Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  The same conditions apply to Spenser’s epic of nationhood, The Faerie Queene, which is fashioned after European models. There are passages literally translated from Ariosto’s Gerusalemme Liberata, as well as more general borrowings from European epics or romance. Yet once more Spenser mingles these contemporary or near contemporary European elements with a self-conscious English antiquarianism. Thus he combines a modern vocabulary, among its words being “fierce,” “piercing” and “noblesse,” with such Middle English borrowings as “ydrad,” “troden” and “brast.” He manages to be both ancient and modern at the same time, and so becomes sufficiently representative of the national tradition.

  Spenser’s century was obsessed by its past, just like every succeeding English century. The justification for Tudor governance lay in inheritance or continuity. The Tudor monarchs claimed to draw their lineage from Arthur, and to find their origins even further back in the story of Brutus and of the foundations of England itself. The great displays of heraldry and genealogy come from the Tudor period, as do the history plays of Shakespeare; the image of empire was to include America, the land which Henry VII “causyd furst for to be founde,” but its authenticity was based upon a supposed Arthurian empire which according to Dr. Dee comprised “twenty Kingdomes.” The Arthurian myth of “Britaine” and “this Brytish Monarchie” was thus linked, for example, with the sixteenth-century conquest of Ireland. In The Faerie Queene itself Spenser extols

  Mightie Albion, father of the bold And warlike people, which the Britaine Islands hold

  This too became part of the national myth of Protestantism or what has been called “the Spenserian idiom of Protestant chivalry.” 1 So everything came together, as the Tudor kings asserted power based on historical models and the English genius busily conflated past and present.

  The same propensity is evident in the architectural vogue for the perpendicular Gothic, combined with modern experimentation, to produce the Elizabethan “prodigy houses.” The Faerie Queene itself is a kind of “prodigy house.” It is to be found in the jousts and tilts of the Tudor court, as well as in the bogus crenellation of Tudor castles. It is part of that fascination for lavish externals which characterises Tudor portraits as well as Tudor poetry. This predilection for the past even emerges in the new art of literary criticism. In A Defence of Poesy Sir Philip Sidney numbered Spenser among those “English poets who have done good work” but then remarked of Chaucer that “truly I know not, whether to merveile more, either that he, in that mistie time, could see so clearley, or that wee, in this cleare age, walk so stumblingly after him.” It is a characteristically English tone, revived in every generation. The best work was done in the past, and contemporary writers only “stumble” afterward. It represents, perhaps, a way of suppressing or concealing the powerful disturbances of the present moment. It may be a form of disguise, therefore, or embarrassment. But the truism remains. Nothing excellent or distinguished can happen again. All lies in the past. It is, in truth, an intrinsic part of the English imagination.

  This native tradition has been examined by one Renaissance scholar, Richard Helgerson, who in Forms of Nationhood created his own genealogy of books deriving from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. They are, in order, Camden’s Britannia (1586), Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593), Shakespeare’s history plays, Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611), Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612), and Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England (1624). Their context may be located in a letter which Spenser wrote to Gabriel Harvey in 1580—“Why a’ God’s name, may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language?” The authors named were all born between 1551 and 1564; as Helgerson remarks, “Never before or since have so many works of such magnitude and such long-lasting effect been devoted to England by members of a single generation.”2 With the exception of Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations they were also all attempts to repossess or reformulate the past as an instrument of contemporary polity and understanding; they are evidence of the antiquarianism which seems endemic to the English imagination itself.

  The Faerie Queene itself is a creation of great and elaborate artifice, an allegory and a romance sustained within the smooth and even line; the phrasing is perfectly attuned to the cadence, in the fullness of achieved harmony, so that Spenser seems to let the imagination speak in its own clausal melodies. This measured artifice, so well displayed in other guises by Shakespeare and Milton, is an integral part of English poetry and of the English imagination; it is the artifice of those quintessentially English spirits Puck and Ariel, but it can also acquire the more ponderous tones of Satan in Paradise Lost. The Faerie Queene has been described by a modern scholar as “dream-like” containing “well-known elements of the dream process,”3 and it has haunted English poetry like a dream. Its metre is reawakened by Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and by Shelley in The Revolt of Islam, and its dream is continued by Keats in his “Imitation of Spenser.” The analogy here is with music, the music of the reed or flute, a timeless and enchanted music which like dream can roam over the centuries.

  The Faerie Queene is in Spenser’s own word an epic of “Faeryland,” constructed in six books on symbolic and numerical principles. Certain books concern individual heroes and heroic adventures, such as those of the Red Cross Knight in Book One, while others are interwoven with various narratives and episodes in the manner of English embroidery. Spenser himself deemed its principal figure to be King Arthur who, in the poet’s own words, becomes “the image of a brave knight perfected in the twelve private morall vertues as Aristotle hath devised”; but in truth Arthur is only one element in the heterogeneous mixing of classicism and romance, faery and Christian lore. It is a visionary conception, and what later critics called a Gothic poem or a piece of English tapestry; it possesses its own internal laws of growth and change, so that in a sense it seems to be in the process of writing itself.

  The Faerie Queene is modeled upon continental sources, so that the paradox remains of a quintessentially English production finding its provenance within a larger European culture. Yet it is still notably English in manner and inspiration. It represents a collection of incidents and episodes which emerge effortlessly from one another; it is highly decorative and scenic, eschewing intensity for the sake of variety. It proffers a European euphony and elegance, but manifests itself in the English love for surface variety and decoration. It moves from pathos to “Gothic” horror as if they were good companions, and descends easily from melodrama into allegory. It has been said of romance itself “that it embodied in English the same greatness which had found an alternative form of expression in Latin and Greek” epic4 but, amidst its stylistic variation and exaggeration, is there not a hint of fulsome self-mockery? The success of The Faerie Queene, therefore, lies in the very nature of its Englishness. This vast and elaborate system of words might even be described as the alembic of the English language in all its mixture and variety. It then becomes time to address the question of heterogeneity itself. Its name is Shakespeare.

  Mungrell Tendencies

  William Shakespeare. Seventeenth-century engraving by Martin Droeshout

  CHAPTER 28

  A Short History of Shakespeare

  To write about Shakespeare is to write about everything. We might adopt the opening lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe”:

  Wild air, world-mothering air, Nestling me everywhere

  This capacious movement opens up a vista of

  This needful, never spent, And nursing element . . .

  And so may Shakespeare be compared to the air we breathe. The incalculable number of his phrases and aphorisms that has entered the general vocabulary testifies to a greater truth, that he is now within the fabric of our language. Such is the power and persuasiveness of his work that each day, somewhere in the world, a book is published upo
n his work or upon his influence.

  In 1711 he was described as “the Genius of our Isle,” and the celebration of David Garrick’s “Shakespeare Jubilee” at Stratford in 1769 confirmed his status as “the god of our idolatry.” Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt, all contributed to what became known as “bardolatry.” In the year 2000, Shakespeare was named as the dominant figure in the previous thousand years of English history. The appropriation of Shakespeare as the national genius, therefore, is a striking and significant fact; those who have never read a line of his work consider him to be a token of national consciousness. His being is so fluid that it can acquire the shape of a nation, his personality so little known or understood that it can be endlessly reinterpreted; he has become the “affable familiar ghost” of his sonnet sequence.

  The process may be said to begin with Ben Jonson’s remark that “hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature.” The interpretation has then run as follows. Shakespeare was not overwhelmed by any sense of his own importance. Shakespeare was not self-obsessed. He was not pretentious. It is so benevolent an image that it has since become that which the English wish to form of all their writers. Elements of his biography are then adduced. The fact that he possessed “small Latin and less Greek,” falsely interpreted as an insult on Jonson’s part, has been used to suggest that he was not in any sense an intellectual; this distrust of intellectualism runs very deep within the English sensibility. The evidence that he played no part in the publication of his plays has led to the supposition that he did not take his work in the theatre very “seriously”—that he was not, in other words, in love with his own writing. The possibility that this negligence might be a token of supreme confidence has not really been considered. Shakespeare is fixed forever in the image of modesty and self-effacement, thus embodying or representing the highest virtues to which English writers can aspire.

  The evidence that he collaborated with other dramatists on an ad hoc basis, even at the very end of his career, has in turn lent weight to the depiction of him as supremely pragmatic; the image of the writer as workman, labouring in shifts to produce masterpieces, has great appeal to a native sensibility that always eschews the theoretical for the practical. The fact that the dramatist also earned a great deal of money, and that he was on a small scale a successful speculator, affords equivalent satisfaction.

  Yet Ben Jonson’s words are also open to another interpretation. “Open” itself, as a description of Shakespeare, is infinitely interpretable. What Jonson seems to have meant by his “open and free nature” is a sensibility alert and responsive to other temperaments. The fact that it can also imply sincerity and artlessness serves only to confirm the impression of Shakespeare as candid, straightforward and affable. Yet it ought of course to be remembered that Shakespeare was an actor before he became a dramatist, and that he remained an actor for much of his working life. It may be possible to counterfeit openness. He may have been “free” in his nature, too, because he secretly realized that his genius was inexhaustible.

  All the elements of Shakespeare’s life seem to come together within his drama. The folk-tales of his Warwickshire childhood and his schoolboy reading of Latin literature, for example, combine in his creation of classical enchantments. But his biography provides other conclusions. The “missing years,” when he may have been a tutor in a recusant household, contain the mystery without which no life of a writer is complete. His journey to London and his employment as an actor prepared him for the hard and raucous business of the stage. His early success as a dramatist, far eclipsing any reputation as an actor, directly resulted from his ability to please the crowd. But even though he never stopped writing for that many-headed hydra, he had aspirations towards gentility and coveted his own coat of arms; he was also a successful businessman, who owned property in both London and Stratford. He can never be fully identified with either place, and his hovering between two worlds seems wholly appropriate in a man of such equivocal personality.

  That is why there has been endless speculation about the religion which the playwright espoused; the evidence suggests that his father was a Roman Catholic, and that as a result Shakespeare was brought up in a recusant household while outwardly assenting to the creed of the reformed Protestant Church. It is perhaps worth noting that, in contrast to his contemporary Marlowe or to the Jacobean playwrights, Shakespeare never indulged in “Catholic-baiting.” The representatives of the Roman faith are generally presented in his drama as well-meaning, if sometimes ineffectual, figures. Intriguingly, he also takes two cautious dips into the malarial marshes of dogma. In Henry IV Part One Falstaff jokes with Prince Hal, declaring that he will never be saved if merit be the condition for salvation; in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Princess of France teasingly reproaches a forester for suggesting that her beauty, being a merit, will save her. Both examples clearly refer to the misconception, popular among Protestants of the time, that Catholics believed humankind was saved by its own virtues. The bantering tone, all the more remarkable given the religious tensions of the period, suggests either that Shakespeare took a light view of religious dissension, or that he was indulging in the Persian habit of taqqiyah, the perverse pleasure derived from colluding with one’s oppressors. In any case, Shakespeare’s unwillingness to invoke either anti-Roman rhetoric or Protestant theological prejudice must surely lend weight to the “recusant” theory of his origins.

  The childhood dissimulation, if such it was, may then have had a profound effect upon the burgeoning dramatist. To utter all the phrases of religious orthodoxy, and to believe none of them, would emphasise both the power and the hollowness of words. To be suspended between two worlds, between seeming and being, would enhance any vision of existence as a stage. To hold secretly to a persecuted faith would be a hard lesson in disguising; to be “of an open and free nature” might then paradoxically become an act of concealment. It adds lustre, in any case, to the supposed mystery or impenetrability of Shakespeare’s character; it was the duty of every English Catholic to remain invisible in order to keep his or her faith inviolate.

  All this may be idle supposition, however, and no more than a winter’s tale to satisfy the native appetite for anecdote and biographical speculation. It is more just, and easier of proof, to suggest that the dramatist’s “open” sensibility afforded him access to the wealth of English culture before the Reformation; the mysteries and miracles were a living part of his linguistic and theatrical inheritance. In the ritual drama of his last plays he even seems to mimic, or adopt the postures of, the Catholic Mass.

  Ben Jonson also suggested the extent of Shakespeare’s facility in his remark that “I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, (whatsoever he penned), hee never blotted out line.” Jonson was not necessarily impressed by this facility—“would he had blotted a thousand”—but subsequent commentators have interpreted that easy grace as the token of genius or inspiration. Shakespeare did not know where the words came from; he knew only that they came. By a subtle transition he then became “fancy’s child” or even nature’s child, warbling “his native wood-notes wild,” wherein he became aligned with the pastoral dream of England. His fluency can also be seen as an aspect of his “open” nature, since he became susceptible to the slightest inflection of the language; rare combinations and congregations of words emerged in the process, so that Shakespeare becomes a principle of organisation. It is well known that he depended upon the plots, and even the words, of others; he lifted passages from North and borrowed images from Ovid. There is hardly a play of his which is not established upon some earlier source, historical or dramatic, so that he corresponds to the English archetype; he seems most original when he borrows most freely. Like the language and the nation itself he is altogether receptive, taking up external or foreign constituents and moulding them instinctively to his purpose. This may on occasions become a cause of ambiguity and, as th
e clown admits in As You Like It, “the truest poetrie is the most faining.” The remark is amplified by Olivia in Twelfth Night:

  VIOLA: Alas, I tooke great paines to studie it, and ’tis Poeticall.

  OLIVIA: It is the more like to be feigned, I pray you keep it in.

  Yet the richness and elaboration which these borrowed words disclose are all Shakespeare. Once more the alchemical analogy, in which the process of transformation is as significant as any product of it, seems appropriate. His education at the grammar school in Stratford led him towards Virgil and Erasmus, Horace and Ovid; despite Jonson’s remark about his “small Latin,” he also knew Terence and Plautus and Seneca, from whose dramas he variously borrowed. It is also appropriate that, in an age of cultural transmission from Europe to England, Shakespeare should rely heavily upon a number of translations—among them North’s Plutarch, Chapman’s Homer and Golding’s Ovid. He translated the translations, and rendered them original again.

  It has been said of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece that “in a poem derived mainly from Livy and an annotated edition of Ovid, we have in one stanza echoes from two poems of Ovid, a Biblical parable and the marginal note on it, and possibly from Juvenal’s description of the miseries of old age. It is probable that Shakespeare, here and elsewhere, consulted the Adagia of Erasmus.”1 This is not to mention Shakespeare’s scattered and forgotten reading. Even if the materials were not original, however, their combination was new and surprising. That was once itself the definition of great art. But Shakespeare performed a different miracle. In his act of remembering and restoration, all the resources of his imagination clustered around the words and images so that they were immeasurably strengthened and deepened; they became echoic with past and present life, instinct with powerful intuition which is the verbal equivalent of feeling, at once startlingly new and hauntingly familiar. That is why they resist interpretation or, rather, why they are open to innumerable interpretations: meaning is suspended, or exists only in the forceful interplay of difference. It is as if we were gazing upon language in the act of expressing itself.