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Stephen Greenblatt
Professor, Harvard University; Editor, Norton Shakespeare; Author, Will in the World
Answers to Questions from the Audience
Q: Were you able to learn one more fact about the life of William Shakespeare, what might that be?A: I would want most of all to have some greater certainty about all the facts that we have. Virtually anything we seize upon begins as, in a horror movie, to crumble in our hands. Take the question of the Catholicism in the family, which certainly must be important given the paranoia of the 1580s; the whole country was in the grip of fantastic anxiety about assassination plots, about terrorism. A fantastic document turned up in the 18th century when the roof of the family birthplace was re-tiled. A workman found a six-page document that was a spiritual last will and testament, decidedly Catholic in form, asking for his children to pray for his soul in Purgatory after death. It was signed by John Shakespeare, Shakespeare's father. It was sent to the great Shakespeare biographer in London, Edward Malone. That document is lost. The transcription survives, but we can't actually now look at the document and test it to say, Is this actually accurate, or is it a forgery from the 18th century? I shouldn't admit this, but the truth is that virtually every one of the details of Shakespeare's life, including the ands and the thes, can be subjected to the same kind of skeptical questioning.
Q: Shakespeare had a son, coincidentally named Hamnet, and that son died during Shakespeare's life. Could you comment on the influence that that death had on his writing?
A: The son was a twin born when Shakespeare was 20. The children were named after Shakespeare's neighbors in Stratford - Hamnet and Judith Sadler. In Shakespeare's last will and testament, Hamnet Sadler was still alive; Shakespeare leaves him a small bequest, a ring. But the name is written Hamlet Sadler; that is, the names are interchangeable - Hamnet and Hamlet.When Shakespeare's son died in the middle of the 1590s, he was 11 years old; Shakespeare had in effect abandoned his entire family some years earlier when he had gone off to London. It's quite possible to construct an account in which Shakespeare is simply indifferent to the death of children - lots of children died in the age and people must have been hardened to it. It's true that nothing very decisive immediately emerges after the death of his son.
When Shakespeare sat down to write "Hamlet," and he wrote that name over and over again - the name of his dead son - something happened to him inside, a volcanic eruption of grief centered on the question of the relationship between the living and the dead - and fantastic creativity. A creative explosion that not only is marked in "Hamlet," which is a decisive turning point in Shakespeare's career but that plays itself out in the plays that he subsequently wrote, plays that are unimaginable before the writing of "Hamlet" - "King Lear," "Macbeth," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Othello" - the astonishing outpouring of his genius, which I think depended on this creative breakthrough that happened out of grief and trauma in 1601.
Q: We have several questions on authorship, the possibility that Shakespeare was a collage of several authors. One questioner asks that you not only address this but put it to rest finally.
A: You can't entirely put the collage, in the sense of collaboration, to rest, because Shakespeare did collaborate on several of his plays. An exhaustive study recently written on this, collecting all of the now very sophisticated computer-driven studies of collaboration, confirms, to my surprise, the most conservative hypothesis about collaboration. Virtually all the plays in which Shakespeare collaborated are more or less dogs (one doesn't want to say that any play that Shakespeare had his hand in was completely a dog) and the plays in which he had his hand alone are the ones that astonish. If you have a big stake in "Pericles, Prince of Tyre," "The Two Noble Kinsmen," "Henry VIII" or "Titus Andronicus" you will be able to celebrate the idea of the collaborative Shakespeare, but in almost any of the plays that most of us care most deeply about it is apparently only written by Shakespeare.
About the big alternative question, somebody else having written the plays - Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon, Queen Elizabeth or Marlowe - all of them run into tremendous trouble simply at the level of fact. To take a very popular current theory: Edward de Vere had the misfortune of dying in 1604. Too bad for Edward de Vere because, after 1604, the following Shakespeare plays were performed: "Measure for Measure," "Othello," "All's Well that Ends Well," "Timon of Athens," "King Lear," "Macbeth," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Pericles," "Coriolanus," "Winter's Tale," "Cymbeline," "The Tempest," "Henry VIII" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen." You can believe that the conspiracy actually held each of these in cryonic suspension and thawed them out year after year, time-released into the world in order to keep this conspiracy going, but it does take a rather extravagant set of beliefs to get to that point. We have a very large amount of evidence that poor, disappointing, middle-class William Shakespeare was the one who wrote the plays.
Q: Can you name a few plays that you feel perhaps have been overlooked in the popularizing of Shakespeare?
A: It's hard to say that any play by Shakespeare has really been overlooked. There's such an intensity of engagement in Shakespeare's work. He seems to be available and appropriate for any given moment. This is a person who wrote "Henry V"about the question of the justification for a war, an invasion, in which there's an elaborate discussion of an exceedingly disturbing kind about why you could enter a war, and what the moral justification for entering a war would be, and who's responsible for the deaths in such a war, and what does it mean to take responsibility, and what the relationship is between the acts of the people who are fighting the war and the acts of those who have sent them into that war. This is a play that seems to have been written late last night. At any given moment, there will be a set of such plays in which Shakespeare will seem to speak directly to us, not for mystical reasons, but because he's huge and because he understood how to launch the deepest issues of human experience into art.
Q: Given the relatively common background of Shakespeare, how can we explain his tremendous insight into human nature?
A: He had a very good education, for starters. He had access, probably through his friend Richard Field, to a substantial library. You really shouldn't think of Shakespeare as the village idiot. It just happens that he didn't have an advanced theology education, which is what he would have received at Oxford or Cambridge. Still, I accept the drift of the question. Indeed, behind the snobbery of the theories of somebody else writing the plays is the problem: How is it possible that he did what he did? In addition to his native genius, his extraordinary hard work, his wide reading, this was someone who let virtually nothing that came his way pass. This is the most extraordinarily open human being to the world in which he lived, and to the tiniest signals of that world, of anyone that I've ever encountered.
Q: His plays were essentially written to be performed, but did Shakespeare also have in mind that these plays would be read as literature?
A: It was, for quite a long time, the common consensus that Shakespeare was not interested in the publication of his works. Half of Shakespeare's plays were not published in his lifetime. In late Shakespeare years there was fire in the Globe Theater. If the theater had burned down, we wouldn't have half of Shakespeare's plays, because that's presumably where they were. We wouldn't have "Macbeth"; "The Tempest" only appears in the folio that was brought out in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death.
That is prima facie evidence that he didn't worry a lot in the course of his life about the publication of his works. It is often said that the companies - and Shakespeare was part owner of his company - didn't like the plays circulating. There was no copyright, no royalties in our sense of the term, so once the play was out, you couldn't control who was performing it. Companies tended to try to keep these for themselves, unless they needed the money, in which case they sold the plays to the printers to try to make some money.
However, there is some evidence that Shakespeare did think about the plays to be read. In the first place, if half the plays didn't appear, half the plays did, so we know that people wanted to read them, were willing to pay for them. There is evidence that he worked and reworked the plays in ways that may have to do with readership. Shakespeare characteristically writes more than can be performed in an afternoon in London. "Hamlet" is a great example. Only Kenneth Branagh thought that you could do a 12-hour movie of "Hamlet," the whole damn thing. Most performances of "Hamlet," certainly in the live theater, are severely cut. Why did he write so much? There are two competing answers. One, he wrote so much because he knew that these plays were going to be cut and re-cut; he wanted to give his companies an enormous amount of material. But an alternative or supplementary answer could be that he actually had a bigger idea than could be performed on the stage and he wanted to get it down. He understood that people would read it.
Q: You began this book with a high level of insight and understanding of Shakespeare, but, after the writing, did you come away with any new insights?
A: I had lots of surprises, actually. I had thought in the beginning that I would organize the book around the idea of this enormous imaginative generosity of Shakespeare. This is a person who has a fantastically wonderful ability to think about human beings, to pour himself out into them. I didn't write the book about Shakespeare's imaginative generosity because it kept bumping up against the fact that his life showed so few signs of generosity. This is a person who had a great deal of money at the end of his life who didn't leave money in substantial amounts to the poor of Stratford; who didn't establish a scholarship for a poor young man of worthy abilities to attend the university; who cut out his daughter Judith almost completely from inheritance; who left his wife of 34 years their second best bed and nothing else. This is a person who does not come across as humanly, hugely generous. He's not horrible and mean, but he's not an enormously impressive model.
Q: James Joyce developed the Hamlet character in Ulysses. Does that resonate for you in an accurate way?
A: Not accurate, but I love it. Joyce's pages in Ulysses are among the greatest pieces of imaginative conjuring of Shakespeare ever written. They turn around a remarkable and deeply Joycian thinking through of Shakespeare's relation to his wife and to an imagining of the wife's infidelity. The Joycian fantasy is really very much about Molly and Leopold and it's about Anne Hathaway as unfaithful. That doesn't actually resonate deeply for me. But the marvelous Stephen Dedalus imagining of Hamlet and of the dead son and of the father, that seems to me sublime.
Q: Which of Shakespeare's plays do you consider the most autobiographical?
A: Shakespeare distributed himself in remarkably subtle and supple ways across his work. One startlingly autobiographical moment is at the end of "The Tempest," at the moment that Shakespeare is thinking of retiring from his London world to return to Stratford early - he is only in his late 40s - and settle down as a big, somewhat fat-faced burgher. He has his magician Prospero break his magic staff, bury it in the sea and give up his magic, and then turn to the audience and: "As you from crimes would pardon'd be, Let your indulgence set me free."
Q: Maureen Dowd, in her columns, often uses Shakespearean characters to dramatize a particular political point. What is your reaction as an academic to the politicization of these characters?
A: If it's someone I agree with, pleasure; someone I disagree with, I'm annoyed, I think it's been used out of context. I enjoy it also, more seriously, because it's further evidence of the fact that Shakespeare is still alive in our culture, and we can use him in lots of different ways to orient ourselves in the world. We're lost. We can't find ourselves. We don't know what we are doing. One of the few things that we can seize on to, to try to find language for our condition, is to turn to Shakespeare - and I entirely approve.
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Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers