Contested Will (5 page)

Audience members would have known that the ‘relic' they were celebrating could be traced back to ‘Drama's God' himself – a
wooden chalice carved from the famed mulberry tree that the playwright had reportedly planted at New Place, the large house he had purchased in Stratford-upon-Avon. It was the closest thing to a literary Holy Grail. The old tree had been cut down in 1756 by the owner of New Place, who had grown tired of all the souvenir hunters disturbing his peace. A savvy local tradesman named Thomas Sharp saw his chance, bought most of the logs and spent much of the next half-century enriching himself by selling off countless carvings from it, far more than one tree, no matter how miraculous its origins, could ever produce. No one at Drury Lane that evening objected to a spectacle that a former age would have found sacrilegious. The great anti-theatrical preachers of Elizabethan England may have been turning in their graves, but Shakespeare's divinity was now taken for granted.

The process that had led to his deification was a curious one. In his own day Shakespeare was typically equated with rivals, both classical and contemporary. Francis Meres likened him to Ovid, and ranked him with the best of English tragedians and comedians. In his Epistle to
The White Devil
in 1612, John Webster grouped him with Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood as one of England's most prolific playwrights, notable for their ‘right happy and copious industry'. And when Edmund Howe added a brief account of ‘our modern, and present excellent poets', in the fifth edition of John Stow's
Annales
in 1615, Shakespeare's name predictably appears along with those of a score of other distinguished Elizabethan poets and dramatists. Examples could easily be multiplied.

It was only posthumously that Shakespeare was finally unyoked from the company of rivals or mortals. This occurred in the prefatory verses to the collection of his plays put together by fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, who had worked alongside Shakespeare for over twenty years. They published the collected plays in 1623 in a folio edition (and the decision to publish them in a large and costly folio format – in which the printed sheet of paper was only folded once – the equivalent of the modern
‘coffee-table' book rather than the paperback-sized and inexpensive quartos or octavos in which plays typically appeared, and in which the printed sheet was refolded to produce a considerably smaller page – was itself an indication of his distinction). Before this, only Ben Jonson had published plays in a folio-sized volume, and he had been mocked for presuming to do so. For Jonson, who contributed a pair of poems to the First Folio in praise of his rival, Shakespeare ‘did far outshine' Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and John Lyly (though not, presumably, Jonson himself). But in the same poem, Jonson also recycled a trope he had used so effectively in his ‘Ode to Cary and Morison', where the heroic dead live on in the heavenly firmament:

In a similar vein, James Mabbe wrote that ‘We thought thee dead', but like a good actor, Shakespeare has managed to ‘die, and live'. For Leonard Digges, it was the works that would prove immortal: ‘every line, each verse, / Here shall revive, redeem thee from thy hearse'. Ben Jonson wrote much the same thing:

These are all lovely and probably heartfelt sentiments, but nobody at the time would have mistaken hyperbolic claims about Shakespeare's immortality for anything but a literary device. So too, when in the late seventeenth century John Dryden spoke of Shakespeare's ‘sacred name', or ‘professed to imitate the divine Shakespeare', his words were never meant to be taken literally.

Yet referring to Shakespeare as divine had become so habitual that by 1728 a sharp-eared foreigner like Voltaire couldn't help but notice that Shakespeare ‘is rarely called anything but “divine” in England' – to which Arthur Murphy proudly retorted that ‘With us islanders, Shakespeare is a kind of established religion in poetry.'
What had begun as a literary trope became a widely shared conviction after David Garrick mounted a Shakespeare festival – a three-day ‘Jubilee' with all its religious overtones – in Stratford-upon-Avon in September 1769. Garrick, who had risen to fame thanks to Shakespeare, had few rivals as a bardolator. By this time he had appeared in a score of Shakespearean roles and had produced many of the plays. Acknowledged in his day for having done much to revive interest in Shakespeare onstage, he would be buried at the foot of Shakespeare's statue in Westminster Abbey, the words on his tomb declaring that ‘Shakespeare and Garrick like twin stars shall shine'.

Garrick had even built a temple to Shakespeare on his estate in Hampton on the banks of the Thames. The treasures contained within the octagonal shrine drew admirers from Horace Walpole to the King of Denmark: Roubiliac's statue of Shakespeare (now housed in the British Museum, and for which Garrick himself was almost certainly the model), various carvings from the famed mulberry tree, and even some of Shakespeare's personal effects, including ‘an old leather glove, with pointed fingers and blackened metal embroidery', an old dagger and a ‘signet ring with W.S. on it'. For detractors like Samuel Foote the heresy was a bit much: Mr. Garrick had ‘dedicated a temple to a certain divinity … before whose shrine frequent libations are made, and on whose altar the fat of venison, a viand grateful to the deity, is seen often to smoke'. Others found nothing strange in this at all.

Even Garrick admitted that the rain-soaked Stratford Jubilee had been a ‘folly'. It set him back
£
2,000 and he never again set foot in Shakespeare's native town. Locals were apparently confused by the Jubilee (including a labourer from Banbury hired to deliver a double-bass viol to the event, who reportedly thought that it was to be used at ‘the resurrection of Shakespeare'). Stratford's tourist industry as well as the proliferation of Shakespeare festivals around the world can trace their roots back to that extravaganza. The Jubilee, according to Christian Deelman, the best historian of the event, also ‘marks the point at
which Shakespeare stopped being regarded as an increasingly popular and admirable dramatist, and became a god'.

By all accounts, its climax was Garrick's recitation of an ‘Ode to Shakespeare', a shameless appeal to Shakespeare's divinity:

In case anyone missed the point, Garrick was happy to repeat it: ‘'Tis he! 'Tis he! / The god of our idolatry!' One gushing eyewitness wrote afterwards that the audience ‘was in raptures'. Garrick avidly promoted mulberry relics, of which he owned a considerable supply, including the very goblet that reappeared as a prop in the Drury Lane celebration of 1794.

Garrick recouped his Stratford losses four times over by restaging a version of the events at Drury Lane, in a play simply called
The Jubilee
. It was a sensation and ran for a record ninety-two nights. His ‘Ode' was not only published and circulated widely, but also recited on provincial stages from Canterbury to Birmingham. The Jubilee tapped into larger cultural currents, for no ‘other topic in the century inspired quite such a surge of stage plays and poems'. Word spread quickly beyond England's shores, and two Jubilees were held in Germany, modelled on Garrick's. After Garrick's death, William Cowper celebrated him as ‘Great Shakespeare's priest', underscoring the ways in which the celebration of Shakespeare was now most fittingly described in religious terms:

Contemporary painters were quickly drawn to the idea of a divine Shakespeare, and did much to popularise this conceit. In 1777 Henry Fuseli sketched out plans, much talked of but never
realised, for a Shakespeare ceiling modelled on that of the Sistine Chapel: even as Michelangelo portrayed the story of Creation, Fuseli would render Shakespeare's creations in his predecessor's style, including characters from
The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Lear
and
Macbeth
. In his ‘Ode' Garrick had described how ‘the Passions' wait upon Shakespeare and ‘own him for their Lord'; George Romney would capture this image in an exceptional painting –
The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions
– completed around 1792, reproduced at the beginning of this chapter. As critics have noted, the infant Shakespeare is cast in a pose familiar from Nativity scenes, while Nature and the Passions substitute for the Magi and Shepherds. Other artists picked up on similar themes, depicting, for example, the poet in clouds of glory in ‘The Apotheosis of Shakespeare'. By the end of the eighteenth century the idea of a divine Shakespeare had become commonplace. Still, it wasn't as if anyone was paying homage to his image in a house of worship. Another century would pass before that happened.

It was William-Henry Ireland's misfortune to have forged what amounted to divine writ at a time when the first fully-fledged Shakespeare experts, most prominent among them Edmond Malone, had appeared on the scene (though the word ‘expert' itself wouldn't enter the vocabulary for another quarter-century). Malone's exposure of the Ireland forgeries struck a nerve: who had the expertise to decide such matters? And what knowledge did such experts possess that well-versed amateurs lacked?

Malone did not weigh in until he had his hands on Samuel Ireland's
Miscellaneous Papers
and was able to examine the documents closely. He obtained a copy of the book immediately after its publication in late 1795 and worked without pause for the next three months. At the end of March 1796 he published
An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments … Attributed to Shakespeare
. It was an overnight bestseller. His verdict was devastating: the documents and manuscripts
were second-rate forgeries and the subscribers dupes. The evidence was damning. Malone demonstrated that the spelling and language of the documents in the possession of the Irelands were wildly at variance with Elizabethan usage. Words that Ireland attributed to Shakespeare weren't in currency until the eighteenth century (one of his most damning examples was the word ‘upset', originally a nautical term, not employed in the now familiar sense of ‘distressed' or ‘troubled' until two centuries after Shakespeare's day). Malone also showed that the dates affixed to many of Ireland's documents were off the mark; Queen Elizabeth's letter addressed to Shakespeare at ‘the Globe' in the late 1580s, for example, anticipated the building of that playhouse by over a decade. He also established that surviving autographs of the Earl of Southampton looked nothing like the ones that appeared in the Ireland papers.

Malone's
Inquiry
made clear that those who had examined the manuscript of
Lear
and confirmed its legitimacy had no clue what Elizabethan dramatic manuscripts looked like. Only a few other scholars and editors used to handling old papers were in a position to recognise that these playscripts did not in the least resemble the documents Ireland had forged. And they knew this because they had bought, consulted and borrowed (in Malone's case often refusing to return) as many of these as they could get their hands on. ‘I am myself', Malone writes in the
Inquiry
, ‘at this moment surrounded with not less than a hundred deeds, letters, and miscellaneous papers, directly or indirectly relating to Shakespeare.'

The handful of dramatic manuscripts that had survived – and few were extant, since there was no need to keep them once a play was printed – were written in a mix of secretary and italic script (in part to distinguish speaking parts from stage directions). Professional dramatists and scribes prepared these documents in a kind of theatrical shorthand, indicating that they were intended for playhouse use rather than for publication. And, unlike Ireland's manuscript of
Lear
, these scripts typically bore the mark of the censor, since a copy would have to pass through the hands
of the Master of the Revels, who had to signify on each script his official approval before it could be publicly staged. In contrast to the Ireland forgeries, the Elizabethan manuscripts Malone had at hand weren't written on both sides of the page or ‘trimmed' or ‘ornamented in any way, but stitched in covers and well embrowned with dust and age'. And unlike Ireland's manuscripts, none included line numbers in the margin.

Yet Ireland succeeded by making the language of his forged texts seem sufficiently strange – in a pseudo-Elizabethan way – to pass as genuine. Among his tricks was omitting all punctuation and then spelling words in a way that seemed old-fashioned, doubling as many consonants as possible and adding a terminal ‘e' whenever possible. The prefatory words to
Lear
are typical: ‘Iffe fromme masterre Hollinshedde I have inne somme little departedde fromme hymme butte thattte libbertye will notte I truste be blammedde bye mye gentle readerres.'

One reason why the forgeries struck contemporaries as authentic was that their portrait of Elizabethan literary culture felt so familiar. Like a typical eighteenth-century author, Ireland's Shakespeare accumulated a sizeable library, negotiated terms with his publishers and took great care in disposing of what he had written, for it was his property, to do with as he pleased. He was also a writer on familiar terms with members of the elite, as we see in the forged correspondence with the Earl of Southampton (in which Shakespeare refuses half the money that his ‘friend' and patron offers) as well as in his exchange with Queen Elizabeth (who attended command performances of his plays at the public playhouses a dozen times ‘every season', as eighteenth-century royalty might). What neither the Irelands nor those men of letters who testified to the authenticity of the documents understood was that such conventions and behaviour were almost unimaginable in Shakespeare's day.