by Park Honan
Not the least important memorial poem in the Folio is that by Leonard Digges, who makes it clear, once and for all, that Shakespeare the poet is the same man as William Shakespeare of Stratford-uponAvon. 'When that stone is rent', Digges writes very instructively in 1623:
And time dissolves thy Stratford Monument, Here we alive shall view thee Still. 37
Such tributes, of course, have wider, more general meanings than one can easily find in Shakespeare's testamentary bequests of 25 March 1616. Nevertheless, when Collins came to see him on that day, Shakespeare had his aims. His will is as open to interpretation as anything from his pen, but it shows his trust in the Halls. He empowered them, with a belief in their ability and perhaps in their generosity. One cannot assume that he forgot his own servants; his will may not express all of his arrangements in March. He tried to see that his estate would not be dispersed, not foolishly wasted in future. He was very specific, in any case. He was not confused on that day, though he was mortally ill.
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'For all time'
A Jacobean gentleman who had fallen sick did not wear formal dress. The doublet, in any event, would have been confining and uncomfortable with its high neck, tight sleeves, and a row of close-set buttons. More suitable would have been the long gown, often faced with silk. Shakespeare in his effigy in the church, as one recalls, is seen in a long gown, which hangs open to reveal a doublet with its decorative slashes.
But for gentlemen, there was a very special dress worn 'in sickness or in captivity'. In hot weather, it sufficed by itself. This was the 'night shirt', which was more elaborate than the term suggests, since it had panels or stripes of drawnwork, or beautiful embroidery. Wearing a gown as well, one might receive a visitor or step into one's garden. The poet alertly received Mr Collins on 25 March -- but after that he became more feeble.
What caused Shakespeare's suffering as he lingered from March into April? Though one cannot be certain, something other than the plague had struck Stratford in 1616. The year was an extraordinary one with hot weather and a forward spring, and in the strangely warm winter even young people fell ill as the death-rate climbed. On average in the previous five years, about seventy-five deaths had occured annually in Stratford's parish. This year as many as 109 died (if not all of the same cause). One wonders. John Ward as vicar of Stratford later kept a diary and jotted in it, around 1662, that Shakespeare had died of a fever. Ward frequented local taverns, and evidently heard that the fever had been 'contracted' because ' Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson, had a merie meeting, and itt seems drank too hard'. 38 Invention runs high in taverns, of course. Michael Drayton was a light drinker, and Jonson is not reported as having been at Stratford. Drunkenness was a topic of jokes -- and nothing else confirms that the 'meeting' really took place.
But interestingly Ward was also a physician who, in his enquiries, had some authority for the 'fever' remark. The first editor of Ward's diary, a physician, called this 'low typhoid fever'. E. I. Fripp, an expert on Stratford's records, thought it probable the dramatist had 'typhoid
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fever, which killed him'. 39 Typhoid, a so-called 'new disease', was virulent in a forward spring, and it is likely that Shakespeare's New Place was dangerous because of the fetid stream which ran down beside it to supply the fullers of cloth near the River Avon. In the nineteenth century, when research into typhoid inspired fieldwork, it was discovered that the county's small rivulets could be lethal. Dr William Budd (not trying to explain the poet's disease) followed a small, typhoid-carrying brook which, he wrote, 'discharges itself into the Avon'. 40 From March to April, by coincidence or not, Shakespeare's illness lasted about as long as the normal time it takes for a typhoid victim to die.
His 'fever', by 25 March, no doubt caused alarm. He was made constantly to drink, or he could not have survived into the new month. Those near him could be infected, and there is evidence that his disease was thought communicable. He was to be interred quickly in 1694, was 'full seventeen foot deep'. 41 So close to the river, that is unlikely, but the report may echo a local memory of contagion.
Townspeople -- whatever else they felt about him -- took Shakespeare to be financially successful. Few poets had ever had a better income, and few had been so involved with a highly competitive, commercial enterprise. In the view of some who knew him no doubt, he simply wrote playscripts after his Venus and Lucrece. Yet he may have written less exclusively for the stage than is said even today, and scraps of 'outside' work have emerged. Did the Sonnets' publisher, Thorpe, bring out more of Shakespeare's work? On 13 February 1612, Thorpe had registered 'a Funeral Elegy in the memory of the late virtuous Master William Peter, of Whipton, near Exeter', and this work appeared as by 'W.S'. Very probably 'W.S.' was a countryman such as Sir William Strode of Plympton Erle in Devonshire, or the Revd William Sclater, Rector of Pitminster in Somerset. 42 William Peter had been murdered in a wrangle over a horse near Exeter. The elegist's style is faintly like Shakespeare's, but too many linguistic features differ here; no external evidence links the dramatist with the elegized, and it is only wishful thinking to suppose Shakespeare wrote the 'Elegy'. Still, it is probable that more of his occasional verse will be found. His prose may yet appear in Southampton's or Pembroke's formal letters, if he had a stint
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as a lord's secretary, or, of course, we may find his hand in more dramas than the thirty-eight or thirty-nine we allow him.
Why are we lucky enough to have so much of Shakespeare's work? So much written in his time is lost. Of the 175 play titles recorded by Henslowe of the Rose, only thirty-seven plays survive today. The total number of dramas written between 1560 and 1642 must be at least six times the number of plays that survive. Shakespeare's plays have come down to us because he was immensely popular, and, too, he was fortunate. After all, England's population had climbed from about 3 million at his birth, to about 4½ million fifty years later. Despite his actors' many troubles, they could rely, in the long run, on an alert public of ever greater size. Moreover, though his audiences came from all ranks and backgrounds, they included the people Milton praises in the Areopagitica, or Londoners who are 'trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement', as the essayist holds, 'disputing, reasoning, inventing, discoursing . . . things not before discoursed or written of'. 43
London helped Shakespeare to offer the most profound, demanding plays ever given to any city. No doubt, commercial pressures liberated his talent as he worked to supply the needs of actors. But his receptivity and extraordinary insight gave him a unique understanding of human experience, so that all of his works transcend their time. His dramas are inexhaustibly fertile in stimulating new ideas and interpretations -- and that they have the power to transform the lives of play-goers and readers testifies not to a 'miracle' but to unique qualities of his artistry and intellect. His intellectual power is felt for example in the strong, subtle, weblike structures of his works, in the enormous variety of his thousand or more portrayals, and even in the upsetting nature of his perceptions and art. His wit and sense of comedy are unsurpassed, but far from soothing an audience, Shakespeare depicts human nature in ways that are at once truthful and deeply troubling. His curiosity about human nature was in a sense remorseless, though it never outran his sympathy for the human predicament. The major changes he makes in using his sources have to do with motive and emotion; he rejects crude simplicities of feeling and of violence, though he ensures that his own stage violence will have the
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maximum effect. Encouraged by his fellows he gave them what they wanted, and always more in that his dramas brilliantly generate their own renewal and affect people as no other plays have ever done. He challenges the finest skills of a troupe, but it is also true that he amply rewards those who act in his plays. He typically complicates a text by altering the mood, tone, and tempo from line to line, and, in effect, gives an actor a varying inner surface to exploit.
All of this
argues his habitual closeness to actors, and probably his need for a group. But his 'myriad-mindedness' arises from his own intellectual and spiritual endeavour, his questing, his hope and dissatisfaction. In the dialectic of his plays he looks for what is valid, worthy, or possible in human nature, and comes at last to a darkening. Henry VIII, as well as Palamon and Arcite in The Two Noble Kinsmen, represent the commonness, the banality of our impercipience, faithlessness, and blind, selfish passion, as if humanity's bleak, disappointing past will yield to a bleaker and more tragic future. And yet at the end of Noble Kinsmen in Theseus's speeches, Shakespeare perhaps implicitly gives thanks for life itself.
Easter came early in 1616, on 31 March. It might have been that Easter, for all its blessed meaning, had not blessed the month of April. A sufferer with typhoid fever knows incessant headache, lassitude, and sleeplessness, then terrible thirst and discomfort. The features begin to shrivel. Whatever the cause of his own fever, Shakespeare's face in the effigy at Holy Trinity appears to be modelled on a death-mask. His eyes stare, the face is heavy and the nose is small and sharp. Because of the shrinkage of the muscles and possibly of the nostrils, the upper lip is elongated. 44
It is, on the whole, likely that Shakespeare was so well nursed his miseries lasted little longer than they might have done. But he died on 23 April, and two days later his body was taken into Holy Trinity's chancel, which has ornamental stone knots of foliage, and on the south side, the muzzled bear and ragged staff of the Earl of Warwick. Shakespeare's grave slab was later probably altered, since it is too short. But his sufferings were over, and the speeches of the exiled brothers, Arviragus and Guiderius, in Act IV of Cymbeline might well do for his epitaph:
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Fear no more the heat o'th' sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages.
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o'th' great,
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke.
Care no more to clothe and eat,
To thee the reed is as the oak.
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor th' all-dreaded thunder-stone.
Fear not slander, censure rash,
Thou hast finished joy and moan.
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee and come to dust.
No cxorcisor harm thee,
Nor no witchcraft charm thee.
Ghost unlaid forbear thee.
Nothing ill come near thee.
Quiet consummation have,
And renownèd be thy grave.
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THE ARDEN AND SHAKESPEARE FAMILIES
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DESCENDANTS OF SHAKESPEARE'S NEPHEW THOMAS HART (B. 1605) DOWN TO THE SALE OF THE BIRTHPLACE IN 1806
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A NOTE ON THE SHAKESPEARE BIOGRAPHICAL TRADITION AND SOURCES FOR HIS LIFE
It has been said that the year 1616 is an insignificant one in theatrical history. In fact, both Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont died in that year, but the King's men had learned to do without Shakespeare the man while keeping his popular plays in repertoire, and Beaumont, too, had left the theatre earlier. Actors carried on without new dramas from older suppliers, and even the great Folio of Shakespeare's plays broke no trade records in selling possibly 750 copies, or perhaps fewer, inside nine years. Why was curiosity about the Stratford poet at a low ebb for some decades after 1623?
He was not alive to inspire new gossip -- and Inns of Court wits (for example) needed to be au courant in their enthusiasms. Views similar to Ben Jonson's on his Stratford friend's lack of learning were repeated. That Shakespeare was 'never any Scholar' and that 'his learning was very little' are claimed, by a self-styled 'biographist', in the first formal sketch of him, in Thomas Fuller The History of the Worthies of England ( 1662); and Fuller's views are echoed in paragraphs about Stratford's poet for the rest of the century.
Furthermore, from about 1660 to the 1730s, with the canons of criticism mainly set against them, Shakespeare's plays were often radically adapted or purged of scenes of bloodshed, of their sensuously strong imagery, and of other assumed faults. As Brian Vickers has written, there is no 'comparable instance of the work of a major artist being altered in such a sweeping fashion' ( Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, i, 1623-1692 ( 1974.)). Those who dwelt on his small learning, or his gross diction and imagery, evidently did little to stimulate fresh enquiry into the man.
Useful biographical work really begins with John Aubrey's hectic notes, of about 1661 (but not published until Andrew Clark's edition
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in 1898), and Nicholas Rowe's short biography which introduces his edition of the plays in 1709.
Aubrey, born in 1626, jotted down what people had told him of the great poet. He knew three members of the Davenant family, as Mary Edmond has shown ( Rare Sir William Davenant ( 1987), ch. 2). Stratford 'neighbours' spoke to him of Shakespeare's youthful feats as the son of a 'Butcher'; they were doubtless wrong, but Aubrey also sought out William Beeston (the youngest son of Christopher, the playwright's former colleague in the Chamberlain's Servants), who is the source of the remark that Shakespeare 'understood Latine pretty well: for he had been in his younger yeares a Schoolmaster in the Countrey'. Aubrey twice notes that the poet visited Warwickshire 'once a yeare', and he comments on Shakespeare's personality, appearance, and (it seems) on his not being a 'company keeper', in invaluable notes which today call for unusual caution and tact on the part of critics and biographers. The same might be said of the remarks of Nicholas Rowe, a poet and playwright himself, who in 1709 relied on what Thomas Betterton, the ageing tragedian, had picked up at Stratford, and partly on hearsay, for his 'Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear', a forty page sketch which remained influential for a century.
By 1709, then, the three main channels for data about Shakespeare's life (through Stratford, Oxford, or London) were being used. Lewis Theobald's biographical sketch in his edition of the plays ( 1733) acknowledges Rowe, but adds a history of Shakespeare's New Place and discusses for the first time the licence King James I had granted in 1603 to the players. Neither William Oldys nor Edmond Malone completed their lives of Shakespeare. Despite Oldys's interviews with Joan Hart's descendants, and Malone's searches and scholarship, hard facts about Shakespeare's life were slow to emerge. Facts and legends appear in eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare's plays, or for example in notices by Thomas Tyrwhitt ( 1730-86) about allusions to the poet in the two Elizabethan works, Greene Groats-worth and Meres Palladis Tamia.
By the end of the eighteenth century, materials for a full, factual biography were accumulating. The known facts hardly exposed the poet's intimate life. But, apparently, the practices of the late Tudor sonnet
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vogue were forgotten or ignored (as they usually are today), and the notion arose that Shakespeare's Dark Lady and Young Man of the Sonnets were portraits of once living persons. Obviously for some, his anguished private life was on record, though others in the new century doubted that he had sketched in the Sonnets his exact relations with, say, a Tudor bordello-keeper or a lord's mistress. To the notion that the Earl of Pembroke was literally the Young Man of the Sonnets, the Victorian biographer Charles Knight replied in 1841, Would Pembroke suffer 'himself to be . . . represented in these poems as a man of licentious habits, and treacherous in his licentiousness?' But by then not only Pembroke but a real Dark Lady, as Samuel Schoenbaum puts it, had 'sauntered into the best-loved sequence of lyric poems in our language'.
Having unmasked forgeries, edited Shakespeare d
ocuments, and studied the order in which the plays were written, Edmond Malone died in 1812. His Life of Shakespeare was finished and published by James Boswell's son and namesake in 1821; Malone's fragment is still of interest for its authoritative method and a few, rather cautious, speculations. With much less than Malone's strict sense of fact, Nathan Drake Shakspeare and his Times ( 1817) and Charles Knight William Shakspere: A Biography ( 1843) began to explore inspirations the poet may have found in his environment. Malone had given an impetus to genealogical research. George Russell French Shakspeareana Genealogica ( 1869) was admired for its tables of descent, and more than a century later was praised for establishing the exact 'relationship between Mary Shakespeare's father and Walter Arden [of Park Hall], whose son Sir John was Esquire of the King's body in the reign of Henry VII'. Unfortunately, French, whose pedigrees are flawed, establishes no such thing, and Mark Eccles's statement that 'there is no proof' that Shakespeare was related to the wealthy Ardens of Park Hall, near Birmingham, still holds good, though 'it is possible that Thomas [Arden, Mary's grandfather] may have descended from a younger son of that family' ( Shakespeare in Warwickshire ( 1961), 12).
