Contested Will (43 page)

It's unlikely that the identity of
Licia's
author was widely known in his own day. Scholars have since learned (from a stray remark of his son) that it was written by Giles Fletcher, who in 1593 was a far cry from the persona of the young lover conveyed by these sonnets: married and middle-aged, father to at least seven children, he was also a veteran diplomat who had recently returned from a dangerous mission to the court of the Tsar. Fletcher had hoped to write a history of Elizabeth's reign, but shelved plans for that after Lord Burghley refused to approve such a politically sensitive project. So he tried his hand at something completely different – ‘this kind of poetry wherein I wrote, I did it only to try my humour'. He borrows heavily (we might say plagiarises, though the concept would have been foreign to Fletcher) from Latin poetry, especially Angerianus'
Poetae Tres Elegantissimi
, with a nod here and there to Sidney's
Astrophel and Stella
. And it's likely that the unusual name Licia is taken from Sidney as well, whose
Arcadia
, published three years earlier, describes at some length, and a bit tongue-in-cheek, paintings of ‘eleven conquered beauties', including the ‘Queen of
Licia
'. Sonnets don't have to be autobiographical; they don't even have to be original. Poets assume personae. Mistresses can be fictional (though that didn't stop a young Cambridge scholar from bragging, after Fletcher's book appeared, that he had slept with Licia).

If Giles Fletcher could compose sonnets to ‘try' his ‘humour', Shakespeare could have done so too. If Sid Smith could have asked around or read enough to write convincingly about China, Shakespeare could easily have done the same with Venice and Verona. We know that he was voracious in his pursuit of sources: rather than rest content with what he found in one or two books about the reign of Richard II, he managed to get his hands on almost everything written about him. The argument that he could never have had access to so many books unless he was a wealthy aristocrat is nonsense. Nobody asks this question about Thomas
Dekker, who in 1599 alone worked on eleven plays (with a dizzying number of printed sources) after his release from prison for debt. How did professional playwrights like Dekker and Shakespeare gain access to so many books? We don't know for sure. They may have owned some, borrowed others and browsed in London's many bookstalls in search of additional sources of inspiration. Elizabethan playing companies spent upward of
£
10 for a single elaborate costume, though only
£
6 for a finished play. It may well be that they also maintained a stock of comparatively inexpensive books, since it was in their interest to provide dramatists whose proposed scripts they had purchased with the necessary materials to research and write their promised plays.

Shakespeare's knowledge of the world was not limited to what he found in books. It was not difficult in Elizabethan London, where thousands of ‘strangers' or foreign-born individuals were living, to encounter all sorts of travellers – both those from abroad visiting or living in London, and English merchants or voyagers who had seen a good bit of the world. A curious Shakespeare could have learned everything he needed to know about the Italian settings of his plays from a few choice conversations.

This obsession with hands-on experience extends to the playwright's familiarity with hawking, hunting, tennis and other aristocratic pursuits. It would be surprising if, during his years as a travelling player, performing at various aristocratic households around England, Shakespeare hadn't frequently observed the rich at play. As for the ways of the court: Shakespeare visited royal palaces scores of times and was ideally placed to observe the ways of monarchs and courtiers. Insisting that Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done, as Steevens warned Malone two hundred years ago, can lead to some very unsettling conclusions. If the blood-splattered plays are truly to be taken as auto biographical evidence, whoever wrote them had to have unusual access to the mind of a murderer. They are also full of scoundrels, liars, cheats, adulterers, cowards, orphans, heroes, rapists, pimps, bawds and madmen. The plays are not an à la carte menu, from
which we pick characters who will satisfy our appetite for Shakespeare's personality while passing over less appetising choices. He imagined them all.

One of the most habitual charges made against Shakespeare is that he didn't have enough formal education to have written the plays – and, some have argued, there's no record that he received
any
formal education. What they fail to add is that no evidence survives that anybody in Shakespeare's day was educated in Stratford, since the records for all pupils at that time have been lost (though we know the names of the schoolmasters and the Tudor schoolroom in the town's Guildhall survives to this day). Are we to imagine that the London publisher Richard Field, Shakespeare's age-mate, went uneducated as well because there's no record of his attending school? Or that the sons of other leading figures in Stratford, some of whom went on to Oxford, were unlettered before arriving at university? Scholars have exhaustively reconstructed the curriculum in Elizabethan grammar schools and have shown that what Shakespeare and Field would have learned there – and for that matter, what the many playgoers who had a comparable education would have been taught in similar schools – was roughly equivalent to a university degree today, with a better facility in Latin than that of a typical classics major.

No less groundless is the argument that Shakespeare's vocabulary was far greater than someone with only a grammar-school education could have possessed. As David Crystal, the leading expert on Shakespeare's language, has shown, the myth that ‘Shakespeare had the largest vocabulary of any English writer' is hard to dispel. Impressive claims are often tossed about, such as that Shakespeare used as many as thirty thousand different words. It's true if you count variants (both ‘cat' and ‘cats', or ‘say' and ‘says'); otherwise, his vocabulary was about twenty thousand words. It's a sizeable figure but not all that surprising, given the vast range of subjects treated in his plays and poems as well as how much of his work survives (the complete
Works
runs to just under nine hundred thousand words). Crystal also notes that ‘most of us
use at least 50,000 words' out of the roughly one million that are available in English today – and yet few of us with working vocabularies twice Shakespeare's can boast of having written anything of the order of
Romeo and Juliet
.

Ignorance of what a grammar-school education offered has also led sceptics to claim that the true author of the plays intention ally wrote over the heads of most of those who went to see them: ‘what is all that culture and erudition doing in the plays', Diana Price wonders, if Shakespeare is merely writing ‘primarily for the general public over at the Globe?' This isn't snobbery so much as an impoverished sense of how much playgoers who paid to see Shakespeare's plays – and for that matter the even more erudite ones of Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Marston and Chapman – readily understood. Ignored, too, in attacks on Shakespeare's limited if typical formal education, is the kind of informal study of books and foreign tongues that aspiring writers, then, as now, engage in long after classroom education has come to an end. We have no idea how much of this Shakespeare undertook in the decade or more between the time he finished school and he began writing and acting professionally.

What I find most disheartening about the claim that Shakespeare of Stratford lacked the life experience to have written the plays is that it diminishes the very thing that makes him so exceptional: his imagination. As an aspiring actor, Shakespeare must have displayed a talent for imagining himself as any number of characters onstage. When he turned to writing, he demonstrated an even more powerful imaginative capacity, one that allowed him to create roles of such depth and complexity – Rosalind, Hamlet, Lear, Juliet, Timon, Brutus, Leontes and Cleopatra, along with hundreds of others, great and small – that even the least of them, four centuries later, seems fully human and distinctive. What's especially fascinating is that he didn't actually invent most of these characters: he found almost all of them, half-formed, not in the people he knew but in the works of other writers – including
North's translation of Plutarch's
Lives
and Holinshed's
Chronicles
, sources he turned to again and again. The stories and portraits they contained stuck in his mind, sometimes for years, until he was able to see what was needed to transform them utterly and breathe life into them.

The argument for writing from personal experience is implicitly an argument for a kind of realism. When it served his purposes, Shakespeare wrote realistically; but when realism fell short, he never hesitated to bring divinities onstage, have a character enter invisible, make time run backwards, or bring a statue to life. If Shakespeare really had been interested in writing about what he knew first-hand, he would have done what Jonson, Dekker, Middleton and many other playwrights at the time chose to do: set his plays where he grew up, or in his adopted city, London. But he chose instead to give his imagination freer reign, locating his plots in distant lands and former times – Vienna, Verona, Venice, and ancient Britain, Athens, Troy, Tyre and Rome. In
Cymbeline
, he even has modern-day Italians and ancient Romans rub elbows. Even when he is closest to personal experience and sets much of As You Like It in a version of Warwickshire's Forest of Arden, it turns out to be a magical landscape inhabited not only by shepherds and hermits but also by lions, snakes and a divinity, Hymen.

‘Imagination', the
Oxford English Dictionary
reminds us, means ‘forming a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses', one that ‘does not correspond to the reality of things'. In simple terms, then, imagination begins where experience – what we see, hear or feel – ends. Shakespeare may not tell us a lot about his personal life in the plays, but he often shares what he thinks about the workings of the imagination. It's no accident that Hamlet, the character widely acknowledged as his greatest creation, argues most cogently for the power of imagination, confiding to Ophelia: ‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.' Where Hamlet most resembles his creator is not in the fact that he was captured
by pirates or mourned his father's death, but in his capacity to give shape and words to often wild thoughts: as he demands of Horatio, ‘Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?'

Helena, Lear, Antonio, Miranda, Vincentio, Gower, Malvolio and Polixenes are among the many other characters – rulers and lovers, the puritanical and the guileless, the self-deluded and the self-knowing – who reflect upon imagination in the plays. Fittingly, it's the character most sceptical about the power of imagination, Theseus in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, to whom Shakespeare assigns its most memorable definition:

One of the great pleasures of this speech is that Theseus is himself ‘an antique fable'. Along with lovers and lunatics, writers share a heightened capacity to imagine the ‘forms of things unknown'. But only writers can turn them ‘to shapes' and give ‘to
airy nothing / A local habitation and a name'. It's hard to imagine a better definition of the mystery of literary creation. Not long after delivering this speech, Theseus watches a play performed by Bottom and the other rude mechanicals and finds himself transformed by the experience. His reaction to their play ranks among the most wonderful speeches in Shakespeare: ‘The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.' His captive bride-to-be Hippolyta is quick to remind him, as well as us: ‘It must be your imagination then, and not theirs' (5.1.210–12).

When I first explored the idea of writing this book some years ago, a friend unnerved me by asking, ‘What difference does it make who wrote the plays?' The reflexive answer I offered in response is now much clearer to me: ‘A lot.' It makes a difference as to how we imagine the world in which Shakespeare lived and wrote. It makes an even greater difference as to how we understand how much has changed from early modern to modern times. But the greatest difference of all concerns how we read the plays. We can believe that Shakespeare himself thought that poets could give to ‘airy nothing' a ‘local habitation and a name'. Or we can conclude that this ‘airy nothing' turns out to be a disguised something that needs to be decoded, and that Shakespeare couldn't imagine ‘the forms of things unknown' without having experienced them first-hand. It's a stark and consequential choice.