30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (26 page)

The Shakespeare and Marlowe comparisons are apposite. Macbeth is not just a ruler of eleventh-century Scotland but a soldier who fails to see that killing in civilian life is different from killing in military life. As such he is like Brutus in
Julius Caesar
(a noble character called upon to do an ignoble deed) or Hamlet in
Hamlet
(a thinker called upon to do a violent act): the wrong man for the job. Faustus is based on a combination of two magus figures; however, he is not just a sixteenth-century necromancer but any ambitious person who feels disillusioned by what life has offered and is driven to traffic with illicit or forbidden activities. Comparing
The Witch
with
The Changeling
can help us see how the topical can become the timeless.

Shakespeare's plays do not avoid the topical. But they deal with it differently from Middleton. Although Shakespeare's investigations are frequently contemporary—the position of women in
Comedy of Errors
or
Midsummer Night's Dream
, dividing or uniting a kingdom in
King Lear
, definitions of borders and shores in
Pericles
, the status of lies in
Othello
—Shakespeare confines topicality to simple references or allusions. Queen Elizabeth is complimented in a speech of a dozen lines in
Midsummer Night's Dream
(Oberon's description of the origin of the flower love-in-idleness at 2.1.155–68: see Myth 28); Henry V is optimistically compared to the Earl of Essex (“the general of our gracious Empress” coming triumphant from Ireland, 5.0.30) in the Chorus to Act 5 of
Henry V
(Essex returned far from triumphant, so this reference helps us date
Henry V
, or at least, this Chorus, very precisely); the Porter's references to equivocation in
Macbeth
(2.3.7–11) are a topical allusion to “Catholics who used equivocation in court as a way of escaping prosecution”;
⁷
The Comedy of Errors
has a punning reference to the Protestant revolt in the Netherlands (“making war against her heir/hair”; 3.2.127);
King John
refers to the Spanish Armada; the unseasonable summers of 1594–6 are described by Titania in
Midsummer Night's Dream
; the 1608 grain riots feature in
Coriolanus
; Sonnet 107 refers to Queen Elizabeth's death; the “little eyases” (2.2.340) passage in the 1604 text of
Hamlet
is a reference to the boys' theater companies in London whose resurgence threatened commercially the adult companies (hence the players traveling to Elsinore)—it was dropped by the Folio when it was no longer topical; Malvolio may satirize Puritans in
Twelfth Night
(“he is a kind of precisian”—Folio reading, 2.3.135, emended to “puritan” by the Oxford editors) and Orsino may refer to Don Virginio Orsini who made an official visit to Elizabeth and who saw a performance of
Twelfth Night
on Twelfth Night 1601 (however, the point of this reference is hard to understand since the portrait of the lovesick Orsino is hardly complimentary). Most of these (and other) allusions are easily extractable or ignorable;
Twelfth Night
's puncturing of Malvolio's pretensions works whether one sees him as a Puritan or not;
Macbeth
is Shakespeare's most topical play throughout, but it does not stand or fall on its parallels or compliments to James (see Myth 28);
Coriolanus
appeals whether or not one sees the plot's corn riots and grain hoarding as reflecting those of 1608.

In fact Shakespeare goes out of his way to avoid the topical. He never wrote religious poetry.
⁸
When Marlowe deals with recent French politics in
The Massacre at Paris
(the St Bartholomew's Day slaughter of Protestants in 1572) it is an explicitly contemporary play, as the title indicates. When Shakespeare handles the same material he carefully depoliticizes it:
Love's Labour's Lost
turns war between France and Navarre into a romantic comedy, leaving only the names to do the work (all the main characters are named after contemporary French figures). And this work is not political but literary: an interest in genre and generic conflict (not political conflict).
⁹

Politics, of course, are, or can be, timeless. But Middleton's
Game at Chess
(1624) or Dekker's
Whore of Babylon
(1607) are not. This may be due to genre (political satire and religious allegory respectively). Part of Shakespeare's timelessness may be due to the fact that he embedded local politics in transcendental forms—tragedy, comedy (comedy, we might note, without any restrictive qualifying adjective such as city comedy or satirical comedy). In fact, satire was not Shakespeare's most successful genre if the histories of
Troilus and Cressida
and
Timon of Athens
are any indication. The printer's epistle to one of the quartos of
Troilus and Cressida
reveals that it was a failure on stage;
Timon of Athens
may be an unfinished play (see Myth 17).

Certainly Shakespeare's plays reflect local issues. That is why dramatists write plays.
Henry VI
is about fifteenth-century history but it is also about fear of civil war.
Hamlet
is about usurpation but it is also about bereavement.
Macbeth
is about political disloyalty and about political succession but it is also about influence and imagination (positive and negative) and definitions of manhood. And that is why later centuries revive older plays: their topicality is newly applicable, their material is renewably, and in some cases ubiquitously, endlessly topical. It is no coincidence that
Pericles
was one of the first Shakespeare plays to be revived in the Restoration in 1660: its plot of an exiled monarch, restored, had special resonance for the returning cavaliers.
¹⁰

But there is more to timelessness than relevance. Or rather there is a difference between relevance and timelessness. It is worth pausing here to think about some differences between Shakespeare's plays and those of his contemporaries. Take Marlowe's
Edward II
for instance. The background to this play comes from Holinshed's
Chronicles of England
which depict the agricultural, financial, and topographical devastation at the start of the fourteenth century. Northern England was ravaged by constant raids from the Scots; there had been annual agricultural failures; herds had suffered sickness and been depleted by death; the people were physically weak, struggling for survival, and in their famine resorted to eating “horses, dogs and other vile beasts.”
¹¹
None of this makes its way into Marlowe's play. As Roma Gill observes, “The common man was Shakespeare's concern, not Marlowe's.”
¹²

Although the “common man” is the subject matter of the dominant genre of the seventeenth century—city comedy—Shakespeare was not drawn to this topical satirical writing. One of the reasons may be that it requires a different kind of characterization from the kind he was writing. Actors often notice the difference between Shakespeare's characters and those of his contemporaries. Marlowe's characters are created by ironic distancing; their speeches are full of asides as they knowingly construct a persona for themselves. One director observes that Marlowe's plays are “fairly intractable material for anyone determined to approach the text with a ‘naturalistic’ or ‘realistic’ methodology.”
¹³
Soliloquies in Shakespeare rarely advance plot, but they often add complexity to character. Shakespeare's style of characterization is particularly congenial to the kind of preparation made standard in the twentieth century at the Moscow Arts Theatre by the director Konstantin Stanislavsky's “method acting” (in which actors construct a pre-history, an inner life, and motivations for a character).

It is Shakespeare's interest in interiority that perhaps accounts for his timelessness. Politics change, the position of women changes, but the human heart does not change. At the center of every Shakespeare play is a human being. King Lear is a father first and a king second. Furthermore, he is a father facing empty-nest syndrome, on the verge of losing his last daughter in marriage; and he is a ruler on the point of taking early retirement. Hamlet is a prince whose uncle has murdered Hamlet's father and usurped his throne; but he is also a university student who cannot come to terms with the loss of his father (he is inconsolable long before he hears about the murder). Losing a throne is a rarefied predicament; losing a parent is not. These are human situations, not confined to monarchs or princes. The human is a timeless category.

Notes

¹
 New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

²
 A.E.B. Coldiron, “Canons and Cultures: Is Shakespeare Universal?”, in Laurie Maguire (ed.),
How To Do Things with Shakespeare
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) pp. 255–79 (p. 261).

³
 Ibid.

⁴
 See
The Witch
, ed. Elizabeth Schafer, New Mermaids (London: A. & C. Black, 1994), p. xvi.

⁵
 Marion O'Connor in
Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works
, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 1128.

⁶
 Helen Gardner, “Milton's ‘Satan’ and the Theme of Damnation in Elizabethan Tragedy,” in F.P. Wilson (ed.),
English Studies 1948
(London: John Murray, 1948), pp. 46–66 (p. 47).

⁷
 Note to
Macbeth
2.3.8, in
William Shakespeare: Complete Works
, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007).

⁸
 Alison Shell,
Shakespeare and Religion
, Arden (London, 2010).

⁹
 9 Gillian Woods, “Catholicism and Conversion in
Love's Labour's Lost
,” in Maguire (ed.),
How To Do Things with Shakespeare
, pp. 101–30.

¹⁰
 Gary Taylor,
Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present
(London: Vintage, 1991), pp. 21–2.

¹¹
 Raphael Holinshed,
Chronicles
, vol. 4 (1587): see the Oxford Holinshed Project,
http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/texts.php?text1=1577_5319

¹²
 
Edward II
, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967; repr. 1978), p. 19.

¹³
 Stevie Simkin,
Marlowe: The Plays
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 66–7.

In 1898 Max Beerbohm reviewed a production of
Macbeth
at the Lyceum for the
Saturday Review
. He had recently taken over the role of theater reviewer from George Bernard Shaw and this was only his second essay for the paper. His first, the inauspiciously titled “Why I ought not to have become a drama critic,” explained that “I am not fond of the theatre. Dramatic art interests and moves me less than any of the other arts. … I am innocent of any theories on the subject.” His second essay begins with a polemical plea to theater managers to stop staging Shakespeare stalwarts such as
Hamlet
because “when a play has become a classic in drama, it ceases to be a play. … The play is dead.”
¹
He then turns to one of these unstageable classics:
Macbeth
. He cites two authors of seventeenth-century criticism (thus giving the lie to his earlier pronouncement that he is innocent of dramatic theory or history): John Aubrey (1626–97), whose biographical researches were gathered into a posthumous volume called
Brief Lives
, and the Restoration diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703). To Aubrey, he tells us, we are indebted for the information that “Hal Berridge, the youth who was to have acted the part of Lady Macbeth, ‘fell sudden sicke of a pleurisie, wherefor Master Shakespeare himself did enacte in his stead’.” Beerbohm's regret that Aubrey did not give “some account of the poet's personation” leads to a discussion of acting styles, cemented by a second piece of historical evidence: a lengthy quotation from Pepys' Diary in which Pepys describes Mrs Knipp (his mistress) playing Lady Macbeth in 1667.

Aubrey's anecdote about Hal Berridge's illness is the origin of the myth that
Macbeth
is unlucky in the theater. The boy-actor's name has a nicely Shakespearean flavor, sharing its first part with Henry IV's wayward son. The actor, however, is entirely fictional. So too is the incident—no actor was taken ill, and Shakespeare was never forced to step into the role. Aubrey made no such comment as the one quoted. Nor did Pepys, who although he saw
Macbeth
three times in 1667–8 (once in Dryden and Davenant's version) made only brief remarks on it, commenting on the music and dancing, and criticizing the understudy who replaced Betterton. Beerbohm's extended quotation in which Pepys compares Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking to his wife's, and credits Mrs Knipp in the role, does contain real characters (Mrs Pepys and Mrs Knipp) but has no place in the Diary. The series of tongue-in-cheek statements that begins with the disavowal of dramatic knowledge and the proposal to abolish Shakespeare favorites on stage continues with this citation of fabricated evidence. Beerbohm never acknowledged his hoax, and it lay unexposed until ten years ago when Stanley Wells thought to check Aubrey and Pepys.
²

And so Beerbohm inaugurated a tradition in which it is unlucky to play in, or be associated with, a production of
Macbeth
. Actors consider it bad luck even to refer to the play by name, preferring instead the descriptive euphemism “The Scottish Play.” If the name is uttered in the theater, actors resort to cleansing rituals (Horatio's line from
Hamlet
, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us” [1.4.20], is one of several thought to counter the bad luck). Many films and television shows, from
Blackadder
to
The Simpsons
, parody this thespian superstition. In “The Regina Monologues” episode of
The Simpsons
Ian McKellen utters the play's title only to be struck by lightning.
The Simpsons
extends the
Macbeth
joke to another theater superstition (that it is bad luck to say “Good luck,” and so one should attract good luck by invoking its opposite: “Break a leg”). Marge Simpson inadvertently wishes McKellen “Good luck,” after which he is felled by a piece of falling masonry. J.L. Carrell's detective novel,
The Shakespeare Curse
(2010), outdoes Beerbohm's invention by having Shakespeare take over from Berridge while touring in Scotland where he inadvertently witnesses a black magic rite he works into his play: her dustjacket has the lurid promise of “a sickening modern killer—driven by a centuries-old curse.”