Creators (7 page)

Dürer’s enormous corpus of prints and drawings proved, over the centuries, to be of more use to aspiring artists (and, indeed, to masters) than the work of any other draftsman. They are notable for clarity, precision, extreme accuracy, feeling for texture, superb proportion and design, and—often—great depth of feeling. If Dürer saw something remarkable, he wanted to draw it instantly and preserve it for posterity. Many of his drawings emphasize the structure and solidity of a living object, and his watercolors of towns and buildings convey the various distances from the viewer with extraordinary fidelity of tone. All these drawings teach. In 1515 he got hold of a detailed drawing of an Indian rhinoceros, taken from a creature sent to Lisbon
from Goa. The animal was, alas, wrecked and drowned on its way to Genoa, and Dürer never saw it. But from the material he had, he produced a woodcut of astonishing power, presenting the animal as an armored being, and the image has been the archetype of the rhinoceros, all over the world, ever since. Indeed in German schools it was still in use in biology lessons as late as 1939. His images of two hands joined in prayer has likewise achieved world celebrity. There are few areas of representation of the visual world on which Dürer has not left an ineffaceable mark—not surprisingly, since the number of his pages in circulation had reached the tens of millions even before the advent of steam printing.

As early as 1512, when Dürer still had sixteen years to live, Cochlaus’s
Cosmographia
stated that merchants from all over Europe bought Dürer’s woodcuts and engravings and took them home for native artists to imitate. Toward the end of the sixteenth century there was a phenomenon in German-speaking territory known as the “Dürer revival,” during which his works were reprinted and collectors, led by Emperor Rudolf II in Prague and Emperor Maximilian I in Munich, collected his paintings, prints, books, and drawings. His fame increased in the eighteenth century, and he became an artistic symbol, part of romanticism (especially for Goethe and for artists like Caspar David Friedrich and then, under Bismarck, for German nationalism). On the morning of 6 April 1828, the three-hundredth anniversary of his death, 300 artists gathered at his tomb to pay homage. His life and work were made an object of the full battery of German academic scholarship beginning in the 1780s, earlier than those of any other great artist, and it is likely that more large-scale exhibitions have been held for Dürer than for anyone else. This attention, far from producing satiation, has served to emphasize for successive generations the freshness of his vision and the crispness of his line. No other man has been more creative, in black and white, and it was Erasmus who first noticed—and said so—that it was a crime to try to color Dürer’s prints.

S
HAKESPEARE
is the most creative personality in human history. Born in Stratford in April 1564, he became a professional writer toward the end of the 1580s, in his early twenties, so his writing career covers barely a quarter of a century to his death, at age fifty-two, in April 1616. During this time, besides acting often and engaging in speculations and investments both in Stratford and in London, he wrote thirty-nine plays that have survived, and collaborated on a number of others; he also wrote a dozen major poems and hundreds of sonnets.
¹
During his lifetime his plays were already being performed abroad as well as all over Britain, and even at sea off the coast of west Africa; they have since been translated into every known language and acted all over the world. They have become the basis for over 200 operas by composers great and minor, including Purcell, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, and Britten, and have inspired works by Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and scores of other masters. The 103 songs that dot his plays have been set to music by all the composers of art songs.
²
Shakespeare’s works have inspired over 300 movies and thousands of television adaptations, and have provided material or ideas for most professional playwrights from Dryden to Shaw and Stoppard. His poetry is a mainspring of imaginative English literature and a formative influence on its foreign equivalents, especially French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Russian.

Shakespeare’s imaginative and artistic fecundity—and depth—
are an apparent demonstration of the unimportance of heredity or genes in creative lives. His father, John, was a provincial glover, who prospered for a time as a small-town worthy, then declined; his mother came from a higher social group, with landed connections, but also provincial. There is no evidence of any kind of previous literary or artistic activity on either side of his family. He was educated at the Stratford grammar school and was (probably) a schoolmaster before forming a connection with a traveling theater company and then coming to London as an actor-playwright (rather like Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby). His undistinguished origins have led some to suppose that the real author of his works was Sir Francis Bacon, the lord chancellor. But this is crude intellectual snobbery—any number of great writers have come from nothing and nowhere. “Baconian theory” rests on cryptograms, chiefly the nonce word “honorificabilitudinitatibus” in
Love’s Labours Lost
(V. i), which Bacon is supposed to have invented to be rendered in Latin as “These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world.” But in fact the word was not coined by whoever wrote the play—it is found in an English text as early as 1460. In any case Shakespeare’s life is well documented: there are sixty-six references to him in contemporary documents, which include overwhelming evidence of his connections with theater in general and his plays in particular.
³
Many of his contemporaries were fully aware of his greatness, as is attested to by the twenty-four commendatory poems and prefaces written between 1599 and 1640.
⁴
Thanks to the love and devoted work of two of his colleagues, John Hemminges and Henry Cordell—who took a great deal of time and trouble to put together the First Folio, published in 1623—some sixteen of Shakespeare’s plays were saved from oblivion, and the rest, eighteen of which had been published earlier in corrupt quartos, were printed more or less as Shakespeare wrote them. Of the many hundreds of plays written and staged in the years 1580–1620, more than half have disappeared without trace, but we can be reasonably sure we possess Shakespeare’s oeuvre almost in its entirety.
⁵

I do not propose to discuss Shakespeare’s output in detail, merely to examine his creation of two characters, Falstaff and Hamlet, and the plays in which they appear. First, however, it is
useful to note Shakespeare’s chief characteristics as a writer, and the way in which they helped his creative process.

We begin with his practicality. He was what Jane Austen was later to call a “sensible man.” He worked empirically, by trial and error, by learning his job and experimenting. He was rational. Always keen to get on, he was never guilty (to use his own words) of “vaunting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on the other side.” He became a player probably by accident when a visiting company had a vacancy through illness in Stratford, and Shakespeare, already an amateur, filled the gap so well that he was asked to turn professional. He worked for several companies in the 1580s, playing “kingly parts,” and later was Adam in his own
As you Like It
and the Ghost in
Hamlet
, as well as appearing in Ben Jonson’s comedies and Jonson’s tragedy
Sejanus
. But Shakespeare seems to have grasped, early on, that his gift for writing plays was greater than his skills as an actor could ever be; and he was an established playwright by 1592, when a bad outbreak of plague closed the London theaters for nearly two years. He then (in addition to going to provincial towns) explored the possibility of becoming a nontheatrical man of letters by writing his two great narrative poems,
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
.

Such work might have served. But when the theaters reopened in May 1594, an opportunity opened to participate, as actor, writer, and investor, in a new theatrical venture, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a group of skilled professionals who soon made themselves, and remained, the leading theatrical company in London (and so in the world).
⁶
Shakespeare was named from the start as part of the undertaking, which began at the “private” theater at court in January 1594, when plays were performed indoors in artificial light to select audiences of 500 or so. The company then went on in the summer to lease the theater north of the Thames in Shoreditch, which was “public,” seated over 1,000, and worked by daylight. This playhouse was the first to be professionally designed and built (in 1576). It was created by the father of Shakespeare’s great acting colleague Richard Burbage. James Burbage was a joiner, and the theater was a work of highly sophisticated carpentry, built to provide endless dramatic opportunities.

Here, and later at another professional theater on the South Bank, the Curtain, Shakespeare matured as a dramatist. In 1599, he, Burbage, and others formed a syndicate to dismantle the timber of the theater and use it, plus much other material, to build a newly designed state-of-the-art theater, the Globe, also on the South Bank at Southwark, to escape the jurisdiction of the London city fathers, who were puritanical and anti-plays. The Globe could seat 3,000 and was a highly profitable venue, supplemented in winter, from 1609 on, by a “private” indoor theater, the Blackfriars.
⁷
As a “sharer,” Shakespeare held ten percent of the Globe shares, and a similar portion of other enterprises of the Chamberlain’s Men (after the accession of James I in 1603 they were known as the King’s Men). His company played more often at court than any other did: between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605 the company presented eleven plays, seven by Shakespeare (
Love’s Labours Lost
, written specially for court performances;
The Comedy of Errors
;
Measure for Measure
;
Othello
; and—twice—
The Merchant of Venice
).
⁸
Shakespeare made a good deal of money out of the theater, a fact to which his investments in land and housing in Stratford testify; and he remained connected with the company till his death. No other playwright had such a long and continuous connection.
⁹

Shakespeare’s practicality also expressed itself in his willingness to write, and his skill at writing, plays suitable, in general and in detail, for the theater to be played in; the actors available to perform; and the public, both “public” and “private,” to be entertained. (The public audiences paid one penny minimum; the private audiences sixpence.) Shakespeare made brilliant use of all the facilities of the new professional theaters in his staging—the underfloor, the stage, the canopy level, the top level, and the apparatus for raising and lowering actors—while bearing in mind the limitations of the indoor “winter” theaters. It is notable that, as theatrical facilities expanded, Shakespeare’s plays made more use of them. For instance, in
Cymbeline
Jupiter descended by machinery, as did Diana in
Pericles
and Juno in the masque in
The Tempest
. But machinery and big theaters were never essential to Shakespeare’s effects; this is one reason why his plays were, and are, easier to stage well than those of his leading contemporaries: Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and
Webster.
¹⁰
Shakespeare was always willing to write and rewrite to order or to suit the resources available. He was particularly successful in writing women’s roles played by the teenage boys who formed an essential part of the company. He wrote, as a rule, short but emphatic and incisive parts (Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, Ophelia). He was also capable of writing much longer and subtler characterizations (Rosalind, Cleopatra) if an outstanding boy was available. As for the public, Shakespeare was adept at appealing to both the elite and the “vulgar” or “groundlings” in the same play. Still (as the scene in which Hamlet instructs the players indicates), he was striving to improve the public taste, especially in acting. Like all the greatest artists, he created his own public, teaching the audiences to appreciate what he had to offer, and he left the theater a much more subtle and sophisticated world than he found it.
¹¹

Linked to Shakespeare’s practicality were his distrust for the abstract and his dislike of theory. He was in no sense an intellectual, that is, someone who believes ideas are more important than people. His plays are essentially about people, not ideas. He was not, in the eyes of intellectuals like Ben Jonson, an educated man; and though he knew a lot, it had all been picked up by word of mouth—listening to people talk about what they knew well—and by private reading. He had no whiff of the university, no “system,” whether from the medieval scholars or the ancient Greek philosophers. He was not trying to deliver a new “message.” Though associated with the young earl of Southampton, and through him with the dangerous earl of Essex—who tried to overthrow the stable Elizabethan regime in 1601, thus getting himself beheaded and Southampton imprisoned—Shakespeare never dipped his pen in ink to give them a word of support. He was not a revolutionary in any sense or in any field. Quite the reverse. He valued stability. He had the instincts of a provincial middle-class tradesman who was doing well. He was a conservative who actively disliked radical ideas, as he made clear in his most openly opinionated play,
Troilus and Cressida
. He reiterated the dislike strongly and often in his history plays, where he deplores all attempts at a general redressing of wrongs, especially by violence against the existing order.
¹²
Shakespeare’s conser
vatism, his preference for the present order of society with all its imperfections (of which he was well aware and which he frequently exposed), was tempered by a desire for “improvement,” in public morals and private manners, by the gradual and peaceful adoption of better ways of doing things. This love of “improvement” rather than revolution would have made Shakespeare an eminent Victorian.

He rarely allows his opinions open expression, preferring to hint and nudge, to imply and suggest, rather than to state. His gospel, however, is moderation in all things; his taste is for toleration. Like Chaucer, he takes human beings as he finds them, imperfect, insecure, weak and fallible or headstrong and foolish—often desperate—and yet always interesting, often lovable or touching. He has something to say on behalf of all his characters, even the obvious villains, and he speaks from inside them, allowing them to put forward their point of view and give their reasons. Charles Lamb, a keen student of Shakespeare’s characters, took the view that only the “bloat king” in
Hamlet
was without redeeming qualities. Yet even King Claudius is sharp and shrewd in pointing out—to himself, too—the difference between worldly standards (which are his) and divine ones: he knows the difference between right and wrong. Actors, as Shakespeare intended, have found ways to play Iago, Macbeth, and Shylock in such splendor as to turn these bad men not indeed into sympathetic characters but into powerful studies in distorted values, who grip our attention and make us shiver. And there are literally scores of figures who flick across his scenes and whose weaknesses and follies amuse rather than disgust us. They are the common stock of humanity: flesh, not stereotypes; individuals with quirks and peculiarities; men and women who have stepped out of the street onto the stage to be themselves. They form a mighty army of real people.
¹³

Shakespeare gives his characters things to say that are always plausible and often memorable. “The wheel is come full circle.” “All the world’s a stage.” “There is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon!” “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.” “Sweet are the uses of adversity.” “It was Greek to me!” “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” “Oh,
that way madness lies.” “Thy face is as a book where men may read strange matters.” “Throw physic to the dogs—I’ll none of it!” “To the last syllable of recorded time.” “Murder will out.” “A blinking idiot.” “A Daniel come to judgment.” “A good deed in a naughty world.” “Ill met by moonlight.” “Night and silence—who is here?” “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” “A heart as sound as a bell.” “Put money in thy purse.” “Thereby hangs a tale.” “The green-eyed monster.” “Trifles light as air.” “A foregone conclusion.” “This sceptred isle.” “Call back yesterday.” “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” “I am not in the giving vein today.” “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” “A plague o’ both your houses!” “I am Fortune’s fool.” “The dark backward and abysm of time.” “A very ancient and fish-like smell.” “Time hath a wallet at his back in which he puts alms for oblivion.” “Dost thou think, because thou are virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” “Why, this is very midsummer madness.” “My salad days, when I was green in judgment.” Shakespeare fills seventy-six pages of the
Oxford Book of Quotations
.