Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  A great love story which he knew in Arthur Brooke poem Romeusand Juliet

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  and Juliet dictated an Italian setting. Italy suited Shakespeare's experiments, and with her pagan, triumphal Rome so often compared with the English capital, this was the cultural land of his schooldays. The beauty and elegance he associates with Italy have a curious effect upon him, freeing his pen from normal inhibitions even as he adheres to an outmoded Petrarchism in his Sonnets. His path to Elsinore is partly Italian. He set most of his early comedies and six of his ten tragedies in Italy or ancient Rome -- and no other country gave him freer leave to test unbalanced extremes in his dramaturgy. In creating absurd, febrile lovers in The Two Gentlemen or the sharply articulate pain of his Roman Titus, or the piercing beauty of Juliet, or the pithy, unassimilated grandeur of his Italian Shylock, he supplied the stage while opposing its norms, boundaries, stereotypes, and predictability-and there is a note of defiance in Romeo and Juliet. The author, as poet, upsets his medium and redefines tragedy, but on the other hand his play's rhymes, sonnets, intense bawdy wit, and soaring images drenched with the classics almost topple his new work into bathos.

  No doubt economic and social facts of the theatre were influencing him even as he took rivals into account. Keeping in step, his own company and the Admiral's both soon had plays on Henry V, Jack Straw, Owen Tudor, King John, Richard III, or Troilus and Cressida. The Admiral's took a conservative 'good citizen's' attitude to love and marriage, but Shakespeare's fellows, offering more radical and subtle love-dramas, were getting a following among Inns of Court students, courtiers, members of Commons, lawyers, merchants, and their ladies. Beyond these were ranks of tradespeople, carriers, labourers, and many apprentices, and the latter were of no small interest to the entertainment industry. Most of the city's apprentices -- contrary to what is often said -- were not boys but young people in their late teens or early twenties, who might wait years in the metropolis or return home before they could marry. 12 If the bordellos and bear-pits drew some of them, so did love plays and even popular history plays in the suburbs. With its numerous young of both sexes, London by the mid1590s was the nation's training college. The trainees of course had reason to complain, but they indulged in no mass riot after 1595 and

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  many would have come to see Romeo and Juliet at the Curtain -- and to see its author.

  In the play, Shakespeare's Friar propounds a theme in Act II, scene ii, reminiscent of thoughts that an English boy might have heard from a vicar's clerk. 'O mickle' -- or much -- as he says over a basket of greenery,

  is the powerful grace that lies

  In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities.

  (11. ii. 15-16)

  Does botany offer instruction in life?

  Within the infant rind of this weak flower

  Poison hath residence, and medicine power

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  Two such opposèd kings encamp them still

  In man as well as herbs -- grace and rude will.

  (II. ii. 23-4, 27-8)

  Grace and rude will -- or love and hate -- inhabit all sensate things and so must occur in each heart, each town. That truth may relate to the author's childhood, but it is borne out here with a dazzling sophistication and particularity which exalt brief love ironically above all else.

  Romeo and Juliet begins as a romantic comedy. After servants of the Capulets and Montagues appear there is a minor street fight, and Romeo -- as a Montague besotted by a black-haired Rosaline -- even sounds like the butt of a romantic farce: 'O me! What fray was here?' he asks his friend Benvolio,

  Here's much to do with hate, but more with love.

  Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,

  O anything of nothing first create

  . . . . . . . . .

  This love feel I.

  (1. i. 170, 172-4, 179)

  But if love-struck and unaware, he is not rash. His family's enemies

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  are well disposed to him, and when he invades old Capulet's feast that enemy is not unkind or hostile. 'To say truth', as Capulet admits,

  Verona brags of him

  To be a virtuous and well-governed youth.

  I would not for the wealth of all this town

  Here in my house do him disparagement.

  (I. v. 66-9)

  In a play about love in rival Italian families the true lovers, oddly, have no obvious obstacles to surmount. The town's lawgiver is Escalus, Prince of Verona, who angrily ensures that penalties for violence will be extreme. Romeo and Juliet fall in love in an instant, and might prosper except that they neglect moment-to-moment realities in a drama of competing awarenesses. The tragedy occurs in four days. Images emphasize clock time, morning and night, days of the week, sequences, the exact lapse of time since a fatal event.

  The most chilling murder in Shakespeare's plays occurs on Verona's streets. No violence in Othello or Macbeth, even the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear, has the chancy, terrible immediacy of Tybalt's killing of Mercutio with a thrust under Romeo's arm. That is untheatrical murder, of a kind known in each London parish. In keeping with that realism, the balcony scene -- the most famous scene in any drama -- is dependent on fleetingness, enclosure, sharp disruption, and a defiance of locale. Town, balcony, stony courtyard, perilous walls are inimical to sexual love, but love battens on opposition as if wished for by the lovers, rises to the stars, drawing the terror out of death, and defying all that mocks love's constancy. Romeo and Juliet are right -- the world is wrong -- or they are right to defy the time and circumstance that begrime everyone else.

  Elizabethans would have seen them as ideal in honouring love, silly in flouting parental wishes, and their tragedy as being the result of a conflict between rationality and impulse. Yet the lovers are not tainted. The Franciscan Friar upbraids Romeo for his ardour while loving him the more for it. Capulet loses charity to become a testy old cormorant who will wed his daughter Juliet to Paris willy-nilly,

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  and he is one of the play's fine achievements, his wishfulness foreshadowing Falstaff, then giving a ground-note to offset the lovers' lyric flights. Even the obtuse are in love with words, from Lady Capulet with her book-imagery, to the illiterate Nurse who is obsessed with the 'R' of the hero's name: 'Doth not Rosemary and Romeo begin both with a letter?' she asks. (For Elizabethans, R was the dog's letter since its sound was like a growl.) But the literary images and gorgeous lyric flights might be no more than commercial features of Chamberlain's and Admiral's rivalry. Dekker -a prolific dramatist -- wrote of dramas good enough to tie an audience's ears with 'golden chains' to verbal 'Melody', and so make the ignorant

  clap their Brawny hands,

  T'Applaud, what their charmd soule scarce understands. 13

  If this refers to Shakespeare, it slanders him, since his scenes are usually clear for those of 'brawny hands' and for the refined alike. But 'Melody', or fine, well-worked verse helped such a play as Romeo to keep its appeal so that it might stay in the repertoire for two years, be taken off for three or four, and then put back again later. The 'high style' was profitable.

  Still his lyricism here, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Richard II, has other causes. Shakespeare had a realistic view of himself and nobody of discernment around 1596 would have ranked him with Sidney, Spenser, or, perhaps, even Marlowe. In the commercial theatre he could not have hoped to match the first two, nor need we assume that he secretly thought of himself as Sidney's or Spenser's equal. He was in his own view in this decade a functionary, or a minor cause of a troupe's ability to endure; and his verbal grace, after all, was the essence of his usefulness. In emulating the best poets he knew, in opposing the stage's banalities and exercising lyric talents he had developed in the plague years, he hoped to profit with his troupe, but, then, he also kept open for himself an option to decipher and picture his own complex, inner sense of society and behaviour.

  He takes
risks in Juliet's 'high style'. She speaks in rather magnificent literary images with the cadences of a Roman goddess rallying the

  -211-

  legions, as in her frank display of sexual ardour while awaiting Romeo in Act III, after he has killed Tybalt:

  Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,

  Towards Phoebus' lodging! Such a waggoner

  As Phaëton would whip you to the west

  And bring in cloudy night . . .

  (III, ii. 1-4)

  Juliet's 'high style' divides her from the impercipient around her. The intensity of her love infects Romeo, who is like an adolescent glad to find the proper, inevitable role. (One forgets that he is indirectly responsible for six deaths.) Juliet's suicide in the Capulet tomb, at last, is saintly, and Romeo's has a touching, histrionic grandeur: 'O, here', he says, bemoaning his 'world-wearied flesh' as he leans with a poison vial over pale Juliet for one final kiss,

  Eyes, look your last.

  Arms, take your last embrace, and lips, O you

  The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss

  A dateless bargain to engrossing death.

  (V. iii. 109, 112-15)

  Finally, the dead lovers seem asleep. The Friar retells their tragic story for the benefit of Verona, as if to underline his lesson that grace and hatred are interrelated, always present. Pure love is brief. Hatred or violence, in a modern city, may be expected to endure.

  For all its point and great power, the play has trivial weaknesses (as critics rightly notice). Its heaped-up coincidences, or the poor exposition which brings the Chorus on again in Act II, or the inexplicably sudden failure of the Nurse's sympathies, or the Friar's awkward exit from the Capulet tomb, suggest an author troubled by structure as he develops a new kind of romantic tragedy. However in A Midsummer Night's Dream -- which is likely often to have been staged a few days after Romeo, which it sends up -- he offers a funny, self-mocking summary of what he has achieved in comedy and tragedy so far. This play is so brightly unique it can seem to have no sources -- though it fuses much from folklore and legend, as well as from works such as

  -212-

  Plutarch Lives, Chaucer Knight's Tale and Merchant's Tale, and Lyly's plays, while being unlike any model.

  Was the Dream written for a private occasion? We hear sometimes that it amused Queen Elizabeth at the wedding of the sixth Earl of Derby and Elizabeth Vere (on 26 January 1595), or that it was designed for the wedding of Lord Hunsdon's granddaughter Elizabeth Carey and Thomas, the son of Lord Berkeley (on 19 February 1596). Both brides were god-daughters to the Queen, who had over a hundred god-daughters and seldom went to weddings, though she did attend the Derby-Vere one; but masques (not plays) were performed at Tudor aristocratic weddings and we do not know of a play's being acted at a court wedding until 1614. The Dream, moreover, opens with references to a bleak, cold virginity unflattering to a Virgin Queen. If Hermia will not wed the man her father chooses, she must live as a nun, a 'barren sister all your life', and Theseus warns her with ducal firmness:

  earthlier happy is the rose distilled

  Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,

  Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.

  (1. i. 72, 76-8)

  It is hard to believe that these lines, vital to the plot, were deleted if and when the play went to court, but 'barren sister' or 'virgin thorn' may not have upset Gloriana. The play elsewhere seems to compliment her. The author was not hostile to his Queen, but he would have jeopardized his troupe's profitability by court-toadying, and nearly all of his plays would have been acted first on the London stage, before being taken to an Inn, to court, or anywhere else. Aware of Lyly's examples he uses a free, brisk method in balancing and combining the Dream's personae -- who include Theseus and Hippolyta, a quartet of lovers, the fairies, and the artisans who will perform with sublime bungling 'Pyramus and Thisbe' for Theseus's nuptial day. Most of the mortals quickly retreat to woods where Oberon, King of the Fairies, his Queen Titania and their fairy troupe and the spirit of Puck live.

  Do fairies cause our misery? Puck puts Cupid's love-juice on Lysander's eyes as Oberon does on Demetrius's -- so both men are attracted to an exasperated Helena. But Helena had noted love's

  -213-

  absurdity before entering the magic wood, and Demetrius has been fickle beforehand. Theseus, whom critics have cited as the Tudor ideal, has seduced or raped Ariadne, Antiopa, Perigenia, and Aegles, names the author derives from Plutarch's 'Theseus'. In being only lightly individuated, Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena the better suggest in their yearning and pain that love's 'madness' is universal.

  Marital peace and fidelity everywhere may be slight: the Fairy King and Queen, in coming to bless Theseus and Hippolyta, are torn by bickering and jealousy. Suave aristocrats, in Act V, deride working men who, with no very clear hope of profit, have come to entertain them, and the human mind is implicitly seen to be irrational, out of control, faithless, thankless, unkind, and viciously changeful.

  At the heart of Shakespeare's comic view of life is his tragic sense, and the Dream is evidence that the tragic sense had fairly early roots. The play explores what must have been memories of 'midsummer madness', magic times and features of a country boyhood such as Midsummer Eve with its greenery decoration, divinations, and religious connections with nature. The artisans themselves relate to Stratford days. Snout the tinker is to animate Wall for the artisans' play of 'Pyramus and Thisbe'. 'Some man or other', says Nick Bottom, 'must present Wall; and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-cast about him, to signify "wall"; and let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisbe whisper' (III. i. 62-6). Of similar materials 'the wall' outside Stratford's grammar school bordering the Gild chapel's garden was busily repaired and rebuilt in the 1570s. About 5 per cent of all official payments by council in a year focus on it, so the Wall has an amusing life today in the Minutes and Accounts:

  Item for reparacions of the wall . . .

  pd to Wever for hernes ['earnest' or pre-payment for repairs] of the walle . . .

  pd for syx Rafters to ley vpon the Chappell garden wall . . .

  pd for the peare of Rafters for the wall . . .

  pd Thomas Tyler for his two men, iiij [4] dayes worke about the garden wall

  of the Chapell

  pd to wever to make an ende of the wall

  pd to Thomas tyler for his men working at the Chappell wall . . . 14

  -214-

  Endless work on a wall at Church Street, in days when the author was going to school, puts one in mind of a Midland town's slow, puttering normalcy in contrast to the tenor of an actor's days in London. The funny artisans are sketched with compassion, if not with nostalgia. What enriches the Dream is the breadth of human experience always implied in it, and its workers in their authentic dignity do not seem to be caricatures. Ease of style masks the Dream's profundity, but that ease is biographically interesting as a sign of the author's long familiarity with themes he can handle most lightly: a person of his quality of memory gathers in time past, and may 'compose' quickly what has been in gestation half a lifetime.

  Darkness at the play's heart makes its humour the more affecting. Changed into an ass and loved by an exquisite Fairy Queen -- another Fairy Queen, one notes, was even more humiliated at about this time 15 -- Bottom sums up his experience in 'Bottom's Dream'. Echoing St Paul in 1 Corinthians 2: 9 and confusing the senses, he suggests that the mind's dominance over the eye is a means of gaining divine grace from woodland ritual. The 'bottom of Goddes secretes' cannot be known, as one reads, for example, in the Bishops' Bible ( 1568) or the Geneva Bible ( 1557). 'The eye of man hath not heard', says Bottom earnestly,

  the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called ' Bottom's Dream', because it hath no bottom (IV. i. 208-13)
. 16

  In farce, Shakespeare can allude easily to matters that involve his own past or his present. These religious motifs have early naïve origins, and ' Bottom's Dream' appears to reflect schoolboy lessons of the 1570s about God's unknowability, if not a classroom's jokiness as well. The 'Dream' as a dream within the Dream gets some of its edge and comic depth from a poet's mature, pessimistic reflections on what he had once understood simply. Significantly Bottom stars in Peter Quince's ' Pyramus and Thisbe'. Here self-directed satire is apparent. Peter Quince is like Shakespeare in writing a drama and acting in it, in being versatile, assigning parts and dealing with actors, arranging rehearsals

  -215-

  and making textual changes. Shakespeare burlesques himself as a Johannes Factotum whose efforts produce nonsense, and 'Pyramus' in fact explicitly parodies Romeo and Juliet and has mocking allusions as well to Titus, Comedy of Errors, and the Two Gentlemen.

  Theseus, on the other hand, is gallant enough to defend even the stage's feeblest performances. 'The best in this kind are but shadows', he tells his warrior-bride, 'and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them' (v. i. 210-11). After his days of rape and conquest, the Duke is politically astute. Indeed, in his noble, good-natured authority and concern with illusion, as in his freshness of thought and charity towards the 'rude mechanicals', he might almost typify Shakespeare's interest in the ideal leader of a modern political state.

  Falstaff, Hal, and a Henriad

  The Chamberlain's men needed many plays. Inevitably they took in poor scripts to fill up a week, but, no matter what was done, the outlook deteriorated, and financial straits and worse trouble lay ahead in a time of ruined harvests, inflation, hostile city aldermen, rising numbers of the poor, and intermittent plague. Dull afternoons with feeble dramas, and half-empty galleries, could bring ruin quickly. Their resident poet noted failures: 'I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play', Shakespeare writes for one of his curtseying Epilogues. 17 He also had noted a hunger for political plays evoking shames of the state and cutting close to the bone, and, partly because of the success of Henry VI, he soon turned again to politics and history.