No Fear Shakespeare: A Companion (No Fear Shakespeare)

PART I

SHAKESPEARE THE MAN

Everything you really need to know about his life, career, and world

ONE

WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT SHAKESPEARE?

Does the Emperor Have Clothes?

Let’s face it. Hearing people talk about Shakespeare can be pretty annoying. Particularly if you feel like you don’t understand him. When people talk about which of Shakespeare’s plays they like best, or what they thought of so-and-so’s performance, they often treat Shakespeare like membership in some exclusive club. If you don’t get him, if you don’t go to see his plays, you’re not truly educated or literate. You might be tempted to ask whether the millions of people who say they love Shakespeare actually know what they’re talking about, or are they just sheep?

The Two Things That Make Shakespeare Worth Reading

The greatness of Shakespeare basically boils down to two things:

the emotional impact of the stories he tells

his use of language to convey character

SHAKESPEARE’S STORIES

For the most part, Shakespeare did not create his own stories. Of his thirty-eight plays, only Love’s Labor’s Lost and The Tempest seem to have been invented by him. Shakespeare mainly rewrote stories that had been told elsewhere. He adapted stories from history books about English kings, tragedies by the Roman playwright Seneca, biographies of ancient Romans written by Plutarch, and sometimes stories and characters from older romances (a romance is a long narrative in poetry or prose).

One thing that most of these stories have in common is that they deal with the extremes of human experience. People in these stories commit the worst possible crimes—murder, obviously, but also treason, regicide, patricide, maiming, dismemberment, and torture. Even in the comedies, people suffer the worst kinds of experiences, such as the loss of siblings (sometimes twins), parents, and children; the loss of money, status, and identity; public shaming; and so on. Another thing that many of these stories have in common is that in the original sources, the point of the story is not to show characters with complex motivations and rich, contradictory psychological profiles. (There are some exceptions, such as Plutarch’s biographies or Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida.)

One of the chief differences between Shakespeare’s plays and the stories they are based on is that Shakespeare is interested in the complexities of character and motivation and is able to make the emotions of these characters seem real. To understand why people find his plays so compelling, it helps to think of these two things at once: how extreme the stories are and how real he makes them feel. Most writers wouldn’t touch the stories Shakespeare was attracted to because they’re almost impossible not to turn into melodrama—overwraught, implausible nonsense. (Many modern adaptations of Shakespeare plays, such as Othello reset in a high school basketball team, seem interesting to us because we know they’re adapting Shakespeare—if they weren’t adaptations they’d just be laughable.) But by taking these stories and pulling it off, Shakespeare creates plays that are unique in their emotional impact.

People who don’t like Shakespeare often complain that the stories are in fact implausible and unrealistic. Why would Lear be so stupid as to give his kingdom to daughters who hate him? How could Othello become so jealous that he actually falls down in an epileptic fit? People who ask these questions are seeing something that’s actually there (the extremeness and implausibility of the stories), but they’re only seeing part of what’s there. To see the other half, the emotional realism, you have to look at Shakespeare’s use of language to convey character.

SHAKESPEARE’S USE OF LANGUAGE TO CONVEY CHARACTER

The two most basic facts about the language of Shakespeare’s plays are (1) that it’s virtually all dialogue (just a few stage directions here and there) and (2) that most of it is poetry. The fact that it’s all dialogue means that characters are saying all of these words. When a character speaks in any piece of writing that we would consider literature, what the words tell us indirectly about the character is at least as important as what the words are actually saying. A character’s speech shows us who he or she is at the same time that it conveys a message.

Shakespeare is not the first person to use poetry to write his dialogue. Poems have always had dialogue, and plays have always been written in verse (just think of The Odyssey and Oedipus Rex). But Shakespeare used poetry to create effective dialogue in a very new and innovative way. Poetry, together with rhetoric (the art of persuasive speaking or argumentation), features an entire arsenal of techniques that enable a writer to convey a message with both clarity and emotional force. Shakespeare mastered all of these techniques, such as metaphor, simile, repetition, rhythm, meter—the list would fill a book, and every student in Shakespeare’s time did have a book that listed them. But instead of using these techniques in the way they were intended to be used, to communicate a message or tell a story with emotional impact, he bent these techniques to show us something indirectly about the characters who were speaking these bits of poetry.

TWO

FAMOUS SHAKESPEARE LOVERS

It’s not difficult to find people who are ready and willing to praise Shakespeare to the skies. Shakespeare has been praised to the point that he enjoys an almost mythical status in our society. However, the following five writers usually knew what they were talking about, and here’s what they had to say about Shakespeare.

Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

Ben Jonson, a playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare, was one of the first (and most famous) people to grant Shakespeare the status that he holds without question today. Jonson wrote a dedicatory poem printed near the front of the first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays, the 1623 First Folio. This poem includes the famous adage, He was not of an age, but for all time, a sentiment that has been echoed by Shakespeare adulators in the centuries following. Jonson also praises Shakespeare’s tragedies as equal to those of the best classical dramatists and claims that Shakespeare’s comedic ability is unmatched by anyone else. Jonson mythicizes Shakespeare by likening him to the Roman gods Apollo and Mercury and envisioning him as a star in the sky with the power to judge the theater, which became desolate in his absence.

Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

Alexander Pope, the famous eighteenth-century English poet best known for The Rape of the Lock, was well known in his own time as the editor of a complete works of Shakespeare. In the preface to his edition, Pope praises Shakespeare’s originality and the uniqueness of his characters.

[E]very single character in Shakespeare is as much an Individual as those in Life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike; . . . had all the Speeches been printed without the very names of the persons I believe one might have apply’d them with certainty to every speaker.

Though some have questioned the plausibility of Pope’s assertion, his admiration for the diversity and naturalness of Shakespeare’s characters has often been quoted.

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

Samuel Johnson, an early editor of Shakespeare’s works, praises Shakespeare as a natural writer, one who writes about the desires and values common to all mankind. Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life. For Johnson, Shakespeare’s power lies in his ability to accurately depict life, both its laughter and sorrow. However, Johnson criticizes Shakespeare for neglecting to provide moral instruction in his plays and claims that writers should not simply create the world as they see it but attempt to improve their world by creating a better one.

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)

Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian and satirist, furthered the Shakespeare myth by writing in his book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) that Shakespeare is a symbol to unite English men and women from around the world. That he shine[s], in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; indestructible. For Carlyle, Shakespeare’s genius lies in revealing the inmost heart of a matter and that he portrays a varied range of characters with equal care and fullness. Carlyle believed that for years to come people would continue to relate to the astute characterizations of Shakespeare and claim him for their own. Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet and philosopher, claimed that Shakespeare was the poet of the human race. Emerson praised Shakespeare’s ability to express human experience and emotion beyond all other authors and noted that Shakespeare has fulfilled the famous prophecy of Socrates, that the poet most excellent in tragedy would be most excellent in comedy. Emerson lectured publicly of the genius of Shakespeare and wrote about him in a book of essays called Representative Men. Emerson argued that the genius of Shakespeare lies in his wisdom, his humanity, and his language. [H]e wrote the text of modern life; . . . he drew the man, and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of men and women. For Emerson, Shakespeare succeeded in documenting life to the point of expanding our understanding of our own existence.

THREE

HOW DID SHAKESPEARE GET SO SMART?

Good Timing

Shakespeare could not have become the author we know if he had lived in a different era. If he’d been born fifty years earlier, he would have died before England’s first theater was built. Fifty years later, and the theaters would have been closed for the eighteen years during which he wrote his major plays. Genius depends in part upon luck and timing, and Shakespeare was truly a man of his day. While Ben Jonson, as noted earlier, famously said that his competitor was not of an age but for all time, Shakespeare is immortal because he was the greatest writer of an excellent age.

When we ask what made Shakespeare so great, the answer must come in two parts: the materials that Shakespeare’s society gave him to mold, and the inner genius that Shakespeare brought to the task of shaping them. For better or worse, we know a lot more about the society he lived in than we will ever know about his inner life.

A School Curriculum Focused Exclusively on Writing

Growing up in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare benefited from an excellent public education. He would have first learned to read and write in English, progressing from the alphabet to basic religious texts such as the Psalms and the Lord’s Prayer. At about the age of seven, Shakespeare would have been sent to grammar school, as we still call it. The name, however, was more literal for Shakespeare than it is for us. Our grammar schools teach everything from science to social studies. At the King’s New School in Stratford, and throughout England, Latin grammar was the chief subject. Without the modern-day variety of topics, Shakespeare and his fellow students received a Latin education whose rigor is almost unimaginable today. Shakespeare would have learned to read and write Latin through the repetition of model sentences and maxims. As he mastered those basics, he would have moved on to decomposing and reassembling arguments, and finally graduating to writing orations. All of this would have been done in a constant dialogue between English and Latin, translating from the one to the other and back again until the Latin both captured the English thought completely and conformed to the stylistic example of the classical masters.

Availability of World Classics in Translation

Shakespeare’s education gave him greater command of languages than all but the brightest students today. Even so, he benefited along with the rest of English society from the outpouring of excellent translations in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Classics of Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and more gradually became available in editions which themselves helped to form the still-evolving English language. Many of these versions became classics in their own right. Two centuries after Shakespeare’s death, the poet John Keats still turned to George Chapman’s 1598 translation of Homer to experience the Greek classic. The new wave of translations gave Shakespeare and the rest of England ready access to more great literature than had ever been possible before. These broad new horizons appear again and again in Shakespeare’s plays.

Racy Stories Cheaply Available

Shakespeare’s influences include mundane works as well as classics. Though he benefited from access to great books, he seems to have gained nearly as much from the culture of cheap print that London had to offer. Lurid ballads, scandalous broadsides, and murder pamphlets—the pulp fiction and gossip sheets of their day—were sold in book stalls alongside printed plays. These salacious tales offered Shakespeare a completely alternate set of plots and preoccupations from those available in great books. Shakespeare visited this world again and again as he prepared his plays. And like so much in his rapidly changing society, the world of cheap print would not have been available in any recognizable form even fifty years earlier.

Immersion in the Many Speech Patterns of London

Finally, Shakespeare was influenced not only by books but by the spoken word. Much of the greatness of Shakespeare’s plays flows from their author’s keen ear for the evolving language spoken around him. Over the years, people have argued that Shakespeare must have spent time as everything from a sailor to a lawyer to a falconer, all because he had mastered the dialect of those hobbies and professions and could reproduce convincingly the way such people spoke. Shakespeare’s London was the sort of place where an attentive ear could hear innumerable professional and regional variants of English spoken, and the playwright seems to have listened more attentively than most anyone else.

FOUR

WHAT DID SHAKESPEARE CARE ABOUT?

No one has been more exhaustively researched than Shakespeare, yet what kind of person he actually was remains an enigma. Given the lifetimes that have been spent pursuing traces of him in archives, it’s not likely that we’re going to find out much more about his life than we already know. And it’s remarkable just how little that is. There is so much that we would like to know about Shakespeare. Who were his friends, and who were his enemies? Did he tell a good joke? What did he like to do with his free time? (Well, that one’s easy: He went home and wrote.) Above all, what mattered to him?

Money

Though we will never know as much as we want to about Shakespeare, we can begin to answer this basic question. To begin with, Shakespeare cared about what we all do: money. He achieved a great deal of financial success as a playwright, a profession not known for producing wealth, and that success did not come by accident. Actors reigned over writers on the Elizabethan stage much as they do in present-day Hollywood, and the proceeds were divided accordingly. Leading actors were shareholders in their companies, entitled to a cut of the profits, whereas playwrights generally worked for a flat fee. Shakespeare, in contrast, was both an actor and a writer for his company and a shareholder in it as well. When the Globe Theatre was built in the late 1590s, Shakespeare invested, buying an additional slice of revenue for himself. When the company began performing in the indoor Blackfriars Theater in 1608, Shakespeare again put money into the venture. The great playwright owned a substantial part of the major entertainment conglomerate of his day.

No starving artist, Shakespeare knew how to build a fortune for himself, how to keep it, and how to pass it along. Having watched his father fall from a position of affluence and status within their small village, he invested his money wisely and did not lose track of even small sums. In 1597, Shakespeare bought a large house in Stratford, permanently establishing his place in the community. By then he was known to be a man of some means; a letter from the following year records a rumor that he was looking to buy more property in the area. Several years on, he did just that, acquiring a substantial plot of good farming land just north of town. Shakespeare owned more than just property, however. Like any sensible investor, he diversified. He purchased a lease on a portion of the corn, grain, blade and hay produced in and around Stratford; it produced a steady, sizeable income for the rest of his life. He bought commodities directly, acquiring malt and selling it to his neighbors. When one neighbor failed to pay up, Shakespeare sued—not the only time that he would pursue a small debt in court. And when the time came to leave it all behind, Shakespeare wrote a will that protected his younger daughter from her suspect husband while providing richly for his older daughter and the descendants he hoped to, but would not, have.

Social Status

Shakespeare clearly cared about social status too. Shakespeare’s father, John, had risen from being a glover to hold a series of public offices in Stratford, culminating in a term as bailiff—a very powerful version of a mayor—and many years as an alderman. At some point during these years, John Shakespeare applied for a coat of arms, which allowed a man to call himself a gentleman, in those days a formal title and not a vague description of manners. In theory, such an honor could only be inherited; in practice, it could be bought with enough money and social standing.

That description, however, did not apply to John Shakespeare for long enough to gain him the privilege. He seems to have fallen into financial straits in the late 1570s, and his application was never completed. Not, that is, until it was revived in 1596. Though we have no direct evidence that William Shakespeare renewed the request, by that year he was financially successful in the theater. No one else would have had both motive and means to pursue the matter. This time, the application went through. The Shakespeares were granted a coat of arms, complete with a motto translating as Not Without Merit. Five years before his death, John Shakespeare was a gentleman, and so were his heirs. Shakespeare would sign his last will with that title. But his dedicated social climbing had drawn notice. In the sequel to Every Man in His Humor, a play in which Shakespeare performed, Ben Jonson includes a character who purchases a foolish coat of arms at great cost. A friend suggests a motto: Not Without Mustard.

His Place in History . . . Well, Actually Not

We know what Shakespeare didn’t care about: preserving his work. Though it is hard for us to imagine, the greatest English playwright seems to have made no effort to ensure that his achievements would survive him. At his death, only eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays had been printed. All of these works appeared as quartos: small, single-play editions similar to a pamphlet in size and appearance. Perhaps the modern-day equivalent would be a paperback—not a volume meant to survive the ages. Moreover, it seems that Shakespeare played no role—aside from the obvious one—in making these books. His inattention shows. Hamlet, for example, appeared in two substantially different quarto editions in Shakespeare’s lifetime. One may have been produced by supporting actors recalling their lines as best they could, a process that produced such odd-sounding readings as To be or not to be? Aye, there’s the point. The second, much longer quarto may have been printed from a playhouse promptbook, or even from Shakespeare’s manuscript. But there is no evidence that Shakespeare took the slightest interest in any of these matters.

Shakespeare did have other options and could have taken an interest in publication if he had so chosen. Ben Jonson saw his plays into print with impeccable attention. Sejanus, a drama set in Ancient Rome, was printed with scholarly notes citing classical authorities to justify the descriptions and the action of the play. The printer even employed a font resembling the inscriptions on Roman monuments to identify the act and scene divisions. Without question, Jonson was involved with every aspect of the printing. He even ensured that his masques—court entertainments that were even more ephemeral than plays, typically receiving only one production—were brought into print with much of the same care that was given to Sejanus. Jonson wrote a description of the costumes used in his Hymenaei, an entertainment performed for a noble wedding, that was four pages by itself.

When Shakespeare died in 1616, more than