The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare

Robert Shaughnessy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136855030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Demystifying and contextualising Shakespeare for the twenty-first century, this book offers both an introduction to the subject for beginners as well as an invaluable resource for more experienced Shakespeareans.

In this friendly, structured guide, Robert Shaughnessy:

• 
  
  

• introduces Shakespeare's life and works in context, providing crucial historical background
• looks at each of Shakespeare's plays in turn, considering issues of historical context, contemporary criticism and performance history
• provides detailed discussion of twentieth-century Shakespearean criticism, exploring the theories, debates and discoveries that shape our understanding of Shakespeare today
• looks at contemporary performances of Shakespeare on stage and screen
• provides further critical reading by play
• outlines detailed chronologies of Shakespeare's life and works and also of twentieth-century criticism

The companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/shaughnessy contains student-focused materials and resources, including an interactive timeline and annotated weblinks.

Part I

Life and contexts

1 Introduction

Son of Stratford

Each year, on the Saturday nearest to 23 April, the otherwise unremarkable English Midlands town of Stratford-upon-Avon hosts a birthday celebration in honour of its most renowned former inhabitant. In 2009, this began at 9.45 a.m. with a reception at the Shakespeare Centre adjacent to the property known as Shakespeare's Birthplace, hosted by the President of the Shakespeare Birthday Celebrations, the veteran Shakespearean actor Sir Donald Sinden. At 10.30 a.m., a procession departed from the steps of the Birthplace, led by Sir Donald and featuring amongst its numbers Stratford civic dignitaries, representatives of Birmingham, Warwick, London, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, pupils from local schools, members of the theatre profession and delegations from around the world that included the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, the High Commissioner for the Bahamas, the Political and Press Secretary for Ireland, and the Ambassadors of Kazakhstan, El Salvador, Serbia and China. It fell to the last of these to carry out the task of addressing the several hundred guests in attendance at the Birthday Luncheon, an event lasting nearly four hours, on the topic of ‘Worldwide Appreciation of Shakespeare’.

The parade proceeded along Henley Street and down Bridge Street, where it paused for the ceremony of the unfurling of the flags of the nations, institutions and interest groups represented by the parade. Onwards, with each member of the parade clutching floral tributes that ranged from single stems to lavish wreaths, the procession wound its way past bemused Stratford townspeople, up Sheep Street, along Chapel Street and past the site of the house that Shakespeare bought in 1597, New Place. It passed the King Edward VI Grammar School and Mason Croft, home of the University of Birmingham's postgraduate outpost, the Shakespeare Institute, down Old Tow, alongside Hall's Croft (home of Shakespeare's daughter, Susanna), finally to arrive at the Holy Trinity Church. Here members of the procession were invited to add their flora and assorted greenery to a growing pile at the base of the monument to the figure in whose memory the whole event had been orchestrated. Reminiscent simultaneously of a christening, a wedding and a funeral (for this birthday is also a day of death), the celebration traces commemoration as a collective pedestrian act, for one day a year transforming the sites of shopping and sauntering into what is both a mobile shrine and a cradle of possibilities, and into a biographical narrative which begins and ends with the gift of flowers, an act in Shakespeare associated both with the furthest reaches of madness (Ophelia, Lear) and profoundly redemptive grace (Perdita): ‘There's rosemary, that's for remembrance’ (Hamlet, 4.5.173); ‘Here's flowers for you’ (Winter's Tale, 4.4.103).

Most of us would agree to recognise the procession as an enactment of a secular pilgrimage ritual, undertaking a journey that literally takes its participants in Shakespeare's footsteps from the womb to the tomb. The procession thus traces the arc of a biographical narrative that acknowledges key markers of the life (home, school, funerary monument) as well as acknowledging a global cultural afterlife. What might provoke disagreement, however, is what significance to attach to the extraordinary emotional and cultural investment that the event appears to represent. For the idealist, the gathering is a tribute to a spirit of genius capable of transcending history and geography to speak across and beyond cultural differences; for the cynic, the ceremony is a particularly lavish and sentimental perpetuation of the myth of that very transcendence. Complicating the meanings of the event, in 2009, was the fact that in this year, for the first time, the procession organisers expanded what had been for many years a rather solemn, dogged (and rather dull) trudge through the streets of Stratford into an extravaganza that included stunts, spectacle, street entertainers and a wide variety of local community groups on parade.

Although, sadly, the plan to mount a Royal Shakespeare Company actor, wrapped in the flag of St George, astride one of six motorcycles and send him down Bridge Street declaiming lines from Henry V had to be called off for safety reasons, there was much else for the crowds that had turned out to witness the event to experience. Attractions included stiltwalkers and skateboarders, extras in Elizabethan fancy dress, displays of salsa and line dancing, belly-dancing and Japanese fan dancing, and ‘Gramophone Man’, whose act consists of playing ‘music from 1902 to 1960 on a wind-up gramophone’. If it was not immediately obvious what some of this had to do with the nominal meaning of the procession, it was undoubtedly lively. Moreover, it formed the centrepiece of a long weekend of Shakespeare-themed activities around Stratford that had begun with the unveiling of what was claimed to be a newly discovered likeness of Shakespeare, the Cobbe portrait, and which included Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) actors reciting sonnets and offering masterclasses, the Shakespeare Marathon and half-Marathon, performances of Hamlet: Sword of Vengeance, an adaptation in Mandarin Chinese presented by the Beijing Performing Arts School at the Civic Hall, and Shakespearean face-painting for the under-fives in the grounds of New Place.

The rich variety of activities on offer is at once a testimony to the persistence and the power of Shakespeare, the man, the works and the myth, in twenty-first-century culture, and a sign of the ingenuity and the effort that need to be expended in order to persuade the consumers of everyday culture of his, its and their continuing vitality: ostensibly the focus and meaning of the Birthday festivities, Shakespeare is as much pretext as text and context, and the beneficiary of an afterlife which, depending upon which angle you consider it from, is either joyously inevitable or embarrassingly prolonged.

Shakespeare's biographies

We do not need the annual Birthday celebration to remind us that writing the life of Shakespeare is so much more than a matter of re-examining the documentary record and a legacy of myth: as the story of a local boy made about as good as it is possible to get, it is perhaps one of the greatest, and certainly one of the most enduring, of literary-biographical fables. Yet the desire that is expressed every April in Stratford to follow Shakespeare's tracks is to a certain extent provoked by his own evident wish to cover them: the anniversary of 23 April is a public affirmation of an early modern life which, as far as we can tell, appears to have been lived as privately as possible. Shakespeare's burial site is marked by the bust that was erected by Stratford residents after his death and a tombstone bearing a warning:

Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here!
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.

The sentiments are conventional, formulaic even; as S. Schoenbaum, author of the definitive biography of Shakespeare's biographers, notes, the curse is intended to descend on the sexton, ‘who sometimes had to dig up an old grave in the parish church in order to make room for the newly deceased’ (1991: 3).

Whether or not Shakespeare was the composer of these lines, the epitaph seems to contain a veiled warning for the prospective biographer who would hope to ‘dig the dust’ of their subject's time on this planet. Posthumously memorialising a will to rest undisturbed, and the legacy of his plays and poems aside, Shakespeare left behind a fair few documentary traces of his own life, but little that can be convincingly mined for clues as to how those works came into being. This has not prevented generations of biographers from trying, of course: the first biography, by Nicholas Rowe, was written in 1709 and there have been hundreds since. At the time of writing, the most recent of these include Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life (1999); Anthony Holden's William Shakespeare (1999); Katharine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare (2001); Michael Wood's In Search of Shakespeare (2003, published as a tie-in with a BBC mini-series); the longest entry, at nearly 40,000 words, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Holland 2004); Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World (2004); Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare (2005); James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005); Stanley Wells's Shakespeare and Co. (2006); Bill Bryson's Shakespeare (2007); Charles Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (2007); Germaine Greer's Shakespeare's Wife (2007); and Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age (2008).

Even among mainstream biographers the Shakespeares that are constructed are too many and varied to even begin to summarise here (and out of courtesy to the reader we shall here just once acknowledge, and pass over, the tradition of biographical fantasy that disputes the plain fact that the glover's son from Stratford was author of the works attributed to him; for the definitive account of this topic, see James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? [2010]). In Greenblatt's account, he was a man whose ‘root perception of existence’ was ‘his understanding of what could be said and what should remain unspoken, his preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled’, and who, at the end of his life, ‘had never found or could never realize the love of which he wrote and dreamed so powerfully’ (2004: 324, 388). For Katharine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare ended his days ‘ill and furiously angry with those around him … perhaps almost mad with anger’ (2001: 277). As a biographical subject, perhaps more than any other, Shakespeare focuses the preoccupations of biographers who, knowingly or not, construct him in their own image. Biographical writing about Shakespeare, which ranges from highly specialised scholarship to trade publication, always involves a degree of legitimate speculation, and sometimes blatant fictionalisation. The gaps and silences in Shakespeare's life have also invited the attentions of novelists, playwrights and film-makers, who can be less circumspect about the relations they construct between life and works, and who can be far more adventurously speculative about Shakespeare's professional career, his political allegiances and social affiliations, his personal relationships and, above all, his sexuality.

The seemingly irresistible appeal of Shakespeare as a subject of factual and fictional biography stems not only from the matchless eloquence, lyricism, emotional depth and range of his writings but also from the apparent disparity between them and the terseness of a biographical archive comprised mostly of contemporary allusions by fellow writers, legal documents, records of financial transactions and parish records, which give a rather fuller account of Shakespeare as a mildly litigious businessman than as a creative artist. The aim of this chapter is not to add to the ever-expanding corpus of Shakespearean life writing, and certainly not to contribute a further portfolio of speculations about the author and his works, but, in the space available, simply to provide the outlines of the life as indicated by the documentary records, whilst also, where there are lacunae in the records that seem to invite significant further investigation, to direct readers towards their fuller treatment elsewhere. It also aims to flesh out the sketch by dealing more closely with the contexts, both professional and cultural, in which that life and work took shape.

2 Shakespeare's early years

As we have seen, for the purposes of Stratford-upon-Avon's Birthday Celebration, and according to the general understanding, William Shakespeare was born on 23 April 1564. Given Shakespeare's standing since the eighteenth century as a patriotic icon, this is a fitting assumption, being the feast day of England's patron, St George. It is also a reasonable one: although the precise date of his birth is not recorded, he was baptised, three days later, as was customary, on 26 April. William was the third child of John Shakespeare (c.1530–1601) and Mary Arden (d. 1608), having been preceded by two sisters who died in infancy, Joan (1558–c.1560) and Margaret (1562–63); he was followed by two sisters, Joan (1569–1646) and Anne (1571–79), and three brothers: Gilbert (1566–1612), Richard (1574–1613) and Edmund (1580–1607). The next time William is mentioned in the records is in 1582, in a licence issued on 27 November for his marriage to Anne Hathaway (1555/6–1623), who was pregnant at the time with their first child, Susanna (baptised on 26 May 1583). In the eighteen years between his own baptism and marriage nothing is known of his doings and whereabouts, although these have inevitably attracted a great deal of speculation.

Schooling

It is generally assumed that, as the son of an alderman, William was educated at Stratford's grammar school, the New King's School, from the ages of seven to fifteen. There he would been the beneficiary of a daily regime that began at 6 a.m., studying, primarily, Latin language and literature and acquiring formal training in the skills of rhetoric, composition, memorisation and argument. At grammar school, William would have made acquaintance with the classical canon whose traces are everywhere evident in his writing: the works of Cicero, Erasmus, Virgil, Horace and Ovid (especially his Metamorphoses, in the Latin original but also in Arthur Golding's [c.1536–c.1605] widely read English translation of 1567). In school and at Holy Trinity Church he would also have imbibed the language, and the lessons, of the Geneva and Bishops’ Bibles, published in 1560 and 1568 respectively, the Book of Common Prayer (1549) and the Book of Homilies (1547).

Shakespeare's attitude towards his schooling can only be guessed at; but a flavour of it can be caught in an apparently gratuitous episode in The Merry Wives of Windsor (written around 1597), the only one of Shakespeare's plays to be set in contemporary England, in which a schoolboy named William is tested by the Welsh pedagogue Sir Hugh Evans within earshot of the housekeeper Mistress Quickly:

EVANS What is ‘lapis’, William?
WILLIAM A stone.
EVANS And what is ‘a stone’, William? WILLIAM A pebble.
EVANS No, it is ‘lapis’. I pray you remember in your prain.
WILLIAM ‘Lapis’.

(The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4.1.26–31)

The questions and responses quote virtually verbatim the government-prescribed textbook Short Introduction of Grammar (1540), by William Lily (c.1468–1522); in this instance, however, the chaste sobriety of the all-male Tudor grammar school classroom is unravelled when William's responses provoke Mistress Quickly to unleash a series of obscene puns. School may also have provided opportunities for amateur dramatics in the form of readings of Roman comedy (Plautus and Terence) and tragedy (Seneca), which respectively provided the templates for early works such as The Comedy of Errors (first performed in 1594) and Titus Andronicus (published 1595).

Whether or not William completed his education is not known: the question of whether he did so or not is prompted by evidence of a change in his family circumstances which, most biographers agree, can hardly have failed to have had a significant impact upon him both personally and, perhaps, artistically. For his first decade of married life, William's father, John Shakespeare, was a relatively successful and prosperous local businessman who enjoyed property interests in and around Stratford, including the substantial house on Henley Street which provides the point of departure for the Birthday parade; he was also the holder of a number of increasingly important municipal offices: he was appointed as an alderman in 1565 and as bailiff in 1568, rising to the position of chief alderman and deputy bailiff in 1571. But in 1577, the man who had always been scrupulous in his attendance at council meetings stopped going to them altogether, an action that was only the first stage of a pattern of absenteeism and evasion that would persist long term. John Shakespeare had already been in trouble in 1570 for illegally charging interest on a loan to a business partner; in 1572 he was charged with ‘brogging’, the illegal selling of wool (one of the by-products of his trade as a glover).

In 1576, the Queen's Privy Council acted to counter the growing and serious problem of wool shortages by ordering a temporary suspension of all wool trading, and then calling in all broggers and requiring them to pledge £100 as security against their continuing their illegal activities. Whether or not John Shakespeare was in financial difficulties by this stage, this was a substantial sum, and biographers have generally marked this moment as ‘a turning-point for the Shakespeare family’ (Honan 1999: 39). John Shakespeare was relieved of his responsibility of contributing to poor relief and military levies; in 1579 he mortgaged property inherited by his wife and then forfeited it when he was unable to repay the debt a year later. In 1592, he was among those listed as having failed to attend church regularly, as the commissioners speculated, ‘for fear of process for debt’ (Schoenbaum 1977: 42).

Religion and resistance

John Shakespeare's non-attendance at church has been the subject of much speculation, in that it raises questions about not only his own religious beliefs and allegiances but those of his son also. The Stratford-upon-Avon in which William Shakespeare was born and raised had its share of adherents to the Catholicism that had been imposed during the brief reign of Mary Tudor (1516–58, reigned 1553–58) and which, with the accession of Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) in 1558, and the Acts of Uniformity and of Supremacy in 1559, had been supplanted by the reinstatement of Anglican Protestantism as the state religion. In ...