Shakespeare: A Life (61 page)

Also he could hope to please London's apprentices and servants, many
of whom were female. Psychologically the plays are rooted in the
realities of exile and in his view of society's corruption. They show a
fascination with strangeness and imaginative disturbance, and what
Michael Billington (speaking of Lear) calls his awareness 'of the
precarious absurdity of human existence'.
¹⁵

It might be appropriate if George Wilkins, a hater of women, did
suggest the topic of Pericles. Consorting with leading men of the
theatre, Wilkins, unbelievably, was at that time staying out of trouble,
neither thumping his whores nor stealing anybody's clothes; most of
his crimes were ahead of him. We know that Wilkins had collaborated
with John Day and William Rowley on a play about recent and real
adventures in the East, The Travels of the Three English Brothers,
performed in 1607. This work has been compared with Pericles, which
Wilkins could have begun that year. In some ways Pericles' first two
acts suggest his style, and Shakespeare may have completed or revised
the drama, which was followed in 1608 by Wilkins's prose tale The
Painfull Adventures of Pericles. This hypothetical view of its
authorship, though, is a little weakened by the fact that Pericles
exists only in an irregular, flawed quarto issued by Henry Gosson in
1609. Most of its passages, however, make perfectly good sense, and we
surely have more to learn from Gosson's text. A minor city publisher,
Gosson served as a legal guarantor for Wilkins when he nearly killed a
woman in 1611. At any rate, the play's first two acts are more banal
than anything Shakespeare is known to have written, but with stolid
efficiency they fit an unusual scheme.

Strikingly, Pericles brings on stage a reincarnation of the
fourteenthcentury poet John Gower, who in his Confessio Amantis had put
aside moral concerns to relate over 400 tales about love in a simple,
direct style. Gower had included a version of the story of Apollonius
of Tyre, upon which Pericles is based; and yet Shakespeare also takes
details from Lawrence Twine's romance version, The Patterne of
Painefull Adventures, first issued in 1576. As old Gower, Chaucer's
friend, introduces each act of Pericles in a crabbed, antique style, the
stage action becomes pageant-like, with widely dispersed episodes.
Having found the secret of Antiochus's incest with his daughter in
Greece, Pericles

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is melancholy, passive, and victimized despite his goodness, and yet
his adventures as a jousting knight or a shipwrecked prince bring him
no self-understanding. In the first four acts, he is barely more than an
enduring folk-tale hero. In his wanderings and sufferings, in his
apparent loss of Thaisa his wife, and then of his daughter Marina, he
seems in flight from himself and also from a recognition of the
possibility of incest. In Shakespeare's view, the human mind
constructs such walls of self-justification that only trials worse
than Job's may possibly let in light. When implicitly the hero faces
Antiochus's secret at last, he is able to save Marina and then recover
his lost wife. In its strong images of female virtue as distinct from
female sexuality, the play's view of womanhood is less contradictory,
than Shakespeare's view could have been, but the work is a powerfully
affecting if dreamlike study of guilt and fate.

Much lighter, and yet more complex, Cymbeline highlights among other
topics British history, a dispersed royal family, and supernatural
intervention. The play has a long, threading, inclusive plot which
unfolds with a deceptive casualness, even as Shakespeare lightly
derides some of his own past works. It is a surprisingly difficult play,
and we may stilt be 'far from having got Cymbeline in focus', as
Emrys Jones once observed. A critic of modern stage performance notes
that the text is fearfully elusive, 'constantly shifting its mood and
its ground' and 'apt at any moment to mock itself, to send itself up'.
¹⁶

Not that Cymbeline's themes are wholly parodic or comic. For the
nation's chroniclers, as for Spenser in The Faerie Queene, the time of
the British monarch Cymbeline had been almost uneventful: peace was
its mysterious purpose, for near the end of Cymbeline's thirtyfive-year
reign, which began in 33 BC, Christ was born. The calm of the pax
Romana had a spiritual meaning; but Spenser adds that, because the
island king had refused to pay tribute to Rome, it was in his reign
that the struggle for British freedom, culminating with King Arthur,
really began. Alert to these sources, Shakespeare contrived a lively
story for the public, for wits and lawyers at Blackfriars, and also for
the court, in writing Cymbeline around 1610.

And it has references which might fit 4. June, when the royal Henry
was created Prince of Wales and when James Hay, King James's

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oldest Scottish friend, was made a Knight of the Bath. Shakespeare
turns to Holinshed's History of Scotland to bring in the exploits of an
earlier Scottish Hay. Sixteen times Cymbeline refers to the Welsh port
of 'Milford' or ' Milford Haven', which absurdly becomes the nearest
embarkation-point for the Continent from London. It is perhaps not
enough for critics to tell us that Milford in Wales was a thriving port
(which it was), since Kentish ports were also active: the dramatist,
who gives Bohemia a sea coast in The Winter's Tale, could read a map.
Shakespeare's geography is symbolic, and much in his day was being
made of the fact that James's great-grandfather Henry VII had landed
at Milford Haven in 1485 to conquer a tyrant and win the crown.
'Milford' suggests James's royal line from Henry VII, and a native
resistance to tyranny. But if Britain's first resistance hero was
Cymbeline, this figure in the play begins as a duped fool wed to a
malevolent Queen. When she dies, Cymbeline emerges from mental stupor,
and Britons resist the Romans only to make lasting peace.

Such resistance has a parallel in the spiritual freeing of mankind
which Christ brings -- not that this is made explicit. Disguising his
seriousness, the author mocks his own plays and a few of his hoary
devices, and, though he has sent up his art in A Midsummer Night's
Dream and elsewhere, here self-mockery is ubiquitous, permeating the
play's situations and texture. Brian Gibbons notes 'the extraordinary
frequency with which Shakespeare makes apparent allusions to his own
earlier work' in Cymbeline, which has references to Romeo, Henry V,
All's Well, Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and even Lucrece.
¹⁷
Here, for a final time, the device of turning a 'girl' into a 'boy'
is used -- as if in ironic apology for a parade of sexual changes
feigned by Julia, Jessica, Portia, Nerissa, Rosalind, and Viola. The
heroine Imogen (or as some would have her name, Innogen) becomes the
boy Fidele, only to wake up in a grave beside her headless, oafish
suitor Cloten.
¹⁸
Also Shakespeare again takes up just that distrust of female
sexuality which appears in his Sonnets, Measure for Measure, and
several tragedies. Unhistorically, he gives Cymbeline a daughter as
well as two sons (thus matching King James's family), but the sons
Arviragus and Guiderius are living in a rustic, prehistoric Britain
with old Belarius, who has fled the court. At home is the king's

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daughter Imogen, who is divided from her husband, Posthumus, because he is not of royal blood.

Though far off in Rome, Posthumus is still threatened by Imogen's
sexuality: he is unable to respond to love that is sensual as well as
spiritual. The author reaches through Othello to transfer the problem
from the tragic to the ridiculous. Thus the hero takes a wager on
Imogen's chastity, virtually wills himself to be a cuckold, and, after
believing Iachimo has slept with her, plans to kill Imogen. Hardly a
dutiful Desdemona, Imogen shows her mettle, as when the servant
Pisanio laments tha he has been told to kill her:

PISANIO. Since I received command to do this business I have not slept one wink. IMOGEN. Do't, and to bed, then.

(III. iv. 99-100)

The plot takes her safely into Wales where she finds her royal
brothers. Ever more troubled, Posthumous has thought of her as male
property. He would tear her limbs and destroy 'the woman's part in
me'; he fears betrayal by all women including his mother, and his phobia
leads to disaster before his ultimate regeneration. At the play's
centre is a colossal misogyny, too dark and idiosyncratic to suggest any
deliberate self-burlesque. Yet there is enough self-mockery in
Cymbeline to suggest its author's need to be rid of a burden of
attitudes he has previously dramatized, and, with the help of folklore
elements and a magical view of events, the play is impressionistic
and exuberantly fresh in its exploration of history, myth, and male
conceit.

Less sprawling and somewhat
less topically allusive, The Winter's Tale clearly appealed to the
wits at Blackfriars and to the Globe's public alike. Its sheep-shearing
festival in Act IV and several other scenes so closely evoke
Warwickshire that it might well have been penned at New Place. There
is an influence from the dance of satyrs in Ben Jonson's Masque of
Oberon, staged at court, on 1 January 1611, but there are signs that
Shakespeare added his own dance of satyrs (in IV. iv) after writing
the main text. Simon Forman the astrologer saw The Winter's Tale at
the Globe on 15 May 1611, and after it was acted at court, in November,
it remained in the King's men's repertoire for twenty-nine years.

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One has only to read Greene's Pandosto, a very popular Tudor romance
and the drama's main source, to see how much Shakespeare owes to his
former maligner's pattern of contrasts. Not so savage as Pandosto, and
not so happy at first in marriage, Leontes flies into a jealous rage
at his wife Hermione for her supposed affair with his childhood friend
Polixenes. It has been said that Leontes suffers from delusional
madness, or from memories of a homoerotic boyhood, but the text
carries one quickly on to consequences: he orders his wife's newborn
infant, Perdita, to be burned alive, as if Queen Mary's martyr-fires
were still alight, but the baby is left on Bohemia's sea coast to be
found by a shepherd. Believing that Hermione and the child are dead,
Leontes spends the next sixteen years in prayer and repentance, even
as Stratford's college of priests had prayed round the year. The
burning of a child (which is only threatened) need not evoke martyrs,
but the suffering in Greene's Pandosto is spiritualized. To be sure,
Leontes still doubts Perdita's 'worth' after his ordeal.

A terse, funny link between the wintry opening and the earthy scenes
of Bohemia is in the famous stage-direction, 'Exit, pursued by a
bear'. Perdita's deliverer Antigonus is eaten by an animal which
suggests the Candlemas Bear, the sluggish creature which, in legend,
emerged on 2 February, Candlemas Day, to say how long winter still had
to run.

But in the subtext, as it
were, of this play, Shakespeare emphasizes cruelty, egotism, and
blindness. Earlier, when persecuted by her husband, Hermione remarks,
'The Emperor of Russia was my father'. Jacobeans perhaps would have
remembered Ivan IV or 'the Terrible' ( 1530-84) who saw treachery
everywhere, killed his son in a fit of rage, and at Moscow released
untamed bears on victims.
¹⁹
Shakespeare implies that the cruel bear is not far from our lives,
and his Bohemian scenes, for all their jollity, suggest his underlying
disbelief in redemption. Perdita, though superficially observant, is
timid and unresolved until fortune happens to favour her; her lover
Florizel boasts of an inheritance he will get at his father's death;
and the comic Autolycus (whose namesake in Greek myth is descended
from Hermes, god of crooks) knows the stupidity of countryfolk. As a
petty thief and conman who pretends to be a mugger's victim, Autolycus
takes the

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sheep-shearing as an event in which pastoral folk are to be 'fleeced'.
He delights in his own roguery, sings well, and adds to the play's
charm, but Shakespeare's social pessimism did not pass away with this
work.

That his indirections, late in
his career, are paths to a sharper social realism is perhaps clear in
The Tempest. This play opens with a famous
coup de théâtre,
rather better suited to stage effects at Blackfriars than at the
Globe, in which a ship carrying Prospero's enemies is swept to a rocky
isle. Scene i includes nautical orders which a crew might hear, in a
storm, to get a ship to veer from rocks dangerously close on the lee
side. Books on navigation existed, but the poet had no printed
seamanship manual, though he might have found nautical word-lists in
manuscript (as Ralph Crane copied some). He could have talked to 'old
salts'; but the scene reflects very up-to-date sailing tactics. What
is certain, however, is that he knew the so-called ' Bermuda pamphlets'
and some of the men associated with the Virginia Company's
enterprise.

In May 1609, nine ships
carrying 500 colonists under Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Summers
had set sail to America to reinforce the colony at Jamestown, founded
in the spring of 1607. After two years, Virginia's colony was barely
surviving -- about half of the settlers died each winter. In an
unusual storm, Gates and Summers were driven on the Bermudas, before
managing to sail to the mainland; and news of their ordeal duly
reached London. Shakespeare evidently read an account of the storm, of
Jamestown's plight, and of hostile natives in a letter by William
Strachey, dated 15 July 1610, then in manuscript. He knew some of
Gates's friends, as well as Southampton and Pembroke, both financially
interested in Virginia, and he possibly heard from men such as Sir
Robert Sidney, Sir Henry Ncvile, or even Lord De la Warr, who was to
be governor of the colony.

Yet it was
not enough for him to seek 'insider information' about ships,
American Indians, or the policies and practices of colonial rule,
since he had to count on what audiences would know, or on what was
being talked about. By 1609, some in London had argued on good
evidence that Virginia had been settled by natives who therefore owned
the land along the James River, and whom Europeans had no

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