The Science of Shakespeare (23 page)

Among these publications were a few dozen works written by women, including, from 1589, the first full-length defense of women's rights, penned by a woman in England (or at least the first such work to have survived). Written in response to a misogynist tract by a man named Thomas Orwin, the pamphlet's author, who calls herself Jane Anger, chides men for their illogic and argues for female sexual autonomy. A little over a decade later, a woman named Aemilia Lanyer,
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who supported herself through her poetry, denounced “evil disposed men, who forgetting they were born of women, nourished of women, and that if it were not by the means of women, they would be quite extinguished out of the world, and a final end of them all, do like Vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred, only to give way and utterance to their want of discretion and goodness.” It is from this period that we also find the first original (as opposed to translated) play written by a woman in English,
The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry
, by Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland. It was published in 1613—by coincidence, the approximate year of Shakespeare's retirement.

Shakespeare must have flipped through far more books than he actually purchased; still, the works that provided the backbone of his plays—Holinshed's
Chronicles
, Plutarch's
Lives
—he surely bought; perhaps Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, too. His grammar-school Latin was more than adequate for enjoying his favorite classical writers. His French and Italian, picked up through friends and from casual reading, were likely passable, though he probably preferred an English translation, when one was available (as it often was). He likely also borrowed books from friends. “From what we know of Shakespeare's insatiable appetite for books,” writes James Shapiro, “no patron's collection … could have accommodated his curiosity and range. London's bookshops were by necessity Shakespeare's working libraries.… It's hard to imagine anyone in London more alert to the latest literary trends.”

If we were lucky enough to cross paths with Shakespeare, would we recognize him? Today we are so accustomed to seeing pictures of the playwright that we tend to assume that we have a reliable notion of his appearance, but, as mentioned in the introduction, only two images have a reasonable claim to authenticity. The first is Martin Droeshout's famous engraving in the First Folio (figure 0.2); the second is the funeral effigy in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. Although both date from several years after Shakespeare's death, they were at least carried out under the guidance of those who knew him; as such—as bland as they are—they are our best guess at his appearance. (The funeral bust has been famously described as looking like a “self-satisfied pork butcher.”) A runner-up is the “Chandos portrait” that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Dating from about 1610, it has the advantage of being painted while the playwright was still alive; unfortunately, we don't know for sure that it actually
is
Shakespeare. Its subject certainly resembles the man in the Droeshout engraving, and the painting is from the right time period; unfortunately, its provenance is a blank prior to 1747—more than 130 years after Shakespeare's death—when it came into the possession of the Chandos family. The middle-aged man in the portrait, with slightly unkempt facial hair and sporting an earring, has something of the bohemian look that, warranted or not, we seem to expect in an artistic genius.

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We can increase our chances
of bumping into the playwright if we know where to look. Where, exactly, did Shakespeare live? He seems to have moved several times during his London years; by one account, he lived for a time in Shoreditch, and later in Bishopsgate, where, according to tax records, he was residing by 1596.
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Later, toward the end of the decade, he resided in Southwark—a logical move, as by this time it was the heart of London's theater scene. (Today's visitors are of course drawn to the reconstructed Globe Theatre; but one must also head for Southwark Cathedral, where one can see a memorial plaque to Shakespeare's younger brother Edmund, an actor, who was buried in the church in 1607. The dramatist John Fletcher, Shakespeare's collaborator for his final plays, rests there as well. Stained-glass windows, meanwhile, illustrate scenes from Shakespeare's plays.)

The playwright would still have been living north of the Thames when his work first appeared in print. Shakespeare's epic poems,
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
, date from 1593 and 1594 respectively. But we know he had already made a name for himself as an actor and a playwright in London by 1592, because of a reference to him in a pamphlet by a poet and playwright named Robert Greene. In a snarky commentary on London's theatrical scene, Greene attacks Shakespeare as an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers” and goes on to parody a scene from
Henry VI, Part 3
. Greene refers to the play's creator as someone “in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie”—clearly a put-down (as well as a not very clever pun on Shakespeare's name). Thanks to Greene, we know not only that Shakespeare was working in London by this time (and had at least one set of history plays under his belt), but that he was successful enough to make his colleagues jealous. (We know from independent sources that
Henry VI
was performed early in 1592—possibly with Shakespeare himself among the cast.)

Shakespeare was prolific, and he had to be: The demand for new plays was high, and there was a good living to be made for a playwright capable of filling that need. It's been estimated that one-third of London's adult population saw a play at least once a month, with single performances drawing an audience of up to three thousand. As Shapiro notes, Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were writing for “the most experienced playgoers in history.” The playwright's colleagues were men of remarkable talent in their own right: This was the London of Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, both of whom were renowned for their poignant tragedies. Marlowe's life was cut short in the spring of 1593 when he was fatally stabbed during a bar-room brawl. We don't know if Shakespeare mourned for his colleague, but there is no doubt that Marlowe's death left a vacuum in London's theatrical world, and that Shakespeare helped to fill that void. He wrote, on average, two new plays every year, and kept up that pace until nearly the end of his career. Shakespeare was also a shrewd businessman. Together with his fellow actors, he became a shareholder in the construction of a grand new open-air theater, the Globe, to be built in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames; Shakespeare technically owned one-eighth of the new building. Theaters, deemed morally dangerous, were forbidden within the city proper; but anyone who could afford a ferry ride, or who didn't mind a brisk walk across London Bridge, could pay one penny to see a performance of
Julius Caesar
or
Hamlet
.

Shakespeare's writing career can be divided very roughly into two halves, centered on the year 1600. In the seven or eight years up to this point, he produced a mixture of historical dramas and comedies, including several that are still among his best-loved works, including
A Midsummer Night's Dream
,
Romeo and Juliet
, and
The Merchant of Venice
. From early in this period we find the bloody revenge tale of
Titus Andronicus
; by its end we have one of Shakespeare's most refined comedies,
As You Like It
, and his first great tragedy,
Julius Caesar
. It was at about this time that the published versions of Shakespeare's plays began to routinely bear his name; previously, a playwright's name was hardly worth mentioning, but by this stage Shakespeare was famous enough that his publishers knew it would boost sales.
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Indeed, Shakespeare was now earning a decent living from the theater, perhaps making two hundred pounds a year—“at least ten times what a well-paid schoolmaster could hope for,” as Samuel Schoenbaum points out. He was, as Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton note, “the first Englishman in history to make a serious living by his pen.”

After 1600, Shakespeare produced a string of powerful tragedies, beginning with
Hamlet
and continuing with
Othello
,
King Lear
,
Macbeth
, and
Antony and Cleopatra
. And yet it is not as though he had forgotten how to be funny;
Twelfth Night
dates from the beginning of this period, and there is plenty of humor both in the tragedies and in the so-called romances, which include
The Winter's Tale
and
The Tempest
. All this time, however, Shakespeare was investing in property back in his native Stratford, and, sometime around 1613, he returned to the city of his birth. He died there on his fifty-third birthday, and, as with so many other details of Shakespeare's life, the cause is unknown; syphilis, typhoid, and influenza have all been suggested.

WOULD THE REAL WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE PLEASE STEP FORWARD?

This condensed biography gives us the bare bones of Shakespeare's life and career. We may feel we have almost gotten to know the man—but certainly not nearly as well as we would like to. How well
can
we know William Shakespeare? The documentary evidence is scant enough to count on the fingers of two hands—the parish records of the baptism, the marriage, and the birth of his children; a smattering of legal documents and investment records; and the famous will in which he leaves his “second best bed” to his wife. There are a mere fourteen words known to be written in his own hand (comprising six signatures and the additional words “by me” on the famous will).
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It's not much to go on—and it puts biographers in a bit of a pickle, as they strive to reconstruct Shakespeare's thoughts and actions.
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(And, inevitably, it encourages the anti-Stratfordians.) Of course, most books about Shakespeare—your local university library will likely have thousands—aren't biographies at all; instead, they examine Shakespeare's writings, a far more fruitful subject. The vast majority of Shakespeare scholarship focuses on what he wrote, not who he was.

Still, the urge to “meet” Shakespeare is, for many of us, inescapable—just as we might fantasize about getting to know Mozart or Einstein. And so the biographical gaps gnaw away at us. Consider, for example, the famous “lost years”—the period following the birth of Shakespeare's twins, in Stratford, in 1585, and the first known reference to the playwright as an active Londoner (from Greene's pamphlet of 1592). Where was he during those seven years, and what was he up to? One of his earliest biographers asserted that he was “a schoolmaster in the country”; others imagined him working as a law clerk or serving his country as a soldier. (As Jonathan Bate notes, schoolmasters seem to like the schoolmaster theory, while lawyers tend to favor the law-clerk theory.) The various suppositions go in and out of fashion, and none are backed by any hard evidence. More recently, as mentioned, a BBC television documentary argued (as others had previously imagined) that he traveled to Italy during this time. Again, no actual evidence.

Even for the years in which we
do
know Shakespeare's whereabouts, there is much more we would like to know. Take his marriage to Anne, for example. Were they happy? Did he love her, or was he simply doing what needed to be done—“a bow and arrow wedding,” as one of my tour guides put it—when he took her to the altar, seven months after his eighteenth birthday? The short answer is that we don't know. Here's one biographer's attempt at a longer answer:

In common with most women of her class, [Anne] did not read or write, and may well have been quite willing to play the role of stay-at-home housewife and mother, while her husband acted and wrote in London. She does not seem to have had any great hold over his affections—Shakespeare was not a dissipated man, but nor was he a model of virtue. The most we can say is that he made “an honest woman” of her.

How much does this paragraph tell us? Very little, in fact. Aside from the brief reference to Anne's lack of schooling, it adds almost nothing to the smattering of data that we began with. Add a “may well have” and a “seem,” and we have the skeleton of a character sketch of a young man married to an older woman who bore his children. This isn't meant to be a criticism; when facts are in short supply, we rely on educated guesswork. There is no other way. Indeed, pick up any Shakespeare biography, even one of the very good ones, and you will find a story laced with maybes: “he would have”; “he would likely have”; “one can imagine”; and so on. “It is possible” that Shakespeare's mother took her young son to Wilmcote to avoid the plague (Donnelly and Woledge); “It is easy to imagine” Shakespeare as a young law clerk (Greenblatt); “It is likely” that Shakespeare's old schoolmate, Richard Field, helped him find accommodations on his arrival in London (Day); Shakespeare “must have been” a familiar presence in the London bookshops (Shapiro); “we may plausibly imagine” Shakespeare haunting the bookstalls (Ackroyd). Frank Kermode, in his own very good Shakespeare biography, asks readers to indulge him as “these speculations grow more and more far-fetched as one ‘might have' succeeds another, or a ‘may well have' or a ‘surely.'” (Kermode uses such constructions judiciously—and unavoidably: “We must assume” that Shakespeare attended the local grammar school; Shakespeare “could well have” attended the so-called mystery plays in Coventry. Indeed, the reader may have noticed them in the present work.)

NOBLE WEEDS AND OTHER GRAINS

Our picture of Shakespeare may seem more like a collection of fragments than a unified whole. There is so much more that we would like to know: We don't know if any of Shakespeare's children ever visited him in London, or if he ever gave them any fatherly advice; we don't know if he cried when told of the death of his son, Hamnet, in 1596. We don't know if he was a good archer, or if he gambled at dice or cards; we don't know who he went to the taverns with, or what they spoke about after a few pints of ale; we don't know if he was a regular at the Southwark whorehouses or if he remained faithful to his wife back in Stratford. And speaking of Shakespeare's sexuality, biographers (and ordinary readers) have often wondered if he was bisexual.
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We yearn for any clue, no matter how minuscule. When one is offered, we bite: When archaeologists discovered traces of cannabis in the garden of one of Shakespeare's properties in Stratford, about a decade ago, it was big news. “Did cannabis fuel Bard's genius?” asked a headline on the BBC News website. The analysis was carried out on some two dozen clay pipes found on the site. The lead archaeologist also cited the reference to a “noted weed” in Sonnet 76. Could this be an allusion to the poet's predilection for marijuana? It's a stretch, to say the least. (As is so often the case, the theory was in the news for about a day, and then promptly forgotten.) But it does show how desperate we are for any glimpse, no matter how speculative, into the playwright's life.