30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (24 page)

Strachey proposes commercial rather than autobiographical imperatives: attentive to the fairy-tale aspects of Shakespeare's last plays, he argues that their happy endings show an awareness of genre rather than “serene tranquillity on the part of their maker.” If they reveal anything about Shakespeare's mind, it is that “he was getting bored”; “he is no longer interested, one often feels, in what happens, or who says what, so long as he can find place for a faultless lyric or a new, unimagined rhythmical effect, or a grand and mystic speech.”
⁵
Whereas many scholars wanted to establish
The Tempest
as Shakespeare's last play and to read into that position a corresponding and culminatory wisdom, the play as the benign and humane pinnacle of his dramatic career, Strachey sees it here as a decline. Shakespeare is losing his touch, rather than ascending some mystical poetic throne. It's a view echoed in more prosaic terms a hundred years later in a newspaper article by Gary Taylor. Under the headline “Shakespeare's Midlife Crisis,” Taylor argued that after a period of high commercial popularity in the 1590s, Shakespeare's career after 1600 was in the doldrums. “Like many other has-beens,” Taylor continues provocatively, “Shakespeare in his 40s tried to rescue his sinking reputation by recycling his 20s and 30s.”
⁶
His collaborations with John Fletcher become, in this revisionist argument, a desperate attempt by a worn-out writer to piggy-back on a younger one (rather than, as they have tended to be seen, the work created by an apprentice working under the supervision of the old master: see Myth 24).

So, reading
The Tempest
as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage is not supported by the evidence about Shakespeare's career, and imposes an anachronistically autobiographical framework on dramatic writing. It is also, as noted above, crucially dependent on a reading of Prospero's character as benevolent sage, attentive to his only daughter, using his learning to bring about harmony and reconciliation, forgiving rather than punishing those who have done him wrong. In fact, this positive interpretation overlooks problematic aspects of Prospero's characterization, and these can be discussed in relation to his “slave” Caliban.

Since at least the late nineteenth century when the scholar Sidney Lee discussed knowledge of the New World in early modern England,
The Tempest
has been connected with stories of exploration and, more distantly, with the early colonization of the Americas. This reading of the play has gained ground, particularly because of significant post-colonial rewritings—among them the Martinique poet Aimé Césaire's
Une Tempête
(1969)—of its parable of language, domination, and defeat. When the French/Madagascan psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni's book
Psychologie de la colonalisation
was translated into English in 1956, it had the title
Prospero and Caliban
. We might sum up the shift in criticism by pointing to the difference between Frank Kermode, introducing the second Arden edition of the play in 1954 with the brisk “it is as well to be clear that there is nothing in
The Tempest
fundamental to its structure of ideas which could not have existed had America remained undiscovered,” and Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan's perspective in the third edition of the Arden series in 1999: “the extensive and varied discourses of colonialism, many critics argue, are deeply embedded in the drama's language and events” such that the play is “a theatrical microcosm of the imperial paradigm.”
⁷
A similar shift in interpretative priorities has taken place in the theater. After Jonathan Miller's 1970 staging of the play it has been hard to recover a sympathetic Prospero unmarked by colonial guilt. As reviewers described that landmark production, Prospero was “a solemn and touchy neurotic, the victim of a power complex” who “has arrogated to himself the god-like power of the instinctive colonist … by the end the cycle of colonialism is complete: Ariel, the sophisticated African, picks up Prospero's discarded wand, clearly prepared himself to take on the role of bullying overlord.”
⁸
Recent Prosperos have tended to be so unpleasant that any association with Shakespeare would reflect very badly on the playwright himself.

Notes

¹
 The lines in Shakespeare read: “The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.”

²
 Edward Dowden,
Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1875), pp. 319–20.

³
 Lytton Strachey, “Shakespeare's Final Period,” in
Literary Essays
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), p. 2.

⁴
 Anthony B. Dawson, “Tempest in a Teapot: Critics, Evaluation, Ideology,” in Maurice Charney (ed.),
“Bad” Shakespeare: Reevaluations of the Shakespeare Canon
(Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 1988), p. 62.

⁵
 Strachey, “Shakespeare's Final Period,” pp. 11–12.

⁶
 Gary Taylor, “Shakespeare's Midlife Crisis,”
Guardian
, 3 May 2004.

⁷
 
The Tempest
, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1954; repr. 1958), p. xxv;
The Tempest
, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, Arden (London: A. & C. Black, 2001), pp. 39–40.

⁸
 Reviews by Eric Shorter and Michael Billington, excerpted in John O'Connor and Katharine Goodland,
A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance 1970–2005
, vol. 1:
Great Britain, 1970–2005
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1357–8.

We all know that Shakespeare's verbal creativity is a major part of his reputation and his ongoing appeal. His works—in particular the popular narrative poems
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
—began being anthologized during his lifetime: Robert Allot's book of quotations
England's Parnassus
(1600) includes extracts from
Love's Labour's Lost
,
Richard II
,
Richard III
,
1 Henry IV
, and, especially,
Romeo and Juliet
. The project of anthologizing has continued ever since. Alexander Pope's 1725 edition of Shakespeare provided a useful service to its readers: “Some of the most shining passages are distinguished by commas in the margin, and where the beauty lay not in particulars but in the whole a star is prefixed to the scene”: passages so marked included Portia's speech on mercy in the courtroom of
The Merchant of Venice
(4.1.181–202) and Mercutio's flight of fancy on Queen Mab in
Romeo and Juliet
(1.4.55–96). Shakespeare—or his publishers (see Myth 4)—had already anticipated this kind of highlighting: early printed texts also use the inverted comma in the left-hand margin to identify quotable passages. Polonius's advice to Laertes in
Hamlet
in both the 1603 (where Polonius is called Corambis) and 1604 texts is marked in this way (1.3.58–81). And his lines about borrowers and lenders were, of course, already proverbial: productions of the scene today often have the two adult children rolling their eyes over the familiarity of their father's list of old saws. Lists of phrases which we owe to Shakespeare are easily found on the internet and in print, and many of them are so familiar that they have lost their initial contact with their context in Shakespeare's plays: more sinned against than sinning, tongue-tied, flesh and blood, without rhyme or reason, laughing stock, more in sorrow than in anger, short shrift, Greek to me, world is your oyster, cold comfort, bated breath, discretion is the better part of valor (or Valerie, as Roger McGough memorably wrote in his
Watchwords
[1969]). So Shakespeare, perhaps the world's greatest wordsmith, must have had a huge vocabulary, no?

This is a difficult question to answer, since opinions vary on how a person's vocabulary should best be quantified. But David Crystal, the expert on this question, cites a figure for Shakespeare's vocabulary of 20,000 separate words (so that doesn't double-count plural forms or tenses: “hawk” and “hawks” count as one word, not two; “fly,” “flew,” “flown” count as one word). This compares with an available vocabulary of words in English at the time Shakespeare was writing of around 150,000 words. By comparison with other writers of the time, Shakespeare has a large recorded vocabulary, but that is at least in part because he wrote across different genres which required different registers, and because his extant work is substantial: he wrote a lot. For contrast, Crystal proposes 50,000 words as an average active vocabulary for an educated person at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with an available vocabulary in English of around 600,000, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
(
OED
). So Shakespeare's vocabulary is less than half of your own, and represents a slightly lower proportion of the available words than yours does.
¹

So what about Shakespeare as a coiner of words? Here, the
OED
—which is currently being revised—has been a rather misleading source. Shakespeare has been credited with the first usage of many words that are now common, among them “inauspicious,” to “embrace,” “sanctimonious.” Many of the words he apparently invented have not taken off, for example “allottery,” meaning a share (in
As You Like It
1.1.69) or the word “fleshment” in
King Lear
(2.2.120) which the
OED
defines as “the action of ‘fleshing’; hence, the excitement resulting from a first success.” Crystal lists over 2,000 words from the
OED
in which Shakespeare is the first or only recorded user, or for which Shakespeare is credited with a different meaning.
²
But these examples may be deceptive. The lexicographers who compiled the entries for the dictionary in the era before digitized and searchable texts were more familiar with Shakespeare's works than with works by contemporaries such as Thomas Nashe, and therefore they tended to overstate Shakespeare's neologisms (new words) in the dictionary. Jürgen Schäfer showed this in a landmark study published in 1980, and subsequent scholars have developed his findings, with the result that the number of new words which can be attributed with certainty to Shakespeare has substantially decreased.

This discussion can helpfully be situated in a historical context. There is a big spike in the number of new words during the century from 1550 to 1650. The stimulus to the vernacular given by Reformation Bible translations and by the rapid expansion of print culture, by the influx of new things and their attendant words from other cultures due to exploration and trade, and by the development of specialist languages for scientific discovery—all these factors made for exponential linguistic growth. Newly Latinate vocabulary—words such as “temperature” or “atmosphere” or “malignant”—rubbed up against words from Italian (often associated with culture: “concerto,” “sonnet,” “stanza”), from Spanish or Portuguese (often associated with New World exploration: “hurricane,” “tobacco,” “hammock”), and from other languages, often registering the import of exotic commodities (“coffee,” from Turkish, or “bazaar,” from Persian) or new ways of seeing things (“landscape,” from the Dutch). Borrowings gave early modern English a structure of lexical twins or triplets—near-synonyms acquired through borrowing from other languages. So English has a large number of related words with Old English/French/Latin derivations: rise/mount/ascend; end/finish/conclude; two/second/dual; fear/terror/trepidation; kingly/royal/regal. Using near-synonyms, in the rhetorical figure known as
copia
, is a Shakespearean technique enabled by this lexical density: “‘Romeo is banishèd’—/ There is no end, no limit, measure, bound, / In that word's death” (
Romeo and Juliet
3.2.124–6); “The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved, and loosed” (
Troilus and Cressida
5.2.159).

Something of the strangeness of this influx of vocabulary is captured in the first English dictionary aimed at its native speakers. Robert Cawdray's 1604 volume suggests on its busy title page that the English language has become strange to its own people through the importation of foreign words:

A Table Alphabetical, containing and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usual English words, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latin or French &c. With the interpretation thereof by plain English words, gathered for the benefit & help of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other unskillful persons. Whereby they may the more easily and better understand many hard English words, which they shall here of read in scriptures, sermons or elsewhere, and also be made able to use the same aptly themselves.

It would not have been seemly, given his high-status target audience, had Cawdray suggested it, but plays were also both a source of new words and a means by which words could become better understood. We see this in Shakespeare's works often, when an unfamiliar word or neologism is glossed, as in the dictionary, by a “plain English word”:
Timon of Athens
glosses “decimation” with “tithèd” and “destined tenth” (5.5.31–3). Shakespeare's characters take repeated delight in new words. Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the hapless suitor of
Twelfth Night
, has an ear for fine words, and gathers up “odours, pregnant, and vouchsafed” (3.1.89–90) for future use; the grandiloquent soldier Pistol in
2 Henry IV
quotes Marlowe's mighty lines (2.4.160–5) and Nim in
Henry V
uses the word “humour” as a kind of fashionable linguistic tic (2.1.52, 57); Polonius is preoccupied by Hamlet's word “beautified” in his letter to Ophelia: “that's an ill phrase, a vile phrase” (2.2.111). These characters all—perhaps like Shakespeare himself reading Florio's Montaigne (see Myth 2)—ignore plot and content for a moment in their plays to concentrate on verbal details. And there are those characters, like Dogberry in
Much Ado About Nothing
or Elbow in
Measure for Measure
, who misuse Latinate vocabulary to comic effect: what would come to be called, after the character in Sheridan's play
The Rivals
(1755), malapropisms.