30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (3 page)

Additionally, there is evidence of an inverse relationship between the historical survival of texts and their contemporary popularity. Some printed texts do seem to have been read to death. There are, for instance, only two extant copies, neither complete, of the first edition of
Hamlet
(1603), and just one copy of the first, 1593, edition of Shakespeare's poem
Venus and Adonis
: his first entry into print, and the work, along with the tragic narrative poem
The Rape of Lucrece
(first printed in 1594), for which he was probably best known during his lifetime. The majority of contemporary references to Shakespeare are to him as the author of these two popular poems, which went into nine and five further editions respectively before 1616. The dictionary derivation of “popular” is “belonging to the people as a whole”: it's hard to state that any writer in the Elizabethan period was popular in this sense, where, as David Cressy has estimated, literacy rates may have been around 30 percent for men and less than 10 percent for women in 1600.
⁶
In addition, no print run of any book in the period was allowed to exceed 1,500 copies (the Globe theater, remember, could take 3,000 spectators). Literary works in any case were only a small part of the print market, which was dominated by religious works—sermons, prayer books, bibles, commentaries, and psalm translations—and by household manuals—conduct books and “how-to” works: within this restricted sphere, however, Shakespeare was certainly a significant player.

Popularity and personal renown or artistic recognition are not necessarily the same thing: if we were looking at bestselling books from our own period we would probably not expect that category to overlap extensively with critically acclaimed or “classic” literary works. There is evidence that Shakespeare's works were valued by contemporaries. Francis Meres, writing in 1598, identifies Shakespeare's predominance:

As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witness his
Gentlemen of Verona
, his
Errors
, his
Love labours lost
, his
Love labours won
, his
Midsummers night dream
, & his
Merchant of Venice
: for Tragedy his
Richard the 2
.
Richard the 3
.
Henry the 4
.
King John
,
Titus Andronicus
and his
Romeo and Juliet
.

The identity of “Love labours won” is unclear. Elsewhere in his analysis, though, he seems to identify Shakespeare as on a par with contemporary writers rather than exceeding them in quality or popularity. For example, here is his list of “the best for Comedy amongst us”:

Edward
Earl of Oxford, Doctor
Gager
of Oxford, Master
Rowley
once a rare Scholar of learned Pembroke Hall in Cambridge, Master
Edwards
one of her Majesty's Chapel, eloquent and witty
John Lyly
,
Lodge
,
Gascoigne
,
Greene
,
Shakespeare
,
Thomas Nashe
,
Thomas Heywood
,
Anthony Munday
our best plotter,
Chapman
,
Porter
,
Wilson
,
Hathway
, and
Henry Chettle
.
⁷

This is a roll-call of theatrical writers of the time, not a selective pantheon. The existence of the posthumously printed edition of Shakespeare's collected dramatic works (1623), in an expensive, high-status folio format more usually associated with bibles and serious works of history or topography, is evidence less for his popularity than for his literary—and financial—value. And even as the Folio's editors address it to “the great variety of readers,” “from the most able, to him that can but spell,” and joke that they wish the readership were weighed rather than numbered, they do so at the head of a volume whose cost pushes it well beyond anything that might be called “popular” in its true sense—“of the people.”

Notes

¹
 
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Was_shakespeare_popular_in_his_day

²
 Quoted in Emma Smith (ed.),
Blackwell Guides to Criticism: Shakespeare's Comedies
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 1.

³
 F.J. Furnivall, C.M. Ingleby, and L.T. Smith,
The Shakspere Allusion-Book
(London: Oxford University Press, 1932), vol. 2, p. 536; vol. 1, p. 88.

⁴
 
http://www.lostplays.org

⁵
 Lukas Erne, “The Popularity of Shakespeare in Print,”
Shakespeare Survey
, 62 (2009), pp. 12–29 (pp. 13–14).

⁶
 David Cressy,
Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 177.

⁷
 Francis Meres,
Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury
(London, 1598), pp. 282, 284 (sigs. 2O2
^r
, 2O3
^v
).

The idea of the untutored genius or the self-made man or woman is irresistibly attractive. For Milton, Shakespeare was “Fancy's child, / Warbl[ing] his native wood-notes wild” (
L'Allegro
); the concept of the inspired rustic held sway to the Romantics and beyond. At the other end of the spectrum sits Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson, who noted Shakespeare's “small Latin and less Greek.” Out of context it is easy to interpret Jonson's phrase as meaning “almost no classical knowledge” and, by extension, “uneducated.” In fact, the phrase is part of an extended compliment to Shakespeare who, Jonson says, eclipses not only his contemporaries but the ancients. Shakespeare outshines Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe, and, “though [he had] small Latin and less Greek” he stands “alone” in comparison for comedy and tragedy with “all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome / Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.” (Call you this railing?) And we must note a further context: Jonson himself. Most authors have small Latin and less Greek when compared with Jonson's prodigious classical learning. Nonetheless Jonson's remark is constantly quoted out of context and so the myth of the poorly educated Shakespeare continues.

There are many ways of testing such a myth. First, let us think about the sixteenth-century humanist educational atmosphere into which Shakespeare was born. “Humanism” is the name we give to the post-medieval scholarly drive that recovered ancient texts. But humanism was ambitiously multi-layered. It was ethical, aiming to marry the highest ideals of pagan classical thinking to a Christian universe. It was stylistic: humanists studied the ancients not just for what they said but for how they said it; they thought about what a vernacular English literature might look and sound like; they experimented with the English language, importing words from Greek and Latin (see Myth 21). It was pedagogical: humanists wrote textbooks and founded schools and colleges, passing their ideals to the coming generations. It was scholarly: humanists translated texts, edited them, indexed them, made dictionaries. And it was positively secular, not rejecting a theocentric world view but placing man and his potential at the center of it with questions about government, nobility, court, the commonwealth, kings, and tyrants. (Humanist texts often foreground an individual in their title: Sir Thomas Elyot's
The Governor
, Castiglione's
The Courtier
, Machiavelli's
The Prince
.) The invention of the printing press—the internet of its day—enabled humanist ideas and values to spread with enormous speed.

This is a simplified summary, but the essential point is that humanism had practical effects, not least on the Elizabethan educational system and the development of the grammar school. A sixteenth-century schoolboy (only very few girls, such as Margaret, daughter of Henry VIII's lord chancellor, Thomas More, were formally educated, and then at home rather than in school) was the beneficiary of a new nationwide system of education—a national curriculum. Although Ben Jonson was educated at Westminster, where he studied under the antiquarian and historian William Camden, and Thomas Kyd was educated at Merchant Taylor's school under educationalist and writer Richard Mulcaster, their education would not have been substantially different from Shakespeare's in Stratford-upon-Avon. We don't have any records showing that Shakespeare attended the local grammar school—they are missing for that period—but it would be odd if he hadn't.

Grammar schools were so called because what they taught was grammar. The grammar taught was Latin. (The standard grammar book was William Lyly's—this is the book William Page is studying, not very well, in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
.) School started at 6 a.m. and continued until 6 p.m., followed by homework, and, as the boys moved into the higher forms, the language in which they conversed and in which they were instructed was Latin. It is often said, without exaggeration, that by the time a grammar-school boy left school he had as much classical education as a university student of Classics today.

But grammar meant much more than just the parsing of sentences. Grammar was a part of rhetoric; and rhetoric had many branches, all rooted in stylistic awareness. Exercises ranged from
copia
(saying the same thing in various ways) and
imitatio
(trying to emulate the style of a revered author) to double translation—from Latin to English then back again to Latin, to see if one's own composition in Latin could approach the elegance of the original (see Myth 15). These exercises were designed to prepare boys for professions that required rhetorical skills: the church or the law or local government. They were also ideal training for a writer, fostering in Shakespeare a love of language, of stylistic variation, of the sounds of words—precisely the qualities we value in his writing today.

So Shakespeare left school well equipped. But education does not stop with formal schooling (although belief in this myth seems to imply that it does). Although Shakespeare did not attend university (neither did Thomas Kyd or Ben Jonson), he did not stop reading. The sources of his plays show that Shakespeare read medieval poetry (Chaucer, Gower), Italian fiction (Boccaccio, Cinthio), contemporary history (Raphael Holinshed, 1577, 1587), ancient history (Plutarch), contemporary romance (Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Greene), Greek romance (Apollodorus), contemporary continental philosophy (the essays of the French humanist Montaigne). He read French and Italian, using sources in these languages when they had not yet received an English translation. (Jonson spoke neither modern language, according to his friend William Drummond of Hawthornden.) He read Latin. Yes, he made mistakes. He twice confuses Pluto (god of the underworld) with Plutus (god of wealth). This is hardly a hanging offense, nor is he the only one to confuse the two—ancient Romans did so too. Lois Potter points out that differences in scansion of the classical name Pirithous in the co-authored play
Two Noble Kinsmen
may suggest that one author (Fletcher) knew more Greek than the other (Shakespeare).
¹
But this play was written in 1613—over thirty years after Shakespeare had left school. This is evidence of rusty memory, not of lack of education.

Multi-volume books were expensive. Shakespeare may have read them through the auspices of the printer Richard Field in London. Field was a Stratford contemporary of Shakespeare and the printer of his first poems,
Venus and Adonis
(1593) and
Lucrece
(1594). Field had been apprenticed to the Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier. When Vautrollier died, Field married his widow in 1588, inherited the business, and continued the specialism in foreign works. Field first introduced Ariosto's epic
Orlando Furioso
to an English-speaking audience through the translation by Sir John Harington in 1591. But his list is also impressive for its collection of what are now classics of English literature and Latin-translated-into-English literature. In 1587, Field printed Raphael Holinshed's magisterial three-volume
History of England, Ireland and Scotland
; in 1589, he printed George Puttenham's
Art of English Poesie
, a seminal humanist text about English writing, and Thomas Lodge's hexameter translation of Ovid's
Metamorphoses
. In 1595 he printed Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's
Parallel Lives
(reprinted in 1603). In 1596 he printed Edmund Spenser's epic poem,
The Faerie Queene
, and in 1598 Sir Philip Sidney's prose epic, the
Arcadia
. It is remarkable how many sources of Shakespeare's plays were printed by Field: Ovid, Plutarch, and Holinshed are probably Shakespeare's three favorite texts.

Did Field alert his countryman to exciting new authors and hot-off-the-press publications? Did Shakespeare buy them? Or did Field allow his printshop to function as an unofficial library with Shakespeare borrowing them or reading them on site? What is clear is that Shakespeare kept up with new ideas and new literary discoveries as they reached the English market.

It is often alleged that the level of technical knowledge of certain areas in Shakespeare's plays—such as law or the court—is incompatible with the knowledge of a grammar-school boy from Stratford. This assertion is behind the search for other candidates for authorship of Shakespeare's plays. Thus, the argument goes, the legal knowledge is such that the plays must have been written by a lawyer (enter Francis Bacon). The knowledge of court is such that they must have been written by an aristocrat (enter the Earl of Oxford). Similar points have been made about the plays' knowledge of botany or of seafaring or of birds. There are several problems with this kind of argument. First it assumes that authors are dependent on their own professional or emotional experiences. (It is this presumption of emotional experience that drives Myth 18, that the sonnets must be autobiographical.) One does not need to be a lawyer to acquire legal knowledge, and this was especially so in the Elizabethan period, which was surprisingly litigious (Peter Beal has shown that in one year George Puttenham had over seventy lawsuits in process, and Shakespeare himself was involved in half a dozen legal cases). The legal satires of Thomas Middleton's city comedies, such as
Michaelmas Term
, are effective because they target the familiarly quotidian not the esoterically specialized. Court life was also familiar to Shakespeare once the Chamberlain's Men were invited to perform there. But even before then, “what great ones do the less will prattle of” (
Twelfth Night
, 1.2.29). And to believe that only lawyers can command legal references or aristocrats courtly references misses a crucial concept: imagination. Imagination is the single most important qualification for being a writer.