The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (58 page)

With prodigious energy Shakespeare used all the conventions of his age in this joint exploring-creating expedition. He started with light comedy,
The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost
, and the tragedy of
Romeo and Juliet
. He explored the recent history of the Wars of the Roses in the three parts of
Henry VI
. He depicted the tragedies of earlier English history in
Richard II
and
Richard III
, in the adventures of
Henry IV
and
Henry V
. He mined the grandeur, romance, and tragedy of
ancient Rome in
Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra
, and
Coriolanus
. He elaborated comedies from the Italian—
The Merchant of Venice
and
Much Ado about Nothing
—and invented the fantasy of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. He reshaped fragments of history and folklore into triumphant tragedies—
Hamlet, Othello, King Lear
, and
Macbeth
.

The limits imposed by Elizabethan society Shakespeare somehow made into his opportunity. For the dramatist still dared not comment explicitly on the politics or mores of his own age. Not until the theater would be freed from the whims of the Master of the Revels and the Privy Council could there be serious dramas of contemporary life on the London stage. Ironically, Hamlet and Lear and Macbeth would remain alive for alien centuries, precisely because Shakespeare’s inhibitions saved him from recounting topical problems in familiar settings. He would reach out to us, and take us inward with him to enjoy the Human Comedy in exotic costumes and on remote scenes, equally enticing to the Elizabethan theatergoer and to us.

While we can never solve the mystery of Shakespeare, we do know enough about him and his work to dispose of some easy generalizations. For example, the temptation bred on the Left Banks of the world to identify the creator’s genius with instability, or even with madness. Shakespeare’s life makes us pause at Proust’s self-serving declaration that “everything great comes from neurotics. They alone have … composed our masterpieces.” Shakespeare’s contemporaries seemed agreed on his good-natured equanimity. It is hard to believe he was bland. But Charles Lamb and others have found it “impossible to conceive a mad Shakespeare.” Did he have “the sanity of true genius”? Among quarrelsome competing playwrights, he avoided the acrimony that drew his rival Ben Jonson into a murderous duel with a fellow actor and sent him to prison for a seditious play. Called the amiable “English Terence,” he was widely praised for “no railing but a reigning wit.” Still, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, Ben Jonson exceeded him in reputation and it was Jonson, not Shakespeare, whom the king appointed poet laureate with a substantial pension in 1616.

Had Shakespeare not enjoyed the affection of his fellow actors his plays might not have survived. About three fourths of the prolific output of playwrights in his lifetime has disappeared. But Shakespeare’s fellow actors, as a token of friendship to him, did us the great service of preserving the texts of his plays when they arranged publication of the First Folio in 1623. What other playwright of that age was so well served by his fellows? The First Folio Shakespeare, the compilers explained, was published not for profit but “only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.” In his Ode addressed “to the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare,” Jonson’s praise for the “Sweet Swan
of Avon,” expressed a general view. Shakespeare’s professional life, in a turbulent age, was conspicuously placid. Except for the “dark lady of the sonnets,” we know of no unrequited loves, no Beatrice or Fiammetta!

Still, amiable legends circulated which had the ring of truth and the appeal of Shakespearean wit, and which idolatrous biographers would have trouble explaining away. One was a stage-door anecdote noted for March 13, 1601, in the diary of a London student:

Shakespeare’s proverbial fluency was praised by his fellow actors in their preface to the Folio. “His mind and hand went together, and what he thought, he uttered with the easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” But Jonson, a laborious writer who left only a fraction of Shakespeare’s output, years later still nursed resentment that the players should have “mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing … he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand!’ ”

Unlike other great creators of the human comedy, Shakespeare never left his home country. Even in England he traveled little, and had no public life outside his profession. He had a meager formal education, “small Latin and less Greek,” and showed no learned idiosyncrasy in his reading habits. His best resource was probably in the classic curriculum of the Elizabethan grammar school he attended, reinforced by the reading habits of any literate Elizabethan. Like Boccaccio and Chaucer before them, the writers of Shakespeare’s age did not aim at “originality.” They were accustomed to borrow, embellish, elaborate, and revise Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Virgil, Plutarch, among others, and the abundant classical myths and legends. None of Shakespeare’s plays told a thoroughly original story. As an actor, Shakespeare made his living and stocked his memory with works of other playwrights. He seems to have been well read too in contemporary English authors. The narrow scope and traditions of his elementary education focused his imagination. He felt no uneasiness at drawing on these others and on his own earlier works, or simply translating into blank verse Holinshed’s
Chronicles
or North’s
Plutarch
. His
Julius Caesar, Coriolanus
, and
Antony and Cleopatra
showed a faithfulness to their Plutarchean source
that might worry later pursuers of originality. When Ben Jonson ridiculed Shakespeare’s lack of classical learning, one of Shakespeare’s champions retorted “That if Mr. Shakespeare had not read the Ancients, he had likewise not stollen any thing from ’em; (A Fault the other made no Conscience of).”

The better-documented Ben Jonson provided a perfect foil for our Shakespeare. The robust and irritable Jonson, insecure stepson of a bricklayer, was proud of his learning, and of the sponsorship of the pedantic William Camden. In his plays he took up and developed the popular psychology of “humours.” With explicit theories he professed to do his best to follow the classical rules and apologized, as in
Sejanus
, when he violated them. His most durable play,
Volpone
, applied the simplistic theory that each character should express a dominant humour. While Shakespeare, too, briefly experimented with this theory (in
Timon of Athens
), his achievement was to liberate the theater from such conventions and formulas. Jonson explained in the Prologue to
Every Man in His Humour
,

Shakespeare’s characteristic response was an
Antony and Cleopatra
, which violated all classical rules and offered thirty-two changes of scene across the remote and ancient world.

Nothing was more remarkable about Shakespeare than his afterlife. Within a half century after his death, in 1668, John Dryden intoned the paean of posterity.

“I am proud,” Coleridge boasted in 1811, “that I was the first in time who publicly demonstrated … that the supposed irregularities and extravagances of Shakespeare were the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had not the dimensions of the swan.” And he saw that “on the Continent the works of Shakespeare are honoured in a double way; by the admiration of Italy and Germany, and by the contempt of the French.”

For the cult of Shakespeare, which has had its ups and downs but never died, George Bernard Shaw in 1901 invented the word “bardolatry.” The cult flourished too in Tocqueville’s America, this land of the equality of conditions, where frontier wits made burlesques of Shakespeare a staple for raw communities. “The literary inspiration of Great Britain darts its beams into the depths of the forests of the New World,” Tocqueville noted in 1839. “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.”

M
ILTON’S
Paradise Lost
would do for his age, and perhaps for modern times, what Dante’s
Divine Comedy
had done for the Middle Ages. The writings and life of John Milton (1608–1674) were as redolent of the challenges, promises, and frustrations of the modern Christian West as were Dante’s of the certitudes of medieval Christendom. Milton saw a world of wider, more varied alternatives. His special contribution to the composite human comedy was to create poetry and prose of the pains, rewards, and vagaries of man’s adventures in choice—“to assert eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to man.” And he could not have created a motif more expressive of the nation whose struggle for law and the citizen’s right to choose reached a climax in his time.

Milton’s fortunate circumstances gave him the opportunity for self-education, without which his creations in poetry and prose would have been impossible. Born in London into a family of comfortable means, he had a father who loved learning and composed music. “My father destined me in
early childhood for the study of literature,” Milton recalled, “for which I had so keen an appetite that from my twelfth year scarcely ever did I leave my studies for my bed before the hour of midnight.” At St. Paul’s School he learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which his father supplemented by tutors in other languages at home. Milton’s phenomenal talent for languages would enrich his own writing from the best authors of ancient and modern European literature. “When I had thus become proficient in various languages and had tasted by no means superficially the sweetness of philosophy, he sent me to Cambridge.” From his father he inherited, too, an obstinate Protestant disposition. His grandfather had been a firm Roman Catholic, and when Milton’s father turned Protestant he had been disinherited. Milton himself never ceased to write of his own father with tenderness and gratitude for having inspired his epic vocation.

At Cambridge, Milton worked hard but found it “disgusting to be constantly subjected to the threats of a rough tutor and to other indignities which my spirit cannot endure.” After a quarrel with a tutor who actually whipped him he was sent down from Christ’s College. He enjoyed this brief literary “exile,” and even after returning to college he most enjoyed the “literary retirement” of the Long Vacations. Receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degree, he spent six years with his family at their house in Hammersmith, a London suburb, and then at the quiet village of Horton, on his own course of reading to repair the pedantries of Cambridge. His younger brother, Christopher, had just become a law student at the Inner Temple, but his father saved him from that fate. “For you did not, father, order me to go where the broad way lies, where opportunities for gain are easier and the golden hope of accumulating money shines steadily. Nor did you force me to study law and the ill-guarded legal principles of the nation.” Instead, “I devoted myself entirely to the study of Greek and Latin writers, completely at leisure,” with occasional trips to the city “to purchase books or to become acquainted with some new discovery in mathematics or music.”

If Milton had a premonition that he would be totally blind for the last twenty-three years of his life, he could not have better used his first thirty years, acquiring the languages and harvesting the literatures of Western Europe in his prodigious memory. But this voracious, round-the-clock reading from the age of twelve, he later said, was “the first cause of injury to my eyes.” On his grand tour he met the learned elite of France and Italy, who were impressed by his facility in their languages. They found his poems in Latin and Italian remarkably good work for an Englishman.

His notable experience was meeting two famous victims of tyranny. In Paris he had “ardently desired to meet” Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), the great Dutch humanist and founder of the modern science of international law. In his homeland Grotius had been sentenced to life imprisonment for his
political views and for taking the wrong side in a Calvinist dispute over free will. After a sensational escape from prison in a box of books, Grotius had found refuge in Paris as Queen Christina’s ambassador. In Florence Milton sought out, “found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.”