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Stephen Greenblatt
Professor, Harvard University; Editor, Norton Shakespeare; Author, Will in the World
William Shakespeare created the greatest body of imaginative literature in English and, perhaps, in the whole of Western culture. The interesting thing is that he is not, like Homer, say, a mythical figure. He lived almost within reach. I dedicate Will in the World to my little boy Harry, born in 2001; Harry is named after my father, who was born in 1897, so there is 104 years' difference between the birth date of my father and the birth date of my youngest son. You just put four of those together and you're back in Shakespeare's time - it's not that far away.
He lived in a bureaucratic, record-keeping culture, and there are quite a few traces of him that have been recovered by now, centuries of the frenzied labor of Shakespeare-lovers. The trouble with those traces is that, stripped to their bare bones, the rehearsal of the known facts about Shakespeare's life can be accomplished in about 15 minutes. Where are we then? Or rather, what is it that we are actually looking for? There have been many, many biographies of Shakespeare and many distinguished collections of documents from Shakespeare's life. What happens when we assemble this material? What is it that we want from it?
The trouble is that often we read the available details of Shakespeare's life and feel vaguely disappointed. There's not enough there. What we want we can't immediately have: diaries, journals, love letters - the things that would open up this man and let us see him from the inside. We want to know not simply the details of how he got from one steppingstone in his life to another, we want to know where he came from. What were his parents like? Who were his friends? Who were his lovers? What did he read? What did he fear? What did he long for? What did he think about in the quiet moments of his life? Above all, how did he do what he did?
In the 19th century the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his journal about a "secret note" that would explain everything. If you could find out about someone, the secret note, you would be able to put all the pieces of a life together. That longing for the secret note has very much haunted Shakespeare scholarship and the interest in Shakespeare's life. Was it a hidden affiliation with Catholicism? Was it homosexuality in a homophobic world? Or, the best secret note of all, was it in fact someone else who wrote the plays?
I am skeptical about the very idea of the secret note, but there is a mystery to be solved. How do you get from a provincial, middle-class young man - without a university education, without a noble patron; the son of glover, illegal wool dealer and part-time moneylender - to the person who wrote these plays? Solving the mystery of this extravagant passage would not make the wonder of Shakespeare's achievement evaporate; it would only intensify the wonder by connecting what obviously is the first point of an answer, that this is an extravagant genius, an extraordinary man born with unusual, unmatched skills at language, with a flesh-and-blood person who lived in the world, who grappled with problems that ordinary human beings grapple with and confront.
In the face of talent like Shakespeare's - or the talent of Bach or Brueghel, Mozart - we can throw up our hands in pious incomprehension, we can tell ourselves that the artist was a god, he wasn't himself human or that he was in league with the devil. More plausibly, we should throw ourselves into pleasurable contemplation of a kind that professors of literature love to try to induce to create an enhanced understanding of the techniques that he used, his particular love of the alternation of poetry and prose, his way of conjuring up what seem to be living human beings, not simply Everyman but Othello. We can try to understand odd signatures that we barely would notice, little traces in his texts.
But after we've done all this, we want still something more than technical notation in enhanced form. We want to know about the creator as a human being, to observe the creator in his own world. We want to feel that we've understood something about the person who has left us this extraordinary set of not simply documents but what I think of as letters addressed to us. You open the letter, it's from someone who can't possibly have known you existed, because he's been dead long before you came into the world, and yet the letter seems to be written directly to you. How is it possible? How can you understand the person who did this?
Shakespeare in Love
About 10 years ago I was teaching at Berkeley and a screenwriter named Marc Norman called me. He took me to lunch at Chez Panisse and said he was interested in making a film loosely based on the biopic about Mozart, Amadeus. He wanted to make it about Shakespeare, and he wanted to know what to take from Shakespeare's life to build such a movie. I said, "Forget it. It's not interesting. There are real estate documents. There are tax evasion records. There is nothing for a good movie." "What you should do," I said, "is write about Marlowe. That's a great life: great artist; a wild, dangerous man; heretic, blasphemer; homosexual; double, triple, quadruple agent; and eventually stabbed to death through the eye, probably by a government conspiracy. What more do you want?" He said, "No, no. It would have to be Shakespeare." He was certain of that. So I said, "Okay, have Shakespeare have an affair with Marlowe. Then you can bring in Marlowe's life and you can have Shakespeare somewhere in the background of this." "No, no," he said. He was hoping to get money from the Disney Corporation and it was completely out of the question to write what I was proposing.
Then, in 1998, it turns out Norman had teamed up with Tom Stoppard and written Shakespeare in Love - a terrific movie. I hope I won't deeply disappoint you if I tell you it was not historically accurate. But this movie figured out how to get a very large number of people interested in how Shakespeare got from being the quite good journeyman who wrote "Two Gentlemen of Verona" to being the master who wrote "Romeo and Juliet." How is it possible? The movie's answer, of course, was Gwyneth Paltrow. Delightful as that is, there's not a lot of historical evidence for that. But the intuition that is behind that plot - Hollywood fluff as it is - seems to be fundamentally an accurate intuition.
If you want to understand how Shakespeare got from "Two Gentlemen" to "Romeo and Juliet" you have to know a lot about his technical mastery, his genius, the amount of time he spent working on his iambic pentameter, the amount of time he spent thinking about his sources. But you also have to know something about the life he lived, about the way he existed in the real world of flesh-and-blood people whom he was encountering. It's a vital link between the astonishing art, which is what fundamentally matters, and the life that produced this art.
The Life that Produced this Art
When Shakespeare was 13, Shakespeare's father, the successful businessman and civic official, ran into some kind of serious trouble. The father, just before trouble hit, had filed an application for a coat of arms. That was a significant event in the Shakespeare family because it would have meant that the family would move from the 98 percent of the population that didn't hold coats of arms to the 2 percent of the population that could be armigerous, could be classified as gentlemen. It was a huge step, and it made a difference in the life that you lived. It was something that you had to earn - or you deserved, supposedly by your blood, or in the case of Shakespeare's father, by his civic office as the equivalent of mayor of Stratford. But it was also expensive, because it had to go through an elaborate process in the College of Heralds.
Shakespeare's father had filed the application, and then something happened and the roof of his fortunes caved in. He stopped attending meetings of the town council. He started hiding in his house for fear of arrest for debt. He mortgaged his wife's property, which she had brought to the marriage. Shakespeare lost, with his father of course, most of his prospects: the social position, the possibility of being someone in the world.
When Shakespeare was 16, he left school. He could have expected, as the son of the up-and-coming mayor of Stratford, to be sent to Oxford, but that didn't happen. He seems to have been sent to work somewhere as a schoolmaster. No record of him as a schoolmaster has turned up, though there are stories circulating of him working as an illegal schoolmaster. That probably means that he was working in a Catholic household who would have to hire someone whom they could trust, because they were having priests perform mass secretly and illegally in the house.
The family had Catholic connections. Shakespeare's mother was related to one of the wealthiest and most important men in Warwickshire, Edward Arden, who was a very significant Catholic figure. The family fell upon extremely difficult times when Arden's son-in-law, a man named Somerville, took into his head to kill Queen Elizabeth, and then, an even crazier idea, decided to tell people in a tavern that that's what he was going to do. He didn't make it out of Warwickshire let alone get to London to do it. Officials in that part of the country used this occasion not only to arrest and execute Somerville but to get the father-in-law, Edward Arden, who was also arrested, interrogated, tortured and executed.
When Shakespeare was 18, he made a crucial move in his life and it seems to have been a disaster: He married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was apparently pregnant with their first child, because she delivered that child six months after the wedding. In those days they couldn't keep a six-month-old newborn alive, so we can presume for at least the three months prior to that marriage Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway knew each other in the biblical sense. So already, by the time that Shakespeare was 18, fundamental questions were on the table: What shall I do with my life? What is my vocation? What can I discover for myself? In what can I have faith? What can I believe in? What can I stake my fundamental beliefs on? Whom can I love?
Imagining Shakespeare
I've tried to explore these issues in a variety of ways, using evidence, but also using speculation or, as we like to call it, imagination - but I hope imagination based on as close an account of the truth as I can get. For one thing, I've thought a lot about recurrent patterns, apparently obsessive concerns in Shakespeare's life. All of his creative life he comes back over and over again to what I call "the dream of restoration," to a plot in which someone encounters some terrible event - a shipwreck is one of Shakespeare's favorite images for it - that casts him or her up on a shore without identity, without property, without a name, without the security of being a gentleman or a gentle lady. They have to find their way in this complicated situation, to reclaim an identity that they've lost: it's Viola and Sebastian in "Twelfth Night"; it's Orlando in "As You Like It"; it's Marina and Pericles; it's virtually all the characters in "Cymbeline"; it's Prospero in "The Tempest."
You could say that this particular plot is an entirely conventional one, so in itself it doesn't automatically tell you something about Shakespeare's life. But there are lots of conventional plots that Shakespeare could have used, lots of patterns that he could have been drawn to. This is the one that Shakespeare could think through over and over again in imaginatively compelling ways. It seems to me manifestly linked to the man who, at 13, had already lost the position that he thought was just in the grasp of his family, that coat of arms.
Twenty years after that application had been filed by his father, William Shakespeare, who is now prosperous and successful in the London theater world, revives the application for a coat of arms so that he can make his father a gentleman. By making his father a gentleman, he can make himself a gentleman and his children. He was willing to do this in the face of what he must have known would be some kind of social policing for social climbing.
Shakespeare was an actor and a playwright; an actor and a playwright was worthless in the social scale of Elizabethan England. It wasn't anything that would get you the right to call yourself a gentleman, and sure enough, Shakespeare applies through his father's claims. But there is something slightly defensive about the motto that Shakespeare wrote to go with that coat of arms: Non Sanz Droict, "Not Without Right." Well, the clerk who sat in the office writing this application when it was renewed wrote, either because he was incompetent or because he was an incredible wise guy, No, Sanz Droict, "No, Without Justification." The person who was standing next to him, who was almost certainly William Shakespeare, said, "Lose the comma, will you please?" He finally wrote it the correct way. But that wasn't the end of it.
In 1598, Shakespeare's company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men, put on a play by Shakespeare's colleague and rival Ben Jonson that has a fantastically vulgar and coarse character named Sogliardo from the countryside come and buy a coat of arms. I don't know if this happens to you but every once and a while I get in the mail an offer to buy the ancient and honorable Greenblatt coat of arms. Sogliardo does the equivalent in Ben Jonson's play. Everyone is laughing at him, and for a great deal of money, he gets the motto, "Not Without Mustard." Shakespeare got the joke you can be sure, but he did it because it meant something deep to him. But he was also the playwright who created, in his greatest comic block perhaps, the figure of Malvolio, who tries to climb above his station and is ruthlessly humiliated by his world. He understood deeply, from the inside with a form of simultaneous identification and loathing, this position that he found himself in.
Absences and Presences
What other evidence do I use? I talk about absences in Shakespeare's work. This is obviously exceedingly problematic from an evidentiary point of view because there's a lot that is absent in his work - he didn't write about stem-cell research. But I try to talk about the absences that seem interesting, plausible. I start with the assumption, Shakespeare lover that I am, that Shakespeare could represent anything if he wanted to, and so it is striking if he doesn't represent certain things, such as a sympathetic account of sainthood. Shakespeare lived in a world touched with adherence to Catholicism and with many martyrs who were going to their deaths to defend the old faith. It's interesting that Shakespeare is so weary about ideological heroism, about people who are willing to throw themselves into a desperate and dangerous position because of their adherence to an idea. When he represents Joan of Arc, she is a whore in cahoots with the devil. When he represents Henry VI, who is a saintly king, he is an idiot. When he represents Angelo, who is a very prim and proper and highly repressed gentleman, he turns out to be a miserable hypocrite.
Another kind of absence that seems striking is a sympathetic and convincing portrayal of what it's like to be married. Shakespeare is the greatest poet of courtship, of making love in the older sense of making love as wooing, in the English language and perhaps in the world. He is fantastically good at representing what it is to desire someone with all of your heart and soul, but he's not interested in representing what it is to be in a long-term marital relationship. He does it convincingly in his career twice in a sustained way: Gertrude and Claudius, the murderer and villain in "Hamlet," and Lady Macbeth and her charming husband in "Macbeth." What does it mean that those are the two sustained marriages in Shakespeare's world? They are happy marriages. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth call each other by cute names - Dearest Chuck, the equivalent of sweetie pie. What does that mean?
In addition to writing about absences, I write about presences, about fingerprints in the work; the presence of Christopher Marlowe in Shakespeare's imagination - Marlowe, who was from Shakespeare's point of view his greatest rival and whom Shakespeare thinks about throughout his entire career. But it's not only a towering genius like Marlowe who is on Shakespeare's mind, it's a scoundrel like Robert Greene, whom Shakespeare would have encountered when he first came to London. Greene, an extravagant, larger-than-life character who had cultivated a mop of red hair that came to a sharp point from which he hung a jewel in front of his eyes, would abandon his wife and children. He had taken up with a prostitute named Em Ball and her thuggish brother Cutting Ball, who on his deathbed attacked Shakespeare. Attacked him because, unlike Greene, who had degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, Shakespeare was a mere upstart, an upstart crow beautified with our feathers. That insult stuck in Shakespeare's mind long after Greene was dead. Shakespeare thought about that insult, and he has Polonious in " Hamlet" read an intercepted letter in which Hamlet addresses the most celestial and beautified Ophelia and Polonious looks up and says, "Beautified. That's a vile phrase, beautified."
Finally, I indulge in a series of imaginative exercises to try to conjure Shakespeare at particular moments in his life. A first glimpse of play-acting when Shakespeare was 5 years old, standing between his father's legs. Or the moment at which I believe Shakespeare first kissed a boy playing a girl, in a play by Plautus that the schoolchildren used to perform and that Shakespeare used when he wrote "The Comedy of Errors." Or Shakespeare, as I speculate rather wildly, possibly confessing to St. Edmund Campion in the north of England as a good Catholic. Or Shakespeare listening to the laughter at the foot of the scaffold when the queen's physician Rodrigo Lopez, who was a good Protestant but was said to be of a Jewish family and was reviled as a Jew, said just before his execution, I love the queen as much as I love Jesus Christ. The crowd burst into laughter and Shakespeare, the aficionado of laughter, used that laughter to craft "The Merchant of Venice."
A single glimpse of my method or my madness: I talk about the first time Shakespeare crossed London Bridge. Some of my critics have taken me to task for speculation. Come on guys, there was a first time when he crossed London Bridge. I have somewhat more speculatively imagined Shakespeare crossing it from the south, coming with a troupe of actors after he had run away from his wife and three children. This then might well have been Shakespeare's initial glimpse of London:
An architectural marvel, some 800 feet in length, that a French visitor, Etienne Perlin, called "the most beautiful bridge in the world." The congested roadway, supported on 20 piers of stone 60 feet high and 30 broad, was lined with tall houses and shops extending out over the water on struts. Many of the shops sold luxury goods - fine silks, hosiery, velvet caps - and some the buildings themselves commanded attention: you could buy groceries in a two-story, 13th century stone building that had formally been a chantry dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket, where masses were once sung for the souls of the dead. From the breaks between the buildings there was splendid views up and down the great river, especially to the west; overhead there were scavenging birds, wheeling in the air; and in the river hundreds of swans plucked once a year exclusively for the queen's bedding and upholstery.
But one sight in particular would certainly have arrested Shakespeare's attention; it was a major tourist attraction, always pointed out to new arrivals. Stuck on poles on the Great Stone Gate, two arches from the Southwark side, were severed heads, some completely reduced to skulls, others parboiled and tanned, still identifiable. These were not the remains of common thieves, rapists, and murderers. Ordinary criminals were strung up by the hundreds on gibbets located around the margins of the city. The heads on the bridge, visitors were duly informed, were those of gentlemen and nobles who had suffered the fate of traitors. A foreign visitor to London in 1592 counted 34 of them. When he first walked across the bridge, or very soon after, Shakespeare must have realized that among the heads were those of John Somerville and the man who bore his own mother's name and may have been his distant kinsman, Edward Arden.
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