Shakespeare and Stratford (2)

Answering the sceptical

A. L. Rowse

Most of the nonsense written about Shakespeare comes from people who know little or nothing of Shakespeare's Age, or of the life and conditions in which he worked. Sometimes the questions they want answered are sensible enough; sometimes the questions themselves are just nonsense. lust as mine would be if I were to put questions about the internal combustion engine or the mechanism of a motor car. But I am not such a fool as to put them — I know my limitations: 1 know nothing about mechanics, chemistry, physics, mathematics, or science in general; or law, football, Greek, Chinese etc — so I do not hold forth about them.

But I do know a good deal about the Elizabethan Age, Shakespeare's lifetime and the society he lived in. Most people know hardly anything about it after all, Shakespeare's life fell 400 years ago. So, if people are sensible, they should listen to someone who knows about it — as I listen to the motor mechanics about my car.

I have been reluctantly persuaded to answer a number of questions, some of them sense, some downright nonsense.

"We still have no letter written by Shakespeare, the one giant of Elizabethan poetry and drama. How do you account for this complete absence of evidence?" There is nothing odd about that; we have no letter from Christopher Marlowe, even though he was a university man. From Shakespeare we have the most remarkable verse-letters, i.e. the Sonnets, as well as the public letters, the dedications of his poems, to his patron, Southampton. By the way, Shakespeare was not the only giant: Marlowe and Ben Jonson were giants too.

Shakespeare's education? There is more about the whole process of Elizabethan grammar-school education, about pedagogues, Latin tags from the school text-books used, than in any other Elizabethan dramatist. See especially Love's Labour's Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Early registers of Stratford School have not survived from so long ago, or from many other schools. But where would a Stratford boy have received his grammar school education but at the local school? Shakespeare got a good grounding in Latin there — better than mine; he later added to it French and a little Italian. Like most of us, most of his education came after schooldays.

"The date of Shakespeare's birth is not known." Nor is that of most Elizabethans — we do not know even the year of birth of some great Elizabethans, Sir Francis Drake, for example. But we have the record of Shakespeare's baptism in Stratford Church on April 26, 1564 — and Elizabethans had their children baptised usually within a few days of birth. "No record of Shakespeare's marriage has been found." No — again as with most Elizabethans, the majority of such records have perished in 400 years. The surprising thing is that so much has remained about the Shakespeares at Stratford. We are exceptionally lucky to have Shakespeare's special marriage-bond, for he was a minor when he married his wife, no chicken at eight and a half years older. "Strange that Shakespeare made such a minuscule impact on his fellow men. We know far more about Ben Jonson, Kit Marlowe and John Donne." This is both wrong, and mixed up. We know far more about Ben Jonson's later life, for he was ten years younger and died twenty-one years after Shakespeare; but we know far more about Shakespeare's earlier life than of Ben Janson's, of which we know hardly anything. We also know more about Shakespeare than about Marlowe; we naturally know more about John Donne, because he lived later into the seventeenth century and belonged to marked families on both sides.

Shakespeare's parentage was a good yeoman stock on his father's side, and even better on his mother's (far better than Marlowe's, whose father was a cobbler). Shakespeare's mother was an Arden, a bit of an heiress, her father on the border between yeoman-farmer and small gentry. Shakespeare was keen on emphasising his gentlemanliness — in fact, was what today would be thought a bit of a snob. Of course his tastes were aristocratic, as an artist, a man of taste, and a gentleman. Nothing odd about that. D. H. Lawrence and I were born, unfortunately, in the working class; but our tastes are aristocratic — what else would you expect from two aesthetes?

"The author of these plays obviously had no desire to mention any Warwickshire village by name." What absolute rubbish! Shakespeare's plays are more attached to his own home countryside than any other Elizabethan dramatist whatever. Take Henry IV, for example. Falstaff is leading his mouldy recruits on a public road near Coventry: "Bardolph, get thee before to Coventry . . We'll to Sutton Coldfield tonight." Then Falstaff changes his mind, his men are such a lot of scarecrows, "I'll not march through Coventry with them, that's flat" — Coventry being the cathedral city of the shire. There was but a shirt among all the company, and that probably stolen from "the rednosed innkeeper of Daventry."

In his house in neighbouring Gloucestershire, Justice Shallow reminisces about his old acquaintance, Will Squeal, "a Cotswold man";

and we have Hinckley fair, and old Puff of Barson, or Barcheston — in case some ass thinks the author of the plays was not acquainted with Warwickshire. In Henry VI Sir William Lucy of Charlecote, who was sheriff there, is brought on the stage; so is a Somerville, of another Warwickshire family. Shakespeare brings the opposing forces of Lancaster and York to a plain in Warwickshire, and a camp near Warwick. Familiar places in the neighbourhood are brought in. The Earl of Oxford has arrived at Dunsmore — a heath between Dunchurch and Coventry. Warwick's brother has reached Daintry, the old pronunciation of Daventry. Somerville reports the whereabouts of Clarence: "at Southam I did leave him with his forces."

The background to the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew is pure Stratford. Christopher Sly is "old Sly's son of Barton Heath", i.e. Barton on the Heath — Shakespeare knew it well, for it was where his well-to-do uncle, Edmund Lambert, lived: he had married a sister of Mary Arden, Shakespeare's rather superior mother. Christopher Sly names Marian Hacket, "the fat ale-wife of Wincot" — four or five miles out of Stratford, and the records show that there actually were Hackets there at the time. In As You Like It — with its three welt-known references to Marlowe, whom evidently Shakespeare knew — he brings to the stage the Forest of Arden itself, whence both sides of his family came, the northern half of Warwickshire, from which the poet Drayton too come.

So what is the point of such silly questions as "What evidence is there in the plays themselves that the author Was a Warwickshire man? Is there any passage which clearly refers only to that part of the country?" These questions have already been answered in books; why don't these people, before asking them, read the books in which the information is already given, like mine, or E. I. Fripp's admirable books on the Stratford and Warwickshire background?

I think I was first to notice, as a social historian, how exceptionally devoted Shakespeare was to his native town. All the other people who made money out of the theatre in London invested their winnings there. Not so Shakespeare: he invested it practically all at home — in the finest house in the town, 107 acres of the best land, and a bigger investment still in the tithes. By the end he was an independent country gentleman there. His will portrays him perfectly: most of his property in Stratford, but he owns also a house in Blackfriars, convenient to the theatre, and he leaves money for mourning rings to his three' fellow-actors in the company, Burbage, Heming and Condell. There you have the complete picture, as complete as the bust with its inscription looking down on his grave in Stratford church: the Stratford man who went to London and made his modest fortune in the London theatre, but preferred to retire to New Place as an independent gentleman, his only grandchild to become Lady Barnard.

No tribute to him? What nonsense! — there are a number of tributes to his work in his lifetime, and on his death what could be more exact than Ben Jonson's critical tribute:

And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine, 01 Sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.

That concisely sums up Shakespeare's early development as a dramatist, taking each one as a pacemaker — Lyly in comedy, Kyd in tragedy, Marlowe in the heroic and poetic — and then going beyond them. Until in the end Ben places him, generously but rightly, alongside the greatest Greek dramatists Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles. Ben Jonson, the second biggest man in the theatre, was a querulous fellow, critical of everybody, including Shakespeare; but when he came to sum him up, there could not have been a nobler, more generous tribute.

"Is Shakespeare included in the cast list of any play?" As a matter ot fact, Yes. Not many early cast lists survive; but Burbage and

Shakespeare are given pride of place among the "principal comedians" who acted Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour in 1598, and among the "principal tragedians" in Jonson's Sejanus of 1603. John Aubrey, in only the next generation, tells us that Shakeapeare was a good actor and "a handsome well shaped man, very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit," but that Jonson was better at instructing.

By a fortunate accident Philip Henslowe's papers have survived; they relate partly to the rival company, the Admiral's, to which Shakespeare did not belong. Edward Alleyn was its star-actor, and Shakespeare was not one of Henslowe's hired men who wrote plays for him. From the formation of the Lord Chamberlain's Company in 1594 Shakespeare became a part-sharer — that is how he made most of his money, from theatre-takings and performances, not as actor or dramatist. Thus he was associated with the Burbages; his name turns up in connection with them and the Chamberlain's men, not Henslowe and Alleyn, of the rival concerns. It is a pity that the accounts and papers of the Lord Chamberlain's Company have not survived — we would much rather have had them. But people who are familiar with the Elizabethan Age know how chancy the survival of documents is. There is nothing in the least odd about that.

Naturally we have immeasurably more information about Bacon, for he was one of the first political figures of the time, son of the Lord Keeper (i.e. Lord Chancellor), nephew of the great Lord Treasurer Burghley, and became Lord Chancellor himself: a genius of prose, science, and philosophy. As if that and all the prose works he wrote were not enough for one lifetime! The suggestion that Bacon wrote the plays is the dottiest of all such suggestions. He stands at the opposite pole to Shakespeare — the genius of prose and science; moreover, all his life he was a homosexual — nothing about women in all the volumes of prose he wrote, he just wasn't interested in the subject. Whereas Shakespeare adored women, as you can see throughout his plays: they are full of fascinating portraits of the sex, one might say that he was more than normally responsive to them — and insanely infatuated by the dark musical mistress of the Sonnets.

There is no point in descending to the level of lunatic rubbish: the point about such nonsense is that it is self-proliferating, and endless, and endlessly boring. Anybody may scribble any name in a book, or write comments in the margin. Charles I wrote comments on the plays in his Second Folio, I write my name in my copies of the plays: it does not follow that Charles I or I wrote them.

To conclude, on a sane point, relevant to knowledge. I repeat that it is remarkable that we know as much as we do about Shakespeare, for an Elizabethan, 400 years ago. Elizabethans were not much interested in the biographies of theatre-folk: of his fellow dramatists we know hardly anything of Jonson's early life, little enough of Marlowe's, hardly a thing about such distinguished dramatists as John Ford, Webster, Tourneur, Kyd, Peele, Dekker and so on.

Why should so much nonsense proliferate around Shakespeare?

There are several reasons for it, but I am concerned with only one serious one: Shakespeare scholars, and the Shakespeare establishment, have quite superfluously left the gates open for all the crackpots to gallop through. Quite unnecessarily they have left questions open which can be, and have been, answered and closed. The Shakespeare establishment haven't the strategic sense to see that scepticism, where matters are obvious and clear, only confuses the public mind and lets in the crackpots. They are too second-rate to see that in a leading historian of Shakespeare's Age, who has solved the problems for them, they have their strongest ally,, who has corroborated the conservative tradition at every point, but made it firm and definitive.

It is extraordinary the confusion these Shakespeare authorities created by not notic ing the elementary and undeniable fact that 'Mr

W. H.' was Thorp the publisher's dedicatee, not Shakespeare's young 'Lord' of the Sonnets at all. Most important consequences flow from

that. Sir E. K. Chambers never noticed the fact or its significance. That great Shakespeare scholar was a marvellous accumulator of facts, but, a grand bureaucrat, he had the imperceptiveness of the bureaucrat; and in consequence got the Sonnets —. the loveliest in the language, containing the intimate autobiography of its greatest poet — all wrong.

Dover Wilson, too: he was rather a dear, but an enthusiast, perceptive but notoriously erratic. He, too, never noticed that 'Mr W.H.' was not the young Lord of the Sonnets. Most people still haven't noticed this obvious fact and its chain of consequences. The other day Harold Wilson thought he had come up with a candidate, under the old misapprehension that 'Mr W. H.' was Shakespeare's man. Leslie Hotson wrote a perfectly crazy book barking up the wrong tree, putting forward an obscure William Hatcliffe, 'Prince of Purpoole', again in place of Shakespeare's young Lord. The only person who fell for that rubbish was Dame Veronica Wedgwood. What judgement! Why not fall for sense when told it clearly enough? The leading Canadian writer, Hugh MacLennan — with his background of classical scholarship — saw the point at once; and wrote to me, "Your book has the merit of the good police-detective: never miss the significance of the obvious." The Eng. Lit, people at Oxford simply couldn't see that obvious point; but one by one they came round. Nevill Coghill, who wouldn't have it at first, came up to me a few years ago and said, "You are quite right: 'Mr W. H.' is not Shakespeare's man, but Thorp's the publisher's." And others have seen the point since — there can be no doubt about what is undeniable fact.

The importance of it is that it was the key that unlocked the obvious commonsense interpretation of the Sonnets. They were written to and for the obvious person, Shakespeare's young patron, Southampton — the young man was ambivalent, Shakespeare not interested in him sexually, but by the bad promiscuous, equivocal lady, with whom he was infatuated. The rival poet, of course, was Marlowe, no one else; and what was he rivalling Shakespeare for but the patronage of the Patron, i.e. the Sonnets were written for the Patron. QED. All this is delimited and certified by the dating — as again, with the last discovery, of the actor-dramatist of the Lord Chamberlain's Company becoming infatuated with the Lord Chamberlain's discarded mistress, the musical, temperamental, maddening half-Italian, Emilia Bassano, who cast such a spell over him.

It is quite impossible to question these findings — it would be easy to do so if they were not the simple, commonsense answers to what has been regarded as the greatest problem in our literature. They make sense of the whole story for the first time, dates, ages, circumstances, characters — which cannot be faulted at any point.

What astonishes me is that it should take second-rate people so long to see a point — the Shakespeare establishment bumbling on in their old rut, mumbling their abracadabra, "the problems of Shakespeare's Sonnets (and thereby of his life) are insoluble: therefore they are insoluble." And of course it will take the third-rate even longer to see that they have been solved.

A. L. Rowse is the author of a trilogy of books on the Elizabethan Age; of Shakespeare the Man and William Shakespeare: a Biography, and has produced a modern edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, with prose versions and notes to aid the readers.