30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (8 page)

What has been at the root of this question about Shakespeare is not really the nature of his geographical realism or otherwise. Rather, it has become a bone of contention in the “authorship question” (see Myth 30). Anti-Stratfordians have often claimed that Shakespeare's plays require direct knowledge of foreign locations, and that, since there is no evidence that Shakespeare had such experience, it is more likely that an alternative candidate who traveled in Europe wrote the plays. That Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, traveled as a young man in the 1570s is often cited as crucial to his claims to authorship of the Shakespeare canon; more difficult to explain is how he achieved this with his negligible poetic skill. If Shakespeare's career suggests it is possible to write great plays set in foreign locations without traveling, then Oxford's gives us the corroborating suggestion: the experience of travel does not necessarily lead to great writing.

Notes

¹
 Samuel Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare: A Documentary Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 118–19.

²
 John Aubrey,
Brief Lives
, ed. Richard Barber (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1982), p. 90.

³
 See Charles Nicholl,
The Reckoning
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), p. 92.

⁴
 “Fair Verona to Stage Weddings on Juliet's Balcony,”
Independent
, 14 March 2009.

⁵
 Reviews from John O'Connor and Katharine Goodland,
A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance
, vol. 1:
Great Britain, 1970–2005
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1496–1544; for Canada and the USA, see vol. 3 (
A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance since 1991
), pp. 1882–1970.

⁶
 Jonathan Bate,
Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare
(London: Penguin, 2008), p. 305.

By the standards of our own day, the drama of the Elizabethan period is obviously, distastefully, politically incorrect. Minorities are everywhere disenfranchised: blacks, women, Jews, Catholics, servants, New World inhabitants, animals. The question this myth poses is whether Shakespeare's plays rise above the ideology of his age in a humane transcendental vision, subscribe to the prevailing codes of his culture (wholeheartedly or uneasily), or sit on the fence; and whether our ability to see sympathy for minorities in his plays reflects our twenty-first-century desires rather than the plays' actuality or potential.

Let us begin with an apparently straightforward example: hunting. In the Elizabethan period foxhunting and the hunting of hares was both a recreation and a standard means of pest control. Foxes and hares were not the only quarry; deer were hunted too. Shakespeare's images of hunting are always of deer and evince nothing but sympathy for the innocent, victimized animal. The slaughtered children of Macduff are “murdered deer” (
Macbeth
4.3.207). The raped Lavinia is a “dainty doe” hunted and cornered “not … with horse or hound” but by rapists (
Titus Andronicus
2.2.26, 25). The harmlessly deaf, unfit Julius Caesar is butchered: “Here wast thou bayed, brave heart; / … here thy hunters stand / … O world, thou wast the forest to this hart; / … How like a deer strucken by many princes / Dost thou here lie” (
Julius Caesar
3.1.205–11; the pun on heart/hart is common). Duke Senior is troubled by conscience when killing deer in the Forest of Ardenne (his point is political: the deer are “native burghers” unfairly gored in their own territory:
As You Like It
2.1.22–5); the Princess of France voices similar scruples in
Love's Labour's Lost
(4.1.24–35). Such sympathetic reactions were atypical in the sixteenth century: the other notable exceptions are More, Erasmus, and Montaigne.
¹
So here the evidence lines up quite straightforwardly: Shakespeare's images are consistently sympathetic and this goes against the prevailing norm.

In
Taming of the Shrew
the shrewish Katherine is described in (different) animal terms: she is a wasp, a wildcat, a shrew (a shrew is both a small mammal and a metaphor for a talkative woman). This play's attitude to women—and to its central female, Katherine—is difficult to assess. The title seems to offer an apparently straightforward summary of the plot: a woman of spirit has her personality extinguished. Shrew-taming was a stereotypical comic subject, in prose, ballads, and drama (on the English stage it goes back to Noah's wife in the mystery cycles). But, as critics note, Shakespeare's shrew is depicted more sympathetically than her predecessors. Katherine has a short soliloquy in which she explains why she speaks. She says, “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart” (4.3.77). Anger? She does not identify the cause of her anger, although we might deduce it to be female stereotyping. Early in the play she complains about her sister Bianca's apparent docility. “Her
silence
flouts me” she says of Bianca's behavior; Lucentio says he has fallen in love with Bianca's “silence” and “mild behaviour” (2.1.29, 1.1.70–1; our italics). Katherine's soliloquy continues, “or else my heart concealing it [her anger] will break” (4.3.78). As Coppélia Kahn points out, Katherine is simply saying that speech is “psychologically necessary for her survival.”
²
Katherine's line is both poignant and full of insight.

So, at the start of the play, Shakespeare presents a binary view of women. Society divides women into silent (and therefore marriageable) or talkative (and therefore unmarriageable). Despite this apparent sympathy for Katherine, the last scene presents her as a dutiful wife. She gives a long speech—her longest in the play—explaining that a wife owes obedience to her husband. The speech makes modern audiences and readers uncomfortable, and productions, like critics, have various ways of rationalizing it. It is seen as ironic: although she describes a reciprocal relationship in which men work hard and women obey, the fact is, none of the men in the play behave as she describes (caveat: forty-three lines of irony are hard to sustain in the theater). It is seen as genuine love: Katherine has fallen for her trainer (caveat: can love be inculcated through cruelty?). It is seen as a performance: Katherine is performing simply to win a bet. It is seen as a clever arrangement: Katherine ends the play doing what she wants—speaking—but has found out how to do it with society's approval. If a husband invites or commands you to speak, you can do so for forty-three lines (caveat: is this not a pyrrhic victory? It may profit Katherine but not the cause of women if one gains freedom in private only by acting submissively in public). It is seen as evidence of a new, expanded, happy Katherine who has learned the pointlessness and unacceptability of her previous persona (caveat: is it offensive to suggest that a woman can only find herself with the help of a man?). As our parenthetical counters indicate, it is not clear where this last scene directs our views.

How might the Elizabethans have viewed it? We can perhaps approach that question by looking at a sequel to
The Taming of the Shrew—The Tamer Tamed
—written by John Fletcher in 1611. In this play Katherine has died and Petruccio takes a second wife, one who loses no time in showing him who's boss. “You have been famous for a woman tamer,” Petruccio's martial new wife tells him, “And bear the feared name of a brave wife-breaker: / A woman now shall take those honours off” (1.3.266–8).
³
This plot seems to indicate that Elizabethans viewed
The Taming of the Shrew
as concluding with the husband in control and the wife tamed; Fletcher's sequel reverses the positions. If that is the case, readings of
The Taming of the Shrew
in which Katherine triumphs reflect our desire to rehabilitate a morally unpalatable play, a play that was of its time. And that time is the 1590s.

Shakespeare was not drawing from life in the 1590s when he created his memorable Jewish moneylender, Shylock, in
The Merchant of Venice
: since their banishment in the thirteenth century there had been no Jews living publicly in England, although historians have found evidence of a small, secret community in Elizabethan London. But Shylock, although he is present in only five scenes of the play, has become its most prominent character, with a cultural presence towering over his role in the plot. In
The Merchant of Venice
he lends Antonio the money to give to his friend Bassanio who wants to go and woo a “lady richly left” (1.1.161), Portia of Belmont. There is no love lost between Shylock and Antonio: Shylock bears Antonio an “ancient grudge” and declares: “I hate him for he is a Christian” (1.3.45, 40). Antonio freely admits that he has spat on his adversary and spurned him, and feels justified because of Shylock's profession of lending money at interest (1.3.128–35). Shakespeare's technique here is to show us the position of outsider from inside: we are shown more of Shylock and his character than would be strictly necessary were he simply the comic villain. While he does play the conventional role of the blocking figure who must be circumvented in order to get a happily comic ending, he is also the romantic comedy's enabler: at once repressive father figure (to Jessica) and sugar daddy (indirectly to Bassanio). When he talks of Jessica, who has eloped with her Christian lover Lorenzo and is squandering her father's money, he picks out a lost turquoise: “I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys” (3.1.113–15). The tone is sentimental (we never hear of Leah except at this moment, and although editors suggest she is Shylock's dead wife, we are never sure: it's one of those areas of opacity that makes characters seem so lifelike, as discussed in Myth 29).

Shylock repeatedly exceeds the role appointed him in the play, by occupying the drama's major interpretative space: questions about his motivations and behavior dominate any production or reading of
The Merchant of Venice
. And while there have been some profoundly anti-semitic readings of the play which rejoice in Shylock's enforced conversion in the fourth act, since the end of the nineteenth century it has been much more common to see Shylock as a figure torn between worlds and to sympathize with his outsider status in the play. And since the Holocaust, of course, it has been, rightly, impossible to present Shylock as a racially typed villain, although the playwright Arnold Wesker is among those who have suggested it is not a play that should be performed. In fact
The Merchant of Venice
was not a favorite play of the Nazis: while the long association of German writers and thinkers with Shakespeare meant he was somewhat protected from the Third Reich's nationalistic suspicion of foreign art, the marriage of Jessica to an “Aryan” meant that the play was performed only in a complicated adaptation in which Jessica was not really Shylock's daughter (the Nazis seem to have preferred the virile militarism and coldness of
Coriolanus
).

The Merchant of Venice
also features a black prince of Morocco who tells Portia “Mislike me not for my complexion” (2.1.1). Othello, also a native of Morocco, has no need to say the same to the citizens of the Venice in which his play is located; the Duke honors and trusts him as a military leader, a protector of Venice to whom the senate turns first in time of threat, and Brabantio, a senator, invites him to his home (“oft”) and listens to the stories of his adventuring life. Yet by Act 5 Emilia can protest that her mistress, Othello's wife Desdemona, was “too fond of her most filthy bargain” (5.2.164). Statements like this are partly responsible for the view that miscegenation is the root of this tragedy.

In its Mediterranean locations and combination of geo- and sexual politics,
Othello
shows its links with the contemporary vogue for travel plays in the 1590s and early 1600s. Plays such as the anonymous
Sir Thomas Stukeley
(1605) and
The Travels of the Three English Brothers
(1607, by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins) are based on true stories; others, such as Thomas Heywood's
The Fair Maid of the West
(published 1631 but probably written c.1597–1603) are fictional. All are tales of travel and adventure beyond Europe and of assimilation. In
The Travels of Three English Brothers
one of the brothers actually marries an Ottoman princess and has a baby girl. These plays explore the threat to identity when Christians turn Turk either literally (changing religion, undergoing circumcision) or metaphorically, living and dying abroad (
A Christian Turned Turk
is the title of a play by Robert Daborne in 1612); they explore the physical threat when exotic black women tempt white men sexually and lure them to destruction. In
Othello
Shakespeare both follows this vogue and inverts it.
Othello
is a play in which an African travels to Europe and in which a Muslim becomes a Christian; in
Othello
the exotic other woman is white, not black, and disaster is caused by her chastity, not her sexuality. As Jean Howard observes, the novelty in
Othello
is seeing the experience of otherness from the African's, not the European's, point of view.
⁴

Something similar happens in
Sir Thomas More
(written and revised about the same time as
Othello
according to the play's latest editor, John Jowett, who places
More
's composition
c
.1600 and its revisions in 1604).
Sir Thomas More
is about two things: immigrants to London (the word for foreigners is “strangers,” a much stronger word than now) and the downfall of Sir Thomas More. In the first half of the play More calms the rioting Londoners, He does this in a speech, added by Shakespeare in 1604, which invites the Londoners to imagine the situation if the positions were reversed: that is, if they were banished:

whither would you go?

What country, by the nature of your error,

Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders