Shakespeare: A Life (58 page)

they do on stage. As in the Sonnets, mutual commitment is lacking or
uncertain. Yet Shakespeare so deflates Rome by showing Lepidus's
senile weakness, Pompey's futility, or Octavius's hardness that Antony
gains in stature through his generosity and latent grace. What we
observe of the lovers, peculiarly, becomes less valid or 'true' than
what they say,
³⁷
though Cleopatra's exalting words are offset by her lover's homelier reckonings, as in Act IV after a lucky victory:

CLEOPATRA. Lord of lords!
O infinite virtue, com'st thou smiling from
The world's great snare uncaught?
ANTONY. My nightingale,
We have beat them to their beds. What, girl, though grey
Do something mingle with our younger brown . . .
(IV. ix. 16-20)

Antony's 'visible shape' is subject to the breaking of the Roman
world. A dizzying pace of brief, dispersed scenes implies the break-up
in a recent time with a fracturing of the medieval unity and a loss of a
faith that once bound together western Europe. In the deliquescence
he shows on stage, Shakespeare evokes a cultural parallel in the
Reformation's own chaotic events.

The lovers' suicides complicate
Antony and Cleopatra
's
meanings. Imagining that the Queen has taken her life, Antony bungles
his own death. The hoisting of his still-living body within her
monument typically occasions puns and comedy. And after he dies,
Cleopatra still must endure a diligent Clown -- with a basket of asps
-- who might have had a role in Much Ado.

Such comedy suggests play-acting. Nothing has exalted the lovers more
than their refusal to let events alter their roles. Cleopatra is
stagily linked with Isis's immortality, the Nile's renewals, pyramids,
crocodiles while disguising her aims. So long as her sexuality is
acted,
which is to say verbalized, it eludes age. Antony has avoided time's
'strong necessity' by dying, but is he transfigured in life? Can
self-discovery or psychological change occur in an arena of almost
pure illusion? This mischievous tragedy, happily, shatters its
illusions to reveal them, and, in a famous instance, a Jacobean
audience is made aware that they are

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only watching a boy when Egypt's Queen refers to comedians who, one day, may 'stage us', and when her noble, besotted Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I'th' posture of a whore.
(V. ii. 215-17)

Her political acumen saves her from any such fate: in death she outwits
Octavius. The author's ironies have not demystified her, but the
problem of the worth of her love and of Antony's tragic suffering is
left, rather tantalizingly and wonderfully, up in the air.

Coriolanus
-- which also involves politics and theatricality -- belongs partly
or wholly to Shakespeare's forty-fourth year. Again he takes his main
story from Plutarch, who had coupled the life of the Roman general Caius
Martius Coriolanus with that of the Greek Alcibiades. The latter
appears in
Timon of Atbens
, but Shakespeare prefers as a tragic
hero the valiant Roman who had taken part in wars between Rome's
infant republic and the neighbouring Volsces, and this gives him leave
to explore Rome's nascent politics in light of an English present.
Lately at a time of feeble harvests and high prices, new rioting had
erupted in the English Midlands, and on a scale not matched in ten
years. There were major outbreaks not far from Stratford, at HillMorton
and Ladbroke.

Coriolanus
opens with a plebeian rebellion over Rome's corndearth. The First
Citizen interestingly echoes Lear's and Gloucester's lesson that a
'superflux' must be shared with the poor: 'If they would yield us but
the superfluity while it were wholesome we might guess they relieved
us humanely, but they think we are too dear' (1. i. 16-18). And
separately, the citizens are reasonable, even though the author models
a few of their complaints on a tract of his own county's rebels,
The Diggers of Warwickshire to all Other Diggers
(
c.
1607). Collectively, they are horrendous as they turn from one idol
to the next, easily duped, blind to their folly, vicious towards any
strange excellence. Revering Coriolanus one moment, they despise him
the next.

Coriolanus's mother is especially interesting as a fiercely loving and

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managerial figure. Too complex to be a type, she is not entirely
different from what is known of Mary Arden (whose managerial talents are
recognized in Robert Arden's will). Volumnia is not unlike other
mothers of genius if one may trust, say, Goethe or Freud, and Coriolanus
excels partly to free himself from vulnerability to her. Unfortunately,
the Tribunes, as defenders of citizens' rights, exploit his
temperament to turn the plebeians against him, and, denied a consulship,
he is in his smarting anger exiled from Rome.

In the Tribunes -- Brutus and Sicinius -- as well as in the consulship
election, Shakespeare attends somewhat warily to his day. What he
saw in inflation-ridden England was that more people than ever, the
deserving as well as the loose or lucky, were attaining to incomes of
£40 per year which allowed them to vote. There was a new hostile
attitude to the King. MPs were emboldened, and after they failed to
ratify some of his expenses, James I called his assembled critics
'Tribunes of the people, whose mouths could not be stopped'.
Parliament counter-attacked with appeals to common law and traditional
rights, and this worked. Among direct results, the election of
churchwardens in the Globe's own parish was confirmed (all
parishioners were allowed to vote), and in 1608 King James further
granted London a new charter. This protected the city against the
Crown's encroachment on the right to tax, and extended that to
Blackftiars, where the players were about to open a new theatre.

Coriolanus
also glances into the future of British elections. In Shakespeare's
time English candidates were chosen by a few men and not allowed to
canvass, but there were 'disputed' elections in which voters
stubbornly refused to acclaim a candidate. One of the 'disputes', for
example, involved Stratford's voters in 1601, when Fulke Greville,
then senior MP for Warwickshire, was not returned until King James's
Council argued he
must
be 'chosen'. Importing the English system into his drama, the poet has
Coriolanus
chosen by the Senate to be Consul. The Roman citizens not only deny
him the consulship, but go rather beyond English practice in assuming
that candidates need to be approved by majority vote, not just by
acclamation. 'But that's no matter, the greater part carries it', says
one citizen; another speaks of the 'honour' of individual choice.
English reform-

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ers were then urging the popular choice of parliamentary candidates, but that was not instituted until after 1625.
³⁸

In the play, sophisticated political issues yield to a tragic theme.
Rome cannot accept the pride, scorn, and defiance in Coriolanus which
have enabled him to save Rome in battle, and his wounds, cherished by
Volumnia, emblems of patriotism, avail him nothing. 'Our virtues',
says his friend, enemy and eventual killer Aufidius in Act IV,

Lie in th' interpretation of the time
One fire drives out one fire, one nail one nail;
Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.
(IV. vii. 50, 54-5)

The tragedy ends on a muted note in keeping with Aufidius's words,
but Coriolanus is its author's best analysis of politics, one which
displays his subtle use of the politics of his day. There is nothing
like 'the
Othello
music' in this tragedy's verse style, but a
rough, abrasive lyric music suits its vigorous action. The play's odd
phrase 'lurched all swords of the garland' -- the word
lurched
means 'robbed all contenders of' -- is mocked by Ben Jonson, in his
Epicoene
,
around 1609.

Well before then, Shakespeare must have seen Thomas Middleton, who
was a city bricklayer's son, nearly as gifted as Jonson. Baptized at
St Lawrence Jewry in 1580, Middleton first appears at 22 in Henslowe's
stable of gifted hack writers; but he proved an able collaborator and a
brilliant playwright, as
Women Beware Women
,
The Changeling
(with William Rowley), and
A Game at Chess
of the 1620s were to show. At some point he added witches' songs and a dance to
Macbeth
, and he may have contributed to, or perhaps tried to revise, Shakespeare
Timon of Athens
.
The exact status of that play remains debatable, though R. V.
Holdsworth and others point to Middleton's hand in the text.

Whether or not the Stratford poet saw
Timon of Athens
performed, this tragedy is complete if not polished, and its text is at least better than that for
Pericles
.
Timon is shown in prosperity, then adversity,

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with visits to him by the Poet, Painter, Apemantus, Alcibiades, and
others counterpointed in the two parts. The hero is as naïve as if he
had stepped out of a ballad. Like Lear, he takes pledges of love at face
value: like Coriolanus, he is alienated. Timon regards money in a
medieval way as static and sterile, fit to be given away. When his
flatterers refuse him credit, he finds that money is a liquid,
selfduplicating power which has corrupted the earth. As a colossal
hatred for mankind swells, he enjoins the sun:

O blessèd breeding sun, draw from the earth
Rotten humidity; below thy sister's orb
Infect the air.
(IV. iii. 1-3)

Half-crazed and penurious, he discovers gold, which lends irony to his
tirades against humanity before he dies. His grave will be washed by
the sea, as one learns in the lines beloved by W. B. Yeats:

Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood,
Who once a day with his embossèd froth
The turbulent surge shall cover.
(v. ii. 100-3)

This is one of the few works by Shakespeare (wrote Hazlitt when under
its spell) in which he 'seems to be in earnest throughout, never to
trifle or go out of his way. He does not relax in his effort, nor lose
sight of the unity of his design.'
³⁹
Timon of Athens
reveals that Shylock's view of money as a thing that 'breeds' is,
indeed, correct. Jacobeans accepted the view of money as fluid,
productive, and selfreplicating, which horrifies Timon. King James had
begun to be destroyed by money, or by his own spendthrift ways which
were firing parliamentary zeal against him. And Shakespeare comments
here indirectly on many aspects of the Jacobean money nexus, for
example on a new anxiety over patronage, or on suffering caused by
unending, sharp price-rises. Mercy might have died with the medieval
community. For Shakespeare, money was a mixed blessing: his own earnings
as an actor and shareholder, in the 1590s, had tempted Stratford
alder-

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men to try to manipulate him. That, in fact, is what the SturleyQuiney letters reveal; but they may
suggest
what is worse -- that the poet's money, at one point, had been an
issue capable of dividing him from his own father, if the two Quineys
and Sturley heard about the 'Shottery' investment plan from John
Shakespeare's loose lips. After that plan was bruited about, one
recalls, the poet (despite his earnings) made no investment at home
until his father was dead.

Just when he wrote
Timon
is unknown, but as it derives partly from Plutarch, it may date from
about the time he was using Plutarch for his late Roman dramas. In its
sketch of an anguished hero betrayed by himself and his ethos, it has
thematic interests in common with those tragedies. At what
psychological cost had they been written?

After
Coriolanus
,
Shakespeare abandoned tight plots and realistic scenes, and, as he
wrote no more tragedies, he surely felt he had pursued one line as far
as he could. His case was strange: one thinks of Dante, Leonardo,
Molière, Bach, and of others, all of them peerless, and yet no one has
ever excelled, in art of any kind, over the sheer concentrated
immensity, the intellectual and emotional achievement of this poet's
late tragedies. He was a man who, for the time being, had exhausted
himself; he had run himself dry. He apparently sought a renewal for
himself in the theatre, and also in the prospects of a wilful daughter
at Stratford's Chapel Street, where he may have arrived sometimes, on
horseback, near the Gild chapel, after seeing Jennet and a 'grave'
Master Davenant in an old university town.

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Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

( Prospero, The Tempest)

Sir, she's well restored
And to be married shortly

( Jailer, The Two Noble Kinsmen)

An alert traveller riding into Stratford around 1607 would not have
found the townspeople invariably sombre or the local trades hopelessly
depressed. Puritanical feeling was strong among aldermen who met at
'halls', but old festivals were still honoured. There was jollity
enough, and merchants had more to celebrate than in the lean years of
the 1590s. Despite fears about the ungodly, some thirty alehouses were
to be allowed at Stratford, along with the three inns -- the Crown,
Bear, and Swan -- all on Bridge Street.

There were tensions in the local council which illuminate the
dramatist's late years (as does fresh evidence about his son-in-law).
But after leaving dusty London, Shakespeare would have returned to a
place of natural beauty. Passing over Clopton's bridge, a rider saw
green tillage-lands which ended in high, overgrown earthy banks or
meers. Extending by the Avon were rich 'water-furlongs' -- where all
manner of wild fowl bred and greylag geese fed.

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