30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (33 page)

Shakespeare's most extensive description of Elizabeth comes long after her death. What has been identified as Jacobean nostalgia for the golden age of Elizabeth is a feature of a number of plays of the early seventeenth century, including Samuel Rowley's
When You See Me You Know Me
, based on the events of Henry VIII's reign, and Thomas Heywood's
If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody
, a popular dramatic account of Elizabeth's life. Shakespeare's contribution to this genre is his late romance-history,
Henry VIII
or
All Is True
, co-authored with John Fletcher. This pageant-like play ends with the spectacular staging of the infant Elizabeth's christening, at which Archbishop Cranmer heralds “this royal infant” as a “maiden phoenix,” who “promises / Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings / Which time shall bring to ripeness.” With a weather eye to the current monarch, however, and the patron of the company now known as the King's Men, Shakespeare writes, as the climax of Cranmer's speech, of Elizabeth's successor James: “Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, / His honour and the greatness of his name / Shall be, and make new nations.” (5.4.17–52).

In fact James's direct patronage of the theater company marks a significant new phase in the relationship between Shakespeare and the monarchy, and a number of the plays of the early years of his reign, including
Macbeth
and
King Lear
, can be seen to speak directly to James's interests. James was a published writer—of poetry, including sonnets, and of tracts on witchcraft, on political philosophy, and on the newfangled import tobacco. We can see Shakespeare tracking this published output very attentively in his plays for the newly christened King's Men. In
Measure for Measure
, for instance, the retiring Duke's dislike of the city crowds echoes the new king's own reported shyness. In
Othello
, Shakespeare relocates the general and his bride to Cyprus, scene of the sea battle of Lepanto between the Ottoman Empire and a coalition of Catholic states about which James had written a long poem. In
Macbeth
Shakespeare quarries and reshapes one of the few episodes of Scottish history that could be acceptable both to London theater audiences used to anti-Scottish sentiment and to the Scottish king. His alterations to his source material develop the role of the witches—a topic fascinating to James—and establish a detoxified Banquo as the moral counterweight to Macbeth's ambition—James traced his own ancestry from Banquo who, in the historical sources, was originally Macbeth's murderous accomplice. In
King Lear
James's attempts to unite England and Scotland are shadowed in the play's concern with the “division of the kingdom” (1.1.3–4). In
Antony and Cleopatra
the concern with royal female tombs may be influenced by James's commissioning of monuments to Elizabeth and to his mother Mary Queen of Scots in Westminster Abbey.

Just as Shakespeare the playwright showed a great interest in his royal patron, there is far more evidence that James was actively interested in drama than that Elizabeth was, although he was reputed to enjoy only short plays. In addition to his patronage of the playing company, masques, the elaborately operatic and allegorical dramatic form so enjoyed by the court, flourished during his reign. Why, then, do we not have the myth that James loved Shakespeare's plays? Simply because James is a less iconic figure. If the myth about Elizabeth's court is about the patriotic Golden Age of the Virgin Queen, James's court has been caricatured as sleazy, rife with sexual and political scandal, and structured around the monarch's close relationships with male favorites. Our investment in the frisson of romance between dashing male playwright and passionate Virgin Queen has made a more attractive Elizabethan myth, and, despite the fact that half of Shakespeare's career was under James's rule, Shakespeare tends always to be seen as an Elizabethan phenomenon, along with Drake playing bowls as the Armada approaches and gallant gestures with cloaks over puddles. No one has made a film about the relationship between Shakespeare and James, or forged letters between them, although Ben Jonson's elegy on Shakespeare apostrophizes that “Sweet swan of Avon! What a sight it were / To see thee in our waters yet appear. And make those flights upon the banks of Thames / That so did take Eliza and our James.”

But, like the film director John Madden and the forger William-Henry Ireland, we are still on the lookout for evidence of the bond between Shakespeare and Elizabeth. The 2007 Royal Shakespeare Company
Collected Works
, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, was the first major edition to include a poem titled in its manuscript form “To ye Q. by ye players,” an epilogue to a court performance of an unknown play in 1599. The eighteen-line poem begins “As the dial hand tells o'er / The same hours it had before,” and addresses the “mighty Queen” as a perpetual presence with the wish: “That the children of these lords / Sitting at your council boards, / May be grave and aged seen, / Of her that was their fathers' queen.” Bate describes the attribution of the poem as “absolutely secure,” and in a newspaper trail for the edition, under the winning headline “Is There a Lost Shakespeare in Your Attic?,” judges it “a gorgeous little court epilogue” with an “assurance that is unique to the mature Shakespeare.”
⁷
The trochaic meter of the poem certainly is one used by Shakespeare in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, but the evidence that the “Dial Hand” poem is by Shakespeare is far from “absolutely secure,” and scholars, as Helen Hackett has recently reviewed, have been generally skeptical about this attribution (Hackett convincingly proposes Thomas Dekker as a more likely author
⁸
). The desire for a tangible connection between playwright and queen, however, will not go away.

Notes

¹
 Helen Hackett,
Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 39–40. See also Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson,
England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

²
 Nicholas Rowe, “Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear,” in
The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the first
(London, 1709), pp. ix–x.

³
 Holinshed (1587), p. 1583 (
www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed
).

⁴
 Katherine Duncan-Jones,
Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life
, Arden (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), p. 9.

⁵
 
Henry V
, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), p. 7.

⁶
 Blair Worden, “Which Play Was Performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?”,
London Review of Books
, 10 July 2003, doubts the play was Shakespeare's, and indicts Shakespeareans for so wanting their author to be involved in this political controversy that they have overlooked the evidence. Paul J. Hammer, “Shakespeare's
Richard II
, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising,”
Shakespeare Quarterly
, 59/1 (2008), pp. 1–35, reassesses that evidence, and agrees with Worden's claim about Shakespeareans' over-reading of the incident while arguing that the play performed was indeed Shakespeare's
Richard II
.

⁷
 
Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare
, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007), p. 2395;
Daily Telegraph
, 21 April 2007

⁸
 Helen Hackett, “‘As the diall hand tells ore’: The Case for Dekker, Not Shakespeare, as Author,”
Review of English Studies
, 63 (2012), pp. 34–57.

One of the traditional hallmarks of successful art is that people take it for real. Pliny describes a famous painting competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius in the fifth century BCE. Zeuxis unveiled his painting of a still life in which the grapes were so tempting that a bird came to peck at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to draw the curtain to reveal his painting; Parrhasius explained that the curtain was itself a painting.

Analogous stories occur in the realm of literature. When Sir Thomas More's
Utopia
was published in the sixteenth century, a priest asked his bishop to send him to Utopia. (Utopia is a fictional island—its name in Greek means “no place”—but the characters in the book share their names with real people and so perhaps
are
real, and one describes his visit to Utopia.) On his deathbed Balzac called for Dr Bianchon, one of his fictional creations. Before Freud had a sizable body of patients on which to base case studies, he turned to realist drama—Shakespeare, Ibsen, Greek tragedy—to analyze its characters. It may sound odd to talk of Greek drama with its masks and formal choruses as “realistic,” but Freud was responding to the plays'
emotional
realism.

“Lifelike” and “realistic” are always compliments, the barometers by which we judge how (or whether) a play has worked.
¹
But lifelike in a sixteenth-century play is not the same as lifelike in the twenty-first century. In the UK of the 1950s, the queen's Christmas Day broadcasts undoubtedly seemed lifelike to viewers, but in 2012 they seem stilted, not at all related to anything we recognize as natural. As Edward Pechter points out, questions about what is lifelike in Renaissance drama confuse means and effects. The actor Thomas Betterton “may have chanted—that is, have sounded like chanting to us if we were able to travel back in time to the Theatre Royal in the late seventeenth century … but to his audience,
tuned to a different frequency
, his performance might have seemed like life itself” (our italics).
²
So negotiating this myth is tricky because it involves a concept—lifelike/realistic—which is not constant. Let us try to deal with this myth by dividing it in two parts: characters and real people.

First, characters. At the end of the fourth century BCE, the Greek writer Theophrastus wrote a book of thirty character sketches (
Characters
). Although Theophrastus was not translated (into Latin) until 1592, the form was influential. In England, Thomas Wilson's
Art of Rhetoric
(1553) provides a short character sketch as an example of the rhetorical term
descriptio
; Sir Thomas Overbury wrote a book of
Characters
, published in 1614 (so popular that there were five reprints that year), reprinted again in 1615 and 1616 (three editions), with further reprints in 1618, 1622, 1626, 1627, 1628, and 1630. Part of the initial commercial prominence of Overbury's book may have been due to the sensational nature of his death in 1613 (he was murdered in the Tower of London) and to his involvement in a court scandal of divorce and remarriage (see Myth 22) which made the original volume's raison d'être—a verse character of “a wife”—resoundingly topical. But the subsequent volumes (regularly enlarged by others) were entirely in prose and comprised one- to two-page depictions of character: a wise man, an elder brother, a canting rogue, an ostler. Many of these characters are closer to caricature than to psychological individuals (the drunken Dutchman and braggadocio Welshman are clearly stereotypes), but subtle psychological aspects are nonetheless in evidence. Overbury notes gradation of character: there is a difference between “a whore” and “a very whore,” between “a vertuous widow” and “an ordinary widow.” His portrayal of a creditor moves from costume to attitude to custom.
³
The sympathetic depiction of a franklin contrasts the man's external with his internal attributes, and notes the significance of speech patterns: “Though he be master, he says not to his servants ‘Go to field’ but ‘Let us go’.”
⁴
Overbury's imaginative detail extends even to the reading matter of a chambermaid: “She reads Greene's works over and over [the prose romances of Robert Greene] but is so carried away with the
Mirror of Knighthood
, she is many times resolved to run out of her self and become a lady errant.”
⁵
It is a short step from here to Stanislavsky's
An Actor Prepares
.

The purpose of Theophrastus's
Characters
has never been entirely clear, but classicists now think that it has a legal aim. One of the required rhetorical skills of a lawyer is to build up or demolish the character of the defendant or witness. Similarly, critics such as Lorna Hutson and James McBain have recently explored the English Inns of Court rhetorical traditions that fed into mid-sixteenth-century drama and thence to the commercial theater of the late sixteenth century. Character it seems, from classical times to Shakespeare's, is a rhetorical construct.

But character is also a psychological construct, at least for Shakespeare. One of the things Shakespeare's characters do is try to read and understand other fictional characters. The opening line of
King Lear
gives us Kent's surprise that he has misread Lear: “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall” (i.e. “hmm … I got that wrong”; 1.1.1–2). In
Othello
Lodovico attributes Othello's untypical behavior to the stress of Venetian business: “Maybe the letter moved him” (4.1.232). Hamlet tries to read himself: having seen Fortinbras's purposefulness, Hamlet says:

Now, whether it be

Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple

Of thinking too precisely on th'event –

…

– I do not know

Why yet I live to say “This thing's to do”,

Since I have cause, and will, and strength, and means,

To do't.

(4.4.30–2, 34–7
⁶
)

The dominant question of twentieth-century criticism—why does Hamlet delay?—is a question Hamlet actually asks of himself. It is a question that assumes he has agency, choice, emotions, motivation: in other words that he is a real being.

If Shakespeare characters assume that they, and other Shakespeare characters, are real beings, so too did their earliest readers and audiences. Shakespeare criticism begins with character: Margaret Cavendish's
Sociable Letters
(1664) and Maurice Morgann's
Essay on the Dramatick Character of Sir John Falstaff
(1777). From early on, Shakespeare characters also had a life outside their plays. Tiffany Stern has found Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Germany in a composite play of the seventeenth century that has nothing to do with
Twelfth Night
. In her recent book on the novel, Maria di Battista distinguishes characters in plays from characters in novels—to the detriment of the former. Dramatic characters, she says, are “confined” to the stage.
⁷
But when Sir Andrew Aguecheek goes to Germany in a play that is not
Twelfth Night
it is hard to see him as “confined” in any way.