30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (22 page)

No wonder, then, that William Wordsworth, writing in an age when sonnets (and poetry generally) were instruments of self-expression, wrote that “with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart” (“Scorn Not the Sonnet”). But why, we might ask, do we not assume that Shakespeare unlocked his heart in his plays? To a certain extent, of course, we do.
Hamlet
is often seen as Shakespeare's working through his grief at the death of his son Hamnet in 1596 (see Myth 12).
The Tempest
, a play in which a father loses a daughter in marriage and abandons his theatrical powers, is often taken to reflect Shakespeare's personal and professional circumstances in 1610 (see Myth 20). Orsino's advice in
Twelfth Night
, in which he recommends that the woman should always “take / An elder than herself” (2.4.28–9), is frequently read as Shakespeare's personal regret at having done the opposite in his own marriage: he was eight years Anne Hathaway's junior (see Myth 10). Shakespeare's use of plots with twins is viewed as an expression of his own personal fascination, as a father of fraternal twins, with twins generally (
Comedy of Errors
has two sets of identical twins,
Twelfth Night
one set of fraternal twins). But we never assume that Shakespeare experienced shipwreck or travelled to Illyria or was pursued by the wrong person under the influence of magic (although the plot of
Midsummer Night's Dream
does sometimes lead to the question, “Did Shakespeare believe in fairies?”). In other words, we read sentiments biographically but not plots—except in the case of the sonnets, where we do both.

In 1912 a Cambridge psychologist, Edward Bullough, wrote that the “self-expression of an artist is not such as the self-expression of a letter-writer or a public speaker: it is not the
direct
expression of the concrete personality of the artist; it is not even an
indirect
expression of his concrete personality.”
⁴
Bullough acknowledges that a writer's times and personal experience are indeed reflected in his or her works but adds that readers can only find these once they know what reflected experiences to look for. In other words, we can read backwards from Shakespeare's life into the sonnets but not forwards from the sonnets into his life.

Renaissance literature does not lack self-portraits: Montaigne's
Essays
(translated into English in 1603) and Sir Thomas Browne's
Religio Medici
(published 1643) are obvious examples. But for Bullough even works which are unquestionably autobiographical are artistic productions which are “the indirect formulation of a distanced mental content.”
⁵
That is, self-portraits need not be direct expressions of the self because of the mediating factor of artistic shaping. (Today's genre of the “memoir” provides many examples of this—see, for example, Frank McCourt's
Angela's Ashes
.) As Bullough brilliantly puts it, “the idea may be suggested by an actual experience” but “the idea itself
is
an actual experience.”
⁶
In this sense, all of Shakespeare's works are personal autobiographical reflections (in both senses) of the artist.

Let us return to the sonnets. Peter Holbrook points out that “one of the most astonishing things about them is the audacity and recklessness of their self-exposure.” The poet is anguished, worthless, dismayed, mistrustful, self-loathing, envious, pained, humiliated, outranked, and “out-poetized.”
⁷
What is distinctive about the sonnets, Holbrook concludes, is their portrayal of a defective human in a variety of experiences, and the “implicit claim in the poems that this experience is valuable
because
it is his.”
⁸
This accords with Shakespeare's interest in the individual elsewhere in the canon; “I am that I am” (Sonnet 121) is not far removed from the similar existential self-assertions of Richard III or Aaron the Moor (
Titus Andronicus
) or Paroles (
All's Well That Ends Well
) or Iago (
Othello
): it's striking that none of these characters is an admirable parallel.

But we must not forget that Richard III and Aaron and Paroles and Iago are fictions and the poetic “I” of the sonnets may be equally fictional. Nor should we forget that, as originally printed, the sonnets were followed by a narrative poem,
The Lover's Complaint
. In this poem a narrator sees an anguished weeping country maid who subsequently narrates her story of betrayed love to an aged man, a former city resident who is now a farmer (“A reverend man that grazed his cattle nigh, / Sometime a blusterer that the ruffle knew / Of court, of city”; ll. 57–9). The old farmer indicates that his experience might enable him to assuage the maid's sufferings. Thus encouraged, she tells her story of wisdom gained; but then she offers the startling conclusion that were the situation to occur again she would respond to her faithless lover in the same way and allow herself to be betrayed as before. The poem ends here. We are left with the painful paradox of the young woman's admission, a sentiment at once intensely personal (it is
her
story) and general: she moves from the first to the third person (the lover's attractions “would yet again betray the fore-betrayed / And new pervert a reconcilèd maid”; ll. 328–9). And this distancing maneuver is placed within a narrative structure of tripartite distancing—a story within a story within a story—which leads to a tantalizing and frustrating (in)conclusion in which we hear no more from the old man of stanza 9 or the narrator of stanza 1. We are never told what the old farmer's response was or what relevant experience or wisdom he had to offer, or why the narrator, who observed and overheard the young maid telling her story to the old man, was there in the first place.

And this is the experience of reading the sonnets. The personal and the universal coexist; multiple persons take center stage; time and place and persons are unspecified. As a result, we are no longer sure whose story this is.

Notes

¹
 Katherine Duncan-Jones,
Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan, 1592–1623
(London: A. & C. Black, 2011), pp. 140–6.

²
 Ibid.

³
 Dympna Callaghan,
Shakespeare's Sonnets
, Blackwell Introductions to Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), p. 3; Lois Potter,
The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 414.

⁴
 Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,”
British Journal of Psychology
, 5 (1912), pp. 87–118 (p. 113).

⁵
 Ibid., p. 115.

⁶
 Ibid.

⁷
 Peter Holbrook,
Shakespeare's Individualism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 193–4.

⁸
 Ibid., p. 194.

A new and quickly developing technology, which controlled production and distribution of plays, and released a large number of new products every year. A dream factory, shaping the imagination of generations of theatergoers. A commercial entertainment business located just beyond the reach of the authorities. An industry that shook off its dubious early associations to address monarchs and the court, as well as the man in the street. It's easy to hear the echoes between the early modern theater and twentieth-century Hollywood, and we all know the pedagogue's favorite justification, that Shakespeare was the popular entertainment of his day. So is it reasonable to suppose that a modern-day Shakespeare would be writing for Hollywood?

The parallels between these two entertainment spheres are extensive and suggestive. Just as the early modern theater industry grew up on the South Bank of the Thames to avoid the censure of the London civic authorities, so Hollywood developed close to the Mexican border so that there was a nearby extrajudicial bolt-hole. Both industries reach a wide audience (see Myth 1) and are commercially, as well as aesthetically, successful, making some of their key players rich (including Shakespeare, a share-holder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men). Arguments about the morality of these representational media are also adjacent. The Hays Code imposed on Hollywood from 1930 onwards aimed to ensure that “no picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it” and took as a governing precept that films “affect the moral standards of those who, through the screen, take in these ideas and ideals.” Writing in 1583 Philip Stubbes railed against the theater in similar, if more colorful, terms:

You say there are good examples to be learned in them [plays], truly so there are, if you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the hypocrite, to cog, to lie and falsify; if you will learn to jest, laugh and fleer, to grin, to nod, and mow; if you will learn to play the vice, to swear, tear, and blaspheme both heaven and earth; if you will learn to become a bawd, unclean and to divirginate maids, to deflower honest wives; if you will learn to murder, slay, kill, pick, steal, rob, and rove: if you will learn to rebel against princes, to commit treasons, to consume treasures …
¹

And so on. That the immediacy of seeing actions played out—on stage or screen—might prompt spectators to imitative immorality emerges strongly as a shared concern.

The defenders of both media have tried to suggest that the opposite is true: that films/theater can teach positive behavior. Linda Ruth Williams collected observations of the behavior of audiences at the erotic thriller
Fatal Attraction
(dir. Adrian Lyne, 1989), which seem to show that both men and women reacted strongly against the depiction of an extra-marital affair. One of the critics she cites wrote, “If Aids doesn't stop you, this movie will.”
²
It's not a million miles away from Thomas Heywood's anecdote about a Norfolk woman watching a play about an adulterous wife who murders her husband, and “suddenly screeched and cried out Oh my husband, my husband! I see the ghost of my husband fiercely threatening and menacing me.” It transpires that the woman had herself poisoned her husband, and after her “voluntary confession,” prompted by the play, she is condemned to death.
³

Just as rival studios became associated with particular stars and a particular style of film, so the effective duopoly between the Admiral's Men and the Lord Chamberlain's Men during the 1590s drew its commercial and artistic strength from the two companies' contrasting personnel and house style. For example, the Admiral's Men appear to have capitalized on the furor over their rivals'
1 Henry IV
, when the descendants of Sir John Oldcastle objected to his disrespectful presentation as the fat braggart soldier (the name was changed to the now-familiar Falstaff); their play
Sir John Oldcastle
is a sycophantic portrait of their proto-Protestant ancestor. In turn the Admiral's Men's backlist of Marlowe favorites was imitated in the Chamberlain's repertoire. Like Hollywood stars, Edward Alleyn, famous for his central roles in Marlowe's big, booming dramas, and Richard Burbage, the first Richard III and Hamlet, became well known. An anecdote in the diary of the law student John Manningham attests to this:

Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night with her by the name of Richard III. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard III.”
⁴

At Burbage's death an elegy mourned multiple losses:

He's gone, and with him what a world is dead.

No more young Hamlet, old Hieronimo
⁵

Kind Lear, the grievèd Moor, and more beside

That lived in him have now for ever died.

Comic actors, including the clown Richard Tarlton, famous for his grimaces and “his metatheatrical talent as a maker of exits and entrances,”
⁶
and Will Kempe, whose name substitutes for that of the buffoonish constable Dogberry in
Much Ado About Nothing
in the play's first printing, were also hugely popular. At the turn of the century a Cambridge student play presented Burbage and Kemp as modern celebrities.

And while the role of the playwright in the early modern theater was not quite equivalent to the role of the screenwriter in Hollywood, the parallel is a provocative one. Many of Shakespeare's early plays were printed with reference to the acting company but not their author, such as the extensive title page of the first edition of
Richard III
: “The Tragedy of King Richard the third. / Containing His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephews: his tyrannicall usurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserved death. As it hath beene lately Acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his servants.” Like an iconic Hollywood product such as, say,
Casablanca
(1942)—most of us could probably approximate its most famous line, and name its romantic leads, and some might even identify its director, but few would be able to name its writer—who's performing this play and what it's about seem more significant to potential buyers than who has written it.

Finally, Hollywood and Shakespeare's theater share a penchant for make-believe and fantasy: neither is drawn to grittily realistic drama. Just as the historians of the future would gain a very strange view of early twenty-first-century culture from, say, reading the Harry Potter films or the
Bourne Trilogy
or
Sex in the City
as mirror-images of everyday life, so too it is over-simplistic to look for direct reflections of Elizabethan or Jacobean experience in the drama of the period. Early modern women did not dress in men's clothing to resolve difficulties, nor did all couples fall in love at first sight, nor did family disputes end in carnage, or women substitute for each other in a man's bed, any more than men have asses' heads or identical twins wheel round a city ignorant of each other's existence. The body-strewn stage at the end of
Hamlet
or
Titus Andronicus
is an indication of the literary genre of tragedy, not of a more violent society.