Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also By Stephen Greenblatt

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Preface

  CHAPTER 1: Primal Scenes

  CHAPTER 2: The Dream of Restoration

  CHAPTER 3: The Great Fear

  CHAPTER 4: Wooing, Wedding, and Repenting

  CHAPTER 5: Crossing the Bridge

  CHAPTER 6: Life in the Suburbs

  CHAPTER 7: Shakescene

  CHAPTER 8: Master-Mistress

  CHAPTER 9: Laughter at the Scaffold

  CHAPTER 10: Speaking with the Dead

  CHAPTER 11: Bewitching the King

  CHAPTER 12: The Triumph of the Everyday

  A Note to the Reader

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliographical Notes

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and is the founder of the school of literary criticism known as New Historicism. As visiting professor and lecturer at universities in England, Australia, the United States and elsewhere throughout the world, he has delivered such distinguished series of lectures as the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford and the University Public Lectures at Princeton. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and has been President of the Modern Language Association. Professor Greenblatt is the author and co-author of nine books and the editor of ten others, including The Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th edition) and The Norton Shakespeare.

  ALSO BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT

  Hamlet in Purgatory

  Practicing New Historicism (with Catherine Gallagher)

  Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World

  Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture

  Shakespearean Negotiations:

  The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England

  Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

  Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles

  Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley

  EDITED BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT

  The Norton Anthology of English Literature (general editor)

  The Norton Shakespeare (general editor)

  New World Encounters

  Redrawing the Boundaries:

  The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies

  Representing the English Renaissance

  Allegory and Representation

  TO JOSH AND AARON, ONCE AGAIN, AND NOW TO HARRY

  Will in the World

  How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Preface

  A YOUNG MAN from a small provincial town—a man without independent wealth, without powerful family connections, and without a university education—moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. His works appeal to the learned and the unlettered, to urban sophisticates and provincial first-time theatergoers. He makes his audiences laugh and cry; he turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning and philosophical subtlety. He grasps with equal penetration the intimate lives of kings and of beggars; he seems at one moment to have studied law, at another theology, at another ancient history, while at the same time he effortlessly mimes the accents of country bumpkins and takes delight in old wives’ tales. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare?

  Theater, in Shakespeare’s time as in our own, is a highly social art form, not a game of bloodless abstractions. There was a type of drama in the age of Elizabeth and James that did not show its face in public; known as closet dramas, these were plays never meant to be performed or even printed. They were for silent reading in the privacy of small, preferably windowless rooms. But Shakespeare’s plays were always decisively out of the closet: they were, and are, in the world and of the world. Not only did Shakespeare write and act for a cutthroat commercial entertainment industry; he also wrote scripts that were intensely alert to the social and political realities of their times. He could scarcely have done otherwise: to stay afloat, the theater company in which he was a shareholder had to draw some 1,500 to 2,000 paying customers a day into the round wooden walls of the playhouse, and competition from rival companies was fierce. The key was not so much topicality—with government censorship and with repertory companies often successfully recycling the same scripts for years, it would have been risky to be too topical—as it was intensity of interest. Shakespeare had to engage with the deepest desires and fears of his audience, and his unusual success in his own time suggests that he succeeded brilliantly in doing so. Virtually all his rival playwrights found themselves on the straight road to starvation; Shakespeare, by contrast, made enough money to buy one of the best houses in the hometown to which he retired in his early fifties, a self-made man.

  This is a book, then, about an amazing success story that has resisted explanation: it aims to discover the actual person who wrote the most important body of imaginative literature of the last thousand years. Or rather, since the actual person is a matter of well-documented public record, it aims to tread the shadowy paths that lead from the life he lived into the literature he created.

  Apart from the poems and plays themselves, the surviving traces of Shakespeare’s life are abundant but thin. Dogged archival labor over many generations has turned up contemporary allusions to him, along with a reasonable number of the playwright’s property transactions, a marriage license bond, christening records, cast lists in which he is named as a performer, tax bills, petty legal affidavits, payments for services, and an interesting last will and testament, but no immediately obvious clues to unravel the great mystery of such immense creative power.

  The known facts have been rehearsed again and again for several centuries. Already in the nineteenth century there were fine, richly detailed, and well-documented biographies, and each year brings a fresh crop of them, sometimes enhanced with a hard-won crumb or two of new archival findings. After examining even the best of them and patiently sifting through most of the available traces, readers rarely feel closer to understanding how the playwright’s achievements came about. If anything, Shakespeare often seems a drabber, duller person, and the inward springs of his art seem more obscure than ever. Those springs would be difficult enough to glimpse if biographers could draw upon letters and diaries, contemporary memoirs and interviews, books with revealing marginalia, notes and first drafts. Nothing of the kind survives, nothing that provides a clear link between the timeless work with its universal appeal and a particular life that left its many scratches in the humdrum bureaucratic records of the age. The work is so astonishing, so luminous, that it seems to have come from a god and not a mortal, let alone a mortal of provincial origins and modest education.

  It is fitting, of course, to invoke the magic of an immensely strong imagination, a human endowment that does not depend upon an “interesting” life. Scholars have long and fruitfully studied the transforming work of that imagination on the books that, from evidence within the plays themselves, Shakespeare must certainly have read. As a writer he rarely started with a blank slate; he characteristically took materials that had already been in circulation and infused them with his supreme creative energies. On occasion, the reworking is so precise and detailed that he must have had the book from which he was deftly borrowing directly on his writing table as his quill pen raced across the paper. But no one w
ho responds intensely to Shakespeare’s art can believe that the plays and poems came exclusively from his reading. At least as much as the books he read, the central problems he grappled with as a young man—What should I do with my life? In what can I have faith? Whom do I love?—served throughout his career to shape his art.

  One of the prime characteristics of Shakespeare’s art is the touch of the real. As with any other writer whose voice has long ago fallen silent and whose body has moldered away, all that is left are words on a page, but even before a gifted actor makes Shakespeare’s words come alive, those words contain the vivid presence of actual, lived experience. The poet who noticed that the hunted, trembling hare was “dew-bedabbled” or who likened his stained reputation to the “dyer’s hand,” the playwright who has a husband tell his wife that there is a purse “in the desk / That’s covered o’er with Turkish tapestry” or who has a prince remember that his poor companion owns only two pairs of silk stockings, one of them peach-colored—this artist was unusually open to the world and discovered the means to allow this world into his works. To understand how he did this so effectively, it is important to look carefully at his verbal artistry—his command of rhetoric, his uncanny ventriloquism, his virtual obsession with language. To understand who Shakespeare was, it is important to follow the verbal traces he left behind back into the life he lived and into the world to which he was so open. And to understand how Shakespeare used his imagination to transform his life into his art, it is important to use our own imagination.

  CHAPTER 1

  Primal Scenes

  LET US IMAGINE that Shakespeare found himself from boyhood fascinated by language, obsessed with the magic of words. There is overwhelming evidence for this obsession from his earliest writings, so it is a very safe assumption that it began early, perhaps from the first moment his mother whispered a nursery rhyme in his ear:

  Pillycock, pillycock, sate on a hill,

  If he’s not gone—he sits there still.

  (This particular nursery rhyme was rattling around in his brain years later, when he was writing King Lear. “Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill,” chants the madman Poor Tom [3.4.73].) He heard things in the sounds of words that others did not hear; he made connections that others did not make; and he was flooded with a pleasure all his own.

  This was a love and a pleasure that Elizabethan England could arouse, richly satisfy, and reward, for the culture prized ornate eloquence, cultivated a taste for lavish prose from preachers and politicians, and expected even people of modest accomplishments and sober sensibilities to write poems. In one of his early plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare created a ridiculous schoolteacher, Holofernes, whose manner is a parody of a classroom style that most audience members must have found immediately recognizable. Holofernes cannot refer to an apple without adding that it hangs “like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven” and that it drops “on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth” (4.2.4–6). He is the comical embodiment of a curriculum that used, as one of its key textbooks, Erasmus’s On Copiousness, a book that taught students 150 different ways of saying (in Latin, of course) “Thank you for your letter.” If Shakespeare deftly mocked this manic word game, he also exuberantly played it in his own voice and his own language, as when he writes in sonnet 129 that lust “Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust” (lines 3–4). Concealed somewhere behind this passionate outburst are the many hours a young boy spent in school, compiling long lists of Latin synonyms.

  “All men,” wrote Queen Elizabeth’s tutor, Roger Ascham, “covet to have their children speak Latin.” The queen spoke Latin—one of the few women in the realm to have had access to that accomplishment, so crucial for international relations—and so did her diplomats, counselors, theologians, clergymen, physicians, and lawyers. But command of the ancient tongue was not limited to those who actually made practical, professional use of it. “All men covet to have their children speak Latin”: in the sixteenth century, bricklayers, wool merchants, glovers, prosperous yeomen—people who had no formal education and could not read or write English, let alone Latin—wanted their sons to be masters of the ablative absolute. Latin was culture, civility, upward mobility. It was the language of parental ambition, the universal currency of social desire.

  So it was that Will’s father and mother wanted their son to have a proper classical education. John Shakespeare himself seems to have had at most only partial literacy: as the holder of important civic offices in Stratford-upon-Avon, he probably knew how to read, but throughout his life he only signed his name with a mark. Judging from the mark she made on legal documents, Mary Shakespeare, the mother of England’s greatest writer, also could not write her name, though she too might have acquired some minimal literacy. But, they evidently decided, this would not suffice for their eldest son. The child no doubt began with a “hornbook”—a wooden tablet with the letters and the Paternoster printed on a piece of parchment covered with a thin sheet of transparent horn—and with the standard primary school text, The ABC with the Cathechism. (In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a lover sighs “like a schoolboy that had lost his ABC”[2.1.19–20].) Thus far he was only acquiring what his father and possibly even his mother may have possessed. But probably starting at age seven, he was sent to the Stratford free grammar school, whose central educational principle was total immersion in Latin.

  The school was called the King’s New School, but it was not new and it had not been founded by the king who was honored in its name, Elizabeth’s short-lived half brother Edward VI. Like so many other Elizabethan institutions, this one wore a mask designed to hide origins tainted with Roman Catholicism. Built by the town’s Guild of the Holy Cross in the early fifteenth century, it was endowed as a free school by one of its Catholic chaplains in 1482. The schoolhouse—which survives more or less intact—was a single large room above the guildhall, reached by a flight of external stairs that were at one time roofed with tile. There may have been partitions, particularly if an assistant teacher was teaching very young children their ABCs, but most of the students—some forty-two boys, ranging in age from seven to fourteen or fifteen—sat on hard benches facing the schoolmaster, sitting in his large chair at the head of the room.

  By statute, the Stratford schoolmaster was not allowed to take money for his instruction from any of the students. He was to teach any male child who qualified—that is, anyone who had learned the rudiments of reading and writing—“be their parents never so poor and the boys never so unapt.” For this he received free housing and an annual salary of twenty pounds, a substantial sum at the high end of what Elizabethan schoolmasters could hope to make. The town of Stratford was serious about the education of its children: after the free grammar school there were special scholarships to enable promising students of limited means to attend university. This was not, to be sure, universal free education. Here as everywhere else, girls were excluded from both grammar school and university. The sons of the very poor—a large proportion of the population—also did not go to school, for they were expected to begin work at a young age, and, besides, though there was no fee, there were some expenses: students were expected to bring quills for pens, a knife for sharpening the quills, candles in winter, and—an expensive commodity—paper. But for the sons of families of some means, however modest, a rigorous education, centered on the classics, was accessible. Though the Stratford school records from the time do not survive, Will almost certainly attended this school, fulfilling his parents’ desire that he learn Latin.

  In the summer the school day began at 6 A.M.; in the winter, as a concession to the darkness and the cold, at 7. At 11 came recess for lunch—Will presumably ran home, only three hundred yards or so away—and then instruction began again, continuing until 5:30 or 6. Six days a week; twelve months a year. The curriculum made few concessions to the range of human interests: no English history or literature; no biology, chemi
stry, or physics; no economics or sociology; only a smattering of arithmetic. There was instruction in the articles of the Christian faith, but that must have seemed all but indistinguishable from the instruction in Latin. And the instruction was not gentle: rote memorization, relentless drills, endless repetition, daily analysis of texts, elaborate exercises in imitation and rhetorical variation, all backed up by the threat of violence.

  Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin. A good teacher was by definition a strict teacher; pedagogical reputations were made by the vigor of the beatings administered. The practice was time-honored and entrenched: as part of his final examination at Cambridge, a graduate in grammar in the late Middle Ages was required to demonstrate his pedagogical fitness by flogging a dull or recalcitrant boy. Learning Latin in this period was, as a modern scholar has put it, a male puberty rite. Even for an exceptionally apt student, that puberty rite could not have been pleasant. Still, though it doubtless inflicted its measure of both boredom and pain, the King’s New School clearly aroused and fed Will’s inexhaustible craving for language.

  There was another aspect of the very long school day that must have given Will pleasure. Virtually all schoolmasters agreed that one of the best ways to instill good Latin in their students was to have them read and perform ancient plays, especially the comedies of Terence and Plautus. Even the clergyman John Northbrooke, a killjoy who in 1577 published a sour attack on “dicing, dancing, vain plays or interludes with other idle pastimes,” conceded that school performances of Latin plays, if suitably expurgated, were acceptable. Northbrooke stressed nervously that the plays had to be performed in the original language, not in English, that the students should not wear beautiful costumes, and, above all, that there should be no “vain and wanton toys of love.” For the great danger of these plays, as the Oxford scholar John Rainolds noted, was that the plot may call for the boy who is playing the hero to kiss the boy who is playing the heroine, and that kiss may be the undoing of both children. For the kiss of a beautiful boy is like the kiss of “certain spiders”: “if they do but touch men only with their mouth, they put them to wonderful pain and make them mad.”