Shakespeare

by Shakespeare

  Shakespeare proceeded to intensify the drama of Plutarch’s central characters. There is a spareness in the language that is reminiscent of Julius Caesar, another Roman play in which a mighty figure is raised and pulled down. There are passages, however, where he seems undecided between verse and prose; in the cauldron of creation, they were indistinguishable. He had also become more interested in the theatrical possibilities of a particular flaw or weakness in character, whether amorousness in Antony or pride in Coriolanus. Yet as with all of Shakespeare’s most important figures, Coriolanus is conceived in ambiguity. The rules or standards of interpretation are never clear, and there is no possibility of any final judgement. Like his maker, he remains opaque. He exists; he sings his high chant; and then he is ended.

  Yet the play is affected by all the pressures of the time. The great insurrection in the Midlands of the previous year had been bloodily suppressed, but the summer of 1608 was marked by dearth and famine. On 2 June the king issued “A Proclamation for the preuenting and remedying of the dearth of Graine, and other Victuals” but it had only limited effectiveness. The people were starving from want of bread, and it is not at all surprising that the first scene of Coriolanus concerns the plight of the Roman citizens who are “all resolu’d rather to dy then to famish.” The first citizen declares that they must “revenge this with our Pikes, ere we become Rakes. For the Gods know, I speake this in hunger for Bread, not in thirst for Reuenge”(19-22). Yet it would be wrong to consider Shakespeare as fundamentally sympathetic to their cause. In Coriolanus the crowd is portrayed as fickle and ever changeable, as light and as variable as the wind. In what seems to be an unconscious token of his attitude Shakespeare writes the stage-direction, “Enter a rabble of Plebeians.” They are contrasted with the Roman nobles who in a fit of anachronism he calls “all the Gentry.” The tribunes of the people are not treated by Shakespeare with any great respect, either. His opinion was shared by King James, who castigated the parliamentarians who failed to pass his expenses as “Tribunes of the people, whose mouths could not be stopped.”3 As a servant of the king, too, Shakespeare could not be seen to condone insurrection or rebellion. All of his instincts would in any case have been against it. He could draw attention to the plight of the poorer people without bread, while at the same time firmly withholding assent from their campaign of violence. That is what happens in Coriolanus.

  There are other significant aspects to the play’s topicality. The first citizen launches a direct assault upon hoarding, and upon those who “Suffer vs to famish, and their Store-houses cramm’d with Graine”(76-77). It so happens that Shakespeare himself had already been noted for the storage of 80 bushels of malt at New Place, as we have seen, and there is no reason to doubt that he continued to store or hoard quantities of corn or malt. So through the irate voice of the first citizen he adverts to himself. It is a most extraordinary act of theatrical impersonality, suggesting very forcefully that his imagination was not violated by sentiment of any kind. He could even see himself without fellow feeling. When it is also noticed that some of the charges against the Midlands rioters are here replicated as charges against the nobleman, Coriolanus, then we realise that the events of the day have been displaced and reordered in an immense act of creative endeavour. Everything is changed. It is not a question of impartiality, or of refusing to take sides. It is a natural and instinctive process of the imagination. It is not a matter of determining where Shakespeare’s sympathies lie, weighing up the relative merits of the people and the senatorial aristocracy. It is a question of recognising that Shakespeare had no sympathies at all. There is no need to “take sides” when the characters are doing it for you.

  Which is as much as to say that his sympathies, such as they were, lay entirely with the unfolding of the drama. It might even be suggested that the food riots at the beginning of the play (not present in the source, which merely describes the popular clamour of the Romans against usury) may simply have been Shakespeare’s way of arresting the attention of his audience. It was a way of allowing them access to the world of ancient Rome. It was a way of gaining their imaginative assent by presenting something topical and familiar. Certainly the theme of dearth disappears from the gathering drama. Once it had achieved its purpose, it was forgotten. It is an important token of Shakespeare’s true response to the world, which may well have been one of utter calmness and even of disinterest.

  It has sometimes been surmised that he treats Coriolanus himself with a respect not untinged with admiration. He seems to be aware of his follies but forgives them for the sake of the character he presents to the audience. And that is the important point. The dramatist is intent upon presenting a character of power. Individual power is theatrical. Power misused and abused is also dramatic. Coriolanus is a thing of power; when he ceases to be that, he ceases to exist. That is the only reason Shakespeare chose him out of Plutarch. In a very interesting essay on Coriolanus William Hazlitt asserts that “the imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty … which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion.” Thus poetry puts “the one above the infinite many, might before right.”4 So the position of Coriolanus, reviled by the mass and exiled from Rome only to vow a terrible vengeance, is infinitely dramatic and elicits from Shakespeare some of his finest poetry.

  CHAPTER 83. And Sorrow Ebs, Being Blown with Wind of Words

  One of the most powerful figures in Coriolanus is the mother of the eponymous hero, Volumnia, who has sometimes been considered to be a portrait of Shakespeare’s own mother. One Danish critic, Georg Brandes, described Volumnia as the “sublime mother-form.”1 By curious coincidence Mary Arden died in the late summer of 1608, even as Coriolanus was being written, and on 9 September was buried in the parish church. She had outlived her husband and four of her children; whether the evident success of her oldest son compensated for the losses among her other children, is an open question. She had seen him rise to eminence in his dual profession as actor and writer, and purchase one of the grandest houses in the town. There is every reason to believe that she was proud of his achievements, and perhaps somewhat over-awed by them. We may recall here the admonitory words of Coriolanus to himself, that he must stand (2946-7)

  As if a man were Author of himself,

  And knew no other kin.

  His mother had been occupying the old house in Henley Street together with Shakespeare’s sister, Joan Hart, who continued to live there after Shakespeare’s own death.

  Shakespeare must have visited his mother there before her death. It has even been suggested that Coriolanus was written at Stratford because of the large supply of stage-directions in the published text. Thus there is written, “In this Mutinie, the Tribunes, the Aediles and the People are beat in” and “Martius followes them to gates, and is shut in.” The argument postulates that he did not intend to be present for any of the rehearsals of the first performances, and so had to be more than usually explicit in his directions for the actors. It is a possible circumstance.

  Just before his mother’s death Shakespeare sued a Stratford neighbour, John Addenbrooke, for debt in the borough court; the sum of £6 was not forthcoming and so Shakespeare sued Addenbrooke’s “surety” for the money. The case continued for ten months, a clear sign of Shakespeare’s determination in such matters. In October he stood as godfather to the infant son of the alderman, Henry Walker, who was christened as William; he left the child a bequest in his will. It is important to note that Shakespeare could be accepted as a godfather only if he had outwardly conformed to the Church of England. There were clear rules on this matter, particularly since the godfather was charged with the spiritual education of the child. No nonconformist or recusant would have been permitted in that role. Before the ceremony, Shakespeare would also have received holy communion as a token of his orthodox faith. As the child of a recusant household, attached to the old faith but conforming to the observances of the new, he would have grown up with a prof
ound sense of doubt. That is why ambiguity became one of the informing principles of his art. And why should it not be a mark of his behaviour in the world?

  This raises the vexed question of his religion, endlessly debated through the centuries. It is true that he used the language and the structure of the old faith in his drama, but that does not imply that he espoused Catholicism. His parents are likely to have been of the old faith, but he did not necessarily take it with him into his adulthood. The old religion was part of the landscape of his imagination, not of his belief. As Thomas Carlyle stated, “this glorious Elizabethan Era with its Shakspeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages.”2

  There have been many studies of the association between Catholicism and the theatre itself, at the time “most of our present English actors (as I am credibly informed) being professed Papists.” 3 William Prynne’s asseveration does not help to untangle Shakespeare’s private allegiances, however, and at most suggests that as an actor and dramatist he might have evinced a certain sympathy with the old faith. It must be said that there are a large number of friars and nuns, handled with gentle circumspection, within his drama; his contemporaries, in contrast, tended to treat them as an object of scorn or obloquy. There are also incidental references to Catholic rituals, services and beliefs that suggest some previous acquaintance with them; there are allusions to purgatory, to holy water, to the sacrament of penance, to the Blessed Virgin, and so on. They are all perfectly explicable on the understanding that the young Shakespeare was brought up in a household that professed the old faith. But his interest in ritual and sacramental observance was also part of his interest in the theatre. It was an aspect of his concern for the panoply of power, whether sacred or spiritual. He summons the pagan deities, for example, as frequently as he invokes the Christian God.

  His own adult beliefs are much more difficult to estimate. It is possible that he was, in the language of the period, a “church papist”; he outwardly conformed, as in the ceremony of christening, but secretly remained a Catholic. This was a perfectly conventional stance at the time. There is also the statement, by Richard Davies, the Archdeacon of Coventry, that he “dyed a papist.”4 The archdeacon was a zealous Anglican, and would not have passed on this report with any great pleasure. It is not known how he received the information, but it is not necessarily inauthentic. It can be taken to mean that Shakespeare was given the sacrament of extreme unction at the time of his death. But this may have been at the instigation, or even the insistence, of his recusant family. He may have been too weak and too sick to comprehend the matter. Yet it is also sometimes the case that lapsed or quondam Catholics will, in extremis, embrace the possibility of redemption.

  So there is only evidence by default. He seems to have avoided attending Anglican worship. There is no record for him in the token books (to prove that he had received holy communion) or vestry minute books of Southwark; he may have moved in with the Mount joys since, as a member of a Huguenot household, he was not bound to attend the Anglican service. But, on the other hand, there is also no reference to him in any of the prolific records of Catholic recusants. He made no protest and incurred no fine. Once more he becomes invisible. That invisibility, or ambiguity, is reflected in his work itself. Despite the myriad allusions to the old faith, Shakespeare in no sense declares himself. In the tragedies, for example, the religious imperatives of piety and consolation are withheld; these are worlds with no god. He never adverts to any particular religious controversy, unlike the satirists of the contemporaneous theatre. It should be added that there is also very little sign of religious sensibility in Elizabethan drama as a whole; it is as if the dramaturge, having been banished from temple and church, shook the dust from his feet and built his own temple in the unhallowed ground without. The safest and most likely conclusion, however, must be that despite his manifold Catholic connections Shakespeare professed no particular faith. The church bells did not summon him to worship. They reminded him of decay and of time past. Just as he was a man without opinions, so he was a man without beliefs. He subdued his nature to whatever in the drama confronted him. He was, in that sense, above faith.

  Nevertheless he was godfather in this year to another William, baptised in the font of Stratford Church. William Greene was the child of Thomas and Laetitia Greene, who were in fact residing at New Place during this period. Thomas Greene was a local lawyer who had been educated at the Middle Temple, an institution with which Shakespeare was very well acquainted, and he had moved to Stratford in 1601. At some point he moved with his wife into New Place as a tenant, sharing the household with Anne Shakespeare and her daughters. It may have been a way for Shakespeare of easing the burden of costs. The fact that they named their son William is, in any case, an indication of harmony with the master of the house.

  The continuance of the plague meant that, in the summer and autumn of 1608, the King’s Men were obliged to tour the provinces with their new plays. They were at Coventry at the end of October, and also at Marlborough, but the rest of their progress is unknown. They were back in London, however, for the court performances of that year. They performed twelve plays at Whitehall, but the titles are not recorded.

  It is more than likely that Shakespeare’s most recent plays, Pericles and Coriolanus, were among them. But there is one other candidate for inclusion in this period. Timon of Athens is a play of strange clamour and majesty. It is the story of a man whose lavish generosity is not reciprocated and who, as a result, falls into a state of savage misanthropy. It has been suggested that it comes close to a fable or morality play, with Timon as a type rather than a character. But that is to misinterpret Shakespeare’s subtlety. There is no conflict here between good and evil, only between variously mixed natures.

  The play cannot be securely dated. It is one of those free-floating dramas, without much contemporary reference and no record of contemporary performance, which could be placed anywhere in the early seventeenth century. It may be unfinished or have been abandoned. There are passages of dialogue that need revision, and certain elements of the plot are left suspended. His texts were always in a fluid and incomplete state but, to paraphrase Animal Farm, some are more incomplete than others. It is also possible that it represents a “first draft” by the dramatist, and that he was content to leave it at that point. There is also a theory that the play survives at various stages of composition, with some scenes “roughed out” and others almost finished. If that is the case, then it is a Shakespearian document of the utmost interest; it shows, as it were, the painterly “washes” of Shakespeare’s imagination. On this occasion he created a structure and sketched out the balance of plot and sub-plot, adding incident and detail, but he paid relatively little attention to the role of the minor characters. None of these observations necessarily implies that the play was not performed. Even in its incomplete state it is a fluent and powerful piece of theatre. There is no record of any contemporary productions, but that in itself is not conclusive.

  The immediate source of the play was once more North’s translation of Plutarch, and indirectly we may see Shakespeare’s process of association. The story of Timon is related in Plutarch’s life of Antony, which Shakespeare studied for Antony and Cleopatra. In Plutarch’s work Alcibiades is the figure complementary to Coriolanus, the subject of Shakespeare’s previous drama. Alcibiades plays a large part in Timon of Athens. So there is a set of connections leading Shakespeare forward. He moved from one classical figure to another, all part of the immediate arena of his imaginative concerns. He was also influenced by an academic comedy, entitled Timon, which might have been performed at the Inns of Court. This drama may have played some part in the composition of King Lear as well, and so acted as a powerful spur to Shakespeare’s imagination.

  It is also surmised that Timon of Athens was in part the result of a collaboration with the young dramatist Thomas Middleton, who by his mid-twenties was already
well known for his verse and for his satirical city comedies. Shakespeare’s collaboration with Middleton resembled that with a co-author, perhaps George Wilkins, over Pericles. Shakespeare was happy to contribute scenes, or whole acts, while leaving intact the somewhat jejune work of his collaborators. It is as if he did not care very much about the finished article, as long as it was performable. In this respect he was acting as a professional man of the theatre rather than as an “artist” in the modern sense. It may well be that each dramatist wrote his selection of scenes independently, and that they were brought together only in the process of rehearsal. For this reason his colleagues did not originally intend to place Timon of Athens in the Folio edition of his collected plays. It was only included when a sudden gap (the result of problems over the publication of Troilus and Cressida) had to be filled. The King’s Men did not consider the play to be really “by” Shakespeare. As a result of its placing in the Folio, however, it has remained forever in the canon. The legacy and reputation of even the most eminent writers can sometimes be secured by accident.

  CHAPTER 84. And Beautie Making Beautifull Old Rime

  The plague raged through London for the entire year of 1609. Dekker lamented the condition of the period when “Pleasure itself finds now no pleasure but in sighing and bewayling the Miseries of the Time.” He recorded that “play-houses stand (like Tavernes that have cast out their Maisters) the dores locked up, the Flagges (like their Bushes) taken down; or rather like houses lately infected, from whence the affrighted dwellers are fled, in hope to live better in the Country.” And he added that “Playing vacations are diseases now as common and as hurtful to them as the Foul Evil to a Northern Man or the Pox to a Frenchman.”1 The King’s Men were once more on a provincial tour to escape the miasma of the capital. They visited, among other places, Ipswich, New Romney and Hythe. For much of this journey they sailed around the coast.