Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  Still, one need not look for developed autobiographical patterns in a drama which so transforms its major materials. Shakespeare subordinated most of the figures to an extent that they barely step out of written sources. But he depicted Macbeth's psyche with such interior pressure that this, and not the usurper's outward action, is what is mainly dramatized. The 'milk' or sensitivity of Macbeth's nature is not annulled by his bloodiness, but feeds his active conscience until he cannot bear his own lucidity. He is, indeed, ground down, torn, and stripped. His crimes annihilate his wife, and part of his punishment is to report on his destruction with an accuracy that complicates one's feelings for him, extends one's knowledge of human life, and gives the text a richness infinitely beyond that of any morality drama even in his casual admissions:

  I have almost forgot the taste of fears.

  The time has been my senses would have cooled

  To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair

  Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

  As life were in't. I have supped full with horrors.

  (v. v. 9-13)

  That not Macbeth's but Banquo's heirs will 'get kings' robs him of any consolation, and as the riddling Witches tell him nothing of use he loses his ability to interpret time. Yet his lucidity is unaffected. Macbeth understands his hard, gnawing obsession with Banquo's heirs, and that topic relates indirectly to Shakespeare's personal abiding concern with matters of inheritance.

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  Among actors such a concern was not unusual. Members of the King's men, for instance, typically named their fellows among their heirs. Augustine Phillips, who died in May 1605, had lately left 30s. in gold to Shakespeare, as well as bequests to others in the troupe. The valuable 'share' left by a leading actor could itself provoke hopeful inheritors, cause litigation, and embarrass the company.

  But then the poet's concern with inheritance -- which links Macbeth with King Lear -- runs unusually deep. He shows in these works 'futures equivocally offered, by prediction and by action, as actualities', notes a perceptive critic, 'and the disastrous attempt to impose limited designs upon the time of the world'. 28 That does not quite impute to Shakespeare a moralistic aim, and Macbeth and Lear in turn are involved in nightmares of inheritance, and also in violently disruptive engagements, not only with time but with a civic polity and the inner self.

  Though it could have been tried out earlier at the Globe, King Lear was acted before the court at Whitehall on St Stephen's Night, 26 December 1606. This work pleased its patron, supposedly, by showing King Lear's division of the kingdom to be gross folly. By means of proclamations, coinage, pageantry, and even ships' flags, James's parliaments were being urged to accept Anglo-Scottish union -- a matter which in the end required a hundred years -- and James styled himself 'KING OF GREAT BRITTAINE'. Yet one doubts that Shakespeare's tragedy includes royal propaganda, and in showing Lear's aim as the opposite of James's the play distances itself from him. Perhaps it had to do so, since King Lear was a dangerous work. Its upstarts and courtiers could evoke James's much-detested Scottish favourites, just as its two vicious daughters might be taken for those who with the court's connivance were then snatching at monopolies, and its views of predatory royalty and a decaying order were not bound to delight the Stuart entourage. Censorship or self-censorship could account for some of the extensive revisions in the play's Folio version, as has been suggested.

  On stage King Lear demanded much. One hears that Burbage so excelled as the hero that old Lear 'lived in him', and the quick, dwarfish, and charmingly ugly Robert Armin had talent to excel as the

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  Fool. 29 There is no denying their success, but to stress that is probably to mistake Shakespeare's mind. One reason, as directors say, why good (let alone truly outstanding) productions of King Lear have been fairly infrequent in modern times is that its title-role is relatively less important than the Prince's in Hamlet or the usurper's in Macbeth. Peter Brook finds in King Lear 'eight or ten independent and eventually equally important strands of narrative' besides the principal one, so that the three-dimensional roles of Edgar, Kent, Goneril, Regan, and others, rather than the storm scenes, are the play's major challenge. 30 Or again what Peter Hall calls King Lear's 'physical marathon' taxes many almost equally. 31 The terrain is very difficult; the runners are in a group; none can afford to stumble. The play distributes its great complexities. In 1605 or 1606, it would seem, Shakespeare relied on two major actors rather less exclusively than is usually supposed, and in writing Lear and, later, The Tempest he attended the most closely and boldly to a troupe's potential. With Lear he is less concerned to sculpt a star part for Burbage than to enlist a group's whole power -- and also to explore entirely new kinds of relationships.

  For example, the lunatic King in Act III holds a mock-trial in which one of his vicious absent daughters is indicted. 'Arraign her first', cries Lear in extreme torment, ''Tis Goneril. I here take my oath before this honourable assembly she kicked the poor King her father.'

  FOOL. Come hither, mistress. Is your name Goneril?

  LEAR. She cannot deny it.

  FOOL. Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool.

  ( 1608 quarto, xiii. 4-2-7)

  Unencumbered by time, madness of this kind has a double focus. Goneril's crime, in Lear's view, is only that she 'kicked the poor King her father' -- and one recalls the poet Wilkins, whose 'kicking' of women was an index of his nature. In reducing his daughter's crime, Lear suggests its specific, painful cruelty, as well as its perpetual meaning as a sign of man's bestiality. And the Fool's impudent proverbial confusion of Goneril with a joint-stool befits a drama concerned with strange relations between the physical and non-physical, as in the force of the storm, or in Lear's speeches over Cordelia's dead body.

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  Shakespeare prepared for King Lear with a studious elaborateness, a range of reading wide and intense even for him. Even in a brief consideration of a few of his sources -- which will be the focus of my remarks here -- one begins to see the grandeur of his conception. He enriched his outlook and even his vocabulary by reading Florio's vigorous translation of Montaigne ( 1603), and borrowed a number of Florio's words for the play. Among other versions of the 'King Leir' story he probably knew, he read Holinshed's and the brief, elegant one in Spenser Faerie Queene, Book II and made some initial use of the anonymous King Leir published in 1605. Written in stilted couplets, this may be the same 'king leare' play which the Queen's and Sussex troupes, at their last gasp, had put on near the end of the plague outbreak of the 1590s. At its outset, King Leir plans to trick his beloved Cordella into marrying a ruler of Brittany. Alert to his whims, his daughters Gonorill and Ragan both pledge to wed anyone he chooses; but Cordella refuses to flatter and so, without banishing her, Leir divides the kingdom between the evil sisters. Shakespeare condenses seven scenes of that play in writing only a part of his own first scene.

  No version of the tale implied that the fated king went mad, but a modern scholarly quest for sources (or is it a wild-goose chase?) has unveiled an odd case about insanity. Around 1603 two sisters, Lady Sandys and Lady Wildgoose, had tried to get their old father, Annesley, a gentleman-pensioner, certified insane. Annesley had a third daughter, Cordell, who urged Lord Cecil to put her father and his estate under care of a benign protector. The Wildgooses contested the old pensioner's will, and at last Cordell Annesley in 1608 was to wed Sir William Harvey, the Earl of Southampton's stepfather -- who some would say is 'M r. W. H.' or the dedicatee of Shake-speares Sonnets. A helpful case, but one wonders if the poet needed to know any of it to think of Lear's madness.

  Two sources, though, are especially intriguing. From Sidney's prose tale of the Paphlagonian King in the Arcadia, Shakespeare derived what has been called 'a perfect parallel to the Lear story' or the underplot in which Gloucester, when tricked by his bastard son Edmund and still blind to Edgar's constancy, has his eyes put out by

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  the fierce
Regan and Cornwall. 32 Obtuse when he had eyesight, Gloucester learns to see better when his sockets are clotted with blood. His agony is the outward equivalent of the King's implicit suffering, and here allusions to the Passion are fairly overt. One hand before the other, one foot before the other, were nailed to wood, in the most memorable of all scenes for the Christian West, before a common Roman soldier tried to end the Sufferer's torment. Accordingly between Regan's comment on the gouging of Gloucester's eyes, 'One side will mock another; th' other too', and Cornwall's 'Lest it see more, prevent it', there is a delay in which a common servant tries to save the sufferer and mortally wounds Cornwall; and yet the play is far from being a Christian allegory. Arguably pre-Christian and postChristian at once, it may be released from all historical time, as R. A. Foakes notices. Lear, after all, 'has no history in spite of his great age. We know nothing of how he came to the throne, of the events of his reign, even how long he has reigned, so that it seems he has been in power for ever. We know nothing of his queen, of her life or death . . .'. Not that we need to know, as Foakes implies, and partly because the play cannot be imagined in a wholly mythical context, Lear can always be seen essentially as a contemporary work. 33 The hero watches in most audiences and at all times as Goethe knew, since an aged man is always a King Lear.

  One text, which relates to Stratford, had given the dramatist something more than useful hints for tragic form. This was Samuel Harsnett's high-keyed, ironic exposure of Jesuit exorcist practices, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, published anonymously in 1603 and reissued in the next two years. Such an anti-Catholic tract had a special appeal just after the Gunpowder Plot. Having written earlier of a Puritan exorcist, Dr Harsnett as chaplain to the Bishop of London turns to some exorcisms by a group of priests led by William Weston alias Father Edmunds, which had been performed in 1586-7. Three young chambermaids had been exorcized, and Edmunds's priestly cohorts had included Jesuits of the English Midlands, such as Father Robert Debdale of the Shottery Debdales, and Father Thomas Cottam, the brother of the Stratford schoolmaster who had replaced Jenkins in Shakespeare's schooldays.

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  The priests are only gross feigners sent from France, 'for fire-worke here in England'. Perfidy, as well as perversity, is found in the very names of devils exorcized from the young women's bodies, such as Lustie Dick, Fratcrctto, Hoberdicut, Maho, Modu, Lustie Huffe-cap (a 'swaggering punie devil!'), or Hobberdidaunce who 'could make a lady laugh'. 34 Finding the occult names useful, Shakespeare has Edgar in disguise as the madman Poor Tom tactically use some of them. 'Five fiends have been in PoorTom at once', Edgar cries to his blind father Gloucester,

  as Obidicut of lust, Hobbididence prince of dumbness, Mahu of stealing,

  Modu of murder, Flibbertigibbet of mocking and mowing, who since

  possesses chambermaids and waiting-women. So bless thee, master! ( 1608

  quarto, xv. 56-61)

  In The Comedy of Errors or Twelth Night, Shakespeare had already treated exorcism as a spiritual fraud, and so he does here, except that here Edgar is feigning in order to survive and to save his father. He 'mimes in response to a free-floating, contagious evil more terrible than anything Harsnett would allow', writes a good critic who slightly underestimates Dr Harsnett. 35 Edgar, true to his purposes, tries to purge his father's despair, supposedly at Dover's cliff, and so he, at least, has a redeeming priestly function.

  But it may not follow that Shakespeare meant to refute Harsnett, or that he wanted to show his own regard for Shottery Catholics or martyrdom in a schoolmaster's family. The playwright was less doctrinaire than one might think. What is reasonably clear is that a book on exorcism gave Shakespeare some useffil language, and perhaps some ideas, for the making of Lear, and that its allusions to Stratford names interested him as a man of that parish. Does his own Chapel Street life enter into his work indirectly? It is not too speculative to say that Shakespeare felt profoundly about his own children, or that his elder daughter, Susanna, seemed headstrong or difficult. His own absences from home, as will emerge, were likely to complicate his relations with his two adult daughters. Susanna was hardly his 'model' for Cordelia, but again one cannot impose limits on the range of his sources or his feelings. He drew on what he knew and deeply felt, and after about 1606

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  the father-daughter bond becomes an almost obsessive theme in his work.

  King Lear of course enormously expands upon the initial crisis with Cordelia. Having denied all three of his daughters self-expression, Lear would destroy his kingdom. In opposing that political folly by speaking the truth, Cordelia loses her worldly advantages, though she later proves willing to lay down her life for her father. The vain King recognizes the most crucial of his errors as early as scene iv. 'O most small fault', Lear cries in Goneril's palace,

  How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show,

  Which, like an engine, wrenched my frame of nature

  From the fixed place, drew from my heart all love,

  And added to the gall! O Lear, Lear, Lear!

  (1. iv. 245-9)

  And yet he must suffer until at last he holds Cordelia dead in his arms. There is no scheme of spiritual development in this entire ordeal, and nothing that Lear learns is of use to himself, to the polity of his country, or to the poor whom he cannot help. This work's political themes anticipate those of Shakespeare's later Roman tragedies, and yet politics is not the central concern. Lear, finally, is divested of most of his illusions, except that he never learns that time is unforgiving, or that pride is inherent in our human condition, or that his folly must result in the death of the only person he really loves.

  Classical roots: Egypt, Rome, and Athens

  In mornings at Bankside the King's men put their poet's work to the test. A script recited for the troupe, at a vetting in a buzzing tavern, could be different in the cold light of a rehearsal. The stagemanagement side of a production fell into the hands of the bookholder or book-keeper, who had to be fairly familiar with the whole text of a play. As we have noticed, he had charge of seeing that actors were ready on their cues, and his 'stage-keepers' would have helped to arrange that properties were at hand when needed. Otherwise, as a rule, the actors appear to have been left to their own devices. Practices

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  must have varied, but it is likely that the book-keeper with his senior actors might on occasion cut scenes, rearrange lines, or make up a few, or call for the author or someone else to revise. Shakespeare was much respected, but even his major tragedies were considerably cut and supplemented. Men such as Burbage, Heminges, or Condell might feel that they knew his aims as well as he did himself.

  Moreover, his fellows had to care about how he affected segments of the paying public. The gentry, the educated, and the sophisticated at Holborn, in the city's west, and at Westminster were still crucial since they had influence, money, leisure for plays, and a bent for serious themes. Other people might follow the taste of the élite. How did his tragedies relate to the interests and awareness of Londoners? In the suffering of his tragic heroes, he had been articulating a widely felt sense of malaise and had had a chance to seek out areas of feeling not always expressed in pulpits. In the consciousness of the wider public was an awareness of an appalling loss resulting from the English Reformation, which had fractured the Christian Church. In an age in which religion was a crucial factor in nearly everyone's life, the new malaise had lasting consequences. With a weakening in Christianity, one's identity, one's purpose in life, and the meaning of one's activities were thrown in question. Each person was divided from an orientation which medieval faith had given. And even as parliament challenged King James in 1604, the Stuart regime offered little guidance for a public disturbed by momentous changes in politics, social organization, and other aspects of contemporary life.

  Shakespeare's outlook was more alleviated by hope than that of his heroes, but he could feel as they did. He was aware of enduring evil, too strong to be self-
created by men and women, and yet he does not balance the anxiety implicit in his tragedies with any sign of religious confidence. Each tragedy had been an imaginative hypothesis in which, with his full mastery of rhetoric and dramaturgy, he tested life. But the religious ingredient is withheld. That in itself partly accounts for the affronted speeches of his tragic heroes, as with Lear in the terrible storm. 'Singe my white head', cries the vain, humiliated king,

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  and thou all-shaking thunder,

  Strike flat the thick rotundity o'th' world.

  (111. ii. 6-7)

  Is Lear's despair ever the author's own? Shakespeare's mind was a complex thoroughfare of contradictions and of extreme feelings. But to a degree he was held in check in the uncertainties, tensions, and tragic endings of his own works. What his actors cared for were receipts at the doors, but this is not to say that they failed to encourage him. And, from time to time, they must have made suggestions for new topics.

  Classical subjects, for example, had a wide appeal. After Julius Caesar he perhaps had agreed with the sharers that he would write a new play on the triumvirate. This was the Triumviri reipublicae constituenda of Lepidus, Octavius, and Mark Antony who, after Ceasar's death, jointly ruled the Roman world.

  But if Shakespeare planned that, he put it off. Essex's late revolt, in 1601, affected the stage to the extent that dramas about Romans began to look like jibes at the Crown. Fulke Greville the younger, for example, had penned an 'Antonie and Cleopatra' about lovers who showed 'irregular passions in forsaking Empire to follow sensuality', but had thrown it in the fire. His work had been a closet drama, for private acting, but he felt it would deeply annoy 'the present government'. In the new reign, suspicion predictably touched Ben Jonson. For his Roman Sejanus, in which Shakespeare acted, Jonson was hauled before the Privy Council and accused of 'popery and treason' by the old, half-senile Earl of Northampton. 36 Listening to the author's apology (or trying to stay awake), the Council may have realized their vast mistake and let him go. Jonson's trouble, anyway, embarrassed the King's men less than the fact that Sejanus was hissed off the stage. In his own late Roman plays, Shakespeare apparently takes hints from Jonson's bold recasting of historical material, as with his own Lepidus, but avoids Sejanus's clotted style, lack of irony, and grinding moral emphasis.