What is ‘Shakespeare’? A worldwide cultural phenomenon, a brand-name, a logo, an image that appears on T-shirts and credit cards, a mainstay of theatre, film and video production, a compulsory component of education, a label that sells thousands of books, a household name. Also an individual human being, born in a small English country town in 1564, a man who went to London and had a successful career as an actor, playwright and shareholder in the theatre. By all accounts an agreeable and modest man who did not seek to draw attention to himself, even by publishing his plays, though he does seem to have hoped that the fame of his Sonnets would outlive him. His surname has nevertheless become so familiar that his first name, William, does not need to be mentioned – is not indeed mentioned on the covers or title-pages of his works as published in ‘The Arden Shakespeare’: a person from another planet might work carefully through an entire volume in our series without discovering the first name of the author, but on our planet ‘everyone’ knows who he is. It has even become a kind of perverse tribute to him that periodically people attempt to prove that he didn’t write anything after all, that the works ascribed to him were in fact written by somebody else entirely.
The names of some of this man’s works have become so familiar themselves that we can even drop ‘Shakespeare’ without fear of being misunderstood when we talk of ‘Orson Welles’s Othello’ or ‘Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V’. Certain images have become instantly recognizable: a man dressed in black holding a skull ‘means’ Hamlet, a man talking to a woman above him on a moonlit balcony ‘means’ Romeo and Juliet. We quote Shakespeare all the time, sometimes unconsciously, using phrases that have dropped into common usage: ‘to have one’s pound of flesh’ (Merchant of Venice 1.3.148-9 and subsequently); ‘to the manner born’ (Hamlet 1.4.15); ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance’ Hamlet (1.4.16); ‘at one fell swoop’ (Macbeth 4.3.219). Compilers of crossword puzzles and quiz games routinely rely on Shakespearean quotations and references.
Words and phrases from the plays and poems have provided the titles of hundreds of novels, plays and films: one might cite Edith Wharton’s The Glimpses of the Moon (Hamlet 1.4.53), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury Macbeth (5.5.27), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (The Tempest 5.1.183), Margaret Millar’s How Like an Angel (Hamlet 2.2.307–8), Agatha Christie’s By the Pricking of My Thumbs– Ray Bradbury completed the rhyme with his Something Wicked This Way Comes (Macbeth 4.1.44-5) – and H.E. Bates’s The Darling Buds of May (Sonnet 18, 3). The plays are still being performed live all over the world, and film and video versions have made them accessible to millions of people who never go to the theatre. They continue to inspire adaptations and spin-offs such as Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books (1991), Gus Van Sant’s film My Own Private Idaho (1992) and Alan Isler’s novel The Prince of West End Avenue (1994), all of which assume a prior knowledge of a Shakespeare text on the part of their viewers or readers.
How and why has this happened? Four hundred years after the heyday of Shakespeare’s own dramatic career we find ourselves arguing about whether his extraordinary fame and influence were somehow inevitable, a direct result of the intrinsic qualities of his works themselves, or a piece of sustained hype, the manipulation of a myth by those with a personal stake in its perpetuation – performers, teachers, publishers, Stratford-upon-Avon hoteliers – and by those with a more general interest in promoting British ‘high’ culture: Shakespeare has become ‘the Bard of Avon’, the ultimate canonical figure who is taken to represent the genius and values of an entire nation.
Shakespeare did do well during his lifetime out of what was the nearest thing Elizabethan and Jacobean London had to a mass entertainment industry. Unlike other dramatists of the time, he did most of his work for a single theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, under Elizabeth I, who became the King’s Men under James I. This stability in itself probably provided him with reasonably good working conditions and the opportunity to develop his work with known performers and business associates; it made it relatively easy for his complete works to be collected and published after he died. Other dramatists such as Thomas Middleton, who produced work for a number of different companies, had a less stable working environment and less chance of having their work collected or even identified.
The First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays was published in 1623, seven years after his death, and reprinted in 1632, but in 1642 the theatres were closed, and were to remain closed for nearly twenty years during the Civil War and Commonwealth period, potentially jeopardizing the chances of Shakespeare or any other dramatist achieving lasting fame. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, however, the theatres reopened and Shakespeare’s plays came back into the repertory, albeit in truncated and altered versions. During the eighteenth century his reputation was consolidated by the publication of a number of scholarly editions and monographs, the erection of a monument in Westminster Abbey (1741) and the promotion of Stratford-upon-Avon as his birthplace and the site of David Garrick’s festival or ‘Jubilee’ (1769). While the plays were often rewritten wholesale for the contemporary stage, their texts were simultaneously being ‘restored’ with great care (and even more ingenuity) by editors who contributed largely to the ‘canonization’ of the author. This has essentially been the story of Shakespeare’s reception and cultural survival ever since: we still (in the total absence of manuscripts) pursue the chimaera of ‘what Shakespeare really wrote’, while on the other hand treating his texts as endlessly adaptable, available for rewriting, rereading and reinterpreting by each generation.
The plays have turned out to be equally suitable for export, and Shakespeare has been enthusiastically appropriated by many countries around the world. In Germany, for example, Ferdinand Freiligrath’s 1844 poem beginning ‘Deutschland ist Hamlet’ (‘Germany is Hamlet’) spelt out a long-lasting identification of the character of Hamlet with the German Romantic self-image of a people capable of profound reflection but incapable of action. In the United States, on the other hand, Shakespeare became a kind of symbol of racial and cultural integration and democracy, perhaps especially during the period when silent films made his work accessible to people who did not know English. In Japan, which imported Shakespeare relatively late in the nineteenth century, he quickly came to represent the essence of westernization and modernization. All these countries now have thriving Shakespeare industries of their own.
The globalization of Shakespeare was of course assisted by the political and economic spread of the British Empire in the nineteenth century and by the continuing dominance of English as a worldwide language after the decline of that Empire. What remains remarkable is that Shakespeare is actually quite a difficult writer linguistically – much harder to read today than most of his contemporaries such as Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton or John Fletcher. His syntax is often complex, his figures of speech elaborate and his ideas hard to grasp. Some of this may be offset by the larger patterns of satisfaction we find in his plots and characters, and indeed it could be said that the difficulty itself leaves room for our explanations and interpretations. Shakespeare still ‘works’ in the theatre, but at school we have to be taught to ‘appreciate’ Shakespeare: is this indoctrination or something more benign – an educational process involving the ‘recognition’ of intrinsic merit?
In his essay Of the Standard of Taste, written in 1742, the philosopher David Hume argued that there is such a thing as intrinsic excellence in literature and that it is the continuity of a work’s reputation that proves it. What he calls ‘catholic and universal beauty’ in various art forms is demonstrated by ‘the durable admiration which attends those works that have survived all the caprices of mode and fashion, all the mistakes of ignorance and envy’. To support this he claims that ‘The same Homer who pleased at Athens two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and London’. Shakespeare can be said to have passed the survival test, but perhaps it is not ‘the same Shakespeare’ now as four hundred years ago, and not ‘the same Shakespeare’ in Berlin, New York or Tokyo as in London or Stratford-upon-Avon. One of the secrets of Shakespeare’s success may be his changeability, the openness of his works to take on new meanings in contexts he cannot have anticipated.
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2 Shakespeare as twentieth-century cultural icon, selling lager
William Shakespeare was a successful man of the emerging entertainment industry of Elizabethan England. He was an actor, a ‘sharer’ in the acting company (that is, no mere hireling but a partner entitled to share in its profits) and, of course, a leading playwright.
He began, however, more humbly. We know a remarkable amount, for this period, about Shakespeare and his family. He was born late in April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. The parish church records his baptism on 26 April; his unrecorded birthdate is conventionally set three days earlier on 23 April, St George’s Day (and also, apparently, the date of Shakespeare’s death). His father was John Shakespeare, a glover and later a wool merchant, and his mother was Mary Arden, daughter of a well-established farmer in the nearby village of Wilmcote. Though the records have not survived, we can safely assume that he attended the King’s New School, the Stratford grammar school with its strenuous classically based curriculum, but we know for certain that at the age of eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, also of Stratford, and that a daughter, Susanna, was born to them, as the parish records note, on 26 May 1583. On 2 February 1585 the register records the birth of twins, Hamnet and Judith.
Shakespeare was well established in London by the early 1590s as an actor and as a playwright. In 1592 a book appeared in which Robert Greene criticized an unnamed actor, ‘an upstart Crow’, for his presumption in writing plays, supposing himself ‘as well able to bombast out a blank verse’ as any and imagining himself ‘the only Shake-scene in a country’. Since Greene’s attack contains a parody of a line from 3 Henry VI, it seems certain that it is Shakespeare that he aims at. By 1592, then, Shakespeare had already established himself in the theatre and drawn the ire of a jealous rival. In 1594, Court records indicate payments to Shakespeare and two other sharers in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men for ‘two several comedies or interludes showed by them before her Majesty in Christmas time last’. References to Shakespeare’s activity in the theatre abound, and in 1598 Francis Meres claimed that Shakespeare could be compared with Seneca for the writing of tragedy and with Plautus for comedy, indeed that among English writers he was ‘the best of both kinds for the stage’. But he wrote non-dramatic poetry as well. When a severe outbreak of plague beginning in the summer of 1592 forced the closing of the theatres until the spring of 1594, Shakespeare wrote two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, and printed by a former fellow-resident of Stratford, Richard Field, in 1593 and 1594 respectively; and an edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets was published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609.
But Shakespeare’s primary work was in the theatre, and it was the theatre that made him a wealthy man. His money, however, came neither from commissions nor from royalties for his plays but from his position as a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (who, with the accession of James to the throne in 1603, became the King’s Men), by which he was entitled to one-tenth of the company’s profits, a share handsome enough to permit him considerable investment in real estate. In 1597 he bought for £60 the substantial freehold house in Stratford known as New Place, the second largest dwelling in the town; in 1602, he purchased 107 acres of land in the manorial fields to the north of Stratford for £320, and later that year a cottage in Stratford on Chapel Lane; in 1605 he bought a half-interest in a Stratford tithe farm for an additional £440; and in 1613, with three other investors, he acquired a ‘tenement’ in Blackfriars for £140.
If Shakespeare’s business dealings can be traced in the Court Rolls, his family’s lives and deaths can be traced in the Stratford parish register. His son Hamnet died at the age of eleven and was buried on 11 August 1596. Shakespeare’s father died in September 1601, his mother in 1608. Shakespeare’s elder daughter, Susanna, married John Hall, a well-respected Stratford physician, in Holy Trinity church on 5 June 1607. His younger daughter, Judith, married Thomas Quiney on 10 February 1616. Shakespeare’s wife died on 6 August 1623; she had lived to see a monument to her husband installed in Holy Trinity, but passed away just before the publication of the First Folio of his plays, the more lasting monument to his memory.
Shakespeare himself had died in late April of 1616, and was buried on the north side of the chancel of Holy Trinity, having left a will written that January. He left ten pounds for ‘the poor of Stratford’, remembered local friends and his extended family, and allotted 16s. 8d. each for memorial rings for his theatrical colleagues, Richard Burbage, John Heminges and Henry Condell. He left £150 to his daughter Judith, and another £150 to be paid if ‘she or any issue of her body be living’ three years from the execution of the will, but the bulk of the estate was left to Susanna. His wife is mentioned only once, in an apparent afterthought to the document: ‘Item, I give unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture.’ The bequest of the bed and bedding has led many to speculate that this was a deliberate slight, but English customary law provided the widow with a third of the estate, and the ‘second best bed’ was almost certainly their own, the best being saved for guests.
Yet in spite of the detailed records that remain, allowing us to trace major and minor events in the lives of Shakespeare and his family, as well as to see his vital presence in the life of the London stage, some critics have passionately held that the author of the plays was someone other than ‘the man from Stratford’. It was not until the eighteenth century that anyone questioned Shakespeare’s authorship, but since then many, including Mark Twain, Henry James and Sigmund Freud, have been attracted to the anti-Stratfordian heresy. Various candidates have been proposed. Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Queen Elizabeth, even Daniel Defoe (who was not born until 1661) have all been suggested as the ‘real’ author of ‘Shakespeare’s’ plays and poems. The controversy, however, has little to recommend it except its unintended humour; anti-Stratfordian champions have sometimes had unfortunate names, including Looney, Battey and Silliman. Although usually energetically asserted, the belief that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays seemingly derives from simple, if unattractive, social snobbery: a certainty that only someone educated at university or at court would be capable of such artistry. The desire to give the plays a more socially distinguished patrimony than they in fact had at least attests to the importance they have come to assume in our culture. All in all, however, there seems little doubt that William Shakespeare, the glover’s son from Stratford, wrote the plays that bear his name, though their greatness can hardly be illuminated or intensified by the evidence of the life of their author.
At an unknown date between 1585 and 1591, William Shakespeare left Stratford-upon-Avon and became an actor and playwright. Early tradition holds that he was for a few years before this a country schoolmaster (which might help to explain his close knowledge of some Latin texts, including plays by Plautus and Seneca). In 1587 the Queen’s Men visited Stratford shortly after they lost a leading actor, William Knell, killed in a duel at Thame in Oxfordshire. Whether or not this may be imagined as Shakespeare’s opportunity to join the players, plays from the Queen’s Men’s repertoire were, on the evidence of later allusions in his plays, well known to him. His name is, however, more often associated with two other companies, Lord Strange’s (Derby’s) Men and its offshoot the Earl of Pembroke’s Men, which collapsed in the summer of 1593. A new play, called ‘harey the vj’ and usually identified as King Henry VI, Part 1, was performed by Strange’s Men at the Rose playhouse on 3 March 1592 and thereafter. Titus Andronicus, played by the Earl of Sussex’s Men, followed on 23 January 1594: in June two more performances of it were given by the Lord Admiral’s Men and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. By June 1594 Shakespeare had become a leading member of a newly-formed company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He would remain with them for the rest of his career. Of his repertoire as an actor we know almost nothing. His name heads the list of ‘principal actors in all these plays’ prefaced to the First Folio in 1623. It had earlier appeared in the similar lists for Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus, His Fall (1603), printed in the Jonson Folio of 1616. Beyond this, we have only late seventeenth-century traditions that he played Adam in As You Like It and the Ghost in Hamlet.
1594 saw the stabilization in London of the leading playing companies. The Admiral’s Men, led by Edward Alleyn, under the management of Philip Henslowe, were at Henslowe’s theatre, the Rose, on Bankside in Southwark (whose foundations were partially revealed by archaeologists in the spring of 1989, before being covered once more for the construction above them of an office block). The Chamberlain’s Men, led by Richard Burbage and managed by his father, James, acted at the Theatre, north of the Thames, in Finsbury (not far from the modern Barbican Centre). The Theatre, built in 1576 for James Burbage, was the first building to be erected in the suburbs of London expressly for the presentation of plays. Henslowe’s Rose followed in 1587; after it came the Swan (1595); the Globe (1599), replacing the Theatre and built with its structural timbers, bodily removed through London and across the River Thames from Finsbury to Southwark; the Fortune (1600), built in north London to replace the Rose; the Red Bull (1605); and the Hope (1614). The building of the Globe was an important event for Shakespeare, and we can see in the first plays he wrote for it, perhaps As You Like It and King Henry V, more surely Julius Caesar and Hamlet, a renewed awareness of the propositions that ‘all the world’s a stage’ and that every man and woman is a performer in the wider theatre of the world. Not for nothing was it called the Globe.
Before 1576 plays had been performed, as they continued to be throughout the lifetime of Shakespeare, in a wide variety of locations, indoors and out. In London, the yards of coaching inns were used as theatres (and sometimes adapted for the purpose at considerable expense). Throughout the country the halls of schools, towns, colleges and noble houses were used for occasional performances by visiting players. Models for the public playhouses in London included inn yards as well as the baiting rings on the south bank used for bull- and bear-baiting. A large auditorium (with 20 sides and a diameter of 100 feet in the case of the Globe) had seats arranged in three galleries, and contained within it the separate structure of a stage and backstage building. The stage was covered by a canopy, or ‘heavens’, which could house winding-gear for lowering large properties or descending gods, and it was accessible from below through a trapdoor. At the back of the stage, behind a wall with two or three large doors in it, lay the ‘tiring-house’ (dressing rooms and wings combined), above which was a gallery, reached by a stair and divided into a number of ‘rooms’ or boxes, where the most important members of the audience could sit to see and to be seen. When necessary, one or more of these boxes could be used to represent a window, or walls, if required by action ‘above’ or ‘aloft’, and they may also have housed the musicians.
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3 Portrait of Richard Burbage, leading actor of the Chamberlain’s Men
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4 The Globe Theatre, as recreated in the 1990s on London’s Bankside
Indoor acting continued throughout the period at smaller ‘private’ playhouses, of which the earliest were set up in the halls of former monastic buildings within the city of London. Holding an audience of some 600 or 700 (against the 2,500-3,000 capacity attributed to the public playhouses) these theatres were used for plays appealing to a more restricted and wealthier audience. While you could stand in the yard at the Globe for a penny, the cheapest seat at the Blackfriars or St Paul’s theatre would cost sixpence. The indoor playhouses were associated with companies of boy players, composed of choristers of the Chapel Royal and of St Paul’s Cathedral. The playhouses Shakespeare wrote for were the Theatre (and its substitute the Curtain), the Globe and, after 1608 or 1609, the Blackfriars private theatre.
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5 Detail from Wenzel Hollar’s engraving A Long Bird’s-Eye View of London, 1647, showing the rebuilt Globe
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6 The principal actors in the King’s Men, as listed in the First Folio of 1623
During the lifetime of Shakespeare adult playing companies grew to a size and achieved a stability which justified the expense of building permanent theatres around London. Such companies consisted of some dozen to fifteen men and three to five boys, who trained as the apprentices of leading members and played female and juvenile roles. Earlier in the century, companies were much smaller – sometimes as small as three men and a boy – and playwrights had developed writing techniques to allow a cast of five to double in up to seventeen roles. Survival of such techniques accounts for the very large number of roles for Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, where most actors would have played two or more parts, some of them appearing for no more than a scene or two.
In sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe the prohibition of public acting by women and the convention of all-male casting were peculiar to England. Though easily accepted by audiences, the playing of female roles by boys led writers to emphasize the femininity of the women in their plays to an extent that the use of female performers would have rendered unnecessary. Shakespeare had much to do with the popularity of female roles in which a girl spends much of the action in male disguise. While this may have been an easier convention to accept when the role was played by a boy, it also meant that the performer’s skill was required, not to impersonate a young man, but to keep the audience aware that ‘he’ was ‘really’ a girl under the male costume. In the early Jacobean years the King’s Men evidently had a boy or young man of exceptional talent, if we assume that the roles of Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra and Volumnia in Coriolanus may have been written for the same actor; the same must be true of such roles as Queen Margaret in the King Henry VI plays and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew in the early 1590s, and of the comic heroines of Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night around the turn of the century.
As the plays indicate, the skills demanded of an actor included singing, dancing and sword-fighting as well as the rhetorician’s arts of speech and significant gesture. We know little, however, about acting styles in the period; nevertheless, it is not fanciful to suppose that the changing style of the plays written between 1590 and 1620 reflects a change by actors from a broad style, dependent on resonant vocal delivery and confident use of expansive gesture, such as suited open-air playhouses, to a subtler and more intimate manner, less dependent on emphatic speech and allowing a wider range of gesture and even facial expression, which could register with most of the audience in the smaller space of a private playhouse. The contrast is clear if The Tempest is compared with the King Henry VI plays or Titus Andronicus.
It is likely that Shakespeare’s own plays were instrumental in changing styles of acting between 1590 and 1614. He had the unparalleled good fortune to work in the same company for some twenty years, as actor and as principal dramatist. He wrote for actors who were also his business partners and co-owners of the playhouses they played in. We must presume that he had some say in how the plays he wrote for them were presented. The strength of the company is reflected in the demands his plays make on actors. The Jacobean plays, in particular, regularly require strong performances in ten or a dozen significant roles – a hard requirement for any company to fulfil. The identification of actor with role – the building of a ‘character’ – is a commonplace of modern theatre. In Shakespeare’s time it seems to have been something of an innovation: indeed a ‘character’ would have been understood to mean a stock or stereotyped stage figure such as the old man, the melancholy lover or the country clown. Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s leading actor, attracted comment for (exceptionally) remaining in character when he came off-stage during a performance. Not the least of Shakespeare’s achievements was the writing of dramatic roles a few hundred lines in length which can reward close and subtle verbal, moral or psychological analysis, three-dimensional fictions which create the illusion of the authentically recognizable inconsistency of human individuals.
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7 The earliest illustration of a work by Shakespeare; a scene from Titus Andronicus, attributed to Henry Peacham, c. 1595, 1605 or 1615
We do not know the dates of composition of all of Shakespeare’s plays. Such evidence as there is is circumstantial: dates when they (or works on which they are certainly based) were published, or dated references to, and comments on, early performances can narrow the limits for many of them, while a very few allude to datable events of the time. On such evidence, supported by internal features of style, metre and subject, the plays can be arranged, with varying degrees of certainty, in groups relating to five phases of his theatrical career.
First come the plays Shakespeare had probably already written before the forming of the Chamberlain’s Men in the summer of 1594. These are The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew and possibly The Comedy of Errors, the three parts of King Henry VI, King Richard III and Titus Andronicus. Plays written for the new company at the Theatre in the five years from 1594 until the opening of the Globe in the autumn of 1599, in possible sequence of composition, are Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Richard II, King John, The Merchant of Venice, the two parts of King Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor and (at some date before summer 1598) the lost Love’s Labour’s Won. As You Like It and King Henry V may belong in this group, though both show signs of having been written with the Globe in mind.
Plays for the Globe from 1599 until the death of Queen Elizabeth I in the spring of 1603 are Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Othello and possibly All’s Well That Ends Well. As a leading member of the King’s Men, Shakespeare seems to have reduced his output from the previous average of two plays per year. His new plays from 1603 to 1608 were: Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles and Coriolanus. The final period, from the company’s recovery of the indoor Blackfriars Theatre for winter use in 1608–9 to 1613–14, saw composition of The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest and of three plays written in collaboration with John Fletcher, King Henry VIII, the lost Cardenio and The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Shakespeare’s literary career in his own lifetime strikingly resists the very notions of artistic autonomy and authority that his name has come triumphantly to represent. He had no specific literary and little direct financial interest in his plays. He wrote scripts to be performed, scripts that once they were turned over to the acting company no longer belonged to him in any legal sense and immediately escaped his artistic control, as staging requirements and actors’ temperaments inevitably enforced their changes upon them. He involved himself with the printing and publication of none of them, and held no copyright. In the absence of anything like modern copyright law, which dates in Britain only from 1709, the scripts belonged to the acting company (and as they remained in the repertory they would be subject to continued revision as the actors sought to keep their property current).
Except that, as an experienced actor and sharer in his company, he could no doubt exert influence over production as an independent playwright could not, Shakespeare’s relation to the plays he wrote was in no way unusual. Like all playwrights, he wrote so that his plays could be acted; his words were intended to be heard, not read. In spite of Ben Jonson’s efforts to establish his own plays as a form of high culture, plays remained sub-literary, the piece-work of an emerging entertainment industry. ‘Riffe-raffe’, Thomas Bodley called them in 1612, and ordered his librarian not to collect such ‘idle books’ in order to protect his Oxford library against the ‘scandal’ that would be caused by their presence.
A play was generally written on demand for an acting company, and the completed script then belonged to the company that had commissioned it. Under certain circumstances, and with no necessary regard for the author’s wishes or interests, the companies would sell their rights in a play to a publisher, who would have it printed in an edition of about 800 copies, usually in a quarto format and selling for sixpence. The author would receive no money from the sale of the manuscript or from any subsequent sale of books. Neither were the literary ambitions of the playwrights usually a factor in publication. Ben Jonson’s aggressive effort to create himself as a literary figure is, of course, the exception that proves the rule, his 1616 Folio’s characteristic ‘The Author, B.I.’ on the individual title-pages revealingly anomalous; indeed Jonson is the only playwright in the period ever identified as an ‘author’ on a title-page.
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8 Title-page of the First Quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1598
Shakespeare displayed no similarly proprietary artistic impulses. At the time of his death, eighteen plays had reached print (many in more than one edition), but he had prepared none of the texts for publication and had overseen none through the press. The eighteen play-texts each appeared in a hastily-printed quarto volume; none has a dedication or an epistle from the author; none displays any sign of Shakespeare’s interest or involvement in its printing. On the other hand, his two long poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), printed by fellow-Stratfordian Richard Field, are obviously produced with care, and each is issued with a signed dedication to the Earl of Southampton. The texts of the plays show nothing comparable.
In the course of Shakespeare’s lifetime twenty different publishers brought forth editions of individual plays, but not one took any unusual care to ensure that the text was authoritative or the printing exact. The texts are of varied quality and provenance, some seemingly printed from manuscripts that appear authorial, others apparently from copy showing the inevitable cuts and interpolations of the theatre, still others printed from transcripts, as fellow-playwright Thomas Heywood claims, ‘Corrupt and mangled (coppied by the eare)’, reported texts reconstructing performances witnessed or acted. In any case no manuscript of a Shakespeare play survives (unless it be the so-called ‘Hand D’ in the manuscript of The Booke of Sir Thomas More which, if indeed Shakespeare’s own, bears witness to Shakespeare as collaborator, merely one of five playwrights who collaborated in writing the play).
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9 Title-page of the First Quarto of King Lear, 1608
Though today Shakespeare’s literary pre-eminence has made the publication of his plays a thriving cultural industry, his earliest publishers did not seem much to care about his authorship. The 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus omits Shakespeare’s name from the title-page, giving information rather about the printer and where the play could be bought. The play is advertised – and title-pages were explicitly forms of advertising, hung up as posters on bookstalls – not as by William Shakespeare but by the acting company that performed it: ‘As it was Plaide by the Right Honourable the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their seruants.’ And when it was reprinted, first in 1600 and then in 1611, neither bibliographic scruple nor thought of commercial advantage led the publisher to add Shakespeare’s name to the title-page.
Indeed, until 1598 none of Shakespeare’s plays that appeared in print identifies Shakespeare as its author. Not merely Titus or the early Quartos of King Henry VI, Parts 1 and 2 which could be thought immature efforts of a young playwright whose achievement did not yet merit nor permit a publisher to capitalize on his name on the title-page, but even his later and more successful plays refuse to acknowledge or exploit Shakespeare’s authorship. Romeo and Juliet appeared in 1597, identified only ‘As it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely, by the right Honourable L. of Hunsdon his seruants’; and its next two printings, in 1599 and 1609, while claiming that the text has now been ‘Newly corrected, augmented, and amended’, still make no mention of its author (or corrector), again only identifying the acting company that performed it as the source of its authority. Richard II and King Henry IV, Part 1 similarly first appear with no mention of Shakespeare on the title-page, or anywhere else for that matter.
In fact seven plays appeared before one was issued with Shakespeare’s name. In 1598 Cuthbert Burby published Love’s Labour’s Lost with the title-page identifying the play in small type as ‘Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere’. Whatever this assertion is, it is certainly no ardent proclamation of Shakespeare’s authorship. The unequivocal evidence of the early Quartos is, then, that Shakespeare had no interest in their publication and what is perhaps more surprising, that his publishers had as little interest in him.
At least the latter would soon change. The 1608 ‘Pide Bull’ Quarto (so called after the name of the shop where it was sold) of King Lear does indeed proudly assert Shakespeare’s authorship, emblazoning his name across the title-page in a typeface substantially larger than any other. But the text, it must be said, shows no sign of Shakespeare’s involvement in its publication. It is poorly printed. (It was the first play that its printer had attempted, and noticeably so.) An author overseeing the printing would have insisted on changes, but nonetheless the publisher, Nathaniel Butter, spectacularly identifies the printed play as Shakespeare’s.
What has happened is not that Shakespeare’s rights as an author had suddenly been recognized and were here being celebrated but that Shakespeare’s name was now of value to the publisher. For Butter, identifying his King Lear as ‘M. William Shak-speare: / HIS/ True Chronicle Historie of the life and / death of King LEAR’ served to differentiate his property from another play about King Lear (The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir) that had been published in 1605 and was available in the bookstalls. Shakespeare’s name functioned on the title-page at least as much to identify the play book as the play wright, though already it was becoming evident that Shakespeare’s name could sell books. As the publisher of Othello in 1622 later asserted: ‘the Authors name is sufficient to vent his worke’.
But in truth it is only in 1623 with the publication of the First Folio edition of his plays that Shakespeare truly enters English literature as an author, though this, of course, was neither his own idea nor of any direct benefit to him. He had died in 1616, seven years before the Folio appeared, and to the end showed no sign of any literary ambition for his plays. But the Folio assumes that Shakespeare is indeed an author to be read and not merely the provider of scripts to be acted. The play-texts in the Folio are stripped of their theatrical association. Unlike the early Quartos, there is no mention in the Folio that any text is ‘as it was played’, indeed, though ‘The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes’ are listed, Shakespeare’s own at the head of them, no acting company is ever mentioned by name; rather the texts are described, no doubt too confidently, as perfect and purely authorial, presented here exactly ‘as he conceiued them’.
It is not clear whose idea the collected volume was or even what was the precise motivation for it (beyond a general hope of making some money). The volume’s two principal publishers, Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard, apparently negotiated with two of Shakespeare’s old friends and fellow-actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, for the rights to the plays that had not yet been printed, and they then worked to secure the publishing rights to those that had. Eventually they acquired them all (except for Pericles, which had been published in a Quarto in 1609 as the work of Shakespeare, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, not published until 1634 but identified then as the work of Shakespeare and John Fletcher), and the Folio was published in 1623. It includes thirty-six plays, eighteen of which had never before appeared in print, a dedication and an epistle, prefatory verses, and an engraved title-page with a three-quarter-page portrait of Shakespeare and a facing poem.
Printing had begun early in 1622 and took about twenty-one months to complete. The volume sold for £1 with a plain calf binding, for somewhat less when more cheaply bound; and unbound, as many books were sold, it could be bought for 15s. Its very appearance in folio, a format usually reserved for theological or historical works or for collected editions of canonical authors, itself marks a major shift in the cultural positioning of Shakespeare, a shift confirmed within a few months of publication when Thomas Bodley, who, as we have seen, in 1612 forbade the collection of play-texts, accepted a copy for his library and had it bound in fine leather and stamped with the Oxford University seal.
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10 The catalogue of 35 of Shakespeare’s plays as listed in the First Folio, 1623:Troilus and Cressida is not listed
Today it seems obvious that the Folio published by Blount and Jaggard was a necessary and appropriate memorial to England’s greatest playwright, but at the time all that was clear to the publishers was that they had undertaken a complex and expensive project with no guarantee of recovering their considerable investment. In the event, of course, they did. The book sold well, and a second edition appeared only nine years later, remarkable evidence of its popularity. For later generations, with no financial stake, the book is of even greater value. Without the Folio the eighteen plays that first appeared in it might well have been lost; and without the Folio, Shakespeare might never have emerged as the singular figure of English literature he has become, for it is that book that first established Shakespeare as the author he never aspired to be.
By the autumn of 1623 John Heminges and Henry Condell were the senior surviving members of the King’s Men. In April 1616 they and their colleague, Richard Burbage, who died in 1619, had been left small bequests in the will of William Shakespeare to buy memorial rings. The publication of the First Folio was a different kind of memorial to ‘so worthy a friend and fellow … as … our Shakespeare’, as the dead dramatist is described in the first of two epistles prefaced to the volume and signed with the names of Heminges and Condell. That epistle dedicates the book to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Lord Chamberlain, and his brother Philip, Earl of Montgomery, and calls on them to act as guardians to Shakespeare’s orphaned plays. The second epistle (reproduced here in facsimile) urges ‘the great variety of readers’ to buy ‘these plays’, which ‘have had their trial already, and stood out all appeals’ in the theatre.
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11 The second epistle ‘To the great variety of readers’, prefacing the First Folio, 1623, and signed by John Heminges and Henry Condell
The second paragraph makes several claims which have important implications for actors, readers and editors of Shakespeare. Heminges and Condell claim to have done the best they could, in the absence of their dead friend, to collect and verify the texts of his plays for publication. Three of their claims have been the source of dispute and controversy, and need some qualification. The mention of adding ‘all the rest’ to the plays already in print leads readers to expect the Folio to contain the complete plays of Shakespeare. It does not. Not only are two collaborative late plays, Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, omitted, but the volume initially went on sale without Troilus and Cressida (as its absence from the ‘catalogue’, or table of contents, testifies). Troilus was soon added to the volume – though not to the catalogue: its late arrival is best explained as the result of difficulties experienced by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, the principal publishers, in obtaining permission to reprint it from the copyright holder, Henry Walley. Exclusion from the Folio is accordingly not conclusive evidence that a play may not have had Shakespeare’s hand in it.
More teasing is the warning to readers against previous editions of the plays (half of which were already in print in quarto). What Heminges and Condell meant by ‘diverse stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters that exposed them’ has been much debated. They were clearly aware that some earlier quarto editions of plays by Shakespeare differed radically from the texts they were printing. Among those, a handful are conspicuous by the extent to which they differ from the texts printed in the Folio in length, wording, names and natures of characters, and even scenic sequence or particulars of action. They are The Taming of a Shrew (1594), The First Part of the Contention (i.e. King Henry VI, Part 2) (1594), The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York (i.e. King Henry VI, Part 3) (1595), Romeo and Juliet (1597), King Henry V (1600), Sir John Falstaff (i.e. The Merry Wives of Windsor) (1602) and Hamlet (1603). Modern scholarship (unhappily) has dubbed these the ‘bad’ Quartos. They do seem, however, to merit the description ‘maimed and deformed’, at least in relation to their Folio counterparts (or to later ‘good’ Quartos in the cases of Romeo and Hamlet).
Variation in a further group of Quartos is less radical, though often pervasive. These are King Richard III (1597), King Henry IV, Part 2 (1600), Hamlet (1604/5), King Lear (1608), Troilus and Cressida (1609) and Othello (1622). Where the seven ‘bad’ Quartos seem to demand exceptional circumstances of textual transmission, such as someone’s attempt to reconstruct them from memory, to account for their very approximate resemblance to the equivalent ‘good’ texts, the other six may be adequately accounted for as products of various usual processes of stage abridgement or adaptation, or of authorial revision, to which they may have been subjected.
What is clear is that Heminges and Condell cannot have intended a blanket condemnation of all earlier published versions, but that their focus must have been on the ‘bad’ texts and, to a lesser degree, on those plays which they could offer in texts reflecting a later stage in their evolution than that represented by the Quartos. They had no qualms about simply reprinting Quartos they found reliable, like The Merchant of Venice or Much Ado About Nothing, with the minimum of editorial intervention.
The myth of Shakespeare’s fluency in composition originates in the Folio Epistle. Where Heminges and Condell saw that fluency as a virtue, others, and especially Ben Jonson, demurred. Jonson was later to respond to the claim that Shakespeare rarely ‘blotted’ a line – that is, deleted and revised it – with the wish that he ‘had blotted a thousand’. In his own contribution to the preliminary matter of the Folio, his verses ‘To the memory of my beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us’, Jonson took pains to offer an alternative view of Shakespeare as a conscious and painstaking poetic craftsman, ready to:
strike the second heat
Upon the Muses’ anvil: turn the same,
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel, he may gain a scorn;
For a good Poet’s made, as well as born:
And such wert thou.
Although nearly half of his plays had been printed in his lifetime, Shakespeare only became an author to be read as well as a dramatist to be performed seven years after his death, with the publication of his histories, comedies and tragedies in the First Folio of 1623. During the eighteen-year period between the closure of the theatres in 1642 and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, his plays could only be read. The first published criticism of him, in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters (1664), reflects this shift, claiming that ‘those that could Read his Playes, could not be so Foolish as to Condemn them’. The shift was radical and irreversible. By 1660, the theatrical company Shakespeare wrote for was long dispersed, though survivors would act again and some had distant or secondhand memories of him. The split between progressive revision and adaptation of the plays for theatres with new facilities and constantly changing audiences, and an increasingly conservative scholarly concern to preserve or restore the plays as reading texts had begun. Shakespeare the book and Shakespeare the dramatist were set on their divergent paths.
Elizabethan playwrights worked in a repertory system which constantly demanded new plays. Their natural expedient, encouraged by a literary climate which set store by creative imitation of existing models, was to base many, even most, of their plays on familiar stories. Shakespeare was no exception, other than in the range of subjects he dramatized. Almost all his plays can be shown to follow, broadly or closely, what scholars have designated as his ‘sources’ – that is, earlier texts he had read or otherwise knew of. Often he combined material from two or more sources into a single play, particularly in his comedies. His reading was wide and multifarious: history – Greek, Roman and English; prose fiction (chiefly translated into English from continental originals); earlier plays, ancient and modern, in Latin, Italian and English; pamphlets and other ephemera – all were grist to his mill. He had favourite authors, such as Chaucer, Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney among English writers, or Montaigne, whose essays he seems to have known by the time he wrote Hamlet (about 1600). His Latin favourites were Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the comedies of Plautus, but he also knew Virgil, Seneca and Horace, and Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, written originally in Greek, were well known to him in Thomas North’s English translation. Playwrights of his own and the previous generation, notably John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe, had much to offer him by way of example, and he must also have learned from his interaction with such rivals as Ben Jonson and from his collaborators, John Fletcher and (less certainly) Thomas Middleton. In addition he was, as an actor, deeply immersed in the repertoires of his successive companies.
Reading Shakespeare four hundred years later, we encounter the English language of a period now described as Early Modern, before any notion of correctness of usage, whether of grammar, syntax, spelling or punctuation, had acquired wide currency, let alone authority. The primary language of education, both in schools and universities, was still Latin, a language which required the formal understanding of its rules and structures. Shakespeare had his own schooling in Latin, a schooling which included the standard subjects of grammar, logic and (most important of the three for an aspiring poet) rhetoric, the art of appropriate use of language for all practical and literary purposes. The fluidity of English in the late sixteenth century was a gift to a linguistically inventive generation of writers. Shakespeare did as much as any to exploit and extend the wide range of literary styles and linguistic registers available to him. His characters speak in all styles, from the artificial rhyming verse of Love’s Labour’s Lost or Romeo and Juliet to the uneducated prose of Dogberry or the regional dialect of Fluellen. It was to his plays that Samuel Johnson turned, while compiling his great Dictionary (1755), for illustrations of ‘the diction of common life’.
Blank verse, already the norm of dramatic language in the 1580s, was adopted by Shakespeare and developed into the flexible and versatile medium of his Jacobean plays. The forging of a dramatic prose which could range from low comedy to Hamlet’s philosophical musings or the inexhaustible improvisations of Falstaff was among his major stylistic achievements. The conciseness which is so marked a feature of his dramatic writing was learned, in part, from the experience of writing sonnets.
Readers of Shakespeare have long needed the assistance of a glossary to help with the unfamiliar vocabulary or idiom and the semantic changes which constitute one initial obstacle to full enjoyment and understanding. The glossary in this volume is based on the commentaries in the Arden editions whose texts are reprinted in it. It aims at giving answers to readers’ most likely questions but makes no attempt at full explanation of the sources of difficulty. Readers should always remember that Shakespeare’s plays were written to be heard, not read – least of all silently read. The attempt at full understanding of linguistic detail and subtlety (if such an aim were attainable) should always be seen as secondary to the experience of the play as a whole. Fuller comprehension of detail will follow with subsequent rereadings.
While ‘Shakespeare’ has been a stable element in English culture for four hundred years, and has been successfully exported to numerous other cultures, there is considerable variation in the reputation and influence of individual works. Each generation seems able to find something (its own image?) in ‘Shakespeare’, but it has always been possible to choose a different text or a different interpretation. Some plays, such as Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew, have an almost continuous history of performance and appear regularly on school and college syllabuses; others, such as Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida and Pericles, are rarely either performed or set for study; others again, such as Cymbeline, King John and King Henry VIII, were far more popular in the past than they are today. During his lifetime it would seem that Shakespeare’s most highly esteemed tragedy was Titus Andronicus; for the next 350 years it was Hamlet; since about 1960 it has been King Lear. There is a similar degree of variation in the extent to which works have been adapted, translated and filmed. Broadly speaking, the ‘afterlife’ of the plays and poems has depended on and can be measured by four things: publication, performance, criticism, and adaptation and creative influence.
Publication is taken first as even performers need to read plays before they stage them. About half of Shakespeare’s plays were published during his lifetime as single pocketsize paperback volumes known from their method of printing and small size as Quartos. All the plays in the present volume apart from Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen were printed (or reprinted) after his death in the large-format 1623 First Folio. Until 1709 two separate traditions of publication continued independently of each other: the First Folio was followed by the Second (1632), Third (1663) and Fourth (1685) Folios – ‘literary’ collections of the almost-complete works which found their way into the libraries of individuals and institutions – while many of the Quartos were reprinted as play-texts, used by actors and bought by playgoers.
In 1709 Nicholas Rowe published The Works of Mr William Shakespear, Revised and Corrected in eight volumes, the first of a line of eighteenth-century edited texts. He based his text on the Folio but also began the tradition of including passages which had previously appeared only in the Quartos. He and later eighteenth-century editors also provided commentaries in which they often disagreed with each other over variant readings, emendations and interpretations. These editions were usually published by subscription and were relatively expensive, but cheap acting editions continued to be available, for example the rival sets published in the 1730s by Robert Walker and Jacob Tonson or Bell’s Shakespeare (1773-4). The nineteenth century saw the publication of cheaper mass-market texts and, after the Bowdlers’ Family Shakespeare (1807), a proliferation of expurgated texts explicitly aimed at women and children. In the twentieth century, Shakespeare continued to be big business for publishers and editors, with hot competition for school, college and university markets, and the consequent provision both of popular versions of Shakespeare and of increasingly specialist series such as Shakespeare in Performance, which provides detailed annotation of stage business, and Shakespearean Originals, which offers reprints of the earliest texts.
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12 The three witches in the television cartoon version of Macbeth (1993)
Shakespeare has also, of course, been translated into many languages. Some translations have become ‘classics’ in their own right – François-Victor Hugo’s translations into French, August Wilhelm Schlegel’s translations into German, and Boris Pasternak’s translations into Russian – but it has also seemed necessary for each generation to produce new translations, just as each generation of English speakers produces new editions.
Our records of performances in Shakespeare’s lifetime are poor, possibly because of the fire which destroyed the first Globe Theatre (and presumably its papers) in 1613. The title-pages of play-texts sometimes give misleading information about whether plays were (or were not) performed and where; sometimes we have to rely on chance diary entries or on what we can deduce from passing references by contemporaries – evidence for pre-1623 performances is provided in the introductions to individual plays in this volume. We do know that the plays were not performed at all after 1642 when the theatres were closed during the Civil War and the Commonwealth period, but that they returned as staple fare when the theatres reopened at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. At this time Shakespeare was popular but not as popular as the Jacobean dramatists Beaumont and Fletcher. Two significant innovations in 1660 were the use of stage scenery and the introduction of female performers; before 1640 women’s roles had been played by boys.
The Restoration theatres were relatively small, indoor and expensive, attracting patrons from upper- and middle-class circles. In this they were like the Blackfriars Theatre, used by the King’s Men before the Civil War, and unlike the large outdoor Globe which had cheap standing room for those who could not afford a seat. Attendance at a Shakespearean performance had thus become more of a minority pursuit, though touring companies continued to flourish in the British provinces and abroad in the eighteenth and nineteenth and indeed twentieth centuries. Shakespeare reached a mass market again with the invention of film and video in the twentieth century. The versions performed in the Restoration and in the eighteenth century were regularly cut (partly in order to allow time for changing the scenery and trimming the candles) and often substantially rewritten. Despite a first attempt by the famous actor David Garrick in the mid-eighteenth century to restore more of Shakespeare’s lines, the performance tradition continued to give audiences far less of the texts than was available in published versions.
A fashion for historical accuracy and heavily pictorial staging in the nineteenth century further weighted the plays with unnecessary baggage, and it was not until the 1880s that, under the influence of William Poel, a serious attempt was made to return to fluid ‘Elizabethan’ staging with minimal props and scenery. In Britain in the twentieth century the performance of Shakespeare became institutionalized with the foundation of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (originally built 1879, rebuilt after a fire in 1932) and later, in 1961, of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which currently performs in three theatres in Stratford-upon-Avon and two in London and undertakes national and international tours.
Shakespeare’s plays were widely performed in Europe from the very beginning (English actors toured to Germany, Poland and other countries), and a strong acting tradition grew up in America in the nineteenth century, but the silent cinema brought a new and powerful means of internationalization. Dozens of silent versions were made, in America, England, Germany, France and Italy, usually abbreviating the plots but often finding inventive ways of replacing Shakespeare’s language with visual images. This tradition continued into the sound period after 1929 when, perhaps ironically, it has been precisely those films which have not been ‘hampered’ by Shakespeare’s text which have been seen as the most successful screen versions: Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese Macbeth (Throne of Blood, 1957), for example, and Grigori Kozintsev’s Russian Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970). A few English-language directors have nevertheless managed to make creditable films, notably Laurence Olivier (Henry V, 1944, Hamlet, 1948, Richard III, 1955), Orson Welles (Macbeth, 1948, Othello, 1952, Chimes at Midnight (the Falstaff plays), 1966) and Kenneth Branagh (Henry V, 1989, Much Ado About Nothing, 1993, Hamlet, 1996). Many Shakespeare films are commercially available on video; the British Broadcasting Company and the American Time-Life Corporation sponsored a series of the complete works for television from 1979 to 1985 which, while proving uneven aesthetically, has become an invaluable resource for those without access to live performances.
The first person to publish a critical essay on Shakespeare was Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in 1664. She was a poet, dramatist and essayist, and in effect inaugurated a tradition of critical writing on Shakespeare by people who were themselves creative writers: John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T.S. Eliot are examples of such influential critics whose work is still read today. While from the beginning Shakespeare was highly praised for his dramatic skills, particularly in the construction of lifelike characters, late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers were often critical of what they saw as his grammatical incorrectness, his undisciplined elaboration of metaphors and his carelessness with plotting and historical accuracy. During the nineteenth century the general tone became more adulatory and the focus on character increased: many studies treated Shakespeare’s men and women as if they were real people or at least characters in realistic novels. The publication by famous performers of their reminiscences enhanced this tendency. At the same time, the introduction of English Literature as a subject for study at universities brought about a professionalization of criticism and resulted in the situation we have today where most Shakespeare criticism is written by people with full-time academic posts in university departments of English or Drama.
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13 David Garrick in four of his most famous Shakespearean roles, from a contemporary engraving
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14 Ellen Terry as Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor
Modern criticism is diverse and alarmingly prolific: the American journal Shakespeare Quarterly publishes listings which show that around two hundred items (editions, translations, books and essays) are currently published every year on King Lear, and around four hundred on Hamlet. As in the past, critics today aim in various ways to elucidate Shakespeare for audiences and readers. They study his language and the literary and dramatic conventions of his time. They explore the circumstances in which the texts were originally produced – how and where they were performed, how they were copied and printed. They are also perhaps more attentive than their predecessors were to the circumstances in which the texts are continually reproduced – how and why we keep rereading and even rewriting Shakespeare for our own purposes. Dominant in recent criticism are issues of power and gender: ‘power’ in the sense of Shakespeare’s relation to and analysis of early modern political structures and also in the sense of the power of ‘Shakespeare’ as a cultural artefact; ‘gender’ in the sense of his representations of gender identity and sexual relations when seen from the perspective of the continuing struggle of women, gay men and lesbians for acceptance and equality.
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15 A modern production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1994)
While he was still alive, some of Shakespeare’s works were already exerting an influence on other writers. John Fletcher’s play The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed (1611) is a ‘sequel’ to The Taming of the Shrew, and Fletcher and Francis Beaumont’s Philaster (1609) could not have been written without Hamlet; if we read the plays of the next generation of dramatists such as John Ford, Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton and John Webster, we keep encountering echoes of Shakespeare in characters, situations, lines and phrases. In the Restoration period playwrights ‘adapted’ his plays for their own stage by cutting them and ‘improving’ the language, correcting Shakespeare’s grammar and clarifying his difficult metaphors. They also began to rewrite the plays substantially, producing hybrids which are clearly dependent on their Shakespearean originals but sometimes very different in their handling of the plots. John Dryden and William Davenant’s 1667 The Enchanted Island, for example, a version of The Tempest, introduces a sister for Miranda and Hippolito, a man who has never seen a woman; Dryden’s 1678 All for Love is a version of Antony and Cleopatra in which Antony’s wife Octavia confronts Cleopatra (who never wavers in her commitment to Antony); Nahum Tate’s 1681 King Lear leaves Lear and Gloucester alive at the end and Cordelia about to marry Edgar.
In later centuries, the plays inspired works in other genres: operas, novels, films and musicals. Neither Henry Purcell’s opera The Fairy Queen (1692) nor Benjamin Britten’s opera (1960) would exist without A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Hamlet inspired countless works in the nineteenth century from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795) and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1) to Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull (1896); such musicals as Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate (1948) and Jerome Robbins’s and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957) depend on The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet respectively. In recent times King Lear has inspired Akira Kurosawa’s film Ran (1984) and Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres (1991); The Tempest has inspired Suniti Namjoshi’s poem sequence Snapshots of Caliban (1984) and Marina Warner’s novel Indigo (1992).
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16 (above) Sir Henry Beerbohm Tree in the surviving silent film fragment of King John, 1899
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17 (right) Laurence Olivier as the King in the 1944 film of Henry V
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18 (below) Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese film version of Macbeth, Throne of Blood, 1957
Shakespeare’s fame and influence began early and show no sign of abating. In the volume of his notebooks covering the years 1661-3, John Ward, vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon from 1662 to 1681, wrote of his most famous deceased parishioner:
I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural wit, without any art at all; he frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with 2 plays every year, and for that had an allowance so large, that he spent at the rate of a thousand pounds a year, as I have heard.
He continued with a note to himself: ‘Remember to peruse Shakespeare’s plays, and be versed in them, that I may not be ignorant in that matter’. We can think of no better advice to give our readers, and to repeat with it the encouragement of his first editors inviting the public to ‘read and censure’ their volume of the collected works. ‘Do so’, they exhort frankly, ‘but buy it first’:
Then, how odd soever your brains be, or your wisdoms, make your licence the same, and spare not. Judge your six penn’orth, your shilling’s worth, your five shillings’ worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the just rates, and welcome. But whatever you do, buy. Censure will not drive a trade, or make the jack go. And though you be a magistrate of wit, and sit on the stage at Blackfriars or the Cockpit to arraign plays daily, know: these plays have had their trial already and stood out all appeals, and do now come forth quitted rather by a decree of court than any purchased letters of commendation.
Like Heminges and Condell and all our distinguished predecessor editors, we urge you to buy and read or reread Shakespeare, confident that ‘if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him’.