The Plays of Shakespeare

We know more about the life of William Shakespeare than a lot of people think, but less than we would like. There is ample documentation of his commercial career as the most popular London playwright of his era. It comes in the form of notices, commentaries, and of course the plays themselves, about half of which were published as standalone volumes for private reading during his lifetime. These last are especially potent testimony to his popularity; it was far less usual for his competitors to get this treatment, the turn-of-the-seventeenth-century equivalent of the novelizations that used to accompany blockbuster films.

In addition to all of the public artifacts from the theatrical and publishing worlds, we have a fair number of more private documents involving Shakespeare: tax and financial statements, legal affidavits, Church records, and a last will and testament bearing his name, all of which tell of a self-made go-getter who came to London from his provincial hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon with little more than a dream and left the big city for the last time as a prosperous and even moderately famous man.

What is sadly missing from this picture is any sign of who William Shakespeare was as a person, beyond the obvious facts of his talent, motivation, and ambition. Such a lack is not unheard of for even a prominent man of his time period, but it is frustrating all the same. Before I started on this current project, I wrote a history of how Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gradually came to understand that the Earth orbits the Sun rather than vice versa. Most of the characters I wrote about there — such famous astronomers and thinkers as Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei — left behind copious written correspondence. I felt as if I came to know them thereby: Kepler’s awkward social naïveté and his almost childishly heartfelt Christian faith, Galileo’s acid wit and comparative impatience with religious sentiment, etc. But there’s nothing like that when it comes to Shakespeare. We don’t have so much as a single personal letter written by him. The only undisputed examples of his handwriting that we have are the signatures he affixed to some of the aforementioned official documents, which were required to forward his business and his family life.

This leaves Shakespeare the individual as more of an absence than a presence at the center of his own story. Like astronomers in search of a black hole, we can detect the man by the ripples of gravity moving outward from him, but we can’t see him for ourselves. When we do imagine that we can catch a glimpse, the impression often doesn’t live up to what we might expect of the greatest writer in the history of English literature. This man who ranged so widely throughout the time and the space of the world as it was known to Elizabethan Englishmen in his plays appears to have had no taste for travel or adventure in his own life, may in fact have traversed no larger a gap than the 140 kilometers separating Stratford-upon-Avon from London during the entirety of his time on Earth. And then there is his infamous last will, in which he gives his “second best bed” to his wife amidst a range of similarly fussy bequests. It seems more like the petty leavings of a pre-redemption Ebeneezer Scrooge than a visionary artist. Unsatisfying details like these have caused people to ask for almost 300 years now whether the man who wrote the last will of William Shakespeare really wrote the plays and poetry at all, or whether he was just a front figure for someone else who preferred or needed to remain anonymous.

Let me state right here for the record that there is every reason to believe that it was Shakespeare who wrote Shakespeare. But whoever he really was, we ought to have one more way of getting to know him as a person, the best way of all to get to know most authors: through his works themselves. Even here, however, the face behind the mask proves elusive. For Shakespeare was an oddly impersonal writer, albeit in the best possible way. One of the reasons we might cite for labeling him the greatest of all time is that he is always true to his characters, always lets them speak and think and feel for themselves. When you read a Dickens novel, you are constantly aware of the presence of old Charlie, commenting on and judging the events in his story; you know pretty clearly which of his characters he likes and which ones he doesn’t, sense that he is stacking the deck to ensure that you feel the same. Not so with Shakespeare; each of his characters is fully realized in his right, free of intrusive authorial judgment, caught up in a story which rolls along with its own inexorable comic or tragic logic. This makes Shakespeare a brilliant capturer of the manifold human condition, but also makes it damnably difficult to identify the man putting the words in his characters’ mouths.

The one exception that may provide a surer route to Shakespeare the man is the sonnets, which are by their very nature less impersonal. One can’t help but think especially of the so-called “Dark Lady” sonnets, which speak so vividly of an apparently illicit and unquestionably carnal love affair that it’s hard to believe they don’t spring directly from lived experience. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, as we will so many others (not least among them the authorship controversy).

Setting the Dark Lady and the rest of the sonnets aside for now, I am fully prepared to make the argument that the elusiveness of Shakespeare the man in his own writings is another sign of his genius. We live in an age in which our arts and entertainments have become deeply — perhaps too deeply — personal, in every sense of the word. We hang on every Instagram-enabled glimpse we get into the private lives of the actors and singers and athletes we admire. Even in the supposedly more rarefied realm of literature, the books that win prizes tend to be intimately connected with the personal stories of the people who write them; this is taken as a proof of their authenticity and worth. I certainly have nothing against a good memoir or autobiographical novel. But I think there might also be a more ineffable sort of literary genius, one that transcends the life story of the creator to encompass, well, everything. Some art provides no easy answer to the question of, “Where the hell did come from?” Why should the Beatles, a group of unremarkable-seeming working-class lads from the back streets of Liverpool, have pushed the boundaries of music relentlessly forward almost on a monthly basis for seven years? Why should William Shakespeare, a middle-class striver from Stratford-upon-Avon, have captured the human condition writ large more completely and honestly than any other person who ever wrote in the English language? These kinds of art — the kinds that defy easy explanation, that seem to come inexplicably from somewhere else — make the very best art of all in my book.

That said, none of this changes the fact that any biography of Shakespeare that sticks stubbornly to provable facts is predestined to wind up somewhat unsatisfying. The pace at which people keep on writing them despite the vaguely futile nature of the enterprise — every few years a “major” new one comes out, promising fresh insights and new revelations on its jacket that never quite materialize in its pages — speaks to what a central place in our culture this eternal enigma of a man continues to occupy.

Shakespeare frustrates his would-be chroniclers right from the moment when they first put pen to paper to write the traditional opening sentence of any biography: we have no way of knowing for sure when exactly he was born. We know only that an infant named William Shakespeare was baptized in the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon, a mid-sized market town in the county of Warwickshire, on April 26, 1564. Written in Latin, as was still the custom in the relatively young Church of England, the official records of Stratford-upon-Avon’s Church of the Holy Trinity call him Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere: “William son of John Shakspere.” (The Elizabethans were not overly fussy about spelling, even when it came to proper names: Shakespeare’s name was spelled at least a dozen different ways in various public documents during the Bard’s own lifetime, and for that matter spelled differently by the man himself in almost every signature we have from him.) Consulting the Church of England’s contemporary guidelines on the timeline of baptisms, we can conjecture that Shakespeare was probably born on April 21, 22, or 23. The last of these dates is the most typically accepted, but this is more of a tribute to the sentiments than the research skills of his biographers. For April 23 is also the birthday of Saint George, the patron saint of England. What better day could there be for England’s most enduring artistic export of all time to come into the world? Faced with a choice of days that are all equally probable, it’s no surprise which one the Bard’s biographers have embraced.

Little William was born into a respectable provincial family; he was a scion of an upwardly mobile middle class that was beginning to flourish in England and many other places in Europe by the middle of this second millennium after Christ, as Medieval life, with its strict and unalterable hierarchies of nobles, priests, and peasants, retreated ever further into the past. He was by no means the first member of his family who would prove industrious and ambitious. His grandfather, whose given name was Richard, had succeeded in hitching his family’s fortunes to those of the Arden family, landed gentry of Warwickshire and surrounding counties who could trace their line of descent back to the shadowy era before the Norman Conquest of 1066. Richard Shakespeare came to administer parts of the Ardens’ land holdings for them, and John Shakespeare, William’s father, rose high enough in their esteem to marry an Arden daughter named Mary, through whose dowry he acquired a valuable estate near Stratford-upon-Avon and capital to invest into his business interests, which primarily involved gloves and other leather goods. He was also active in local politics, serving as alderman and bailiff.

William was the first of five children of John and Mary Shakespeare to survive beyond infancy. His childhood must have had much to recommend it in contrast to that of many another Englishman of the time. Stratford-upon-Avon was the home of a few thousand permanent residents, a tidy place of broad, straight streets, with no looming Medieval walls to circumscribe its people’s lives and trap filth and disease inside the perimeter. The pride of the town, even more so than its fine Gothic church, was the King’s New School, one of the best grammar schools in England outside a major city, run by graduates of Oxford University. A short walk from there brought you to rolling farmland and woods, perfect for rambling or hunting or just for reading in some shady nook from one of the books that were widely available by now, a century after the invention of the printing press. Or you could make your way out to the lovely Avon River itself, whose murmuring current invited you in to refresh the mind and body with a swim or a turn in a rowboat, fishing pole at the ready. Compared to the crooked, fetid, often plague-infested streets of London where William would win his fame and fortune, Stratford-upon-Avon was a bucolic paradise. Small wonder that he would continue to reside here for part of every year throughout his life, that he would keep his wife and children here year-round, or that he would choose to retire here when his fortune was secure and his playwrighting days were over.

Probably starting around age seven, William attended the King’s New School, where, alongside other budding gentlemen of the upper and middles classes, he learned to read and write English, Latin, and maybe even a smattering of Greek (Ben Jonson’s later jibe about his “small Latin and less Greek” notwithstanding). Here he must also have been exposed to many of the texts, written in all three of the aforementioned languages, which he would come to use as sources for his plots. Shakespeare’s formal education was not lengthy by our standards in its overall span of time — about eight years at the King’s New School, likely preceded by a couple of years of foundational work at the local primary school — but it was quite intense while it was going on. “Grammar” schools didn’t come by that name lightly. Students were drilled exhaustively in vocabulary and the other vagaries of language, expected to memorize long passages and rattle them off on command, or face corporeal punishment for their laziness. A school day lasted nine hours or more, with only a few weeks off over the course of the year. The curriculum involved little mathematics and nothing of what we like to call the STEM subjects: it was almost all languages and humanities, almost all the time. In marked contrast to the attitudes of today, these were considered the really important things for a man of the world to know.

Yet the young William Shakespeare surely didn’t spend all of his time hunched over his books. In addition to the attractions of the surrounding countryside, there were occasional holidays and fairs to look forward to and enjoy. We know that a stream of traveling theater companies flowed through Stratford-upon-Avon. It is easy and perchance permissible enough to picture the future playwright taking in their performances with rapt attention as they brought to vivid life many of the people and situations he was reading about at school.

For all its positives, though, William’s childhood was not unblemished. It was in fact marked by a slow but steady decline in his father’s fortunes in the years after his oldest son’s birth, for reasons that we cannot even guess at with any degree of confidence. Attempting to compensate for whatever misfortunes were befalling him, John Shakespeare became a dealer in black-market wool and a loan shark, neither of which did much in the long run for either his finances or his reputation. When William was sixteen — about the time he must have been finishing his tenure at the King’s New School — the land that he should have inherited from his father was seized because the latter had pledged it as collateral for bills which he couldn’t pay.  If the teenager had had any aspirations of following in the footsteps of his teachers and attending university — something only an extremely small percentage of people did in England during this period — that was made impossible by John Shakespeare’s deteriorating situation.

These events could not have failed to leave an imprint on young William; they might have helped to instill in him a piquant sense of the precariousness of fortune, an understanding that no one is ever so elevated that he cannot be toppled by divine or human foibles. If his father hadn’t let prosperity and respect gradually slip away, William would quite possibly have never become a playwright at all, would have stayed in Stratford-upon-Avon to manage his inheritance and further his family’s commercial interests. He would doubtless have been good at doing so, if the business success he enjoyed in the London of our timeline is anything to go by, but the world would have missed out on the Bard.

His name next turns  up in the public record on November 27, 1582, when he was eighteen years old. On this day, he was issued a license (under the name of “William Shagsper”) to marry a local woman eight or nine years his senior named Anne Hathaway. We know virtually nothing about her or her family, only that the match could have been nowhere near as strategically advantageous as the one that John Shakespeare had made with Mary Arden. Indeed, the wedding appears to have been a haphazard, rushed ceremony, the reason for which becomes obvious when we notice that Susanna Shakespeare, the couple’s first daughter, was baptized just six months later, on May 26, 1583. She was followed by male and female twins named Hamnet and Judith on February 2, 1585, after which the couple produced no more children. Some have speculated that their relationship may have become troubled or just distant — again, the Dark Lady sometimes enters the discussion here — but it is at least as probable that Anne simply couldn’t carry another child to term as she moved deeper into her thirties. People lived much shorter lives back then, and all of the biological stages of life, menopause included, tended to come upon them earlier than they do us.

After the birth of the couple’s children, there is a long gap in the record; these so-called “lost years” of William Shakespeare stretch all the way to 1592, until after he had turned 28 years old. John Aubrey, one of his earliest biographers, claimed in 1681 to have been told by a son of one of the actors Shakespeare worked with in London that the playwright had spent some time as a teacher in Warwickshire during his twenties, but it is difficult to know how much stock to place in such an attenuated anecdote from living memory. At any rate, it had to have been at some point during this period that Shakespeare joined a theater troupe in London, started spending at least six months out of every year there with them, and began writing for the stage.

Shakespeare’s lost years end with his appearance in a satirical pamphlet that was published in London in September of 1592. He is described therein as

an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you. And, being an absolute Iohannes fac totum [jack-of-all-trades], is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in the country.

The most interesting part of this broadside against an allegedly arrogant young whelp is the bit about the “tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide.” It parodies a line from Henry VI, Part 3 — “O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!” — thus showing that that play, and thus by extension its two predecessors, must have reached the stage during or before September of 1592. Just as importantly, the sentence strongly insinuates that Shakespeare first joined the London theater scene as an actor, a “player” in the diction of the time; thus the disparaging Latin reference to his being a jack-of-all-trades. The snobbery that he would have to deal with throughout his career is already on full display here.

My 1969 Pelican Shakespeare posits that the Bard wrote The Comedy of Errors before the three parts of Henry VI, making it his very first play. This position is by no means universally accepted, but it feels correct to me, given how short and basic that comedy is compared to all of the others. Then, too, there is its anachronistic topical reference to the Spanish Armada which tried and resoundingly failed to conquer England in the summer of 1588. This seems just the sort of thing that a playwright who had been swept up in the rush of patriotic fervor which immediately followed that astounding victory might have been tempted into including, anachronisms be damned. It’s for these reasons that the Pelican editors and I label The Comedy of Errors as Shakespeare’s “Opus 1.”

We are on firmer ground with Henry VI, thanks to our irascible friend the pamphleteer. The three parts of Henry VI plus Richard III — Opuses 2 through 5 — constitute the lengthiest interlinked sequence of plays Shakespeare would ever produce one after another. Together they tell the sweeping tale of England during the time of rampant civil strife known as the Wars of the Roses, when two distinct branches of the royal family tree intrigued and warred for control of the country. These are bracing works, even if all of them but Richard III can be placed fairly safely alongside The Comedy of Errors in the category of Shakespeare’s juvenilia.  For they show him already challenging the status quo, by effectively inventing a whole new type of play that doesn’t fit neatly into either of the traditional categories of comedy and tragedy. Rest assured that I’ll talk about that aspect of them more very soon.

For now, suffice to say that these flamboyant depictions of relatively recent English history, performed at a time of high patriotic fervor in the wake of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, were clearly very, very popular, winning Shakespeare his first taste of real success as an up-and-coming London playwright. Inevitably, not all commentators were equally taken with the young Turk; our pamphleteer certainly was not.

From all of this, then, we can begin to construct a plausible if less than ironclad narrative about how Shakespeare wound up writing plays in London. He could have come there as an actor, then convinced his theater troupe to let him write for them as well, first The Comedy of Errors as a sort of proof of concept and then his real breakthrough, those four plays about the Wars of the Roses. If we are willing to go a little further, we might take notice that a London theatrical troupe known as the Queen’s Men put on some performances in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1587. Might Shakespeare have convinced them to take him back to London with them as their latest cast member? It’s a romantic notion, bolstered in the eyes of some by the fact that the Queen’s Men’s repertoire included an uncanny number of plays telling stories which Shakespeare would later tackle himself as a playwright. The principal argument against the idea is that an arrival in London as late as 1587 gives precious little time for Shakespeare to have established himself as a reliable member of a troupe, convinced them to let him write for them, and churned out four complete plays by September of 1592. That said, more meteoric rises have occurred in the history of the arts. (Insert one of my obligatory Beatles references here…) And then, too, many scholars suspect that others might have helped Shakespeare write large parts of all of the early plays, with the arguable exception only of Richard III, the moment when he graduated from his artistic childhood into, if not quite yet his full maturity, at least a sort of precocious adolescence.

However it came about, he was clearly a force to be reckoned with on the London stage after 1592, both popular and prolific; his name shows up with some regularity from here on in notices and pamphlets. Our Pelican chronology posits that he unleashed no fewer than seven more plays in the three years after he completed the Wars of the Roses tetralogy. These included four increasingly subtle and sophisticated comedies (The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Love’s Labor’s Lost) and another two crowd-pleasing depictions of English history (King John and Richard II). And then there was Titus Andronicus, his first stab (and I use that word advisedly) at a proper tragedy, a blood-splattered, grotesque, rather ridiculous spectacle which modern theater companies tend to turn into high camp for lack of knowing what the heck else to do with it. In its day, by contrast, Titus Andronicus was hugely successful, so much so that it became the very first Shakespeare play to be printed and sold in bookstores. This demonstrates two things: that the Elizabethans’ appetite for violent entertainment was at least as voracious as our own, and that commercial success has never been a reliable barometer of artistic quality.

Shakespeare may have passed through several theatrical troupes early on, but by the end of 1594 he had become a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, with whom he would remain until his retirement; this was the group that would build the legendary Globe Theatre in 1599. It seems that Shakespeare continued to act with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in addition to writing for them. As an actor, he was never a star, but pitched in in smaller supporting roles, in his own plays and possibly those of others from time to time. We can conjecture from the bare fact that he kept at it so long that he must have enjoyed acting, enjoyed being part of the day-to-day life of his theatrical troupe when he came up to London. It might have provided a necessary contrast to sitting alone behind a desk in Stratford-upon-Avon, wrestling his plays’ scripts into being.

But plays weren’t all that Shakespeare created during this period. He also wrote his first two works that were intended to be read rather than acted out for an audience, the heavily Ovid-influenced narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Often overlooked today, these are in some ways the oddest entries of all in the Shakespeare canon, representing a serious bid for the sort of literary respectability enjoyed by contemporaries like Edmund Spenser of The Faerie Queene fame. Shakespeare briefly went all out playing at that strictly prescribed game, right down to crafting florid dedications to a noble patron, in his case the young Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southhampton. In these dedications, Shakespeare seems to be trying to distance himself from his less respectable theatrical career, going so far as to call Venus and Adonis “the first heir to my invention,” as if the plays that were packing London theaters at the time didn’t exist at all. Coming out the year before Titus Andronicus and thus marking the very first time when anything by Shakespeare had been printed, Venus and Adonis especially proved very popular. In fact, it may have been the most read Shakespeare work of all during his lifetime, going through about a dozen separate printings in order to meet the demand. “The younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus,” states a 1601 pamphlet.

These poems are far less prominent today, and are generally not considered among the Bard’s best works. Reading them, one gets the impression of a titanic talent who is trying just a little bit too hard to show what he can do, to the detriment rather than the benefit of his art, like a virtuosic but immature musician who insists on playing ten notes where one would better suit the song. Even so, given the popularity of Venus and Adonis in particular, we are left to ponder why Shakespeare never wrote anything else in this vein. Perhaps the rigmarole of kowtowing to an august patron didn’t please him, or perhaps he simply grew bored with writing homages to Ovid, or perhaps he decided after The Rape of Lucrece was printed in 1594 and did less well than its predecessor that his most direct route to fame and wealth was sticking with the stage.

It may have been around this same time that Shakespeare began writing sonnets, of which he would produce 154 in all before he was through. Unlike all of his other writings, which had a commercial as well as an artistic purpose, these little fourteen-line poems he created only for himself; when they were finally published in 1609, it was without his permission. As I mentioned earlier, they arguably provide our best insight into the soul of the man, as well as showing that he wasn’t exclusively preoccupied with pounds and shillings, that he must have had more than a touch of artistic idealism about him too in order to work so hard on poems that he never sought to make any money at all from. For these reasons and others, we will have to give the sonnets their due at some point. For the time being, though, we’ll stay focused on Shakespeare the playwright.

By 1596, this version of Shakespeare had already written a dozen plays and watched audiences enjoy them. All signs point to a man who was prospering financially as well as artistically. A good son to his father, he seems to have paid off John Shakespeare’s debts in Stratford-upon-Avon, and even greased the right palms to help him secure a coat-of-arms for his family, the fulfillment of a longstanding dream. Meanwhile, on the London stage, the younger Shakespeare’s comedies were full of witty good humor, his history plays full of dashing action; no wonder they were so popular and profitable. His potential as a tragedian, on the other hand, was less obvious. He still seemed too lusty, too playful, too young for tragedy.

But during 1596, his only son Hamnet died. Shortly afterward, he unleashed upon the world his first great tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, in which he demonstrated his understanding that young love need not always end so happily, thus entering fully into the mature phase of his artistic life. Perchance these two events were not unrelated. Perchance every great artist, even one as all-encompassing of the human condition as Shakespeare, needs to suffer personally at some point for his art.

Before we get to the older and wiser version of the man, however, we’re going to dwell a good long while with the young and lusty Shakespeare…

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(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)