Shakespeare, page 36
Shakespeare is never more lively, or more alert, or more witty, than in dealing with sexual matters. They are such a pervasive presence that they quite overshadow the ending of The Merchant of Venice, for example, where a number of obscene puns dominate the closing dialogue. The English crowd has always enjoyed sexual farce and obscenity, and he knew that such comedy would please the spectators of both “higher” and “lower” sort. But in his plays sexual puns and sexual allusions are more than just a dramatic device; they are part of the very fabric and texture of his language. His writing is quick with sexual meanings.
It could be argued that this is in part the sexual expressiveness of a celibate, or a faithful if absent husband, but common sense suggests otherwise. The printed reminiscences (or gossip) of his contemporaries strongly indicate that he had a reputation for philandering. He may have been “pricked out,” as he puts it, for women’s pleasure in a world where sex itself was a dark and dangerous force. The writer of the sonnets seems to have been touched by the fear and horror of venereal disease, and some biographers have even suggested that Shakespeare himself died from a related venereal condition. Nothing in Shakespeare’s life or character would exclude the possibility.
The Elizabethan age was one of great and open promiscuity. London women were known throughout Europe for their friendliness, and travellers professed to be astonished by the freedom and lewdness of conversation between the sexes. It was not only in the capital, however, that sexual activity was commonplace. It has been recorded that, out of a population of forty thousand adults in the county of Essex, some fifteen thousand were brought before the church courts for sexual offences in the period between 1558 and 1603.3 This is an astonishingly high number, and can only reflect upon the even more obvious opportunities and attractions of the city.
It was not always a clean or hygienic period in matters pertaining to the body, at least from a modern perspective, and the sexual act veered between mud wrestling and perfumed coupling. In order to avoid the more unpleasant sights and odours, it was customary for men and women to have sexual congress almost fully clothed. It was in many respects a short and furtive act, a mere spilling of animal spirits. In certain of the sonnets that act provokes shame and disgust. Hamlet is a misogynist. Loathing for the act of sex is apparent in Measure for Measure and in King Lear, in Timon of Athens and in Troilus and Cressida. This is of course a function of the plot, and cannot be taken as an expression of Shakespeare’s opinions on the matter (assuming that he had any at all), but it is a mirror of the reality all around him.
The poet’s passionate attachment to the young man of the sonnets, whether real or assumed, suggests that Shakespeare had an understanding of devoted male friendships. We have already noticed the presence of such friendships in the plays. It is also the case that Shakespeare was a “born” actor, and it has become apparent through the ages that actors are often possessed by an ambiguous sexuality. A great actor must always have a uniquely sensitive and yielding temperament, capable of assuming a thousand different moods, and psychologists have often assumed this to be a “feminine” component inherited from love or imitation of the mother. We do not need to go far down the by-ways of psychology to find this an eminently sensible observation. From the time of the Greek dramas of the fifth century BC, actors have been classified as wanton or effeminate, and in the late sixteenth century London preachers and moralists inveighed against the uncertain sexuality of the players. Acting was also deemed to be unnatural, an attempt to escape from nature and an act of defiance against God. It does not prove anything about Shakespeare, but it does help to explain the context and society in which he worked.
In his writing he knew what it was like to be both Cleopatra and Antony, both Juliet and Romeo. He became Rosalind and Celia, Beatrice and Mistress Quickly. More than any of his contemporaries he created memorable female roles. This does not imply that he was in any sense homosexual but suggests, rather, an unfixed or floating sexual identity. He had the capacity to be both female and male, and the scope of his art must have affected his life in the world. We may recall here the recently discovered portrait of the Earl of Southampton apparently dressed as a woman. In the late sixteenth century it was considered natural and appropriate that high-born males should assert the feminine aspect of their natures; it was a part of the Renaissance humanism considered essential for “gentle” conduct. The concept of divine androgyny was an element in the popular and fashionable teaching inspired by Renaissance Platonists. This is the proper context in which to understand Shakespeare’s invocation of the “master-mistress” of his passion. His was not an invitation to sodomy, which remained a capital offence in sixteenth-century England together with heresy and sorcery. Even arguably homosexual poets such as Marlowe draped their allusions in appropriately classical garb. It has also been demonstrated that, in sixteenth-century texts, what may be described as theoretical homosexuality was considered to be a predilection of the noble and the well-born; so it would not have been unthinkable for the “gentle” Shakespeare to make poetical allusions to the subject. It was a love not of the phallus, but of the mind.
It is instructive to compare the women in his plays with the “Dark Lady” of the sonnets. His comic heroines are lively and self-assured, which may also be an implicit reference to their sexual vitality; they have enormous powers of will, in a world where “will” also meant sexual power and potency. Will Shakespeare was fully aware of this. But there are other females touched by more desperate and dangerous forces. Ted Hughes has noticed in the plays evidence of Shakespeare’s loathing of the lustful female together with an “obsession with chastity.”4 This may be true of the late plays, where Miranda and Perdita and Imogen are altogether non-sensual beings. But it is not clear in these accounts whether the preoccupations of Shakespeare have been confused with those of his commentators. There is really no typical Shakespearian woman, in other words, and it is perhaps more interesting to study the responses they elicit from men. The most obvious and most common reaction is one of sexual jealousy, whether Othello at Desdemona or Leontes at Hermione. This is also the dramatic situation of the sonnets. There is much suspected betrayal and some real infidelity. It has become a commonplace of Shakespearian biography, of course, that Shakespeare suspected his absent wife of unfaithfulness. It is plausible but unprovable. We can only say that infidelity, true or false, plays as large a part in the plots of his plays as in the sequence of the sonnets.
It is of course true that most of Shakespeare’s plays involve the promise and the problems of love, in all its forms, and that his is the most profound treatment of love in the English language. It is natural and inevitable, therefore, that he should be preoccupied with sexual, as part of amatory, relationships. But that does not explain why sex is often treated with shame, horror and disgust. In his treatment of love he frequently uses the metaphors of warfare. The only couple who seem to be happily married in the plays are Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet although, of course, Macbeth and his wife are not without fondness for each other. But these fortunate pairs are hardly what in the modern world would be called “role-models.” Unhappy love and amatory conflict are the staple of drama, and dramatic convenience does not necessarily reflect Shakespeare’s personal misgivings. There is no need to introduce a poignant autobiographical note.
CHAPTER 54
And to Be Short, What Not,
That’s Sweete and Happie
James Burbage had died at the end of January 1597, and was buried in the little church of Shoreditch in the presence of his family and of the players. It has been assumed by some that he expired from disappointment or depression at the failure of his scheme to convert the Black-friars refectory into a playhouse, but he was probably too tough and experienced a manager to succumb to local difficulties. He was in any case past his mid-sixties, and in sixteenth-century terms had reached an advanced age. He left everything to his two sons who had continued in their father’s theatrical business. He gave the Theatre to Cuthbert Burbage, company sharer but not an actor, and the Blackfriars property to Richard Burbage, actor and company sharer; both properties may have seemed to his sons at the time to be the theatrical equivalent of the poisoned chalice, especially since Cuthbert was still not able to reach a satisfactory agreement with the landlord of the Theatre. The ground lease was set to expire in April 1597; Giles Allen agreed to an extension of the lease, but then objected to Richard Burbage as one of its guarantors. So it seems that in the late spring and early summer of 1597 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at the Curtain, while dispute continued over the now deserted Theatre. It was at the Curtain that the two completed parts of Henry IV were played.
Shakespeare had in fact stopped work upon the second part of Henry IV in order to concentrate upon The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is generally supposed that this latest comedy was written for the Garter Feast celebrated at Whitehall on 23 April 1597. Specifically it was a feast held in honour of the election of George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, as Knight of the Garter; he had just been appointed Lord Chamberlain after the death of Lord Cobham and had become the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The actors’ winter under Cobham’s rule had turned to glorious summer with the son of their former patron and supporter. The first Lord Hunsdon had been a welcome patron, and it seemed likely that his son would carry on that honourable tradition. It is reported that the queen asked for a drama about Falstaff in love, as we have already observed, and it is further reported that Shakespeare wrote the play in two weeks. Lord Hunsdon doubtless relayed the royal request, and Shakespeare immediately set to work. It is clear enough, given the number of their performances at court, that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were singled out for royal attention. Shakespeare may not have been court poet, but he was certainly favourite dramatist.
The Merry Wives of Windsor was set in Windsor simply because the new knights were ceremonially installed at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. There is no indication of any full-length drama being presented at such Garter celebrations, but the masque at the end of the play in which Mistress Quickly, absurdly disguised as the Fairy Queen, trips a measure, might have been perfomed at the castle rather than at the feast in Westminster Palace. A fortnight seems a reasonable time for its composition, together with other incidental stories or pieces of dialogue. Shakespeare then subsequently wrote the rest of the play to lead to this celebratory climax.
The characters of Falstaff and Shallow, Pistol and Bardolph, were just too good to relinquish; by dint of popular applause they came back. In the first printed edition the principal attraction is made clear in the description of “an excellent and pleasant conceited commedie of Sir John Faulstof and the merry wyves of Windesor.” Shakespeare may also have included material that he was unable to use in the history plays themselves. He was thrifty in such matters. He also added a contemporary note. One of the exasperated husbands in the play, concerned about his wife’s possible adultery with Falstaff, takes on the assumed name of “Brooke.” It seems to be a clear if harmless hit against the Brooke family whose paterfamilias, Lord Cobham, had recently died. Yet it may also be a hit against Sir Ralph Brooke, the York Herald who was disputing the Shakespeares’ right to bear arms. Whatever the truth of the matter Shakespeare was obliged by the Master of the Revels to turn “Brooke” into “Broome.” The joke is in any case lost upon posterity. There were other jokes, one about a German count who had been made a knight in absentia, suggesting that Shakespeare still had an eye for contemporaneous affairs.
The fact that the drama flowed so fluently from his pen suggests that it was an emanation from his natural wit—which means, in turn, that it can be interpreted as a traditional English comedy. Here are all the ingredients of English humour—a continual bawdiness of intention, a salacious narrative, and a man farcically dressed in “drag” as Falstaff escapes detection by posing as the fat woman of Brentford. There is also a comic Frenchman and, in true native style, a sudden turn towards supernaturalism at the end. More importantly, perhaps, sexual desire is continually transformed into farce. It is the stuff of a thousand English comedies, and in this place the sexual innuendo and the blue joke find their locus classicus. Others have noticed how in the play the English language is twisted and turned in a hundred different ways, in the mouths of a Frenchman and a Welshman, but this is only another aspect of the variability and variety of Shakespeare’s style when he is writing at the height of his invention. Words themselves become farcical in a world where improbability and incongruity are the only standards. In one sense The Merry Wives of Windsor resembles the “citizens’ plays” that had become very popular, but it is governed by a more genial spirit. By setting it in a country town, outside London, Shakespeare avoids the kind of urban satire that Jonson and Dekker employed.
The comedy would have been a gift to his players, too, with the emphasis on mistaken identities and sudden changes of plot. If Kempe continued to play Falstaff, he would have proved a singular “hit” dressed up as the fat woman of Brentford; the spare Sinklo would have played Slender. It has often been supposed that Shakespeare borrowed his comic plots from Italian drama, but in the crossing they have suffered a sea-change. It is characteristic of the English imagination, of which he is the greatest exemplar, to incorporate and to alter foreign models.
Part VI
New place
Shakespearye Player: rough sketch for the proposed
coat-of-arms.
CHAPTER 55
Therefore Am I
of an Honourable House
In the early days of May 1597, Shakespeare purchased one of the largest houses in Stratford. It was called New Place and had been erected at the end of the fifteenth century by the most celebrated former resident of the town, Sir Hugh Clopton. Its ownership set the seal on Shakespeare’s standing in the place of his birth. Its frontage was some 60 feet, its depth some 70 feet, and it reached a height of 28 feet. Shakespeare’s new house was made of brick upon a stone foundation, gabled, and with bay windows on the eastern or garden side. The topographer, John Leland, had called it a “pretty house of brick and timber,”1 and to the people of Stratford it was known as the “Great House.” As a boy Shakespeare had passed it every day, on his way to school, and it impressed itself on his imagination as a most desirable residence. It represented his childhood dream of prosperity. It was exactly the same spirit that persuaded Charles Dickens to buy Gad’s Hill Place in Kent; that house was for him, too, the measure of his childhood longing for success and notability. “If you work hard,” John Dickens had told his son, “you may one day own such a house.” These were perhaps also the words of John Shakespeare.
It was on the corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane, a commodious residence with its servants’ quarters at the front looking over Chapel Street; behind these was an enclosed courtyard and the main house. It was a prosperous, but not necessarily a quiet, neighbourhood. Chapel Street had many good houses, but Chapel Lane was squalid and malodorous; there were pigsties and common dunghills there, together with mud-walls and thatched barns. New Place itself stood immediately opposite the Falcon hostelry, and the local cheese market took place just outside the front door. Further down the street, on the other side of the lane, was the guild chapel and schoolroom where he had spent his early years. He had come back to the very site of his childhood.
He purchased the house and grounds for “sixty pounds in silver,” representing the first large investment he had ever made. In this he differed from his theatrical colleagues who tended to make their first investments in London property for themselves and their families. It is an indication that Shakespeare still readily and naturally identified himself with his native town; in London he remained, to use a Greek term, a resident alien. It may be doubted, however, whether he was really at home anywhere.
The deeds mention this sum of £60 but the complication of Elizabethan property negotiations is such that the actual cost was probably twice as much. Before Shakespeare bought it, however, the property had been described as “in great ruin and decay, and unrepaired, and it doth still remain unrepaired.” It was going cheap, in other words, and Shakespeare saw a likely opportunity for investment. According to a Clopton descendant Shakespeare “repair’d and modell’d it to his own mind.”2 He ordered stone to fulfil his vision. The building work must have been extensive, therefore, and almost instinctively found its way into the play he was writing at the time. In the second part of Henry IV there are three references to the building of a house, with its plots and models and costs.
It comprised at least ten rooms (there were ten fireplaces that were taxed at a later date), with two gardens and two barns; a later reference to two orchards may mean that Shakespeare and his family converted part of the gardens to more practical use. A similar if less spacious house, two doors away from Shakespeare’s dwelling, contained a hall, a parlour bedchamber, a “great chamber” and two other chambers beside a kitchen and cellar. Was there also in New Place a study, or perhaps even a library, for the master of the house? On this, of course, the public records are silent. But if Shakespeare now returned more often to Stratford, as some people surmise, then he would have required a place to read and to write.
He enlarged the garden by buying additional land and by demolishing a cottage. There were two ancient wells here, which can still be seen on the now empty site. Shakespeare was at ease in these surroundings, on his frequent or infrequent returns to Stratford. It is very likely that he owned a copy of John Gerard’s The Herball or generall historie of plantes, which was published in the year he purchased New Place. In that compendium of garden lore there is a reference to a blue-petalled speedwell that the Welsh called “fluellen.” Fluellen was the name he gave to the Welsh captain in Henry V. He is also supposed to have planted a mulberry tree in the garden, from which in later years an inexhaustible supply of wood was provided to cater for “tourist” items such as paperweights and walking sticks. If he did indeed plant a mulberry tree, he would have done so twelve years after the purchase of the house; in 1609 a Frenchman named Verton distributed young mulberry plants through the midland counties at the request of James I. There were also fruitful grape-vines here. A few years after Shakespeare’s death a local dignitary asked to be given from New Place “2 or 3 of the fairest of those budes on some few shutes of the last yeares vines.”
