The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (13 page)

Here I would let slip
(If I had any in me) scholarship,
And from all learning keep these lines as clear
As Shakespeare’s best are, which our heirs shall hear
Preachers apt to their auditors to show
How far sometimes a mortal man may go
By the dim light of Nature.
⁴⁶

The idea of Shakespeare’s ‘natural’ style was enshrined early in the mythos, but in a contrary movement scholars have, at least since the eighteenth century, been patiently unpicking this fabric of native wit to disclose the many threads of ‘learning’, or at any rate reading, that went into it. Shakespeare was a voracious, though probably - like most creative writers - an opportunist, reader. He read for what he needed as often as for pleasure.

In 1604 Shakespeare’s bookshelf - a metaphorical item of furniture, which in the convention of the time would more likely be one or more book-chests - contained the customary mix of old favourites and new purchases or borrowings. Among the former were the works of the Roman poet Ovid, who might be claimed as Shakespeare’s favourite author, and especially the sleek, evocative legends of the
Metamorphoses
. From this Shakespeare took the story of Venus and Adonis, the subject of his first published poem, and Pyramis and Thisbe in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and much else. In his early tragedy,
Titus Andronicus
, the book is named as a young boy’s reading, the title perfectly forming the back half of an iambic pentameter -

TITUS: What book is that . . . ?

lucius: Grandsire, ’tis Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
: My mother gave it me . . . (4.1.41-3)

And in
Cymbeline
it is the book Iachimo finds by Imogen’s bedside:

She hath been reading late:
The tale of Tereus - here the leaf’s turn’d down . . . (2.2.44-5).

Shakespeare was still turning the leaves of the
Metamorphoses
at the end of his career. Writing Prospero’s valediction to the spirits in
The Tempest
(
c
. 1610) he had before him the incantations of the sorceress Medea. In the standard 1567 translation by Arthur Golding the passage begins:

Ye airs and winds, ye elves of hills, of brooks, of woods alone,

Of standing lakes, and of the night, approach ye everychone,

Through help of whom (the crooked banks much wondering at the thing)

I have compelled streams to run clean backward to their spring.

(
Metamorphoses
7.197-200)

Shakespeare writes:

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back . . . (5.1.33-6)

Comparisons like this are a master-class. His first line is almost straight plagiarism, but then comes the airy elaboration of the next lines, transforming the archaic ‘fourteeners’ of Golding’s Ovid to the litheness and fluency of Shakespeare’s late blank verse. Some details of the speech show that he also used the original text of the poem, employing his skills in Latin, which Jonson perhaps under-estimated, or deliberately undervalued, when he spoke of Shakespeare’s ‘small Latin and less Greek’.
⁴⁷

Also much thumbed is his copy of Plutarch’s
Lives
, in Sir Thomas North’s vigorous English version: the first edition was 1579, but perhaps the edition in Shakespeare’s chest was that of 1595, published by his old Stratford friend Richard Field. He first used North’s Plutarch extensively for
Julius Caesar
, which opened the new Globe theatre in 1599. The Life of Mark Antony was of particular interest, and as he read it for
Caesar
other stories were lit on the back burner - not just Antony and Cleopatra but also Timon, whose life is sketched there
en passant
. Another trusty was Raphael Holinshed’s
Chronicles
(1587), the mother-lode of Shakespeare’s history plays, not much consulted of late but soon to be of use again in its account of the reign of an eleventh-century Scottish king, Macbeth.

Two books published in 1603 are soon to be found on his desk. One is an expos’ of supposed exorcisms performed by Catholic priests, unsnappily titled
A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures . . . under the pretence of casting out devils, practised by Edmunds alias Weston a Jesuit, and divers Romish priests his wicked associates
. Its author, Samuel Harsnett, was rector of St Margaret’s on New Fish Street Hill, and chaplain to the Bishop of London (and thereby involved in the licensing of books for the press). Some think Shakespeare’s interest in it relates to his own involvement in the clandestine Catholic world of the Midlands, but I would relate it more to authorial opportunism. He found in Harsnett’s tract an arcane and archaic language of religious mania, which proved decisive in one of his strangest and greatest stage-creations, the possessed beggar ‘Poor Tom’ in
King Lear
. Many of the demons and familiars invoked by Tom - Flibbertigibbet, Smulkin, Modo, Mahu, Hoppedance, Obidicut and the rest - come straight from the pages of Harsnett.
⁴⁸

Also published in 1603 was an influential book which reflects and perhaps partly inspires the questioning temper of the problem plays or tragicomedies. This was the handsome folio edition of the
Essays
of Michel de Montaigne, translated from the French by John Florio. The Montaigne motto, ‘Que scays-je’ - ‘What do I know?’, as distinct, perhaps, from ‘What do I erroneously assume that I know?’ - echoes through these plays, which interrogate and indeed ‘assay’ (the original sense of the Montaignian ‘essai’) the philosophical and ethical assumptions of the age. Isabella’s words in
Measure
are an attenuated echo of this motto - ‘Go to your bosom, / Knock there, and ask thy heart what it doth know’ (2.2.137-8).

Shakespeare doubtless knew the translator Florio, twelve years his senior, Italian by blood but English born - a brilliant linguist, a prickly and proud figure. They may have met in the circle of the young Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated two poems in 1593-4. Florio was a tutor to the Earl in the early 1590s. It is sometimes said that the pedant Holofernes in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
is a caricature of Florio, done for the enjoyment of the Southampton set - this overstates the case, but it is true Holofernes quotes from Florio’s book of Italian proverbs, the
Gardine of Recreations
(1591).
⁴⁹
At any rate, Florio is a man Shakespeare knows - for a writer in Jacobean London there is this dimension of acquaintance in his reading. The literary circuit was small and crowded; they knew one another’s voices.

His reading of Montaigne seeps identifiably into the Silver Street tragicomedies. ‘To embrace all the rules of our life into one’, writes Montaigne, ‘is at all times to will, and not to will, one same thing.’ This is the shuttling, contradictory mentality of
Measure for Measure
, in which characters find themselves ‘at war ’twixt will and will not’. And when Montaigne observes that ‘Man all in all is but a botching and party-coloured work,’ and that ‘the best good I have hath some vicious taint’, we hear a foretaste of the famous line in
All’s Well
, ‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.’ The plays’ shifts of tone and uncertainties of message reflect Montaigne’s drastic disclaimer, ‘I have nothing to say, entirely, simply and with solidity of myself, without confusion, disorder, blending, mingling.’
⁵⁰

Shakespeare read Florio’s Montaigne, and may well have owned a copy, but if he did it is not the copy now in the British Library which bears on the verso of the endpaper the signature ‘Willm Shakspere’. This is now held to be a forgery, though a competent one, probably dating from the late eighteenth century.
⁵¹

Some other books which might be seen in his room on Silver Street include Richard Knolles’s
History of the Turkes
(1603), used in
Othello
for detail about the Turkish invasion of Cyprus; George Whetstone’s
Promos and Cassandra
(1578) and Cinthio’s
Epitia
(1583), both sources of
Measure for Measure
; and an unspecified Latin edition of the works of Lucian containing the story of ‘Timon the Misanthrope’, originally written in Greek in the second century AD.

The chief narrative source of
All’s Well
was a story from Boccaccio’s
Decameron
. Shakespeare used an English translation of the story, found in William Painter’s
Palace of Pleasure
(1566), a popular collection of tales. But linguistic traces suggest that for this French-set play Shakespeare also made use of a French version of the
Decameron
by Antoine de Ma¸on, published in 1545 and frequently reprinted.
⁵²
The textual evidence is not conclusive, but Shakespeare’s presence in a French household makes it plausible - perhaps it was a book owned by one of the Mountjoys.

Amid this small jumble of books one might note also a pair of publications, dated 1603 and 1604 - not de-luxe editions like the Montaigne folio, but rather shoddily printed quartos. The earlier of the two title-pages reads: ‘THE / Tragicall Historie of / HAMLET /
Prince of Denmarke
/ By William Shake-speare. / As it hath beene diverse times acted by his Highnesse ser- / vants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two U- / niversities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where.’ This book, ‘printed for N.L [Nicholas Ling] and Iohn Trundell’, is the first edition of
Hamlet
. It is nowadays generally known as the ‘bad quarto’ (or to bibliographers, ‘Q1’). It was swiftly supplanted by the ‘good quarto’ of 1604 (‘Q2’), which is described on the title-page as ‘Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie’. The latter is the play we know: the text in the First Folio (‘F1’) is based on it. The earlier quarto has some interesting variations, but is generally a corrupt or impoverished text, drained of much of the complex poetry and quick philosophical skirmishing which are the hallmarks of
Hamlet
. Thus Q1’s version of the Prince’s best-known soliloquy begins:

To be or not to be, I there’s the point.
To die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes . . .

To the casual reader this may look like gibberish. It is not - ‘I’ was a common spelling of ‘aye’ - but it is clearly an inferior version of the soliloquy. The language is blunted (‘there it goes’ instead of ‘there’s the rub’) and the speech is drastically truncated by the loss of seven famous lines (which should come immediately after the first), beginning ‘Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer . . .’, and ending with that wonderful synopsis of the human condition - ‘The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to’ (3.1.58-65).

Of course, to say that Q1 has truncated a speech which ‘should’ be longer and richer is already to make assumptions about the relation of the two quartos. The standard hypothesis is that Q1 is a ‘memorial reconstruction’ by an actor who had performed in the play (possibly the one playing Marcellus). An alternative theory is that it represents an early version of the play by Shakespeare himself, with Q2 a later rewrite. There certainly was an earlier
Hamlet
(sometimes called, with a professorial twinkle, the ‘Ur-
Hamlet
’). It is referred to punningly by Nashe as early as 1589 - ‘he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches’ - and a performance was seen by the author Thomas Lodge at one of the Shoreditch playhouses some time before 1596.
⁵³

These textual mysteries make it hard to know the status of the 1603 quarto in Shakespeare’s mind, but that he was irritated by its publication seems inevitable. Whether the product of an amnesiac actor or of Shakespeare’s own rougher skills in his prentice-years, the text was purloined and the publication of it unauthorized. It is one of various piracies of Shakespeare playscripts - plays such as
Romeo and Juliet
and
The Merry Wives
first appeared in corrupt editions. The supplanting of such texts was one of the guiding editorial principles of the First Folio: ‘Where before you were abus’d with diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious imposters that expos’d [published] them, even those are now offered to your view cur’d and perfect in their limbes.’

This indignation at rapacious publishers was likely shared by Shakespeare himself. There are two reported instances of him in a temper with someone, and in each case the cause is a publication. The first, already mentioned, is the spat with Henry Chettle in 1592, further to the slurs against ‘Shakescene’ in
Greene’s Groatsworth
. The second followed the publication of a poetry collection,
The Passionate Pilgrim
, in 1599. The title-page announced it as ‘by W. Shakespeare’, though only five of the poems in it were his, two of them previously unpublished sonnets and all of them printed without permission. The publisher was William Jaggard. The existence of Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’ had been mentioned in print the previous year, and this may have sharpened Jaggard’s appetite. Shakespeare’s reaction is recorded by Thomas Heywood in 1612, when a new edition of
The Passionate Pilgrim
was published, still ‘by’ Shakespeare - ‘The author I know much offended with Mr Jaggard that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name’.
⁵⁴