Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our World

By Peter Conrad

In 1623 the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell assembled Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, better known as The First Folio. In doing so they preserved literature's most dramatically vital and poetically rich account of our human world.

Endlessly reinterpreted by critics and performers, Shakespeare's inexhaustible work has remained abreast of contemporary concerns ever since, and it continues to hold a mirror up to the nature of our troubled society and our contradictory selves. The plays accompany us through the ages of mankind, from comic springtime to wintry age, compressing our life in time into the three hours' traffic of the stage; the characters in them have shaped the way we think about politics and war, consciousness and morality, love and death.

Peter Conrad examines the world-view of the plays, their generic originality and their astonishingly inventive language. He goes on to explore Shakespeare's global legacy as his characters migrate to every continent and are reinvented by later writers, painters, composers, choreographers and film-makers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781788540162

Peter Conrad

Peter Conrad is a literary critic and cultural historian. His books include The Everyman History of English Literature; Creation: Artists, Gods & Origins; and Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century.

Book preview

cover.jpg

SHAKESPEARE

The Theatre of Our World

Peter Conrad

Start Reading

About this Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

About Shakespeare

In 1623 the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell assembled Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, better known as The First Folio. In doing so they preserved literature’s most dramatically vital and poetically rich account of our human world.

Endlessly reinterpreted by critics and performers, Shakespeare’s inexhaustible work has remained abreast of contemporary concerns ever since, and it continues to hold a mirror up to the nature of our troubled society and our contradictory selves. The plays accompany us through the ages of mankind, from comic springtime to wintry age, compressing our life in time into the three hours’ traffic of the stage; the characters in them have shaped the way we think about politics and war, consciousness and morality, love and death.

Peter Conrad examines the world-view of the plays, their generic originality and their astonishingly inventive language. He goes on to explore Shakespeare’s global legacy as his characters migrate to every continent and are reinvented by later writers, painters, composers, choreographers and film-makers.

Contents

Welcome Page

About Shakespeare

Frontispiece

Chapter 1: So Long Lives This

Chapter 2: World, World, O World!

Chapter 3: A Piece of Work

Chapter 4: Scene Individable, Or Poem Unlimited

Chapter 5: Words, Words, Words

Chapter 6: This Is the Forest of Arden

Chapter 7: The Forms of Things Unknown

Chapter 8: All Which It Inherit

Chapter 9: And This Gives Life to Thee

Chronology

Further reading

Acknowledgements

Index

About Peter Conrad

The Landmark Library

An Invitation from the Publisher

Copyright

Frontispiece

img2.jpg

The First Folio.

1

So Long Lives This

Shakespeare forever

Unlikely likenesses

Author and actor

The poet-priest

Disbelievers

At the National Theatre in London, a stone plaque in the foyer dedicates – no, consecrates – the building ‘TO THE LIVING MEMORY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’. The solemn phrase conjures up a spirit, as if calling on Shakespeare to patrol the theatre’s angular concrete ramparts, like the ghost at Elsinore who asks to be remembered before disappearing. A mile away, Shakespeare is a less spectral presence at his own reconstructed Globe, where his name and his lean, goateed face sell branded merchandise that includes chocolate bars, sweatshirts, beanies, cufflinks, earrings, coffee mugs, fridge magnets, plastic bath ducks, and skeletal ceramic heads with slots in the rear for use as money boxes.

Shakespeare might have been surprised to find himself so piously and profitably commemorated. One of his sonnets predicts that ‘So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this’, but his plays are haunted and yet acerbically amused by temporariness: in the scene that almost allegorically sums up Shakespearean drama, a man holds a skull in his hand and tells it jokes. Metaphors abrade and corrode the language Shakespeare’s characters use. The Duke in Measure for Measure assures Angelo that his name will be eternalized in ‘characters of brass’, securing for him

A forted residence ’gainst the tooth of time

And razure of oblivion.

But burnished metal and castellated architecture are no defence: time gnaws at us, or erases us with a cruel, razory implement. Love, belying the sonnet’s assurance, cannot resist this unsparing force. At the beginning of All’s Well That Ends Well, Helena, having mourned her adored father for six months, asks herself ‘What was he like?’ With a shamed candour that instantly establishes her raw human truth, she admits ‘I have forgot him.’

When Shakespeare died in 1616, he was probably resigned to the same fate. Unlike Ben Jonson, he did not safeguard his work by collecting his plays in print; it was the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell who assembled the First Folio in 1623, and we have them to thank for preserving literature’s most dramatically vital and poetically intricate account of our human world. Four centuries later, Shakespeare himself is reverently remembered, but his characters are still alive, thriving inside us. Macbeth says that his imaginary dagger ‘marshall’st me the way that I was going’, and for good or ill the people in the plays perform the same service. From Romeo we learn about a man’s emotional awakening, while Hamlet exposes our internal conflicts and Richard III shows us, if we are that way inclined, how to convert debilities and disadvantages into sources of power. Cordelia and her sisters suggest a range of responses to a social order invidiously ruled by fathers. Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth – a voluptuous goddess and a killer who despises ‘the milk of human kindness’ – are outlying female archetypes. Rosalind with her manifold affections and her generous adaptability is an Everywoman or perhaps, because of her androgyny, an Everyperson. Falstaff smiles at the world, Lear berates it, and Feste in his parting song at the end of Twelfth Night jauntily copes with its sodden daily disappointments. These imaginary beings, taking on flesh in the theatre, have shaped our understanding of love and death or consciousness and morality; they demonstrate how singular we are, and also what a plurality of selves we possess.

The Shakespearean stage is a playground for alternate identities, and as his actors experimentally reveal or conceal themselves and assume or swap roles, we come to see that our existence is a dramatic exercise, requiring us, as Bottom says, to ‘rehearse most obscenely and courageously’. Prospero writes the script and engages others ‘to enact / My present fancies’; Puck chaotically directs the show; Iago, ‘nothing if not critical’, scribbles notes as he watches from the sidelines. We can choose who to be, but during a lifelong performance we are likely to adopt all those parts, successively or simultaneously. Whatever we experience will have been anticipated by a character in one of the plays, and expressed with such force or pathos or witty brevity that, when the occasion arises, we only need the living memory of a quotation. It sometimes seems as if Shakespeare created us all.

*

Heminges and Condell compiled the Folio to honour ‘the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow’, yet they left Shakespeare indistinct. What, to ask Helena’s question, was he like?

We know little enough about him; ultimately he may be unknowable. His origins were ordinary, his life professionally busy but otherwise uneventful. He was neither glamorous like the universally admired Philip Sidney, nor scandalous like Christopher Marlowe with his provocative opinions and his violent end in a tavern brawl. The traces Shakespeare left are mostly financial: records of taxes owed or properties purchased, a will that is seemingly ungenerous to his wife Anne Hathaway. Some spurious anecdotes enliven the annals. Gossip alleges that he stole a deer in Stratford-upon-Avon in his youth and later shared a mistress in London with Richard Burbage, the actor who played many of his tragic roles. His testimony in a legal case that involved his landlady’s daughter was terse, and in one instance the clerk noted that he ‘remembereth not’. When he signed the transcript, he abbreviated his name to ‘Wllm Shakp’ – negligent haste, or a ghostly vanishing act?

William Hazlitt, the most psychologically acute of Shakespeare’s nineteenth-century critics, rightly celebrated the idiosyncrasy of his characters – Hamlet with his whimsies, Cleopatra with her wiles, the volcanic pique of Coriolanus – and said that each of them was ‘absolutely independent of the rest, as well as of the author’, who did not share their outsized eccentricity. Shakespeare, Hazlitt suggested, must have been ‘just like any other man’, with the proviso that ‘he was like all other men’ – an impossible compendium of the divergent, incompatible people in his plays. The man with a thousand faces is effectively faceless, so Hazlitt proposed that we should think of Shakespeare abstractly, picturing him as ‘the tallest, the strongest, the most graceful and beautiful’ of ‘a race of giants’.

img3.jpg

Gheeraert Janssen’s monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Colin Underhill/Alamy Stock Photo

img4.jpg

Peter Scheemakers’s monument in Westminster Abbey.

Corbis/Getty Images

Early portraits, however, were stubbornly uncharismatic. Martin Droeshout’s engraving in the Folio gives Shakespeare leaden eyes in a thin, unamused face, with hair as stiff as a bad wig; his ruff threatens to slice off his head. Chubbier and ruddier, the bust by Gheeraert Janssen in the church at Stratford presents him as a provincial worthy, holding a quill that seems ready to tabulate accounts or take minutes at a committee meeting. What we cannot see is the mind behind the facial mask. Victor Hugo, who in his worshipful fervour described the plays as an ‘indirect divine creation’, compared Shakespeare’s brain to a virgin forest and a turbulent ocean, or described him as a condor swooping and soaring. The man portrayed by Droeshout and Janssen looks less elemental and aquiline.

For his contemporaries, Shakespeare was not superhuman, and his canonization happened gradually and a little grudgingly. Ben Jonson regretted his death, but noted that Chaucer and Spenser had not been edged aside to make room for him in Westminster Abbey, so he remained ‘a monument without a tomb’; Milton defensively argued that Shakespeare needed no ‘star-ypointing pyramid’. Did he even deserve one? The literary corner in Westminster Abbey was reserved for poets, whose art had a classical pedigree, and who, like Milton, regarded the quest for fame as a noble motive. Dramatists practised a newer and more ignoble trade, hustled by commerce and the demands of customers, which made plays as disposable as popular songs or other seasonal offerings.

Nevertheless, by the mid-eighteenth century Shakespeare had begun – as Samuel Johnson observed, not without surprise – to ‘assume the dignity of an ancient’, which entitled him to ‘the privilege of… prescriptive veneration’. Monuments were called for, and memorialists had to decide how an eternalized Shakespeare ought to look. A statue was at last installed in Westminster Abbey in 1741. Sculpted by Peter Scheemakers, Shakespeare here bends sideways under the weight of posterity’s expectations, leaning on a pile of the collected works that he never saw in print. A dagger, the emblem of tragedy, grazes a laurel wreath that he is not wearing: has he declined the exalted status wished on him? He points to an unfurling scroll that for a long while remained blank, since there was no consensus about what Shakespeare’s testamentary statement should be. Eventually Prospero’s preview of universal dissolution in The Tempest was painted onto the marble page. The nihilism of this speech, which curtails a magic show, comes as a shock: is human life really an ‘insubstantial pageant’, as transitory as the performance of a play? And doesn’t that ghoulishly subvert the only too substantial pageants staged in the abbey on state occasions? Aptly enough, fulfilling Prospero’s prophecy about ‘the baseless fabric’ of his vision, the lettering has partly rubbed off the scroll.

In 1836 Samuel Colman painted a sublime apocalypse entitled The Edge of Doom, taking his title from a sonnet in which Shakespeare swears that love will persist ‘even to the edge of doom’. Uninterested in love but excited by doom, Colman imagined mountains collapsing as the sky falls in on a city scorched by lightning bolts. The poem refers to the slow, erosive power of time’s sickle; the painting more impatiently brings the world to a sudden, blazing end. Among toppled carriages and shattered columns, one object is still intact: Scheemakers’ Shakespeare from Westminster Abbey. Despite the conflagration, the marble figure maintains its poise – an ultimate memento of perishable civilization, even though all copies of Shakespeare plays have presumably been incinerated in the city’s burning libraries.

Statues mortify the human beings whose flesh they turn to stone, weighing them down with a symbolic burden. Louis-François Roubiliac’s Shakespeare, now in the British Library, is at least permitted to relax, rather than being forced to plead mankind’s case on the day of judgement. The posture of Roubiliac’s figure is willowy, with one of his slippers half off; pretending to write, he uses his spare hand as a pensive support for his chin. He attitudinizes for the sculptor’s benefit, though this preening self-awareness was wished on Shakespeare by the actor David Garrick, who commissioned Roubiliac in 1758 and volunteered as his model. A more self-absorbed Shakespeare, sculpted by John Quincy Adams Ward, was set up in New York in 1872. Out for a stroll on the Literary Mall in Central Park, Ward’s figure has one hand earnestly placed on his heart, while the other holds a book. He might be mimicking Hamlet, who promenades while reading to convince Polonius of his distracted melancholia. Ronald Gower’s Shakespeare, placed in a Stratford garden in 1887, is not a reader but an omnific creator. Veneration has led to levitation: seated on a pedestal, Shakespeare here surveys four characters who occupy lower plinths of their own at the end of radial paths. Arranged in a global circle, they mark the outer limits of his intellectual world. Hamlet brooding over Yorick’s skull represents Philosophy, and vigorous Prince Hal is History; gripping her wrist because she cannot wash her bronze hands, Lady Macbeth stands for Tragedy, while big-bellied Falstaff embodies Comedy.

At Southwark Cathedral, Henry McCarthy’s monument, completed in 1912, eases Shakespeare into eternity by making him lie down in a coffin-shaped recess. But he is not yet ready for the mausoleum: he props himself on an elbow, and in his open hand he sometimes holds a sprig of fresh rosemary, a token of remembrance donated by a devotee. Earlier, a Victorian stained-glass window directly above gave Shakespeare a celestial patron: he stood beside an enthroned Muse of Poetry with a dove above her head, which made him a conduit for doctrinal verities. In 1954, when the window was replaced, Christopher Webb’s new design left out this literary version of the Holy Spirit, although Webb’s Prospero resembles a priest raising his arms in prayer, while Ariel in a streak of light might be mistaken for the Pentecostal dove. But the cathedral no longer equates art with Gospel truth, and infidels are not debarred. Webb’s modern congregation includes a simian Caliban, a wracked, pallid Lady Macbeth, and Falstaff filling out an infernally vivid scarlet tunic. Only the author is absent from the window, and his multifarious characters – who preen in cross garters or bemoan a lost warhorse, caper in a jester’s costume or come to terms with a suddenly furry head and lengthened, flapping ears – are too intent on their own affairs to bother searching for him.

img5.jpg

Shakespeare on Doomsday, painted by Samuel Colman.

Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

*

If Shakespeare eludes us, it is because he was evasive on purpose. Wordsworth, for whom poetry consisted of lyrical confession, believed that in the sonnets ‘Shakespeare unlocked his heart’; Robert Browning countered by saying ‘If so, the less Shakespeare he!’

A typical sonnet by Shakespeare begins with a gesture that feels impulsive and self-revealing – ‘Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing’, or ‘Alas, ’tis true, I have gone here and there / And made myself a motley to the view’, which seems to lament a life of self-squandering on stage. But as the regularity of the poetic form takes over, an emotion that initially sounds private or intimate is analytically dissected or rhetorically teased out through three quatrains until in a final couplet it becomes impersonal, applicable to whoever chooses to share it:

img6.jpg

Louis-François Roubiliac’s monument.

British Museum

img7.jpg

The memorial window at Southwark Cathedral, with Henry McCarthy’s monument

Topfoto.co.uk

For as the sun is daily new and old,

So is my love still telling what is told.

Sometimes the conclusion is proverbial, a domestic commonplace rather than the product of some secret crisis. The ninety-fifth sonnet starts with a lacerating attack on sexual treachery, but ends by warning that ‘The hardest knife ill used doth lose his edge’, which is true in the kitchen and perhaps also in bed. The I has become an other, anybody or nobody.

The Prologue in Troilus and Cressida appears dressed in armour, and explains that this is not ‘in confidence of author’s pen or actor’s voice’. Text and performance are managed by two different beings, separate aspects of a co-operative creation; the Prologue is embarrassed to be in limbo, neither the writer of the speech he delivers nor a participant in the play. Despite this shiftiness, the distinction is crucial for Shakespeare, even when he writes a poem in the first person. Author hides behind actor, the pen silently inscribes lines to be spoken by an alter ego. Illicit glimpses of the dramatist’s emotional life should not be expected.

Thomas Carlyle thought that Shakespeare must have possessed a ‘joyful tranquillity’, so ‘quiet, complete and self-sufficing’ that he might never have written a word if he had not been prosecuted for deer-poaching, which forced him to make a living outside Stratford. This fanciful scenario flirts with primal mysteries. Why, after all, should God – also presumably self-sufficient and joyfully tranquil before making the world – have bothered to create the vexatious human race? Uncertainty or lack of information has licensed delusional theories that Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone with a better education and glossier social connections, such as Marlowe, Francis Bacon, or the courtier Edward de Vere. Henry James could not reconcile ‘the divine William’ with ‘the man from Stratford’, and suspected that Shakespeare might be ‘the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world’.

The Victorian painter Ford Madox Brown was troubled by ‘the want of a credible likeness of our national poet’: the want of credibility was a temptation to disbelief or outright atheism, and could not be tolerated. Scheemakers’ pensive sage and Roubiliac’s dapper wit hardly qualified as credible likenesses, so in 1849 Brown made good the deficiency by producing an imaginary portrait of Shakespeare. He merged features from Droeshout’s bony engraving and Janssen’s better-fed bust, and hired a professional model to give bullish solidity to the identikit image. The figure’s right hand rests on a desk near a row of the books Shakespeare used as sources –