Comedies can thus deal with serious themes. Let's look again at The Comedy of Errors, the apparently light and farcical play cited at the head of this myth as the fall-guy to King Lear's evident superiority in seriousness. Like King Lear, The Comedy of Errors is deeply concerned with questions of identity and selfhood. Just as Lear descends into madness when his daughters Goneril and Regan do not acknowledge him as their father, so too the twin Antipholuses and Dromios enter a world of madness when they are repeatedly mistaken for one another. As Adriana, wife to his brother, berates him for his lack of care to her, the bewildered Antipholus of Syracuse wonders “what error drives our eyes and ears amiss?” (2.2.187). Error here has a stronger connotation than our modern sense of “mistake”: it is, as in Book 1 of Edmund Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene (1590), a terrifying condition of spiritual and intellectual wandering (from the Latin verb errare, to wander astray). When Antipholus of Ephesus returns to his own house only to have his way barred by a servant telling him he cannot enter because he is already inside at dinner, the comedy of mistaken identity becomes an existential exploration: how do we know we are ourselves, if those nearest to us do not recognize us or if they tell us we are someone other than we believe ourselves to be? John Mortimer's observation that “farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute”8 is appropriate to The Comedy of Errors: while the tragedies may approach similar themes they do so in a more consciously dilated and reflective way, whereas the comedy hurtles through the same difficult territory at breakneck speed.
To take another example of the overlap between comic and tragic treatments of the same theme: in both genres Shakespeare depicts the destructive effect of male sexual jealousy. In Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio is persuaded by the malevolent Don John that his bride-to-be Hero has been unfaithful on her wedding night, and he denounces her publicly. In Othello Iago works on the credulous Othello to make him believe his wife Desdemona is a “lewd minx” (3.3.478). Despite the fact that both women are the blameless victims of male rivalry and manipulation, death is their punishment. In Hero's case, it is a faked death but one which nevertheless has the force of ritual purgation. Reconciled with Claudio at the end of the play she tells him that “One Hero died defiled, but I do live, / And surely as I live, I am a maid” (5.4.63–4). For Desdemona there is no such “resurrection”: although she revives briefly in the bed on which her husband has smothered her, it is only to acquit him of blame for her murder. The theme is taken up again in one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote, The Winter's Tale. This play belongs to a group of Jacobean comedies whose combination of generic elements, use of the fantastical or supernatural, and more extended chronologies across generations mean they are often called “romances.” In it Leontes, the King of Sicilia, becomes convinced that his wife Hermione has been unfaithful with his friend Polixenes. He puts her on trial for treacherous adultery and banishes the child he believes a bastard, but when the Delphic oracle brands him a “jealous tyrant” (3.2.133) and both Hermione and his son Mamillius die, he repents, acknowledges “our shame perpetual,” and vows that “tears … shall be my recreation” (3.2.238–9). So far, so Othello. But the difference here is that the play is not over. Leontes is a tragic character who is not allowed the comfort of suicide—like Othello—and a jealous character who is not permitted timely resolution—like Claudio. He has to live with his terrible mistakes. A comic, pastoral second half, set after a sixteen-year gap, sees the courtship of Perdita—the lost child of Leontes and Hermione—by Florizel—son of Polixenes. This new couple are to heal the breach in their parents' generation. Back in Sicilia, the family is reunited, and, wonder of wonders, Hermione is returned to life. This final treatment of male jealousy goes beyond tragedy, and shows us that what is on the other side is a version of comedy, ending in marriage and reconciliation. As elsewhere in his career, it seems that Shakespeare's commitment is less to the differences between comedy and tragedy than to their continuities and overlaps. As Dr Johnson put it, “Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind but in one composition.”9
Notes
1 Edwin Wilson (ed.), Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw's Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 79.
2 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 25–6.
3 Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry; or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Thomas Nelson, 1964), p. 117.
4 www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Nashe/Terrors_Night.pdf (page 11, accessed 18 February 2012).
5 Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 178.
6 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 43.
7 Henri Bergson, Le Rire (1900), trans. F. Rothwell as Laughter, in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 74.
8 Georges Feydeau, A Flea in Her Ear, trans. John Mortimer (Old Vic theater program, 1986).
9 Quoted in Emma Smith (ed.), Blackwell Guides to Criticism: Shakespeare's Tragedies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 19.
Myth 10
Shakespeare hated his wife
Shakespeare's will is a tantalizing document in many respects. Dated 25 March 1616, preserved in the National Archives in Kew, and prepared by his lawyer Frances Collins, it is three pages long and a second draft, showing amendments and corrections.1 It contains half the extant examples of Shakespeare's signature we know about—one on each page—and paleographical analysis has suggested that the signatory was weak and ailing.2 (Shakespeare died a month after signing his will.) Perhaps unexpectedly, there is no mention of any books or papers in the property to be dispersed (any playscripts would, of course, have remained the property of the King's Men: see Myth 4). Unlike some other self-made men Shakespeare is not particularly philanthropic in disposing of his property to charitable causes: the actor Edward Alleyn, for instance, had endowed Dulwich College and left money for the building of ten almshouses in Southwark at his death in 1626, and compared with this generosity the £10 left by Shakespeare for the poor of Stratford is derisory. Shakespeare seems instead to have favored his daughter Susanna and her respectable husband, the Stratford doctor John Hall, over her younger sister Judith, whose ne'er-do-well husband had recently come before the church courts for getting a local woman pregnant before he was married. Shakespeare makes small gifts to friends from Stratford and from the theater world in London, singling out fellow King's Men Richard Burbage, John Heminge, and Henry Condell for gifts to buy mourning rings. But it is for one of the will's final provisions that it is most famous. An inserted clause squeezed into a space between the lines reads: “Item. I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture.” Anne Hathaway, it seems, was only mentioned at all as an afterthought, and that a niggardly one: a second-best bed as a reward for three children and more than three decades of marriage? Surely this is evidence that Shakespeare despised his wife and wished to use his will to express this animosity?
Figure 3 The will shows the bequest to Anne as an insertion—an afterthought?
Reproduced by permission of the National Archives.
Maybe. What has made the second-best bed story so compelling in a narrative of Shakespeare's unhappy marriage is the way it can be made to correspond with other things we think we know about the relationship between William and Anne. First, their marriage itself. Because Anne was evidently pregnant at the time of their marriage late in 1582 (their first child, Susanna, was born six months later), and because the marriage was conducted not in the usual way, by having banns announced on successive Sundays, but by license from the Bishop of Worcester, perhaps suggesting particular haste, biographers have been keen to sense reluctance or compulsion on the bridegroom's part. There is even an apparent error by a diocesan clerk who wrote the name of the bride as “Anne Whateley”—a roman
tic but entirely fanciful line of speculation constructs this mysterious person as the third point in a love triangle: the two Annes and Shakespeare. Added to this, Anne Hathaway was—gosh—older than her husband. As the usually rather dry biographer Samuel Schoenbaum puts it, the “unambiguous testimony” is that Anne was “seven or eight years her husband's senior, and twenty-six in 1582; by the standards of those days, growing a bit long in the tooth for the marriage market. She took a teen-aged lover, became pregnant, and married him.”3
Stephen Dedalus puts it more colorfully, in the punning and allusive style so characteristic of James Joyce's Ulysses:
He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.4
The parallel is with the unwilling Adonis, wooed by the amorous goddess Venus in Shakespeare's first, and highly popular, erotic narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593). Further fuel is the mention of a £2 debt, money lent to Anne Shakespeare, in the will of a Stratford shepherd Thomas Whittington, which seems to suggest that her husband kept her short of money. The marriage was empty and loveless, the biographical consensus has often been, and it is therefore no wonder that Shakespeare hot-footed it to London to leave behind this unwanted family. Poor Shakespeare (trapped unwillingly), or, if you prefer, Bad Shakespeare (treating his dependent family cruelly).
In fact, Shakespeare kept strong connections with Stratford throughout his life, buying property there, including New Place in 1597, and maintaining business relationships. Conversely, he did not buy property in London until the very end of his career, living instead in a series of lodgings, and so it is by no means evident that he turned his back on his family or made his settled life in London without them. Literary evidence for a warmer relationship between husband and wife has also been proposed, including the suggestion that one of the less accomplished poems gathered in his collection of sonnets, first published in 1609, is an early work addressing Anne in the cryptic phrase “hate away”:
Those lips that Love's own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said “I hate”
To me that languish'd for her sake;
But when she saw my woeful state
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom,
And taught it thus anew to greet:
“I hate” she alter'd with an end,
That follow'd it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who, like a fiend,
From heaven to hell is flown away.
“I hate” from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying “not you.”
(Sonnet 145)
If so, their relationship is cast in an unfamiliar light, with a speaker who “languish'd for her sake” in place of the unwilling suitor often imagined by biographers (the conventions of sonnets are important cautions here: see Myth 18).
Of course we can't know the secrets of the Shakespeares' marriage—nor, with our modern Western idealization of marriage as a union of minds as well as bodies, can we understand the perhaps more pragmatic early modern expectations of this relationship. Renaissance commentators were more inclined to discuss male–male friendship in the intimate and affectionate terms we might now reserve for romantic partnerships. As Michel de Montaigne put it in his Essays, translated into English in 1603 in a version we know Shakespeare consulted extensively (see Myth 2), “If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed, but by answering: Because it was he, because it was my self.”5 Many of Shakespeare's comedies dramatize marriage as the painful severing of strong male affections, such as the idealized boyhood relationship between Leontes and Polixenes in The Winter's Tale, who “as twinned lambs that did frisk i'th sun” “tripped” from this innocence only when women entered the frame (1.2.69, 77). Similarly, it is no accident that when in Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick swears his love for Beatrice, and bids her demand anything of him, her answer is the terse “Kill Claudio” (4.1.290): Benedick must kill his best friend to be with his lover.
But if we cannot see the secrets of the marriage bed (best or second-best), we can be conscious of the cultural operations of the myth of the wife who does not understand her genius husband. Germaine Greer titles the first chapter in her spirited defense of Anne Hathaway against misogynistic assumptions based on very little evidence “considering the poor reputation of wives generally, in particular the wives of literary men, and the traditional disparagement of the wife of the Man of the Millennium”: Greer deftly points out that the depiction of a foolish, contrary, scolding, or generally unsympathetic wife is one of the tropes of literary biography and thus part of the ideological construction of male creative genius.6
The second-best bed thus chimes with a whole range of other scattered facts in Shakespeare's biography and helps to turn them into a narrative of an unhappy marriage, usually one in which the teenage Shakespeare cannot be blamed. Attempts by scholars trying to defend Shakespeare from the charge of mistreating his wife have suggested that the second-best bed in a Jacobean household would be the marital bed, with the best bed being reserved for guests, and that therefore the bequest was a romantic one: the sentimental biographer A.L. Rowse asserted that it was an act of great care and generosity to his wife, in response to Katherine Duncan-Jones's view of the bequest's “shabbiness.”7 Carol Ann Duffy's sonnet “Anne Hathaway” develops Rowse's interpretation in sensual style: “The bed we loved in was a spinning world / of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas / where he would dive for pearls” (ll. 1–3).8 Or apologists have stressed the residual rights payable to widows, at least by London custom, or assumed that Shakespeare knew his wife would be cared for by Susanna and John. The arguments here, as so often, tend to proceed from the desired conclusion back to review the evidence, rather than vice versa.
If we cannot know whether Shakespeare's bequest of his second-best bed to his wife in 1616 was evidence of his disregard for her, does this matter? Not for Shakespeare the playwright. As Myths 7, 12, and 18 show, neither Shakespeare nor any of his contemporary dramatists was writing autobiographically. A mainstay of humanist models of learning, much copied in grammar-school curricula such as that at the King's New School in Stratford, was known as utramque partem (on either side of the question). This training in being able to argue from both points of view was formative for the generations who wrote for, and attended, the new Elizabethan theaters, since it introduced them to a rhetorical narrative form in which different perspectives were always simultaneously present. We cannot readily deduce anything about Shakespeare the man from Shakespeare the works, and even at those moments when the writing may seem most confessional, it is shaped by convention, artifice, and imagination (see Myth 18). So looking at attitudes to wives in Shakespeare's plays, or trying to draw out the way he deals with women, cannot help us.
Greer observes that the spectacle of an active, perhaps more worldly or experienced woman wooing a more naïf or tongue-tied young man is, in Shakespeare's comedies, a source of erotic and dramatic satisfaction (think of Rosalind seducing Orlando in As You Like It, or the attraction of Portia for Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice). Greer's biographical application of this observation to the Shakespeare–Hathaway relationship has to be as off-limits, argumentatively, as the assumptions of earlier biographers that the frequent depictions of male sexual jealousy in Shakespeare's plays (in Othello, or The Winter's Tale, or Cymbeline) told us something about Anne Hathaway's assumed infidelity, or, as in Stephen Dedalus's analysis above, that the reluctant Adonis tells us something about the courtship of Anne and William. And in any case, Shakespeare's plays would always furnish contradictory examples: Shakespeare's women range f
rom the demure Ophelia to the charismatic Cleopatra, and from the unconventional Katherine (The Taming of the Shrew) to the wronged Innogen in Cymbeline. It would be hard to know which to select to build a biographical reading.
Notes
1 See http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/museum/item.asp?item_id=21
2 Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 297.
3 Ibid., p. 82.
4 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 183.
5 Michel de Montaigne, The essays or morall, politike and militarie discourses of Michaell de Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1603): ‘On Friendship’, p. 92 (sig. I4v).
6 Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 1.
7 This particular skirmish was in the Times Literary Supplement, 18 and 25 November 1994.
8 Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife (London: Picador, 1999), p. 30.
Myth 11
Shakespeare wrote in the rhythms of everyday speech
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur “Thou still unravished bride of quietness”, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary. I know this because the texture, rhythm and resonance of your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning … Your language draws attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like “Don't you know the drivers are on strike?” do not.1
30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Page 9
