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Shakespeare: A Life

Page 21

by Park Honan


  How comes it now, my husband, O how comes it That thou art then estrangèd from thyself? -Thy 'self' I call it, being strange to me That, undividable, incorporate, Am better than thy dear self's better part. Ah, do not tear away thyself from me; For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall A drop of water in the breaking gulf, And take unmingled thence that drop again Without addition or diminishing, As take from me thyself, and not me too. ( II. ii. 113, 122-32)

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  Does Adriana in effect address the author from a ' Stratford viewpoint'? Interestingly, Shakespeare most nearly indulges in autobiography in a play when depicting illusory states of mind. Errors is a many-layered comedy with hints of Stratford's life in it. The 'confusions' of the Antipholi, though farcical, result in sharp, realistic mercantile tensions before the denouement: old Egeus, saved from death, is reunited with his wife the 'Abbess', who is as practical about medicinal herbs as about faith. Like the dramatist's father, Egeus has lacked money at a crucial time, and also faced a law as arbitrary as the Tudor usury statutes which affected John Shakespeare. He yearns less for his wife than for his progeny, and his Syracusan son, Antipholus, has been as bereft of family as a travelling actor might be.

  Such autobiographical aspects of the play -- which I risk overemphasizing here -- at least help the author to detach himself from the tone of his literary sources. Whereas the Latin Menaechmi is hardedged and cynical, The Comedy of Errors tells a healing story befitting a drama twice performed on Innocents Day. Shakespeare explores problems of lasting intellectual importance to himself, such as the fear of non-being, or the need for self-redemption, and this light comedy really looks ahead to matters of identity in Hamlet and to reconciliations in the late romances. If it was written after September 1592, as is probable, Errors also suggests that he was more deeply troubled by the attacks oil his integrity in Greene Groats-worth than is often supposed. Errors is not so much a vindication of himself as it is an enquiry into the matter of how he can judge himself at all. Unrecognized by other people, Antipholus of Syracuse has no 'self' to be certain of, or to defend. Adriana's selfliood, even the nature of her 'blood', depends not merely on her own behaviour, but on her husband's. Funny as it is, Errors is in some ways a troubling work by a proficient author seeking to know himself. Gray's students -- if the play was audible -- must have been amused by mentions of the 'Phoenix' (the sign of a shop in Lombard Street and of a London tavern) and 'Porpentine' (a Bankside inn), as well as by a tour of modern Europe and America focusing on fat Nell's geography and by bawdy jokes on baldness. Losing his hair perhaps at about 30, Shakespeare finds baldness a sign of wit, or syphilis, or both.

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  It has been suggested that he also wrote Love's Labour's Lost during or just after the plague and with an audience of students and lawyers in mind. The work has bawdy enough for Inns of Court 'termers'. It was to be staged at the royal court, and it must have served in a public amphitheatre. Though its verse is adroit, Love's Labour's Lost has signs of having been penned very quickly in a relatively unplanned way. It opens with the King of Navarre's quixotic, limp wish to defy 'cormorant' time and win fame with his lords in three years' study during which no woman is to sully their academe; but the scheme is quickly subverted, and the drama nearly runs out of plot. Its wooing-games and funny shows of the Muscovites and of the Nine Worthies are at least well improvised by Shakespeare, and before Mercadé arrives with news of the King of France's death in Act V, the play is an exquisite frolic -- a Lylyan work in which wit, word-play, and drama about words aspire to music's condition.

  Biron, the most astute of the lords, for example uses the word light gracefully and half a dozen times in three lines, quite as easily as he breathes --

  Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile; So ere you find where light in darkness lies Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes. ( I. i. 77-9)

  He also summarizes the whole truth of Navarre's 'academe' at the outset with little or no effort:

  Necessity will make us all forsworn Three thousand times within this three years' space; For every man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by special grace. ( I. i. 147-50)

  Yet -- within a leisurely framework -- Shakespeare appears to carry out in part an exercise in recollection, or in comic criticism of his own early attachment to prosody and rhetoric. The ambience, in some respects, might be Church Street's in the 1570s. The hothouse of the grammar school is resurrected with affectionate gusto. Armado,

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  Holofernes, and Nathaniel all together suggest Upper and Lower School pedantry -- but Holofernes does not have the name of Pantagruel's tutor in Rabelais for nothing. He is no mere fool, since he thinks the best poet who ever woke up in Italy was Ovid, or Naso, the great nose ('for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy'). Indeed, 'Ovidius Naso was the man' ( IV. ii. 123-5). In his Ovidveneration, he speaks for his creator. What might seem, in Act IV, to be a satire aimed at a modern writer's excessive dependency upon Ovid turns into astute praise for Naso, or the Nose. Shakespeare's affection for Ovid mutes or qualifies an exceedingly mild criticism here of grammar-school ideals, as if Ovid's charm at one time had suffused the air of Church Street and softened Master Jenkins's very benches. Primed by Ovid, Holofernes has learned from Book X of Quintilian that, for poetry, imitation alone is not sufficient ('imitatio per se ipsa non sufficit') and that grace, facility, and invention count most, as they did for Naso. 25 So he offers an expert critique of a Biron sonnet, and Act IV itself seems to point Shakespeare away from a dramatic career and towards a lyric poet's one.

  If Holofernes is indulged by the dramatist, so is Biron. This lord's role appears to have been slightly expanded as a result of Shakespeare's second thoughts, currente calamo, during the actual writing of Love's Labour's Lost. And in the action, Biron is the most fully defined ghost from the Gild hall's overhall. Suitably chastised, he frames a vow to give up taffeta phrases in a speech which is itself a perfect sonnet ( V. ii. 402-15), and his penance will be the hardest of the lovesick lords. If he visits the groaning sick and makes a 'painèd' impotent smile, as Rosaline asks, the power of his dancing wit is likely to be confirmed by invalids.

  The question might be whether Shakespeare could give up Bironic lyric grace, or could find a way to adapt lyric gifts further to his uses. Love's Labour's Lost suggests his diminishing commitment to the theatre, and in some ways a failure in dramatic nerve. Its women after all are remote, untested, enigmatic, and seemingly not in need of love of any kind. The play looks out on its time very tentatively -- though it is filled with newsworthy names. The Earl of Essex had banqueted with Navarre or Henry IV, with Biron the French general, and with

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  Longueville the Normandy governor in 1591. The play's topical parallels are vague, and its satirical targets are not clear (if it really had any). Armado's page-boy Mote at least is not an explicit caricature of Nashe, though a boy actor could have mimicked Nashe's swagger, or shown off his funny, angled teeth.

  Nashe may well have heard Biron compared with the real Armand de Gontaut, duc de Biron, since he noted how 'busie wits' look for nonexistent allusions. 'Let one but name bread', wrote Nashe, 'they will interpret it to be the town of Bredan in the low countreyes; if of beere he talks, then straight he mocks the Countie Beroune in France.' 26

  Shakespeare in the play mocks very little, so far as we know, apart from the euphuistic style and his light, parodying glances at Marlowe or Spenser. But if the attack in Groats-worth and the long, discouraging closure of the playhouses did nothing to reconcile him to the theatre, it is likely that hardships had made a new path ahead for him more attractive. In his refined dramas, he had aimed to please actors and large crowds -- but not without implicit defiance of his calling. He had written with an elegance that belied the normal constraints and tawdriness of an actor's days. Financially insecure at the best of times, he and his fellows had to predict what the crowds might like, and what might not offend authority
. In the bitter hiatus of the plague, the solvency of every troupe was at risk, no matter what dramas they had on hand or how cleverly they were performed.

  Furthermore, there is evidence of Shakespeare's acute and undiminishing concern for his own (and his Stratford family's) respectability. He would have been tempted to adopt a new calling if he profitably could, and as a sanguine and energetic man he might hope to find the ingenuity to please a great poetry-patron of England. Having spent his working life in the theatre, he cannot have been certain of his way ahead. There can be a prospect of self-betrayal in new undertakings. His Sonnets, to the extent that they are autobiographical, approach his identity uneasily, as if he were taking the lid off a jar of worms. They are urgently preoccupied with illusions of selffiood, and a picturing of the self. In any case during the plague, so far as we know, he looked beyond the stage to a new circle, a new audience, and with some hope to a remarkable young man.

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  10

  A PATRON, POEMS, AND COMPANY WORK

  How can it, O, how can love's eye be true,

  That is so vexed with watching and with tears?

  (Sonnet 148)

  To the 'Earle of Southampton'

  Well aware of a sophisticated readership among courtiers, lawyers, and others in the professional and mercantile ranks, Shakespeare published two erotic works in the plague years. These poems were meant for readers of either sex. Yet they were especially well suited to young men with leisure to admire tales of rape, seduction, and female grief told with Ovidian grace and wit. With Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, he made a strong bid to be recognized as a poet by refined society.

  And the poems contrast with a bleak, plague-ridden London. Early in 1593 Shakespeare had done much. If he had suffered as an upstart 'Shake-scene', he had Chettle's apology in print. And now for a few weeks actors resumed work in London, until plague closed the theatres on 28 January. Strange's and Sussex's players lingered near a wintry city before returning to the road. In fact, Sussex's troupe did not get a Privy Council warrant to play beyond a seven-mile radius of London until 29 April. Strange's larger group had a warrant on 6 May, by which time they had left with Alleyn for Chelmsford. In the interval the acting companies prepared for hard tours, which took the likes of Kempe, Pope, Heminges, and other sharers with hired men and boys as far north as Newcastle and York.

  London's streets -- in this year of Venus and Adonis -- were

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  thronged with beggars, some of them maimed soldiers back from abroad. Among greasy crowds at Paul's Churchyard, booksellers did a fair business, but in the suburbs there was misery enough. Philip Henslowe, of the Rose, turned to pawnbroking, gouging clients at a 50 per cent rate of interest and taking in meagre, cloth-wrapped bundles of children's clothing, mainly from women.

  Shakespeare would have been of use to a troupe readying for the road, and there is reason to think he had a collaborative task at about this time. He must have seen his dramas altered by improvising actors or other hands, and perhaps already had written some of Edward III, a work still outside the accepted Shakespearean canon, though scholars usually agree that he contributed to its first two acts. A history play with a fresh view of kingship and a moderate view of France, Edward III concerns a king's efforts to govern his own nature. Shakespeare's style is evident, for example, in a scene in which a nobleman advises his daughter in a grave list of school-like sententiae on the corruption of power:

  . . .poison shows worst in a golden cup;

  Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash;

  Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. 1

  Shakespeare used the last line, word for word, in Sonnet 94. Other phrases from the play are in his Sonnets -- which relate lightly to Edward III's text.

  This year it is likely that he collaborated on a more volatile play; and the theatrical manuscript of The Booke of Sir Thomas More may give us -- briefly -- a chance to see him at work at about the time of his Venus. 2 We know that Anthony Munday -- a government informer fond of volatile topics -- had a major hand in working up a script on Sir Thomas More, who had been martyred by the Queen's father. The play was timely. It involved London's 'Ill May Day' riots against foreigners in 1517; these were ominous, unforgotten risings which had been echoed in a Southwark riot of 11 June 1592 -- the very cause of an official closure of theatres two months before the plague alert of August. On the latter occasion, mobs were angered by the government's slowness in protecting apprentices from competing 'strangers'

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  or workers streaming in from France and the Lowlands. Munday's play about More's role in the historic riot was meant to be sensational, but the writing ran into trouble. Revisers were called in, and Shakespeare's handwriting in More's manuscript has been found in three folio pages known to us, today, as those of 'Hand D'.

  'Hand D' -- or Shakespeare, as we think -- writes at speed in a clear, cursive 'secretary' hand with ease, lack of restraint, and economy of effort. He dithers confusedly over names, abbreviations, and other incidentals, and may imagine a scene in life rather than a play on a stage, not unlike Shakespeare who elsewhere has 'Enter before Angiers' or 'Citizens upon the walles' as untheatrical stage directions. 3 But 'Hand D' evokes a firm, compassionate Sir Thomas More, who speaks in a rapid series of images as if the poet were compulsively caught up in them. The emotive force of an image sets up a rhythm of feeling, so that the poet follows and fills out More's psyche, but does not seem to create it; a vivid delineation of 'character' may be too external a matter to be involved in his aim or process of composing. If the quill of a theatre-poet could move rapidly, we have little sign of that speed in our modern texts of Renaissance plays. We punctuate More's lines to the London rioters rather heavily today:

  What do you to your souls

  In doing this? O desperate as you are,

  Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands

  That you like rebels lift against the peace

  Lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees,

  Make them your feet.

  What 'Hand D' actually wrote is very quick, with its spontaneity and harmony all the more evident because the punctuation does not mark out every breath-pause for the lungs of an Alleyn or Burbage:

  what do you to yor sowles

  in doing this o desperat as you are

  wash your foule mynds wt teares and those same handes

  that you lyke rebells lyft against the peace

  lift vp for peace, and your vnreuerent knees

  make them your feet 4

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  The writing by 'Hand D' reminds one of Heminges' and Condell's memory of Shakespeare in the Folio of 1623, as a sure writer of such 'easinesse' his 'mind and hand went together'. Even if it were shown that he did not write More's speeches, they display just such theatrical qualities -- rapidity, flow, expressive tone among them -- as we find in his narrative poems and Sonnets. Thomas More in any case alarmed the censor's eye of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, who asked for material that dramatized the insurrection to be narrated instead, and added for the script's revisers, 'nott otherwise att your own perrilles [perils]'. 5

  Despite the work of six 'hands' as poets or scribes, More languished -- and one doubts that it reached the boards of any stage.

  Almost as if in response to weariness of the plague, Shakespeare prepared Venus and Adonis. The erotic poem was ready by spring. With verve and colour, it plays upon a wide view of time, and reminds one of how easily Elizabethans imagined vast stretches of time ahead, even in legal documents. (They hardly needed our science fiction.) In the month of Shakespeare's birth, one Simon Saunders typically sold a lease on a 'Crofte' for a term of 2, 995 years. Again, Thomas Sharpham acquired Devon lands until AD 3607, and John Hodge signed for property to be his family's until AD 4609, as if our twenty-first century were a 'tomorrow'. 6 Shakespeare's expansive view of time is not unusual, but it appears to good advantage in his poems. He inscribed Ven
us and Adonis to the refined, well-schooled Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, and found a Latin epigraph to suit that patron of poets. It reads, in one version, 'Let base-conceited wits admire vile things, | Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses' springs'. 7

  After that, he appends a letter which suggests he barely knows the 19-year-old earl. As printed by his Stratford acquaintance Richard Field, then in London, to whom he sold Venus, the letter ends with the name ' William Shakeƒpeare' -- and the spelling is interesting. Field probably inserted a neutral e between the two syllables of the last name -- 'Shak' and 'ƕpeare' -- because, in a Tudor press, both k and the long letter ƒ kerned (that is, the face of each letter projected beyond the tiny body behind it, and when set together such letters bent or broke in printing). None of the poet's six known signatures shows an

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  e in the middle of his last name; but surnames were not thought of as fixed. Out of habit, or to the extent that he cared, he was perhaps happy to be 'Shakspere', or 'Shakspeare'. 8

  'Right Honourable', he writes tactfully within a few weeks of his twenty-ninth birthday for the earl and other readers of Venus and Adonis,

  I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my vnpolisht lines to your Lordship, nor how the worlde will censure mee for choosing so stronge a proppe to support so weake a burthen, onelye if your Honour seeme but pleased, I account my selfe highly praised, and vowe to take aduantage of all idle houres, till I haue honoured you with some grauer labour. But if the first heire of my inuention proue deformed, I shall be sorie it had so noble a god-father: and neuer after eare so barren a land, for feare it yeeld me still so bad a haruest[.] I leaue it to your Honourable suruey, and your Honor to your hearts content, which I wish may alwaies answere your owne wish, and the worlds hopefull expectation.

 

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