30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (32 page)

The genre that is most reliant on props is romance. Romance plays—the kind Shakespeare wrote late in his career—traditionally hinge on the reunion of separated families via an identifiable token, often a piece of jewelry that was left with the foundling child. In
The Winter's Tale
, the baby Perdita is abandoned in her basket with “the mantle of Queen Hermione's, her jewel about the neck of it” (5.2.32–3). But Shakespeare does not write in reunions that are dependent on these props qua props. In
The Winter's Tale
the Third Gentleman narrates the reunion. In
Twelfth Night
the twins recognize each other not through props but through memories of their father and through shared bodily marks that they narrate. In
Pericles
it is Marina's narrative of suffering that prompts Pericles to recognize her as his daughter (“I will believe you by the syllable / Of what you shall deliver”; 21.155–6). In
The Tempest
the reconciliation of brothers is rooted in Prospero's live body. When Alonso is embraced by Prospero at the end—“I embrace thy body”—he knows the body is real and not another “enchanted trifle” because “thy pulse / Beats as of flesh and blood” (5.1.111, 114–16).

A parody of theatrical romance by Michael Frayn illustrates the pitfalls of props. Frayn imagines a play called
Error for Error
in which the Duke's long-lost son, carried off at birth, proves his heritage by a prop—a locket—which he throws to the Duke. The Duke drops it; the actors have to improvise:

Duke:
Alas! Methinks I have misfinger'd it!

Ferdinand:
Sire, bend thou down thy aged frame

Duke:
Bend me as I might I cannot see the thing.

Ferdinand:
Was not one glance as it came winging by

Duke:
A fig for your problems—what worries me

Ferdinand:
Is this meet welcome for a long-lost son?

Duke:
Meet welcome for a long-lost son, forsooth!

Frayn's parody incidentally reveals the way in which Shakespeare's plays set up romance prop conventions only to shy away from using them.
⁵

When Shakespeare's plays do demand props, the props demand attention. The mirror in
Richard II
, for instance, is probably anachronistic (glass mirrors were unusual in England at the time of Richard II) and it is not found in Shakespeare's sources. It is therefore a hugely symbolic item in which King Richard (soon to be ex-king Richard) contemplates the way his reflection does not mirror his sufferings. The language of the scene suggests that Richard dramatically smashes the mirror on stage—“there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers” (4.1.279), although this would be an expensive gesture in the theater. In
Othello
, the circulating handkerchief—it moves from Desdemona to Emilia to Iago to Cassio—starts to take on a life of its own. It becomes “not merely a sign but a performer in the play's action.”
⁶

Stage props are not simply material properties. They have back stories (Yorick's skull prompts anecdotes about the Fool's activities; Othello's handkerchief is given two contradictory stories about its origins; we are told about the pre-play commission for the gold chain in
Comedy of Errors
). They cue emotions and associations. They function as go-betweens (we pay as much attention to their movements as to characters'). They are symbols (all the skulls in Jacobean drama have a conventional memento mori function). They have to be read and interpreted like every other stage picture. And in their concrete presence they negotiate the boundary between the fictional world and the material real world (so, too, do costumes). With its material onstage existence, Yorick's skull is as present as the physical body of a living actor. In this sense, Yorick's skull, like all stage props, is “real.”

Notes

¹
 Elizabeth Maslen, “Yorick's Place in
Hamlet
,”
Essays and Studies
, 36 (London: John Murray, 1983), pp. 1–13 (p. 12).

²
 Quoted in Pascale Aebischer,
Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 86–7.

³
 Richard Sugg,
Murder after Death
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 20.

⁴
 A video of this staged reading of Chettle's
Tragedy of Hoffman
, directed by Elisabeth Dutton, is available at bit.ly/hoffman2010

⁵
 Michael Frayn, “Business Worries,” in
Collected Columns
(London: Methuen, 2007), pp. 44–7 (pp. 46–7).

⁶
 Andrew Sofer, “Felt Absences: The Stage Properties of Othello's Handkerchief,”
Comparative Drama
, 31 (1997), pp. 367–94 (p. 367).

Two examples. First, a caustically wise Queen Elizabeth enters the Curtain theater at a performance of
Romeo and Juliet
to stop the Master of the Revels from revealing that one of the actors is in fact a woman. Dispensing money and persons, she invites Shakespeare for future discussions at Greenwich, while sending his lover back to her husband and thence to the New World. Second, a letter discovered and published at the end of the eighteenth century sees the queen addressing Shakespeare in terms of warm appreciation: “Wee didde receive youre prettye Verses goode Masterre William … and wee doe complemente thee onne theyre greate excellence.”
¹

Both these encounters between monarch and playwright are fictional. The first is the denouement of John Madden's hugely enjoyable film
Shakespeare in Love
(1998) with Oscar-winning Judi Dench as the queen. The second is a fake by the noted eighteenth-century forger William-Henry Ireland, part of a sheaf of documents he claimed to have discovered in the private library of the mysterious “Mr H.” These two fictions, 200 years apart, attest to the vitality of the myth that the queen was Shakespeare's biggest fan. And they give us two indicative assertive strategies, recognizable from some of our other myths: where the required evidence is lacking, it must be invented—within the fictional genre of romantic comedy in the film, in scholarly hoaxes for Ireland.

Most specifically, since Shakespeare's first biographers writing in the early eighteenth century, it has been traditionally asserted that
The Merry Wives of Windsor
was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth, who wished for a revival of Falstaff, corpulent star of
1
and
2 Henry IV
that would “shew him in Love.” “Without doubt,” Nicholas Rowe observed in 1709, Elizabeth “gave him many gracious Marks of her Favour,” although he does not offer any proof.
²
While it is impossible that Elizabeth would have attended the disreputable public theater, she did have the theater come to her. Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, performed at court every Christmas season, and although the specific plays performed are not recorded, it seems likely that many of them would have been by the resident playwright, Shakespeare. The title page of
Love's Labour's Lost
, printed in 1598, describes the play “as it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas”;
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, first published as “Syr John Falstaffe, and the merrie Wives of Windsor” in 1602, also claims it was “divers times Acted … Both before her Majestie, and else-where.” As many critics have noted, Elizabeth's own sense of monarchical power, in an age of stage kings, was highly theatrical: as she recognized, “We princes, I tell you, are set upon stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed: the eyes of many behold our actions.”
³

Unlike many of his contemporaries, including Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare does not seem to have depicted Elizabeth directly in his writing. Not for him the epilogue that Jonson addressed to her in his
Every Man Out of His Humour
, or Dekker in his
Old Fortunatus
. Only in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
might Elizabeth be glanced at. In that play, Oberon's description of a “mermaid on a dolphin's back / Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath / That the rude sea grew civil at her song” (2.1.150–2) has been plausibly connected to the Earl of Leicester's lavish entertainments for Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle in 1575. It seems likely that this extravagant spectacle, with its gunfire and fireworks seen and heard over twenty miles away, would have involved the inhabitants of nearby Stratford, perhaps including the 11-year-old Shakespeare.
⁴
Oberon's identification of a “fair vestal” or “imperial votress … In maiden meditation, fancy-free” (2.1.158–64) may well be a reference to the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. There are more buried allusions in the play, too: Titania, queen of the fairies, must have recalled Edmund Spenser's influential contemporary epic which addressed Elizabeth as “The Faerie Queene.” A production directed by Peter Hall at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames, in 2010 visualized this association between the queens, as Judi Dench reprised in her performance of Titania something of her bewigged and stately role in
Shakespeare in Love
, recalling elaborate paintings of the jeweled Elizabeth. But while the connection was strikingly visual, it was also rather neutered: in the play Titania, doctored with a love potion as part of a quarrel with her lover Oberon, falls in love with the lower-class Bottom, who has been transformed with an ass's head, and takes him off to her fairy bower. We do not see what transpires, but Bottom's delicious insinuations afterwards—“Methought I was, and methought I had—” (4.1.206) give plenty of room for speculation that more than ear-stroking took place. If this is a disguised portrait of Elizabeth, its implications are not very flattering: in the production Peter Hall did not put either Judi Dench, or Elizabeth herself, to such scandal, merely bestowing some dowager-chaste kisses on Bottom's long asinine nose.

Figure 7
Judi Dench playing Titania as Queen Elizabeth at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames (2010). Photo: Nobby Clark / ArenaPAL.

Elsewhere Shakespeare refers to our “gracious Empress” in
Henry V
, when he likens Henry's historical victory at Agincourt to the topical and anticipated success of the Earl of Essex in quelling rebellion in Ireland (5.0.30), in a passage convincingly described as “the only explicit, extra-dramatic, incontestable reference to a contemporary event anywhere in the canon.”
⁵
Perhaps it is significant that the idealized king of the play is likened not to the queen herself but to her general, Essex. This theme is evident elsewhere in connections between Shakespeare and Elizabeth. The story of
Richard II
, for instance—a weak king's deposition by his cousin Henry Bullingbrook—took on a topical relevance amid the tensions of the end of Elizabeth's reign, and one writer, John Hayward, was imprisoned for dedicating his prose history of Henry IV to the Earl of Essex, seen as a challenger to Elizabeth. In a conversation with the antiquary William Lambarde in 1601, Elizabeth is reported to have likened herself to Richard II—the monarch, rather than the play. And when the supporters of the Earl of Essex paid for a play to be performed on the eve of their rebellion, it was perhaps inevitable they would pick
Richard II
, although it is not absolutely certain that this was Shakespeare's play. Members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men were called before the Privy Council to answer for this particularly political scheduling. (Their spokesman, Augustine Philips, claimed innocence: the company was simply well paid to put on an “old play.”
⁶
)

So far, Shakespeare's literary depictions of Elizabeth do not suggest that her favor was of particular concern to him. His response to her death in 1603 is also revealing. Amid the outpouring of poetic tribute to the dead queen and the new Scottish king, Shakespeare is conspicuous by his absence. Henry Chettle, writing his elegiac
England's Mourning Garment
of 1603, criticizes Shakespeare under the name of Melicert for his failure “To mourne her death that graced his desert”: the suggestion that Elizabeth has “graced” Shakespeare is a tantalizing one, anticipating Nicholas Rowe's later assumption about the relationship between monarch and playwright.