Shakespeare, page 48
There are other contemporary matters that must be seen in the context of Othello, if only because they would have been known to every member of the audience who witnessed the first production. King James had a pronounced sympathy for the Spanish state; that is why Shakespeare and his fellows were entertaining the Ambassador Extraordinary in Somerset House. But there was also a well-attested story publicised throughout Europe that the previous king of Spain, Philip II, was an insanely jealous husband who had strangled his wife in her bed. What is more, he had become suspicious of her when she had inadvertently dropped her handkerchief. These parallels are too close to be coincidental. The fact that Cyprus becomes the scene of the tragic action of Othello is also explicable in these terms. Cyprus was once a Venetian protectorate but had been occupied by Turkish forces for more than thirty years, and thus posed a threat to Spanish as well as Venetian interests in the region. King James himself had written a poem upon the subject. So Shakespeare was deliberately reflecting the interests and preoccupations of the sovereign. During the present reign of Philip III, too, Spain was at odds with the republic of Venice. It would be too much to claim, as some commentators have done, that Othello “represents” Spain and that Desdemona “represents” Venice. Yet it is undoubtedly true that Shakespeare’s imagination, magnetised, as it were, around Spain, had drawn in everything. He had become, for the purposes of this play, a vessel for all things Spanish.
So it would be wrong to state that Shakespeare never wrote a play concerning contemporary life. Othello was a very modern drama, refracting all the circumstances of the period. Shakespeare also read some recently published translations that suited his purpose—among them A Geographical Historie of Africa and Pliny’s Historie of the World. He also read Sir Lewis Lewkenor’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. These books were published in 1600, 1601 and 1599 respectively, so we may plausibly imagine Shakespeare as a haunter of bookstalls, picking up any recently printed volumes as a spur to his creativity. The booksellers pointed out their recent acquisitions, and his noble patrons may have informed him of the latest fashionable volume. But there was a pattern to his reading. The evidence of Othello suggests that, when he had hit upon a theme, he opened those books that were directly relevant to it. He was searching for local “colour” but also for the circumstantial detail and the significant phrase.
The question of Shakespeare’s learning has vexed many commentators. Its extent can perhaps be measured in the simple statement that he learned as much as he needed to learn. He had no wasted or superfluous knowledge. He was familiar with the classics of the schoolroom, as we have seen, and for his own dramatic purposes used Ovid and Virgil, Terence and Plautus. He could read Latin, and possibly even a smattering of Greek, but he preferred to use translations wherever possible. He read North’s translation of Plutarch rather than Plutarch himself, for example, and read Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses rather than the great original. He would have been obliged, however, to read Plautus and Ovid’s Fasti in Latin. He was not interested in these texts for their own sake, only for what they inspired within him. He was of course thoroughly familiar with all of his source material, whether it be out of Plutarch or Holinshed. This may also come under the rubric of useful learning. He was not a scholar, an antiquarian or a philosopher. He was a dramatist. He seems in fact to have distrusted philosophy, rational discourse and sententiousness in all of its forms. Abstract language was his abhorrence. He trusted only language imbued with action and with character, with time and with place.
It is possible that he could read both French and Italian, but he preferred to use translations wherever possible. It is not a question of laziness but of efficiency. The fact that he preferred English versions of foreign stories also suggests that he was not particularly interested in the “otherness” of other cultures. It was his habit to search through books, old or new, looking for that which his imagination could use. He seems on occasions to have read the summaries of the text in the margin rather than the text itself. His knowledge of popular botany, medicine, astrology, astronomy, and other matters, is extensive rather than profound; his alertness and power of assimilation were unique, so that he seems to know “more” than his contemporaries. He picked up everything.
We may make an informed guess about the books he assimilated. Among them are William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, Geoffrey Fenton’s Certaine Tragicall Discourses, Bandello’s Novelle, Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi, George Whetstone’s Heptameron, Arthur Brooke’s Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet and the anonymous A Hundreth Mery Tales. They are what might be called “light” contemporary reading. He seems to have had a particular affection for anthologies of romance stories and for the new Italian novels, and it has already been noted how closely his work followed the model of the popular romances. But he also read the English poets, principal among them Edmund Spenser and Geoffrey Chaucer; he seems to have sensed, justifiably, that these were his real predecessors. He also seems to have read poetical miscellanies such as The Paradyse of Daynty Devises and A Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions. There is some hint, too, that he read contemporary poets such as Donne and Southwell in manuscript form. He may have read those plays by his contemporaries that had emerged in print, although it is always possible that he preferred to watch them. He was acquainted with Montaigne and with Machiavelli, but such knowledge was commonplace at the time. It is unlikely that he studied them with any great attention.
He may have owned a library or carried his store of books with him in a book-chest. He mentions libraries only twice in his published work. Yet he could have used the libraries of patrons, such as Southampton or Pembroke, and of course he might have lingered and read in Richard Field’s bookshop. He must have had one or two books physically close to him, however, since there are occasions when he quotes long passages almost verbatim from Plutarch and from Holinshed. Various books have emerged over the last three centuries, bearing Shakespeare’s signature, but the chances of forgery and fakery are high. The most plausible and likely candidate for inclusion among Shakespeare’s books, however, is the signed edition of Lambarde’s Archaionomia mentioned earlier. It would not seem appropriate material for a forger, unlike the works of Ovid or of Plutarch, and the volume does indeed chime with Shakespeare’s youthful legal interests. So there may be a true connection.
When he read his primary source narrative for Othello, Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, he must have been struck—inspired, rather—by its first sentence. “Fu gia in Venezia un Mow”. There was a Moor in Venice. Venice had been the site of his first outcast, in the person of Shylock. Othello was another example of the dispersed and dispossessed, the wanderers of the earth. There was a Moor in Venice. Cinthio’s narrative is a prose tale, but something within it stirred all the powers of Shakespeare’s sympathetic imagination. He immensely deepened and broadened the story, so that the first two acts of the play in particular bear very little resemblance to any possible originals. A measure of his contribution is to be found in the fact that all the names of the characters, apart from that of Desdemona, were formulated by him. He also revised his play, giving Desdemona more pathos and credibility, and, because he must have realised in performance that Emilia, the wife of Iago, had become too unsympathetic a creation, he gave her more dialogue with Desdemona so that she gained in sympathy.
The play, with the title of The Moor of Venis by “Shaxberd,” was performed for the king and his court on 1 November 1604 in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. It was not written for private performance, of course, and it had already been played at the Globe and in the guildhalls of the company’s provincial tours. Richard Burbage, as Othello, would have “blacked up.” There was no occasion for subtlety in the presentation. A versifier later commented upon Burbage’s role as “the grieved Moor.” One curiosity concerns the part of Othello. When Ben Jonson described Shakespeare’s own character he considered that he “was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature.”1 He is quoting almost verbatim from Iago’s description of Othello (677-8):
The Moore is of a free and open nature,
That thinkes men honest, that but seeme to be so.
It may be an inadvertent recollection on Jonson’s part, but does it suggest that Shakespeare was in some sense “like” Othello? The theme of sexual jealousy runs deeply through many of Shakespeare’s plays. Could Jonson have known that Shakespeare harboured suspicions about his wife in Stratford? It has become a well-known theory, promulgated among others by James Joyce and Anthony Burgess, but it must remain wholly theoretical. It might just as well be said that, because both Julius Caesar and Othello suffer from epilepsy, Shakespeare was personally acquainted with the disorder.
If a boy played Desdemona, he must have been a skilful and remarkable actor. He had to suggest a certain eroticism within Desdemona’s innocence; as the German philosopher Heinrich Heine put it, “What repels me most every time are Othello’s references to his wife’s moist palm.”2 The boy actor would also have had a good voice, able to sing popular ballads. Since Desdemona’s willow song is absent from the first published version of the play, however, it is likely that for some performances he was unavailable for the part.
It might come as a surprise to contemporary audiences that Iago, customarily seen as the epitome of evil in modern productions, was initially played by the company’s resident clown and fool, Robert Armin. Iago was in the comic mode, and spoke to the audience in his confidential soliloquies. Charles Gildon, at the end of the seventeenth century, disclosed that
I’m assur’d from very good hands, that the Person that Acted Iago was in much esteem for a Comoedian, which made Shakespeare put several words, and expressions into his part (perhaps not so agreeable to his Character) to make the Audience laugh, who had not yet learnt to endure to be serious a whole Play.3
Iago’s role as comedian also fits the essentially comic structure of the play itself. Of course Gildon is alluding here to the sexual bawdry and innuendo in which Iago indulges with Desdemona, but he is being less than fair to Shakespeare. The dramatist loved sexual slang, and would not have considered it as writing “down” to any audience. It was a part of his imagination. As for being “serious” for “a whole Play” there is not one drama of Shakespeare’s which aspires to that unity of mood or tone. Comedy and tragedy were equal parts of his art.
There are elements of Roman new comedy and Italian learned comedy in this play with the presence of the zany and the cuckold who is also the Spanish braggart. But again they are here enriched beyond measure. Shakespeare used “types” as a matter of course, but they were simply the structure upon which he built. It is also worth observing that Othello is unique in being a tragedy largely established upon comic formulae. That may even have been the task that Shakespeare set himself. He establishes a comic structure, in which the locales of Venice and Cyprus have little connection with the main action, but then all begins to go awry. In the process he manages to enter the very rhythm of his characters in the world. They are deeply embedded in their language, with their own particular vocabulary and even cadence, so that we can as it were see Shakespeare living and breathing in unison with them. It is a miracle of transference. And we can feel the propulsion of his imagination. When a character mentions the “enchafed flood,” the immediate response is that the Turkish fleet be not “ensheltered and embayed”; the syllables push him forward into new paths of thought.
It has been suggested that in some way Iago is a refraction of the dramatist, an unmoved mover whose intellectual agility far outruns any moral conscientiousness, but in fact he is closer to the medieval Vice who stirred up trouble with the unwitting connivance of the audience. No doubt, however, Shakespeare derived great pleasure from creating a villain who orchestrates his victims like a dramatist while at the same time proclaiming his honesty and sympathy on every occasion.
CHAPTER 77
Why, Sir, What’s Your
Conceit in That?
Three days after the performance of Othello in the Banqueting House, The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed in the same setting. There is a description of the king attending a performance. When the king entered
the cornets and trumpets to the number of fifteen or twenty began to play very well a sort of recitative, and then after his Majesty had seated himself under a canopy alone … he caused the ambassadors to sit below him on two stools, while the great officers of the crown and courts of law sat upon benches.1
But the hall, with “ten heights of degrees for people to stand upon,”2 seems by general consent to have been too large for comfort. It was 100 feet long, with 292 glass windows. It had been erected by Elizabeth twenty-three years before, and King James described it as an “old, rotten and slight-built shed.”3 The Great Hall at court was prepared, instead, for the production of Shakespeare’s second new play of the year, Measure for Measure.
Before that event, however, another play was to emerge from the King’s Men only to disappear very rapidly. It was entitled Gowry and purported to be a dramatic version of the “Gowrie conspiracy” against James four years before. The play no doubt celebrated the courage and virtue of the new sovereign but, despite its patriotic tone, it was deemed unsuitable for public performance. One courtier wrote on 18 December that
The Tragedy of Gowrie, with all actions and actors, hath been twice represented by the King’s Players, with exceeding concourse of all sorts of people; but whether the matter or manner be not well handled, or that it be thought unfit that princes should be played on the stage in their lifetime, I hear that some great councellors are much displeased with it, and so it is thought it shall be forbidden.4
It was indeed considered to be unfit, and the play disappeared never to rise again. The courtier had hit upon the right explanation. It was considered lèsemajesté to portray a reigning monarch upon the public stage, in whatever circumstances. It served only to emphasise the theatricality of the king’s role. The author of the forbidden play remains unknown, although it is not beyond conjecture that Shakespeare may have contributed to it.
James could not have been wholly displeased by his players since, a week later, they performed before him Measure for Measure. In this play a ruler, Duke Vincentio, disliking crowds and noise of “applause, and Aues vehement,” pretends to absent himself from his land in order better to survey it. In his absence a rigidly puritanical deputy, Angelo, proves himself unworthy of his superior’s trust. There are enough contemporary allusions here to have occasioned volumes of commentary, not least the resemblance between the Duke and King James himself. The king was known to dislike crowds and “Aues” to the same degree as the imaginary ruler. The unflattering portrayal of the Puritan, Angelo, must be seen in reference to the current controversies involving those sectarians in the new kingdom. That, at least, is how contemporary playgoers would have viewed it. Earlier that year, for example, the king had been presented by the country’s foremost Puritans with a “Millenary Petition,” containing proposals on dogma and ritual that the king rebuffed. The conclusion of the play, in which the Duke redeems those who have been judged guilty, can also be said to reflect current controversies over the privileges of the king. James believed that Parliament depended upon royal grace, and the ending of Measure for Measure can be construed as maintaining the divine right of kings. The title of the play itself may be taken from a sentence from James’s own treatise on divine right, Basilikon Down, in which he writes: “And, above all, let the measure of your love to everyone be according to the measure of his virtue.” The King’s Men were precisely that, the sovereign’s servants, and part of their role was to advertise the virtues of their patron. Since the play is also set in Catholic Vienna, with a Catholic nun as the principal female and the Duke disguising himself as a Catholic friar, Shakespeare seems to be reflecting the increased level of tolerance for those who professed the old faith. It is pertinent, perhaps, that in this play as in Romeo and Juliet and in Much Ado About Nothing, the friar counsels deceit or concealment for the sake of a greater good. Shakespeare seems always to have been preternaturally alert to the prevailing atmosphere of his time. He was such a sensitive instrument in the world that he could not help but reflect everything.
Shakespeare derived some of the story of Measure for Measure from the same source as Othello. This suggests that he had riffled through Cinthio’s Hecatommithi in search of likely plots. An anthology of stories, such as this one, was a mine of gold. When he found this particular plot to be of interest, he looked up an earlier dramatisation of it—George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra, written in 1578—to see if there were any extra scenes or characters he might borrow. There were more immediate models to hand, also, since the theme of the ruler in disguise was a popular one in the London playhouses. It is important to grasp the immediacy of Shakespeare’s inspiration. If there were two or three plays using a plot or character that had proved popular, the chances are that he would use them. Even though Measure for Measure is ostensibly set in Vienna, its real setting is early seventeenth-century London with its stews and suburbs, bawds and pandars. It is the world of Southwark and the Globe. Measure for Measure is in part a sketch for King Lear and The Tempest; here the Duke abandons the governance of his dukedom, but the space from this play to King Lear is measured in the shift from comedy to tragedy. It is also worth noticing that the first scenes of the play are also the most inventive. That is frequently the case in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, where he is often most spirited and emboldened at the beginning of each enterprise.
At court, the day after the performance of Measure for Measure, the Earl of Pembroke helped to assemble and present a masque with music entitled Juno and Hymenaeus. The text has not survived, but Pembroke may have obtained some assistance from the king’s leading dramatist. Then, on the next day, The Comedy of Errors was performed. This was followed on 7 January with Henry V. It was something of a Shakespeare festival, marked a day later by a special production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the London house of the Earl of Southampton. This was the play that seems to bear references to the Southampton coterie or “circle” which in previous years had included some of the king’s most fervent supporters. Sir Walter Cope, the Chamberlain of the Exchequer, wrote to Robert Cecil earlier in the month that
