The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  The players were not the only special visitors to pass through. In the summer of 1575 Queen Elizabeth herself visited Warwickshire, during one of her many ceremonial tours of the countryside, known as “progresses.” She stayed at Kenilworth Castle, not far from Stratford, as a guest of the Earl of Leicester. Country folk came from miles around to see their queen, with the festivities—music, plays, fireworks—stretching for three full weeks. Shakespeare would certainly encounter Elizabeth years later, when his own theater company performed before the Court; but perhaps the eleven-year-old William caught a glimpse of the middle-aged Elizabeth on this tour. We know that she liked to “work the crowd,” so to speak. A few years earlier, the Spanish ambassador observed that the queen “ordered her carriage sometimes to be taken where the crowd was thickest and stood up and thanked the people.” Elizabeth was educated, witty, and erudite, and could switch effortlessly between modern and ancient languages (apparently she was fluent in Latin and Greek by age twelve). She excelled at dancing and riding, and could fire an arrow as well as any huntsman. One can sense why her courtiers referred to her as “Gloriana.” Another eyewitness account of her demeanor, from twenty years later, focuses on her physical appearance. The queen, in her later years, was

  very majestic; her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled; her eyes small, yet black and pleasant; her nose a little hooked; her lips narrow, and her teeth black (a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar). She had in her ears two pearls, with very rich drops. Her hair was of an auburn colour, but false; upon her head she had a small crown.

  It would have been the younger, sprightlier version of the monarch that William would have seen in Warwickshire; a woman who had yet to face down a foreign armada; a woman who had yet to declare, “I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”

  Whatever he thought of Her Majesty, William spent more time thinking about a woman named Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior. (The audio guide on one of the bus tours naughtily refers to William as her “boy toy.”) They married in 1582, when he was eighteen and she was twenty-six—and pregnant. (Contrary to what we might imagine based on the youth of the lovers in Romeo and Juliet, the average age for marriage at that time was twenty-seven for men; twenty-four for women.) Their first child, Susanna, was born the following year, and twenty months later they had twins—a boy named Hamnet and a girl called Judith.

  THE GENIUS FROM WARWICKSHIRE

  Unlike some of the other successful playwrights of the time, Shakespeare did not attend university. A common refrain from the “anti-Stratfordians”—those who believe that someone other than the actor from Stratford wrote the works of Shakespeare—is that someone from such a lowly background, with such a modest education, could hardly have written about affairs of state, the courtly intrigues of kings and princes, military struggles, sea voyages, and the ways and customs of foreign lands. How could a country bumpkin have become the greatest writer in the English language? What the doubters seem to forget is that there is more to learning than mere schooling. As one biographer puts it:

  It may, in fact, have been a positive advantage for Shakespeare to have had no experience of a university. Many of his contemporaries who prided themselves on their learning have since been criticized for artificiality, whereas Shakespeare had enough education to profit from it, but not so much that it spoiled him.

  Or, as another similar work notes:

  This was an age in which a good secondary school pupil endowed with a strong sense of curiosity could become thoroughly self-educated. The fact that Shakespeare lacked higher education and social advantage proved no obstacle. His love of language and innate mastery of the art of the theater—combined with a tremendous capacity for work and fertile powers of invention—were enough to enable him to produce work of astonishing range.*

  Moreover, Shakespeare’s humble origins were hardly unique: Jonson had worked as a bricklayer, and Marlowe was the son of a cobbler. Such arguments probably do little to satisfy the anti-Stratfordians—but then, people who buy into conspiracy theories aren’t usually interested in what the experts have to say. (After all, if you’re enamored with the conspiracy, the “experts” are part of the problem.) An exploration of the psychology behind conspiracy theories is beyond the scope of this work, but the motivation behind the so-called authorship question seems at least partly rooted in the simplistic disbelief that underlies a wide range of such theories. A country lad “couldn’t possibly” have written King Lear, just like ancient Egyptians “couldn’t possibly” have built the pyramids, and the NASA of the 1960s, equipped with chemical-powered rockets and computers with two kilobytes of memory “couldn’t possibly” have flown to the moon—except, of course, that they did. In the case of Shakespeare, class prejudice is probably also a factor. As James Shapiro notes, those “who believe that a genius of Shakespeare’s order had to be from a higher social station, or have a university degree, and so on, reveal more about their prejudices than they do about the nature of genius.”

  We don’t know what drove Shakespeare to leave his hometown, nor do we know exactly when he left. Perhaps he already had an eye on becoming an actor, and sensed that any real career advancement could come only in the capital.* One seventeenth-century account—seen as somewhat dubious today—says that he was caught poaching deer on the estate of a wealthy landowner in Charlecote, just across the river from Stratford; if it’s true, perhaps he simply felt that some distance between himself and his native Warwickshire was in order. Whatever the reason, sometime in the mid-1580s, William Shakespeare said good-bye to his wife and children, packed his bags, and set off for London.

  LONDON CALLING

  In Elizabethan London, the term “urban sprawl” was unknown—but the concept would not have been a foreign one. In the Middle Ages, the population had managed to constrain itself more or less to the space within the city walls, built on the ruins of the ancient wall established by the Romans more than a thousand years earlier. By Shakespeare’s time, this was no longer possible. Under Henry VIII, London’s population had been just fifty thousand, but by midway through Elizabeth’s reign, that figure had swelled to some two hundred thousand—about one-twentieth of its current size, and yet infinitely bigger than the town the young actor had left behind. London was literally bursting at its medieval seams.

  When I walk along the narrow streets of “the City”—London’s ancient center—I like to play a game that, for lack of a better name, we might call “time machine.” St. Paul’s Cathedral is as good a place as any to begin. If I was in a time machine of the sort that H. G. Wells imagined in his novel, I would simply dial up some numbers on a console, turn a lever, and the scene would begin to evolve backward through time. As Wells describes it, the day would turn to night, and then to day and night again, and so on; as one pushed the lever further, the days and nights would eventually blur together into a kind of nondescript gray. Eventually, as the years pass in reverse, the glass-and-steel office towers deconstruct, the Starbucks and Pret a Manger outlets transform into the small independent shops that they replaced, and, eventually, the roads turn from pavement to cobblestones; the cars and buses to horse-drawn carts and carriages. An astute observer would notice the colors of the buildings change: Granite and limestone facades that gleam white today—including St. Paul’s—would give way to their blackened, soot-coated appearance of earlier decades. Structurally, however, the cathedral would show almost no perceptible change for more than seventy years, until we reach the time of the Blitz, when fires raged all around it; as we speed backward through time, the smoke quickly clears and the cathedral is once again a grand, imposing building. As we continue our backward journey, we reach the year 1709, the year of the present cathedral’s completion. Now the dome begins to dissolve, top to bottom, to be replaced with the debris from the Great Fire of 1666. As the years whizz backward, the fire itself flashes in, and then out, of view: black smoke, orange
flames, chaos. Then the cathedral suddenly pops into view again—this time in its gothic, medieval form. If we’re aiming for the London of Shakespeare’s day, we’ll know we’ve gone too far when the cathedral’s great spire snaps into place. The soaring spire, measuring almost five hundred feet from base to tip, was destroyed by lightning in 1561. (It is indicative of the religious mood of the time that both Catholics and Protestants saw the destruction of the spire as a sign of God’s displeasure with the other group.) And so we turn the lever in the other direction and travel forward until we reach the late 1580s—the approximate time of Shakespeare’s arrival in London.

  Stepping out from our time machine, we find ourselves in a smaller London—but also a noisier, dirtier, smellier London. A few streets, like Cheapside, are broad thoroughfares, but most are narrow and crowded, and filled with the sound of vendors’ cries and rattling of wagon wheels. Of course, the iconic red phone booths, mailboxes, and double-decker buses are gone—and yet there will be familiar sights. The Tower of London, dating from the time of William the Conqueror, is already six centuries old. (Shakespeare imagined it was a thousand years older—it’s referred to as “Julius Caesar’s ill-erected tower” in Richard II, reflecting the popular mythology of the day.) The medieval Guildhall is there too; so is the Priory Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, and a handful of other places of worship. Remarkably, one will also find the Staple Inn on High Holborn, dating from 1585—the only half-timbered structure to survive the Great Fire (and presumably, in Shakespeare’s day, absent the Vodafone shop). Another landmark would be familiar by name but not by sight: The Royal Exchange had been founded in 1571, though it has been destroyed and rebuilt twice since then.

  Fig. 6.2 Heart of a bustling city: The Dutch artist Claes Visscher created a remarkable panorama of London as it appeared around 1600—the year of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the detail seen here, St. Paul’s Cathedral towers over the city; the Bear Gardens and the Globe Theatre can be seen on the south bank of the Thames. The Bridgeman Art Library, London

  And of course there is St. Paul’s itself; though located on the site of the present-day cathedral, the building we find in Shakespeare’s day bears little resemblance to Christopher Wren’s masterpiece. In fact, the gothic structure was bigger than today’s cathedral, stretching some 585 feet in length; it was the largest church in all of Europe. And it was not just a place of worship, but a place of business, too: Everyone from lawyers to barbers plied their trade within its walls, which would have been plastered with advertising. There were booksellers and other vendors, an endless parade of deliverymen (many of them simply using the cathedral as a shortcut), and of course beggars and pickpockets. Just like today, visitors could pay a fee to climb the stairs and enjoy the view from a balcony near the top of the tower; in Shakespeare’s time, the admission was one penny.

  Should we stroll down to the river, we would find it spanned by only one bridge: the remarkable London Bridge, a wonder of medieval engineering. Built in the late twelfth century, it stands on a series of nineteen stone arches and is lined with multi-storied homes and shops (not to mention the heads of traitors). Beneath it flows the mighty Thames—a far more polluted waterway than its twenty-first-century counterpart. The river carries everything from royal barges to tiny skiffs and rowboats; farther downstream, great sailing ships bring goods from across Europe, the Mediterranean, and beyond. Looming over the river’s southern bank we would also recognize Southwark Cathedral, at this time known as the Church of St. Mary Overy, begun in the thirteenth century and largely unharmed by the passing centuries.

  The city’s crowds, noise, and filth must have had an immediate impact on the young Shakespeare. He would have encountered, first of all, people, of every shape, size, and social class, and speaking a multitude of tongues. As Thomas Dekker described the scene:

  For at one time, in one and the same rank, yea, foot by foot and elbow by elbow, shall you see walking, the knight, the gull, the gallant, the upstart, the gentleman, the clown, the captain, the apple-squire [pimp], the lawyer, the usurer, the citizen, the bankrupt, the scholar, the beggar, the doctor, the idiot, the ruffian, the cheater, the puritan, the cut-throat, the high man, the low man, the true man, and the thief.…

  They came from all over England, seeking work in the bustling capital. Increasingly, they also came from the Continent, including growing numbers of French and Italians, as well as a wave of Dutch immigrants fleeing religious persecution. There were handfuls of Africans and Turks and Jewish conversos—Jews from Spain or Portugal who had converted to Christianity.* London was becoming cosmopolitan, and would remain so. But life was difficult for newcomers, no matter where they were arriving from. As one official observed, the city was home to “great multitudes of people” forced to live “in small rooms, whereof a great part are seen very poor, yea, such as must live by begging, or by worse means … heaped up together, and in a sort smothered with many families of children and servants in one house or small tenement.” (Sewage systems, as we know them today, did not exist, and household waste was emptied directly onto the street.) “This city of London is not only brimful of curiosities,” a Swiss visitor noted in 1599, “but so popular also that one simply cannot walk along the streets for the crowd.”

  Westminster, the site of Court and Parliament, was a separate city, although the road that connected it to London was rapidly being developed. Other neighborhoods that today are considered part of central London were semirural, and sometimes their names tell a story: One went to Notting Hill to gather nuts, while sheep grazed at Shepherd’s Bush; hogs could be found at Hoxton. While some of London’s nooks and crannies must have been repugnant to the eye and nose, it was also, undeniably, a city seething with activity and abuzz with creative energy. There were painters and musicians, poets and playwrights. There was high life and low life and everything in between. One could attend a play one afternoon and watch the spectacle of bear baiting the next—often in the same venue.† Cockfights and dogfights were popular; so were the brothels. Indeed, as Jonathan Bate notes, “the link between the theatre industry and the sex trade was symbiotic.” The prostitutes plied their trade at the playhouses, and George Wilkins—Shakespeare’s coauthor for Pericles—owned a chain of brothels. It was, needless to say, a cutpurse’s paradise.

  “VOLUMES THAT I PRIZE ABOVE MY DUKEDOM”

  Returning to the neighborhood immediately surrounding St. Paul’s, we find what we might call the publishing district, where printers had their workshops and booksellers hawked their wares. As many as twenty booksellers plied their trade in the churchyard itself, and more in Paternoster Row behind the cathedral. (The area remained the center of London’s book trade right up to the Second World War.) Shakespeare surely gleaned many of his ideas as he perused the stalls and leafed through the latest offerings. And what a deluge of offerings it was: Between 1558 and 1579, some 2,760 books were published in London. Between 1580 and 1603, the number rose to 4,370. As Frank Kermode points out, the percentage of the population that could read was small, but there were still enough readers that a popular work could quickly sell out—as was the case with Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, which went through nine editions during the poet’s lifetime. A curious browser could find religious works, poems, plays, romances, and etiquette guides; as we’ve seen, there were also numerous science-themed offerings, including texts on botany, medicine, astronomy, and astrology, along with almanacs and atlases. For those on a budget, there were the penny and halfpenny “ballads,” the forerunners of today’s newspapers. These illustrated, single-sheet publications contained bits of news, stories from the Bible, and, especially, the latest gossip—the more sensational, the better. (Murders, fires, and reports of “monstrous births” were perennial favorites.) These ballad sheets were an industry in their own right; as one observer noted, “Scarce a cat can look out of a gutter but out starts a half-penny chronicler.”

  Among these publications were a few dozen works written by women, includ
ing, from 1589, the first full-length defense of women’s rights, penned by a woman in England (or at least the first such work to have survived). Written in response to a misogynist tract by a man named Thomas Orwin, the pamphlet’s author, who calls herself Jane Anger, chides men for their illogic and argues for female sexual autonomy. A little over a decade later, a woman named Aemilia Lanyer,* who supported herself through her poetry, denounced “evil disposed men, who forgetting they were born of women, nourished of women, and that if it were not by the means of women, they would be quite extinguished out of the world, and a final end of them all, do like Vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred, only to give way and utterance to their want of discretion and goodness.” It is from this period that we also find the first original (as opposed to translated) play written by a woman in English, The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, by Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland. It was published in 1613—by coincidence, the approximate year of Shakespeare’s retirement.

  Shakespeare must have flipped through far more books than he actually purchased; still, the works that provided the backbone of his plays—Holinshed’s Chronicles, Plutarch’s Lives—he surely bought; perhaps Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, too. His grammar-school Latin was more than adequate for enjoying his favorite classical writers. His French and Italian, picked up through friends and from casual reading, were likely passable, though he probably preferred an English translation, when one was available (as it often was). He likely also borrowed books from friends. “From what we know of Shakespeare’s insatiable appetite for books,” writes James Shapiro, “no patron’s collection … could have accommodated his curiosity and range. London’s bookshops were by necessity Shakespeare’s working libraries.… It’s hard to imagine anyone in London more alert to the latest literary trends.”