30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (21 page)

So far we have been considering jointly authored plays. But there is another kind of collaboration in which an author contributes a speech or a scene or a short sequence to another's play. This is the case in the manuscript of
John of Bordeaux
, a sequel to Robert Greene's popular comedy
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
(1589) where Henry Chettle wrote one speech (a large blank space was left for the purpose). It is the case in the anonymous history play
Edward III
, for which Shakespeare wrote the Countess of Salisbury scenes (in about 1596). It is the case for
Sir Thomas More
where Shakespeare added speeches in which More addresses and calms the rioters. This is an especially interesting case and it is worth pausing over it.

Sir Thomas More
dramatizes two key events of recent history: the “evil May Day” riots of 1517, and More's refusal to subscribe to Henry VIII's divorce articles in 1532 (conflated in the play with his refusal to subscribe to the Act of Succession in 1534). The play links the two by having More talk the rioters into obedience in the first half while himself refusing obedience to his king in the second half. The manuscript of the play contains seven hands: five authors/revisers, a scribe, and the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, who censored the play so severely that many critics believe it was abandoned. At some later stage the play was revised. The questions that have always dogged criticism of the play are: Why would you write it at all given that it dramatizes material that could not be openly discussed in the sixteenth century? When was the play written? Why would Munday, one of the authors, a rabid anti-Catholic, write a play sympathetic to a Catholic martyr? Were the revisions made immediately following Tilney's censorial prescriptions, or later? Who are the seven hands and five authors?

John Jowett's magisterial Arden edition (2011) steers a clear line through these questions.
⁵
The original play was written by Munday and Chettle, censored by Tilney, and an unknown playhouse scribe coordinated revisions by Chettle and three additional authors: Dekker, Heywood, and Shakespeare. Jowett places the play's composition in the late Elizabethan period,
c
.1600 (plays about Henry VIII's reign were coming into companies' repertoires then) and the revision in 1603–4. Jowett feels “more secure” in his suggested date for the revision than in that for the original composition. His date of 1603/4 supports the new perspective on Shakespeare as collaborator. Instead of confining collaboration to the start and end of his career, we now have a scenario in which he is writing with and for others in the middle. (It was a contractual obligation to “patch” other men's plays or provide new prologues and epilogues. In 1602 Ben Jonson was paid for additions to Thomas Kyd's
Spanish Tragedy
, although the case has been made that Shakespeare is the author of the published additions.
⁶
In the same year Samuel Bird and William Rowley were paid for additions to Marlowe's
Dr Faustus
.)

The deployment of so many hands is usually a sign that a revised text was urgently needed (especially given that the revisers worked simultaneously, not sequentially, as the manuscript shows). Jowett's dating of the revisions at the start of James's reign might help us supply the occasion. One of the perplexing questions about Shakespeare's career is: why did he not write city pageants (see Myth 14)? Lord Mayor's annual processions (and, in 1604, James's coronation festivities) were occasions when the city brought out its heavy hitters. Munday, Middleton, Jonson, Heywood, Dekker, and Peele were all commissioned to write pageants for the city. Why not Shakespeare? Shakespeare knew all these writers and worked with some of them at various stages in different ways (he acted in Jonson's plays, for instance, and collaborated with Peele on
Titus
). The revision of
More
in a hurry in 1603/4 may have been related to some London event.

Jowett's dating argument about Shakespeare's addition to
More c
.1604, plus our suggestion about the collaborative nature of
All's Well c
.1607, dislodges many of our assumptions about Shakespeare's mid-career: we have known that he worked collaboratively but not at that time or in that way. Perhaps we can extend the field of consideration. Giorgio Melchiori sees a court connection in
Merry Wives of Windsor
(1597). He argues that this was not just a play performed at court, as many of Shakespeare's plays were, but a play developed from a court masque that Shakespeare wrote specially for the second Lord Hunsdon (Shakespeare revised the masque into a longer version of the Herne's Oak scene, printed subsequently in the 1623 Folio).
⁷
Like Jowett's edition of
Sir Thomas More
, Melchiori's edition of
Merry Wives
opens the door for us to think about other kinds of writing that Shakespeare was involved in. Together these editions expand our concept of the social circumstances, in the city and at court, in which Shakespeare was writing and being commissioned to write.

Notes

¹
 Stanley Wells,
Shakespeare and Co
. (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 248 n. 40, citing Eric Rasmussen, “Collaboration,” in Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells (eds.),
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

²
 For an account of this insalubrious character see Charles Nicholl,
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street
(London: Penguin, 2008).

³
 See Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, “‘Time's Comic Sparks’: The Dramaturgy of
A Mad World My Masters
and
Timon of Athens
,” in Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (eds.),
The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 181–95.

⁴
 Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, “Many Hands—A New Shakespeare Collaboration?”,
Times Literary Supplement
, 20 April 2012, pp. 13–15.

⁵
 
Sir Thomas More
, ed. John Jowett, Arden (London: A. & C. Black, 2011).

⁶
 Brian Vickers surveys a number of important new studies on Shakespeare's authorship in his “Shakespeare and Authorship Studies in the Twenty-First Century,”
Shakespeare Quarterly
, 62 (2011), pp. 106–42.

⁷
 
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, ed. Giorgio Melchiori, Arden (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 2000).

Are Shakespeare's sonnets autobiographical? The short answer is: undoubtedly, some of them are; some of them are not; and some of the latter have the appearance (or are designed to have the appearance) of the former.

Sonnet 145 has a strong claim to be autobiographical or self-referential. It turns (quite literally) on a pun on hate away/Hathaway and is often thought to be a love poem written early in Shakespeare's career to his bride-to-be Anne Hathaway (see Myth 10). For twelve lines the poet documents the lady's hatred; then in the concluding couplet the sentence structure offers both a delayed negative and an unexpected object (or non-object):

“I hate” from hate away she threw,

And saved my life, saying “not you.”

Given that the conjunction “And” is a near-homophone of “Anne,” the last line can also read, “Anne saved my life.” The poetic simplicity (some say, triviality) of this poem, and its unusual tetrameter structure (each line has four stresses; the other 153 sonnets are in five-stressed pentameter lines: see Myth 11), may also indicate its composition early in Shakespeare's career (or, perhaps more accurately, early in Shakespeare's life, before he had a career).

In Sonnet 135 Shakespeare puns more obviously, this time repeatedly, on his own given name as the poet begs the dark lady to include him among her lovers:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

And Will to boot, and Will in overplus.

…

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,

Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

With sixteen uses of the word “will” in fourteen lines, this poem rings the changes on the multiple meanings of “will” as wish, obstinacy, sexual desire, slang for the penis and the vagina, as well as a male name. It is impossible to separate these puns from the name of the author. In fact, punning on one's name or the name of one's beloved was a poetic fashion in the period. Astrophil and Stella—star-lover and star—are Philip Sidney's fictional names for himself and his inaccessible inamorata, Lady Penelope (inaccessible because she was the wife of Lord Rich); her real-life identity is acknowledged in a concentrated sequence of puns in Sonnet 37 which play on her married name: she is rich in all things (beauty, virtue), but the poet's tragedy is that she is Rich.

“Hate away” and “Will” in Shakespeare's Sonnets 145 and 135 are clear in their referents. Less clear, because unnamed, is the presence of one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, perhaps George Chapman, in the “rival poet” sonnets, which may reflect Shakespeare's professional despair in the late 1590s. In 1598 Chapman had just published his translation of part of Homer's
Iliad
—a section of Book 18 he called
Achilles' Shield
; in the same year Marlowe's erotic epyllion,
Hero and Leander
, was published; furthermore, it was
re
printed the same year with a continuation by Chapman. These works were not just a literary success, highly popular and (in the case of Chapman's translation) high in prestige (
Achilles' Shield
was dedicated to a patron whom Chapman flatteringly compared to Achilles); they were also a literary gauntlet—a challenge to find Marlowe's successor. Chapman's continuation of
Hero and Leander
blatantly announced that he viewed himself as that successor. In Sonnet 86 Shakespeare compares his poetic success (or lack of it) with another poet's achievements. Chapman is a logical contender for comparison. Shakespeare laments that he has mismanaged his literary career, not winning the patronage that Chapman has managed (“the proud full sail of his great verse / Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you”) or able to compete with his classical knowledge (“by spirits taught to write”—the ancients; “his compeers by night”—his nocturnal study; “that affable familiar ghost / Which nightly gulls him with intelligence”—Chapman claimed inspiration from Homer). In fact, there may be more than one rival poet in this sonnet if the ghost is Marlowe inspiring Chapman rather than Homer.
¹

It is perhaps no coincidence that it is at this time that Shakespeare first mentions Marlowe (twice) in a play,
As You Like It
(1599). In the Forest of Ardenne the love-struck shepherdess, Phoebe, says: “Dead shepherd [i.e. dead lyricist: “shepherd” was shorthand for a pastoral poet], now I find thy saw [= saying] of might: ‘Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’” (3.5.82–3). Her rhetorical question is a direct quotation from Marlowe's
Hero and Leander
. The play's other reference to Marlowe comes when the clown, Touchstone, in a speech about the frustrations of having one's poetry underappreciated, says “It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room” (3.3.11–12). Marlowe was killed in 1593 over an argument about the bill (reckoning) in a boarding house where he and three others had spent the day. (
The Reckoning
is the title of Charles Nicholl's biography of Marlowe.) The death of London's most famous dramatist had clearly shocked the theater world. As Katherine Duncan-Jones points out, the qualification in Touchstone's “it strikes a man
more
dead than a great reckoning in a little room” is illogical. Death cannot be modified; there are no degrees of deadness; one is either dead or not.
²
Unless, of course one is talking about
literary
life and death where reputation can be seen relatively. A poet's work can be alive or dead or anywhere on the spectrum between. In Sonnet 86 the poet laments that the rival poet's success “struck me dead.” The sentiments in
As You Like It
, written in the year in which Marlowe continued to live poetically through the publication of
Hero and Leander
, link to the anxieties in Sonnet 86 about literary reputation and comparisons. Shakespeare is worried that he, a living poet, may be more dead in literary terms than the dead Marlowe. Such expressions of anxiety also help to date this sonnet by locating it in the literary world of the 1590s.

Whether these readings of the “name” sonnets or the “rival poet” sonnets mean that we can read all of Shakespeare's sonnets autobiographically is a moot point. Collectively the sonnets tell a story every bit as dramatic as the plots of Shakespeare's plays: a plot in which two men compete for the favors of one woman, in which the woman rejects the poet, in which the poet expresses his love for a young man, in which the poet experiences rivalry in love as well as in poetry. The poems were not written as a narrative sequence (they were composed over a period of about sixteen years). Although some of them function sequentially (several begin with the contrasting or continuative conjunctions “But” or “So,” continuing a line of thought from the previous sonnet), others (such as 153 and 154, a story of Cupid) duplicate each other, and look like experimental variations on a theme. The fact that one or more poems can be read autobiographically does not mean that all 154 sonnets or their cumulative story are autobiographical. In fact, as Dympna Callaghan notes, the collection as a whole is remarkably unspecific as to the time and place of events (she contrasts the detail of Petrarch or Samuel Daniel) and Lois Potter points out that whereas other Elizabethan sonneteers leave no doubt as to the persons they are talking about, Shakespeare's sonnets name only mythical figures: Adonis, Helen, Eve, and Time.
³

Nevertheless it is true that the title page of the 1609 volume foregrounds Shakespeare the author. These, the title page proclaims, are “Shakes-peare's Sonnets,” the possessive linking author and creation in a way not typical of published sonnets of the period. The only other sonnet title page to use a possessive is “Sir P[hilip] S[idney] His Astrophel and Stella” (1591). Thomas Lodge's
Phillis
(1593) does not name the poet on the title page. Neither does Richard Barnfield's
Cynthia
(1595). A notable contrast is Thomas Watson's
Hekatompathia
(1582):
The Hekatompathia or Passionate century of love divided into two parts: whereof, the first expresseth the author's sufferance in love: the latter, his long farewell to love and all his tyranny. Composed by Thomas Watson Gentleman
. But Watson is unusual: he is following a continental tradition of sonnet presentation, seen also in his headnotes to each of his poems; the fashion did not catch on in England.