Shakespeare: A Life (57 page)

the fierce Regan and Cornwall.
³²
Obtuse when he had eyesight, Gloucester learns to see better when his
sockets are clotted with blood. His agony is the outward equivalent
of the King's implicit suffering, and here allusions to the Passion are
fairly overt. One hand before the other, one foot before the other,
were nailed to wood, in the most memorable of all scenes for the
Christian West, before a common Roman soldier tried to end the
Sufferer's torment. Accordingly between Regan's comment on the gouging
of Gloucester's eyes, 'One side will mock another; th' other too', and
Cornwall's 'Lest it see more, prevent it', there is a delay in which a
common servant tries to save the sufferer and mortally wounds
Cornwall; and yet the play is far from being a Christian allegory.
Arguably pre-Christian and postChristian at once, it may be released
from all historical time, as R. A. Foakes notices. Lear, after all,
'has no history in spite of his great age. We know nothing of how he
came to the throne, of the events of his reign, even how long he has
reigned, so that it seems he has been in power for ever. We know
nothing of his queen, of her life or death . . .'. Not that we need to
know, as Foakes implies, and partly because the play cannot be
imagined in a wholly mythical context,
Lear
can always be seen essentially as a contemporary work.
³³
The hero watches in most audiences and at all times as Goethe knew, since an aged man is always a King Lear.

One text, which relates to Stratford, had given the dramatist something
more than useful hints for tragic form. This was Samuel Harsnett's
high-keyed, ironic exposure of Jesuit exorcist practices,
A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures
,
published anonymously in 1603 and reissued in the next two years.
Such an anti-Catholic tract had a special appeal just after the
Gunpowder Plot. Having written earlier of a Puritan exorcist, Dr
Harsnett as chaplain to the Bishop of London turns to some exorcisms
by a group of priests led by William Weston alias Father Edmunds,
which had been performed in 1586-7. Three young chambermaids had been
exorcized, and Edmunds's priestly cohorts had included Jesuits of the
English Midlands, such as Father Robert Debdale of the Shottery
Debdales, and Father Thomas Cottam, the brother of the Stratford
schoolmaster who had replaced Jenkins in Shakespeare's schooldays.

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The priests are only gross feigners sent from France, 'for fire-worke
here in England'. Perfidy, as well as perversity, is found in the very
names of devils exorcized from the young women's bodies, such as
Lustie Dick, Fratcrctto, Hoberdicut, Maho, Modu, Lustie Huffe-cap (a
'swaggering punie devil!'), or Hobberdidaunce who 'could make a lady
laugh'.
³⁴
Finding the occult names useful, Shakespeare has Edgar in disguise as
the madman Poor Tom tactically use some of them. 'Five fiends have
been in PoorTom at once', Edgar cries to his blind father Gloucester,

as Obidicut of lust, Hobbididence prince of dumbness, Mahu of stealing,
Modu of murder, Flibbertigibbet of mocking and mowing, who since
possesses chambermaids and waiting-women. So bless thee, master! ( 1608
quarto, xv. 56-61)

In
The Comedy of Errors or Twelth Night
,
Shakespeare had already treated exorcism as a spiritual fraud, and so
he does here, except that here Edgar is feigning in order to survive
and to save his father. He 'mimes in response to a free-floating,
contagious evil more terrible than anything Harsnett would allow',
writes a good critic who slightly underestimates Dr Harsnett.
³⁵
Edgar, true to his purposes, tries to purge his father's despair,
supposedly at Dover's cliff, and so he, at least, has a redeeming
priestly function.

But it may not
follow that Shakespeare meant to refute Harsnett, or that he wanted to
show his own regard for Shottery Catholics or martyrdom in a
schoolmaster's family. The playwright was less doctrinaire than one
might think. What is reasonably clear is that a book on exorcism gave
Shakespeare some useffil language, and perhaps some ideas, for the
making of
Lear
, and that its allusions to Stratford names
interested him as a man of that parish. Does his own Chapel Street life
enter into his work indirectly? It is not too speculative to say that
Shakespeare felt profoundly about his own children, or that his elder
daughter, Susanna, seemed headstrong or difficult. His own absences from
home, as will emerge, were likely to complicate his relations with
his two adult daughters. Susanna was hardly his 'model' for Cordelia,
but again one cannot impose limits on the range of his sources or his
feelings. He drew on what he knew and deeply felt, and after about 1606

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the father-daughter bond becomes an almost obsessive theme in his work.

King Lear
of course enormously expands upon the initial crisis with Cordelia.
Having denied all three of his daughters self-expression, Lear would
destroy his kingdom. In opposing that political folly by speaking the
truth, Cordelia loses her worldly advantages, though she later proves
willing to lay down her life for her father. The vain King recognizes
the most crucial of his errors as early as scene iv. 'O most small
fault', Lear cries in Goneril's palace,

How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show,
Which, like an engine, wrenched my frame of nature
From the fixed place, drew from my heart all love,
And added to the gall! O Lear, Lear, Lear!
(1. iv. 245-9)

And yet he must suffer until at last he holds Cordelia dead in his
arms. There is no scheme of spiritual development in this entire
ordeal, and nothing that Lear learns is of use to himself, to the
polity of his country, or to the poor whom he cannot help. This work's
political themes anticipate those of Shakespeare's later Roman
tragedies, and yet politics is not the central concern. Lear, finally,
is divested of most of his illusions, except that he never learns that
time is unforgiving, or that pride is inherent in our human
condition, or that his folly must result in the death of the only
person he really loves.

In mornings at Bankside the King's men put their poet's work to the
test. A script recited for the troupe, at a vetting in a buzzing tavern,
could be different in the cold light of a rehearsal. The
stagemanagement side of a production fell into the hands of the
bookholder or book-keeper, who had to be fairly familiar with the whole
text of a play. As we have noticed, he had charge of seeing that
actors were ready on their cues, and his 'stage-keepers' would have
helped to arrange that properties were at hand when needed. Otherwise,
as a rule, the actors appear to have been left to their own devices.
Practices

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must have varied, but it is likely that the book-keeper with his senior
actors might on occasion cut scenes, rearrange lines, or make up a
few, or call for the author or someone else to revise. Shakespeare was
much respected, but even his major tragedies were considerably cut
and supplemented. Men such as Burbage, Heminges, or Condell might feel
that they knew his aims as well as he did himself.

Moreover, his fellows had to care about how he affected segments of
the paying public. The gentry, the educated, and the sophisticated at
Holborn, in the city's west, and at Westminster were still crucial
since they had influence, money, leisure for plays, and a bent for
serious themes. Other people might follow the taste of the élite. How
did his tragedies relate to the interests and awareness of Londoners?
In the suffering of his tragic heroes, he had been articulating a widely
felt sense of malaise and had had a chance to seek out areas of
feeling not always expressed in pulpits. In the consciousness of the
wider public was an awareness of an appalling loss resulting from the
English Reformation, which had fractured the Christian Church. In an
age in which religion was a crucial factor in nearly everyone's life,
the new malaise had lasting consequences. With a weakening in
Christianity, one's identity, one's purpose in life, and the meaning of
one's activities were thrown in question. Each person was divided
from an orientation which medieval faith had given. And even as
parliament challenged King James in 1604, the Stuart regime offered
little guidance for a public disturbed by momentous changes in
politics, social organization, and other aspects of contemporary life.

Shakespeare's outlook was more
alleviated by hope than that of his heroes, but he could feel as they
did. He was aware of enduring evil, too strong to be self-created by
men and women, and yet he does not balance the anxiety implicit in his
tragedies with any sign of religious confidence. Each tragedy had
been an imaginative hypothesis in which, with his full mastery of
rhetoric and dramaturgy, he tested life. But the religious ingredient
is withheld. That in itself partly accounts for the affronted speeches
of his tragic heroes, as with Lear in the terrible storm. 'Singe my
white head', cries the vain, humiliated king,

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and thou all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o'th' world.
(111. ii. 6-7)

Is Lear's despair ever the author's own? Shakespeare's mind was a
complex thoroughfare of contradictions and of extreme feelings. But to
a degree he was held in check in the uncertainties, tensions, and
tragic endings of his own works. What his actors cared for were
receipts at the doors, but this is not to say that they failed to
encourage him. And, from time to time, they must have made suggestions
for new topics.

Classical subjects,
for example, had a wide appeal. After Julius Caesar he perhaps had
agreed with the sharers that he would write a new play on the
triumvirate. This was the
Triumviri reipublicae constituenda
of Lepidus, Octavius, and Mark Antony who, after Ceasar's death, jointly ruled the Roman world.

But if Shakespeare planned that, he put it off. Essex's late revolt, in
1601, affected the stage to the extent that dramas about Romans began
to look like jibes at the Crown. Fulke Greville the younger, for
example, had penned an 'Antonie and Cleopatra' about lovers who showed
'irregular passions in forsaking Empire to follow sensuality', but
had thrown it in the fire. His work had been a closet drama, for
private acting, but he felt it would deeply annoy 'the present
government'. In the new reign, suspicion predictably touched Ben Jonson.
For his Roman
Sejanus
,
in which Shakespeare acted,
Jonson was hauled before the Privy Council and accused of 'popery and
treason' by the old, half-senile Earl of Northampton.
³⁶
Listening to the author's apology (or trying to stay awake), the
Council may have realized their vast mistake and let him go. Jonson's
trouble, anyway, embarrassed the King's men less than the fact that
Sejanus
was hissed off the stage. In his own late Roman plays, Shakespeare
apparently takes hints from Jonson's bold recasting of historical
material, as with his own Lepidus, but avoids Sejanus's clotted style,
lack of irony, and grinding moral emphasis.

Did a new law prompt his own return to Roman topics? In 1606 a
parliamentary Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, which forbade the

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mention of God, Jesus Christ, or the Holy Trinity except 'in fear and
reverence', was taken seriously by the Revels Office. Actors obeyed
that ruling, and an increased use of pagan or classical settings
resulted. Shakespeare at last offered his fellows
Antony and Cleopatra
around 1606 or in 1607, though records of its early performances are
lacking. Its ill-fated lovers had usually been judged in a moral
light. However, Chaucer
Legend of Good Women
and the Countess of Pembroke's
Tragedie of Antonie
( 1592), a version of the French of Robert Garnier's
Marc Antoine
, depict Cleopatra as a martyr to love. Samuel Daniel's
Tragedy of Cleopatra
( 1594) applauds both lovers and shows even a ruthless Octavius as
alert to compassion. A wide range of interpretation was open to
Shakespeare, who follows Plutarch "Life of Marcus Antonius" in North's
version to the extent of borrowing details of phrasing, anecdotes,
hints for scenes, and his basic approach to the characters.

His reading of Montaigne's shrewd, self-honouring
Essays
,
closely enough, it seems, to borrow ideas, might be taken as a hint
of change in Shakespeare's own outlook. This involved an increase in
his confidence, a self-restoration with new inwardness, and even a
bolder, more questioning attitude to popular values. He was becoming
more interested in non-literal truth, in myth, fable, and implicit
connections between historical epochs. With thirty-five speaking parts,
nearly double his usual number, his new play ranges over three
continents in recreating on a wide canvas the events of 41 to 30 BC.
In this period, dissension among the triumvirs had finally ended the
epoch of republican Rome, with its belief in stern self-discipline, hard
service, and anti-absolute civic principles.

Fittingly, the action of
Antony and Cleopatra
opens with a Roman's view of Antony's lapse. 'Look', Philo insists,

Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transformed
Into a strumper's fool. Behold and sec.
(1. i. 11-13)

And so we see. In the famous lovers' quarrels there is a ludicrous
contrast between assertion and action, between what they claim and what

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