A Little History of Literature (7 page)

BOOK: A Little History of Literature
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The entire Wakefield mystery cycle encompasses thirty plays, beginning with the Creation in Genesis and winding up with the hanging of Judas in the New Testament gospels. There are two shepherds' plays, celebrating the product (wool) that was the town's principal source of prosperity. The second play opens with three shepherds on the Bethlehem hills (definitely Yorkshire rather than Palestine hills) watching their sheep by night.

December is a bitterly cold month to be out tending sheep. The first shepherd angrily bemoans the weather, and goes on to rail against the oppressions, including taxes, that poor folk like themselves must bear while the rich are snug, well-fed and warm in their
beds. (Taxes were imposed by the guilds as well as the town authorities. It's a little in-joke.)

We're so burdened and banned,

Over-taxed and unmanned,

We're made tame to the hand

Of these gentry men.

Thus they rob us of our rest, may ill-luck them harry!

These men, they make the plough tarry,

What men say is for the best, we find the contrary –

Thus are husbandmen oppressed, in point to miscarry,

In life,

Thus hold they us under

And from comfort sunder.

It's an extraordinary outburst. And it speaks to us with a directness and force which carries across the centuries and resonates to the present day. Talk to citizens standing outside the job centre in Wakefield today and they might well complain in much the same way as does their distant predecessor, the first shepherd. And certainly with the same rich Yorkshire accent.

The play, however, does not continue in this angry vein. There follows a hilariously comic episode. Mak, another shepherd, has stolen one of the lambs that his three comrades have been out all night guarding, frozen to their bones. Mak takes his booty home and hides it in a crib, disguising it as a newborn baby.

The other shepherds come to Mak's cottage (like the three kings in the biblical story) to give the baby a silver piece – a very sizeable sum for them. After much comic knockabout they discover what exactly the ‘newborn’ in the crib is. Sheep-stealing was a capital crime, punishable by death (hence the proverb, ‘As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb’). But it is Christmas, a time for the forgiveness of sins. That mercy, the play implies, is what Christ died for. The shepherds merely toss Mak in a blanket.

The play then reverts to familiar religious doctrine. The Angel of the Lord appears and instructs the three good shepherds to
worship the true newborn, who is lying between two animals in a Bethlehem manger.

The
Second Shepherds' Play
is a highpoint of this pioneering form of street theatre. But the same energy, vivacity and ‘voice of the people’ animates all the cycles. They died out, as a vital part of town life, in the late 1500s and there is some uncertainty as to why. One reason may be that reformers never liked them. Did they evolve into something much greater than themselves, the London theatre of the seventeenth century, dominated as it would be by Shakespeare? Or did they wither away under the pressures of urbanisation, mass movements of population, the decay of the guild system, the construction of permanent theatres (‘out of the wet’) in towns, and easier access to the Bible in its printed form? The Bible found other ways of getting to the people over the following centuries. Mystery plays were no longer needed.

Whatever the answer, there is one important conclusion to be drawn from the two-centuries-long flowering of this street theatre. Namely the fact that the way in which we respond to literature on the stage – whether that stage is a trundling procession of carts or the boards of a modern theatre – is very different from the way in which we respond to printed literature on the page.

You can pick up a book any time and put it down when you want. It is different in a theatre: the curtain goes up at a precise moment and comes down at specifically timed intervals. The audience does not move from its seats while watching the play. People, even in the twenty-first century, tend to ‘dress up’ to go to the theatre. They generally do not, as when watching TV, eat meals or talk during the performance; if you so much as rustle sweet wrappers, or, worse still, your mobile goes off, you will get furious glances. The audience tends to break into laughter at the same moments and they applaud at the end.

Not to labour the point, but all this reminds us that we are in a kind of church. Congregation, audience – what's the difference? Reading – ‘curled up with a book’ – is one of our most private activities but in a theatre we consume literature publicly: as a community. We experience and respond collectively. That's a great part of the pleasure of theatre. We are in company.

Some of the mystery plays that have come down to us, like the
Second Shepherds' Play
, are as great, in their way, as anything in the history of British drama. But most of the mystery-play material is, for the modern playgoer, of more historical than literary interest. Nonetheless, it has huge significance. It reminds us where theatre started and what fuels its lasting appeal. Even today, although we no longer have to stand out in the street to enjoy it, drama is ‘community’ literature. Literature of the people.

CHAPTER
7

The Bard

S
HAKESPEARE

Any poll to decide the greatest writer in the English language would come up with the same result. No contest. But how did Shakespeare come to be so? A simple question, but it admits of no simple answer.

Some of the best literary-critical minds in history (not to say generations of theatre-goers) have tried, but no one has been able to explain convincingly how an early school-leaver, the son of a high-street tradesman, born and brought up in the backwater of Stratford-upon-Avon, whose principal interest in his career seems to have been gathering enough money to retire, became the greatest writer the English-speaking world has known, and, many argue, ever will know.

We shall never be able to ‘explain’ Shakespeare and it's foolish to try. But we can certainly appreciate his achievement and – although the picture is infuriatingly incomplete – we can trace the outline of his life for any hints it might give as to what made him the greatest writer in the English language.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was born some six years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The England he grew up in was
still in the throes of the turmoil left by the reign of the previous monarch, Mary I, nicknamed ‘Bloody Mary’. Under her it had been dangerous to be Protestant, under Elizabeth it was dangerous to be Catholic. Shakespeare, like others in his family, cautiously walked a tightrope between the two faiths (although some people want to claim him as a lifelong secret Catholic). He kept strictly off the subject of religion in his drama. It was literally a burning topic – say the wrong thing and you could burn at the stake.

At the centre of this burning issue was the question of who would succeed to the throne. As Shakespeare entered the dramatic profession, Elizabeth, born in 1533, was an ageing monarch. The Virgin Queen had no heir elect nor even a clearly apparent heir. A vacuum in the succession was dangerous. Every thinking person in the country asked themselves the question, ‘What comes after Queen Elizabeth?’

The most significant political question in much of Shakespeare's drama (particularly in the history plays) is: ‘What is the best way to replace one king (or, in Cleopatra's case, queen) with another?’ Different answers are examined in different plays: secret assassination (
Hamlet
); public assassination (
Julius Caesar
); civil war (the
Henry VI
plays); forced abdication (
Richard II
); usurpation (
Richard III
); legitimate bloodline succession (
Henry V
). It was a problem Shakespeare wrestled with until his last play (as we think it is),
Henry VIII
. England itself would wrestle with the problem a lot longer and would undergo the horrors of a civil war while trying to find a way through.

Shakespeare's father was a moderately prosperous glove-maker and alderman in Stratford. He was probably more inclined to Catholicism than his son. William's mother, Mary, was higher-born than her husband. She, we may assume, planted a desire to rise in the world in the mind of her clever son. Young William attended the Stratford grammar school. Ben Jonson, a fellow dramatist (and friend) famously cracked that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin, and less Greek’. But by our standards he was formidably well educated.

He left school in his teens and for a year or two probably worked for his father. He may have been arrested for poaching.
Aged eighteen he married a local woman, Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older and several months pregnant. The marriage would produce two daughters and a son, Hamnet, who died in infancy and who is commemorated in Shakespeare's most famous, and gloomy, play.

It has been argued that the Shakespeares' marriage was unhappy – the recurrence in the plays of difficult, cold and domineering women such as Lady Macbeth is cited as evidence, as is the fact that the couple had, for the time, few children (three). But the fact is we know little of Shakespeare's private life. Even more frustratingly, we know absolutely nothing about the remainder of his formative years, between 1585 and 1592. He may have left Stratford and found employment as a country schoolteacher. Another theory about the so-called ‘lost years’ is that he was in the north of England, working as a tutor for a noble Catholic family, absorbing their dangerous creed. A third speculation is that he joined a troupe of travelling players, and picked up the dramatic skills evident in even his very earliest plays.

He resurfaces in the early 1590s as a rising figure in the London theatre scene, writing plays and acting. He found a medium suited to his extraordinary talent. There was a thriving network of theatres on the south bank of the Thames alongside the bullbaiting arenas and taverns – outlaw territory compared with the north bank, with its inns of court, St Paul's Cathedral, Parliament, and royal residences.

Just as importantly, there was an existing, but still immature, literary medium for Shakespeare to adapt to his own huge talent. His predecessor Christopher Marlowe (1564–93), in plays such as
Dr Faustus
, had innovated the so-called ‘mighty line’: blank verse. What is it? Consider the following lines – probably the most famous lines in English literature. (Hamlet is thinking about killing himself, unable to bring himself to do what the ghost, his father, has told him to do – kill his stepfather.)

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer

The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them …

The verse is unrhymed (hence ‘blank’). It has the suppleness of everyday speech, but the dignity (‘mightiness’) of poetry – tease out, for example, the complexity of ‘taking arms against a sea of troubles’. It's also something that Shakespeare handled particularly brilliantly – a ‘soliloquy’: that is, someone totally by themselves, talking to themselves. But is Hamlet actually talking, or thinking? In his 1948 film adaptation of the play, Laurence Olivier (the greatest Shakespearian actor of his time) did it as voice-over, his lips not moving, his face locked in a fixed expression. Shakespeare perfected this way of getting inside the minds of characters on stage. All his great plays – particularly the tragedies – hinge on soliloquy: what is going on inside.

By 1594 Shakespeare had risen to the top of the London theatrical world – as an actor, a shareholder, but most spectacularly as a playwright who was changing the whole idea of what plays could do. He would go on to live for many years in London (his family meanwhile were kept out of the way in distant Stratford), dabbling at times in commerce and adding substantially to his net worth. Over a twenty-year career he penned some thirty-seven plays (occasionally with collaborators) as well as many poems. Notable among the latter is his sonnet sequence, composed in the 1590s – probably during a summer when the open-air theatres were shut, as they often were, during outbreaks of plague.

The sonnets offer rare insights into Shakespeare the man. Many are addressed as love poems to a young man, others to a possibly married woman (‘the Dark Lady’). It's possible Shakespeare may have been bisexual, as – it is sometimes argued – he was both Catholic and Protestant in religion. That is something else we shall never be entirely sure about.

BOOK: A Little History of Literature
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