30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (23 page)

Drama, like Hollywood, is the world of pretense. People went to the theater not to see realist or familiar worlds represented, but rather to experience strange things: as Thomas Platter, himself a tourist visiting the Globe theater in 1599 observed, “the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home.”
⁷
Like Hollywood, the theater district of Bankside was a sort of dream factory: as Puck tells the audience at the very end of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, “think … you have but slumbered here, / While these visions did appear; / And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream” (Epilogue, 2–6). Apart from
The Merry Wives of Windsor
and the induction to
The Taming of the Shrew
, Shakespeare never set a play in contemporary England, and never in the metropolitan London of his audiences. In this he bucked the fashion for the so-called ‘city comedy’ of Thomas Middleton or John Marston, a genre still shaped by conventions and stock motifs, but one taking the morals and locale of London itself as its main theme. Instead, Shakespeare's plays draw extensively on literary sources and generic models, and almost all of his drama could be broadly classified as “adaptation,” reworking existing texts, omnivorously transforming his material into the new medium of theater.

The similarities between Hollywood and the early modern theater may seem to make this myth true: were Shakespeare writing now he would be writing for films. But there is one major difference between these two media that compromises this conclusion. The early modern theater was, particularly in the first half of Shakespeare's career, a theater of words, in which verbal artistry was more important than visual artistry (see Myth 8). The phrasing is indicative when, in
The Taming of the Shrew
the tinker Christopher Sly is persuaded he is a lord and is to be shown a play: “your doctors … thought it good you
hear
a play / And frame your mind to mirth and merriment” (Induction 2, 127–31). The opposite is true of Hollywood cinema, where images—locations, expressions, interactions—are more significant than dialogue in conveying meaning. Budding screenwriters are advised to keep their scripts short, at about a page a minute, averaging around 20,000 words. Only
The Comedy of Errors
, Shakespeare's shortest play, is anywhere near the length of script required by a film. Shakespeare's plays move along at about 800–900 lines an hour in the modern theater, and thus they are around three hours long. Perhaps it is this relative unimportance of the script in Hollywood cinema that would make it ultimately impossible for a modern Shakespeare to choose this medium. So what would he write? Not novels (too directive); not poetry or theater (too elite). Maybe radio? The pictures, as they say, are better.

Notes

¹
 Tanya Pollard, extracting Philip Stubbes,
The Anatomie of Abuses
(1583) in
Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 121.

²
 Linda Ruth Williams,
The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 52–4 (p. 52).

³
 Quoted in Pollard,
Shakespeare's Theater
, p. 245.

⁴
 John Manningham's Diary, 1602, quoted in
King Richard III
, ed. Janis Lull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 24.

⁵
 The revenging father in Kyd's
Spanish Tragedy
; see Myth 1.

⁶
 Peter Thomson, “Tarlton, Richard (
d
. 1588),”
Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

⁷
 
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/16century/topic_4/tplatter.htm

In 1740 a life-size statue commemorating Shakespeare was erected in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The dramatist leans his elbow on a pile of books, and points to a scroll on which is written a variant of Prospero's valedictory lines in
The Tempest
(4.1.152–6): “The Cloud capt Tow'rs, / The Gorgeous Palaces, / The Solemn Temples, / The Great Globe itself, / Yea all which it Inherit, / Shall Dissolve; And like the baseless Fabrick of a Vision / Leave not a wreck behind.”
¹
The text serves as an epitaph for the playwright, and their original speaker in the play becomes a transparent mask for Shakespeare himself: the myth that Shakespeare wrote his own farewell in
The Tempest
here receives concrete—or rather marble—form.

The Tempest
is one of Shakespeare's last plays. It tells the story of a magician, Prospero, who lives on an island with his daughter Miranda, having been exiled from his dukedom in Milan by his brother Antonio. Prospero causes Antonio, his friend Sebastian and ally Alonso, together with Alonso's son Ferdinand, to be shipwrecked on his island. With the help of his airy spirit-servant Ariel, Prospero subjects his enemies to various magical punishments, brings Ferdinand to woo Miranda, and finally confronts his brother, whom Ariel prompts him to forgive rather than chastise: “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (5.1.27–8). Vowing, in elegiac tone, to give up his powers and to drown his books of sorcery, Prospero prepares to return to Milan to take up his dukedom.

That this play might serve as a kind of allegory for Shakespeare as playwright is an interpretation with a long critical history—dating back to the first adaptation of
The Tempest
by John Dryden and William Davenant, Restoration dramatists adept in reworking Shakespeare's plays for the tastes of the late seventeenth century. Writing in the Prologue to their
The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island
(1667), they acknowledge “Shakespear's Magick” as the equivalent of Prospero's. The analogy is developed through eighteenth-century criticism, which entrenched the view of Prospero as a portrait of the artist as an old man, and, necessarily, constructed a highly positive reading of Prospero's character. Edward Dowden, writing at the end of the nineteenth century in an influential intellectual biography of Shakespeare, is exemplary:

It is not chiefly because Prospero is a great enchanter, now about to break his magic staff, to drown his book deeper than ever plummet sounded, to dismiss his airy spirits, and to return to the practical service of his Dukedom, that we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakespeare himself. It is rather because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his self-mastery, his calm validity of will, his sensitiveness to wrong, his unfaltering justice, and, with these, a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world, are characteristic of Shakespeare as discovered to us in all his latest plays.
²

Dowden's argument is beautifully circular, even syllogistic. Prospero reminds us of Shakespeare because his character constructs our idea of what Shakespeare must have been like: 1. Prospero is a good guy. 2. Shakespeare is a good guy. 3. Therefore Prospero is Shakespeare. (Or perhaps it is 1, 3, 2; or even 3, 2, 1.)

Despite the logical fallacy of Dowden's argument, there are, as Davenant and Dryden identified, parallels between Prospero's art of magic and the art of the theater. The play's first scene is a good example. The dramatic opening stage direction,
A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard: Enter a Ship-master and a Boatswain
, pitches us into the pitch and roll of the eponymous tempest, as the bewildered passengers on the storm-tossed ship listen to the mariners exchanging increasingly desperate and technical instructions: “take in the topsail” (1.1.6), “down with the topmast! Yare” (1.1.33), “we split, we split” (1.1.59). We think we are in the middle of a “real” storm, but the next scene reveals that this was a theatrical illusion, magicked up by Prospero from the island to bring his enemies into his power. The seafarers were never in danger: the events looked believable but were created out of a few props and a believable script. As in a play, events happen, controlled by an unseen dramatist, to further a yet unknown plot. Throughout the play Prospero controls the other characters like a playwright, filling out their back-stories, creating encounters by bringing them together or keeping them apart, and creating a denouement in which all is revealed. He refers to his magic as “mine art” (1.2.292) and uses theatrical props—a disappearing banquet table, a line of
glistering apparel
(stage direction, 4.1.193), a play-within-a-play for the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda. And when he vows to give up his magic the speech, represented on the Poets' Corner monument, seems to draw on the language of theater, in particular in its evocation of the “great globe” (4.1.153; the name of the Shakespeare company theater on Bankside).

Saying that Prospero's role in the play is akin to that of a dramatist does not, however, mean he is a Shakespearean self-portrait. Other figures elsewhere in the canon share these qualities—Iago, the arch-plotter of
Othello
; the Duke who manipulates events in the guise of a friar in
Measure for Measure
; Paulina, the keeper of secrets in
The Winter's Tale
—and we might see the self-reflexivity of
The Tempest
alongside that of
Hamlet
or
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, both of which perform inset plays which occasion commentary on the nature of theater and the blurred lines between illusion and reality. But the idea that Prospero is a picture of Shakespeare has drawn strength from the persistent claim that
The Tempest
is the playwright's final play before retiring to Stratford. Prospero's farewell to his magic becomes Shakespeare's to the theater, and the Epilogue's poignant appeal for “release” (Epilogue, 9), forgiveness, and applause a final curtain-call for the King's Men's superannuated playwright.

In fact we do not know that
The Tempest
, written and performed in 1610–11,
is
Shakespeare's final play: no reliable external evidence can guarantee its order alongside the other late plays
The Winter's Tale
and
Cymbeline
. It is because we want the Epilogue to read as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage that we place
The Tempest
at the end of Shakespeare's career, and then use that position to affirm that the play must dramatize Shakespeare's own feelings. We know that he worked on
Two Noble Kinsmen
and
All Is True
with John Fletcher afterwards, so it was certainly not his last writing for the stage. In fact his last performed words may have been Theseus's rather unsonorous “Let's go off / And bear us like the time” (5.6.136–7) at the end of
Two Noble Kinsmen
(most scholars attribute the Epilogue to that play to Fletcher as co-author). And we also know that in 1613 Shakespeare bought property in Blackfriars near to the theater—the first time he appears to have purchased in London—thus giving the lie to the sentimental idea that he was withdrawing from the hurly-burly to the quiet of Stratford (and setting aside that the movement for Prospero is quite the opposite: he is returning
from
retirement to active life as Duke of Milan). It has been suggested that Prospero is Shakespeare the actor, retiring from the fray to concentrate on writing, perhaps on preparing his own complete works like his rival Ben Jonson (see Myth 4); relatedly, the position of
The Tempest
as the first play in the First Folio (1623) has been read as a recognition that in it Shakespeare asserts an authorial identity. But even if external evidence did not compromise the reading of Prospero as Shakespeare, it is still an anachronistic assumption that any early modern dramatist ever wrote autobiographically (see Myths 7, 10, and 18). Instead, as we have repeated in the essays in this book, the ability to see issues from multiple perspectives and to make competing world views equally compelling is intrinsic to successful dramaturgy, is encouraged by the rhetorical training of the Elizabethan grammar schools, and is appropriate to a culture in which literary expression was public and participatory rather than private and confessional.

The readings of
The Tempest
that draw on the play's place in an assumed chronology of Shakespeare's writings are not, however, unique to this play. Writing early in the twentieth century, Lytton Strachey argued strenuously against the chronological assumptions of Victorian scholarship. Strachey countered the general idea that the mind of the artist could be deduced from the character of the art, and in particular scorned the narrative that “after a happy youth [the writing of the comedies] and a gloomy middle age [the tragedies] he reached at last—it is the universal opinion—a state of quiet serenity in which he died.”
³
The implications of Strachey's trenchant rejection of this explanatory framework are far-reaching. If
The Tempest
has benefited from assumptions about the aesthetic values of “lateness,” so too have other plays been pigeonholed though chronological evaluation. As one critic pointedly asks: “how many unexpected virtues would suddenly appear in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
if it were proven to date from 1597, or … 1603? Its reliance on duologues and soliloquy, for example, no longer a mark of immaturity, might emerge rather as a strategically disintegrative gesture functioning as a check on conventional romantic momentum”: the counterfactual scenario here sardonically reveals that apparently chronological words like “early,” “late,” and “mature” carry implicit value judgments and predetermine our critical response.
⁴
We prefer a chronology that places the mechanicals' bathetic love tragedy of “Pyramus and Thisbe” (the inset play in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
), in which the lovers mistakenly kill themselves each believing the other to be dead,
after
its more somber equivalent of
Romeo and Juliet
, but there is no external evidence to certify this order. We expect the earliest history plays,
2
and
3 Henry VI
, to show immaturity when compared with the later ones, and, lo and behold, the plays' depiction of claim and counter-claim in the Wars of the Roses seems to support that expectation. Modern collected editions of Shakespeare's plays, in particular the
Oxford Shakespeare
(edited by Wells and Taylor) and the
Norton Shakespeare
which followed its text, often order the plays by presumed chronology. While this gives readers used to the generic divisions of the First Folio of 1623 some unexpected and fruitful juxtapositions—attitudes to battle and to courtship in the adjacent
Much Ado About Nothing
and
Henry V
, for instance, or the bleak fairy-tale of the revised
King Lear
(see Myth 24) alongside
Cymbeline
—it ultimately privileges an implicitly biographical reading: the chronology is that of the author's life.