Shakespeare (65 page)

The sculpture has been described by one Shakespearian as resembling that of “a self-satisfied pork butcher.”
¹⁰
That it is a good likeness is not in doubt, however, because an early chronicler of Shakespeare’s Stratford believed that “the head was evidently taken from a death-mask.”
¹¹
It must have been acceptable to Shakespeare’s immediate family, who commissioned it. It was executed by Gerard Johnson, a Dutch artist who lived near the Globe in Southwark. He had ample opportunity, therefore, to study his subject. There is no reason why a great writer should not resemble a pork butcher, satisfied or otherwise, and it is at least ironic that later accounts did make him a butcher’s apprentice. He may have possessed that corpulent and ruddy glow that seems to be peculiar to English butchers. And why should he not look satisfied?

There are other portraits which claim some attention from posterity, if
only because the quest for Shakespeare’s face is an unending one. They all provide varying degrees of resemblance. One painting, now known as the “Chandos portrait” (c. 1610), depicts a man in his early forties wearing a black silk doublet; he is of muddy or swarthy complexion, and his black curls lend him a gypsy or continental appearance. He is also wearing a gold earring. It was once suggested, half in earnest, that it was a portrait of Shakespeare dressed to play Shylock. The painting itself has a long and complicated history, which is as much as to say that its provenance is uncertain.

A more refined and noble image presents itself in the painting known as the “Janssen portrait” (c.1620), in which a sensitive face surmounts an exquisite doublet. The “Felton portrait” (c. eighteenth century) is executed on a small wood panel, and displays a man in his thirties with an enormous forehead but no other distinguished or distinguishing characteristics. The “Flower portrait” is close to the Droeshout engraving, and has led some scholars to believe that it is in fact the lost original for the Folio engraving; it is dated 1609, and has been painted on top of a Madonna of the fifteenth century. But there have been arguments over the authenticity of the dating. And so the matter rests. All of these paintings have a family resemblance, but all of them may be derived from Droeshout.

The one notable exception would seem to be the Grafton portrait (c. 1588), which has already been described in the context of Shakespeare’s own life. It shows a young and fashionably dressed man in his early twenties, and was previously dismissed on the grounds that the young Shakespeare could not have been so affluent at such an early stage of his career. That is no longer a reasonable supposition, as we have seen, and so the merits of the painting can be taken on their own. If it is placed next to the Droeshout engraving, a consonance of youth and middle age begins to emerge. All of these representations, hovering in the realm of uncertainty and conjecture, resemble Shakespeare in more than a pictographic sense; they are a token of his elusiveness in the world. They also suggest that the appearance of the man may have been quite different from any mental or cultural image of Shakespeare that currently exists. He may have been swarthy. He may have worn an earring. He may in later life even have been fat.

W
e can see him
in another sense. On 2 February 1602, he walked from the landing-stage by the Thames a few yards northwards to the hall of the Middle Temple. It was here that a new play,
Twelfth Night
, was to be performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in front of the members of that Inn. There is an account of it by one of them, John Manningham, in his diary. “At our feast wee had a play called ‘Twelue Night, or what you will’ much like the commedy of errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called
Inganni
.”
¹
He then goes on to describe the gulling of Malvolio. It is a brief but interesting entry, revealing the game of source-hunting to be an old one. It might even lead to the speculation that Shakespeare expected the sources of his plays to be known to the more knowledgeable among the audience, and that his departure from such sources was part of the drama’s effect.

The work to which Manningham refers is
Gl’Inganni
by Curzio Gonzaga, an Italian play that had not been translated into English. It is likely, then, that Shakespeare had some knowledge of Italian. He had a professional attitude towards reading, and probably never opened a book without hoping to extract something from it. In any case Shakespeare always departed from his sources when he deemed it necessary to do so, elaborating them and pushing them further into romance and fantastic improbability.

The fact that Manningham compared
Twelfth Night
to
The Comedy of Errors
suggests that there were playgoers who were familiar with a number of Shakespeare’s plays; this, in itself, is a serious measure of his reputation. But they may not have been in the majority. The audience in the hall of the Middle Temple was presumably rowdy and quite possibly drunken. If they wished for bawdy humour and broad farce, then
Twelfth Night
would have satisfied them. It took its name from the “Twelfth Day” festivals that were well known for their riotousness, and it had an effervescent mood of continual gaiety that did not dip once. The story of Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, of Malvolio and Feste, was awash with innuendo and suggestion. The fact that Viola dressed as a boy, while being acted by a boy, added an element of sexual
frisson
that would not have been lost upon the members of the Inn. It may be that the convention of boys playing female roles was in fact the context for obscenity and suggestion that do not appear in the written texts. The language of the wooing scenes was in any case erotically charged, and might well have been complemented by “wanton” gestures. The layers of strange multisexual loving delighted Shakespeare.

There are also numerous legal puns and quibbles in
Twelfth Night
that would have found responsive hearers. A literal interpretation of the title, of course, would imply that it had first been performed on the afternoon of 6 January 1602. So it is unlikely that the performance in the Middle Temple was the first. It would have suited the Globe, and there are remarkably few stage-properties to be accommodated.

It can be assumed that Armin played Feste, and as a result Feste is given four songs, three of which have entered the national repertoire—“O Mistris mine where are you roming?,” “Come away, come away death,” and “When that I was and a little tine boy.”
Twelfth Night
is suffused with music. It begins and ends in music. Shakespeare has used the advent of Armin, and perhaps the acoustic resources of the Globe, to explore a new range of theatrical effect. It is more than possible that the dramatist himself played Malvolio; as has already been suggested, Malvolio’s crossed yellow garters may have been a farcical version of Shakespeare’s own coat of arms.
²
There are many topical allusions in
Twelfth Night
, but one of the most prominent must surely concern the scenes between Feste and Malvolio. Feste represents the spirit of festival and entertainment, for example, whereas the rancorous Malvolio is described as a Puritan. Their conflict represents one of the oldest and most divisive controversies of the period, with the Puritan faction ranged against plays and playhouses as agents of the devil.

The Puritans opposed the playhouses on a number of levels. Playhouses
competed with the pulpits in the matter of public instruction or, as one moralist put it, “the Playe houses are pestered when the churches are naked.”
³
The dramas were considered to be the entertainment of idle people, gapers and lookers-on who ought to be more profitably employed in the afternoons. The actors were deemed to encourage ready emotionalism; they relied upon sexuality and sexual innuendo, especially with the pretty boys dressed as girls who excited lascivious passions; they were subversive of hierarchies, dressed as princes in one scene and as commoners in the next. They were in any case acting, counterfeiting God’s image; it was a form of primitive idolatry, that only papists could enjoy.

It is also possible to go from the general to the particular. It has been suggested that Malvolio was based upon a “real” original, one Sir William Knollys, the Comptroller of the Royal Household, but all such allusions have long since been lost. Yet there can be no doubt that Shakespeare often had certain contemporaries in mind, when inventing characters, and that the actors deliberately impersonated them in their parts. He never knowingly neglected a source of amusement for the London crowd.

That popular success meant that he had become a relatively affluent man. It may be that his purse had been enlarged by his father’s recent death but, whatever the source of his funds, he paid the large amount of £320 for more Stratford land. On 1 May 1602, he purchased from John and William Combe 107 acres of arable land and 20 acres of pasture in the hamlets of Bishopstone and Welcombe. He knew the Combes very well, and he knew the land in question very well. He was now, in the words of his Hamlet, “spacious in the possession of durt” (3356-7). It is doubtful whether he took so ironical an attitude towards his own property. Three years later he purchased even more land. Earlier in
Hamlet
he betrays his interest in the subject, when the prince of Denmark holds up a skull, and remarks that “this fellowe might be in’s time a great buyer of Land, with his Statuts, his recognisances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoucers” (3072-4). The buying of land in the late sixteenth century was indeed a tiresome and complex business; it was natural for Shakespeare to express his frustration, even through the mouth of the melancholy Dane. In the autumn of 1602 he also bought a plot of half an acre of land, with a cottage and cottage garden, in Chapel Lane just behind his grand house of New Place. The cottage may have been intended for a servant and
family, or even for a gardener. Or could it possibly have been a place in which he might seclude himself?

He was clearly aiming for local respectability as well as prosperity. The corporation of Stratford, however, were not necessarily sympathetic to the sources of his wealth. At the end of this year they formally forbade the performance of plays or interludes in the guildhall. It was a manifestation of the regional Puritanism that affected other districts of the country. The fact that he began to spend more time, and money, in Stratford suggests that he was not much concerned about such matters. His life as dramatist, and his life as townsman, were separate and not to be confused.

James I depicted on the title page of
Mischeefes Mysterie
or Treasons Master-peece, the Powder-plot
. Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
was written during the aftermath of the attempt by
Robert Catesby with Guy Fawkes and other conspirators
to blow up king and parliament.