Shakespeare's (unknown) life

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, most probably on 23 April¹³⁷ 1564, was the third child and the eldest son of a glove-maker, ‘whittaver’¹³⁸, landowner, money-lender, and dealer in wool and other agricultural goods, John Shakespeare. Until 1577, William’s father was a well-to-do and esteemed member of his town. Around 1557 he married Mary Arden, whose Catholic family could trace back their ancestry in an unbroken line to Anglo-Saxon times, something which only two other families were able to do. Yet by that time, Mary’s father, Robert Arden of Wilmcote was a wealthy farmer in the Stratford-area.

We know nothing certain about William’s childhood and his younger years. He had seven siblings, yet only one of his younger sisters, Joan (b. 1569) and two of his younger brothers, Gilbert (d. 1612) and Edmund (d. 1607) survived early childhood. Gilbert became a haberdasher in Stratford, Edmund tried to become an actor in London but evidently without much success and William’s interest in his brother’s fate might not be more than an expensive funeral in Edmund’s memory. In 1576, John Shakespeare applied to the Herald’s College for a coat of arms, which would have meant the family’s elevation from middle-class to that of the gentry. Yet this was granted only twenty years later, probably through William’s intervention, who, by 1596, had become a successful actor and playwright. In the late 70s, John Shakespeare started to experience financial difficulties. In 1586 he was replaced on the city-council, though he had been the bailiff (equivalent of “lord mayor”) of Stratford and in 1592 he is among those who do not dare to attend church for fear of being arrested for debts. There are no records on why he went bankrupt, yet it is probably for this reason that William could not go to university. He had to rest satisfied with the education he got in Stratford’s grammar school, though surprisingly there are again no records on that. Yet education was not bad in a provincial yet quite prosperous market-town like Stratford.

Though Ben Jonson later claimed that Shakespeare “had small Latin and lesse Greek”, young William – among other things – surely went through Ovid (the Metamorphoses was, judging by his plays, one of his favourites), Apulueus’ Golden Ass, Aeasop’s Fables, Plautus, Terence and Seneca. The next record shows that on 28 November, 1582, 18-year-old William married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway and that in May, 1583, their first daughter, Susanna was born; on 2 February, 1585 their two twins, Judith and Hamnet [sic!] were baptised (the boy died in 1596). What Shakespeare had been doing before he made his appearance in the theatrical world in London (around 1590, but in 1587 the earliest) remains a secret. According to a popular legend, he had to leave Stratford because he had fallen into ill company and made frequent practice of dear-stealing in the park that belonged to a certain Sir Thomas Lucy. Another story has it that his first duty in London was to wait at the door of the play-house and hold the horses of those who had no servants. But a young and married man coming from a good grammar school¹³⁹ but without a university education, could clerk for lawyers, or teach in a ‘petty’ (elementary) school, or – worst – help in his father’s shop. We have no idea how Shakespeare got to London, but we know that in 1587 the Earl of Leicester’s Men – led by James Burbage, a joiner, who built the first permanent theatre in London, “The Theatre”¹⁴⁰ –, The Queen’s Men and also The Earl of Worcester’s Men¹⁴¹ all visited Stratford. Shakespeare may well have joined one of them.

136 In 1603 – most probably because they were ‘the best’ in London – James Stuart I ‘claimed them’, having ascended to the throne after the death of Queen Elizabeth.

137 The date is not certain while we only know that he was baptised on 26 April, and then children had their baptism three days after their birth.

138 A whittaver is the curer and whitener of animal skins.

139 At the grammar-school of Stratford, Oxford graduates were teaching, and the curriculum comprised, in the

‘humanities’, the usual Grammatica Latina by Lily; Cato; Aesop’s Fables; the Eclogues of Mantuanus and Vergil;

Plautus; Terence; Ovid; Cicero; Ceasar; Sallust; Livy (cf. 3.1.3), and even some Greek

140 That was The Theatre (cf. 5.2). James Burbage later became the ‘entrepreneur’, the ‘producer’, the ‘manager-and-accountant’ of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, like Henslowe was the entrepreneur for

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From the theatrical point of view, Shakespeare appears in a highly competitive London, What Shakespeare was doing in Stratford after his ‘retirement’ roughly between 1610 and 1616 (his death) remains an enigma. The Winter’s Tale (1610) and The Tempest were – most probably – both written in Stratford and Shakespeare had a hand in Henry VIII (a genuinely weak or even bad play) and perhaps in The Two Noble Kinsmen (not always accepted into the Shakespeare-canon). But he would have had plenty of time to polish and edit his own plays (something Ben Jonson actually did; he put his plays, revised and carefully edited, into a Folio). But Shakespeare seems to have had little interest in his own plays and it is difficult to swallow that the author of King Lear or Hamlet died rather as a wealthy land-owner, in the second most beautiful stone-house of Stratford ('New Place') than as a theatre. But perhaps he never edited his plays precisely because he was a man-of-the-theatre: he thought that a play existed genuinely only in its performance and not in its written version. So it fell to his friends and fellow-actors, Hemming and Condell to put one version of his plays together in the famous ‘First Folio’ of 1623. Most of his contemporaries considered him to be an eminent playwright, yet no one really thought that he would be ‘Shakespeare’, our contemporary as well.

7. 3. The ‘history play’ and Shakespeare's two tetralogies

7.3.1. The genre

The ‘history play’ (as opposed to tragedy and comedy) is a ‘native’ English development.

It dramatises, even if it seems to concentrate on, e.g. ‘the life of Henry the Fifth’ (as the full title suggests), the life of a nation, or at least its governing class. The main character, a king (or 'monarch' or 'sovereign' or 'England', as he was also called in Shakespeare's time¹⁴² is conceived as an endless generational succession, inheriting a political and historical situation from the ancestors and passing it down to the descendants. The history play as a genre is not Shakespeare’s invention (Marlowe, Greene, etc. also wrote histories) but it was Shakespeare’s idea to produce two tetralogies, two series of four pieces – one about the time of the Wars of the Roses (1420-1485): the three parts of Henry VI (c. 1590-1592) plus Richard III (1592 or 1593) and another about the times before the Wars of the Roses (1398-1420), comprising Richard II (c.1595), Henry IV, Part 1 (1596), Henry IV, Part 2 (1597) and Henry V (1599), with, of course, lots of other plays between these. (King John [c.1593], somewhat a parody of the first tetralogy, stands alone, and so does the ‘last’ play, Henry VIII (1613), most probably from various hands, one of them being Shakespeare’s.) The great popularity of the history plays (first large ‘tableaux’, ‘dramatised chapters’ of mainly Raphael Holished’s Chronicle¹⁴³ has to do with English people, amidst their

‘changing’ geographical position on the map (sea-commerce moving from the Mediterranean region to the Transatlantic one) and, further, under the constant threat of the Catholic Spanish Armada (the most decisive year being its ‘defeat’ in 1588) and, even further, after (and before) a civil war and desiring, most of all, order, were exceedingly interested in seeing themselves on the grand stage of History.¹⁴⁴ Not only Holinshed but other historians like Polydor Virgil, Edward Hall, Richard Grafton and, most importantly for the figure of Richard III as Shakespeare

the Lord Admiral’s Men. James’s son, Richard (Dick) Burbage played all the great Shakespearean roles from Richard III through Hamlet, Othello and Lear to Macbeth.

141 Among them, then, Edward Alleyn, later Marlowe’s tragic actor, playing Barabas, Faustus, etc.

142 Curiously, even Queen Elizabeth was referred to in official documents as ‘he’.

143 Shakespeare used the second, enlarged edition of 1587.

144 Adventurers or ‘pirates’, like Captain Drake, were even in the confidence of the Queen.

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portrayed it, Sir Thomas More’s The History of King Richard III (1513-1514)¹⁴⁵, asked the significant question: who makes history? A great figure? The people? Fate? God?

Shakespeare was no philosopher of history: he re-presented it rather than explained it but these representations – interpreted by one group of Shakespeare-critics as part of the ideological preservation of the Royal order and also, by another group, as a subversive force in Elizabethan England – have some logic: Shakespeare starts with the pious but weak Henry VI, continues with the horrible Richard III; then, in the second tetralogy, he starts with another weakling again:

Richard II. Then comes the ‘making of a monarch' (Prince Hal, later Henry V, ‘educated’ by the remarkable and comic Sir John Falstaff), to round the series off with the ‘good’ King (or the imperialist?), the mature Henry V, in a campaign against France.

7.3.2. Richard III – God'd scourge?

Richard III is unique because here Shakespeare moves, for the first time, towards tragedy, still of the Marlovian pattern (one highly colourful character in the centre, driven by uncompromising ambition, the others mostly side-characters in the ‘grand show’), also using some of the Medieval models, making Richard explicitly identify himself as Vice or Iniquity of the morality plays¹⁴⁶ the whole play also reminiscent of the Medieval de casibus tragedy, the ‘fall of the great ones’, according to the ‘Wheel of Fortune’. But Richard is also a typically Renaissance figure in a very important sense; in being a typical ‘Machiavel’¹⁴⁷. In England the Italian statesman and founder of political philosophy, Niccoló Machiavelli (1469-1527) became – quite unjustly and under the influence of the distorted representation by Innocent Gentillet¹⁴⁸ – the symbol of ambitious, cruel, immoral, sinister, treacherous, guileful and anti-religious principles on the English stage, the Machiavel being a criminal from choice (cf. “I am determined to prove a villain” (I,1;30).

The play becomes a ‘study’ in power indeed, where the limping and physically deformed Richard is always a few steps ahead of the others, always wanting what his enemies want (who are far from being angels), but he wants it before (earlier than) they do. He causes the death of altogether eleven people, but here practically everyone is a murderer. His first greatest scene (Shakespeare’s, Burbage’s first greatest scene) is with Lady Anne, whom Richard can persuade into marriage while standing next to her father-in-law’s coffin, poor Henry VI murdered by Richard himself. Here Richard’s trick is a constant changing-of-the-roles: for example, he hands his sword (the ‘manly weapon’) over to Anne. Shakespeare’s first great character is an actor within the play, too, playing the roles of the lover, the good uncle, the pious man, etc. to attain his single goal: the crown. Richard’s greatest weapon is the power of speech against which the curses of especially Margaret (all coming true in the end) are too weak in the beginning. Yet when Richard is already on the throne, he has to realise that the goal has exhausted itself in its very accomplishment: the throne is in fact, empty, he has nothing to desire any more, he literally forgets his lines (in IV,4;452-455), he has nobody to rely on and one can neither annihilate a whole country, nor can he turn totally inhuman. Richard gets in conflict with Richard, Richard fears Richard in the famous 3^rd scene of Act V (lines 178-207), where Richard can no longer separate ‘deceit’ form ‘reality’ (dreaming and being awake, love and hatred, etc.), since he has nobody to imitate (to ‘conquer’) now but himself. Richard enters into a ‘mimetic’ relationship

145 More’s book on Richard III was later used by the other historians working on the 'Tudor myth'.

146 RICHARD [while talking with the young Prince, later his victim]: “[Aside] Thus, like formal Vice, Iniquity, / I moralise two meanings in one word” (III,1;82-83). All references to Shakespeare’s plays are according to the relevant Arden-editions.

147 Here Shakespeare follows the Marlovian tradition again, cf. Barabas from The Jew of Malta, especially.

148 Gentillet, Discours ... contre Nicolas Mchiauel (Paris, 1576, no English translation is known till 1602.

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with Richard, so the circle is complete and the total theatre (the ‘one-man-show’) collapses onto itself. He is heroic enough to face his doom but his previous comedies haunt him just as much as the ghosts of his victims: he offers his Kingdom for a horse. He might be ‘God’s scourge’

(flagellum Dei), i.e. the punishment of England, but his great performance is diabolically attractive and Richmond (the future Henry VII), coming as a redeemer at the end of the play, is too much of a conventional ‘good man’ to be interesting in comparison with the ‘actor’s actor’.

7.3.3. Henry V – the conflict of Tudor myth and reality

In the national legend, it is Henry V who seems to remain the most heroic of English kings. On 25 Oct, 1415, Henry V of England stood at the head of 6000 British soldiers outside of the village of Agincourt. In this battle he lost 300 men, the French 10 000. A contemporary Parisian wrote: “Never since God was born did anyone [...] do such destruction in France.”

From the English point of view, Henry is the talented and intelligent ‘good king’, the ‘good prince’, Richard III's direct opposite, also in Machiavelli’s sense: he leads the army himself and fights with his soldiers as a simple 'man-of-arms'; he successfully tries Scrope, Cambridge and Grey and discovers their conspiracy against him (cf. II, 2); at the end of the play he cheerfully woos Catherine (whom he would marry anyway) in one of Shakespeare's most successful wooing scenes. He gets for his people what is their due and even worries about the public and the private man within himself: in IV, 1 he goes into the camp disguised and has a long discussion with Bates and Willimas on royal responsibility: is there a just war? Is the King responsible for the death of a soldier? Should the Christian prince answer for the fall of his subjects on the Day of the Last Judgement? Henry (disguised) will say 'no', Bates will agree, but Willimas remains a sceptic. Henry is also a wonderful orator: with his ‘Saint Crispin's day'-speech he is even able to create a new mythology.

However, Shakespeare was careful to put several question-marks around this success story, especially in the context of England's invading Ireland under the leadership of Essex, Queen Elizabeth's dashing young favourite, and the campaign proved to be a disaster.

Patriotism started to mix with nationalism, and England's foreign policy was hotly debated again: after a period of defending herself (mostly form Spain – see the eventual defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588), England started to act like an 'Empire' (as the beginning of a long and successful period for the next three centuries), not only with respect to Ireland but with respect to the New World, too (cf. Sir Walter Raleigh founding later Jamestown and Virginia as a colony in America). Yet right at the start, Canterbury's reasoning to justify the invasion of France is so complicated that nobody can really follow it, it seems to be mere rhetoric, especially because we very well know that Canterbury fears the loss of church-property and his interests are all with the war. Further, Henry obviously enjoys playing the cat-and-mouse game with Scrope, Cambridge and Grey. Even further, from the famous battle of Agincourt, Shakespeare puts one single incident on the stage: Pistol sparing the life of a French soldier for two hundred crowns. In this subtle comparison, Henry, in a certain sense, is Pistol.

Williams is given his glove back full of gold coins but it is never clear whether he eventually accepts it. But, most of all, through the employment of a constantly present, all-knowing Chorus, Shakespeare constantly emphasises the theatricality, the illusionary character of his theatre: “Can this cock-pit hold / The vastly fields of France? Or may we cram / Within this wooden O [the theatre, maybe the Globe already] the very casques [helmets] / That did afright the air of Agincourt?” (Prologue, 11-14), perhaps as a direct response to Sir Philip Sidney's A Defence of Poetry (cf. 5.4.3.). We do not know for certain whether Shakespeare read Sidney or not (it is very likely that he did), yet the Chorus provides an ironic distance between homespun glory and the spectators anyway: Shakespeare keeps myth and reality apart. The

Chorus ends the play reminding the audience of the gloomy story of Henry VI, with which Shakespeare's first tetralogy (and career) started (see 6.3.1.). Shakespeare ends, for good, the writing of history plays (which an act of the Queen prohibited anyway) by going back to the beginning.