The Book of Lost Books (21 page)

Did Shakespeare read Cervantes in the original, or in the translation? Or did Fletcher summarize the plot and allow the elder dramatist to freely adapt the material? More important, did
Cardenio
keep Don Quixote, or dispense with the romance-obsessed knight entirely? Francis Beaumont, another collaborator of Fletcher's, had staged a play called
The Knight of the Burning Pestle
in 1607, which featured an apprentice called Ralph, who harbored chivalric delusions, and was clearly modeled on Don Quixote. It is not impossible, though it is unlikely, that
Cardenio
contained the first appearance of Don Quixote on a British stage; and, in a manner as romantic and mythic as the identification of Prospero with Shakespeare, it is a pleasant conceit that the old playwright found in the gentle knight with the jangled mind another redemptive self-image.

Cardenio
had a curious afterlife. In 1727, Lewis Theobald, the Shakespeare editor whom Pope bitterly attacked in the first version of
The Dunciad,
presented a tragicomedy at Drury Lane entitled
Double Falsehood,
or The Distrest Lovers,
which he claimed was adapted from
Cardenio,
“written originally by W. Shakespeare.” Theobald maintained he was working from the manuscript prompt-copy, not a quarto version, of the play.

The plot has broad similarities: Cardenio is renamed Julio, and again he spies on the wedding of his fiancée and his onetime confidant. He goes mad, and with the help of Dorothea (now called Violante), brings Henriquez/Ferdinand to justice. There is no Knight of the Doleful Countenance, or his waggish squire. Perhaps the only strikingly Shakespearean device is that Violante disguises herself as a shepherd. How much of the “real”
Cardenio
was present in the later version is problematic: this was the age that gave us Tate's
King Lear,
complete with happy ending, and Dryden's
The Enchanted Isle,
which added a female monster and a man who has never seen a woman to
The Tempest.
Theobald would not have thought it disrespectful to radically rewrite Shakespeare. It is more difficult to explain why Theobald did not ever print the original. After his death in 1744, the precious copy lingered on, according to a newspaper advertisement, in the Museum of Covent Garden Play-house. The building, including its library, burned down in 1808.

Shakespeare's collaboration with other writers provides our final, tantalizing proximity to expanding his oeuvre. The only manuscript of Shakespeare's creative work is a censor's copy of
The Booke of Sir Thomas More:
the so-called Hand D is presumed to be Shakespeare's by comparison to other examples of his handwriting. Hand D provides a longish speech for the protagonist. As a professional man of the theater, Shakespeare might well have had a hand in countless works. Later copies of the Folio included other plays
—Arden of Feversham, Edward III, The Yorkshire
Tragedy, Sir John Oldcastle, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The London
Prodigal, The Birth of Merlin, The Tragedy of Locrine, The Puritan,
and the like—and, though little of the “Shakespeare Apocrypha” has found favor with critics, the ghost of a chance exists that Shakespeare's words are scattered throughout a far wider corpus. Shakespeare is like language itself, diffuse, ever-present, in constant flux, and we might read far more by him, if only our eyes were sharp enough to see words for what they are.

John Donne

{1572–1631}

“
ANTES MUERTO QUE MUDADO
” ran the legend across John Donne's earliest portrait: “sooner dead than changed.” At the time, Donne was a self-assured, intelligent eighteen-year-old Catholic—a precarious enough position in persecutory Protestant England, where suspected priest-harborers were publicly executed. It was even more perilous if your uncle happened to be the head of a crack team of covert Jesuits; so hazardous, in fact, that emblazoning your miniature with a quotation in the language of the recently defeated Spanish Armada would seem reckless, if not suicidal.

Although the young Donne could hardly have scried into the future, even he might have been surprised to see himself as a law student, MP, acclaimed poet, eloping lover, naval adventurer, and Anglican convert. It might have raised the teenager's eyebrow, archly, to know that at forty he would publish a withering satire on the Jesuits and their founder, entitled
Ignatius His Conclave,
where the Jesuit leader applied for the position of second-in-command to the Devil. He might even have blanched to see himself, at fifty, as the dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, an impassioned and inspiring preacher. It may have been some comfort for him to know that he would at least have the self-clarity to write, in his Holy Sonnet XIX:

Oh, to vex me contraries meet in one:
Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot
A constant habit.

Of all the poets of the Renaissance, Donne remains the one we know—or think we know—best; not in terms of a compendious memorization of his verse and sermons, but as a once-living human being, who loved, thought, ate, and argued. Whether as Jack Donne, the bawdy, sophisticated, pirouetting poet of
Songs and Sonnets,
or as Dr. Donne, the grave, tortured, unflinching author of such lines as “Ask not for whom the bell tolls,” Donne is a palpable presence. In fact, it appears that the very riven-ness of him is what appeals. How did one transform into the other? How did he hold the contradictory and centrifugal aspects of his identity together? And, as always, he shimmers just ahead of the reader, preempting questions and preventing answers. In a sermon preached on New Year's Day 1625, he says, “It is an execrable and damnable monosyllable,
Why;
it exasperates God, it ruins us.”

Donne's poetry is as slippery as his motivations. Even in a relatively straightforward piece, such as Holy Sonnet X, it is impossible to distill out of the words a singular, intact meaning. At first sight, it seems clear enough: “Death be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so.” Donne catalogues the weaknesses and limitations of supposedly almighty Death; he whittles away the Grim Reaper to a pathetic skeleton, triumphantly concluding: “And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.” But that final paradigmatic paradox rankles in its bald simplicity. If Death is such a slight, inconsequential entity, why deploy such formidable rhetorical powers to argue us out of our fear? Writing a poem ostensibly to dispel the terror of death, Donne simultaneously manages to evoke that very horror.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, when T. S. Eliot was looking for a new kind of poetic voice, it was to Donne's ironic, elusive register he turned. What is more remarkable is that if it had not been for a gruesome incident, we would have had to strain just to catch even a few echoes of it.

John Donne Jr. was expected to follow his now-respectable father into the church. He had a middling gift for poetry, and his father's ability to weather the storms of political upheaval: he managed to live through the Commonwealth and into the Restoration with scant personal disturbance. He was also implicated in a murder. In 1634, he and a university chum were horse-riding in Oxford when a little boy called Humphrey Dunt inadvertently gave their steeds a start. John Donne Jr., aggravated by the whelp's carelessness, thrashed him with a whip around the head. The child died a few days later. John Junior was tried, and though several doctors testified that the walloping had done nothing directly attributable to the child's demise, he found his career path distinctly hampered.

Dr. Donne had died in 1631, three years before, and his literary remains were in the hands of his friend Henry King. Somehow—and there have been imputations of outright theft—John Donne Jr. obtained the manuscripts, and for the next thirty years brought out publication after publication of his father's essays, poetry, and sermons.

His father had published little during his lifetime. He was, moreover, disinclined to publish at all. This was not merely a case of Dr. Donne disregarding the antic verses of his earlier incarnation Jack; as early as 1600, Donne wrote to a friend, including a copy of his
Paradoxes,
with the following plea:

Yet, Sir, though I know their low price, except I receive by your next letter an assurance upon the religion of your friendship that no copy shall be taken for any respect of these or any other of my compositions sent to you, I shall sin against my conscience if I send you any more.

Among Donne's papers were works such as the controversial and perhaps tongue-in-cheek
Biathanatos,
which argued that suicide was not a sin: Dr. Donne would certainly not have approved of its appearance in the booksellers.

Much of Donne might have been lost. One major project, however, remains regrettably incomplete:
Metempsychosis—
though Donne himself was probably glad in later years he abandoned the poem subtitled “The Progresse of the Soule.” Ben Jonson, the poet and dramatist, probably in his cups and possibly unaware his conversation was being eagerly noted by his friend William Drummond, gave a brief précis of the work:

The conceit of Donne's transformation or µετεµψυχοσις, was that he sought the soul of the Apple which Eve pulled, and thereafter made it the soule of a Bitch, then of a she-wolf, and so of a woman. His general purpose was to have brought in all the bodies of the Heretics from the soul of Cain and at last left it in the body of Calvin. Of this he wrote but one sheet, and now since he was made a Doctor he repenteth highly and seeketh to destroy all his poems.

The doctrine of metempsychosis, where an individual soul is reincarnated in different bodies, was controversial enough. To write a biography of the soul of persistent wickedness was even more dangerous.

Jonson is not wholly accurate. Donne actually wrote 520 lines, and his son published them in 1635. He begins:

I sing the progress of a deathless soul,
Whom Fate, which God made, but doth not control,
Placed in most shapes. . . .

The poem continues to find homes for the soul. It would animate Luther and Muhammad, and work its way through a mandrake root, a sparrow, a fish, a whale, a mouse, a wolf, and a “toyful ape” with certain unhealthy impulses toward human females.

What would be the final vessel of this diabolical psyche? The opening epistle promises to “seriously deliver” the reader “from her first making when she was that apple which Eve eat, to this time when she is he, whose life you shall find at the end of this book.” Calvin, advanced Jonson. Later critics, such as Edward Gosse, thought it would be Queen Elizabeth herself—the poem is written before 1601, so the still-Catholic Donne might have relished demonizing the head of the state that had killed his uncle and brother. Such an identification is abetted by the fact that some manuscripts have “this time when she is she,” rather than “he.” Moreover, the seventh stanza drops some heavy hints:

For the great soul which here amongst us now
Doth dwell, and moves that hand, and tongue, and brow,
Which as the moon the sea, moves us, to hear
Whose story, with long patience you will long;
(For 'tis the crown, and last strain of my song).

If the reference to the crown were not enough, Elizabeth was frequently depicted as Cynthia, the moon, by Raleigh, Jonson, and others. One can imagine the headlines if this happened today: DEAN OF WESTMINSTER CLAIMS QUEEN IS REINCARNATION OF DEVIL. The passing of time blunts much, but not the deeply controversial nature of this poem. No wonder Donne attempted to lose his own work.

Ben Jonson

{1572–1637}

CONSIDERING THAT THE author was so besotted with posterity, it is ironic that Ben Jonson's first and last works are lost. As early as 1616, his voluminous writings were issued as
Works,
not merely
Plays,
nor just
Poems,
not even
Prose and Other Writings.
He had his own coterie devoted to his kind of literature: the “Tribe of Ben.” He was the sort-of poet laureate, enjoying the royally approved pension but not the title; the
de
facto
not
de ipso
leading author of the day. His masques had been performed with kings, queens, and favorites in the leading roles. As a writer of epigrams, tragedies, satires, odes, comedies, lyrics, epistles, and elegies, he was the spin doctor and jester of the court, as well as the toast of the underlings. He had even been Shakespeare's drinking buddy, antagonist, and commemorator.

It had started somewhat differently. The adopted son of a bricklayer, he was apprenticed into that trade, even though he had attended the prestigious Westminster school and studied under the antiquary and scholar William Camden. He tired of “having a
trowell
in his hand, [and] a
book
in his pocket,” and enlisted in the army. If we are to take him at his word, he fought in the Netherlands and defeated a Spanish champion in single combat. Perhaps by way of playing roles in a touring company, Jonson drifted into the theater. Even at the height of his career, his lower-class background provided plenty of ammunition for his enemies: he was a “whoreson poore lyme- and hayre-rascal,” “the wittiest fellow of a Bricklayer in England.”

Jonson was originally attached to Philip Henslowe's theatrical company, and from Henslowe's diaries we learn that Jonson was paid for such plays as
Robert II of Scotland, Page of Plymouth, Richard Crookback,
and
Hot Anger Soon Cold.
None of these has survived. Jonson, however, fares slightly better than his enemy and sometime coauthor Thomas Dekker—Henslowe records forty titles of Dekker's works that have vanished. The Elizabethan literary critic Francis Meres ranked Jonson as among “our best in tragedy”; nonetheless, we have none of the plays by which Meres came to his judgment.

The first play, however, with which Jonson was involved was not lost through chance or carelessness, but active suppression. In 1597 he acted in and wrote part of a satirical comedy entitled
The Isle of Dogs,
in collaboration with the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe. The Privy Council ruled that the work contained “very seditious and slanderous matter.” Jonson, along with two other actors, was arrested; Nashe, whose quarters were searched, left London, and hid out in Great Yarmouth. All copies of the play were to be burned. All theaters in London were closed, as a precautionary measure.

What had riled the authorities in
The Isle of Dogs
? Nashe, in his prose work
Lenten Stuff,
recalls the affair:

The strange turning of
The Isle of Dogs
from a comedy to a tragedy two summers past, with the troublesome stir which happened about it, is a general rumour that hath filled all England, and such a heavy cross laid upon me as had well near confounded me.

Although he claimed only to have written the first act, Nashe was never to return to London, and was cut off from lucrative sources of patronage. He rails against the miserly aristocrats, and compares his fate to that of Homer, a wandering minstrel reliant on occasional generosities. Nashe hopes that “those greybeard huddle-duddles and crusty cum-twangs” would be “struck with such stinging remorse of their miserable euclionism and snudgery.” All the reader learns about the lost play is that Nashe found it difficult to write.

The Isle of Dogs . . .
breeding unto me such bitter throws in the teeming as it did, and the tempests that arose at his birth so astonishing outrageous and violent as if my brain had been conceived of another Hercules, I was so terrified with my own increase, like a woman long travailing to be delivered of a monster.

Whatever
The Isle of Dogs
contained, it was clearly so sensitive that no one dared even to record the nature of the misdemeanor. Ben Jonson was imprisoned again in 1605 for his part in a play called
Eastward Hoe!
In that instance, it seems that the king was offended by a seven-line attack on the Scots in act III, scene 3 (ironically, the play ends with the villains washed up on the Isle of Dogs). So
The Isle of Dogs
may have had but a few lines that offended, or the whole plot of the piece could have been treasonable.

Jonson could barely keep out of trouble. Just a year after the brouhaha about
The Isle of Dogs,
he was back in prison, charged with murdering a fellow actor, Gabriel Spenser, who had been imprisoned alongside him during the investigations into the “lewd play.” Jonson, being literate, pleaded benefit of clergy, and was branded on the thumb rather than hanged by the neck. During the late 1590s and early 1600s, he was an active protagonist in the “War of the Theatres,” attacking rival playwrights John Marston and Thomas Dekker (though their subsequent collaboration suggests that the whole affair may have been subtly stage-managed). Even Shakespeare was not spared his barbed asides; Jonson's
Bartholomew
Fair
begins with a dig at “those that beget tales, tempests, and such-like drolleries.”

The testy, hot-tempered playwright would enjoy major successes with
Volpone, The Alchemist
(said by Coleridge to be one of the three perfect plots in existence),
Bartholomew Fair,
and
Epicoene,
as well as playing a significant role in the Jacobean court with his masques and entertainments (though, typically, he fell out with the stage designer Inigo Jones on the subject of correct classical imagery).

It seems that Jonson sickened of the theatrical life. In his
Ode to Himself,
he erupts,

Come leave the loathèd stage,
And the more loathsome age,
Where pride and impudence in faction knot,
Usurp the chair of wit:
Indicting and arraigning every day,
Something they call a play.
Let their fastidious, vain
Commission of the brain
Run on, and rage, sweat, censure, and condemn:
They were not made for thee, less thou for them.

Jonson did not live to complete his final play,
The Sad Shepherd.
The play was obviously advanced in conception: nearly half is extant, as well as the dedicatory preface.
The Sad Shepherd
is a new direction and thus especially unfortunate in its incomplete state. Jonson finally tries his hand at pastoral.

The pastoral tragicomedy was not a new genre: the double-act stars of the stage, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, had already produced such works as
Philaster
and
The Faithful Shepherd.
As early as 1618, Jonson had confided in William Drummond that he “had in hand” a pastoral called
The May Lord
about which nothing else is known. In
The
Sad Shepherd
Jonson does not use the rococo caricatures of the Italian pastoral, but grafts into this form authentic English mythology: his work features Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, Little John, Maid Marian, and Maudlin, the Witch of Paplewick. His strengths had always been in realizing indigenous English characters, from the thinly disguised portraits of contemporaries in
The Poetaster
to the quacks, con men, puppeteers, Puritans, and popinjays of
Bartholomew Fair.
Even the title of
The Isle of
Dogs
hints at a particular local significance. Throughout his career, it was the vibrant chaos of the streets, as much as the sonorous splendor of the classics, that informed his writing.

The Sad Shepherd
opens with a prologue in which Jonson looks back, and forward:

He that hath feasted you these forty years,
And fitted fables for your finer ears,
Although at first he scarce could hit the bore;
Yet you, with patience, harkening more and more,
At length have grown up to him, and made known
The working of his pen is now your own:
He prays you would vouchsafe, for your own sake,
To hear him this once more, but sit awake . . .
His scene is Sherwood, and his play a Tale,
Of Robin Hood . . .

Had he completed
The Sad Shepherd,
the English stage might well have benefited from an injection of new idioms and traditional legends. As it was, the Civil War was looming, and the theaters would soon be silent for a generation.