30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (13 page)

Of course we can't know the secrets of the Shakespeares' marriage—nor, with our modern Western idealization of marriage as a union of minds as well as bodies, can we understand the perhaps more pragmatic early modern expectations of this relationship. Renaissance commentators were more inclined to discuss male–male friendship in the intimate and affectionate terms we might now reserve for romantic partnerships. As Michel de Montaigne put it in his
Essays
, translated into English in 1603 in a version we know Shakespeare consulted extensively (see Myth 2), “If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed, but by answering: Because it was he, because it was my self.”
⁵
Many of Shakespeare's comedies dramatize marriage as the painful severing of strong male affections, such as the idealized boyhood relationship between Leontes and Polixenes in
The Winter's Tale
, who “as twinned lambs that did frisk i'th sun” “tripped” from this innocence only when women entered the frame (1.2.69, 77). Similarly, it is no accident that when in
Much Ado About Nothing
, Benedick swears his love for Beatrice, and bids her demand anything of him, her answer is the terse “Kill Claudio” (4.1.290): Benedick must kill his best friend to be with his lover.

But if we cannot see the secrets of the marriage bed (best or second-best), we can be conscious of the cultural operations of the myth of the wife who does not understand her genius husband. Germaine Greer titles the first chapter in her spirited defense of Anne Hathaway against misogynistic assumptions based on very little evidence “considering the poor reputation of wives generally, in particular the wives of literary men, and the traditional disparagement of the wife of the Man of the Millennium”: Greer deftly points out that the depiction of a foolish, contrary, scolding, or generally unsympathetic wife is one of the tropes of literary biography and thus part of the ideological construction of male creative genius.
⁶

The second-best bed thus chimes with a whole range of other scattered facts in Shakespeare's biography and helps to turn them into a narrative of an unhappy marriage, usually one in which the teenage Shakespeare cannot be blamed. Attempts by scholars trying to defend Shakespeare from the charge of mistreating his wife have suggested that the second-best bed in a Jacobean household would be the marital bed, with the best bed being reserved for guests, and that therefore the bequest was a romantic one: the sentimental biographer A.L. Rowse asserted that it was an act of great care and generosity to his wife, in response to Katherine Duncan-Jones's view of the bequest's “shabbiness.”
⁷
Carol Ann Duffy's sonnet “Anne Hathaway” develops Rowse's interpretation in sensual style: “The bed we loved in was a spinning world / of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas / where he would dive for pearls” (ll. 1–3).
⁸
Or apologists have stressed the residual rights payable to widows, at least by London custom, or assumed that Shakespeare knew his wife would be cared for by Susanna and John. The arguments here, as so often, tend to proceed from the desired conclusion back to review the evidence, rather than vice versa.

If we cannot know whether Shakespeare's bequest of his second-best bed to his wife in 1616 was evidence of his disregard for her, does this matter? Not for Shakespeare the playwright. As Myths 7, 12, and 18 show, neither Shakespeare nor any of his contemporary dramatists was writing autobiographically. A mainstay of humanist models of learning, much copied in grammar-school curricula such as that at the King's New School in Stratford, was known as
utramque partem
(on either side of the question). This training in being able to argue from both points of view was formative for the generations who wrote for, and attended, the new Elizabethan theaters, since it introduced them to a rhetorical narrative form in which different perspectives were always simultaneously present. We cannot readily deduce anything about Shakespeare the man from Shakespeare the works, and even at those moments when the writing may seem most confessional, it is shaped by convention, artifice, and imagination (see Myth 18). So looking at attitudes to wives in Shakespeare's plays, or trying to draw out the way he deals with women, cannot help us.

Greer observes that the spectacle of an active, perhaps more worldly or experienced woman wooing a more naïf or tongue-tied young man is, in Shakespeare's comedies, a source of erotic and dramatic satisfaction (think of Rosalind seducing Orlando in
As You Like It
, or the attraction of Portia for Bassanio in
The Merchant of Venice
). Greer's biographical application of this observation to the Shakespeare–Hathaway relationship has to be as off-limits, argumentatively, as the assumptions of earlier biographers that the frequent depictions of male sexual jealousy in Shakespeare's plays (in
Othello
, or
The Winter's Tale
, or
Cymbeline
) told us something about Anne Hathaway's assumed infidelity, or, as in Stephen Dedalus's analysis above, that the reluctant Adonis tells us something about the courtship of Anne and William. And in any case, Shakespeare's plays would always furnish contradictory examples: Shakespeare's women range from the demure Ophelia to the charismatic Cleopatra, and from the unconventional Katherine (
The Taming of the Shrew
) to the wronged Innogen in
Cymbeline
. It would be hard to know which to select to build a biographical reading.

Notes

¹
 See
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/museum/item.asp?item_id=21

²
 Samuel Schoenbaum,
William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 297.

³
 Ibid., p. 82.

⁴
 James Joyce,
Ulysses
, ed. Jeri Johnson, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 183.

⁵
 Michel de Montaigne,
The essays or morall, politike and militarie discourses of Michaell de Montaigne
, trans. John Florio (London, 1603): ‘On Friendship’, p. 92 (sig. I4
^v
).

⁶
 Germaine Greer,
Shakespeare's Wife
(London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 1.

⁷
 This particular skirmish was in the
Times Literary Supplement
, 18 and 25 November 1994.

⁸
 Carol Ann Duffy,
The World's Wife
(London: Picador, 1999), p. 30.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur “Thou still unravished bride of quietness”, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary. I know this because the texture, rhythm and resonance of your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning … Your language draws attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like “Don't you know the drivers are on strike?” do not.
¹

Terry Eagleton's example of the literary, the first line of Keats's poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, is also an example of the most common metrical pattern in Shakespeare's writing: iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter structures a pattern of five paired unstressed/STRESSED syllables that we usually render as “de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM, de-DUM”: hence “Thou STILL unRAVished BRIDE of QUIetNESS.” There are thousands of iambic pentameter lines in Shakespeare: “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks” (
Romeo and Juliet
2.1.44) or “When I do count the clock that tells the time” (Sonnet 12) or “If music be the food of love, play on” (
Twelfth Night
1.1.1) or “False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (
Macbeth
1.7.82). But iambic pentameter shows up, as many critics have pointed out, in lots of everyday situations too: “We hold these truths to be self-evident” (the first line of the American Declaration of Independence); “the baffled king composing Hallelujah” (Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah”); “A skinny cappuccino, please, to go” (us, in Starbucks). On the one hand, iambic pentameter is part of a package of qualities epitomizing the literary; on the other hand, it crops up in prose, popular song, and everyday speech. Which is it?

An example from Shakespeare may help us answer that question. Stage directions in Shakespeare's plays are always in prose. In the first quarto edition of
King Lear
(1608) we find the following direction for Regan to stab a servant:
Shee takes a sword and runs at him behind
(H2
^r
). The theater person who prepared the version which reached print many years later in 1623 reduced the direction to the essential:
Killes him
(TLN 2155), which gets the job done. The quarto simply offers extra details about the way in which the killing is staged. But it adds something else too: a line of poetry. The quarto stage direction is a perfect example of iambic pentameter. Is this an example of Shakespeare at work, having penned dialogue in iambic pentameter and not switched off the rhythm when he wrote the stage direction? Or is it another example of the poetic rhythms of everyday speech? Of course, it's both.

Writing about poetic forms, Derek Attridge describes pentameter verse as having “a relatively weak rhythmic architecture, neither dividing into half-lines nor forming larger units. It can be rhymed or unrhymed, stanzaic or continuous. It makes no use of virtual beats [silent beats implied by the rhythmic pattern].” “These characteristics,” writes Attridge “make it particularly suited to the evocation of speech and thought.”
²

Shakespeare can use iambic pentameter lines as part of formal, literary, heightened language, or as an indication of more conversational speech. Let's consider the exchange between Juliet and her Nurse about the unexpected guest at the Capulets' party:

Nurse:
His name is Romeo, and a Montague,

Juliet:
My only love sprung from my only hate!

(1.5.135–7)

This is poetic iambic pentameter but it is also idiomatic conversation. The Nurse offers information: Romeo's names, his parentage. But it is also highly patterned: Juliet's one-line response is structured as an antithesis and a paradox. The effect here is as much to do with vocabulary and word order as with rhythm.

This kind of variety operates not only within dialogue but within each pentameter line. Iambic pentameter is always tipping towards the stressed beat, so its cadence moves quickly: inverting that rhythm is preemptive, eager. Richard's well-known opening “NOW is the winter of our discontent” (
Richard III
1.1.1) suggests, in its stressed first syllable, that just as he can seize the expected meter, so he will seize the throne. When Juliet, awaiting Romeo, speaks the inverted “GALlop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” (3.2.1), her impatience reveals itself metrically: she cannot wait for the stressed syllable. Other variations on the iambic pentameter include syllabic ones: Hamlet's most famous line “To be, or not to be; that is the question” (3.1.58) ends on an extra unstressed syllable (sometimes this is called a “feminine” ending). Perhaps this is suggestive of the unfinished nature of Hamlet's thought here. (Cicely Berry, veteran voice coach of the Royal Shakespeare Company, suggests that these additional syllables “occur less frequently in the histories where action is more definite, perhaps swifter and less considered.”
²
)

Lines are broken between speakers, often suggestive of powerful, even sexual, awareness of each other's rhythm: the first encounter between Katherine and Petruccio in
The Taming of the Shrew
, for instance, or the taut exchanges between Angelo and Isabella in
Measure for Measure
. The tension between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as they absorb, jumpily, the aftermath of Duncan's murder, is enacted through the suspension between them of a pentameter line:

Did you not speak?

When?

Now.

As I descended?

(2.2.16)

The scene's rhythms are further punctuated by the insistent knocking at the castle doors. In an essay on the play, the Romantic poet and opium addict Thomas de Quincey noted that this knocking wakes the playworld from the dreamlike trance in which the murder takes place: but the beat of the pentameter is a more subtle version of the same thing: “the pulses of life are beginning to beat again.”
⁴
That iambic pentameter has a beat like the human heart is a nice conceit—and it is helpful to try to connect poetic rhythm with physiological ones (but it's a rather Anglocentric view: other languages have quite different poetic meters even as their speakers have the same somatic ones).

If iambic pentameter is not an English bodily phenomenon, neither is it an English dramatic tradition. Elizabethan playwrights did not have a history of iambic pentameter plays. Medieval mystery plays were composed in a variety of stanzaic structures; aural unity was partly achieved through alliteration. Mid-sixteenth-century interludes and comedies were often written in rhyming couplets.
Gammer Gurton's Needle
(published 1575 but probably written in the reign of Mary or Edward) gives us an example from university drama: “Alas, Hodge, alas! I may well curse and ban / This day, that ever I saw it, with Gib and the milk-pan”; 1.4.1–2).
⁵
At the end of the century the successful professional company, the Queen's Men, were performing the flat-footed “fourteeners” (a line of seven stressed syllables) of
Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes
(published 1599). Listen to this dialogue between Juliana and Sir Clamydes in the play's first scene:

Juliana:
My faith and troth if what is said by me thou dost perform.

Clamydes:
If not, be sure, O Lady, with my life I never will return.

Juliana:
Then, as thou seemst in thine attire a virgin's knight to be, Take thou this shield likewise of white, and bear thy name by me.