The Book of Lost Books (20 page)

William Shakespeare

{1564–1616}

IMAGINE YOURSELF SITTING on a bench in a garden at dusk, with a house behind you and the view in front. The hill slopes gently toward a river, the night-scented stock is beginning to bloom, and the pale summer light fades. Wisps of mist seem caught like sheep's fleece on the branches of the trees lining the river; gradually, it thickens and coalesces, inching up the fields, billowing, solidifying, obliterating the trees it seemed to hang on, creeping, silently, toward where you are sitting. You think—I will wait, and see if it reaches me. It swirls and chills as the sun sets: a fence, running down the hill, lets you measure its progress up the field as the posts are one by one enveloped, erased. It stops. You wait. Wait. The wall of cloud does not move; exactly the same number of fence-posts remain, the last one barely visible. It gets slightly colder, and slightly darker, but the obstinate haze has halted. You stand up, stretch, and turn around, only to see the lighted windows of the house shimmering and blurred by the mist you are in. You pause, and realize: it was never the edge of the mist you were watching, but the limits of your own vision. You saw only the distance that your eye could pierce, rather than the periphery of inexorable mist. That moment of realization is like thinking about Shakespeare, as he disappears behind Shackespere, Shakeshafte, Shakspere, Shagspere, Shxpr.

There is a large number of documents relating to Shakespeare's life—baptismal registers, marriage licenses, loan agreements, satirical swipes, enthusiastic praises: but no letters, no memoirs, no autobiography. In the absence of incontrovertible evidence, countless scholars have chased will-o'-the-wisps through the plays, looking for allusions, disappointments, and the settling of scores. Did Shakespeare get back at Sir Thomas Lucy by depicting him as Justice Shallow in
The Merry Wives of
Windsor
? Is fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe the dead shepherd in
As You Like It,
and does the “great reckoning in a little room” refer to his death? What connects the performance of
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
in 1601 and the death by drowning of Hamnet Shakespeare, William's son, in 1596? What triggered the great, late plays, which undo and mend the tragedies of the previous decade? Who is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets? What happened in the “Lost Years” between 1585 and 1592, or in the final years between the performance of
The Two Noble Kinsmen
in 1613 and his death three years later?

That way madness lies: and the history of Shakespeare criticism is littered with fantastical theories, dogmatic speculation, and lunatic conspiracy. Let us leave biography along with its awful ghost: those reams of obsession that, discomfited by Shakespeare's lack of self-presentation, presume instead that John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, the earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Sir Philip Sidney's sister, and Shakespeare's own wife must have written his work. Let us begin with what isn't:
Love's Labour's Won, Pericles,
and
Cardenio.

In 1598, Francis Meres wrote in his
Palladis Tamia, Wit's Treasury,
the first panegyric on Shakespeare:

As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. For comedy witness his
Gentlemen of Verona,
his
Errors,
his
Love's Labour's Lost,
his
Love's
Labour's Won,
his
Midsummer Night's Dream,
and his
Merchant of
Venice;
for tragedy, his
Richard the 2., Richard the 3., Henry the 4.,
King John, Titus Andronicus
and his
Romeo and Juliet.

The only plays written before 1597 that Meres omits are the trilogy on
Henry VI
and
The Taming of the Shrew.
This led to the supposition that the mysterious
Love's Labour's Won
was an alternative title for
The Taming of the Shrew;
and, one could argue, Petruchio wins his love, albeit aggressively, in that play. The chance discovery, in 1953, of a scrap from a bookseller's list bound into a later volume demolishes that theory.

The fragment seems to be a list of volumes sold in August 1603: it includes “marchant of vennis,” “taming of a shrew,” “loves labor lost” and “loves labor won.” Since it mentions both works, it precludes their being one and the same text. It does, however, raise further problems, since it would seem to imply that
Love's Labour's Won
was actually printed.

Nineteen of Shakespeare's plays—called quarto editions—were printed individually. In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, his friends John Heminges and Henry Condell edited his manuscripts or “foul papers” and published the Folio edition of thirty-six plays (which does not include
Love's Labour's Won
). The chimera nevertheless persisted that
Love's Labour's Won
was an alternative title for another play by Shakespeare. The title might be thought to fit the plot of
Much Ado
About Nothing,
which was performed in 1598, but published in 1600 under its own name.
As You Like It
or
All's Well That Ends Well
could have been the subtitle for
Love's Labour's Won,
in the same fashion as
Twelfth Night
is subtitled
What You Will:
neither exists as a quarto. By interpreting “labour's won” as “suffering deserved,” it has even been proposed that the
Troilus and Cressida
was the mysterious lost play. The idea of actually having lost a play by Shakespeare seems too much to bear, and these alternative ascriptions belie a desperation
not
to have lost anything.

But the other possibility is that
Love's Labour's Won
is, in fact,
Love's
Labour's Won.
Since it appears to have been printed, over one thousand copies might have existed in Elizabethan London. That Heminges and Condell did not include it in the Folio does not mean that it had disappeared by 1623. They do not include
Pericles
or
The Two Noble Kinsmen,
and analysis of the composition and printing of the Folio has established that
Timon of Athens
was only added at a later stage, and that
Troilus and
Cressida
was nearly left out altogether. The Folio is a Collected Works of Shakespeare, not a Complete Works.

The quarto of
Titus Andronicus
was only discovered in the first decade of the twentieth century; so the chance that
Love's Labour's Won
is bound, somewhere, in an anonymous bundle of old plays is not outside the realms of possibility. But the likelihood diminishes with every passing year.
Love's Labour's Lost
ends on a bittersweet note: “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You, that way: we, this way.” While
Love's Labour's Lost
is left secure in the canon, its putative sequel exits into a darker, more obscure offstage future.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre,
as mentioned above, is not in the Folio. The play was printed in quarto in 1609, though to justify its presence in this book requires a further distinction: the good and bad quartos. If the Folio is the album, and the quartos are singles, then the bad quartos are bootleg copies. Many of them were constructed by jobbing actors who memorized as much as possible, and then cashed in on the play's success. What makes
Pericles
a lost work is that all we have is the version seen through a glass darkly: an unofficial, clandestinely created simulacrum of the real play.

How do you spot a bad quarto? Thankfully, we have two quartos of
Hamlet
to compare, Q1 and Q2, printed only a year apart. It looks suspiciously as if the second was a retort to the plagiarized first version. There are some obvious corkers in Q1, particularly in soliloquies when “Hamlet” could not be overheard by his eavesdropping fellow actor. “To be, or not be, I there's the point,” reads one famous line; and “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” is oddly rendered as “Why what a dunghill idiot slave am I!”, let alone the wonderfully problematic fact that Polonius, in Q1, is called Corambis. The evidence for how the bad quartos came about is equally persuasive: in Q1 Horatio does not “season,” but “ceasen” his admiration; Fortinbras's bedridden uncle is “impudent” rather than “impotent,” and the play that “pleased not the million, 'twas caviare to the general” instead “pleased not the vulgar, 'twas caviary to the million.” Slips and mishearings, presumptions and anticipations typify the hastily assembled bad quarto.

So with
Pericles,
all we can read is an image thus disfigured. Despite its mangled and mutilated state
Pericles
retains features that seem classically Shakespearean. Like the other late plays,
The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline,
and
The Tempest,
it involves a parent reconciled with a child thought to have been lost. Just as the apothecary in
Cymbeline
reversed the tragic accident in
Romeo and Juliet,
or the insane jealousy of Othello is redeemed in Leontes' penitence in
The Winter's Tale,
or the irascible Lear is forgiven in Prospero's own contrition,
Pericles
enacts a startling transformation of the potentially monstrous into an unexpected atonement.

It opens in horror, with Pericles, looking for a wife, and realizing the incestuous relationship between his prospective father-in-law and his intended. He leaves in disgust and, endangered, is shipwrecked, married, and shipwrecked again. He thinks he has lost both his own wife and his own daughter, since he put one overboard, dead to the world, and left the other behind on his travels, and is reduced over the years to madness and misery. Then he glimpses his wife in his miraculously returned daughter (who has escaped, unharmed, from a brothel) and allows her to lead him to an epiphanic reunion with his similarly restored wife. Paternal devotion and daughterly love emancipate him, and counter the perversion of those attributes at the play's beginning.

There are flashes of Shakespeare's language: when Pericles' wife, Thaisa, regains consciousness in her coffin, the onlooker says, “Her eyelids . . . begin to part their fringes of bright gold.” Prospero similarly addresses Miranda, saying, “The fringèd curtain of thine eye advance.” The dialogue of the fishermen and the brothel frequenters has some recognizable brio. In his elegiac laments, Pericles occasionally reaches an almost familiar grandeur:

A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear;
No light, no fire: the unfriendly elements
Forgot thee utterly; nor have I time
To give thee hallow'd to thy grave, but straight
Must cast thee, scarcely coffin'd, in the ooze;
Where, for a monument upon thy bones,
The aye-remaining lamps, the belching whale
And humming water, must o'erwhelm thy corse,
Lying with simple shells.

But in other places, the verse is clunking and bloated.

Few love to hear the sins they love to act
'Twould 'braid yourself too near for me to tell it.

In Ben Jonson's
Ode to Myself,
he derided
Pericles
as a “mouldy tale,” “stale / as the shrieve's crust, and nasty as his fish.” He could not have known just how corrupted and corroded our version of it would be. It is tempting to imagine a perfect
Pericles
that would rank alongside
The
Tempest;
although, since Shakespeare reworked these notions of redemption and absolution in his subsequent plays, it might suggest that he too was somewhat dissatisfied with
Pericles.

Prospero, adjuring his magic and consigning his staff to the bottom of the sea at the end of
The Tempest,
has become romanticized into Shakespeare's own farewell to the stage. It's a lovely image, even if it is utterly wrong. Far from renouncing the theater in 1611, Shakespeare continued, in collaboration with the up-and-coming John Fletcher, on
Henry VIII,
or All Is True, The Two Noble Kinsmen
(based on Chaucer's Knight's Tale), and the enigmatic
Cardenio.
John Heminges, leader of the King's Men, was paid by the Privy Council for presenting “Cardenno” or “Cardenna” in May and June of 1613; and the Stationer's Register for 1653 attributes
The History of Cardenio
to “Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare.” Even if it was not entirely written by Shakespeare, it nonetheless raises some intriguing possibilities.

The name “Cardenio” comes from Cervantes'
Don Quixote,
Part I, which appeared in English in 1612, and in which we learn his story intermittently from chapter 23 onward. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meet Cardenio, a man driven mad by the duplicity of his erstwhile friend, Don Ferdinand, who has connived Cardenio's beloved Lucinda into marriage and abandoned the farmer's daughter, Dorothea, whom he had seduced. By a series of lucky coincidences, chance meetings, and the timely intervention of Don Quixote, the lovers are reunited, the wicked Ferdinand repents, and Cardenio is cured. Even this brief outline indicates that many of the elements are consistent with Shakespeare's concerns in his last plays.