Creators (8 page)

Indeed, if there is one area in which Shakespeare lacks moderation, it is the world of words. Here he is, in turn, excitable, theoretical, intoxicated, impractical, almost impossible. He lived in a period drunk with words, and he was the most copious and persistent toper of all. He was an inventor of words on a scale without rivalry in English literature—Chaucer, fertile though he was, came nowhere near. There are different ways of calculating how many words Shakespeare coined: one method puts the total at 2,076; another at about 6,700. There were 150,000 English words in his day, of which he used about 20,000, so his coinages were up to 10 percent of his vocabulary—an amazing percentage.
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Some were words he took out of the common stock of speech and baptized in print: abode, abstemious, affecting, anchovy, attorneyship, weather-bitten, well-ordered, well-read, widen, wind-shaken, wormhole, zany. He created words by turning nouns into verbs and vice versa, or by adding suffixes. There are 314 instances of his using “un-” in this way, as when Holofernes says in
Love’s Labours Lost
that Dull is “undressed, unpolished, unconcealed, unpruned, untrained or, rather, unlettered, or,
rather, unconfessed fashion.” Some of these “un-” words, such as uncomfortable and unaware, rapidly became common use. He added “out-” too—outswear, outvillain, outpray, outfrown. Some of these neologisms did not catch on. There were 322 words that only Shakespeare ever used. Others, as noted above, caught on fast—bandit, for instance; ruffish; charmingly; tightly. Some words were rejected at the time but then rediscovered in his texts by romantics such as Coleridge and Keats—cerements, silverly, and rubious, for example. Sometimes Shakespeare just had fun with coining words like exsufflicate or anthropophaginian. Or he flicked off expressions in sheer polysyllabic exuberance—“corporal sufferance” instead of bodily pain, or “prenominate in nice conjecture.” Among his new, long words were plausive, waffure, concupiscible, questant, fraughtage, prolixious, tortive, insisture, vastidity, defunctive, and deceptious. (The last is a rival to “dublicitous,” coined by an American secretary of state in 1981.) But although he could be polysyllabic and prolix for effect, Shakespeare used short English words of Anglo-Saxon origin to drive the plot forward and produce action, as in the tense, tightly written murder scene of
Macbeth
, where everything is cut to the dramatic bone. And he used short words for beauty, too, as in what many think his most striking poem,
The Phoenix and the Turtle
(1601), on the chill but powerful subject of pure, deathless love. These thirteen quatrains followed by five tercets are composed with virtuosic skill almost entirely of short, usually one-syllable, words.
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Phoenix
was clearly written to be read aloud—if well spoken it is much more easily understood—and to a musical background, possibly to be sung. Reading Shakespeare to oneself, or watching it acted on a purely spoken stage, is a falsification, for the musical dimension is omitted. The age was musical, the last spasm of the polyphonic art of the Middle Ages in which England led the world, and the theater reflected this love of music. Even the grim and gruesome Henry VIII composed music, and his daughter Elizabeth fought tooth and nail to preserve the sacred musical splendors of her Chapel Royal from the Puritan vandals. Shakespeare, as his verse—whether blank or rhymed—testifies, had a wonderful ear for sound, and that he loved music is
unquestionable—it runs in and out of his plays at every available opportunity, not just in the hundred songs but at almost every part in the acting. Elizabethan theater companies included actor-musicians and professional instrumentalists who could play difficult instruments like hautboys (oboes), horns, and trumpets in a variety of ways. Music was used to accompany onstage battles, duels, processions, and ceremonies; to signal doom or increase tension (as in movie and television drama today); to mark changes in character or tone in the action; to enhance magic and masques; and in general to add depth to a play. The prosperity of the Chamberlain–King’s Men, the increasing size of their theaters, the taste of the times, and, not least, Shakespeare’s own passion for music and his ingenuity in working it into his scenarios and verse meant that music played an increasing role in his work, especially in his last plays.
The Tempest
is a musical play, like the earlier, experimental
Midsummer Night’s Dream
; so is
A Winter’s Tale
. Shakespeare emphasized musical abstraction by casting his lines overwhelmingly in verse rather than prose and by stressing imagination and the metaphysical—even the supernatural—rather than realism, though, being the worldly man he was, he interpolates the earthy and the real, as in
The Tempest
, with vivid scenes of shipwreck and drunken comedy, to keep the feet of his audience firmly on the ground even while he was mesmerizing their senses.
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On many occasions Shakespeare’s atmospheric musicians paraded openly onstage. At other times they played behind curtains or under the stage, which had a trapdoor and cavity for the use of gravediggers, prisoners, and similar underground characters.
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Shakespeare several times made use of “sleep music” to induce slumber in his characters for dramatic purposes. In
The Tempest
Ferdinand is sung to sleep by the enchanting “Come unto these Yellow Sands.” For
Henry IV, Part 1
(as we shall see), Shakespeare had use of a Welsh-speaking teenage boy who played the monoglot daughter of Glendower and sang her husband Mortimer to sleep with a Welsh lullaby. Shakespeare also used music and singing to broaden his character studies. Thus in
Measure for Measure
, Marianna’s self-indulgence is emphasized by the song “Take, Oh Take, Those Lips Away!” In
Twelfth Night
Feste’s beautiful song “O Mistress Mine” tells us about the relationship between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek and their sovereign lady. In
A Winter’s Tale
, at the end of the fifth act, Paulina brings Queen Hermione’s statue to life with the words “Music! Awake her! Strike! Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more. Approach!” It is not difficult to imagine the music accompanying these dramatic words, which are immediately followed by the reconciliation between Hermione and her husband, King Leontes, and the rebirth of love with which the play ends.

Though some textual indications (alarums, excursions, etc.) indicate particular instruments—trumpets signify the anger of battle; “ho’boys” signify fear creeping in—the texts rarely indicate the musical comments that were frequent throughout a play. As Shakespeare grew more experienced, it is possible to trace a steady and impressive increase in artistry, both in the use of music and in the many art songs themselves, in presentation. So modern productions that are not “scored” or “orchestrated” leave out a dimension of the plays. That of course is one reason why Shakespeare’s texts lend themselves so easily (and often) to opera. The 200-plus operatic versions mentioned earlier do not include the fashion for “music plays” of the seventeenth century, which may have begun during Shakespeare’s lifetime but which certainly dominated the reopened stage after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when a music-starved public flocked to listen to musical adaptations of plays, especially Shakespeare’s. Purcell and Dryden played important roles in this development, which saw
Macbeth
,
The Tempest,
and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
established as favorites. The
Dream
also inspired Purcell’s
Fairy Queen
(1692), though the latter is more a series of masques than a play and does not include settings of Shakespeare’s words.
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The rage for musical versions of Shakespeare was a nineteenth-century phenomenon that continued into the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. In musical inspiration Shakespeare is easily ahead of all rivals, Goethe coming next with about sixty musical settings; then Byron and Scott, with fifty-five each; and Victor Hugo with fifty-two. Very occasionally the composer excels the playwright—thus Verdi’s
Falstaff
is a better opera than
The Merry Wives of Windsor
is a play. But in almost every other case the subtle verbal music of Shakespeare’s texts defies
improvement by the composer. Verdi’s early opera
Macbeth
is a travesty of that monument to poetic horror, Shakespeare’s play; and the musical
Kiss Me, Kate
, though highly successful and often revived, mainly serves to set off the theatrical fun and brilliance of
The Taming of the Shrew
.

Shakespeare, then, was a virtuoso in words and sounds; and in his plays, though anxious always to follow a story line which is plausible and (when appropriate) historically accurate, he is equally, perhaps more, keen to create opportunities for his virtuosity. He quickly learned that, in the theater, an unsophisticated, perhaps uneducated, audience does not necessarily need to understand precisely everything that is said onstage in order to enjoy displays of verbal dexterity, ingenuity, and sheer poetry—a point also well understood by Molière, Shaw, and Stoppard. Shakespeare never forgot the groundlings, but he never lowered his sights either. He always gave his best, and stretched his intelligence and genius for words to its limits, knowing he could pull the public after him.

The two parts of
Henry IV
, written toward the end of the 1590s as the climactic year 1600 (the peak of Shakespeare’s invention, the miracle time) approached, are wonderful exercises in stagecraft and sheer invention, creativity at its most active and unexpected. The last years of Elizabeth were a time of strident patriotism and also of war-weariness, the coexistence of two such incompatible emotions being precisely the kind of psychological paradox that Shakespeare understood and relished. He wanted to make a theatrical epic of the doings of the great soldier-king Henry V, who combined an overwhelming victory with a superb peace. But to do this he needed—or felt he needed—to present Henry’s youth and show how Henry became the man he was as king. This was not easy. The historical records, as reflected in sources like Holinshed’s Chronicles, Hall, and so forth, show that “Harry of Monmouth” began his military experience in his early teens on campaign with Richard II in Ireland, and that thereafter, with heavy military responsibilities in Wales and on the northern borders—sometimes both at once—he was rarely out of the saddle and camp. But like other battle-hardened young men he could also be dissolute, and stories about an unruly youth got about. Shakespeare, unwilling to accept the marvelous Henry V as a natural development from the teenage warrior Harry,
seized on such tales to create a prolegomenon to his epic, a satisfying study in repentance and redemption.
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It did not quite turn out like that. Creative forces in a writer, as Shakespeare was always discovering and as anyone who studies the creative process knows well, have an inveterate habit of taking over and calling the score. Thus
Henry IV
elongated itself into two formidable plays, among the best Shakespeare ever wrote, which proved enormously popular, being printed during Shakespeare’s lifetime in quarto and duodecimo, more often than any other of his works.

Shakespeare was already an expert in theatrical counterpoint, the interplay of comedy and seriousness (or tragedy), marking the contrast by putting the former in prose—often racy dialogue or farcical bombast—and the latter in blank verse. In the first part of
Henry IV
he raises counterpoint to a new art form. For this purpose he invents two extraordinary characters, Hotspur and Falstaff. I say “invents,” but both were real, Hotspur being Earl Percy, son and co-rebel of the duke of Northumberland, who led Henry IV a dangerous dance; and Falstaff being based on Sir John Oldcastle, a Lollard knight. Indeed Falstaff was originally called Oldcastle, but Oldcastle’s family, powerful at court, kicked up such a fuss at seeing their forebear caricatured that the author changed the name (and nearly ran into more trouble with the family of the great warrior Sir John Fastolf ).

Still, these two characters are essentially Shakespearean inventions. Hotspur is designed to contrast, as a bellicose and manly figure, with young Harry Monmouth’s dissolute pub-crawling. Hotspur takes himself by the scruff of the neck and appears fully rounded: hotheaded, angry, and short-tempered, but beguiling and straightforward—a man who loves horses and war; hates gassing; is truthful, loyal, and brave; has huge sex appeal (to both sexes, indeed); is impossible to dislike. This is one of the greatest parts Shakespeare ever wrote, and it was the favorite of Laurence Olivier—I was lucky enough, as a teenager, to see him perform it gloriously in 1945—fitting his peculiar gift for leaping about the stage belligerently, shouting poetically, and, not least, dying with dramatic pathos. Shakespeare is forced by the logic of his own escaped creation to oblige Harry Monmouth to apologize to Hotspur for killing him, and he gives the dying antihero-turned-hero a wonder
ful death speech, ending in a spectacular stammer, for Hotspur cannot pronounce his
w
’s and so cannot say his last words “I am food for w—” (worms).

The death of Hotspur almost turns
Henry IV, Part 1
into a tragedy, for earlier, in Act II, scene iv, Shakespeare shows the warrior in a touching scene with his adoring but perky wife, Kate, the two exchanging brilliantly animated dialogue and the antiwar Kate trying to stop him from going off to campaign, calling him “Mad-headed ape” and “paraquito,” and saying, “A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with.” This relationship broadens out, in Act III, scene i, into the finest scene Shakespeare had yet written. It provides a chance for a virtuoso actor to display Hotspur’s charm, rage, and skill with words and to knock all the other actors into the corners with the sheer power of Hotspur’s personality. Hotspur has another, longer, love scene with Kate, itself in counterpoint with a love exchange involving Mortimer, who has married the daughter of Owen Glendower, the Welsh prince and magician. The princess can speak no English, only Welsh, but she sings Mortimer to sleep marvelously, as even Hotspur has to admit. Hotspur is a man who hates verbosity in any form, despises euphemisms; anything smacking of what we would now call the politically correct he repudiates. He dislikes suburban genteelism and rebukes Kate for her dainty swearing: