30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (20 page)

Christopher Rush's
Will
offers a different approach: from six legal pages in the National Archives, Rush fashions a fictional autobiography in which a bedridden Shakespeare dictates his will. A man's last will and testament, Shakespeare's lawyer observes, has nothing in common with a Shakespeare play: it has no emotion, no ambiguity. On the contrary, responds his client: there is plenty of sentiment and “a little drama” tucked away between the neutral lines. Shakespeare's explanations of his will's bequests lead to plausible reminiscences about his relationships in Stratford and London (of his rivalry with Marlowe: “he was even born in front of me, beating me by two months”). There are plenty of creatively adapted lines from Shakespeare and others: Anne Hathaway is his “muse of hellfire,” “this long disease, my wife.” If marriage is an affliction, writing is also an illness (“happy men don't write plays. Happy men play bowls”), and we glimpse Shakespeare's sense of failure as husband, father, tradesman, scholar, and martyr. All the myths we discuss in this book are dealt with creatively in Rush's novel.

Just as Falstaff is not only witty in himself but “the cause that wit is in other men” (
2 Henry IV
1.2.9–10), so Shakespeare's life has fueled other lives, fictional lives. And fictions have a way of becoming truths. We see this from Juliet's balcony in Verona (the real balcony of a fictional character) to Laurence Olivier's film of
Henry V
, set in an Elizabethan theater, which becomes for many of us, in moments of weakness at least, tantamount to proof of what happened in the Elizabethan theater. (Elizabethan prompters were visible on stage. How do we know this? We saw it in Olivier's film.)

Negotiating Shakespeare's life, its (sometimes dispiriting) facts and its frustrating gaps, forces us to think about myths. In our introduction we cited the
OED
definitions of myth. Here, Ambrose Bierce's satiric definition in
The Devil's Dictionary
(1906) is salutary:

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the
true accounts
which it
invents
later. (our italics)

“Truth” and “invention” go hand in hand in all biographies; biographies are stories that we tell. The biographies of a Christopher Rush or an Anthony Burgess are just as much a myth—a true invention—as those of Peter Ackroyd or Charles Nicholl.

Notes

¹
 This quotation, and variants of it, appear in print and on the web.

²
 Bill Bryson,
Shakespeare: The World as a Stage
(London: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 7.

³
 Colin Burrow, “Who Wouldn't Buy It?,” review of Stephen Greenblatt's
Will in the World
,
London Review of Books
, 20 January 2005.

⁴
 Germaine Greer,
Shakespeare's Wife
(London: Bloomsbury, 2007); Lois Potter,
The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), ch. 3, citing David Cressy,
Birth, Marriage and Death
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 74.

⁵
 Katherine Duncan-Jones,
Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life
, Arden (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), p. 91; Potter,
The Life of William Shakespeare
, p. 59.

⁶
 Potter,
The Life of William Shakespeare
, p. 48.

⁷
 Stanley Wells,
Shakespeare and Co
. (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 129.

⁸
 William Urry,
Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury
(London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 28; Christopher Marlowe,
Dr Faustus: The A-Text
, ed. Roma Gill, New Mermaids (London: A. & C. Black, 1989), p. 2, quoting Urry, “Marlowe and Canterbury,”
Times Literary Supplement
, 13 February 1964.

⁹
 
The Three Parnassus Plays
, ed. J.B. Leishman (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1949).

¹⁰
 Potter,
The Life of William Shakespeare
, pp. 235–6.

¹¹
 Duncan-Jones,
Ungentle Shakespeare
, p. 109.

¹²
 Potter,
The Life of William Shakespeare
, p. 404.

¹³
 
Sir Thomas More
, ed. John Jowett, Arden (London: A. & C. Black, 2011).

¹⁴
 Peter Whelan,
The School of Night
(London: Warner Chappell Plays, 1992), pp. 57–8.

We tend to see genius as a solitary art: the writer alone in a garret.
Shakespeare in Love
shows Shakespeare at various stages of writer's block—practicing his signature, speaking to his therapist, making a false start (
Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter
)—before covering page after page in a love-inspired white-hot creative frenzy. Whether in success or in failure, the writer writes (or fails to write) alone. The paradigm certainly holds true in other art forms such as music. We cannot imagine Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as composed by “Beethoven and his collaborator and his revisers.” (Our phrasing comes from the Revels edition of
Dr Faustus
, edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, whose title page advertises the multiple hands in “Marlowe”'s play.) Mozart's
Requiem
is still so called despite our knowledge that it was unfinished at Mozart's death and that much—perhaps the larger part—was contributed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr.

But if genius is solitary, theater is by definition collaborative. It requires the input and coordination of many groups of people: actors, costume designers, and musicians (to name but three). These are the collaborative partners (or at least, some of them) at point of production. What were the circumstances at point of composition?

The Elizabethan theater impresario Philip Henslowe regularly records payments to teams of writers. Extant manuscript plays often show more than one hand. The most famous is
Sir Thomas More
, which has five authors/revisers (one of the revisers was Shakespeare). When Thomas Middleton and Samuel Rowley co-authored
The Changeling
(1622), Rowley wrote the comic subplot, Middleton the tragic main plot. When Robert Daborne was behind on a commission for Philip Henslowe in 1613, he subcontracted an act to speed things up. Clearly, there were many models of collaboration in the Elizabethan theater.

But if it is clear that collaboration was not unusual, it is equally clear that many authors wrote alone, and preferred to write alone. Anthony Burgess plays on this in
Enderby's Dark Lady
when he depicts the Jacobean writing duo, Beaumont and Fletcher, who not only shared a study but, it was reported, a mistress. Burgess's Shakespeare enters a tavern and sits down “not far from Beaumont and Fletcher with their one doxy who, being born under the sign of Libra, was fain to bestow kisses and clips equally on both.” Beaumont hails Shakespeare:

“Master Shakespeare,” said Frank Beaumont timidly, “there is a matter we would talk of, to wit a collaboration betwixt you and us here.”

“She hath enough to do fumbling two let alone three.”

Burgess's Shakespeare shuns collaboration of any kind, but the evidence tells a different story.

The bulk of Shakespeare's work is single-authored in all genres: comedies, histories and tragedies. Of the thirty-eight plays in the Shakespeare canon, only six are accepted to be collaborations:
1 Henry VI
,
Titus Andronicus
,
Timon of Athens
,
Pericles
,
Two Noble Kinsmen
, and
All Is True
(
Henry VIII
). (The figure rises to eight if we include
2
and
3 Henry VI
, about which there is no consensus.) For comparison: almost half of Thomas Middleton's canon is collaborative; over 50 percent of Elizabethan plays were collaborative.
¹

We have long known that Shakespeare collaborated late in his career. In 1634
The Two Noble Kinsmen
, a play not included in the 1623 Folio, was published with two names on the title page: “Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. William Shakspeare, gentlemen.” Both authors were dead by 1634 (Fletcher had died in 1625, Shakespeare in 1616); the title page describes them as “the memorable Worthies of their time.” Fletcher had been one of the King's Men's most successful dramatists for two decades, and his plays continued to be printed and reprinted. Between 1620 and 1634 there were ten editions of six of his plays, including
Two Noble Kinsmen
. 1634 saw the publication not only of
Two Noble Kinsmen
but of Fletcher's single-authored
The Faithful Shepherdess
; the following year saw two more Fletcher titles reach print for the first time. Thus Fletcher's name alone was a guaranteed selling point in 1634. There could only be one reason to put Shakespeare's name on the title page of
Two Noble Kinsmen
and that is that he was indeed a co-author.

One of the ways we can identify shares in collaborative works is by authors' linguistic fingerprints: verbal tics that work at a subconscious level. So, for instance, Fletcher prefers the elided pronominal form “'em”; Shakespeare prefers “them.” In
Two Noble Kinsmen
scenes with these different forms are fairly clearly demarcated. But some scenes have both forms. The collaborators obviously read each other's scenes and contributed to them.

Two Noble Kinsmen
was written in 1613. The partnership was successful: Fletcher and Shakespeare worked together again the same year on
All Is True
(
Henry VIII
) and
Cardenio
(now lost). Although Shakespeare had begun his late romances collaboratively, writing
Pericles
(1607) with George Wilkins,
²
the partnership with Wilkins was not repeated. And the collaboration worked differently: Shakespeare seems to have been responsible for Acts 3–5 of
Pericles
, with Wilkins writing the first two acts.

Let us go back to the start of Shakespeare's career since it has some points of contact with the collaborative method with Wilkins. Critics have long suspected a different hand in Act 1 of
1 Henry VI
and in Act 1 of
Titus Andronicu
s. Identifying the hand(s) has been difficult. The favored candidate for
Titus
is George Peele. The issue of collaboration in
1 Henry VI
is complicated by where one places it chronologically in the sequence now known as
1–3 Henry VI
. Many critics believe
1 Henry VI
to have been written after
3 Henry VI
, as a prequel: having written a two-part sequence about York and Lancaster, Shakespeare came across a play (by Peele? by Nashe?) and adapted it. However, this theory does not take adequate account of the linguistic simplicity (even inferiority) of
1 Henry VI
in comparison to the other
Henry VI
plays.
1 Henry VI
is one of the easiest Shakespeare plays to read. One line equals one thought; there are no complicated syntactical structures or images or ideas. It is hard to see this as the work of someone who had just written
3 Henry VI
and was about to write
Richard III
.

The dates of these plays are pertinent (late 1580s or early 1590s for
1 Henry VI
, early 1590s for
Titus
): they are not just early in Shakespeare's career but early in the life of the professional Elizabethan theater. There are good practical reasons for collaboration. It is speedy. Two are better than one; three or four may be better still. The newly professional theater needed new plays. Between 27 December 1593 and 26 December 1594 Philip Henslowe's Diary records 206 performances of forty-one different titles; if his marginal “ne” means “new,” then fifteen of these were brand new plays. Dramatist Robert Daborne outsourced when he needed to meet a deadline. So too do Burgess's fictional Beaumont and Fletcher. Beaumont corrects Shakespeare's sexual (mis)interpretation of his proposed collaboration: “I mean with Jack here and myself. A comedy called
Out on You Mistress Minx
which must be ready for rehearsing some two days from now and not yet started though the money taken.” A second practical consideration applies: collaboration worked as a kind of apprentice system in which inexperienced dramatists learned from—by working with—others. In 1612–13, Shakespeare may have been training his successor (John Fletcher became the King's Men's “attached” (i.e. contracted) dramatist after Shakespeare).

What about the middle of Shakespeare's career? In 1607 he collaborated with Thomas Middleton on the satire
Timon of Athens
. The play may be unfinished (it contains loose ends) although it is certainly stageable. (Middleton later adapted
Macbeth
and
Measure for Measure
after Shakespeare's death; see Myth 24.) We are just beginning to explore the extent of the working relationship between Middleton and Shakespeare at this period. Middleton's city comedy,
A Mad World My Masters
(1607), written immediately before
Timon
, has as one of its central characters an over-hospitable knight by the name of Sir Bounteous Prodigal. Given that Timon is a tragic Sir Bounteous Prodigal, it may be that the collaborative
Timon of Athens
was actually initiated by Middleton as a generically logical next step, following on from his exploration of prodigality in comic form.
³
We have recently offered evidence to suggest that Middleton was a co-author with Shakespeare on the comedy,
All's Well That Ends Well
(
c
.1607). Critics have long noted oddities in the first printed text of this play (the Folio of 1623)—variations in how characters are designated in speech prefixes, in stage directions, and in dialogue; curiously narrative stage directions that promise dialogue that does not then occur; an un-Shakespearean urban grittiness of tone, and so on. Many of the play's textual, tonal, and stylistic features match up with the known preferences and habits of Thomas Middleton; they are particularly concentrated in certain scenes—the comic subplot with Paroles, for instance—but they feature in some of the Helen scenes too.
⁴
So we need to modify the conventional story about co-authorship in Shakespeare's career, a story in which he collaborated, briefly but successfully, at the beginning and then, more regularly, at the end of his career but not successfully or regularly in the middle. It now looks like collaboration was a palatable and practical activity for him throughout, successful enough for him to want to work with two authors (Middleton and Fletcher) again.