Worlds Elsewhere (2 page)

The cult attains a discomfiting intensity in Stratford-upon-Avon, centre of what the motorway signs call ‘Shakespeare's County', Warwickshire – the symbolic as well as literal heart of England. A few months before watching Rah-e-Sabz at the Globe, I went up to Stratford for the annual birthday celebrations, the first time I'd seen them. What I witnessed I found puzzling: a cross between town fete (Morris dancers and decorated floats), militaristic tourist spectacle (cub scouts and the Band of the Royal Engineers) and Bardolatrous seance (volunteers dressed up as Master and Mistress Shakespeare). None of this is especially surprising: the celebrations have their origin in the tub-thumpingly patriotic ‘Shakespeare Jubilee' of 1769 masterminded by the great actor-manager David Garrick, which – among many bizarre pieces of pageantry – featured the ritual humiliation of a ‘Frenchman' followed by a passionate avowal of Shakespeare's flinty Britishness. What any of it has to do with an early-modern playwright is exceedingly hard to tell.

Even Shakespeare's birthday seems, the closer one looks, like a way of burnishing the patriotic myth. It has become conventional to celebrate it on 23 April. Yet the records are unclear, and no one knows for sure that William Shakespeare
was
born on 23 April – he might just as easily have come into this world on the 21st or the 22nd. But 23 April is St George's Day, the patron saint of England. So 23 April the anointed day has become.

Later that summer I sat down to watch the Olympic opening ceremony, broadcast from the stadium a couple of miles from my home in east London. Its contents had been kept rigorously secret; all I or anyone else knew was that Danny Boyle, a sometime theatre director, had chosen the theme of ‘Isles of Wonder', a nod to
The Tempest
and Team GB's very own world-beating Bard.

With an estimated 900 million others, I watched scenes of Maypolers cavorting on the greensward and cricketers running up to bowl. I looked on, a little more apprehensively, as choirs of children from across the British Isles piped their way through ‘Jerusalem', ‘Danny Boy', ‘Flower of Scotland' and ‘Guide me, O Thou Great Redeemer'. Where
was
this Shakespearian theme we had all been promised? Was this meant to be it?

Then the actor Kenneth Branagh strode forward, in waistcoat and stovepipe as the nineteenth-century engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and declaimed, to the swelling strains of Elgar's ‘Nimrod', a speech many can recite from memory:

Words spoken by an oppressed and imprisoned slave, Caliban, in a play,
The Tempest,
that dwells at length on the costs and consequences of colonialism, were being repurposed as a eulogy for the British Empire, placed above music by Edwardian England's most patriotic composer and replayed for the watching world.

As I flicked off the television, I wondered if I would ever discover how Britain had acquired such a curious, conflicted attitude to its National Poet.

Of the numerous things odd about this, the most obvious one is that there was never anything especially British about William Shakespeare.

Granted, if one plots the known facts of his life on a map, the route runs from Warwickshire to London and back again, not far from what is now the M40 motorway corridor. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, educated at a grammar school a few streets away from his birthplace, Shakespeare married a local girl and had three children with her. By the early 1590s he was in London, a hundred miles south-east. Even the capital seems to have been a temporary halt: Shakespeare never bought a permanent residence there, preferring to acquire property back home in Warwickshire, where he retired (scholars guess) a few years before his death. He was buried in April 1616, in the same town as his forefathers, and the same church where he had been baptised fifty-two years earlier.

A few adventurous biographers have detected glimpses of the playwright in Lancashire (in the so-called ‘lost years' between the birth of his twins in 1585 and the first record of him as a playwright in 1592), but the traces are spotty and unconvincing. Even more unconvincing are legends that Shakespeare travelled in continental Europe, perhaps as a soldier: no evidence whatsoever. It is equally feasible that he never went further north than the Midlands, or further south than the London borough of Southwark. In London, one can still pace out his daily commute: from the parish of St Helen's, Bishopsgate, near Liverpool Street station, down through the City and across London Bridge, past Southwark cathedral (then St Mary Overie) to the Globe or the Rose, perhaps with detours via the bookstalls around St Paul's or to Clerkenwell, where scripts were approved by the Master of the Revels. At most, the area covers a few square miles.

But while his physical existence was cramped and confined, Shakespeare's imagination roamed far and free. Taking advantage of the worlds opened up by a grammar-school education and the Elizabethan explosion in publishing (especially travel publishing), he made innumerable voyages of discovery.

Via the historians Halle and Holinshed, he trod the bloody territory of his own country through the Middle Ages and beyond, filling out their chronicle accounts with a cacophony of Welsh, Scottish and French voices. Despite Ben Jonson's gibe about his older colleague's ‘smalle Latin and lesse Greeke', Shakespeare raided classical sources with magpie enthusiasm, reading Ovid and Virgil in the original and English translation, and exhibiting an impressive knowledge of Roman comedy and the tragedies of Seneca. He scoured Plutarch's
Lives
– in a version that had been translated via French – for the traces of Caesar, Coriolanus, Cleopatra and Antony on their journeys through the ancient world. The sonnets and narrative poems show the heavy imprint of Dante and Petrarch. On his shelves at various times were copies of Montaigne's
Essais,
collections of Italian and French tales (some read in their original languages) and accounts of journeys around North Africa and the Mediterranean and to the Americas.

Little wonder the plays Shakespeare wrote bestride the world. His characters hail from Tunisia, the Levant, Algeria, India; his dramatic imagination roams restlessly across France, Denmark, Austria, Turkey, Greece, covering a veritable gazetteer of far-flung destinations. He has a particular passion for Italy: Padua (
The Taming of the Shrew
), Venice (
The Merchant of Venice, Othello
), Verona (
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo and Juliet
), Sicily (
Much Ado About Nothing
); and, behind it, for ancient Rome (
Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus,
parts of
Antony and Cleopatra
).

In fact, he seems actively to have avoided writing about the Britain of his own lifetime: the plays Shakespeare does locate in the British Isles are either distanced by time (the English histories) or by theme (the ancient Britain of
King Lear,
feudal Scotland in
Macbeth,
the Roman invasion-era
Cymbeline
). In arresting contrast to born-and-bred Londoners such as Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, whose plays place on stage the city in which they lived and breathed, Shakespeare sets only one full script,
The Merry Wives of Windsor,
in anything resembling the Elizabethan world he knew.

On a microscopic level, too, the scripts are littered with tiny but telling references to what Coriolanus calls ‘a world elsewhere'.
Macbeth'
s Witches make fleeting mention of the disastrous far-Eastern voyage of the
Tiger,
one of whose shipmates went on to found the East India Company;
Henry
V's prologue glances at the Earl of Essex's campaign in Ireland;
Love's Labour's Lost
pokes sly fun at the inept diplomacy of Ivan the Terrible. Hamlet frets that his fortunes will ‘turn Turk'. In
Measure for Measure
we hear gossip about ‘China dishes'. The ‘Indies' – in Shakespeare's time America as well as the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia – make a fleeting appearance in several texts, notably
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
where Oberon and Titania wage a fairy-tale war over an enigmatic boy ‘stolen from an Indian king'. No fewer than five plays –
Dream, Henry VI Part III, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing
and
Richard II
– mention that remotest location of all from England, the Antipodes'.

Shakespeare was not merely indulging his own curiosity about worlds elsewhere (or those of his audiences); as scholars have recently begun to understand, he reflected the world as it was changing around him. Though England lagged far behind colonial powers such as Spain and Portugal, international trade had begun to make its presence felt by the end of the sixteenth century, particularly in London, where the Royal Exchange became a nexus for merchants from across the globe. In 1600, the East India Company was founded to capitalise on the spice routes through Arabia and towards Asia, while other joint-stock companies soon thrust west towards the Americas. In 1603 the Scottish James I took the throne, accompanied by his Danish queen, Anne, ushering in a new, more geopolitically open era after the combative defensiveness of the Elizabethan period.

As well as experiencing this first upsurge in global trade – spices, silks, tobacco, exotic foodstuffs – Shakespeare and other Londoners jostled among a melting pot of immigrants, including people from the Jewish diaspora, Spanish ‘blackamoors', former slaves from North and West Africa and religious refugees from the European continent. Simply by strolling down to the docks or around St Paul's, nicknamed ‘the whole world's map' by one contemporary writer, the playwright could have heard half the languages of Europe. The expansion of British influence is attested to by the extraordinary fact that in the summer of 1603, around the time Shakespeare was writing
Othello,
a small clutch of Native Americans were shipped across from Chesapeake Bay and ordered to paddle their canoe up the Thames for the amusement of spectators.

Shakespeare (who, as a Warwickshireman, was himself an alien of sorts) seems to have been particularly intimate with the city's expatriates. As well as reading French and Italian, he knew people who could correct his grammar: from around 1602 he lived with the family of a French Huguenot refugee, Christopher Mountjoy, and his wife in Bishopsgate in the City of London, an area known for the diversity of its residents, teeming with Flemish, Dutch and French families. He was apparently on nodding terms with the Italian translator of Montaigne, John Florio, and perhaps acquainted with the Bassanos, a family of Italian Jewish musicians. One thinks of Bob Dylan's lines in ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again':

Footwear notwithstanding, they are accurate enough: not only did Shakespeare know at least one ‘French girl', Christopher and Marie Mountjoy's daughter Mary, he acted as a go-between in her marriage to a young apprentice (and later testified in a lawsuit regarding it).

Soon after moving in with the Mountjoys, in 1603, Shakespeare for the first time became a royal servant, putting him into contact with visitors not only from mainland Europe but from far beyond. Ambassadors and tourists from elsewhere in Europe came to see his plays at the public theatres; at court, meanwhile, his newly renamed King's Men played more often than any other company, including for foreign dignitaries.

If Jaques is right to suggest in
As You Like It
that ‘all the world's a stage' – the phrase is held to be the motto of the original Globe – then the stage was also a way of reflecting the world back at these increasingly diverse audiences. The Swiss doctor Thomas Platter, who came to London as a tourist in 1599 and witnessed the first-known performance of
Julius Caesar,
claimed that the theatre was the means by which Londoners found out what was happening abroad: ‘the English,' Platter remarked, ‘for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters … at home.'

There were more literal voyages, too. Rummaging in early production history, I came across a tale frequently repeated in accounts of Shakespeare and the world beyond British shores. It seems almost too good to be true, offering a tantalising connection between the East India Company, the globalising currents beginning to flow through London, and Shakespeare. In March 1607 – the same year the playwright might have begun work on
Pericles
– a vessel called the
Red Dragon
weighed anchor at Tilbury and headed into the North Sea. Commanded by the young captain William Keeling, the
Dragon
was the flagship of the Company's third voyage to the Far East. Keeling's destination was Java in Indonesia; he had orders to buy as many spices as could be squeezed into his hold and open trade negotiations for the English in India and Aden, at the tip of the Arabian peninsula.

Things went badly for the
Dragon
almost from the off. Foul weather split up the convoy of three ships, and a man was swept overboard. Another crew member was found enjoying what a ship's diarist called ‘carnall copulation' with a dog, and whipped at the mainmast. A lack of reliable maps created navigational headaches, and despite being bound for the east via the Cape of Good Hope, the
Dragon
and her smaller companion the
Hector
were driven south-west, and ended up crossing the equator near Brazil, the wrong side of the Atlantic altogether, in June. ‘Inforced by Gusts, Calmes, Raines, Sicknesses, and other Marine inconveniences', they ended up recrossing it a month later. Water was running low; dysentery and scurvy were rife. Desperate to save his voyage, Keeling hit upon the idea of heading for the coast of Africa, to repair and refuel. They finally reached a Portuguese trading outpost in Sierra Leone in early August.