30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (36 page)

Stately homes, and houses that have been in the same family for generations, tend to have large collections of manuscript documents. An example from recent literary history will serve to show how rich these private repositories are. Vita Sackville-West wrote in longhand and kept all her manuscripts: “books published and unpublished, the notebook in which she recorded her dreams, her gardening articles, her juvenilia, poems, stories, plays, and reviews in quantity. The total amounts to some 9,000 pages.”
²
This archive lay in Sissinghurst for forty years until her son, Nigel Nicholson, sold it at Sotheby's on 10 July 2002. There are archives that have lain unsold for over 400 years. In 2010 Katherine Duncan-Jones made a key discovery in the archives of Berkeley Castle, a piece of evidence suggesting that William Kemp, Shakespeare's company's famous clown of the 1590s, was alive and still performing as late as November 1610. Duncan-Jones's discovery was in the household accounts of Henry, seventh Baron Berkeley (1534–1613), whose steward records that in late November 1610 “my Lord lay in London” where he paid “in reward to William Kempe, my Lady Hunsdons man, 4s. 4d.”
³
Retired from the public stage, Kemp had apparently found a patron in a private household. This
theatrical
nugget lies in a household's
financial
accounts.

In addition to domestic manuscripts, stately homes often have extensive libraries. Although their book collections are catalogued, not all these books have been opened and every page perused. Scholars are still finding books with Ben Jonson's signature in the flyleaf. One day we will find books with Shakespeare's signature.

However, many new findings come not from factual discoveries but from a change in scholarly attitude. Early twentieth-century Shakespeare articles modeled themselves on scientific procedures, concluding with a triumphant “Thus it can be seen that …” as if the Shakespeare litmus paper had decisively changed color. Today's literary scholars see the value in posing questions without needing to formulate neat answers; we are more comfortable at pointing out contradictions and gaps; we have become adept at dealing with sums that don't add up. This enables us to consider negative evidence: for instance, why did Shakespeare not write religious poetry (see Myth 7)? Important research often begins with changing the kinds of questions that we ask.

If academics profitably spend time in archives, they derive equal benefit from visits to the theater. You will have noticed how often in this book we have turned to theater productions for proof of principle—how an idea worked or was discovered in performance. Far from being enemy territory, theater is on an equal footing with academia; productions, like books, are interpretations of Shakespeare based on a close study of the text. And the traffic is two-way. The 2011 production of
Cardenio
at Stratford-upon-Avon is one such case. We mentioned in Myth 17 that this collaborative play, written by Shakespeare with Fletcher late in his career, 1613, is lost. (The manuscript existed until the eighteenth century, when William Warburton's cook used it as baking parchment.) We know its source (Cervantes'
Don Quixote
) and we know that Lewis Theobald had adapted the Fletcher–Shakespeare play in 1727 as
Double Falsehood
. Since we have b1 the source and the adaptation—and some of the music, found recently by the historian Michael Wood
⁴
—it should be possible to create an approximation of the missing middle link. In 2011 Greg Doran did just this, working with the source, the adaptation, a scholar, and a playwright to produce a stageable version of the lost play.
⁵
So there is still much to be discovered about Shakespeare—factually, in archives and interpretatively, in the theater. Note how all the exciting developments we cite here have taken place in the last ten years: the Middleton edition, the Kemp reference, the redating of
All's Well
(and of
Sir Thomas More
, see Myth 17), and the Robert Johnson music for a lost play. Clearly, the field of Shakespeare studies still has major surprises.

Future discoveries also involve understanding past and present beliefs—what we have called “myths”—the cultural work these assumptions do for us and our national poet. In this book we have tried to foreground the journey towards discoveries rather than the destination, the reading rather than the conclusion. Throughout these thirty chapters we have been interested in how interpretative meaning is made and remade; how the same evidence can be used in different ways; the investment we have in the stories we tell; and how these stories or myths arose, what appeal they exercise, what evidence can be used to challenge or confirm them. Perhaps the ultimate myth, however, is one our book also perpetuates—except in this final injunction. Myths about Shakespeare can often displace the Shakespeare texts themselves. In the nineteenth century Hazlitt distinguished between Shakespeare's texts and commentaries on them: “If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.”
⁶
His binary is extreme—genius versus insignificance—but his general principle is sound: there is no substitute for close acquaintance with the text. Heminge and Condell introduced their collected edition of the plays in 1623 with the command: “read him, again and again.” Four hundred years later it is hard to find better advice.

Notes

¹
 Gary Taylor, “Divine [ ]sences,”
Shakespeare Survey
, 54 (2001), p. 24 n.53.

²
 Nigel Nicholson, “A Place of Greater Safety for Vita's Work,”
The Times
, 2 July 2001.

³
 Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Shakespeare's Dancing Fool: Did William Kemp Live On as ‘Lady Hunsdon's Man’?”,
Times Literary Supplement
, 11 August 11 2010.

⁴
 Wood's discovery followed his assumption that the songs for
Cardenio
were probably composed by the man who composed the music for the other late romances, Robert Johnson:
In Search of Shakespeare
(London: BBC Books, 2003), pp. 363–5.

⁵
 Later that year, Shakespeare's Globe staged Gary Taylor's version as part of its Read Not Dead series (November 2011); Stephen Greenblatt had worked with the American playwright Charles Mee to create a modern version in 2008.

⁶
 William Hazlitt, “On the Ignorance of the Learned,” first published in the
Edinburgh Magazine
, July 1818.

A new book or article on Shakespeare comes along every hour of every day. You're not going to be able to read them all; nor can we. How, then, to choose what to read? We have offered a selection of further reading in narrative form to give a sense of the content of the books we are recommending, and why they appeal to us critically.

The standard life of Shakespeare is still Samuel Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare: A Documentary Life
(1975; there's also a
Compact Documentary Life
, 1987): Schoenbaum gives the documentary evidence and assesses difficult questions with even-handed restraint. His
Shakespeare's Lives
(1991; paperback 1993) is a perfect supplement, taking as its subject the history of Shakespearean biography, and enjoying many of the more eccentric interpretations of Shakespeare's life. Other recommended biographical works include James Shapiro on Shakespeare's most productive year,
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
(2005; paperback 2006), Stephen Greenblatt's
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
(2004; paperback 2005), and Michael Wood's book accompanying his television series
In Search of Shakespeare
(2003). We quote often from the detailed work of our colleague Katherine Duncan-Jones: her biography of a less than likeable Shakespeare is
Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life
(2010—a revised edition of her 2001
Ungentle Shakespeare
), and her account of Shakespeare's immediate reputation is
Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan, 1592–1623
(2011). Park Honan's
Shakespeare: A Life
(2000) is especially good on the early years in Stratford; Jonathan Bate's
Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare
(2008; paperback 2009) looks at Shakespeare and his context through the life-stages identified by Jaques in
As You Like It
(“All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players”; 2.7.139–40). Charles Nicholl's in-depth analysis of a court case in which Shakespeare was called as a witness (a somewhat evasive one, it has to be said) is in
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street
(2008). Lois Potter's
The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography
(2012) is not just (just!) a biography of Shakespeare: it is a biography of his theater world, informed by Potter's unrivaled theatrical understanding.

The conditions of writing and printing drama are well covered by the contributors to David Kastan (ed.),
A Companion to Shakespeare
(1999), and Kastan's
Shakespeare and the Book
(2001) is a readable account of changes in editing and bibliography and why they matter. The British Library's digital quartos website (
http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html
) allows access to all the early printed editions of Shakespeare: you can view a number of digital facsimiles of the First Folio online via the Folger Shakespeare Library (
www.folger.edu
). Lukas Erne's controversial
Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist
(2007) has turned old notions of the relation between long and short versions of Shakespeare's plays on their head; he posits a Shakespeare who
was
interested in the publication of his plays.

John Jowett's
Shakespeare and Text
(2007) is accessible and learned; his editions of
Timon of Athens
(2004) and
Thomas More
(2011) extend the discussion of collaborative working practices. Andrew Gurr's
The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642
(2004) studies Shakespeare's works from the point of view of the structure and methods of the Chamberlain's, later King's, Men. Tiffany Stern's
Documents of Performance in Early Modern England
(2009) is one of those books that changes totally how you think about the early modern play—she shows it not to be a unified text as published by Arden or World's Classics, but rather an assemblage of fragments: songs, letters as props, parts, epilogues, prologues. David Crystal is
the
expert on Shakespeare and language, in a vast array of works including
Shakespeare's Words
(with Ben Crystal, 2002) and
“Think on My Words”: Exploring Shakespeare's Language
(2008); Frank Kermode's
Shakespeare's Language
(2001) is a more evocative and associative take on Shakespeare's poetic use of rhetoric and vocabulary.

Classic books on the Elizabethan theater are by Andrew Gurr again:
The Shakespearean Stage
, (4th edn., 2009) and
Playgoing in Shakespeare's London
(3rd edn., 2004). Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper's
Shakespeare's Globe: A Theatrical Experiment
(2008) is full of insights from a decade of productions in the rebuilt Globe on London's Bankside. Tiffany Stern's
Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page
(2004) understands the literary and theatrical contexts for Shakespeare's work, and her
Shakespeare in Parts
(with Simon Palfrey, 2007) is a groundbreaking study of the way Shakespeare's actors understood their roles. Martin Wiggins's
Shakespeare and the Drama of his Time
(2000) is recommended as a way to counter the myopia with which we often consider Shakespeare, and Arthur Kinney's
Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments
(2nd edn., 2005), is the best place to sample contemporary writers.

Cambridge University Press's series
Players of Shakespeare
(6 vols., 1985–2004), supplemented by Michael Dobson's
Performing Shakespeare's Tragedies Today
(2006), provide a series of unique perspectives. Written by actors reflecting on their roles, these essays combine sophisticated analysis of individual actors' roles with a deep understanding of the play in which they perform. Carol Rutter's
Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today
(1988) gives Shakespeare's female characters the same treatment: conversations between actors about their interpretation of, for example,
Measure for Measure
's Isabella or
As You Like It
's Rosalind, are revelatory about the sexual politics of specific productions at specific historical moments. Barbara Hodgdon, W.B. Worthen, Carol Rutter, and Bridget Escolme are all writers on Shakespeare in the theater who are methodologically sophisticated and genuinely revealing about performance: any of their works is well worth reading.

There is no single way of interpreting Shakespeare: here we propose some recent survey volumes, all of which introduce a range of interpretative methods and frameworks and offer extensive suggestions in turn for further reading. Finally, we highlight some specific critical works to which we find ourselves returning for their acumen and provocation.

There are any number of guides to Shakespeare: particularly useful are Robert Shaughnessy's
The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare
(2011), which works through the plays and their historical, theatrical, and critical contexts; Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin's
Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide
(2003), which tries to set out, with detailed examples, different interpretative approaches; and
The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare
(2011), edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, which covers different historical and critical aspects and has good suggestions for further reading. Russ McDonald collects significant twentieth-century criticism in his
Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000
(2003). There are two excellent series, the Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford University Press) and Arden Critical Companions (Arden, Bloomsbury), giving up-to-date interventions in a range of topics, from biography to religion to literary theory. Works such as Dympna Callaghan (ed.),
A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare
(2000), Sonia Massai (ed.),
World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance
(2005), and Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds.),
Post-Colonial Shakespeares
(1998), give a sense of how the field has changed. We, and our students, love
Doing Shakespeare
, Simon Palfrey's brilliant book of close reading (2nd edn., 2011); Marjorie Garber's collection of provocative essays,
Profiling Shakespeare
(2008), is similarly lively. Michael Neill's
Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama
(2000) offers lucid, humanely historicist arguments.