| Introduction |
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| In his lifetime William Shakespeare himself published,
or had published over his own head but under his name, non-dramatic
poetry: the two early and ambitious narrative poems Venus
and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece (usually referred
to as Venus and Lucrece, respectively, hereinafter),
the Sonnets, a quantity of occasional verse (some of
which is not his, but which was published as his in The Passionate
Pilgrim in 1599), "A Lover's Complaint" (bound
up with the Sonnets, as makeweight) and the celebrated
enigmatic lyric "The Phoenix and the Turtle" (published
in Love's Martyr, 1601), about whose meaning and significance
(is it a comic joke, obscene, deadly serious, what is the "bird
of loudest lay"?) there has been little agreement and,
relatively, little commentary. The portmanteau term Poems,
applied to Shakespeare's works, has not usually included the
Sonnets - here, however, the latter are counted as such.
In the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries comparatively
little interest was taken in the non-dramatic works. |
| The Ovidian narrative poems Venus and Adonis
and The Rape of Lucrece were published by the young Shakespeare
with more immediate pleasure and high hopes than ever attended
the publication of any of his plays in the quarto editions in
which they appeared in his own lifetime. Such publication of
the plays was wholly outside his control. But, for all the excellencies,
sometimes the high excellencies, and the often effortless charms
of these two early poems, especially of the first of them, it
is well recognised that the Sonnets (1609) are more mature
and deeper - as well as hugely superior in poetic quality. |
| But when this sonnet-sequence was issued under
the imprint of Thomas Thorpe, a man who made most of whatever
little money he could ever get hold of by going after unpublished
manuscripts (he brought out John Marston's play The Malcontent
and Ben Jonson's tragedy Sejanus), it was almost certainly
not only against the author's will, but also to his extreme
displeasure, discomfiture and possibly even fear. For this sequence,
unlike the earlier and more conventional narrative poems, gives
an account of various apparently personal sexual and social
affairs that the reading public of that time - it was just like
our own, although nothing like as well supplied with fatuous
tittle-tattle, if only because not supplied with as many newspapers
- could easily and gleefully regard as "scandalous"
in a number of respects. None of the other many sonnet-sequences
of the time (there were many) is characterised by similarly
"scandalous" elements; nor do they contain poems that
are as deliberately - by even the standards of their day - obscene.
|
| Homosexuality was not against the law, but buggery
of either man or woman was; homosexuality itself, sexual relationships
between men (let alone between women), was looked upon askance,
remained undefined, and was hardly ever discussed in public
unless under the rubric of "sodomy" (which, it should
hardly need to be pointed out, homosexuality by no means always
is). Witness the unequivocal condemnation of it even by the
tolerant and level-headed Montaigne. However, Shakespeare rode
whatever storm may have been raised by Thorpe's publication
of the Sonnets. It is as well to recognise from the outset
that we have no hard evidence that this publication was without
the author's permission. It is therefore even possible, though
not at all likely, that Shakespeare "turned a blind eye"
to Thorpe's piracy: that he wanted the sonnets published but
not with his overt approval. The text, though, is quite carelessly
printed, if not disastrously so, and is unlikely to have been
supervised by him. The texts of both the two early poems, on
the other hand, are good. It is most likely that Thorpe edition
of the Sonnets was not available for long - perhaps only
for a few days. |
| By 1609 Shakespeare was no longer just a promising
youngster, but established as the most popular and successful
playwright of his age - and that was at a time of many other
not unsuccessful playwrights: Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas
Middleton and John Marston are only a few leading examples.
The "Shakespeare legend" had not by then been created;
but by 1609 it was already well in the making. Only fourteen
years later, in introducing the First Folio, the first collected
edition of the plays in three volumes (the poetry, like the
play Pericles, already in Quarto, was excluded), Shakespeare's
friend Ben Jonson wrote "To the memory of my beloved, The
Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us",
in which he implied that there were already those who, to his
detriment, were beginning to idolise him. Indeed, the contents
of Jonson's poem, famous as it is, so often pass careful consideration
that is worth quoting and paying attention to the first part: |
| |
To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy
name,
Am I thus ample to thy Booke, and Fame:
While I confesse thy writings to be such,
As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise
too much.
'Tis true, and all mens suffrage. But these wayes
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise:
For seeliest Ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but eccho's right;
Or blinde Affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth by all chance;
Or crafty Malice, might pretend this praise,
And thinke to ruine, where it seem'd to raise.
These are, as some infamous Baud, or Whore,
Should praise a Matron. What could hurt her more?
But thou art proofe against them and indeed
Above th'ill fortune of them, or the need.
I, therefore will begin. Soule of the Age! ..... |
| This opening passage echoes the more precise prose
remarks made by Jonson - in the course of making notes for his
lectures at Gresham College in London - about his close friend;
they are to be found in his posthumously issued Timber, or
Discoveries (1640): |
| |
I remember, the Players have often
mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his
writing, (whatsoever he penn'd) hee never blotted a line. My
answer hath beene, would he had blotted out thousand. Which
they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this,
but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend
their friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justifie mine
owne candor, (for I lov'd the man, and doe honour his memory
(on this side Idolatry) as much as any.) Hee was (indeed) honest,
and of an open, and free nature; had an excellent Phantsie;
brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein hee flow'd with
that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop'd;
Sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said of Haterius.
His wit was in his owne power; would the rule of it had beene
so too. Many times hee fell into those things, could not escape
laughter: As when hee said in the person of Caesar, one
speaking to him; Caesar thou dost me wrong. Hee replyed:
Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause and such
like, which were ridiculous. But hee redeemed his vices, with
his vertues. There was ever more in him to be praised, then
to be pardoned. |
| Jonson wrote this after Shakespeare's death; he
was possibly recollecting an occasion upon which his friend,
doubtless hurried and harassed by the need to meet a deadline,
had taken note of his criticisms, and had made a revision: for
the offending line does not appear in the first publication
of Julius Caesar (this is in the First Folio: there had
been no quarto of that play). |
| Shakespeare must have known of Jonson, his junior
by eight years, before 1598, the year of the latter's comedy
Every Man In His Humour, in which he played a major role
(probably Lorenzo senior); but perhaps he did not become an
intimate friend until around that time. His name heads the list
of the players on the title-page of the 1616 edition of Every
Man in his Humour, a revision which changes the scene of
the original from Italy to England. There are in the Prologue
to this some good-natured jokes directed at Shakespeare's style
of making comedies. According to well-established tradition
there was always friendly rivalry between the two men, and they
would try at all opportunities to put each other down in a joking
manner. |
| The thriving bookseller and printer Richard Field
was, like Shakespeare, a native of Stratford-upon-Avon. He is
more than likely to have been a close friend from childhood.
Field left Stratford in 1579, and by 1593, when he entered Shakespeare's
Venus in the Stationer's Register (the obligatory legal
signal of an intention to publish), he was already one of the
more prominent members of the Stationers' Company. |
| The Stationers Company, formed by printers and
publishers in 1557, held a monopoly of the book trade in Tudor
England. No one not a member was allowed either to print or
to publish. The Stationers' Register was the record kept by
the Company in which members announced the works they intended
to publish. This suited the authorities, since by such a means
they could exercise control over publications of which in principle
they were afraid. |
| Shakespeare, like Field, was doing well: well
enough for the poet and playwright Robert Greene, jealously,
to call him "an upstart crow" in his (just) posthumous
Groats-worth of Wit (1592). This insult has always been
taken, and rightly so, as giving an indication of Shakespeare's
standing at the time: as one made against an up-and-coming playwright.
In 1589 Shakespeare's first play, A Comedy of Errors,
had been performed, and soon after that the tragedy of Titus
Andronicus. Then came the three parts of the chronicle-play
Henry VI. |
| The first two plays are carefully cast in imitation
of then very fashionable models: Roman comedy (Terence and Plautus)
and tragedy (Seneca) respectively. In the three Henry VI
plays (about 1590-92) and their sequel Richard III (this
was probably planned as early as 1590), Shakespeare, initially
desiring to capitalise as a playwright upon the patriotic feelings
inspired by the 1588 victory over the Spanish Armada, began
to draw on historical chroniclers such as Holinshed and Hall,
and to develop new metaphorical techniques quite peculiar to
himself. |
| By the time of Richard III (performed between
1591 and 1594 but not printed until 1597) Shakespeare's capability,
originality and drawing-power were no longer in question. He
must have made his beginnings in the theatre, in the mid-1580s,
as a "hired man", an apprentice actor, getting work
where he could; by the mid-1590s he was already prospering,
as a leading actor-dramatist. He was already one of the chief
shareholders in his company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. By
1597 he was able to buy a substantial property, New Place, in
Stratford, and to settle there with his wife (whom he had married
at the age of eighteen) and their family. Only fifteen years
after that he retired to Stratford, and gave up regular writing
for the stage. |
| For much of 1592 and 1593 the theatres were closed
on account of the bubonic plague. A certain number of notified
plague deaths in a given week automatically closed them. This
gave Shakespeare a welcome opportunity - to give time to a form
that was then regarded as far superior to the provision of mere
public entertainment, even if that did happen to be in verse:
the writing of poems, of what was thought of as poetry proper,
the highest of all the literary forms. Edmund Spenser's unfinished
allegorical poem The Faerie Queen, which was being published
throughout the 1590s, was the prime exemplar. There was some
overlap and blurring between what may fairly be described as
these two worlds, of the drama and the more literary and gentlemanly
one of poetry; this overlap gradually became larger. Such men
as Ben Jonson (in particular) could be said to be trying to
extend it. Even Samuel Daniel, a leading light of the time but
not a playwright by inclination, attempted to write a type of
drama rooted in literary tradition. But in the 1590s the two
worlds were still just about distinct. |
| The English drama has its origins not only in
the respectable Church, but also in the far less respectable
(and potentially more subversive) folkways. It was already in
disrepute with all shades of Puritan opinion - which, if only
at its most ludicrous, believed that actors and all those connected
with them were actually in league with the Devil, as, after
all (they claimed) Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus
actually demonstrated. And, although some powerful men were
devoted to the enjoyment of dramatic spectacle, and there was
even a Master of the Revels at court, plays in themselves were
feared, by the authorities as possible weapons of subversion.
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| Everyone connected with the theatrical profession,
therefore, needed the protection of highly placed persons -
even of the sovereign. If they did not have this then they could
be classed as rogues and vagabonds. This aspect of the actor's
life has been a little exaggerated, but it was nevertheless
a legal possibility. Actors needed to possess a technical status,
of servant to someone or other who was important and genuinely
influential. Thus the various companies of actors referred to
themselves, and were referred to, as "belonging" to
noblemen: the Admiral's Men, Sussex's Men, the Lord Chamberlain's
Men, and so on and so forth. |
| The profession of poet, though by no means as
lucrative as that of a playwright, given some success and luck,
could be. If the poet were not a nobleman, then he (there were
only a very few woman poets) required the patronage of a nobleman
and all the gifts that went with it. Edmund Spenser, himself
such a professed poet, laboured to gain the approval and the
favour of Queen Elizabeth. It is well illustrated in the case
of other poets: for example, Michael Drayton (1563-1631), Shakespeare's
friend and fellow Warwickshireman. The prolific Drayton, really
a kind of less gifted successor to Spenser, was very popular
in his time; but, because he was not primarily a dramatist,
he depended, as his career repeatedly shows, upon patronage
for his voluminous and usually (necessarily) fashionable projects. |
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