Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

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  sheep-shearing as an event in which pastoral folk are to be 'fleeced'. He delights in his own roguery, sings well, and adds to the play's charm, but Shakespeare's social pessimism did not pass away with this work.

  That his indirections, late in his career, are paths to a sharper social realism is perhaps clear in The Tempest. This play opens with a famous coup de théâtre, rather better suited to stage effects at Blackfriars than at the Globe, in which a ship carrying Prospero's enemies is swept to a rocky isle. Scene i includes nautical orders which a crew might hear, in a storm, to get a ship to veer from rocks dangerously close on the lee side. Books on navigation existed, but the poet had no printed seamanship manual, though he might have found nautical word-lists in manuscript (as Ralph Crane copied some). He could have talked to 'old salts'; but the scene reflects very up-to-date sailing tactics. What is certain, however, is that he knew the so-called ' Bermuda pamphlets' and some of the men associated with the Virginia Company's enterprise.

  In May 1609, nine ships carrying 500 colonists under Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Summers had set sail to America to reinforce the colony at Jamestown, founded in the spring of 1607. After two years, Virginia's colony was barely surviving -- about half of the settlers died each winter. In an unusual storm, Gates and Summers were driven on the Bermudas, before managing to sail to the mainland; and news of their ordeal duly reached London. Shakespeare evidently read an account of the storm, of Jamestown's plight, and of hostile natives in a letter by William Strachey, dated 15 July 1610, then in manuscript. He knew some of Gates's friends, as well as Southampton and Pembroke, both financially interested in Virginia, and he possibly heard from men such as Sir Robert Sidney, Sir Henry Ncvile, or even Lord De la Warr, who was to be governor of the colony.

  Yet it was not enough for him to seek 'insider information' about ships, American Indians, or the policies and practices of colonial rule, since he had to count on what audiences would know, or on what was being talked about. By 1609, some in London had argued on good evidence that Virginia had been settled by natives who therefore owned the land along the James River, and whom Europeans had no

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  right to supplant. Official Jacobean policy denied this, and in April, for example, two sermons were printed to show that the colonists had truly brought civilization and faith to America's savages. (One sermon, with agile logic, proves degenerate stage actors are the real enemies of Virginia.) 20 The Tempest gives both sides of the colonial argument with ironic depth and complication. On the one hand, Shakespeare replies to Montaigne's essay 'Of Cannibals' which exalts the virtuous life of primitives ( Caliban is morally stunted, predatory and a would-be rapist); but on the other hand, he includes drunkards and murder-plotters among the suave grandees who reach Prospero's isle. He makes Caliban's claim to the isle sound fairly plausible, and to an extent sympathizes with him. The monster's language is like that of a Stratford glover's son, in being above his worldly station or rank, and he speaks the loveliest blank-verse lines in The Tempest. Caliban's final wish to 'seek for grace' (V. i. 299) need not have been construed by audiences as either shallow, feigned, or futile.

  The Tempest, however, is set not in the Atlantic but on a Mediterranean isle, and the author sketches an Italian realpolitik which he had tested before. Prospero, with nearly Machiavellian sagacity, ensures that his daughter Miranda will wed the son of his worst enemy. A modern critic asks if it is necessary, after all, that we 'run away from the identification of Prospero with Shakespeare?' 21 Probably not. Rather as the dramatist does, the magician assembles and disciplines an almost unmanageable world, heads his people along certain paths, and gives them situations to which they must react. The magician's view of the transience of all things, for example, matches his creator's outlook as often expressed, as when Prospero thinks of the melting of 'the great globe itself' and of our 'insubstantial pageant' which will leave, at last,

  not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  (IV. i. 153-8)

  This drama -- nevertheless -- was not Shakespeare's farewell to the stage. He was still to write three more plays. But in its astutely bal-

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  anced structure, it best shows how in a tragicomic romance he can accommodate a lastingly pertinent and intellectually fresh, ambiguous, and searching view of life. One hears of a performance of The Tempest before royalty at Hallowmas, 1 November 1611. About a year and a half later, it was again staged at court around the time of the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth to Prince Frederick -- the Elector Palatine -- who had come over with his retinue from Heidelberg.

  A fire at the Globe

  The stage machinery at Blackfriars made Ariel dive, soar up, and circle over the gallants' hats. A boy might hover, sing naturally -- ten feet up in the air -- and whiz out of sight. Yet despite its magic and enchantment, its beautiful songs, its Edenic lovers in Ferdinand and Miranda, and its bestial, intriguing Caliban, The Tempest was only a moderate success-to judge from the number and style of contemporary allusions to it. The troupe profited, but Caliban did not fill seats as Falstaff and Shylock could. Alive or dead, Shakespeare was to be the mainstay of the company until 1642 -- but a new kind of tragicomedy had come into vogue.

  It is doubtful whether Shakespeare believed his fame as a dramatist had much reality, apart from fame shared by his troupe. Yet he knew he was popular. Young poets imitated or parodied him, and by now Londoners had shortened his name to 'Will' and his main rival to 'Ben' -- a curtailing later deplored by Thomas Heywood.

  Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting quill

  Commanded mirth or passion, was but Will. 22

  Law students, around 1610, might debate the merits of Ben's The Alchemist and Will Cymbeline. Poets opted to be of 'the tribe of Ben', because Ben encouraged disciples; but the older poet had a large following. People had seen him as an actor: 'Some say, good Will, which I, in sport, do sing', wrote John Davies of Hereford late in 1610,

  Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport,

  Thou hadst been a companion for a King. 23

  His wit was lauded by the Oxford man Thomas Freeman, who singled

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  out that 'nimble Mercury thy brain'. As one sign of Shakespeare's popularity, works not written by him, such as The London Prodigal ( 1605) or A Yorkshire Tragedy ( 1608), were issued under his name, or else coyly with his tell-tale initials, such as The Puritan 'by W. S.' in 1607, or The Troublesome Raigne 'by W. Sh.' in 1611.

  Yet at least three negative accounts of Shakespeare gained ground after The Tempest. The first, with antecedents in Greene's and Nashe's remarks, is that he was only an easy, fluent, imperfect writer addicted to 'bombast' or a 'huffing' style, which was simply a 'horrour' in Macbeth (as Jonson used to say, according to Dryden's report of the matter). The second charge is that he was unlearned, and this was made by Francis Beaumont about eight years before the remark on Shakespeare's 'small Latine and lesse Greeke'. 'Heere I would let slippe', writes Beaumont to Jonson in a verse-epistle of about 1615,

  (If I had any in mee) schollershippe,

  And from all Learninge keepe these lines as cleere

  as Shakespeares best are . . .

  Preachers, as Beaumont adds, will seize upon him as a prime example of 'how farr sometimes a mortall man may goe | by the dimme light of Nature'. 24 There is a suggestion that Stratford's poet is a little dimbrained, or intuitive rather than intelligent. A third charge is that the Midlands man fails to match contemporary fashion, or the refined, best talk of ladies and gentlemen. Dryden echoed this, but it was already implicit in the stunning work of Beaumont and Fletcher.

  The King's troupe had gambled on two poets who had failed in the boys' theatres. They were an unlikely pair. Born around 1584 in Leicestershire to a Justice of Common Pleas, and raised partly at the converted nunnery of Grace-Dieu -- which was well known t
o recusants in his family -- Francis Beaumont had been up to Oxford in 1597. From there he had gone without a degree to the Inner Temple, where he gave a burlesque grammar lecture, and then wrote two witty, unsuccessful dramas. Also he met John Fletcher, five years his senior, whose father, as Bishop of London, might have scorned the papists at GraceDieu; but the old bishop had expired in debt.

  Fletcher, at first, also had poor luck. His pastoral play The FaithfulShepherdess

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  Shepherdess failed, as did their jointly written Cupid's Revenge, staged by a boys' troupe. But Beaumont and Fletcher went on in 1609 to write Philaster for the King's men, and this made them famous. Aubrey later recorded gossip: 'they lived together on the Banke side, not far from the Play-house, both bachelors; lay together -- from Sir John Hales, etc.; had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same cloathes and cloake, &c., betweene them'. 25 In seeming harmony, they wrote about a dozen plays jointly before Francis Beaumont left the theatre, in 1613, for the embraces of a well-to-do heiress.

  The art of Beaumont's friend was sprightly, as it is in The Woman's Prize which replies to The Taming of the Shrew. In Fletcher's amusing script, Maria, a cousin of Shakespeare's Kate who is now deceased, marries Petruchio, but shuts him out on his wedding night and otherwise turns the tables on him. The public's habits had begun to make Beaumont and Fletcher indispensable to the King's men. Play-goers were choosing the kind of playhouse they could afford to attend, and as the open-air Fortune and the Red Bull (where Webster's tragedy The White Devil failed in 1612) were becoming 'citizen' theatres, so the Blackfriars and later the small, roofed Cockpit in Drury Lane became gentrified. 26 The King's Servants had begun to feel more secure with élite audiences. Beaumont and Fletcher influenced Shakespeare's work, as he did theirs, but they avoided problems of society and justice, real maladies of the psyche, or any concern with the individual in relation to the state. They cared about notions of honour, emotional dilemmas, polite conduct in politics and love. Fletcher's plays consist of excitement, emotive dialogue and clever plots. His amoral bent pleased the élite, and the King's men capitalized on him.

  Why, then, did Shakespeare bother to write plays with Fletcher? All acting companies normally used jointly written dramas, and most of their poets collaborated. A company's needs determined one's work, although Shakespeare, perhaps, was allowed to do what he pleased. He could be in two or three minds about a matter: he was slightly disengaging himself from his troupe, but also testing the winds of fashion. It is most unlikely that he meant to quit London, and in fact he took part in the King's men's new developments by collaborating.

  One work he wrote with Fletcher, the now missing Cardenio, we

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  know only a little about. This play was acted at court during the winter revels of 1612-13 and again on 8 June 1613. Forty years later Humphrey Moseley, who by then had acquired some of the troupe's scripts, registered a drama called 'The History of Cardenio, by Mr. Fletcher & Shakespeare'. Much later, in 1728, Lewis Theobald published his play Double Falshood -- based on the romantic fable of Cardenio in Don Quixote -- and described that as 'Written Originally by W. SHAKESPEARE; And now Revised and Adapted to the Stage By Mr. THEOBALD'. Is the old Jacobean play at all evident in Falshood? If so, the old play may have featured a duke's anxiety over the worth of his two sons, a subplot, and a seduction scene -- material ripe for Fletcher, perhaps. But it is hard to find Fletcher's famous collaborator in Falshood except that words such as 'Imagination', 'Suspicions', and 'Possession', in their older rhythmic uses, may be the ghosts of Shakespeare's lost words. 27

  Fletcher's hand has been found in Henry VIII or All is True-though there is no external sign that he wrote any part of this. In Cyrus Hoy's linguistic study of Henry VIII's playtext, mainly confirmed by J. Hope's work in 1994, Fletcher emerges as the writer of only a few scenes, and as one who 'touched up' or added very short passages to the work of Shakespeare, who wrote most of the drama.

  The topic of the late Queen's father, Henry VIII, was still hazardous in London. The play ironically celebrates King Henry's getting rid of his wife Katherine, and then picking up Anne Bullen and bedding her offstage to give the nation a peerless baby in the future Elizabeth I. When the infant is christened in Act V, there is almost 'group sex' in the streets. The Porter wonders if an 'Indian', over from Virginia perhaps, has not aroused the city's females. 'Bless me', he cries, 'what a fry of fornication is at door! On my Christian conscience, this one christening will beget a thousand. Here will be father, godfather, and all together' (V. iii. 34-6). That bawdry suits Henry's sly, sensual, opportunistic, unforgiving, slightly incoherent character, and the play unfolds as a documentary romance of a new genre. In 1613 Sir Henry Wotton, a sensitive diplomat (and tireless letter-writer), was impressed. This stage-play, he felt, was 'sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous.' 28

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  Buckingham, Katherine, and Wolsey -- who fall out of Henry's graces -- gain in inwardness only when 'divorced' or excluded by the state. Their acts of repentance are moving, but are unlike the reconciliations in Cymbeline or The Winter's Tale. Here society is not renewed by its spiritual conversions. The author's pessimism is implicit throughout, especially in an acid view of statecraft, though an undercurrent of gloom is balanced by pageantry, lively gossip, and the panegyrics in Act V over Queen Elizabeth's and King James's reigns in time ahead.

  Shakespeare's pessimism -- as he considers human motives, obsessions, and the will -- is even more obvious in a sinister tale about the influence of passion and war over men's minds, which he sketched in The Two Noble Kinsmen. His portion of the writing probably included Act I, the bulk of Act V, and one or two of the opening scenes in Acts II and III. He and Fletcher had set about dramatizing Chaucer's descriptive, rather undramatic The Knight's Tale -- already used lightly in the Dream -- which focuses in part on the rivalry of the two knights Palamon and Arcite for Emelye's love. Fletcher did his best to follow Chaucer's tale. Departing from it, Shakespeare creates an equivalent, glistening brilliance in his ritualistic Act I, which has some of his finest writing. His talent had not faded in 1612 or 1613, and his collaborate work suggests he might have found a new dialectic of enquiry and new dramatic forms, if his career had lasted. In Kinsmen, his verse is powerfully evocative. Theseus, on his way to be married, is stopped by three widowed Queens of Thebes, who tell him that he will never think of their just, urgent need for his help, once he is in Hippolyta's bed.

  'Our suit shall be neglected', cries the First Queen, in one of the last set speeches from Shakespeare's pen:

  when her arms,

  Able to lock Jove from a synod, shall

  By warranting moonlight corslet thee! O when

  Her twinning cherries shall their sweetness fall

  Upon thy tasteful lips, what wilt thou think

  Of rotten kings or blubbered queens? What care

  For what thou feel'st not, what thou feel'st being able

  To make Mars spurn his drum? O, if thou couch

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  But one night with her, every hour in't will

  Take hostage of thee for a hundred, and

  Thou shalt remember nothing more than what

  That banquet bids thee to.

  (I. i. 174-85)

  'To thee no star be dark', the Queens later hail Theseus. 'Both heaven and earth friend thee for ever.'

  His collaborator did not try to match that elegance. Fletcher works up Palamon and Arcite's friendship, their au courant talk, Emily's bemused love and a sub-plot about madness, infatuation, and sex. His medieval knights become Jacobean courtiers -- Palamon, as critics notice, is like the bed-hopping Pharamond in Beaumont and Fletcher Philaster. In the subplot about a Jailer's Daughter whose love for Palamon leads to her madness, Fletcher sets city against the country, exalting an urban aristocracy at the expense of showing rural folk as quaint or naïve, and thus he surely appeals to é
lite play-goers. His writing in the sub-plot is quick, depthless, and nasty, if not amoral -- and thanks to him, this play reflects an absolute ending of the 'Elizabethan compromise', or that vital, social cohesion in audiences which once led dramatists to write for all ranks. 29

  Excluded from the Folio of the older poet's works, The Two Noble Kinsmen was printed in a quarto, of 1634, by Thomas Coates as having been

  Written by the memorable Worthies of their time;

  Though it comes first alphabetically, Fletcher's name is probably mentioned first because he had written most of the drama.

  In the spring of 1613, by which time two or three of these plays were finished, Shakespeare bought his first property in London. This was the Blackfriars gatehouse, which as the name suggests stretched over

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  a gate in the thick eastern wall of the priory complex. As a centre of intrigue and a hideaway for priests, it had an almost visible history: 'it hath sundry back-dores and bye-wayes, and many secret vaults and corners', Richard Frith, of the Blackfriars district, had once told the authorities. A priest might handily escape through 'secret passages towards the water' -- and only a few paces down St Andrew's Hill, one came to Puddle Wharf, waiting boatmen, and the flowing Thames.

  On 10 March 1613, Shakespeare agreed to pay the gatehouse's owner, Henry Walker, a citizen and minstrel of London, £140 -- or perhaps more than the cost of his New Place. A day later, he put up £80 in cash and signed a mortgage deed, stipulating that the balance would be paid on 29 September (Michaelmas), but the mortgage was still unpaid when he died.