It has been said that much of English literature grows out of the writings of William Shakespeare. Tomes have been written about him.
So what should one expect from yet another book about William Shakespeare? Harvard’s Stephen Greenbelt takes on a less explored topic. How could a man who grew up in a small town, a man who never attended Cambridge or Oxford and a man who acted in his own plays, go on to become the most celebrated and quoted playwright not just of his day but of all time?
In Stephen Greenblatt’s view, Shakespeare turned his humble origins into a critical element of his creative imagination, “He never forgot the provincial, everyday world from which he came or the ordinary face behind the mask of Arion.”
Shakespeare did not “harbour any regrets about failing to attend Oxford or Cambridge; nor he did show signs of a frustrated vocation as a scholar.”
In fact, he outshined his scholarly and elitist rivals, even in his day, with consummate ease. Of course, the fact that many succumbed to disease or drunkenness helped him raise his profile in the theatrical arena.
The setting of Medieval London influenced what he wrote. The city was flooded every year with fresh arrivals from the countryside. It was overcrowded, polluted and rat-infested. The city was prone to fire, unsafe and marked by the occasional riot. It was unhealthy. More people died every year than were born, but the city kept on growing.
But it also housed an architectural marvel, the 800-ft long structure over the River Thames, which a French visitor called “the most beautiful bridge in the world”.
And it featured a macabre tourist attraction, the Great Stone Gate, on which were posted the severed heads of nobles who had committed treason. The city was a nonstop theatre of punishments, not limited to the whippings and beatings that were prevalent in every major city of the time, but much more.
If someone was found guilty of murder, the offender’s right hand would be cut off at the place where he committed the crime. Subsequently, the bleeding malefactor was paraded through the streets to the execution site.
In these gruelling times, censorship was the order of the day. Any writer perceived to be critical of the monarch, or royalty, broadly speaking, ran the risk of being branded a traitor. The penalty for treason was death. Thus Shakespeare wrote under the most trying of conditions that writers faced in Elizabethan England.
He avoided criticising the rulers of his time and focused on those of another age. He also had to walk a fine line when it came to the ongoing battle between Catholics and Protestants. But religion plays a big role in his plays. Indeed, Greenblatt says Shakespearean writing would have been so much weaker if the great new English translation of the New Testament and the “sonorous, deeply resonant” Book of Common Prayer had not been available to him.
In Stephen Greenblatt’s view, Shakespeare turned his humble origins into a critical element of his creative imagination, ‘He never forgot the provincial, everyday world from which he came or the ordinary face behind the mask of Arion’
Was Shakespeare religious? It’s hard to say. His characters walk a fine line themselves. Hamlet, for example, seems at once to be both Catholic and Protestant, while being deeply sceptical of religion.
Shakespeare was not a historian, but rather an avid reader of history, drawing heavily from Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, and Raphael Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, as well as the Bible.
Strategic opacity as a literary concept had always been present in literature. But Shakespeare brought it to perfection in Hamlet. Greenblatt asserts that the key was not just the creation of opacity, “for by itself that would create a baffling or incoherent play.”
Rather, Shakespeare endued the plays with an inward logic that gave poetic coherence to the play and that was the hallmark of his genius. Shakespeare found that he could “immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays, that he could provoke in the audience, and in himself, a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold.”
Shakespeare’s personal life was marked by an unhappy marriage. And so are most marriages in his plays. In one, a character says, “Men are April when they woo, December when they wed.” In another, “Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.” And in yet another play, there is the formula, “wooing, wedding and repenting.” In two of his most famous plays, marriage is a haunting relationship between the spouses, as between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and between Gertrude and Claudius.
Greenblatt observes, “These marriages are powerful, in their distinct ways, but they are also upsetting, even terrifying, in their glimpses of genuine intimacy.”
The Bard’s plays are marked by the enigma of restoration. What was irrevocably lost by the main character is reclaimed against all hope but the recovery is never quite what it seems. In “The Winter’s Tale,” King Leontes, after 16 years, recovers the wife and daughter his paranoid jealousy had seemed to destroy. But the wide gap in time cannot be erased. The two women are no longer the women he remembered.
The plots of Shakespeare’s plays are not original to him. They are adaptions of other works in most cases. For example, Falstaff is taken from “The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth.” But the language in which the characters are presented, and the manner in which their story unfolds, are without peer. It’s well known that Shakespeare borrowed heavily from Christopher Marlowe but he created, says Greenblatt, “a set of characters and a range of emotions utterly alien to Marlowe”.
Greenblatt’s book is an exploration into Shakespeare’s imagination, addressing weighty questions such as who was he, where was he born and raised and why did he write what he did write. Despite the lack of first-hand archival material, such as diaries or letters, since none have survived or perhaps none were written because of the stern censorship that was a sign of the times, the book deftly probes each of those questions and provides tentative answers.
But it ends up being a lot more. We are given an in-depth tour of the characters and their lives in his major plays, including Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Richard II and King Lear. The book is a tour de force and a must-read.
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