30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (18 page)

The charge is a difficult one to discuss, not least because ideas of plagiarism and literary property have undergone such a sea-change since Shakespeare's time. Whereas we might now identify “originality” as a compelling literary feature, Renaissance writers learned the importance of
imitatio
—the copying of fine examples from classical and modern sources. Seneca advised the writer to consider “the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey,” and although ancient apian knowledge was not sufficiently advanced to understand quite how pollen was converted to honey, this process of “transformation” was nevertheless cited as exemplary.
²
As Ben Jonson put it, appropriately, drawing on Seneca, the poet must “be able to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use … Not as a creature that swallows what it takes in crude, raw, or indigested, but that feeds with an appetite, and hath a stomach to concoct, divide, and turn all into nourishment”: “observe how the best writers have imitated, and follow them.”
³

Jonson's metaphor of imitation as nourishment—the ingestion and transformation of nutritional material—suggests that
imitatio
is not mechanical but organic, creative rather than repetitive—in short, it is far from the unthinking attempt to pass off others' work as your own that marks the modern concept of plagiarism. T.S. Eliot, writing of Shakespeare's near-contemporary Philip Massinger in
The Sacred Wood
, puts it more quotably: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
⁴

Let's look, then, at Shakespeare's transformative use of his sources. There are some books of source material that Shakespeare clearly must have had open on his writing desk as he worked on the relevant play: Raphael Holinshed's book of English history, his
Chronicles
, for the English history plays, for instance. If we look at the long description of the Salic law, the arcane genealogy barring women from ruling in France adduced by the wily Archbishop of Canterbury to persuade the young King Henry V to war, for instance, we can see that Shakespeare reproduces errors of arithmetic and of history verbatim from his source.
⁵
In
Titus Andronicus
the source—Ovid's
Metamorphoses
—is brought on stage: in this play playwright and characters alike know their Ovid. In
Pericles
, the author of Shakespeare's source, the medieval poet John Gower, becomes a chorus to the action. A more famous example comes from
Antony and Cleopatra
, where the description by the usually laconic Roman soldier Enobarbus of the Egyptian queen is taken directly from Shakespeare's source, Sir Thomas North's translation of the historian Plutarch's
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
. On page 981, Shakespeare found North's description; we have placed Shakespeare's reworking below it so you can decide for yourself whether his borrowing here is plagiarism:

Therefore when she was sent unto by divers letters, both from Antonius himself, and also from his friends, she made so light of it, and mocked Antonius so much, that she disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, hautboys, citherns, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of her self: she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus, commonly drawn in picture: and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. Her Ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the nymphs Nereides (which are the mermaids of the waters) and like the Graces, some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge, out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweet savour of perfumes, that perfumed the wharfside, pestered with innumerable multitudes of people. Some of them followed the barge all alongst the rivers side: others also ran out of the city to see her coming in. So that in the end, there ran such multitudes of people one after another to see her, that Antonius was left post alone in the market place, in his Imperial seat to give audience: and there went a rumour in the peoples' mouths, that the goddess Venus was come to play with the god Bacchus, for the general good of all Asia.

Maecenas:
She's a most triumphant lady, if report be square to her.

Enobarbus:
When she first met Mark Antony, she pursed up his heart upon the river of Cydnus.

Agrippa:
There she appeared indeed, or my reporter devised well for her.

Enobarbus:
I will tell you.

Agrippa:
O, rare for Antony!

Enobarbus:
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,

(2.2.191–225)

The similarities are easy to see here, but so too are the differences: in particular, Shakespeare's version of the scene draws out its eroticism and sensuality. The winds are “love-sick,” the water “amorous,” the tackle is “silken,” hands are “flower-soft,” and where Plutarch busies the scene with props, Shakespeare's focus is on Cleopatra as its animating deity. And there is a crucial difference between the scene in prose and in verse. We see in Shakespeare's writing a metrical equivalence to the excesses of the scene: form and content are inseparable. A number of his lines end in an additional, unstressed syllable, known at the time, appropriately, as a “feminine ending” (see Myth 11)—“vacancy,” “tackle”—and some lines have a complete extra foot. “The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver” and “As amorous of her strokes. For her own person” are both hexameters, standing out from the more usual pentameter rhythm. Put less technically, they are longer, spilling over, depicting in their form the impossibility of conveying the description of a Cleopatra who “beggared all description.” Shakespeare hasn't just cut-and-shut Plutarch: he has created a version of Cleopatra in which the verse form itself contributes to the scene's excesses. He has also transformed a simile in Plutarch with spectacular effect. When Plutarch compares Cleopatra to Venus, it is a straightforward image of equivalence: “attired like the goddess Venus.” In Shakespeare it becomes multi-layered. Cleopatra “o'er-pictur[es] [goes beyond] that Venus [a specific Venus: a painting] where we see / The fancy [imagination] outwork [go beyond] nature”; Cleopatra outdoes that famous painting of Venus in which the artist outdoes nature. The sequence is dizzying: Nature→Venus→Art→Cleopatra. (Tom Stoppard took the joke one step further in
Arcadia
[1993] when the tutor, Septimus Hodge, tells his pupil to put some passion in her translation of Plutarch's Cleopatra and shows her how—by passing off Shakespeare's version of this speech as his own improvised poetic translation.)

This Plutarch passage is an exception, and more often a look at Shakespeare's plays alongside their sources reveals how he has radically reshaped them. The opening of
King Lear
transforms the old play
King Leir
that was one of Shakespeare's sources: instead of beginning with the newly widowed king worried for his daughters without a mother's care and wearied with grief of the cares of state, Shakespeare creates an air of uncertainty about his king's behavior. Opening with an oblique look from Gloucester and Kent which also establishes the interplay between the story of Gloucester's sons and Lear's daughters, Shakespeare moves to the love-test without any real explanation: like Cordelia we are uncertain what is being requested and why. More dramatically, though, Shakespeare has transformed the ending of his play from the outcome of the story in his sources. The story of Lear has its antecedents in Holinshed's history, as well as in more distant folkloric stories of the Cinderella type (Goneril and Regan as the Ugly Sisters?), in other texts of the period by Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, and even, perhaps, in the contemporary court gossip around the elderly Sir Brian Annesley, whose elder daughter was attempting to have him declared insane (and thus to sequester his property), against the will of his loyal younger daughter, suggestively named Cordell. In all of these stories, though, Cordelia survives her father to become queen after him. Shakespeare's twist to a well-known story gives the play its bleak punch: the expectations of the audience, fanned by the joyous reunion of father and daughter in Act 4, are cruelly dashed. Dr Johnson famously professed himself “so shocked by Cordelia's death” that he was unwilling to reread the play's conclusion, but he does not seem to have wanted to believe that his outrage at a play “in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry” was entirely Shakespeare's design.
⁶

Sometimes Shakespeare's changes to his source are small but revealing details. In the pastoral romance from which he took
As You Like It
, it is a lion who menaces the sleeping Orlando. For his play in which Rosalind so dominates her suitor, Shakespeare's change to a “lioness, with udders all drawn dry” (4.3.115) seems telling. In the sources for
Othello
the couple made by Shakespeare into Iago and Emilia have a little daughter, who unwittingly distracts Desdemona while her father takes the fateful handkerchief. It adds to the sterility of the passions of the play that Shakespeare has removed this humanizing aspect, leaving Iago's own generative impulses directed towards the perverse “child” of his plot against Othello: “I ha't. It is ingendered. Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light” (1.3.395–6). Shakespeare's Hamlet is even more psychically overshadowed by his father than his source story equivalents: only in this play do the haunted prince and ghostly father share a name (echoed in the two Fortinbras). Shakespeare characterizes the formidable mother Volumnia in
Coriolanus
, the zany Mercutio of
Romeo and Juliet
, fat Falstaff in
1
and
2 Henry IV
, and the charismatic bastard Philip Faulconbridge in
King John
, either from minimal details in his source material or entirely from his own imagination. At other times, the ghostly shape of the source is still incipient in Shakespeare's own drama. The tragi-comic or “problem play” structure of
Measure for Measure
, for instance, may owe something to the influence of George Whetstone's
Promos and Cassandra
(1582), a two-part play in which the first part corresponds to a tragedy and the second to a comedy. Part of the difficulty in the multiple reunions at the end of
The Winter's Tale
may be the dark shadow of Robert Greene's
Pandosto
, in which the eponymous Leontes-figure falls in love with his long-lost daughter and commits suicide in shame and remorse for his transgressive desire. Oh, and Greene doesn't bring Hermione back to life either.

Almost all of Shakespeare's plays have an identified major source: only the plots of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
,
A Midsummer Night's Dream
,
Love's Labour's Lost
, and
The Tempest
seem to have been Shakespeare's invention. Increasingly as Shakespeare's career proceeds, however, it is his own previous plays that serve him as a source. Perhaps this self-plagiarism reaches its peak in
Cymbeline
, a romance play from the latter part of Shakespeare's career, and a play reveling in too much plot.
Cymbeline
is almost a compendium of Shakespearean tropes: male jealousy (as seen in
Othello
,
Much Ado
, and
Merry Wives
); a plotting queen (compare
Titus Andronicus
,
2 Henry VI
,
Macbeth
); a woman dressed in male clothing (
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
,
As You Like It
,
The Merchant of Venice
,
Twelfth Night
); a pastoral interlude (
As You Like It
,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
,
The Winter's Tale
); beheading (
Macbeth
,
Measure for Measure
); multiple reunions and mistaken identity (stick a pin in the Folio contents list). Elsewhere the late plays rework earlier Shakespearean material:
The Tempest
gives us an ameliorated
Hamlet
: the ambitious brother deposes but does not kill the ruler, thus allowing for the adult child in
The Tempest
to be the means of healing rather than, as in
Hamlet
, revenging, the crime.
The Winter's Tale
revisits
Othello
with the possibility of a second chance. In
Pericles
the title character does, unlike Lear, find salvation in the reunion with his daughter. The villain who plots (unsuccessfully) to destroy husband and wife in
Cymbeline
is resonantly called Iachimo (meaning “little Iago”).