Reviews of the Week
A Life-Size Shakespeare
Shakespeare of London. By Marchette Chute. k'Necker and War- burg. ifs.) $hakespeare Survey 4. Edited by Allardyce Nicoll. (Cambridge University Press. tn. 6d.) rarrics. who might better be referred to as novelists manques. have contrived during the past • 150 years to blow up Shakespeare, the man, like a Luna Park balloon into many fantastic shapes. They have made him an almost surrealist object in which he is confused with his own characters, Hamlet and Prospero, and shals not a few of the characteristics and strange fancies of the cr ics them- selves. But the radical objection to these personae (particularly common in the twentieth century as Professor Kenneth Muir points out in a brilliant essay in the Shakespeare Survey) is that they could never have existed in any possible world, least of all the Elizabethan, so warm and fierce and as human as the worlds fringing the Mediterranean today.
So it is very opportune that Miss Chute, remarking aptly if a little plaintively that " he was once life-size," should attempt a life- size portrait, warts and all, though few are visible. She does it most convincingly, admitting none but accepted facts. Of the little Shakespeare's " visit " to Kenilworth to see the show mounted by the Earl of Leicester to entertain Queen Elizabeth, she nicely says: "Fifteen miles in those days was a journey of real magnitude ; and since no one in Stratford could have known how charmingly suitable it would have been for England's great future dramatist to meet England's great queen," it was unlikely he went. This is her strict witude throughout, and she admits no evidence later than 1635; io that the figure of Shakespeare grows gradually out of his back- ground—Stratford, London, then Stratford again—in the way the 'nain character in a film is finally focused by the camera after t has lingered over the faces in a crowd.
1 As a result, we have perhaps the most natural and living picture f the man ever painted. Miss Chute insists that the most impor- nt part of his background was the Elizabethan theatre ; and she iticises those who, "through misplaced reverence," have forgotten hat he was not only a professional playwright, but also a profes- 'sional actor. Hers is a Shakespeare, therefore, whose career in the theatre absorbed him and repaid his devotion by completely fitisfying him—and incidentally bringing him comparative riches and honours. He was an excellent actor, as Chettic tells us ; and he must because of this have been of excellent physique and otamina, for acting in those days required, with its sometimes too uthentic sword-play, its energetic dancing and its exaggerated movements, something of the equipment of the acrobat. Indeed, since he was also a manager of his company which was highly successful and seldom "resting," the wonder is that he found either time or energy to write plays at all. He never blotted a line because he never had time to do so. For this reason and also because of his well-known even good temper, he was a quiet and well-behaved
citizen, a contrast to such men as his friend Ben Janson, Nash; Greene, or even the serious Chapman who also landed in jail.
Miss Chute's expression of this is particularly happy: "He was a relaxed and happy man almost incapable of taking offence." He took no part in the many literary feuds of his time ; as Sir John Davies said of him: "Thou hast no railing but a reigning wit." He was sober ; the 'Mermaid,' the only tavern with an authentic though slender connection with Shakespeare, was, in spite of all the Romantic poets said, known for being orderly and quiet. He was wise in money matters and investments, ready to help as he did in arranging the marriage of the daughter of a house where he lodged, and not really so bad to his wife as has sometimes been made out.
Two criticisms may be made. One is that this living picture leaves little room for the genius that undoubtedly inhabited the body of Shakespeare. But Miss Chute is trying to present him as his contemporaries saw him, and geniuses do not always behave as oddly as the films would have us believe. Yet his contemporaries did realise that Shakespeare was no ordinary writer ; no other Elizabethan playwright had his works collected and published by his contemporaries (Jonson published his own), and, when we come down to brass tacks, more is known from contemporary sources about Shakespeare than any other playwright of the period except Jonson.
The other criticism is of Miss Chute's method. It has its dangers. For example, Miss Chute mentions that Heywood wrote a long poem "Troia Britannica " which did not sell ; he "therefore," she says; " thriftily " turned the same material to stage use. " There- fore " and " thriftily " are guess-work ; Heywood may have used the same material for a thousand and one other reasons. But it is infrequently that one stops to make the criticism. Miss Chute is much too honest a scholar to fall often into the trap (though as a good scholar she might have put the sources of her quotations at the end of her book ; there is not a single note, only a long bibliography).
Apart from her picture of Shakespeare, Miss 'Chute makes vivid for us that bubbling cauldron that .was Elizabethan London life ; and makes many points not known to the general reader such as the fact that women flocked to the plays. Her style is easy, and an occasional Americanism (" Kyd roomed with Marlowe") is amusing rather than irritating ; only her trick of referring always to Tom Nashe and Tom Lodge (why not Bill Shakespeare ?) annoys.
The fourth annual Shakespeare Survey is a much more specialised work, giving the recent advances in our knowledge of Shakespeare and his plays, details of the production of his plays in other countries, brilliant studies by Hardin Craig and Miss Bradbrook of (respectively) "motivation in Shakespeare's choice of materials" and "the sources of Macbeth." But there is a more general essay by John Gielgud about tradition in the contemporary theatre which
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