Shakespeare (17 page)

Among much else Hinman determined that no two volumes of the First Folio were exactly the same. “The idea that every single volume would be different from every other was unexpected, and obviously you would need a lot of volumes to make that determination,” said Rachel Doggett with a look of real satisfaction. “So Folger's obsession with collecting Folios turned out to be quite a valuable thing for scholarship.”

“What is slightly surprising,” Ziegler said, “is that all the fuss is about a book that wasn't actually very well made.” To demonstrate her point she laid open on a table one of the First Folios and placed beside it a copy of Ben Jonson's own complete works. The difference in quality was striking. In the Shakespeare First Folio, the inking was conspicuously poor; many passages were faint or very slightly smeared.

“The paper is handmade,” she added, “but of no more than middling quality.” Jonson's book in comparison was a model of stylish care. It was beautifully laid out, with decorative drop capitals and printer's ornaments, and it incorporated many useful details such as the dates of first performances, which were lacking from the Shakespeare volume.

 

At the time of Shakespeare's death few would have supposed that one day he would be thought the greatest of English playwrights. Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Ben Jonson were all more popular and esteemed. The First Folio contained just four poetic eulogies—a starkly modest number. When the now obscure William Cartwright died in 1643, five dozen admirers jostled to offer memorial poems. “Such are the vagaries of reputation,” sighs Schoenbaum in his
Documentary Life
.

This shouldn't come entirely as a surprise. Ages are generally pretty incompetent at judging their own worth. How many people now would vote to bestow Nobel Prizes for Literature on Pearl Buck, Henrik Pontoppidan, Rudolf Eucken, Selma Lagerlöf, or many others whose fame could barely make it to the end of their own century?

In any case Shakespeare didn't altogether delight Restoration sensibilities, and his plays were heavily adapted when they were performed at all. Just four decades after his death, Samuel Pepys thought
Romeo and Juliet
“the worst that ever I heard in my life”—until, that is, he saw
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, which he thought “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.” Most observers were more admiring than that, but on the whole they preferred the intricate plotting and thrilling twists of Beaumont and Fletcher's
Maid's Tragedy
,
A King and No King
, and others that are now largely forgotten except by scholars.

Shakespeare never entirely dropped out of esteem—as the publication of Second, Third, and Fourth Folios clearly attests—but neither was he reverenced as he is today. After his death some of his plays weren't performed again for a very long time.
As You Like It
was not revived until the eighteenth century.
Troilus and Cressida
had to wait until 1898 to be staged again, in Germany, though John Dryden in the meanwhile helpfully gave the world a completely reworked version. Dryden took this step because, he explained, much of Shakespeare was ungrammatical, some of it coarse, and the whole of it “so pester'd with Figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure.” Nearly everyone agreed that Dryden's version, subtitled “Truth Found Too Late,” was a vast improvement. “You found it dirt but you have made it gold,” gushed the poet Richard Duke.

The poems, too, went out of fashion. The sonnets “were pretty well forgotten for over a century and a half,” according to W. H. Auden, and
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
were likewise overlooked until rediscovered by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his fellow Romantics in the early 1800s.

Such was Shakespeare's faltering status that as time passed the world began to lose track of what exactly he had written. The Third Folio, published forty years after the first, included six plays that Shakespeare didn't in fact write—
A Yorkshire Tragedy, The London Prodigal, Locrine, Sir John Oldcastle, Thomas Lord Cromwell
, and
The Puritan Widow
—though it did finally make room for
Pericles
, for which scholars and theatergoers have been grateful ever since. Other collections of his plays contained still other works—
The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Mucedorus, Iphis and Ianthe
, and
The Birth of Merlin
. It would take nearly two hundred years to resolve the problem of authorship generally, and in detail it isn't settled yet.

Almost a century elapsed between William Shakespeare's death and the first even slight attempts at biography, by which time much detail of his life was gone for good. The first stab at a life story came in 1709, when Nicholas Rowe, Britain's poet laureate and a dramatist in his own right, provided a forty-page background sketch as part of the introduction to a new six-volume set of Shakespeare's complete works. Most of it was drawn from legend and hearsay, and a very large part of that was incorrect. Rowe gave Shakespeare three daughters rather than two, and credited him with the authorship of a single long poem,
Venus and Adonis
, apparently knowing nothing of
The Rape of Lucrece.
It is to Rowe that we are indebted for the attractive but specious story of Shakespeare's having been caught poaching deer at Charlecote. According to the later scholar Edmond Malone, of the eleven facts asserted about Shakespeare's life by Rowe, eight were incorrect.

Nor was Shakespeare always terribly well served by those who strove to restore his reputation. The poet Alexander Pope, extending the tradition begun by Dryden, produced a handsome set of Shakespeare's works in 1723, but freely reworked any material he didn't like, which was a good deal of it. He discarded passages he thought unworthy (insisting that they were the creations of actors, not Shakespeare himself), replaced archaic words that he didn't understand with modern words he did, threw out nearly all puns and other forms of wordplay, and constantly altered phrasing and meter to suit his own unyieldingly discerning tastes. Where, for instance, Shakespeare wrote about taking arms against a sea of troubles, he changed
sea
to
siege
to avoid a mixed metaphor.

Partly in response to Pope's misguided efforts there now poured forth a small flood of new editions and scholarly studies. Lewis Theobald, Sir Thomas Hanmer, William Warburton, Edward Capell, George Steevens, and Samuel Johnson produced separate contributions that collectively did much to revitalize Shakespeare's standing.

Even more influential was the actor-manager David Garrick, who in the 1740s began a long, adoring, and profitable relationship with Shakespeare's works. Garrick's productions were not without their idiosyncrasies. He gave
King Lear
a happy ending and had no hesitation in dropping three of the five acts of
The Winter's Tale
to keep the narrative moving briskly if not altogether coherently. Despite these quirks Garrick set Shakespeare on a trajectory that shows no sign of encountering a downward arc yet. More than any other person, he put Stratford on the tourist map—a fact of very considerable annoyance to the Reverend Francis Gastrell, a vicar who owned New Place and who grew so weary of the noisy intrusions of tourists that in 1759 he tore the house down rather than suffer another unwelcome face at the window.

(At least the birthplace escaped the fate considered for it by the impresario P. T. Barnum, who in the 1840s had the idea of shipping it to the United States, placing it on wheels, and sending it on a perpetual tour around the country—a prospect so alarming that money was swiftly raised in Britain to save the house as a museum and shrine.)

 

Critical appreciation of Shakespeare may be said to begin with William Dodd, who was both a clergyman and a scholar of the first rank—his
Beauties of Shakespeare
(1752) remained hugely influential for a century and a half—but something of a rogue as well. In the early 1770s, he fell into debt and fraudulently acquired £4,200 by forging the signature of Lord Chesterfield on a bond. For his efforts he was sent to the scaffold—inaugurating a long tradition of Shakespeare scholars being at least a little eccentric, if not actively wayward.

Real Shakespeare scholarship starts with Edmond Malone. Malone, who was Irish and a barrister by training, was in many ways a great scholar though always a slightly worrying one. In 1763, while still in his early twenties, Malone moved to London, where he developed an interest in everything to do with Shakespeare's life and works. He became a friend of James Boswell's and Samuel Johnson's, and ingratiated himself with all the people with the most useful records. The master of Dulwich College lent him the collected papers of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn. The vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon allowed him to borrow the parish registers. George Steevens, another Shakespeare scholar, was so taken with Malone that he gave him his entire collection of old plays. Soon afterward, however, the two had a bitter falling-out, and for the rest of his career Steevens wrote little that didn't contain, in the words of the
Dictionary of National Biography
, “many offensive references to Malone.”

Malone made some invaluable contributions to Shakespeare scholarship. Before he came on the scene, nobody knew much of anything about William Shakespeare's immediate family. Part of the problem was that Stratford in the 1580s and 1590s was home to a second, unrelated John Shakespeare, a shoemaker who married twice and had at least three children. Malone painstakingly worked out which Shakespeares belonged to which families—an endeavor of everlasting value to scholarship—and made many other worthwhile corrections concerning the details of Shakespeare's life.

Flushed with enthusiasm for his ingenious detective work, Malone became resolved to settle an even trickier issue, and devoted years to producing
An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays of Shakespeare Were Written
. Unfortunately the book was completely wrong and deeply misguided. For some reason Malone decided that Heminges and Condell were not to be trusted, and he began to subtract plays from the Shakespearean canon—notably
Titus Adronicus
and the three parts of
Henry VI—
on the grounds that they were not very good and he didn't like them. It was at about this time that he persuaded the church authorities at Stratford to whitewash the memorial bust of William Shakespeare in Holy Trinity, removing virtually all its useful detail, in the mistaken belief that it had not originally been painted.

Meanwhile the authorities at both Stratford and Dulwich were becoming increasingly restive at Malone's strange reluctance to give back the documents he had borrowed. The vicar at Stratford had actually to threaten him with a lawsuit to gain the return of his parish registers. The Dulwich authorities didn't need to go so far, but were appalled to discover, when their documents arrived back, that Malone had scissored parts of them out to retain as keepsakes. “It is clear,” wrote R. A. Foakes, “that several excisions have been made for the sake of the signatures on them of well-known dramatists”—an act of breathtaking vandalism that did nothing for scholarship or Malone's reputation.

Yet Malone, remarkably, was a model of restraint compared with others, such as John Payne Collier, who was also a scholar of great gifts, but grew so frustrated at the difficulty of finding physical evidence concerning Shakespeare's life that he began to create his own, forging documents to bolster his arguments if not, ultimately, his reputation. He was eventually exposed when the keeper of mineralogy at the British Museum proved with a series of ingenious chemical tests that several of Collier's “discoveries” had been written in pencil and then traced over and that the ink in the forged passages was demonstrably not ancient. It was essentially the birth of forensic science. This was in 1859.

Even worse in his way was James Orchard Halliwell (later Halliwell-Phillipps), who was a dazzling prodigy—he was elected a fellow of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries while still a teenager—but also a terrific thief. Among his crimes were stealing seventeen rare volumes of manuscripts from the Trinity College Library at Cambridge (though it must be said that he was never convicted of it) and defacing literally hundreds of books, including a quarto edition of
Hamlet
—one of only two in existence. After his death, among his papers were found 3,600 pages or parts of pages torn from some eight hundred early printed books and manuscripts, many of them irreplaceable—a most exceptional act of destruction. On the plus side he wrote the definitive life of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century and much else besides. In fairness it must be noted again that Halliwell was merely accused, but never convicted, of theft, but there was certainly a curious long-standing correspondence between a Halliwell visit to a library and books going missing.

 

After his death William Shakespeare was laid to rest in the chancel of Holy Trinity, a large, lovely church beside the Avon. As we might by now expect, his life concludes with a mystery—indeed, with a small series of them. His gravestone bears no name, but merely a curious piece of doggerel:

His grave is placed with those of his wife and members of his family, but as Stanley Wells points out, there is a distinct oddness in the order in which they lie. Reading from left to right, the years of deaths of the respective occupants are 1623, 1616, 1647, 1635, and 1649—hardly a logical sequence. They also represent an odd grouping in respect of their relationships. Shakespeare lies between his wife and Thomas Nash, husband of his granddaughter Elizabeth, who died thirty-one years after him. Then come his son-in-law John Hall and daughter Susanna. Shakespeare's parents, siblings, and twin children were no doubt buried in the churchyard and are excluded. The group is rounded out by two other graves, for Francis Watts and Anne Watts; they have no known Shakespeare connection, though who exactly they were is a matter that awaits scholarly inquiry. Also for reasons unknown, Shakespeare's gravestone is conspicuously shorter—by about eighteen inches—than all the others in the group.