Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  Did a new law prompt his own return to Roman topics? In 1606 a parliamentary Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, which forbade the

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  mention of God, Jesus Christ, or the Holy Trinity except 'in fear and reverence', was taken seriously by the Revels Office. Actors obeyed that ruling, and an increased use of pagan or classical settings resulted. Shakespeare at last offered his fellows Antony and Cleopatra around 1606 or in 1607, though records of its early performances are lacking. Its ill-fated lovers had usually been judged in a moral light. However, Chaucer Legend of Good Women and the Countess of Pembroke's Tragedie of Antonie ( 1592), a version of the French of Robert Garnier's Marc Antoine, depict Cleopatra as a martyr to love. Samuel Daniel's Tragedy of Cleopatra ( 1594) applauds both lovers and shows even a ruthless Octavius as alert to compassion. A wide range of interpretation was open to Shakespeare, who follows Plutarch "Life of Marcus Antonius" in North's version to the extent of borrowing details of phrasing, anecdotes, hints for scenes, and his basic approach to the characters.

  His reading of Montaigne's shrewd, self-honouring Essays, closely enough, it seems, to borrow ideas, might be taken as a hint of change in Shakespeare's own outlook. This involved an increase in his confidence, a self-restoration with new inwardness, and even a bolder, more questioning attitude to popular values. He was becoming more interested in non-literal truth, in myth, fable, and implicit connections between historical epochs. With thirty-five speaking parts, nearly double his usual number, his new play ranges over three continents in recreating on a wide canvas the events of 41 to 30 BC. In this period, dissension among the triumvirs had finally ended the epoch of republican Rome, with its belief in stern self-discipline, hard service, and anti-absolute civic principles.

  Fittingly, the action of Antony and Cleopatra opens with a Roman's view of Antony's lapse. 'Look', Philo insists,

  Take but good note, and you shall see in him

  The triple pillar of the world transformed

  Into a strumper's fool. Behold and sec.

  (1. i. 11-13)

  And so we see. In the famous lovers' quarrels there is a ludicrous contrast between assertion and action, between what they claim and what

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  they do on stage. As in the Sonnets, mutual commitment is lacking or uncertain. Yet Shakespeare so deflates Rome by showing Lepidus's senile weakness, Pompey's futility, or Octavius's hardness that Antony gains in stature through his generosity and latent grace. What we observe of the lovers, peculiarly, becomes less valid or 'true' than what they say, 37 though Cleopatra's exalting words are offset by her lover's homelier reckonings, as in Act IV after a lucky victory:

  CLEOPATRA. Lord of lords!

  O infinite virtue, com'st thou smiling from

  The world's great snare uncaught?

  ANTONY. My nightingale,

  We have beat them to their beds. What, girl, though grey

  Do something mingle with our younger brown . . .

  (IV. ix. 16-20)

  Antony's 'visible shape' is subject to the breaking of the Roman world. A dizzying pace of brief, dispersed scenes implies the break-up in a recent time with a fracturing of the medieval unity and a loss of a faith that once bound together western Europe. In the deliquescence he shows on stage, Shakespeare evokes a cultural parallel in the Reformation's own chaotic events.

  The lovers' suicides complicate Antony and Cleopatra's meanings. Imagining that the Queen has taken her life, Antony bungles his own death. The hoisting of his still-living body within her monument typically occasions puns and comedy. And after he dies, Cleopatra still must endure a diligent Clown -- with a basket of asps -- who might have had a role in Much Ado.

  Such comedy suggests play-acting. Nothing has exalted the lovers more than their refusal to let events alter their roles. Cleopatra is stagily linked with Isis's immortality, the Nile's renewals, pyramids, crocodiles while disguising her aims. So long as her sexuality is acted, which is to say verbalized, it eludes age. Antony has avoided time's 'strong necessity' by dying, but is he transfigured in life? Can self-discovery or psychological change occur in an arena of almost pure illusion? This mischievous tragedy, happily, shatters its illusions to reveal them, and, in a famous instance, a Jacobean audience is made aware that they are

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  only watching a boy when Egypt's Queen refers to comedians who, one day, may 'stage us', and when her noble, besotted Antony

  Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

  Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

  I'th' posture of a whore.

  (V. ii. 215-17)

  Her political acumen saves her from any such fate: in death she outwits Octavius. The author's ironies have not demystified her, but the problem of the worth of her love and of Antony's tragic suffering is left, rather tantalizingly and wonderfully, up in the air.

  Coriolanus -- which also involves politics and theatricality -- belongs partly or wholly to Shakespeare's forty-fourth year. Again he takes his main story from Plutarch, who had coupled the life of the Roman general Caius Martius Coriolanus with that of the Greek Alcibiades. The latter appears in Timon of Atbens, but Shakespeare prefers as a tragic hero the valiant Roman who had taken part in wars between Rome's infant republic and the neighbouring Volsces, and this gives him leave to explore Rome's nascent politics in light of an English present. Lately at a time of feeble harvests and high prices, new rioting had erupted in the English Midlands, and on a scale not matched in ten years. There were major outbreaks not far from Stratford, at HillMorton and Ladbroke.

  Coriolanus opens with a plebeian rebellion over Rome's corndearth. The First Citizen interestingly echoes Lear's and Gloucester's lesson that a 'superflux' must be shared with the poor: 'If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome we might guess they relieved us humanely, but they think we are too dear' (1. i. 16-18). And separately, the citizens are reasonable, even though the author models a few of their complaints on a tract of his own county's rebels, The Diggers of Warwickshire to all Other Diggers (c. 1607). Collectively, they are horrendous as they turn from one idol to the next, easily duped, blind to their folly, vicious towards any strange excellence. Revering Coriolanus one moment, they despise him the next.

  Coriolanus's mother is especially interesting as a fiercely loving and

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  managerial figure. Too complex to be a type, she is not entirely different from what is known of Mary Arden (whose managerial talents are recognized in Robert Arden's will). Volumnia is not unlike other mothers of genius if one may trust, say, Goethe or Freud, and Coriolanus excels partly to free himself from vulnerability to her. Unfortunately, the Tribunes, as defenders of citizens' rights, exploit his temperament to turn the plebeians against him, and, denied a consulship, he is in his smarting anger exiled from Rome.

  In the Tribunes -- Brutus and Sicinius -- as well as in the consulship election, Shakespeare attends somewhat warily to his day. What he saw in inflation-ridden England was that more people than ever, the deserving as well as the loose or lucky, were attaining to incomes of £40 per year which allowed them to vote. There was a new hostile attitude to the King. MPs were emboldened, and after they failed to ratify some of his expenses, James I called his assembled critics 'Tribunes of the people, whose mouths could not be stopped'. Parliament counter-attacked with appeals to common law and traditional rights, and this worked. Among direct results, the election of churchwardens in the Globe's own parish was confirmed (all parishioners were allowed to vote), and in 1608 King James further granted London a new charter. This protected the city against the Crown's encroachment on the right to tax, and extended that to Blackftiars, where the players were about to open a new theatre.

  Coriolanus also glances into the future of British elections. In Shakespeare's time English candidates were chosen by a few men and not allowed to canvass, but there were 'disputed' elections in which voters stubbornly refused to acclaim a candidate. On
e of the 'disputes', for example, involved Stratford's voters in 1601, when Fulke Greville, then senior MP for Warwickshire, was not returned until King James's Council argued he must be 'chosen'. Importing the English system into his drama, the poet has Coriolanus chosen by the Senate to be Consul. The Roman citizens not only deny him the consulship, but go rather beyond English practice in assuming that candidates need to be approved by majority vote, not just by acclamation. 'But that's no matter, the greater part carries it', says one citizen; another speaks of the 'honour' of individual choice. English reform-

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  ers were then urging the popular choice of parliamentary candidates, but that was not instituted until after 1625. 38

  In the play, sophisticated political issues yield to a tragic theme. Rome cannot accept the pride, scorn, and defiance in Coriolanus which have enabled him to save Rome in battle, and his wounds, cherished by Volumnia, emblems of patriotism, avail him nothing. 'Our virtues', says his friend, enemy and eventual killer Aufidius in Act IV,

  Lie in th' interpretation of the time

  One fire drives out one fire, one nail one nail;

  Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.

  (IV. vii. 50, 54-5)

  The tragedy ends on a muted note in keeping with Aufidius's words, but Coriolanus is its author's best analysis of politics, one which displays his subtle use of the politics of his day. There is nothing like 'the Othello music' in this tragedy's verse style, but a rough, abrasive lyric music suits its vigorous action. The play's odd phrase 'lurched all swords of the garland' -- the word lurched means 'robbed all contenders of' -- is mocked by Ben Jonson, in his Epicoene, around 1609.

  Well before then, Shakespeare must have seen Thomas Middleton, who was a city bricklayer's son, nearly as gifted as Jonson. Baptized at St Lawrence Jewry in 1580, Middleton first appears at 22 in Henslowe's stable of gifted hack writers; but he proved an able collaborator and a brilliant playwright, as Women Beware Women, The Changeling (with William Rowley), and A Game at Chess of the 1620s were to show. At some point he added witches' songs and a dance to Macbeth, and he may have contributed to, or perhaps tried to revise, Shakespeare Timon of Athens. The exact status of that play remains debatable, though R. V. Holdsworth and others point to Middleton's hand in the text.

  Whether or not the Stratford poet saw Timon of Athens performed, this tragedy is complete if not polished, and its text is at least better than that for Pericles. Timon is shown in prosperity, then adversity,

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  with visits to him by the Poet, Painter, Apemantus, Alcibiades, and others counterpointed in the two parts. The hero is as naïve as if he had stepped out of a ballad. Like Lear, he takes pledges of love at face value: like Coriolanus, he is alienated. Timon regards money in a medieval way as static and sterile, fit to be given away. When his flatterers refuse him credit, he finds that money is a liquid, selfduplicating power which has corrupted the earth. As a colossal hatred for mankind swells, he enjoins the sun:

  O blessèd breeding sun, draw from the earth

  Rotten humidity; below thy sister's orb

  Infect the air.

  (IV. iii. 1-3)

  Half-crazed and penurious, he discovers gold, which lends irony to his tirades against humanity before he dies. His grave will be washed by the sea, as one learns in the lines beloved by W. B. Yeats:

  Timon hath made his everlasting mansion

  Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood,

  Who once a day with his embossèd froth

  The turbulent surge shall cover.

  (v. ii. 100-3)

  This is one of the few works by Shakespeare (wrote Hazlitt when under its spell) in which he 'seems to be in earnest throughout, never to trifle or go out of his way. He does not relax in his effort, nor lose sight of the unity of his design.' 39 Timon of Athens reveals that Shylock's view of money as a thing that 'breeds' is, indeed, correct. Jacobeans accepted the view of money as fluid, productive, and selfreplicating, which horrifies Timon. King James had begun to be destroyed by money, or by his own spendthrift ways which were firing parliamentary zeal against him. And Shakespeare comments here indirectly on many aspects of the Jacobean money nexus, for example on a new anxiety over patronage, or on suffering caused by unending, sharp price-rises. Mercy might have died with the medieval community. For Shakespeare, money was a mixed blessing: his own earnings as an actor and shareholder, in the 1590s, had tempted Stratford alder-

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  men to try to manipulate him. That, in fact, is what the SturleyQuiney letters reveal; but they may suggest what is worse -- that the poet's money, at one point, had been an issue capable of dividing him from his own father, if the two Quineys and Sturley heard about the 'Shottery' investment plan from John Shakespeare's loose lips. After that plan was bruited about, one recalls, the poet (despite his earnings) made no investment at home until his father was dead.

  Just when he wrote Timon is unknown, but as it derives partly from Plutarch, it may date from about the time he was using Plutarch for his late Roman dramas. In its sketch of an anguished hero betrayed by himself and his ethos, it has thematic interests in common with those tragedies. At what psychological cost had they been written?

  After Coriolanus, Shakespeare abandoned tight plots and realistic scenes, and, as he wrote no more tragedies, he surely felt he had pursued one line as far as he could. His case was strange: one thinks of Dante, Leonardo, Molière, Bach, and of others, all of them peerless, and yet no one has ever excelled, in art of any kind, over the sheer concentrated immensity, the intellectual and emotional achievement of this poet's late tragedies. He was a man who, for the time being, had exhausted himself; he had run himself dry. He apparently sought a renewal for himself in the theatre, and also in the prospects of a wilful daughter at Stratford's Chapel Street, where he may have arrived sometimes, on horseback, near the Gild chapel, after seeing Jennet and a 'grave' Master Davenant in an old university town.

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  IV

  THE LAST PHASE

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  17

  TALES AND TEMPESTS

  Now I want

  Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

  And my ending is despair

  Unless I be relieved by prayer,

  Which pierces so, that it assaults

  Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

  ( Prospero, The Tempest)

  Sir, she's well restored

  And to be married shortly

  ( Jailer, The Two Noble Kinsmen)

  Susanna's marriage

  An alert traveller riding into Stratford around 1607 would not have found the townspeople invariably sombre or the local trades hopelessly depressed. Puritanical feeling was strong among aldermen who met at 'halls', but old festivals were still honoured. There was jollity enough, and merchants had more to celebrate than in the lean years of the 1590s. Despite fears about the ungodly, some thirty alehouses were to be allowed at Stratford, along with the three inns -- the Crown, Bear, and Swan -- all on Bridge Street.

  There were tensions in the local council which illuminate the dramatist's late years (as does fresh evidence about his son-in-law). But after leaving dusty London, Shakespeare would have returned to a place of natural beauty. Passing over Clopton's bridge, a rider saw green tillage-lands which ended in high, overgrown earthy banks or meers. Extending by the Avon were rich 'water-furlongs' -- where all manner of wild fowl bred and greylag geese fed.

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  The Gunpowder Plot still cast a long, curious shadow. After he was found with a bag of popish 'relics', George Badger the alderman went to prison; also sent to prison was one William Reynolds, perhaps the same man (a son of Catholic recusants) who was remembered in the poet's will. But, much worse for those at New Place, Shakespeare's elder daughter Susanna broke a n
ew, severe law -- the aim of which (in the words of the act) was to penalize 'persons popishly affected'. Among twenty others on 5 May 1606, she was cited in a complaint in the court's act book, which, as it refers back to preceding entries, reads rather drily:

  Officium domini contra

  Susannam Shakespeere similiter similiter

  dimissa

  What this amounts to is that, at the age of 23, Susanna was charged with the fault of not receiving the Anglican sacrament at Easter, 20 April, and so became liable to a stiff fine of between £20 and £60. Along with six others, she increased the fault by ignoring a summons, though cited personally by the apparitor. Hence her penalty was reserved for the next court -- when the word 'dimissa', after her entry, indicates that she was discharged. 1