April 23, 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. Professional critics will devote tons of ink and lightning bolts worth of electrons to the anniversary. I hope a few words from an amateur will do no harm.
The date may also mark his 452nd birthday. No record confirms the date of birth because there was no birth registry in Stratford at that time. April 23 has been the date favored by English traditionalists as his birthday because it is the name day of St. George, the patron saint of England. We do know that he was baptized on April 26, 1564. His death notice states that he was in his fifty-third year when he died on April 23rd He had to have been born on or before April 23, but not too much before in light of the baptism on the 26th. Samuel Schoenbaum tells us that the rule in the 1560s was to baptize an infant no later than the Sunday or other holy day following birth. A child born on Sunday, April 23, 1564 would have been baptized on April 25, St. Mark’s Day.
The exact date of his birth will remain unknown. April 23 lends symmetry to a notable life that it should have begun and ended on the same day on the calendar. However, Professor Schoenbaum reminds us that “other considerations usually determine these events”.
How William Shakespeare ended up working on the London stage is the bigger puzzle.
John Shakespeare, William’s father, was a prominent citizen of Stratford during his son’s early childhood. He was an alderman and served a one-year term as mayor[1]. He was a prosperous glover and dealer in hides and wool. Stratford had a grammar school. No attendance records survive; possibly they were not kept in the first place. We can’t know whether William was a student, but it is likely that the son of a prominent citizen would have attended the local school. Historians have dug up the standard curriculum of English grammar schools of that time, so we know what he would likely have learned had he in fact attended. The standard course of study included Latin and English grammar. Older students would read classical Roman plays in Latin.
We know that William married when he was 18. There is a marriage license dated November 27, 1582. The bride, Anne Hathaway, was seven or eight years older than the groom. Scholars have had to deduce her age; there were no baptismal records kept in Stratford at the time of her birth. Their first child, Susanna, was born in May 1583 (ahem) six months after the wedding. In February 1585, less than two years later, the couple had twins (a boy and a girl).
So, here we have William Shakespeare, two months shy of his twenty-first birthday with a wife and three children to see to. He is a resident of a small town some 100 miles northwest of London. At some point in the 1580s he left Stratford, traveled to London, and started working in the theater. By 1592 he was well enough established in London to have been attacked in a pamphlet by the writer and playwright Robert Greene as an “upstart crow”. Greene was near death as he wrote. According to the pamphlet’s title page, Greene’s dying request was that it be published. So, by 1592 Shakespeare had earned a reputation, a bad one as far as Mr. Greene was concerned, as an actor and writer.
How far in advance of Mr. Greene’s death in 1592 would Shakespeare have begun working in London? The first plays might have been written as early as 1589 or as late as 1591. It’s hard to imagine that a theater company would hire him as a playwright off the street, so he must have started working in the theater some years before the first play was performed. It would have taken time to gain the confidence of a theater company and to have awakened the ire of Robert Greene.
How did this happen? In 1585, Shakespeare was a young townsman of Stratford with a wife and children. Some five years later, he was writing plays that are performed, read, enjoyed, studied, and argued over more than four centuries later. And he was writing sonnets and narrative poetry as well.
The short answer is that we don’t know and we aren’t going to know, ever. The mystery is so complete, so profound, that it has given rise to the fascinating controversy that has been brewing for some 200 years over the identity of the true author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare[2]. The nearly blank pages of the poet’s early years have created opportunities for speculation.
Scott McCrae in The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Controversy[3] makes the point that the seeds of the dispute were sown shortly after Shakespeare’s death, although they did not germinate until later. The early legend was that Shakespeare was a child of nature, that his writing displayed little learning or sophistication, and that the plays and poems are the expression of an untutored genius. That view invited the devaluation of Shakespeare’s biography.
The problem is that later study showed that the author of the Shakespeare canon must have been far more learned than his early critics thought. For example, scholars have measured the size of his vocabulary by counting each different word in the canon. Shakespeare’s vocabulary was twice as large as that of his nearest contemporary. It’s not just a matter of vocabulary, needless to say. His command of English, his power of expression, are monumental.
It became increasingly difficult to reconcile the imagined country bumpkin with the sophisticated mind that produced the canon. The author of the plays, sonnets, and other works could not have come from the modest background that legend had created for him. So, he must have been a university graduate? This is what I find so fascinating about the authorship controversy. It discloses biases that might otherwise have remained unexamined. Only those with university degrees know how to string together a powerful English sentence? Let’s stop while we count all the owners of advanced degrees who have written great literature.
There is some spoken French here and there in the works. Where could the fellow from Stratford have picked it up? What about the knowledge of law displayed by the author? There are many claims (mostly by lawyers) that he must have been trained in the law.
Or, think of all the Shakespeare plays that are set in Italy. I’m not going to look at a list, but off the top I can think of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. If you wanted to throw in Julius Caesar, go ahead. The author of the plays must have traveled in Italy to be able to write about the place, no?
We have no reason to think that William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford, ever traveled outside of England. Yet, the argument goes, the person who wrote these plays must have spent time in Italy. Therefore, the man from Stratford could not have written the plays. Q.E.D.
But how much does the author of the plays know about Italy? McCrae suggests that Shakespeare’s Italy is not very Italian; it is more like England in the summertime. He believes that most of the Italy plays do not demonstrate any particular sense of place. For example, the two plays set in Venice don’t mention the canals. His characters placed in Verona never mention the brick wall encircling the city that was constructed in the 1530s.
Here’s a telling example. In Two Gentlemen of Verona there are several references to travel by sea. The action begins in Verona. In the early scenes, each of the two gentlemen makes a voyage to Milan, each with his servant. It is clear that the trip will be made by water. Characters are urged to hurry to catch their ship, and not just a ship but the “flood” (i.e., the tide). This opens the door to a pun-fest using the words “tide” and “tied”. But look at a map of northern Italy. Verona is perhaps 60 miles inland and Milan is another 100 or so miles from the Adriatic. The only sensible way to travel from Verona to Milan is over land. In theory, you could take a river trip from Verona down the Adige River to its mouth, then coast southward to the mouth of the Po and fight the current for 150 miles or so to get close to Milan. You could then use a system of canals, still in existence, to take you the rest of the way.
Some have argued that northern Italy had a more intricate system of canals in the sixteenth century. On this view, the existing canals that connect Milan to the Po River are just a small part of a much larger system that connected Milan to Verona. The author of the plays knew what he was talking about after all. People of Shakespeare’s time would have traveled from Verona to Milan and back by water[4].
But, where are the canals? The ones connecting Milan to the Po still have water in them. Where is the magnificent system of canals connecting the two cities? Some who believe William Shakespeare could not have written the plays and poems conclude that the old canals have been filled in and are no longer visible. Also, that no record of them survives[5].
So, we start with the assumption that the author had to have known Italy. We end with the conclusion that there must be a network of canals buried beneath the soil east of Milan, canals of which no historical or archeological record exists. It’s a remarkable piece of reasoning, symptomatic of the belief that these great works could not have been produced by a small-town fellow with a 16th century grammar school education. Because that kind of thing doesn’t happen.
Which leads to the question: why is there an authorship controversy over the works of William Shakespeare but not over any of his contemporaries? Is there an authorship controversy surrounding Cervantes (who died April 22, 1616 – it was a tough week for great writers)? Everyone seems to be sure that John Donne wrote the poems attributed to him. Donne is one of the great figures of English literature. If you watch the Emma Thompson film “Wit” you learn that some Donne scholars think their man is a better poet than Will. Could the reason be that Donne was held in low regard during most of the time between his death in 1631 and the early 20th century? As an underappreciated master, he was not worth the trouble of an authorship controversy.
Shakespeare was recognized as a fine poet and dramatist by his contemporaries, but it was only in the late eighteenth century that his status was elevated to “greatest writer of the English language.” True “bardolatry,” as it was called, came into vogue. And it was only after Shakespeare had been widely considered the greatest writer in the English language that questions about the provenance of his works began to emerge.
What is it about the works of Shakespeare that makes the doubters want to attribute them to someone else? Why, in their minds, could the fellow from Stratford not manage it?
Let’s agree that it can’t be due to any special facility with plotting. Entire subplots are introduced and then dropped without further mention in Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night. In As You Like It, we are given as much story as is required to get the characters off to the Forest of Arden where they can frolic. Are there characters in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, etc. that you are not fond of? Just be patient, they will soon be dead.
It’s not the plot, it’s the poetry. Part of his power lies in his ability to show rather than tell, to put images before our minds. Consider an almost trivial example. In the first scene of Henry IV, Part 1 the King is waiting in London for news from a battle in a place called Holmedon. A messenger has arrived, one Sir Walter Blunt, and the author wants us to know that so conscientious and devoted is Sir Walter that he has ridden straight through to bring the news.
How to convey this information in the most compelling way? “He rode without rest.” That doesn’t say much. “He rode hell for leather.” Thanks, but there are enough clichés in Shakespeare’s work already[6]. “He left a trail of dust behind him for miles.” Better, but that takes our attention away from the present scene and puts it out on the road somewhere. “He is caked with mud from his ceaseless riding.” Now we have the rider and some mud standing in front of us, so that’s an improvement. Here is Shakespeare’s answer:
Here is a dear, a true industrious friend,
Sir Walter Blunt, new lighted from his horse,
Stain’d with the variation of each soil
Betwixt that Holmedon and this seat of ours;
It’s an elegant solution. We can picture the man and the horse covered in mud of different shades. Why are they so covered? Because they did not stop but rode straight through as the landscape and topography changed under them. We aren’t told what the man and horse did. Instead, an image is placed before our eyes, but our brains have to work to make sense of it.
And this is purely a throw-away line. Nothing in the play turns on whether Sir Walter rode fast or far. The lines are part of the web that draws us into the world that the poet has created for our entertainment or amusement or edification, depending on the particular play or scene within it.
The magic comes when a series of these images and metaphors are arranged together and cascade through our minds as we read or listen. To take an almost random example (from Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1):
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:
And Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
Now perhaps that’s an unfair example. Once Mr. S gets going on the subjects of blood, death, war, and mayhem, he puts that little bit extra into his work that makes such a difference. The example really was chosen nearly at random. We have a 1936 first edition of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare[7]” that belonged to my mother-in-law. It is some 1500 pages thick. I opened to the middle and then went forward and back by twenty or so pages until I found something suitable on the fourth try.
It would be easy enough to find hundreds if not thousands of other examples. There is John of Gaunt’s speech in Act 2, Scene 1 of Richard II (“This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle . . . .) or Leonato’s lines at the beginning of Act 5 of Much Ado About Nothing where he refuses to be calm and philosophical while he rages over what he believes, wrongly we know, to be the death of his daughter (“For there never yet was philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently,”) or the gentle post-courtroom scene in Merchant of Venice when, after the trial that condemned Shylock, the characters who are destined for happiness reflect on the beauty that surrounds them (“Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold[8]”).
I’m not quoting these passages at length since they and countless others can be found in books or online. Their power and beauty are augmented by the cascading effect of a series of potent metaphors. We have barely absorbed one when the author starts to unfold the next one. The effect can be dizzying, spellbinding.
It isn’t just the poetry, as potent as that is. His people are so believable, even though we know that they are characters in a story. And the range of personalities is staggering. Think of the evil SOBs – Iago, Cassius, Richard III, or Lady Macbeth (a DOB) – each of them evil in his or her own special way. The clowns, fools, and comics form their own regiment. There are cadres of kings, legions of lovers, not to mention warriors, rustic innocents, raging drunkards, sympathetic priests, and the occasional self-important official.
A particularly congenial group are the women who spend time disguised as men (Viola, Rosalind, Portia, with apologies to those I overlooked). This trope reaches a peak in Twelfth Night, where the young woman (Viola) masquerades as a young man (Cesario). She falls in love with her employer, a Duke who is himself in love with a neighbor, Olivia. Olivia falls in love with Cesario. The tangle entertains us for five acts. The resolution leaves the main characters as fully blinded by their emotions as they were at the beginning, but in new relationships.
Perhaps one characteristic common to many of Shakespeare’s characters is that they don’t explain themselves. They act out who they are. There is no exposition of their motives. The purely evil SOBs, the innocent lambs, the furious fathers, the doting mothers, the masquerading women, none of them undergoes psychoanalysis – we see who they are. How they got that way is rarely an issue[9].
So many of the jokes are still funny centuries later. A lot of Shakespeare’s humor devolves from the plain meaning of words.
Viola: [D]ost thou live by thy tabor[10]?
Clown: No, sir[11], I live by the church.
Viola: Art thou a churchman?
Clown: No such matter, sir: I do live by the church; for I do live at my house, and my house doth stand by the church. Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 1
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them? Henry IV, Part 1 Act 3, Scene 1
And a last, more complicated example, from Sir John Falstaff (again in Henry IV, Part 1), who saves his life in battle by pretending to be dead and then, when he is alone, rises to explain to himself and to us the wisdom of what he has done:
I am no counterfeit: to die, is to be a counterfeit; for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed.
In Twelfth Night, there is a subplot in which Malvolio, Olivia’s self-important chief of staff, is ensnared by a set of characters that he considers his moral inferiors. As he starts to fall victim to their plan, one of them, Fabian, says, “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.” The two times I’ve seen the play, he steps outside the action, comes to the edge of the stage, and addresses the audience directly. The theater erupts with laughter. The same thing must have happened when the line was spoken on the stage during the first known performance in 1602. I’d bet a steak dinner that audiences have laughed out loud at that line every time it has been spoken. There are forces at work that would outlaw laughter if they could. Unless they achieve a complete victory, that line will be shaking the rafters a century from now, when our grandchildren and great-grandchildren commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Bard’s death.
I know that I have barely touched what sets this work apart. Whole libraries could be, have been, filled with books by scholars who have analyzed individual works or particular aspects of them. I enjoy learning about the sources that Shakespeare was likely to have used for his plays, the place of the stage in the urban life of his time, the structure of his metaphors, the political implications of the plays. It is sobering to think of the tens of thousands of scholars who have each devoted decades of study to better understand, and to help us better understand, the work of one individual.
And it is staggering to think that one individual could have a mind so profound and the ability to translate his thought into language of such depth and power that tens of thousands of scholars more will still be improving their understanding of his work and the understanding of our remote descendants centuries from now.
Does any of this establish that the mind in question could not have belonged to the man from Stratford? Is there some known ingredient to genius operating at this level that we know Shakespeare lacked? Can it be said honestly that, given a man with the mind of Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere or any of the other leading candidates, of course you would expect works of this quality? It’s only when we stoop to a fellow like Will Shakespeare that we have trouble seeing how he could do it. The fact is that it is difficult to understand how anyone, of whatever level of education, birth, or experience, wrote these works.
It’s a little like the assertion that life had to have been created because it’s impossible to imagine that it could have evolved through a natural process. Without deciding that question, we have to acknowledge that the failure of our collective imaginations is not evidence of anything other than the bluntness of the instrument that is the human mind. We can’t imagine how someone in his early twenties walked out of a mid-sized town and ended up a few years later writing the greatest works in the English language. The mystery would not be resolved if we had reason to think that the author held a degree from a university, or had traveled widely, or held a hereditary title of nobility. How would that explain anything? No one else possessed of those characteristics has demonstrated that those are the keys that allow us to unlock the mystery.
To repeat myself, we don’t know how he decided to pursue his career or how he got his start, and we aren’t going to know. But we do owe a debt to someone who has provided his audience with so much entertainment, inspiration, and stimulation. We can’t repay him but I would like to make a small gesture toward acknowledging the debt by remembering the author on the four hundredth anniversary of his death.
[1] The official title was High Bailiff.
[2] To be clear, and for what it is worth, I believe there is no reason to doubt that William Shakespeare is the author of the plays and poems that are attributed to him.
[3] The title is optimistic.
[4] But even if there were such a system, all the jokes about floods, tides, and drowning would not fit a voyage via canal barge.
[5] There are German maps of the 1500s that view northern Italy as seen from the Alps. They show the area covered by rivers. Those rivers don’t exist, never existed. As McCrae points out, some remains of the supposed canals would have survived had they been in the ground. Four hundred years is not enough time to have erased the archeological record.
[6] Joke. Sorry.
[7] No longer complete. It predates the discovery that The Two Noble Kinsman is at least partly the work of W.S.
[8] What an enchanting image, that we are looking up at the floor of heaven. The original glass ceiling.
[9] Richard III is perhaps an exception. Possibly his hyper-self-consciousness is a source of his evil power. It would be natural to emphasize this characteristic in a play about the last Yorkist king written for an audience accustomed to cheer for the Lancastrians.
[10] I believe this would be a tambourine or similar instrument.
[11] Viola is disguised as a young man.
The Passing Scene 