Shakespeare: A Life (62 page)

right to supplant. Official Jacobean policy denied this, and in April,
for example, two sermons were printed to show that the colonists had
truly brought civilization and faith to America's savages. (One sermon,
with agile logic, proves degenerate stage actors are the real enemies
of Virginia.)
²⁰
The Tempest gives both sides of the colonial argument with ironic
depth and complication. On the one hand, Shakespeare replies to
Montaigne's essay 'Of Cannibals' which exalts the virtuous life of
primitives ( Caliban is morally stunted, predatory and a would-be
rapist); but on the other hand, he includes drunkards and
murder-plotters among the suave grandees who reach Prospero's isle. He
makes Caliban's claim to the isle sound fairly plausible, and to an
extent sympathizes with him. The monster's language is like that of a
Stratford glover's son, in being above his worldly station or rank,
and he speaks the loveliest blank-verse lines in The Tempest. Caliban's
final wish to 'seek for grace' (V. i. 299) need not have been
construed by audiences as either shallow, feigned, or futile.

The Tempest, however, is set not in the Atlantic but on a Mediterranean
isle, and the author sketches an Italian realpolitik which he had
tested before. Prospero, with nearly Machiavellian sagacity, ensures
that his daughter Miranda will wed the son of his worst enemy. A
modern critic asks if it is necessary, after all, that we 'run away from
the identification of Prospero with Shakespeare?'
²¹
Probably not. Rather as the dramatist does, the magician assembles
and disciplines an almost unmanageable world, heads his people along
certain paths, and gives them situations to which they must react. The
magician's view of the transience of all things, for example, matches
his creator's outlook as often expressed, as when Prospero thinks of
the melting of 'the great globe itself' and of our 'insubstantial
pageant' which will leave, at last,

not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

(IV. i. 153-8)

This drama -- nevertheless -- was not Shakespeare's farewell to the
stage. He was still to write three more plays. But in its astutely bal-

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anced structure, it best shows how in a tragicomic romance he can
accommodate a lastingly pertinent and intellectually fresh, ambiguous,
and searching view of life. One hears of a performance of The Tempest
before royalty at Hallowmas, 1 November 1611. About a year and a half
later, it was again staged at court around the time of the wedding of
the Princess Elizabeth to Prince Frederick -- the Elector Palatine --
who had come over with his retinue from Heidelberg.

The stage machinery at Blackfriars made Ariel dive, soar up, and circle
over the gallants' hats. A boy might hover, sing naturally -- ten
feet up in the air -- and whiz out of sight. Yet despite its magic and
enchantment, its beautiful songs, its Edenic lovers in Ferdinand and
Miranda, and its bestial, intriguing Caliban, The Tempest was only a
moderate success-to judge from the number and style of contemporary
allusions to it. The troupe profited, but Caliban did not fill seats
as Falstaff and Shylock could. Alive or dead, Shakespeare was to be
the mainstay of the company until 1642 -- but a new kind of tragicomedy
had come into vogue.

It is doubtful
whether Shakespeare believed his fame as a dramatist had much reality,
apart from fame shared by his troupe. Yet he knew he was popular.
Young poets imitated or parodied him, and by now Londoners had
shortened his name to 'Will' and his main rival to 'Ben' -- a
curtailing later deplored by Thomas Heywood.

Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting quill
Commanded mirth or passion, was but
Will.
²²

Law students, around 1610, might debate the merits of Ben's The
Alchemist and Will Cymbeline. Poets opted to be of 'the tribe of Ben',
because Ben encouraged disciples; but the older poet had a large
following. People had seen him as an actor: 'Some say, good Will,
which I, in sport, do sing', wrote John Davies of Hereford late in 1610,

Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport,
Thou hadst been a companion for a King.
²³

His wit was lauded by the Oxford man Thomas Freeman, who singled

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out that 'nimble
Mercury
thy brain'. As one sign of Shakespeare's popularity, works not
written by him, such as The London Prodigal ( 1605) or A Yorkshire
Tragedy ( 1608), were issued under his name, or else coyly with his
tell-tale initials, such as The Puritan 'by W. S.' in 1607, or The
Troublesome Raigne 'by W. Sh.' in 1611.

Yet at least three negative accounts of Shakespeare gained ground
after The Tempest. The first, with antecedents in Greene's and Nashe's
remarks, is that he was only an easy, fluent, imperfect writer addicted
to 'bombast' or a 'huffing' style, which was simply a 'horrour' in
Macbeth (as Jonson used to say, according to Dryden's report of the
matter). The second charge is that he was unlearned, and this was made
by Francis Beaumont about eight years before the remark on
Shakespeare's 'small Latine and lesse Greeke'. 'Heere I would let
slippe', writes Beaumont to Jonson in a verse-epistle of about 1615,

(If I had any in mee) schollershippe,
And from all Learninge keepe these lines as
cl
eere
as Shakespeares best are . . .

Preachers, as Beaumont adds, will seize upon him as a prime example
of 'how farr sometimes a mortall man may goe | by the dimme light of
Nature'.
²⁴
There is a suggestion that Stratford's poet is a little dimbrained, or
intuitive rather than intelligent. A third charge is that the Midlands
man fails to match contemporary fashion, or the refined, best talk of
ladies and gentlemen. Dryden echoed this, but it was already implicit
in the stunning work of Beaumont and Fletcher.

The King's troupe had gambled on two poets who had failed in the
boys' theatres. They were an unlikely pair. Born around 1584 in
Leicestershire to a Justice of Common Pleas, and raised partly at the
converted nunnery of Grace-Dieu -- which was well known to recusants in
his family -- Francis Beaumont had been up to Oxford in 1597. From
there he had gone without a degree to the Inner Temple, where he gave a
burlesque grammar lecture, and then wrote two witty, unsuccessful
dramas. Also he met John Fletcher, five years his senior, whose
father, as Bishop of London, might have scorned the papists at
GraceDieu; but the old bishop had expired in debt.

Fletcher, at first, also had poor luck. His pastoral play The FaithfulShepherdess

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Shepherdess failed, as did their jointly written Cupid's Revenge,
staged by a boys' troupe. But Beaumont and Fletcher went on in 1609 to
write Philaster for the King's men, and this made them famous. Aubrey
later recorded gossip: 'they lived together on the Banke side, not
far from the Play-house, both bachelors; lay together -- from Sir John
Hales, etc.; had one wench in the house between them, which they did
so admire; the same cloathes and cloake, &c., betweene them'.
²⁵
In seeming harmony, they wrote about a dozen plays jointly before
Francis Beaumont left the theatre, in 1613, for the embraces of a
well-to-do heiress.

The art of
Beaumont's friend was sprightly, as it is in The Woman's Prize which
replies to The Taming of the Shrew. In Fletcher's amusing script,
Maria, a cousin of Shakespeare's Kate who is now deceased, marries
Petruchio, but shuts him out on his wedding night and otherwise turns
the tables on him. The public's habits had begun to make Beaumont and
Fletcher indispensable to the King's men. Play-goers were choosing the
kind of playhouse they could afford to attend, and as the open-air
Fortune and the Red Bull (where Webster's tragedy The White Devil
failed in 1612) were becoming 'citizen' theatres, so the Blackfriars
and later the small, roofed Cockpit in Drury Lane became gentrified.
²⁶
The King's Servants had begun to feel more secure with élite
audiences. Beaumont and Fletcher influenced Shakespeare's work, as he
did theirs, but they avoided problems of society and justice, real
maladies of the psyche, or any concern with the individual in relation
to the state. They cared about notions of honour, emotional dilemmas,
polite conduct in politics and love. Fletcher's plays consist of
excitement, emotive dialogue and clever plots. His amoral bent pleased
the élite, and the King's men capitalized on him.

Why, then, did Shakespeare bother to write plays with Fletcher? All
acting companies normally used jointly written dramas, and most of
their poets collaborated. A company's needs determined one's work,
although Shakespeare, perhaps, was allowed to do what he pleased. He
could be in two or three minds about a matter: he was slightly
disengaging himself from his troupe, but also testing the winds of
fashion. It is most unlikely that he meant to quit London, and in fact
he took part in the King's men's new developments by collaborating.

One work he wrote with Fletcher, the now missing Cardenio, we

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know only a little about. This play was acted at court during the
winter revels of 1612-13 and again on 8 June 1613. Forty years later
Humphrey Moseley, who by then had acquired some of the troupe's
scripts, registered a drama called 'The History of Cardenio, by Mr.
Fletcher & Shakespeare'. Much later, in 1728, Lewis Theobald
published his play Double Falshood -- based on the romantic fable of
Cardenio in Don Quixote -- and described that as 'Written Originally by
W. SHAKESPEARE; And now Revised and Adapted to the Stage By Mr.
THEOBALD'. Is the old Jacobean play at all evident in Falshood? If so,
the old play may have featured a duke's anxiety over the worth of his
two sons, a subplot, and a seduction scene -- material ripe for
Fletcher, perhaps. But it is hard to find Fletcher's famous collaborator
in Falshood except that words such as 'Imagination', 'Suspicions',
and 'Possession', in their older rhythmic uses, may be the ghosts of
Shakespeare's lost words.
²⁷

Fletcher's hand has been found in Henry VIII or All is True-though
there is no external sign that he wrote any part of this. In Cyrus
Hoy's linguistic study of Henry VIII's playtext, mainly confirmed by J.
Hope's work in 1994, Fletcher emerges as the writer of only a few
scenes, and as one who 'touched up' or added very short passages to
the work of Shakespeare, who wrote most of the drama.

The topic of the late Queen's father, Henry VIII, was still hazardous
in London. The play ironically celebrates King Henry's getting rid of
his wife Katherine, and then picking up Anne Bullen and bedding her
offstage to give the nation a peerless baby in the future Elizabeth I.
When the infant is christened in Act V, there is almost 'group sex' in
the streets. The Porter wonders if an 'Indian', over from Virginia
perhaps, has not aroused the city's females. 'Bless me', he cries,
'what a fry of fornication is at door! On my Christian conscience, this
one christening will beget a thousand. Here will be father, godfather,
and all together' (V. iii. 34-6). That bawdry suits Henry's sly,
sensual, opportunistic, unforgiving, slightly incoherent character,
and the play unfolds as a documentary romance of a new genre. In 1613
Sir Henry Wotton, a sensitive diplomat (and tireless letter-writer),
was impressed. This stage-play, he felt, was 'sufficient in truth
within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous.'
²⁸

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Buckingham, Katherine, and Wolsey -- who fall out of Henry's graces
-- gain in inwardness only when 'divorced' or excluded by the state.
Their acts of repentance are moving, but are unlike the reconciliations
in Cymbeline or The Winter's Tale. Here society is not renewed by its
spiritual conversions. The author's pessimism is implicit throughout,
especially in an acid view of statecraft, though an undercurrent of
gloom is balanced by pageantry, lively gossip, and the panegyrics in
Act V over Queen Elizabeth's and King James's reigns in time ahead.

Shakespeare's pessimism -- as he considers human motives, obsessions,
and the will -- is even more obvious in a sinister tale about the
influence of passion and war over men's minds, which he sketched in
The Two Noble Kinsmen. His portion of the writing probably included
Act I, the bulk of Act V, and one or two of the opening scenes in Acts
II and III. He and Fletcher had set about dramatizing Chaucer's
descriptive, rather undramatic The Knight's Tale -- already used lightly
in the Dream -- which focuses in part on the rivalry of the two
knights Palamon and Arcite for Emelye's love. Fletcher did his best to
follow Chaucer's tale. Departing from it, Shakespeare creates an
equivalent, glistening brilliance in his ritualistic Act I, which has
some of his finest writing. His talent had not faded in 1612 or 1613,
and his collaborate work suggests he might have found a new dialectic
of enquiry and new dramatic forms, if his career had lasted. In
Kinsmen, his verse is powerfully evocative. Theseus, on his way to be
married, is stopped by three widowed Queens of Thebes, who tell him
that he will never think of their just, urgent need for his help, once
he is in Hippolyta's bed.

'Our suit shall be neglected', cries the First Queen, in one of the last set speeches from Shakespeare's pen:

when her arms,
Able to lock Jove from a synod, shall
By warranting moonlight corslet thee! O when
Her twinning cherries shall their sweetness fall
Upon thy tasteful lips, what wilt thou think
Of rotten kings or blubbered queens? What care
For what thou feel'st not, what thou feel'st being able
To make Mars spurn his drum? O, if thou couch

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