30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (19 page)

Finally, the question of whether Shakespeare was a plagiarist has had a new twist in recent years. Software designed for educational institutions to identify—and punish—plagiarism in its students has been used on the corpus of Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists to try to secure their authorship. For example, Brian Vickers, the doyen of this methodology, has recently attributed parts of
Edward III
to Shakespeare based on an analysis of phrases shared by this play and the rest of the Shakespearean canon.
⁷
Of course, the method rests on an assumption that Shakespeare's own works are just that, and that there is a stable body of Shakespeare's own, unplagiarized work. Renaissance cultures of
imitatio
here clash with modern cultures of plagiarism and originality.

Notes

¹
 Quoted in Samuel Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 151.

²
 Seneca,
Epistulae morales
84, quoted in Brian Vickers (ed.),
English Renaissance Literary Criticism
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 24.

³
 Ben Jonson,
Discoveries
, in
Jonson
, ed. Ian Donaldson, Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 585–6.

⁴
 T.S. Eliot,
The Sacred Wood
(London: Methuen, 1920; reissued Faber & Faber, 1997), pp. 105–6.

⁵
 For Holinshed see
http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed

⁶
 Quoted in Emma Smith (ed.),
Blackwell Guides to Criticism: Shakespeare's Tragedies
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 20.

⁷
 
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/article6870086.ece

One of the most enduring myths is that we don't know much about Shakespeare's life. When Bill Bryson's biography of Shakespeare was published in 2007, reviewers were agreed that “Considering the hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about Shakespeare, relatively little is known about the man himself.”
¹
Indeed, Bryson's biography begins with George Steevens's famous one-line summary of Shakespeare's biography: “he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, produced a family there, went to London, became an actor and writer, returned to Stratford, made a will, and died.” Although Bryson acknowledges that this is not all we know, he inclines towards Steevens: “it is not all that far from the truth either.”
²
In fact, we know a great deal about Shakespeare's life and movements—far more than we know about most other Elizabethan dramatists. We may not know all that we want to know, or precise details of the bits that most interest us, but it is not true to say that the records are scant.

We know when Shakespeare was born (plus or minus a day). We know when he died. We know the birth dates and death dates of his three children. We know their godparents. We know about his mother's family and his father's, and we know about his father's civic activities in Stratford, his activities in wool-brogging (smuggling) and usury, and his subsequent debts. We know who Shakespeare's Stratford neighbors were. We know about his property inheritance, acquisition, and investment—houses in Henley Street and New Place, a cottage in Chapel Lane, land in Old Town, Stratford, a gatehouse in London's Blackfriars, a share in Stratford's tithes. We know about his litigation (it was a litigious culture). We know about his son's premature death and his two daughters' marriages. We lack comparable information for many of Shakespeare's Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries.

Part of the reason that we know so much, relatively speaking, about Shakespeare is that he maintained links with his home town, thus providing a constant in his life. Yes, there are gaps. We do not know what Shakespeare was doing in the crucial period between leaving Stratford and showing up in London, the “lost years” of the late 1580s. (Colin Burrow notes that “opinion even differs as to how many years were lost.”
³
) Did he go straight to London working as an actor? (Much has been made of the death of the Queen's Men's actor William Knell in 1587 while the company was on tour, just before it visited Stratford. Was Shakespeare recruited to fill the gap?) Or did he work, as John Aubrey first reported in the late seventeenth century, as a schoolmaster in the countryside, perhaps in Lancashire, in a county and a family (at Hoghton Tower) with Catholic and Warwickshire links (see Myth 7)? Clearly there is much that we would like to know; but this should not blind us to how much we
do
know. It is what we do with what we know—how we evaluate the evidence (and negative evidence) and the inferences we draw—that is important.

One of the key things to do with what we know is to put it in context. Thus, the shotgun wedding of Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare, allied to the fact that she was eight years his senior, is often used to argue that Anne trapped her teenage lover into marriage (see Myth 10). In fact, unmarried pregnant women were not uncommon in Stratford, and historians estimate that 25 percent of late-sixteenth-century brides were pregnant when they married.
⁴
In certain circumstances, pre-marital sex could be seen as an advantage: it enabled lovers to marry in defiance of their parents' wishes since parents were likely to prefer a son-in-law of whom they disapproved to the alternative: an illegitimate grandchild. Shakespeare's hurried wedding can be interpreted as evidence of his marital desire as well as evidence of marital entrapment.

Whether the Hathaway–Shakespeare alliance was or continued to be “a willing … bondage” (as
The Tempest
's Ferdinand calls marriage, 3.1.89–90) depends on how we contextualize it with later evidence. The couple's failure to have more children after the early death of their only son in 1596 (see Myth 10) may indicate, as Katherine Duncan-Jones believes, that conjugal relations had long since ceased; or it may, more neutrally, reflect Anne's infertility after the difficult delivery of twins.
⁵
Stories can be told in more than one way, based on the same evidence.

A similar need for context surrounds Shakespeare's education (see Myth 2). Critics often cite Shakespeare's marriage as an event that would have prevented him going to university. This was a period when Bachelors of Art were still, literally, bachelors. But Shakespeare married at 18 and that was a late age to be starting university in the sixteenth century. (There are plenty of records of students matriculating between the ages of 11 and 13.) By 1582, then, it was clear that university was not on the Shakespeare family's agenda for their first son. In fact, as Lois Potter reveals, only one of the Stratford men born in 1564 attended university (and he took holy orders, for which university was the essential training).
⁶

What is clear from the records is that although we know a considerable amount about Shakespeare's transactions and activities and finances, we have very little sense of his personality. This contrasts with other Elizabethan playwrights. Ben Jonson's personality is quite clear to us: he was, in Stanley Wells's trenchant summary, “the most aggressively self-opinionated, conceited, quarrelsome, vociferous and self-advertising literary and theatrical figure of his time.”
⁷
Marlowe comes across as intellectually and socially unorthodox: an iconoclast, or perhaps just a braggadocio. His entire family was irascible and impulsive: the archives record a “rowdy, quarrelsome, awkward, busy, self-assertive” father, a sister accused of extra-marital philandering, and another chastised as a “scold, common swearer and blasphemer of the name of God.”
⁸
Thomas Kyd, arrested in 1593 for the possession of atheistical documents, identified the papers as Marlowe's, and under torture offered further details of Marlowe's beliefs: that Christ was a bastard and Mary unfaithful, that Jesus and John the Baptist were sodomitical lovers, that religion was established only “to keep men in awe,” and “that all they that love not tobacco & boys were fools.” Richard Baines, a Secret Service spy whose allegations against Marlowe led to Marlowe's arrest, accused him of inciting people to atheism. Certainly, Marlowe associated with freethinkers (Sir Walter Raleigh, the mathematician Thomas Harriot, the magus Earl of Northumberland), but Kyd and Baines are not impartial witnesses: Kyd was under torture, and Baines was in government service. The student author of the
Parnassus
plays, performed at Cambridge at the turn of the century, is perhaps more reliable: he did not know Marlowe, but he reports what everyone thought about him:

Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell

Wit lent from heaven but vices sent from hell.

(1.2.288–9)
⁹

While there are many details we would like to know about Marlowe—his precise activities in Rheims when absent from Cambridge on government service, his illegal coining in Flushing, the activities of his last day and the truth of his last moments—this information is unlikely to alter our sense of Marlowe the man. It is because we know so much about his personality that we read his protagonists—such as Tamburlaine and Faustus—as expressions of his personal views; paradoxically, it is because we know so
little
about Shakespeare's personality that we read his plays as personal expressions.

We have only one letter written to Shakespeare in his lifetime. It is a business letter from two Stratford aldermen in 1598 trying to interest Shakespeare in an investment.
¹⁰
The closest thing to a letter from him is the printed dedications to the Earl of Southampton, prefaced to his narrative poems
Venus and Adonis
(1593) and
The Rape of Lucrece
(1594). They read like love letters: “What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours” (
Rape of Lucrece
). These could be the words of Juliet (
Romeo and Juliet
was written the year after the publication of
Lucrece
, in 1595) or of Portia in
The Merchant of Venice
, written in 1596. It is an elegantly incremental expression. The tricolonic structure moves from past tense (“what I have done”) to future tense (“what I have to do”) to an eternal present (“being”) which unusually goes beyond the expected patronage relationship of dependence and devotion to one of symbiosis and unity (“being
part
in
all
I have”). It is, or sounds, simple and heartfelt. As such, of course, it fulfills the conventions of the genre of dedication whose art was to be sycophantic while sounding sincere: in this era of humanist self-conscious rhetoric, plain style is a style as artfully constructed as any other. The voice that sounds most like Shakespeare's may be least his own.

Perhaps the reason we so desperately want the plays to speak to us, is that the story the legal documents tell us is not always the story we want to hear. Many biographers have been troubled by Shakespeare's lack of civic or institutional philanthropy (given his affluence) in his will or by the evidence of Shakespeare hoarding grain in 1599, at a time when a series of bad harvests meant that many of Stratford's poor were starving, especially as he writes about exactly this scenario at the beginning of
Coriolanus
.
¹¹
Or by the fact that in a Stratford protest against proposed land enclosures by William Combe in 1614–15, Shakespeare hired a lawyer to protect his own land and appears to have supported Combe. The case is well documented and Lois Potter speaks for many when she writes, “Combe's behaviour … seems thoroughly obnoxious, and it is depressing to find Shakespeare on his side.”
¹²
History is full of examples of creative artists who were not the nicest of people (Mozart is one such example, the Elizabethan playwright Anthony Munday another). But literary creation complicates acceptance of the paradox. It is (perhaps) one thing to make sublime music and behave un-sublimely; but to put the human and the compassionate at the center of one's dramatic world (as Shakespeare does) and then not to enact it in one's own life or to persecute Catholics (as Munday did) and then write a play sympathetic to Sir Thomas More …
¹³

Thus it is not just William Shakespeare that we do not know; we do not know how real lives and artistic creation interact or overlap or contradict. And the person who bears the brunt of our frustration is the shadowy figure of Anne Hathaway whose marital history bears more relation to Steevens's simple factual narrative than does Shakespeare's: she married, she bore three children, she died. We lack any sustained sense of Shakespeare's personality and it is this lack, Germaine Greer argues in
Shakespeare's Wife
(2008, see Myth 10), that fuels anti-romantic and fundamentally misogynist readings of Anne Hathaway as a husband-trapper rather than as (say) an emotional support or an enabler of Shakespeare's career. What lies behind this, Greer implies, is envy. We envy Anne Hathaway because she has something we don't: closeness to Shakespeare, an understanding of who he was, knowledge of what he thought and felt.

There is one advantage to our uncertainty about Shakespeare's personality: it leaves the way clear for creative writers to fill the gap. Anthony Burgess's 1964 novel
Nothing Like the Sun
captures not just Shakespeare's love life but Elizabethan life itself through his plausible Elizabethan prose (a feat he repeated for Marlowe's life in
A Dead Man in Deptford
, 1993). John Madden's film foregrounds the love life of the naïf and hapless playwright in his title—
Shakespeare in Love
(1998)—and works at the opposite end of Burgess's historical spectrum with wittily modern takes on Elizabethan life (a waterman, the Elizabethan equivalent of a taxi driver, presses his own scripts on theater people; and a waiter explains “The special today is a pig's foot marinated in juniper-berry vinegar served on a buckwheat pancake”). But both writers present Shakespeare as someone ruled by his heart. So too does Peter Whelan in his play
The School of Night
(1992), which has Marlowe and Shakespeare discuss their theories of comedy. For Marlowe, humans are vulnerable when they laugh; laughter is “the fish opening its mouth”; and comedy is “the bait that hides the hook.” With such a philosophy Marlowe is inevitably disturbed by Shakespeare's question: “But what if you only want to feed the fish … not catch them?”
¹⁴
Shakespeare is compassionate; and his compassion is for humanity.