30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (17 page)

⁸
 William Fennor, “The Description of a Poet,” in
Fennors Descriptions
(London, 1616).

⁹
 John Webster, “To the Reader,” in
John Webster: Three Plays
, ed. David Gunby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 37.

¹⁰
 Quoted in Arthur F. Kinney,
Shakespeare by Stages: An Historical Introduction
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 85.

¹¹
 Blakemore Evans,
Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama
, p. 99.

¹²
 Andrew Gurr,
Playgoing in Shakespeare's London
, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 197–212, 4.

¹³
 Quoted ibid., p. 225.

¹⁴
 Forman's comments are included as appendices to the Oxford editions of the plays (
Macbeth
, ed. Nicholas Brooke, pp. 235–6;
The Winter's Tale
, ed. Stephen Orgel, p. 233). Jackson's note on
Othello
is in the Oxford edition, ed. Michael Neill, p. 9.

¹⁵
 Robert Bridges, “The Influence of the Audience on Shakespeare's Drama,” in
Collected Essays Papers &c. of Robert Bridges
(Oxford, 1927), pp. 28–9.

¹⁶
 Gurr,
Playgoing in Shakespeare's London
, p. 3.

Shakespeare is to Stratford-upon-Avon what Juliet is to Verona. Just as you can visit Juliet's balcony in Verona (see Myth 5), so you can visit the house in which Shakespeare was born, the houses in which his mother and grandmother were born, the school he probably attended, and the church in which he was baptized and buried. The difference is that Juliet is a fictional character and her balcony a product of the Veronese tourist industry. (The tourist industry is not entirely self-serving; here it caters to the desires of all those who wish a fictional character to have been real, the adult equivalent of children wanting their toys to come alive at night.) But Shakespeare really lived. He and his family have a tangible material presence in the parish and legal records of Stratford.

The medieval market town of Stratford (current population 25,000) has a thriving tourist trade thanks to its Renaissance playwright. There are six Shakespeare properties to visit plus a theater company dedicated in name and practice to staging his works. It is ironic to think that when an annual Shakespeare festival was first mooted in the nineteenth century, the initial response was an incredulous, “Who would want to visit a small Warwickshire market town?”
¹
Today the answer to that question is: 3 million people each year.

Shakespeare left Stratford sometime in the late 1580s. How frequently he returned to visit his wife and three children, whether he was able to attend the funeral of his son Hamnet in 1596 or that of his mother in 1608, is not documented. But he obviously continued to support his family; he was involved in Stratford investments or actions in 1598 (when his Stratford friend Richard Quiney wrote to him and visited him in London), in 1605 (when he bought a share in tithes) and 1611 (when he was one of seventy citizens petitioning parliament for the improvement of the roads); he invested in Stratford property in 1597 (New Place) and 1602 (107 acres in Old Town plus a cottage in Chapel Lane), retiring to Stratford (or commuting from Stratford) sometime from 1608 onwards (in a London court case in 1612 he gave his address as Stratford-upon-Avon).

Stratford, its inhabitants, and its language make appearances in Shakespeare's plays. One of his earliest plays,
The Taming of the Shrew
, opens with a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, whose experiences are rooted in Warwickshire. In a dispute about his ancestry, he calls for support from a neighbor: “Ask Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot if she know me not” (Induction 2.20–1; Wincot is a village four miles outside Stratford). Later in his career, Shakespeare uses Warwickshire dialect. In
Coriolanus
(1608) a character admires the destructive capacities of Coriolanus' son. She describes the cat-and-mouse game the young boy played with a butterfly, catching it and letting it go, before finally tearing it to pieces with his teeth. “I warrant how he mammocked it” she says approvingly (1.3.67). “Mammock” is a Warwickshire noun meaning a torn remnant; Shakespeare converts it to a verb: to tear something to shreds.

The sixteenth century saw the expansion of the English language as humanist scholars, translating and editing classical texts, imported Greek and Latin words to the English language (see Myth 21). Sir Thomas More gave us Latin-derived words such as
lunatic
; Francis Bacon, a scientist, gave us
skeleton
and
thermometer
(both from Greek). Sir John Cheke, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, was a lone voice of opposition to this influx among his classically minded contemporaries. Shakespeare simply made up words (he uses nouns as verbs) and imported them from Warwickshire. No one seems to have commented on this at the time and so his practice probably seemed reasonable during this period of linguistic innovation. Thus, “language rose like a tide on all sides until the ghost of Sir John Cheke relinquished its Canute-like efforts.”
²

One of the most beautiful lyrics in Shakespeare is the funeral dirge for Fidele in
Cymbeline
. This lyric lists items in the natural and political worlds that must fade and die, or, in the poem's poetic euphemism, “come to dust.” The poem begins:

Fear no more the heat o'th'sun,

Nor the furious winter's rages,

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

(4.2.259–64)

“Chimney-sweepers,” with its Victorian associations, seems a curiously inept image in the elegy; for a long time it perplexed editors. It was the twentieth century before researchers discovered that “chimney sweeper” is Warwickshire dialect for “dandelion,” the weed whose mature flower (which resembles the chimney-sweeper's brush) is a suitably fragile and evanescent symbol for this poem about transience.

In the same play Shakespeare pays tribute to a Stratford contemporary and friend, Richard Field. The disguised Innogen, asked to name her master, improvises a French name, “Richard du Champ.” The translated pun is multiply appropriate. Richard Field was a printer who specialized in foreign language books (see Myth 2). On many title pages he gave his name and print shop in a translated or transliterated form appropriate to the language of the book he was printing: in Spanish, French, Latin, and (pseudo-)Welsh. Thus, we find “Ricardo Campello” in Spanish texts. Field was two years older than Shakespeare and was the London printer of Shakespeare's first published works, the narrative poems
Venus and Adonis
(1593) and
The Rape of Lucrece
(1594). This book-ending of Shakespeare's career with Field (as printer at the start and punning reference at the end) suggests that the men maintained a friendship throughout.

But if Shakespeare was and remained a Stratford man with Stratford connections (at home and within London) he also had a professional life in London for two decades. What kind of affiliation did he have with the city?

It is notable that Shakespeare was never asked to write a city pageant. City pageants were allegorical tableaux sponsored by livery companies to celebrate the incoming Lord Mayor each year and, in 1604, the royal entry of the new king into London (James' entry had been delayed because of the outbreak of plague in 1603). This was the moment for the city to commission its heavyweight writers. George Peele, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Heywood all contributed to city pageants; Shakespeare never did (see Myth 17). The reasons for this are far from clear. Birth outside London did not disqualify someone (Heywood hailed from Lincolnshire), nor did the lack of a university education (Jonson did not attend university). Possibly membership of a livery company was an advantage (Jonson continued to pay his quarterly dues to the bricklayers' company even when he was rising to success as a playwright), but not all pageant writers were freemen of a livery company. So Shakespeare did not, as far as we know, have the literary links with London through celebrating it in an annual pageant that many of his contemporaries did.

Nor did he ally himself with the dominant comic genre of the late 1590s and early seventeenth century—city (London) comedy. City comedy is a branch of satire caricaturing the foibles and eccentricities of London's middle-class citizens; London is obviously an essential ingredient in this genre. The prologue to Jonson's
Every Man Out of His Humour
(1598) proclaims: “Our scene is London, 'cause we would make known, / No country's mirth is better than our own.” William Haughton's
Englishmen for my Money
(1598) relies on the audience's detailed knowledge of London topography and landmarks. The plot concerns three daughters who are wooed by three foreign and three London suitors; the London suitors trick the foreigners by giving them directions which take them in the opposite direction from that which they requested. Full of meaningful geographical references, the play is a veritable Elizabethan
A–Z
(a modern edition provides a map to enable non-Londoners to follow the plot). The closest Shakespeare came to writing in this satiric city genre is
Merry Wives of Windsor
, a city comedy of
c
.1597 in which Falstaff is tricked by the merry wives of the title. But the play is set in Windsor—hardly the typical city location of the genre. Shakespeare was not a London playwright.

In another sense, of course, he was. All his plays were performed in London; arguably, they are all also set in London. He may call the city Venice or Padua or Rome (republican or imperial) but the coloring is recognizably English. When shipwrecked in Illyria (modern Croatia),
Twelfth Night
's Antonio recommends that Sebastian lodge “in the south suburbs at the Elephant” (3.3.39). Southwark (London's south suburbs) did indeed have an inn called the Elephant, at the end of Horseshoe Lane. This allusion may be more than just a local reference, constituting what we would now call “product placement”: Antonio actually says “In the south suburbs, at the Elephant, /
Is best to lodge
” (3.3.39–40, our italics) and when Sebastian leaves him, Antonio reminds him: “To th'Elephant”; Sebastian reassures him, “I do remember” (3.3.48). The reminiscences of Falstaff and Justice Shallow in the English world of
2 Henry IV
naturally include London landmarks (the Inns of Court, Turnbull Street, the Tilt-yard) but they also include a known Southwark tavern (or brothel): “the Windmill in Saint George's Field” (3.2.192). The penthouse (lean-to roof projecting from a building) under which Borachio and Conrade converse in
Much Ado About Nothing
is both Italian and recognizably English, and they shelter for a familiar English reason: “it drizzles rain” (3.3.101).

Shakespeare lodged in London. For four years (between approximately 1592 and 1596) his parish church was St Helen's Bishopsgate (the church is beautifully intact, having escaped both the Great Fire of London and the Blitz, although it was partially damaged—and then restored—by an IRA bomb in 1992). Shakespeare performed on stage in London; he rented rooms in Bishopsgate, in Southwark, and in St Giles Cripplegate; eventually he bought a house in London, just three years before he died, in 1613. But there are hardly any walking tours of Shakespeare's London; no advertising of St Helen's as Shakespeare's church. Shakespeare has become for us a Stratford playwright, as Cole Porter's lyrics to “Brush up Your Shakespeare” attest:

But the poet of them all

Who will start 'em simply ravin'

Is the poet people call

The bard of Stratford-on-Avon.

Part of the attraction of Stratford (see titles such as
The Man From Stratford
) is the romantic story of small-town boy makes good in the big city. It is Dick Whittington, a version of the rags-to-riches story. Someone who went to Westminster School or was taught by William Camden ought to be successful, it is thought (this was Ben Jonson's pedigree). (Of course, that Shakespeare's grammar-school education was equivalent is testimony to the pedagogical vision of the sixteenth-century humanists; see Myth 2.) But while it is true to say that Shakespeare was and remained a Stratford man, we ought perhaps to separate Stratford
man
from Stratford
playwright
(“the bard of Stratford-on-Avon”). Shakespeare's plays are as neutral geographically (Stratford/London) as they are in terms of religion (Protestant/Catholic) or politics (conservative/radical).

There is no doubt that Shakespeare the actor in London was the same person as the man from Stratford. In fact, as we saw in Myth 2, there is nothing in Shakespeare's plays that cannot be attributed to an author who simply had very close powers of observation. As we discuss in Myth 16, one of the reasons we have very little sense of Shakespeare's personality (unlike that, say, of the flamboyant, iconoclastic, irascible Marlowe) is that Shakespeare seems to have been the kind of person who sat in the corner and watched people.

And he watched people in both Stratford and in London.

Notes

¹
 For a history of the town's festival attempts from Garrick's bicentenary celebration onwards, see ‘The Borough of Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespearean Festivals and Theatres’, in
A History of the County of Warwick
, vol. 3:
Barlichway Hundred
, ed. Philip Styles (1945), pp. 244–7;
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=57017
(accessed 10 July 2012).

²
 George Puttenham,
The Arte of English Poesie
, ed. Gladys Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. xciii.

The first recorded reference to Shakespeare as a writer is in a pamphlet called
Greene's Groatsworth of Wit
(it purports to be by Robert Greene but many scholars now believe Henry Chettle actually wrote it): “there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his
tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide
supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute
Johannes Factotum
, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”
¹
The tiger's heart alludes to the line in
3 Henry VI
when the captured York replies to the taunting Queen Margaret that she is “a tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide” (titled
Richard Duke of York
in the
Oxford Shakespeare
, following its initial publication title in 1595; 1.4.138). Like all the documentary allusions to Shakespeare, this one has been pored over and subjected to a range of interpretations, but one idea in particular has stuck: it is often assumed that the author of the pamphlet is accusing Shakespeare, like a crow who has the power to mimic but not invent, “beautified with our feathers,” of something like plagiarism.