Shakespeare

by Paul Edmondson

  All of Shakespeare’s plays can be performed with a basic company of ten men and three boys, supplemented by ‘hired-men’ when needed. Parts needed to be doubled (and more, in the early history plays especially), but Shakespeare’s plotting allows for this. Boys, not men, played the female roles, helped by the fact that their voices broke later than male voices do now. The records at Durham and Chichester cathedrals for the 1560s show that some boys could still sing treble as late as sixteen, old enough to have the emotional intelligence to perform one of Shakespeare’s great female roles.15 A sixteen-year-old boy could bring precisely the right kind of petulance, sexual capriciousness and flirtation to the role of Cleopatra, or even imitate the devouring mother, Volumnia, in Coriolanus.

  Shakespeare made use of the fact that boys played the female roles to create dizzying dramatic effects. While seeking to make his audience erotically aware of Cleopatra, he wants us to be aware of the boy player inhabiting the part. Just moments before her suicide Cleopatra stares into a terrible future without Antony in which she imagines Caesar taking her as a prisoner back to Rome. She fears that the workmen of Rome will mock her on the stage:

  Antony

  Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

  Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

  I’th’ posture of a whore.

  (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.214–17)

  Our attention is drawn to the boy player in the role of Cleopatra at the same time as Cleopatra imagines another boy player playing her. Henry Jackson of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, saw the King’s Men perform Othello there in 1610. His eyewitness account (in Latin) provides valuable evidence about the impact a boy actor could make:

  the celebrated Desdemona, slain in our presence by her husband, although she pleaded her case very effectively throughout, yet moved us more after she was dead, when, lying in her bed, she entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance.

  Jackson clearly found his performance captivating and this particular, anonymous boy was obviously a star in his own right.

  SUPPLY AND DEMAND

  Shakespeare was aware of his audience’s tastes, which shifted and developed over time. It becomes easy to imagine meetings of the company’s co-shareholders in which the next kind of play was debated before Shakespeare wrote it. Henry V, for example, which glorifies a head of state, is followed by Julius Caesar about an assassination. He was to some extent always writing to commission. There is a marked shift in dramatic tone between Elizabethan and Jacobean Shakespeare when, from 1603, he effectively became the royal playwright. There are no more explicitly romantic comedies after Twelfth Night, or What You Will (in 1601) and thereafter Shakespeare produced a much darker dramatic texture in plays such as Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and then a cluster of tragedies. James I’s fascination with witchcraft and the supernatural prompted Macbeth, a play that also reminded the monarch of his Scottish ancestry and his descent from the line of Banquo (‘your children shall be kings’, Macbeth 1.3.83). And it was the Jacobean court that had a taste for what became known as tragi-comedy, exemplified by plays such as The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

  State censorship was an important shaping factor. The most vital, illustrative document is the manuscript of The Book of Sir Thomas More, a collaborative play of the 1590s, understood to be by Antony Munday and Henry Chettle, but transcribed by Munday, probably in 1600, and into which have been inserted revisions apparently by Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood and William Shakespeare. 16 Crucially, the manuscript also shows us how Shakespeare wrote. The principal passage thought to be by Shakespeare is lightly punctuated, perhaps in the first draft of composition, and the handwriting bears comparison with his six surviving signatures, notably the ‘distinctive “spurred” form of the letter “a”’.17 Marked into it are the only surviving interventions by Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, the official in charge of ensuring that plays did not contain politically sensitive or overtly religious material. It looks like Tilney was dissatisfied with the portrayal of the May Day riots against foreigners and any mention of the Oath of Succession, which More could not accept. Tilney, it seems, held on to the manuscript, forbidding both performance and publication.

  COLLABORATION, REVISION AND AUTHORSHIP

  One of the most significant developments in Shakespeare scholarship since the 1980s has been a growing understanding of how Shakespeare collaborated, a common practice among all of his contemporaries (Thomas Heywood, for example, claimed to have ‘a main finger’ in around 220 plays). The example of Sir Thomas More shows Shakespeare being brought in to patch up an already existing script, but he is also thought to have collaborated on several other plays, mainly at the beginning and end of his career. Based on stylometric tests designed to reveal different hands at work in the same play the theories – and they are only theories – about how Shakespeare collaborated reveal different kinds of practice. In Henry VI Part One (with Thomas Nashe), Titus Andronicus (with George Peele), and Timon of Athens (with Thomas Middleton), the collaborating dramatist seems to have contributed a few scenes within a particular act (in the case of Titus Andronicus the whole of act one). In Pericles, George Wilkins seems to have written the first half and Shakespeare the second (from scene 11). The scenes with Hecate, the Queen of the witches, in Macbeth (3.4. and 4.1.) include material which refers to Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch which suggests he adapted the play, at least in part, before it found its way into the Folio of 1623. It has been suggested that Middleton’s hand can be seen at work in Measure for Measure (supplying act one, scene two and possibly altering the end of act three and the beginning of act four). The later plays show a different model of collaboration in which the labour has been divided more equally into definite stints across the whole of the drama. Since the nineteenth century, John Fletcher’s hand has been identified in All is True (Henry VIII), and there is external evidence that tells us he collaborated with Shakespeare on The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost play Cardenio. Perhaps when working with Fletcher in this way, Shakespeare was the thought leader and innovator of style, encouraging Fletcher to take on the role of the leading dramatist for the King’s Men.

  Several plays have been known variously over the centuries as ‘the Shakespeare Apocrypha’, ‘doubtful’ or even ‘dubious’ works, in which Shakespeare may or may not have had a hand. The term ‘apocryphal’ evokes the canon of holy writ against which writing is measured for inclusion or exclusion. Knowing more about Shakespeare as a collaborative playwright has led to a renewed interest in these plays and the list has fluctuated over time. A useful distinction can be drawn here between ‘contributed’ and ‘collaborated’. Shakespeare’s hand in them, if present at all, seems to be intermittent and not part of an overall artistic design. Two of these plays, The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy, name Shakespeare as the author on their title pages. Both were performed by the King’s Men, which may partly explain why his name is there. Or it might have been added by the publisher eager to encourage sales. Edward III however, which used to be among this category of play, can now be found jacketed and canonised among the major Shakespeare editions. One theory suggests that Shakespeare wrote up to four of its eighteen scenes.

  Shakespeare revised his work. For half of the plays we only have one text, the Folio version of 1623. The other half exists in at least two versions, the Folio and the earlier quarto texts. For many years, it was assumed that each text had come down to us imperfectly, representing a lost original. But modern scholarship understands the different versions to be a result of authorial revision, sometimes minor (in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which reallocates some of the speeches), sometimes more significant. There are three significantly different versions of Hamlet, and two of King Lear, Othello and Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare’s revisions included abridgement but mainly affected the adjustment and enhancement of the dramatic texture. For example, the lat
er, Folio version of King Lear is even more uncompromisingly harsh: there are no servants who come forward to apply whites of eggs to the bleeding eye-sockets of the tortured and blinded Earl of Gloucester (as they do in the earlier The History of King Lear, scene 14, 104–5). The Folio version of Othello amplifies the role of the foppish Roderigo as a foil for Iago and only in the Folio does Desdemona sing ‘a song of willow’ about love forsaken in the scene before she is murdered. Her music brings an emphatic and haunting stillness to the moment. Only in the Folio do Desdemona and Emilia then go on to talk candidly about marital infidelity and the duty that wives owe their husbands (4.3.).

  That Shakespeare wrote for actors he knew, collaborated with other playwrights, and revised his work in light of theatrical contingencies should give us pause before giving any credence to theories which claim that someone else was the author of the plays. Besides the obvious biographical and historical objections (these theories have to reject the evidence of Shakespeare’s memorial bust in Holy Trinity Church and the Folio of 1623), the plays attributed to and written by William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon were not written in a vacuum. They needed the playhouse, the actors, the theatrical climate and industry of the time in order to be produced. It is simplistic and wrong-headed to suppose that they could have been written in isolation by an aristocrat, for example, which many of the theories attempt to prove. Some people even argue that Christopher Marlowe did not die in 1593 but instead stayed alive, secretly writing the works of Shakespeare. But his death was certified by a coroner and independent witnesses, and his burial recorded in the register of St Nicholas’s Church, Deptford. People who argue that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare are sometimes known as anti-Stratfordians, but in 2013 I co-coined a new term: ‘anti-Shakespearian’. Since no artist can be separated from the social context that helped to form and sustain his or her creativity, it is as illogical to separate Stratford-upon-Avon from Shakespeare as it is, for example, to separate Michelangelo from Florence and Rome. The term anti-Shakespearian is therefore a more accurate description of the Shakespeare deniers’ agenda.18 While it is fascinating to appreciate the anti-Shakespearian endeavours as a psychological and cultural phenomenon, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century around the same time as the rise of detective fiction and Charles Darwin’s theories of natural origins, they have nothing to do with how playwrights of Shakespeare’s period actually wrote.

  NEVER BLOTTING A LINE?

  ‘Fantastic!’, the Hollywood film producer Samuel Goldwyn is said to have remarked, ‘and it was all written with a feather!’ It is worth thinking about Shakespeare’s feather for a moment and the practicalities of writing in his time. Quill pens needed good ink to help prevent blotting. The nib would need proper stiffening by being dipped into cold water and then into hot sand and sharpening every so often. The dipping into the ink had to be done carefully, evenly and steadily. The ink itself was usually home-made from oak apples, that is the crushed, empty chrysalis husks which the grubs of oak trees leave behind when they have turned into wasps, along with gum Arabic for a fixative, and mixed with rainwater, vinegar or wine so that it flowed sufficiently and did not blot.

  We know Shakespeare was right-handed, but we do not know how many nibs he used to write a play, or how often he sharpened it, or who made his ink. But his friends and fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell (who put together the first major collection of Shakespeare’s plays, the Folio of 1623) portray Shakespeare as a natural writer whose thought and written expression were one: ‘his mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’ Their description summons up an image of Shakespeare writing swiftly and gracefully. Characteristically, though, Ben Jonson is on hand to puncture and contradict any suggestion of idyllic composition. In the posthumously published Timber (written in 1630), he writes: ‘I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted.’ Perhaps all three men are telling different sides of the same truth. Heminges and Condell could be referring to manuscripts in fair copy that they worked with; Jonson, as well as suggesting that Shakespeare should have had a greater sense of self-censorship and restraint, also sounds as though he knew how Shakespeare wrote, had watched him write, and saw him crossing out.

  If pushed to suggest one role that Shakespeare himself played in his works (though there is no evidence to show which he did actually perform), I would nominate the Chorus in Henry V, because of the way it reminds us of the powers of the imagination and the process of playwriting. In the Chorus’s sonnet-Epilogue we hear:

  Thus far with rough and all-unable pen

  Our bending author hath pursued the story,

  In little room confining mighty men,

  Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.

  (Henry V, Epilogue, 1–4)

  Were these lines spoken by Shakespeare himself as he opened his arms to a full house and took a bow as that same ‘bending author’? He knew what it was to adapt a story of great scale into a drama of around two to three hours, and he knew what a messy business writing can be, especially with all of the surrounding professional and personal demands on his craft and concentration. But what was the work that came from his ‘rough and all unable pen’?

  3

  WHAT DID HE WRITE?

  A glance at the title page of the 1623 Folio immediately tells the reader and potential purchaser that the volume contains different kinds of plays: Master William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. A few pages further in and we come across ‘a Catalogue’, or list of contents, which divides the plays up into the three different classifications. John Heminges and Henry Condell were seeking to organise their late friend and colleague’s works as attractively and helpfully as possible by dividing them up into three different genres that their audiences and readers would recognise.

  But Heminges and Condell’s organisation creates problems. Thankful as posterity is for their great labour of love, their generic divisions have become ingrained in the way we think about Shakespeare. Consistently he seems rather to have enjoyed challenging his audience’s expectations of genre. He includes comic elements in tragedies and gestures towards the ingredients of tragedies in comedies (for example, by referring to, or including, deaths as part of the narrative).

  Some of the plays resist easy categorisation. Troilus and Cressida and Cymbeline are placed among the tragedies in the Folio whereas both of them have strong claims to be known as comedies, or even histories. The former is Shakespeare’s biting and satirical debunking of Greek and Trojan heroes; the latter is a romantic and miraculous history play, based on Holinshed’s chronicles. If Cymbeline is a tragedy because it contains the death of one of its characters, Prince Cloten (whose death is only really tragic for Cloten himself), then The Winter’s Tale, which is found among the comedies, could be placed among the tragedies since it too includes a prince, Mamillius and a courtier, Antigonus, who die. Henry VI Part Three, Richard III and Richard II are history plays cast in tragic form; Henry V ends in marriage (its long final scene in which King Henry woos Princess Katherine takes that part of the play into the genre of comedy); King Lear, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens and Antony and Cleopatra are tragedies about historical figures.

  First and foremost, Shakespeare was writing lively, entertaining, innovative and challenging plays. Generic considerations were secondary to him. This is why, if we take only the classical considerations of genre to Shakespeare, he will challenge them. Not for him the literary rules or theories of Horace and Aristotle. His project was altogether freer and more individual, so that the more Heminges and Condell’s generic divisions are scruti
nised, the less satisfactory they become. The King of France dies towards the end of the comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost (and one of the Princess’s ladies-in-waiting mentions her sister who died of love, 5.2.14–15). Ragasine, the pirate, dies in the comedy Measure for Measure. And the tragedies have their fair share of humorous figures: the drunken Porter in Macbeth (2.3.); the gravediggers in Hamlet (5.1.); the hapless clown who is put to death by the Emperor Saturninus in Titus Andronicus (4.4.40–49); the bawdy clown in Othello (3.1.1–29); and an obsessive, sinister clown who brings Cleopatra the poisonous asp in a basket of figs (Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.238–74).

  In hindsight, it would have been far more useful to us if Heminges and Condell had printed the plays chronologically, since many of them are difficult to date. Unfortunately, chronology did not matter to them. Shakespeare’s last sole-authored play, The Tempest, is printed first. Perhaps Heminges and Condell saw it as his great culmination as a dramatist. The history plays are arranged according to the historical order of their eponymous monarchs, rather than the order in which he wrote them. The Henry VI plays were written first; Henry VI Part One was written as a prequel after the composition of Henry VI Part Two and Henry VI Part Three, whose earliest titles were quite different (see ‘A Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works’ at the front of this book). A chronological ordering of Shakespeare’s plays is attempted by The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1986; second edition 2005), presenting a richly suggestive way of appreciating his growth as a poet and professional dramatist.

  GETTING UNDER SHAKESPEARE’S SKIN