In the age of "dumbing down", you can still find serious stuff in the papers if you are prepared to look. This was in Saturday's Guardian. Needless to say, I intend to see some Bard on the Beach in Vancouver this summer.
A man for all ages: According to many critics of his time, Shakespeare was vulgar, provincial and overrated. So how did he become the supreme deity of poetry, drama and high culture itself, asks Jonathan Bate, editor of the first Complete Works from the Folio for 300 years
The Guardian, Saturday April 14, 2007
In the spring of 1616, Francis Beaumont and William Shakespeare died within a few weeks of each other. Beaumont became the first dramatist to be honoured with burial in the national shrine of Westminster Abbey, beside the tombs of Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. Shakespeare was laid to rest in the provincial obscurity of his native Stratford-upon-Avon.
We now think of Shakespeare as a unique genius - the embodiment, indeed, of the very idea of artistic genius - but these two very different burial places are a reminder that in his own time, though widely admired, he was but one of a constellation of theatrical stars. How is it, then, that in the 18th and 19th centuries Shakespeare's fame outstripped that of all his peers? Why was he the sole dramatist of the age who would eventually have a genuinely worldwide impact? There are two answers: availability and adaptability.
In the same year that Beaumont and Shakespeare died, Ben Jonson became the first English dramatist to publish a collected edition of his own plays written for the public stage. Seven years later, Shakespeare's fellow actors John Hemings and Henry Condell followed with their magnificent Folio-sized collection of Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, Published according to the True Original Copies. Whereas Jonson's works got only a single reprint after his death, Shakespeare's Folio was reprinted three times before the end of the century. And through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, there was a major new edition of his Complete Works once every 20 years or so.
Shakespeare thus quickly became more available than his contemporaries - though the text in which he has been transmitted since the early 18th century has not been that of the Folio authorised by his own players. Shakespearean editors have adopted a "pick and mix" approach, printing some plays in the text of the Folio and others in the variant texts of the little quarto-sized volumes published in Shakespeare's lifetime. Astonishingly, the new RSC Complete Works, published next week, is the first since 1709 to be based primarily on the Folio, to offer an edition of the iconic book in its own right.
In his dedicatory poem to the Folio, Jonson described Shakespeare as a "star" whose "influence" would "chide or cheer" the future course of British drama. Once the Folio was available to, in the words of its editors, "the great Variety of Readers", the plays began to influence not just the theatre, but poetry more generally. The works of Milton, notably his masque Comus, were steeped in Shakespearean language. The young Milton's first published poem was a sonnet prefixed to the second edition of the Folio, in which Shakespeare was said to have built himself "a live-long Monument" in the form of his plays. Shakespeare was Milton's key precedent for the writing of Paradise Lost (1667) in blank verse rather than rhyme. Even later 17th-century poets who were committed to rhyme, such as John Dryden, acknowledged the power of his dramatic blank verse; as a homage to "the Divine Shakespeare", Dryden abandoned rhyme in All for Love (1678), his reworking of the Cleopatra story.
The London theatres were closed during the years of civil war and republican government in the middle of the 17th century, and the years after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 were characterised by a conflicting attitude towards Shakespeare. On the positive side, he was invoked for his inspirational native genius, used to support claims for English naturalness as opposed to French artifice and for the moderns against the ancients. In his sweeping Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), Dryden described Shakespeare as "the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul". He brushed off charges of Shakespeare's lack of learning with the memorable judgment that "he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature".
The learned Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, praised Shakespeare for his extraordinary ability to enter into his vast array of characters, to "express the divers and different humours, or natures, or several passions in mankind". Yet, at the same time, the courtly elite had spent their years of exile in France and come under the influence of a highly refined neoclassical theory of artistic decorum, according to which tragedy should be kept apart from comedy and high style from low, with dramatic "unity" demanding obedience to strict laws. For this reason, Dryden and his contemporaries took considerable liberties in polishing and "improving" Shakespeare's plays for performance. According to the law of poetic justice, wholly innocent characters should not be allowed to die: Nahum Tate therefore rewrote King Lear (1681) with a happy ending in which Cordelia marries Edgar. Tate also omitted the character of the Fool, on the grounds that such a figure was beneath the dignity of high tragedy.
The more formal classicism of Jonson and the courtly romances of Beaumont and Fletcher answered more readily to the Frenchified standards of the Restoration theatre. Actors, though, were demonstrating that the most rewarding roles in the repertoire were the Shakespearean ones. Thomas Betterton (1635-1710), the greatest player of the age, had enormous success as Hamlet, Sir Toby Belch, Henry VIII, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Lear, Falstaff, Angelo in Measure for Measure and Othello (some of these in versions close to the original texts, others in heavily adapted reworkings). Playhouse scripts of individual plays found their way into print, while the Folio went through its third and fourth printings. By the end of the century, Shakespeare was well entrenched in English cultural life, but he was not yet the unique genius.
Betterton's veneration for the memory of Shakespeare was such that late in his life he travelled to Warwickshire in order to find out what he could about the dramatist's origins. He passed a store of anecdotes to the poet, playwright and eventual poet laureate Nicholas Rowe, who wrote "Some Account of the Life of Mr William Shakespeare", a biographical sketch published in 1709 in the first of the six volumes of his Works of Shakespeare, the collection that is usually regarded as the first modern edition of the plays. Rowe's biography offered a mixture of truth and myth, calculated to represent Shakespeare as a man of the people. It tells of how young Will was withdrawn from school when his father fell on hard times, how he then got into bad company and stole deer from the park of local grandee Sir Thomas Lucy. The resultant prosecution forced him to leave for London, where he became an actor and then a dramatist. Rowe's account is a symptom of how every age reinvents Shakespeare in its own image. The road from the provinces to London was a familiar one in the 18th century - Samuel Johnson and David Garrick walked it in real life, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones in fiction. Shakespeare served as exemplar of the writer who achieved success, and an unprecedented degree of financial reward, from his pen alone. The Earl of Southampton may have helped him on his way in his early years, but he was essentially a self-made man rather than a beneficiary of court and aristocratic patronage. For writers such as Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, struggling in the transition from the age of patronage to that of Grub Street professionalism, Shakespeare offered not only a body of poetic invention and a gallery of living characters, but also an inspirational career trajectory.
If we had to identify a single decade in which the "cult of Shakespeare" took root, in which his celebrity and influence grew to outstrip that of his contemporaries once and for all, it would probably be the 1730s. There was a proliferation of cheap mass-market editions, while in the theatre the plays came to constitute about a quarter of the entire repertoire of the London stage, twice what they had been hitherto. The promotion of Shakespeare was driven by a number of forces, ranging from state censorship of new plays to a taste for the shapely legs of actresses in the cross-dressed "breeches parts" of the comedies. The plays were becoming synonymous with decency and Englishness, even as the institution of the theatre was still poised between respectability and disrepute.
David Garrick (1717-79), the actor who may justly be claimed as the father of what later came to be called "Bardolatry", arrived in London at a propitious moment. Shakespeare was growing into big business and the time was ripe for a new star to cash in on his name. As in many a good theatre story, Garrick's first break came when he stepped in as an understudy and outshone the actor who normally took the part. This was followed by a more formal debut, again of a kind that established a pattern for later generations: the revolutionary new reading of a major Shakespearean part. For Garrick, it was Richard III (for Edmund Kean in the next century, it was Shylock). After this, there was no looking back. Garrick did all the things we have come to expect of a major star: he took on the full gamut of Shakespeare, he had an affair with his leading lady (the gorgeous and talented Peg Woffington) and he managed his own acting company, supervising the scripts and directing plays while also starring in them. It was because of Garrick's extraordinary energy in all these departments that he not only gave unprecedented respectability to the profession of actor, but also effectively invented the modern theatre. The "actor-manager" tradition that he inaugurated stretched down to Laurence Olivier and beyond.
It was in the art of self-promotion that Garrick was unique. His public image was secured by William Hogarth's vibrant painting of him in the role of Richard III, confronted with his nightmares on the eve of the battle of Bosworth Field. The most frequently engraved and widely disseminated theatrical portrait of the 18th century, this iconic image simultaneously established Garrick as the quintessential tragedian and inaugurated the whole tradition of large-scale Shakespearean painting. Previously, the elevated genre of "history painting" had concentrated on biblical and classical subjects. With Hogarth's image - created in the studio, though influenced by Garrick's stage performance - Shakespearean drama joined this august company.
The climax of Garrick's career in Bardolatry was the jubilee that he organised to commemorate the bicentenary of Shakespeare's birth. The event took place in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769, on the occasion of the opening of a new town hall, a mere five years later than the anniversary it was supposed to mark. It lasted for three days, during which scores of fashionable Londoners descended on the hitherto obscure provincial town where Shakespeare had been born. The literary tourist industry began here: local entrepreneurs did good business in the sale of Shakespearean relics, such as souvenirs supposedly cut from the wood of the great Bard's mulberry tree. Not since the marketing in medieval times of fragments of the True Cross had a single tree yielded so much wood. The jubilee programme included a grand procession of Shakespearean characters, a masked ball, a horse race and a firework display. In true English fashion, the outdoor events were washed out by torrential rain. At the climax of the festivities, Garrick performed his own poem, "An Ode upon dedicating a building and erecting a statue to Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon", set to music by the leading composer Thomas Arne. In the manner of a staged theatrical "happening", Garrick had arranged for a member of the audience (a fellow actor), dressed as a French fop, to complain - as French connoisseurs of literary taste had complained for generations - that Shakespeare was vulgar, provincial and overrated. This gave Garrick the opportunity to voice his grand defence of Shakespeare. Though the whole business was much mocked in newspaper reports, caricatures and stage farces, it generated enormous publicity for both Garrick and Shakespeare across Britain and the continent of Europe. The jubilee did more than turn Stratford-upon-Avon into a tourist attraction: it inaugurated the very idea of a summer arts festival.
In an age when orthodox religion was facing severe challenges, the cult of Shakespeare was becoming a secular faith. Thanks to the enthusiasm of poets, critics and translators such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt and John Keats in England, Goethe and the Schlegel brothers in Germany, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas in France, during the 19th-century era of Romanticism, the grammar-school boy from the edge of the forest of Arden became the supreme deity not just of poetry and drama, but of high culture itself.
From the initial reception of Venus and Adonis, his first published work, through the dedicatory material prefaced to the First Folio, Shakespeare was renowned by his contemporaries above all for his wit, his mastery of language. He lived in an age when English was undergoing a huge expansion, sucking in new words from all over Europe and beyond.
It is universally acknowledged that Shakespeare's gift of poetic invention surpassed that of any writer before or since. Sometimes, though, the art of Bardolatry has led to excessive claims: Shakespeare is sometimes said to have coined more new English words than anyone else, with the possible exception of James Joyce. This is not true. The illusion of his inventiveness in this regard was created by the tendency of the Oxford English Dictionary to cite examples from him as the first usage of a word, because of his ready availability when the dictionary was created at the end of the Victorian era. Now that there are large, digitised databases of 16th-century books, it is easy to find earlier occurrences for many supposed Shakespearean coinages. Despite this, the list of neologisms remains impressive. To give a random selection of words, Shakespeare is responsible for such verbs as puke, torture, misquote, gossip, swagger, blanket (Poor Tom's "blanket my loins" in Lear) and champion (Macbeth's "champion me to the utterance"). He seems to have invented the nouns critic, mountaineer, pageantry and eyeball, the adjectives fashionable, unreal, blood-stained, deafening, majestic and domineering, the adverbs instinctively and obsequiously in the sense of "behaving in the appropriate way to render obsequies for the dead". Many of his coinages are not new words, but old words in new contexts (such as the application of "manager" to the entertainment business, with A Midsummer Night's Dream's "manager of mirth") or new compounds or old words wrested to new grammatical usage.
Shakespeare's enduring appeal cannot, however, be said to rest solely on his linguistic virtuosity, nor on the proposition - favoured by some of today's politically minded critics - that he achieved world domination simply because of the power of the British empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. At one level, he is "not of an age, but for all time". He works with archetypal characters, core plots and perennial conflicts, as he dramatises the competing demands of the living and the dead, the old and the young, men and women, self and society, integrity and role-play, insiders and outsiders. He grasps the structural conflicts shared by all societies: religious against secular vision, country against city, birth against education, strong leadership against the people's voice, the code of honour against the energies of erotic desire. But he also addressed the conflicts of his own historical moment: the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism and feudalism to modernity, the formation of national identity, trade and immigration, the encounter with new worlds overseas, the shadow of foreign powers.
He was restricted by the customs of his age, notably when it came to the subordination of women, but at the same time he was prophetic of future ages. Despite the inferior position of most women in his society and the fact that the convention of his theatre meant that female parts were played by young men, he gives a remarkable degree of freedom and mental agility to his women. In the Victorian era, the husband and wife Bardophiles Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke suggested that "Shakespeare is the writer of all others whom the women of England should most take to their hearts; for we believe it to be mainly through his intellectual influence that their claims in the scale of society were acknowledged in England, when throughout what is denominated the civilised world, their position was not greatly elevated above that of the drudges in modern low life."
Since the 1700s, the cult of Shakespeare has been closely bound up with the idealisation of Queen Elizabeth I. Consequently, his plays have often been set beside the poetry of John Donne, the gentleman-like virtues of Philip Sidney, the global circumnavigation of Francis Drake, the colonial enterprise of Walter Raleigh and the defeat of the Spanish Armada: these, it has been said, were the fruits of England's golden age. The reality is that Queen Elizabeth inherited, and Shakespeare grew up in, a divided and vulnerable nation. The Spanish threat and the Irish problem would not go away. The queen's tactic of not marrying was a highly effective way of keeping open a range of possible alliances, but by the 1590s it had created severe anxiety about the succession to the throne. In the period when Shakespeare was writing his plays, the queen and her ministers had come to rely more and more on coercion, threat and surveillance in order to maintain authority.
Shakespeare's political beliefs are as elusive as his religion, his sexuality and just about everything else about him that matters. Precisely because he was not an apologist for any single position, it has been possible for the plays to be reinterpreted in the light of each successive age. This is where that other crucial factor, adaptability, comes into play. In the four centuries since his death, he has been made the apologist for all sorts of diametrically opposed ideologies, many of them anachronistic - we should not forget that he was writing before the time when toleration and liberal democracy became totemic values.
The political appropriation of him is true to his own practice: he, too, was a great trader in anachronism. He took the political structures of ancient Rome and mapped them on to his own time and state with fascinating effect: The Rape of Lucrece is set at the moment of transition from monarchy to republic; Coriolanus during the republican era; Julius Caesar at the pivotal moment when a crown is offered and refused but the republic collapses anyway; Antony and Cleopatra ends with the beginning of empire; and Titus Andronicus fictionalises the Roman empire in decay, approaching the time when the great city will be sacked by "barbarian" hordes from the north; King Lear and Cymbeline find echoes of the modern in the matter of ancient Britain. The history plays speak at once to the generations before Shakespeare and to his live audience. Several other plays use contemporary Italy as a mirror. Humanist learning and mercantile travel meant that the eyes of the Elizabethans were open to forms of government other than the hereditary monarchy they experienced at home. They had great admiration for Venice, regarding that island city-state as a model of anti-papal modernity and trading prowess. Venice had no monarch, but a sophisticated oligarchic system, which was observed by English travellers and absorbed by readers such as Shakespeare by way of Lewis Lewkenor's translation of Contarini's The Commonwealth and Republic of Venice (an important source for Othello).
Not so long ago, it was commonplace for historians to assert that republican thought had no following in England until well into the 17th century - that the intellectual conditions which made the Cromwellian republic possible emerged only a few years before the extraordinary moment when the English chopped off their king's head. Recent scholarship has shown that this was not the case: republican discourse, if not overt republican polemic, was widespread in Shakespeare's time. So, for instance, the anti-imperial Roman historian Tacitus was read and discussed and admired as the most dispassionate of historians, whose work combined moral insight into the behaviour of political actors with an assessment of their value as governors.
The association of Shakespeare with Tacitism is especially interesting because it aligns him with the Earl of Essex. Shakespeare's patron, Southampton, was a follower of Essex, so it must have been a political gesture on Shakespeare's part to dedicate to him The Rape of Lucrece, a highly Tacitean account of the tyranny of Tarquin and the establishment of the Roman republic. Shakespeare's most explicit contemporary political allusion is a flattering allusion in one of the Henry V choruses to Essex's military expedition against the Irish. The commissioning of the performance of Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion suggests that the Tacitean faction still considered Shakespeare to be in effect their house dramatist in the last years of the old queen's reign. But with his usual cunning, Shakespeare somehow managed to throw off the association: Essex was executed for treason and Southampton was sent to the Tower, but the players got away with a reprimand. They claimed that they had only put on the show because they had been well paid to do so.
Shakespeare sometimes wrote in direct flattery of Queen Elizabeth, as in the epilogue to a court performance on Shrove Tuesday, 1599. And the Virgin Queen is almost certainly the immortal phoenix of the mysteriously beautiful poem that has become known as "The Phoenix and Turtle", written the same year as the Essex rebellion. But when the old queen finally died in 1603, Henry Chettle expressed surprise that Shakespeare's "honied muse" dropped "no sable tear" in her memory. Though there seems not to have been a published elegy, Shakespeare did perhaps reflect on the end of the era and the uncertain times to come in Sonnet 107, with its reference to the "eclipse" of the "mortal moon" (in classical mythology, the moon was associated with Diana the virgin huntress - and Elizabeth in turn was associated with her).
The new king, James I, immediately took Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, under his direct patronage. Henceforth they would be the King's Men, and for the rest of Shakespeare's career they were favoured with far more court performances than any of their rivals. In August that year, they had to close the theatre and spend 18 days literally "waiting" in attendance at Somerset House during the visit of a special envoy from the king of Spain, while a peace treaty was being thrashed out. This moment of suspension was an important turning point in Shakespeare's work. Elizabethan Shakespeare was a war poet: the Armada and the campaigns against the Spanish in the Netherlands had overshadowed his whole career. Jacobean Shakespeare was a peace poet: of course, he still wrote battle scenes, which were always good box office, but a play such as Coriolanus is equally interested in the question of what happens to a man of action in a time of peace; a Scottish king working in harmony with the English court brings peace at the climax of Macbeth; Cymbeline ends with a peace treaty; and Antony and Cleopatra concludes with Octavius becoming Augustus and promising to fulfil his prediction that "The time of universal peace is near". James liked to see himself as a modern Augustus, at once the bringer of peace across Europe and the founder of a new empire ("Britain", in contrast to Elizabeth's "England"). Shakespeare's Jacobean plays resonate with the new king's preoccupations: in Macbeth, the Gunpowder plot, witchcraft, the lineage of Banquo, the practice of "touching" subjects to cure them of scrofula, known as the king's evil; in Lear, the need to unite Britain and the dire consequences of its division; in Cymbeline, Britain as a new Rome and the talismanic Welsh port of Milford Haven, where Henry Richmond landed at the dawn of the Tudor dynasty; in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, royal children and dynastic liaisons.
Shakespeare endures because, with each new turn of history, a new dimension of his work opens up before us. His insights into the dynamics of royalty and power are such that, whoever is king or president or prime minister, one or more of the plays will always strike a resonance with the times. When George III went mad, King Lear was kept off the stage - it was just too close to the truth. During the cold war, Lear again became Shakespeare's most popular play, its combination of starkness and absurdity answering to the mood of the age, inspiring both the Russian Grigori Kozintsev (1969) and the English Peter Brook (1971) to make darkly brilliant film versions.
Early in 1934, when the French socialist government was close to collapse, a new translation of Coriolanus was staged at the Comédie Française in Paris. The production was perceived as an attack on democratic institutions. Rioting pro- and anti-government factions clashed in the auditorium. Shakespeare's translator, a Swiss, was branded a foreign fascist. The prime minister fired the theatre director and replaced him with the head of the security police, whose artistic credentials were somewhat questionable. What are we to conclude from this real-life drama? That Coriolanus's contempt for the rabble makes Shakespeare himself a proto-fascist? How could it then have been that, the following year, the Maly Theatre company in Stalin's Moscow staged a production of the same play which sought to demonstrate that Coriolanus was an "enemy of the people" and that Shakespeare was therefore a true socialist? Shakespeare was neither an absolutist nor a democrat, but the fact that both productions were possible is one of the major reasons why he continues to live through his work four centuries after his death.
"Shakespeare's plays," wrote Johnson in the preface to his edition of 1765, "are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolic of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design." Johnson's preface to Shakespeare was written in a spirit of English empiricism that did not worry itself about neoclassical rules. "There is always an appeal open from critics to nature," he says: Shakespeare's plays are great for the very reason that they mingle joy with sorrow and high with low. They may not conform to the model of the ancients, but they are true to life. The fall of the mighty is only ever part of the picture. Even Shakespeare's severest tragedies have their comedians: the Porter in Macbeth; Lear's Fool. Even his happiest comedies have their malcontents: Jaques in As You Like It; Don John in Much Ado About Nothing. We might go so far as to say that all Shakespeare's plays are tragicomedies and that is one of the principal reasons why his drama is, as Johnson also recognised, "the mirror of life".
The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, is published on April 19 by Macmillan (£30).
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