30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (12 page)

In Shakespeare's plays we tend to be encouraged to laugh
at
(Dogberry's verbal mix-ups in
Much Ado About Nothing
, Malvolio's cross-garters in
Twelfth Night
), rather than
with
: such laughter is, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it a half-century after Shakespeare, an attack of self-satisfaction, either of pleasure in “some sudden act” of one's own, or “the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof [we] suddenly applaud ourselves.”
⁶
“Laughter,” writes Henri Bergson at the beginning of the twentieth century, “is a corrective.”
⁷
In showing us our own aggression, comedy is a serious business, based on a complicated form of recognition and on forms of social control. Shakespeare did not, unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, leave us any theoretical writings on drama, so perhaps Jonson's own description of comedy showing “an image of the times,” showing “human follies” rather than “crimes”—“such errors as you'll all confess / By laughing at them, they deserve no less” (
Every Man in His Humour
, 1598)—can stand in.

Comedies can thus deal with serious themes. Let's look again at
The Comedy of Errors
, the apparently light and farcical play cited at the head of this myth as the fall-guy to
King Lear
's evident superiority in seriousness. Like
King Lear
,
The Comedy of Errors
is deeply concerned with questions of identity and selfhood. Just as Lear descends into madness when his daughters Goneril and Regan do not acknowledge him as their father, so too the twin Antipholuses and Dromios enter a world of madness when they are repeatedly mistaken for one another. As Adriana, wife to his brother, berates him for his lack of care to her, the bewildered Antipholus of Syracuse wonders “what error drives our eyes and ears amiss?” (2.2.187). Error here has a stronger connotation than our modern sense of “mistake”: it is, as in Book 1 of Edmund Spenser's epic
The Faerie Queene
(1590), a terrifying condition of spiritual and intellectual wandering (from the Latin verb
errare
, to wander astray). When Antipholus of Ephesus returns to his own house only to have his way barred by a servant telling him he cannot enter because he is already inside at dinner, the comedy of mistaken identity becomes an existential exploration: how do we know we are ourselves, if those nearest to us do not recognize us or if they tell us we are someone other than we believe ourselves to be? John Mortimer's observation that “farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute”
⁸
is appropriate to
The Comedy of Errors
: while the tragedies may approach similar themes they do so in a more consciously dilated and reflective way, whereas the comedy hurtles through the same difficult territory at breakneck speed.

To take another example of the overlap between comic and tragic treatments of the same theme: in both genres Shakespeare depicts the destructive effect of male sexual jealousy. In
Much Ado About Nothing
, Claudio is persuaded by the malevolent Don John that his bride-to-be Hero has been unfaithful on her wedding night, and he denounces her publicly. In
Othello
Iago works on the credulous Othello to make him believe his wife Desdemona is a “lewd minx” (3.3.478). Despite the fact that both women are the blameless victims of male rivalry and manipulation, death is their punishment. In Hero's case, it is a faked death but one which nevertheless has the force of ritual purgation. Reconciled with Claudio at the end of the play she tells him that “One Hero died defiled, but I do live, / And surely as I live, I am a maid” (5.4.63–4). For Desdemona there is no such “resurrection”: although she revives briefly in the bed on which her husband has smothered her, it is only to acquit him of blame for her murder. The theme is taken up again in one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote,
The Winter's Tale
. This play belongs to a group of Jacobean comedies whose combination of generic elements, use of the fantastical or supernatural, and more extended chronologies across generations mean they are often called “romances.” In it Leontes, the King of Sicilia, becomes convinced that his wife Hermione has been unfaithful with his friend Polixenes. He puts her on trial for treacherous adultery and banishes the child he believes a bastard, but when the Delphic oracle brands him a “jealous tyrant” (3.2.133) and both Hermione and his son Mamillius die, he repents, acknowledges “our shame perpetual,” and vows that “tears … shall be my recreation” (3.2.238–9). So far, so
Othello
. But the difference here is that the play is not over. Leontes is a tragic character who is not allowed the comfort of suicide—like Othello—and a jealous character who is not permitted timely resolution—like Claudio. He has to live with his terrible mistakes. A comic, pastoral second half, set after a sixteen-year gap, sees the courtship of Perdita—the lost child of Leontes and Hermione—by Florizel—son of Polixenes. This new couple are to heal the breach in their parents' generation. Back in Sicilia, the family is reunited, and, wonder of wonders, Hermione is returned to life. This final treatment of male jealousy goes beyond tragedy, and shows us that what is on the other side is a version of comedy, ending in marriage and reconciliation. As elsewhere in his career, it seems that Shakespeare's commitment is less to the differences between comedy and tragedy than to their continuities and overlaps. As Dr Johnson put it, “Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind but in one composition.”
⁹

Notes

¹
 Edwin Wilson (ed.),
Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw's Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 79.

²
 George Puttenham,
The Arte of English Poesie
, ed. Gladys Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 25–6.

³
 Philip Sidney,
An Apology for Poetry; or The Defence of Poesy
, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Thomas Nelson, 1964), p. 117.

⁴
 
www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Nashe/Terrors_Night.pdf
(page 11, accessed 18 February 2012).

⁵
 Jan Kott,
Shakespeare our Contemporary
(London: Methuen, 1964), p. 178.

⁶
 Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan
, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 43.

⁷
 Henri Bergson,
Le Rire
(1900), trans. F. Rothwell as
Laughter
, in Wylie Sypher (ed.),
Comedy
(New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 74.

⁸
 Georges Feydeau,
A Flea in Her Ear
, trans. John Mortimer (Old Vic theater program, 1986).

⁹
 Quoted in Emma Smith (ed.),
Blackwell Guides to Criticism: Shakespeare's Tragedies
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 19.

Shakespeare's will is a tantalizing document in many respects. Dated 25 March 1616, preserved in the National Archives in Kew, and prepared by his lawyer Frances Collins, it is three pages long and a second draft, showing amendments and corrections.
¹
It contains half the extant examples of Shakespeare's signature we know about—one on each page—and paleographical analysis has suggested that the signatory was weak and ailing.
²
(Shakespeare died a month after signing his will.) Perhaps unexpectedly, there is no mention of any books or papers in the property to be dispersed (any playscripts would, of course, have remained the property of the King's Men: see Myth 4). Unlike some other self-made men Shakespeare is not particularly philanthropic in disposing of his property to charitable causes: the actor Edward Alleyn, for instance, had endowed Dulwich College and left money for the building of ten almshouses in Southwark at his death in 1626, and compared with this generosity the £10 left by Shakespeare for the poor of Stratford is derisory. Shakespeare seems instead to have favored his daughter Susanna and her respectable husband, the Stratford doctor John Hall, over her younger sister Judith, whose ne'er-do-well husband had recently come before the church courts for getting a local woman pregnant before he was married. Shakespeare makes small gifts to friends from Stratford and from the theater world in London, singling out fellow King's Men Richard Burbage, John Heminge, and Henry Condell for gifts to buy mourning rings. But it is for one of the will's final provisions that it is most famous. An inserted clause squeezed into a space between the lines reads: “Item. I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture.” Anne Hathaway, it seems, was only mentioned at all as an afterthought, and that a niggardly one: a second-best bed as a reward for three children and more than three decades of marriage? Surely this is evidence that Shakespeare despised his wife and wished to use his will to express this animosity?

Figure 3
The will shows the bequest to Anne as an insertion—an afterthought?

Reproduced by permission of the National Archives.

Maybe. What has made the second-best bed story so compelling in a narrative of Shakespeare's unhappy marriage is the way it can be made to correspond with other things we think we know about the relationship between William and Anne. First, their marriage itself. Because Anne was evidently pregnant at the time of their marriage late in 1582 (their first child, Susanna, was born six months later), and because the marriage was conducted not in the usual way, by having banns announced on successive Sundays, but by license from the Bishop of Worcester, perhaps suggesting particular haste, biographers have been keen to sense reluctance or compulsion on the bridegroom's part. There is even an apparent error by a diocesan clerk who wrote the name of the bride as “Anne Whateley”—a romantic but entirely fanciful line of speculation constructs this mysterious person as the third point in a love triangle: the two Annes and Shakespeare. Added to this, Anne Hathaway was—gosh—older than her husband. As the usually rather dry biographer Samuel Schoenbaum puts it, the “unambiguous testimony” is that Anne was “seven or eight years her husband's senior, and twenty-six in 1582; by the standards of those days, growing a bit long in the tooth for the marriage market. She took a teen-aged lover, became pregnant, and married him.”
³

Stephen Dedalus puts it more colorfully, in the punning and allusive style so characteristic of James Joyce's
Ulysses
:

He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.
⁴

The parallel is with the unwilling Adonis, wooed by the amorous goddess Venus in Shakespeare's first, and highly popular, erotic narrative poem
Venus and Adonis
(1593). Further fuel is the mention of a £2 debt, money lent to Anne Shakespeare, in the will of a Stratford shepherd Thomas Whittington, which seems to suggest that her husband kept her short of money. The marriage was empty and loveless, the biographical consensus has often been, and it is therefore no wonder that Shakespeare hot-footed it to London to leave behind this unwanted family. Poor Shakespeare (trapped unwillingly), or, if you prefer, Bad Shakespeare (treating his dependent family cruelly).

In fact, Shakespeare kept strong connections with Stratford throughout his life, buying property there, including New Place in 1597, and maintaining business relationships. Conversely, he did not buy property in London until the very end of his career, living instead in a series of lodgings, and so it is by no means evident that he turned his back on his family or made his settled life in London without them. Literary evidence for a warmer relationship between husband and wife has also been proposed, including the suggestion that one of the less accomplished poems gathered in his collection of sonnets, first published in 1609, is an early work addressing Anne in the cryptic phrase “hate away”:

Those lips that Love's own hand did make

Breathed forth the sound that said “I hate”

To me that languish'd for her sake;

But when she saw my woeful state

Straight in her heart did mercy come,

Chiding that tongue that ever sweet

Was used in giving gentle doom,

And taught it thus anew to greet:

“I hate” she alter'd with an end,

That follow'd it as gentle day

Doth follow night, who, like a fiend,

From heaven to hell is flown away.

“I hate” from hate away she threw,

And saved my life, saying “not you.”

(Sonnet 145)

If so, their relationship is cast in an unfamiliar light, with a speaker who “languish'd for her sake” in place of the unwilling suitor often imagined by biographers (the conventions of sonnets are important cautions here: see Myth 18).