William Shakespeare

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: THE FANTASY

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Lyric Theatre, Belfast, 1997

Did Shakespeare really hold rich patrons’ horses outside The Globe? Did he really poach deer on the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlecote, get whipped for it, and pen an abusive ballad in revenge? Did he really gain his entrée into the theatre when the Queen’s Men visited Stratford, and one member of the company, William Knell, was killed in some backstage quarrel? These are just a few of the legends which have grown up around the world’s most elusive genius.

The missing years

Between 1585, when his twins were born, and 1592, when his name is first mentioned in London, little is known for sure about what Shakespeare did, but many have adduced internal evidence from the plays to suggest a number of pursuits. These include page boy, soldier of fortune, butcher and country schoolmaster. Various references in the plays lend weight to the theory that he spent some time in the law, possibly as a lawyer’s clerk. New documentary evidence indicates he had several brushes with the courts, including defaulting on his taxes in both 1599 and 1608. The shipwrecks in The Tempest and Twelfth Night – not to mention his wide knowledge of the world – encourage the notion that he circumnavigated the globe with Francis Drake on the Golden Hind. On the other hand, he once has a couple of characters sail from Padua to Verona, a journey of barely fifty miles over land…

Shakespeare and Burbage

Richard Burbage was one of the greatest actors of the day, and some have even said Shakespeare created the roles of Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and Lear for him. One popular anecdote would have us believe the two men also enjoyed a friendly rivalry: “Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III, there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard III. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard III.”

Will’s will

Shakespeare drew up his will in January 1616 and revised it on 25 March. In the only instance in which she is mentioned by name, Anne Hathaway is bequeathed the couple’s “second best bed”. Some have interpreted this as a slight, and incontrovertible proof that the marriage was unhappy.

The truth is, on the death of the husband, the bulk of his property passed automatically to his widow, and at the time it was the custom to reserve the best bed in the house for guests. The bequest of the second-best bed therefore is an intimate and affectionate one, as this would have been the one husband and wife shared. Yes, Anne Hathaway was eight years older than him, and the fact that their first child Susanna was born barely six months after the wedding suggests they ‘had’ to get married. But this did not prevent them having further children, the twins Hamnet and Judith, later on. And although Shakespeare spent the bulk of his working life away in London, he never ceased to own property in Stratford, and he returned regularly to the town of his birth.

Incidentally, no one knows exactly what Shakespeare died of, but according to John Ward, the vicar of Stratford writing in 1660, “Shakespear, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted.” Note the source – a cautionary tale, such as a vicar might tell as a warning to his flock on the dangers of strong drink and over-indulgence. For who dies of a fever after drinking too much? Was this the closest they could get in the 17th century to a diagnosis of alcohol poisoning?

Will the real Will please stand up?

The movement to discredit Shakespeare as the man who wrote Shakespeare’s plays really got into its stride around the middle of the 19th century. An American, Delia Bacon, claimed her namesake Francis, the great Elizabethan statesman, philosopher and essayist, must have been the true author of the plays as they were far too various and rich to have been the work of a mere yokel from the sticks. She died insane in 1859. Then in1920 a schoolteacher from Gateshead, names J Thomas Looney, declared that the credit should go to Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. His supporters backed up the claim later with the help of a spiritualist who had it from the ghost of Oxford himself that the works were collaborative, with Oxford as the principal writer. Unfortunately, Oxford had died in 1604, some time before the historical Shakespeare hung up his quill.

Other contenders over the years have included the royals Mary, Queen of Scots (who was beheaded in 1587), and Elizabeth I (died 1603); the belted earls of Salisbury, Essex and Southampton; fellow writers Ben Jonson (who wrote eulogies to Shakespeare while he was alive), John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund (Faerie Queene) Spenser; and from the realms of the clergy, Cardinal Wolsey, a team of Jesuits who adopted the name Shakespeare to honour the only English pope Nicolas Breakspear, and an Irish nun.

Perhaps the most serious contender for the honours is Christopher Marlowe. Many claim that because it is so unlikely two such major talents as Marlowe and Shakespeare could have existed at the same time, they must have been one and the same. They were certainly born in the same year and Marlowe showed great precocity as a playwright. But he died, stabbed to death in a tavern brawl in Deptford in 1593 at the age of 29. Some say it was the result of an argument over the bill, others more sinisterly suggest it was connected with Marlowe’s activities as a spy. Whatever the truth of it, the Marlowe faction insist that he did not, in fact, die, that the story was a ruse to allow him to drop out of sight, and he adopted another name in order to write the world’s greatest plays.

Maybe the other name he adopted was Francis Bacon? We may never know.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: THE FACTS

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1997

The man whom history has come to know as playwright William Shakespeare was baptised at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glover and trader in timber who by his association with the guilds rose to the office of high bailiff, or mayor, in 1568. In this capacity he would have been responsible for finding accommodation for the troupes of players visiting the town, and this may have been his son’s first point of contact with the theatre.

Young William was almost certainly educated at the local King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys with which his father had a close connection. He could have been apprenticed in his father’s shop for a while after leaving school at fifteen, but the next surviving record is that of his marriage in November 1582, at the age of eighteen, to 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. They had a daughter Susanna the following May, and two years later, following the birth of their twins Hamnet and Judith, Shakespeare appears to have gone on the boards for the first time, probably joining one or other of the acting companies which came to Stratford at regular intervals.

Whatever he did during the second half of the 1580s, it certainly involved writing for the new public theatres in London, for when Shakespeare’s name next appears it is in a bitter deathbed attack by Robert Greene in 1592. Greene, himself a dramatist, wrote in the pamphlet Greenes Groats-worth of Witte of “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers… in his own conceit the onely Shake-scene in a country”, referring to the fact that whereas all the other playwrights of the time had been educated at university, Shakespeare had the temerity to consider himself able to write for the stage without such an advantage. The pamphlet also parodies a line from Henry VI part 3 which indicates Shakespeare must have written at least part of the trilogy by this date.

He was also engaged on writing poetry and building up a circle of friends. These included the young and wealthy literary patron Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, to whom the poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are dedicated. It is likely that Shakespeare concentrated on poetry rather than plays in the early 1590s as all the London theatres had been closed due to plague.

With the murder of Christopher Marlowe in 1993 and the death of Thomas Kyd the following year, Shakespeare became the most sought-after playwright of his day, appearing as actor and author with London’s leading theatrical group, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He is said, for instance, to have taken the part of the Ghost in Hamlet, though later he had less time for performing and the last role for which there is any record is his appearance in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus in 1603.

In 1596, around the time his son Hamnet died, Shakespeare moved to a house in Bishopsgate, presumably to be near his current place of work, The Theatre, run by James Burbage, father of the troupe’s noted actor Richard. By the following year he was affluent enough to buy New Place, the second largest house in Stratford. Two years later, he was one of a syndicate of actor-shareholders in The Globe at Southwark on the South Bank, rebuilt from the timbers of the old Theatre. By now his reputation was solid; in 1598 a literary handbook by Francis Meres entitled Wit’s Treasury contains this plaudit: “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage.”

In the first decade of the new century Shakespeare lost a substantial part of his family; his father died in 1601, his younger brother Edmund (also an actor) in 1607, and his mother in 1608. At this time he was lodging with a French Huguenot hat-maker named Christopher Mountjoy in Cripplegate, on the corner of Monkwell Street and Silver Street. This was very close to the Blackfriars Theatre, an outdoor playhouse on which his company, now called The King’s Men, had recently taken out a 21-year lease. Living so close to St Paul’s, the playwright found himself at the centre of the English bookselling and publishing trade. It was undoubtedly here that he found the large range of books which provided the sources for so many of his works.

Shakespeare retired from the stage and moved back to his home town in about 1612. On 29 June 1613 The Globe burnt down during a performance of Henry VIII, and although Shakespeare helped pay for the rebuilding he had sold all his shares in the venture by the time of his death. A few years before, he is known to have paid £80 for joint ownership of the Blackfriars Gatehouse. His final years were spent enjoying the life of a modest country gentleman at New Place. He deid on St George’s Day, 23 April (according to tradition, his fifty-second birthday) 1616, leaving ample provision for his wife and family.

Within a few years his former colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell set about collecting his plays from corrupt drafts, prompt copies and pirated versions, and in 1623 these were published for the first time as a group. For succeeding generations it is this, the First Folio, which is Shakespeare’s greatest legacy, and for which Ben Jonson wrote a ringing tribute: “He was not of an age, but for all time!”

PS

The picture illustrating this article is of a statue in the so-called Casa di Giulietta in Verona, Italy. It stands beneath a stone balcony sticking out of the wall, and most of the tourist guides will tell you this was the actual inspiration for the play and the most romantic scene in world literature. They will also tell you that tradition requires you to touch the statue’s breast for luck, which is why in the summer months platoons of grinning fat blokes in T-shirts and shorts queue up to cop a feel so their irrationally tolerant wives can snap a cheeky picture of their beloved getting it on with the bronze effigy of a fictional pre-pubescent teenager.

It is only the better tourist guides who will tell you that there is no ‘House of Juliet’ in Verona, the balcony is an 18th-century add-on - probably part of a vault which once housed a coffin - and the statue’s anatomy has been so ravaged by the sweaty hands of the gullible that the original, which only first appeared in 1969, has now had to be moved inside under cover and the present incumbent of the space is a copy first erected in 2014.

I don’t know why I have such little patience with the imposture. After all, it’s only a bit of fun and the guides have to eat. But to me it’s just something else that feeds unnecessarily into the myth-making, and with Shakespeare I think we’ve already got enough of that to go around. Why not accept the most likely explanation - that he was the right person at the right place at the right time with the right set of skills to set the stage on fire (literally in 1613 when The Globe burnt down during that performance of Henry VIII). Why does anyone feel the need to believe he might have been an aristocrat and not the son of a glover? Why does he need to have been a lawyer, or a teacher, or a soldier or the follower of any other craft or trade or lifestyle whose language and traditions he could easily have picked up and absorbed through study or listening or schmoozing or simply going about life with his eyes and ears open? Why can he not just be the man who wrote the plays? It’s not as if, at this remove, we’re going to be able to reach back through history to shake his hand or pat him on the shoulder to show our appreciation. Would King Lear any more affecting if we knew for sure it had been written by a lord? Would Much Ado About Nothing be any funnier if someone could prove it was written by a woman? The mere fact that his work is so rich that it can provoke such pointless arguments and head-scratching about their provenance four hundred years on merely emphasises his genius and much-vaunted ‘universality’. And in the long run it makes zero difference who wrote them, does it? “The play’s the thing” after all. Let’s just leave it at that.