Shakespeare

by Paul Edmondson

  He was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 25 April 1616. The vicar who presided over his funeral was John Rogers, who was his next-door neighbour in 1611, from the old priest’s house close to the Guild Chapel. A gravestone without a name on it, but always assumed to be Shakespeare’s, marks the spot near the high altar with an epitaph of two rhyming couplets. They arrest the passer-by with a blessing and a curse:

  Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear

  To dig the dust enclosèd here.

  Blessed be the man that spares these stones,

  And cursed be he that moves my bones.

  A Dutch sculptor, Geerhart Janssen, made Shakespeare’s bust in the monument on the wall above his grave. He had made the tomb and effigy for Shakespeare’s friend John Coombe (buried near the high altar in July 1614). Janssen’s father’s workshop was in Southwark near The Globe Theatre so the chances are that both father and son knew what Shakespeare looked like. The Latin words on Shakespeare’s monument compare him to classical figures and call him ‘a Nestor in counsel, a Socrates in mind, and a Virgil in art.’ There then follows an inscription in English:

  Stay Passenger, why goest thou by so fast?

  Read if thou canst, whom envious Death hath placed

  Within this monument Shakespeare: with whom

  Quick nature died: whose name doth deck this tomb

  Far more than cost: sith [since] all that he hath writ

  Leaves living art, but page to serve his wit.

  Shakespeare, says this inscription, is a poet of nature, a writer of plays (‘living art’) and published works. The printed pages, like a pageboy, serve his intelligence. The effigy of Shakespeare is crudely executed but gives us some sense of what he looked like: high, rounded cheeks, small, sunken eyes, a high forehead and balding, auburn hair. He is wearing the scarlet livery tunic of the King’s Men, harking back to the coronation of 1603. We do not know when the monument was installed but it seems to be a tribute from friends, colleagues and townspeople. Stratford-upon-Avon historian Mairi Macdonald points out that Thomas Wilson, a vicar with Puritan leanings, took over the running of the church in 1619 and that the colourful memorial is unlikely to have agreed with his taste.8 The bust is likely, therefore, to have been installed by 1619 and was certainly in place by 1623 when it was referred to in the preliminary matter to the edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays.

  Shakespeare’s bequests show that he died a wealthy man. The sums of money mentioned in his will, amounting to around £360, exceed those of many of his theatrical contemporaries, and in addition he owned land, property and shares. Susanna inherited the most, including New Place. The fact that Shakespeare leaves his widow, Anne, his ‘second-best bed with the furniture’ has raised questions about the state of the marriage. But the ‘second-best bed’ may have been the marriage bed, the best bed being reserved for guests. The degree to which the bequest is understood to represent a romantic souvenir or a put-down is open to interpretation. Certainly it is unusual that Anne was not named executrix. That duty fell to daughter and son-in-law, Susanna and John Hall.

  Judith inherited £100 as a marriage settlement, interest on £150 as long as she remained married, and a ‘broad silver-gilt bowl’. This bequest was no doubt influenced by her being involved in something of a scandal in the last couple of months of Shakespeare’s life. On 10 February 1616 she married Thomas Quiney, who, like Shakespeare himself, had begotten a child outside wedlock. But in Quiney’s case, the poor woman, Margaret Wheeler, died in childbirth, as did her baby. The day after Shakespeare had signed his will, Quiney appeared before the court and pleaded guilty to fornication.

  The only grandchild Shakespeare knew, Elizabeth Hall (1608–1670), inherited the rest of his ‘plate’ (gold and silver ware). William Walker, his young godson, received twenty shillings in gold; Thomas Coombe (John’s brother) had Shakespeare’s sword (an intimate bequest which signals a close friendship) and his fellow actors Richard Burbage, John Heminges (1566–1630) and Henry Condell (1576–1627) were among others to be given money to buy mourning rings, a common practice. The Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells has suggested that these bequests also signalled an agreement that they would publish a posthumous collection of his work.9 Burbage died in 1619, but the other two men worked hard to publish an almost complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays, which appeared in 1623. It is known as the First Folio (because of the size of paper it is printed on), contains 36 plays (half of which appeared there for the first time), and is Shakespeare’s greatest legacy of all. His fellow playwright, poet, friend and rival, Ben Jonson (1572–1637), wrote a fine and famous tribute for the Folio. He refers to Shakespeare as ‘soul of the age! / The applause, delight and wonder of our stage!’ Later, Jonson would write: ‘I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped’ (published posthumously in Timber, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter, 1640).

  Anne Shakespeare died in 1623 and is buried next to the wall, beneath her husband’s monument. Son-in-law John Hall died in 1635, and his widow, Susanna, died in 1649. She is buried near her father and husband. Her epitaph commemorates her as being ‘witty above her sex’ and says that ‘something of Shakespeare was in that’. Shakespeare’s daughter Judith had three sons, all of whom died young: Shakespeare (1616–1617), Richard (1618–1639) and Thomas (1620–1639). There were no more direct Shakespeare descendants.

  In 1661 the vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon, Rev. John Ward, made a note to himself that he must visit Judith Quiney (then aged seventy-six) to talk to her about her father. Judith died shortly afterwards. One can only begin to imagine the difference Ward’s notes from a conversation with the poet’s daughter might have made to our understanding of Shakespeare. Either Ward never got round to making a record of it, or it remains the most important literary conversation of all time that never took place.

  The earliest reference to anyone noticing Shakespeare’s grave is 1634 when a Lieutenant Hammond, during a tour of twenty-six counties, records ‘a neat monument of that famous English poet, Mr William Shakespeare; who was born there.’ Two centuries later the novelist Walter Scott would stand on the same spot and, looking upon Shakespeare’s grave, call it ‘the tomb of the mighty wizard.’ But how did that wizard make his magic?

  2

  HOW DID HE WRITE?

  Towards the back of the inner courtyard of New Place stood the inner dwelling, the family home. Richard Grimmitt (born 1683), who used to play there with his friend Edward Clopton when they were children, remembers entering a side door on Chapel Lane from which ‘they crossed a small kind of green court before they entered the house which was bearing to the left and fronted with brick, with plain windows consisting of common panes of glass set in lead.’ It was a writer’s house, and writers need books. Imagine then, for a moment, peering through one of those leaded windows into Shakespeare’s library. In my mind’s eye I see a book-lined room with a desk at one end in front of a south-facing window. There’s a small chest to one side in which to transport some of the most frequently used volumes to and from his lodgings in London. But which books did Shakespeare need in order to write the plays? However we imagine Shakespeare’s library, it is subject to change as our understanding about how he wrote continues to deepen.10

  SHAKESPEARE’S ORIGINALITY

  Shakespeare’s contemporaries compared him to classical writers and when John Manningham saw a performance of Twelfth Night, or What You Will at the Middle Temple on 2 February 1602, it reminded him of the Roman comedy Menaechmi by Plautus, as well as of a much more recent Italian play, Gl’Inganni (that refers to The Mistakes by Nicolò Secchi, first published in Florence in 1562). Manningham mixed up his sources. Twelfth Night much more closely resembles another work with a similar name, Gl’Ingannati (that
is, the anonymous The Deceived, first published in Siena in 1537 and widely translated across Europe by the time Shakespeare was writing). Manningham’s account reveals how Shakespeare was understood to be a literary writer, one who used different kinds of source material from different periods.

  All writers draw from their own experience, too, some more than others, but where do Shakespeare’s reading and imagination end and his life experience begin? The personality of Shakespeare’s contemporary, John Donne (1572– 1631), the poet, lover, philosopher, priest and preacher, is writ large in his work. It would seem strange not to read it biographically, at least in part. Shakespeare’s writing was rooted in classical and humanist learning. At school he was taught to write, as it were, within literature, imitating the Latin authors. In asking how Shakespeare wrote we might turn the question around and ask ourselves: if we wanted to write like Shakespeare, what would we have to do?

  HOW TO WRITE LIKE SHAKESPEARE

  If we want to catch something of Shakespeare’s tone of voice, then we need to become acquainted with the rhetorical figures he knew intimately. Figures of speech (and this is only one area of rhetoric: others include logic, memory, elocution and bodily gesture) are no less than the fibres that make up Shakespeare’s poetry. Sometimes he calls attention to the rhetorical display of a character for comic effect. In the speech that follows, I have inserted the names of the rhetorical figures used by the fiery Hotspur:

  HOTSPUR

  By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap (assonance)

  To pluck (onomatopoeia) bright honour from the pale-faced moon (personification, adynaton),

  Or (antithesis) dive into the bottom of the deep (alliteration, metaphor),

  Where fathom-line could never touch the ground (hyperbole),

  And pluck (repetition) up drownèd honour by the locks (synecdoche),

  So (antithesis) he that doth redeem her (personification) thence might wear (metaphor),

  Without corrival, all her dignities (merism).

  But out upon this half-faced fellowship (alliteration)!

  WORCESTER (to Northumberland)

  He apprehends a world of figures here,

  But (antithesis) not the form of what he should attend.

  (Henry IV Part One, 1.2.199–208)11

  His uncle, Worcester, dismisses his nephew’s speech as nothing more than rhetorical hot air, a ‘world of figures.’

  In addition to rhetorical skill, Shakespeare’s plays bristle with proverbial knowledge. Open any edition of a single Shakespeare play worth its salt and you should find the proverbs and aphorisms glossed and referenced. There is a highly entertaining sentence constructed by Bernard Levin that purports to be made up of words and phrases that Shakespeare invented but it should be approached with caution.12 Shakespeare was using many sayings that were already available to him and Levin’s clever sentence represents a rhetorical sleight of hand.

  Having immersed ourselves in rhetorical learning and proverbial wisdom, we might try to assemble an approximation of Shakespeare’s library around us and read what we know he read. Each new play involved research and his work is the product of study and reflection. We would need to read in the original Latin (or in Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation) Ovid’s Metamorphoses for Venus and Adonis. Young Lucius brings a copy of the Ovid on to the stage in Titus Andronicus (4.1.); Innogen is reading from it in Cymbeline (2.2.); Prospero quotes from it in The Tempest (5.1.). We would know Ovid’s mythological and poetic histories in the Fasti (for The Rape of Lucrece); Virgil’s Aeneid (for Troilus and Cressida and the place of Troy in Shakespeare’s imagination, for example in Hamlet); Plautus’s comedies Menaechmi and Amphitryon (for The Comedy of Errors), and Seneca’s ten surviving plays (whose brutality and violence helped to make possible Titus Andronicus, the bloodiest play). From Roman comedies he learnt about the stock dramatic characters, such as the old man who desires a young woman, the angry wife, the courtesan, and the braggart soldier, all comic tropes evident in The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, and All’s Well That Ends Well. We would need to read the Greek historian Plutarch’s account of the lives of great men (which Shakespeare used for his Roman plays Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens). We could read Plutarch in English, in the 1595 translation by Sir Thomas North, as Shakespeare did.

  From much closer to Shakespeare’s own time we would certainly read the fourteenth-century poet John Gower’s 33,000-line Middle English poem Confessio Amantis (especially for Pericles) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen) and his Troilus and Criseyde (for Troilus and Cressida). William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (from 1575) included a version of the story of All’s Well That Ends Well (based on the fourteenth-century Italian Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron). We would have to immerse ourselves in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (for all of the history plays – which make up about a third of Shakespeare’s total output – as well as for King Lear, Macbeth and Cymbeline), and Edward Hall’s chronicle The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York (especially for the plays dealing with the Wars of the Roses: the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III).

  The Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (partly translated by 1563) for The Two Gentlemen of Verona; George Gascoigne’s early comedy Supposes (based on an Italian source from 1509 and published in 1573), for The Taming of the Shrew; and George Whetstone’s tragi-comedy Promus and Cassandra (from 1578), for Measure for Measure, would all need to be on our list, as would Sir John Harington’s 1591 translation of the late fifteenth-century Italian poet Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (for Much Ado About Nothing).

  In the original Italian we would read (as Shakespeare did) a collection of fifty short stories published in 1558 called Il Pecorone (The Dunce) for The Merchant of Venice and Giraldi Cinthio’s Gl’Ecatommiti (The One Hundred Tales, from 1565) for Othello. In the original French, Shakespeare read François de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques (from 1570) for Hamlet.

  From Shakespeare’s reading of contemporary English fiction, we would acquaint ourselves with Arthur Brooke’s long poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562) and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590) for As You Like It. Barnaby Riche’s collection of romantic stories His Farewell to Military Profession (1581) and Emmanuel Forde’s novel The Famous History of Parismus (1598) were other important sources for Twelfth Night, or What You Will (as well as Gl’Ingannati, mentioned earlier). Sir Philip Sidney’s prose work Arcadia (1593) provided source material for King Lear, as did the anonymous play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters (1605). Similarly, The Famous Victories of Henry V (1594) provided a source for Henry IV Parts One and Two and for Henry V. Later in his career, Shakespeare and his co-author, the brothel-keeper, George Wilkins, drew on Laurence Twine’s The Pattern of Painful Adventures (from the mid-1570s) for Pericles, and Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588) is the source of The Winter’s Tale.

  We would read the Bible, regularly (especially the books of Genesis, Job, the Psalms and the New Testament). Shakespeare knew his Bible well and used it a lot. An act of parliament ‘to restrain the abuses of players’ prevented the word ‘God’ being used on stage from 1606 (when ‘Jove’ was often used as the alternative), and it was forbidden to dramatise Bible stories in the professional theatres. But Shakespeare’s work is shot through with biblical allusions which shape some of his characterisations, for example the prodigal son Prince Harry in the two Henry IV plays, and there are Christlike comparisons across the works, such as Richard II, and Cordelia in King Lear. It is perhaps surprising to learn that the character who quotes the Bible the most (inaccurately and never in any way to evangelise) is the drinking and whoring Sir John Falstaff.13 We would familiarise ourselves, too, with the medieval mystery plays (short dramas based on the Bible performed by city craftsmen); and Michel de Montaigne’s essays (John Flori
o’s translation was published in 1603) would show us a contemporary, Renaissance mind reflecting on itself, as it were in soliloquy.

  So far, our Shakespeare library contains biblical, classical, medieval and Renaissance literature from across Europe, which we need to be able to read in Latin, French and Italian, as well as in English. Four of the plays stand out for not having a single, major identifiable source – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Tempest – because their narrative elements come from several different places. But the books mentioned here take us a long way to understanding the kind of reading that informed Shakespeare’s imagination. Other sources and influences must be reasonably assumed: the travellers’ tales he heard in cosmopolitan London as well as everything he saw, the spaces in which he spent his time, the people he knew and the conversations he had.

  The London of Shakespeare’s time was burgeoning with books that were helping to shape the culture in which he lived. The world’s great Shakespeare and Renaissance libraries (the Folger in Washington, the Huntington in Los Angeles, the Bodleian in Oxford, the British Library in London and The Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon) contain between them thousands of books that were available for purchase on Elizabethan and Jacobean book-stalls. Some he read in their entirety and loved all his life, others he dipped into. He had, like many writers, a magpie mind that gathered morsels of all kinds with which to build a play. He read challengingly and diversely, had an excellent memory, and his reading stayed with him throughout his career.