appeared (in the Tennant Hamlet) in her mad scene wearing only her underwear—an innocent floral cotton starter-bra and mini-shorts—the social impropriety and personal vulnerability of her uncontrolled behavior was conveyed more powerfully than a bawdy song alone could. A teenager talking (or singing) about sex does not shock us today or invite our concern; a teenager appearing in public in underwear does (Gertrude compassionately covered Ophelia with her pashmina). In the Kinnear Hamlet Claudius's spy-state was conveyed by besuited officials with clipboards and walkie-talkies exchanging information and receiving instructions. Similarly, when Romeo climbs the orchard walls of the Capulet estate in Romeo and Juliet, it is hard for us to appreciate the danger he runs in entering enemy territory. Banks of CCTV security monitors and patrol-guards with Alsatian dogs, as in Baz Luhrmann's film Romeo + Juliet, set the scene and create the atmosphere in ways we instantly comprehend. Today we understand the social statements made by modern d
ress when we no longer know how to “read” the sartorial status of codpieces.
Modern stage business is a logical extension of modern costume. In Midsummer Night's Dream, Snug the joiner identifies himself to the onstage audience (lest they fear that he really is the lion he plays). When Kenneth Branagh directed the play in 1990, Karl James's Snug removed his mask and came forward to the onstage audience of newlyweds on the line “Then know that I as Snug the joiner am” (5.1.221). He proceeded to distribute his business card; with three weddings he was clearly anticipating a lot of home improvements. This piece of stage business perfectly complemented the line it accompanied: both worked together to break the theatrical illusion.
Modernizing need not always take us into the here-and-now. The 1930s has proved a congenial home for Shakespeare productions, as in Ian McKellen's Richard III (filmed by director Richard Loncraine), for example, which paralleled Richard's growing tyranny with the rise of fascism. Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy that seems firmly set in its own time, the product of a period that believed that male friendship was more important than heterosexual love (see Myth 10). In the last act this results in several (to us) un-psychologically motivated volte-faces, and the reduction of one of the heroines to an object, tossed between men like a pass-the-parcel prize. When David Thacker directed the play at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991, he set it in the Cole Porter/Gershwins/Irving Berlin/Rogers and Hart world of the 1920s and 1930s—not the real world but the world of the Hollywood musical. In so doing, he replaced one set of cardboard conventions with another—but this time, conventions we understand and accept.
Thus, there are no ideological reasons not to stage Shakespeare's plays in modern dress. There may, however, be some logical reasons not to do so. Not all the plays can leave the Elizabethan period. The Taming of the Shrew is based on a sine qua non of Renaissance domestic life: that a wife owes obedience to her husband. The 1950s is therefore probably the latest period to which one can transpose this play. In 1978 Michael Bogdanov set the play in the present and its Katherine, Paola Dionisotti, registered her discomfort: “I kept wondering why I just didn't get up and go”; from the 1960s onwards, the barriers to Katherine's liberty had come down so the 1978 setting made no sense. (Dionisotti again: “The point is that she can't. Kate can't get up and go.” 4) Recent productions which set the play in the present have avoided this problem by making obvious the plot's status as a play-within-the-play (the taming of the shrew is the plot of a play put on by traveling players for a deluded drunken tinker). This calls attention to the fact that all the characters in the plot are actually playing roles (the submissive wife being just another role). By removing the play from the realm of domestic reality, productions remove the problem of the characters' actions and attitudes (problems for our world, if not for Shakespeare's).
30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Page 3
