From the Elephant's Back (18 page)

Now, I spoke of him as a lucky man and I really believe that good luck did follow him all the way through from the very beginning, first of all in his job. The scholars try and tell us that the Elizabethan stage evolved out of the morality play, but in fact I think that we would be right in considering it a really new invention; it leaped pristine onto the scene thanks to Marlowe and Kyd
[3]
and perhaps some unnamed other playwrights too. The ordinary dramatic structure of the morality play is so totally different from a play which has character motivation, has plot, and has pace, that I think we would really be right in thinking that someone like Marlowe had placed in Shakespeare's hands the equivalent of a movie camera. I think personally of the Elizabethan stage as a creation to compare with the creation of the cinema of our own epoch. Incidentally, the conditions of writing for the stage were not very dissimilar from the conditions that are obtained today in a modern film studio. It was all team work and done at a terrific pace and very carelessly, and the miracle is that Shakespeare again had the extraordinary luck to work for the same company through his life. Many of the others changed, they were all selling their plays to different companies, and many of them were too gentlemanly to see them performed. He was the only one inside the theatre, and he was actually engaged in the work of mounting them; but he was also able to write them himself and this gave him a stranglehold on the Elizabethan theatre. In fact, on his arrival, at the age of about twenty-eight in London, he is first announced to us by a terrific attack by another dramatist called Greene, who calls him the “upstart crow”:
[4]
the upstart crow beautified without feathers, who thinks that he can bump us out blank verse with the best of them. The considered “upstart crow” at this moment was doing something rather wicked. Up to now these young gentlemen were from the university, and I am not trying to be satirical; the distinction is a terribly important one in the sociological sense. The players were really considered vagabonds and any transgression of the law put them in a very awkward position, whereas the gentleman could recite his neat verse, and he who has been to the university did not have to be a noble's son. None of the others were. Ben Jonson was a bricklayer's son, and Marlowe was a cobbler's son, but he did not happen to have the university education. From the point of view of the law, it put them in a much stronger position than an ordinary player who was classed socially with a footpad or a vagabond. And I think this is really the reason, not snobbery, that we find these complaints in Shakespeare. I think he wanted to have the security of the added gentlemanly position, because Ben Jonson nearly went to the gallows and the penalties were extreme; Nashe had his ears cropped. It did not pay to have opinions; the list of people who suffered for one reason or another, or the list of people who were imprisoned, is quite impressive, and there were even more savage sentences. There was a gentleman called Stubbs who had some opinions about the French marriage; they were quite sound opinions, but it is a fact that he had opinions and they objected to them. His sentence was an extremely severe one. He was sentenced to have his right arm cut off, on the block, at Smithfield, by the public hangman, with the hangman's knife. He submitted to it quite calmly, and when it was over he raised his hat with the other hand and said “God save the Queen.” At which point the reporter says: “The multitude was strangely silent”; but you see it was not all that easy. Now in Shakespeare's case, he was almost the only dramatist (I cannot think, in fact, of another off-hand) who did not even
seem
to get into trouble with the authorities. I suspect that he learnt his lesson very rapidly. We must imagine the London of that epoch as being something about the size of a park, perhaps 250,000 people, or Aix-en-Provence or Arles say. If he seems a bit of an enigma to us, he was certainly of flesh and blood to his contemporaries, and they saw him not only on the stage but walking about this town. One of the architectural features of this town was a row of rotting heads on pikes, along the walls, and this was a permanent reminder that opinions were dangerous and could land one in awful trouble.
[5]

This sounds like a
boutade
but in fact what would be horrifying to writers today is the state of Elizabethan censorship, and yet, I am not sure that it was not precisely the narrowness and censoriousness of the Elizabethan in general that assisted Shakespeare. It prevented him from becoming either a sociologist, a politician, or a prophet. Now if we could do that for Sartre!
[6]
Well, I think the theme of luck runs all the way to the trough. Few of the people of that period had the luck, for example, to find a livelihood and not to be obliged to adopt an ignominious begging position in front of a noble Lord for trivial presents or perhaps a tiny job as a tutor. While he bemoaned his social status, the fact that he was an ordinary player put the machinery into his hands to earn a livelihood and he seems to care about that very much. I think perhaps independent spirits do not like to beg and borrow, and they must prefer to earn their keep. At any rate, one would not classify as anything but a successful life that of a man who at the age of thirty-five already had money invested in Stratford and who was able to retire to the best house at forty-five or thereabout and live the rest of his short life spending very large sums of money and enjoying himself not with the nobility, because the last drinking bout that he had where he caught the fever that carried him off was with fellow-poets. Every attestation by his contemporaries suggests not only a brilliant actor but a very good-tempered, even, smooth-witted and pleasant person and a humorist. Well, if this distinct pattern is right, as I see it, and luck was the basic thing, he had nothing to do but be himself, and this of course is the hardest thing for any writer to be. It is hard to take time off to be yourself when you have all sorts of other preoccupations. I suspect that now we don't really talk about Shakespeare when we are talking about Shakespeare. For example he must have judged his work by the really acid test of theatrical efficacy, and I think we tend to see him more or less as a novelist because I have only seen about eight of his plays in my life, and I am perfectly sure that is about average for most people. To talk fully about his complete canon I think actors and
metteurs en scène
[7]
would be the people who are always more fruitful in discussions on Shakespeare because they see more of him.

Incidentally, another point which I have overlooked terribly, and which is important is that despite the fact that he was in the public eye and always acting and so on, he lived a life of relative anonymity. You see, of his plays there were sixteen piracies during his life-time and many of them very corrupt; there was no copyright, so the printer could print anything that he picked up, and the author could say nothing about it; that is how the sonnets got out. In the obvious sixteen piracies there were perhaps four or five plays which were tolerably accurate, but we had to wait, the world had to wait, until seven years after his death before the big Folio came out, done by his friends, and in that Folio, which had been lying in the strong rooms of the company all these years, there were twenty-one plays that we would not have got if his friends had not put them together. Those plays were not for publication. They were the property of a company of actors, and they were religiously locked up at night after the show. Of course, occasionally, an impecunious actor sold one, or a company went broke, or one was stolen, and they even ingeniously invented two types of shorthand to try to take down plays, so that they would send a spy, and we suspect that the first version of
Hamlet
that we have was a bad stenographic copy taken by someone who went into the theatre and whose shorthand was not up to UNESCO standards.

I don't want to play with the obvious because to place him is not necessary, he placed himself so very squarely all over the world, but if there is an enigma about him, and we seem to feel there is, I think it is created by ourselves. He really was flesh and blood to the contemporaries who saw him walk about, who heard him act, and we know more about him than we know about any other playwright. There does not seem to me to be any mystery, and the materials we have in the form of gossips and anecdotes about him add up to quite an effective picture of temperament. If his life seems a little too uneventful, it is because the Romantics put it into our heads that artists must have dramatic lives in order to be artists at all. I suspect that the reason we find him delineated so vaguely today is because he has become half a god and half a heavy industry. The titles to godship were supplied largely by Coleridge with help of German critics, who were very romantic, and that side of him is rather cloudy. The heavy industry is being supplied by the Americans, in terms of doctorates and scholarships, and in justice to the Americans, we must say, and this is very important, that in the last twenty-five years, all the best scholarship, the most acute work and the most profound work on the Elizabethans has been done by them and they are clearly leading the field in Elizabethan studies. You cannot move without falling in something really critical by an American scholar. As I say, this part-deity part-machine for producing doctorates and theses was apparently a man walking about in the streets of a small town of 250,000 inhabitants, well-known as an actor. The panoramic view he had is also quite explicable I think; he did not have a life as limited as a modern novelist does, who has very little chance, unless he is taken up by society, of seeing the nobility, of meeting people of cultural or any kind of consequence. Though this tiny little world of London of Shakespeare's time was in some ways very small, from the point of view of population, it was an extremely cosmopolitan world; it was open wide to all continents through the river, and it did centre on the whole Court. I don't know how many times an actor in his career today can count upon going to a command performance; I think probably twice or three times if he is lucky. There, they were called to court every week, every ten days, every month for a celebration, and they were quite used to it; it was rather a villagy atmosphere, you must imagine, and they were allowed on equal terms: all the noble people in the land as well as the most sensitive, youthful members of the nobility of that period and the inordinately rich. The suggestion is that it was due to him: the goddess luck again who made Shakespeare a loan and enabled him to buy a share in the company, because Shakespeare's money was made from the company and it came from the public. It was not just handouts from peers and exchanges with dedications. Then, finally, of course, the mystery of why in his will there were no books. And this is rather a mystery. It has been presumed that he bought the best house in Stratford as a sort of status symbol, the poor boy who wants to come back and show that he is a person of distinction now. But I wonder whether he could have been that. At any rate there are no books listed in the will; it is possible he did not like literature.

The scholars are right, of course, when they warn us against the danger of trying to deduce biographical facts about Shakespeare from stray hints in his plays—for despite the ardent and painstaking work of generations of experts, the canon is still in a state of inextricable confusion, not only as regards accurate chronology but also concerning the actual extent of his collaboration with others.

When he died, no less that twenty-one plays were still in manuscript, locked up presumably as part of the property of the playhouse in which he was a partner. The first complete collection was issued seven years after his death by two of his stage associates. He did not supervise this great Folio volume.
[8]
Many of these plays are retouched versions of old plays by other men which have now disappeared. All save two are based on plots taken from others' books. He was a great borrower, imitator, copier, and collaborator. He appears not to have been at all inventive. Yet in the midst of all this confusion and doubt there is a…something, a Voice which is completely and authentically his own. In poetic range, melody, and orchestration his work is unique, unequalled even in that age of giants.

Who was he? It is strange to know so much about him and yet to find him an enigma. We do in fact know more about him than about any other Elizabethan writer, yet we do not know the interesting things. It is rather like trying to study the destiny of someone from the stubs in his cheque-book. He has successfully buried himself under the immense reticence of his art. Even the world-weary smiling face of the only certain portrait gives little away; in colour he suggests someone who had perhaps some Welsh blood in his veins. Perhaps like his admired Montaigne
[9]
he had a Jewish strain in him? We cannot be certain. Everything is surmise, every new portrait must be, in the nature of things, a personal adventure.

But though the plays are not the happiest of hunting grounds for clues as to what he was really like, the poetic productions might seem safer ground, since at least we can be certain that these are all his own work. The two long verse-narratives,
Venus and Adonis
and
Lucrece
, show signs of careful preparation for the press. The first came out when he was twenty-nine, the second a year later; they were both best-sellers and established his poetic reputation once and for all. Moreover they went on selling all through his life and beyond it—the first passing through seventeen editions between 1593 and 1675. But it was the stage that made him rich, not poetry; starting from humble origins, the son of a wool merchant in Stratford, he enjoyed a meteoric career both as an actor and as a playwright.

We can be less certain of the famous sonnets which were pirated and yet…nobody reading them could believe they were not by Shakespeare; moreover, even in an age of sonnet sequences, they are extraordinarily unlike any other production. Whatever the scholars say, they are not just exercises in a form or poems written to secure a needed patronage. Finally, it is quite impossible to believe that they do not refer to actual people and events, though who the people may have been and when the events took place is another matter. It is as well to take up a definite position on this vexing matter right away so that those who reject this view of them may be spared the trouble of reading further.