Shakespeare: A Life (67 page)

ity shown the buttoned doublet as scarlet, under a black loose gown,
the eyes as hazel, and the hair and beard as auburn. Beneath is an
inscription which begins in Latin,
JUDICIO PYLIIUM, GENIO SOCRATUM, ARTE MARONEM: | TERRA TEGIT, POPULUS MÆRET, OLYMPUS HABET.
(THE EARTH COVERS ONE WHO IS A NESTOR IN JUDGEMENT; THE PEOPLE MOURN
FOR A SOCRATES IN GENIUS; OLYMPUS HAS A VIRGIL IN ART.) This legend
continues in legible English, although the stone-cutter erringly has
carved 'SIEH' FOR'SITH':

STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOU BY SO
FAST?
READ IF THOU CANST, WHOM ENVIOUS DEATH
HATH PLAST,
WITH IN THIS MONUMENT SHAKSPEARE:
WITHWHOME,
QUICK NATURE DIDE: WHOSE NAME DOTH
DECK Υ+S TOMBE,
FAR MORE THEN COST: SIEH ALL, ΥΤHE HATH,
WRITT,
LEAVES LIVING ART, BUTPAGE, TO SERVE HIS
WITT.

OBIIT AÑO DO
¹
1616
ÆTATIS. 53 DIE 23 AP
^R
.

In addition, a darkly concise legend was cut in the playwright's grave
slab, though it was said in the seventeenth century that this was
devised by Shakespeare. Nobody has thrown about his bones, anyway:

GOOD FREND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE, TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE:
BLESTE BE ΥE MAN ΥΤ SPARES THES STONES, AND CURST BE HE ΥΤ MOVES MY
BONES.

Stratford
honoured him, but the tribute paid to him by his fellows was far more
remarkable. The book trade had become livelier than ever, and some of
the thirty or so bookshops at Paul's Churchyard often stocked foreign
offerings. Twice a year a
Catalogus Universalis
listing
worthy German and Latin books exhibited at the Frankfurt Fair reached
London (such a list, one feels, would have amused Prince

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Hamlet and Horatio). In 1622 as it happened, an English reprint of the
Catalogus
with an English supplement listed the following: 'Playes, written by
M. William Shakespeare,
all in one volume, printed by
Isaack Jaggard,
in fol[io].'
³⁵
No such book really existed in 1622, but at the office of old, blind
William Jaggard, who once had irritated the dramatist, printers were
then at work on the great Folio of thirty-six of Shakespeare's plays.
The Folio, issued in November 1623, involved an unusual act of
retrieval and restoration on the part of its editors John Heminges and
Henry Condell.
³⁶
Eighteen of the poet's dramas were printed here for the first time,
and so saved from possible loss. The volume was costly to produce; and
its syndicate of publishers, in which the chief spirits were Edward
Blount and old Jaggard's son, Isaac, faced a loss. The work was not
undertaken chiefly for profit. Nobody knows who proposed it. The
typesetting of thirty-six plays, some from printed copy but others
from scripts in varying hands and in varying degrees of legibility,
for double-columned folio pages, was a colossal task. It may have
involved sweat, and we know that it involved urine, which
printing-house workers used each night to soak the leather casing of the
balls that inked the press. Residual traces of urine and ingredients
such as juniper gum, linseed oil, and lampblack are found in the
greatest secular book in the English language.

Thrice -- in their dedicatory letter in the Folio -- Heminges and
Condell refer to Shakespeare's plays as 'trifles'. That, it appears, is
all that Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale,
The Tempest and the ten greatest history plays in the language can
be. Three times, thirty-six of the dramas are judged 'trifles'. No
word ever applied to the plays tells us more about Shakespeare's life
and times perhaps; but, in fact, the editors were theatre men
dependent on the goodwill of the earls of Pembroke and of Montgomery,
to whom the Folio is dedicated. The word 'trifles' might befit the
editors' sense of their own low rank, and the triviality of public
plays, in contrast to the glowing worth and stellar rank of the 'most
noble and incomparable paire of brethren' whose prestigious names the
editors use. The earls were not to be insulted. The first was Lord
Chamberlain, and the second was later to hold the same post. They were
among the few grandees who aided the King's actors. Plays, so far,
had little status or

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even monetary worth, and few believed that a drama could be artful or
literary. Ben Jonson had called a folio of his own plays and poems his
Workes
, in 1616, and people had mocked him by saying he couldn't tell the difference between 'work' and 'play'.

In their preface 'To the great Variety of Readers', Heminges and
Condell, however, are much warmer: 'Reade him, therefore; and againe,
and againe'. The Folio is also graced by a ten-line poem by Jonson as
well as by his elegy 'To the memory of my beloved, The AUTHOR Mr.
William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us'. The latter is generous,
discerning, and prophetic: 'Soul of the age! | The applause! delight!
the wonder of our Stage!' Jonson writes without reserve and adds, 'He
was not of an age, but for all time!' If Shakespeare here becomes rather
Horatian or a replica of Jonson, he is said as a tragic writer to
equal Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and in comedy or Jonson's
own speciality to eclipse Aristophanes, Terence, and Plautus.

Not the least important memorial poem in the Folio is that by Leonard
Digges, who makes it clear, once and for all, that Shakespeare the
poet is the same man as William Shakespeare of Stratford-uponAvon. 'When
that stone is rent', Digges writes very instructively in 1623:

And time dissolves thy Stratford Monument, Here we alive shall view thee Still.
³⁷

Such tributes, of course, have wider, more general meanings than one
can easily find in Shakespeare's testamentary bequests of 25 March
1616. Nevertheless, when Collins came to see him on that day,
Shakespeare had his aims. His will is as open to interpretation as
anything from his pen, but it shows his trust in the Halls. He
empowered them, with a belief in their ability and perhaps in their
generosity. One cannot assume that he forgot his own servants; his
will may not express all of his arrangements in March. He tried to see
that his estate would not be dispersed, not foolishly wasted in
future. He was very specific, in any case. He was not confused on that
day, though he was mortally ill.

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A Jacobean gentleman who had fallen sick did not wear formal dress.
The doublet, in any event, would have been confining and uncomfortable
with its high neck, tight sleeves, and a row of close-set buttons. More
suitable would have been the long gown, often faced with silk.
Shakespeare in his effigy in the church, as one recalls, is seen in a
long gown, which hangs open to reveal a doublet with its decorative
slashes.

But for gentlemen, there was
a very special dress worn 'in sickness or in captivity'. In hot
weather, it sufficed by itself. This was the 'night shirt', which was
more elaborate than the term suggests, since it had panels or stripes
of drawnwork, or beautiful embroidery. Wearing a gown as well, one
might receive a visitor or step into one's garden. The poet alertly
received M
^r
Collins on 25 March -- but after that he became more feeble.

What caused Shakespeare's suffering as he lingered from March into
April? Though one cannot be certain, something other than the plague
had struck Stratford in 1616. The year was an extraordinary one with
hot weather and a forward spring, and in the strangely warm winter even
young people fell ill as the death-rate climbed. On average in the
previous five years, about seventy-five deaths had occured annually in
Stratford's parish. This year as many as 109 died (if not all of the
same cause). One wonders. John Ward as vicar of Stratford later kept a
diary and jotted in it, around 1662, that Shakespeare had died of a
fever. Ward frequented local taverns, and evidently heard that the
fever had been 'contracted' because ' Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben
Jonson, had a merie meeting, and itt seems drank too hard'.
³⁸
Invention runs high in taverns, of course. Michael Drayton was a light
drinker, and Jonson is not reported as having been at Stratford.
Drunkenness was a topic of jokes -- and nothing else confirms that the
'meeting' really took place.

But
interestingly Ward was also a physician who, in his enquiries, had
some authority for the 'fever' remark. The first editor of Ward's
diary, a physician, called this 'low typhoid fever'. E. I. Fripp, an
expert on Stratford's records, thought it probable the dramatist had
'typhoid

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fever, which killed him'.
³⁹
Typhoid, a so-called 'new disease', was virulent in a forward spring,
and it is likely that Shakespeare's New Place was dangerous because of
the fetid stream which ran down beside it to supply the fullers of
cloth near the River Avon. In the nineteenth century, when research into
typhoid inspired fieldwork, it was discovered that the county's small
rivulets could be lethal. Dr William Budd (not trying to explain the
poet's disease) followed a small, typhoid-carrying brook which, he
wrote, 'discharges itself into the Avon'.
⁴⁰
From March to April, by coincidence or not, Shakespeare's illness
lasted about as long as the normal time it takes for a typhoid victim
to die.

His 'fever', by 25 March, no
doubt caused alarm. He was made constantly to drink, or he could not
have survived into the new month. Those near him could be infected,
and there is evidence that his disease was thought communicable. He was
to be interred quickly in 1694, was 'full seventeen foot deep'.
⁴¹
So close to the river, that is unlikely, but the report may echo a local memory of contagion.

Townspeople -- whatever else they felt about him -- took Shakespeare to
be financially successful. Few poets had ever had a better income,
and few had been so involved with a highly competitive, commercial
enterprise. In the view of some who knew him no doubt, he simply wrote
playscripts after his
Venus
and
Lucrece.
Yet he may have
written less exclusively for the stage than is said even today, and
scraps of 'outside' work have emerged. Did the Sonnets' publisher,
Thorpe, bring out more of Shakespeare's work? On 13 February 1612,
Thorpe had registered 'a Funeral Elegy in the memory of the late
virtuous Master William Peter, of Whipton, near Exeter', and this work
appeared as by 'W.S'. Very probably 'W.S.' was a countryman such as
Sir William Strode of Plympton Erle in Devonshire, or the Revd William
Sclater, Rector of Pitminster in Somerset.
⁴²
William Peter had been murdered in a wrangle over a horse near
Exeter. The elegist's style is faintly like Shakespeare's, but too
many linguistic features differ here; no external evidence links the
dramatist with the elegized, and it is only wishful thinking to
suppose Shakespeare wrote the 'Elegy'. Still, it is probable that more
of his occasional verse will be found. His prose may yet appear in
Southampton's or Pembroke's formal letters, if he had a stint

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as a lord's secretary, or, of course, we may find his hand in more dramas than the thirty-eight or thirty-nine we allow him.

Why are we lucky enough to have so much of Shakespeare's work? So
much written in his time is lost. Of the 175 play titles recorded by
Henslowe of the Rose, only thirty-seven plays survive today. The total
number of dramas written between 1560 and 1642 must be at least six
times the number of plays that survive. Shakespeare's plays have come
down to us because he was immensely popular, and, too, he was fortunate.
After all, England's population had climbed from about 3 million at his
birth, to about 4½ million fifty years later. Despite his actors'
many troubles, they could rely, in the long run, on an alert public of
ever greater size. Moreover, though his audiences came from all ranks
and backgrounds, they included the people Milton praises in the
Areopagitica,
or Londoners who are 'trying all things, assenting to the force of
reason and convincement', as the essayist holds, 'disputing,
reasoning, inventing, discoursing . . . things not before discoursed or
written of'.
⁴³

London helped Shakespeare to offer the most profound, demanding plays
ever given to any city. No doubt, commercial pressures liberated his
talent as he worked to supply the needs of actors. But his receptivity
and extraordinary insight gave him a unique understanding of human
experience, so that all of his works transcend their time. His dramas
are inexhaustibly fertile in stimulating new ideas and interpretations
-- and that they have the power to transform the lives of play-goers
and readers testifies not to a 'miracle' but to unique qualities of his
artistry and intellect. His intellectual power is felt for example in
the strong, subtle, weblike structures of his works, in the enormous
variety of his thousand or more portrayals, and even in the upsetting
nature of his perceptions and art. His wit and sense of comedy are
unsurpassed, but far from soothing an audience, Shakespeare depicts
human nature in ways that are at once truthful and deeply troubling.
His curiosity about human nature was in a sense remorseless, though it
never outran his sympathy for the human predicament. The major changes
he makes in using his sources have to do with motive and emotion; he
rejects crude simplicities of feeling and of violence, though he
ensures that his own stage violence will have the

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