Looking for Shakespeare in Local and Theatrical Circles

Transcription

1 Book Reviews 293 provoking. In the case of Marston it implies that we shall come to appreciate him better if we take him for what he is, and for one who might have been in some ways ahead of Jonson in spite of the latter s copious and multivalent achievement. Peter Happé University of Southampton DOI: /bjj Looking for Shakespeare in Local and Theatrical Circles Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, eds., The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015: xii pp. Bart Van Es, Shakespeare in Company. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013: xiv pp. How does one attempt to reconstruct the formative experiences of England s greatest playwright when all that remains are a few official records of baptisms, deaths, marriages, real estate transactions, legal suits, tax assessments, and a will? Or how does one explain his theatrical development when one treats him as a unique genius unrelated to his theatrical milieu? The challenge of Shakespeare biography both personal and literary is the challenge of filling the gaps in our knowledge of his person and the circumstances that shaped his work. These two books, which attempt to shed new light on Shakespeare by tracing the company he kept, undertake that challenge in different ways: more comprehensively by The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography, which devotes two-thirds of its space to chapters on his family members, friends, and associates in Stratford; and more substantively by Shakespeare in Company, which discusses his theatrical development more fully in relation to changes in the personnel and organization of his dramatic company, to the nature of their theatrical spaces, and to the influence of his late collaborators. Interestingly, the volumes share chapters or sections

2 294 BEN JONSON JOURNAL on his early dramatic rivals and possible collaborators, on the Burbage family, on fellow actors Kemp, Armin, Heminges, and Condell, and on later co-authors Middleton, Wilkins, and Fletcher. The differences in their treatment of these common topics are instructive. Subtitled An Alternative Biography, The Shakespeare Circle might more accurately be labeled Materials for a Biography, for it lacks the orderly introduction of incidents or personages on which any good biography depends. Its twenty-five chapters, each by a different scholar, explore what is known about Shakespeare s parents, siblings, and children, his Stratford friends and neighbors, and many of his literary and theatrical associates. Editors Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells express the hope that these explorations... will both add to our knowledge of the society of his time and, more specifically, will cast reflected light back on Shakespeare himself, enriching our understanding of him by offering a fuller than usual picture of his personal and professional relationships (1). Drawing on the resources of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, with which Edmondson and Wells are associated, the chapters on his Warwickshire ties incorporate recent research into local history and the material evidence of the Shakespeare properties, while those on his London contacts discuss literary and theatrical contexts. The resulting volume offers many excellent essays, but suffers from an inconsistent drive to relate its subjects to Shakespeare and from the narrative fragmentation produced by treating shared events or topics from the perspective of different persons. Although the book s chapters sometimes cover clusters of related individuals, they generally focus on single figures, which guarantees that the women in Shakespeare s family get their proper due. The downside of this is that some incidents are treated repeatedly, but elliptically: the enclosure of the Welcombe commons that threatened Shakespeare s financial interests, for example, is mentioned in four different places, but not fully described until the chapter on the Combes family on pp In the chapters on Shakespeare s relatives and Warwickshire neighbors, at least three possible interrelated narratives struggle to emerge: first, the Shakespeare family s gradual progress up the social scale; second, Stratford s experience as a community

3 Book Reviews 295 troubled by the shocks of religious Reformation, fire, plague, poor harvests, and enclosure; and third, Shakespeare s continuing involvement in Stratford as a family man and landowner even as he achieved success on the London stage. Michael Woods places the Arden family and Shakespeare s mother in the context of upwardly-mobile husbandmen and traditional Catholics conforming to the Church of England, yet carrying on pre-reformation thought patterns. David Fallow s revisionist discussion of Shakespeare s father John argues that the major source of his wealth and of his later financial and legal troubles was his activity as an unlicensed wool dealer who also loaned money above the legal rate of interest. Katherine Scheil s chapter on Anne Hathaway considers the archaeological evidence about New Place as a large and wealthy household, defends Anne against the negative implications some draw from Shakespeare s bequest to her of his second best bed, and notes the implicit celebration of selfless devotion in the epitaph praising her as a nursing mother (67 68). Catherine Richardson s essay on Shakespeare s siblings links brother Gilbert s service as Shakespeare s agent in Stratford and Shakespeare s care of the much-younger Edmund, also a London actor, to contemporary ideals of fraternal behavior. Greg Wells connects the medical practice of Shakespeare s son-in-law John Hall to the idealized treatment of physicians in Shakespeare s late plays and details his support of the puritanical vicar Thomas Wilson. René Weis completes the account of the Shakespeare family s rise with a chapter on Shakespeare s granddaughter, who became Lady Elizabeth Barnard. Drawing on the evidence of leases, bequests, the naming of godchildren, and neighborly proximity, the contributors sketch in a rough sociogram of Shakespeare s connections. Not only were there long-standing relationships between the Ardens, the Shakespeares, and the Hathaways, but Stanley Wells essay on the Combes family and Susan Brock s on Shakespeare s beneficiaries remind us that financial dealings and personal ties bound him to many of his Stratford neighbors. Unfortunately, however, the historical record is too thin to offer much evidence about the basis or quality of those relationships. Brock calls the Stratford friends mentioned in Shakespeare s will mavericks (226), but why some of them were singled out for bequests remains a

4 296 BEN JONSON JOURNAL mystery. Even in the case of Shakespeare s family members, we know little beyond a few basic facts, leaving an open field for speculation and implicit disagreements among the various authors. David Fallows argument that John Shakespeare never fell from financial grace after 1576 (34 36) ignores the mortgaging of Mary Arden s inherited lands at Asbies in 1579 and their subsequent loss (see Wood 22 23). Germaine Greer s fanciful claim that Judith Shakespeare served as the Quineys maid, secretly loving Thomas Quiney for years but not daring to marry him because she had no marriage portion, is based only on the evidence that Judith, along with Thomas Greene and his wife, witnessed a deed for Bess and Adrian Quiney in Greg Wells views Susanna Hall s citation as a recusant in 1606 as due to her Puritan leanings (91 92), while Lachlan Mackinnon interprets it as evidence of her Catholicism (77 78). At the same time, Mackinnon (67 68) attributes to Susanna the authorship of Anne Shakespeare s Latin epitaph (and of all the other Shakespeare family epitaphs as well!), even though Scheil (91 92) points out its Puritan associations and proposes other candidates. What is evident, however, is that Shakespeare fraternized with a broad range of people whose opinions or behavior he may sometimes have disagreed with while remaining detached from the passionate disputes that divided his community. The chapters on Shakespeare s London associates bring us closer to his creative work and, at their best, offer insights about the impact of his associations on his art. Readers of this journal will appreciate David Riggs fine discussion of the long relationship of Shakespeare and Jonson both of whom, he notes, were the sons of tradesmen, received a grammar school education, married early, entered the theater as actors, and reinvented themselves as playwrights. Riggs deftly traces their competition from Jonson s initial imitation in TheCaseIsAlteredof the Roman comedy doubleplot of The Comedy of Errors through their reciprocal exploitation of the comedy of humors and their mutual satire in the War of the Theaters to their divergent development of tightly-structured satirical comedy and free-ranging romance. Carol Chillington Rutter s essay on Richard Field, Shakespeare s Stratford schoolfellow and the publisher of Venus and Adonis, describes the workings of a contemporary print shop and suggests that Field may have given him access to translations of Plutarch and Ovid

5 Book Reviews 297 and of works by Puttenham, Spencer, Sidney, and Chapman. John H. Astington s account of the Burbage family s theatrical activities stresses Richard Burbage s acting career and his brother Cuthbert s role in realizing the ambitious plans of their father James for constructing the Globe and the Blackfriars theaters. Paul Edmondson s discussion of John Heminges and Henry Condell fills out the account of the King s Men s personnel and takes up their role in editing the 1623 Folio. Alan H. Nelson briefly surveys Shakespeare s various literary and theatrical patrons, with special attention to the Earl of Southampton. The recent emphasis on Shakespeare s collaborations is reflected in chapters by Andy Kesson on Robert Greene s attack on him as an upstart crow beautified with others feathers and by Duncan Salkeld, Emma Smith, and Lucy Munro on his shared work with George Wilkins, Thomas Middleton, and John Fletcher, respectively. Many of these essays offer useful information, but unfortunately, they also sometimes fail to connect the dots, leaving it uncertain just how Shakespeare s writing took the abilities of his fellow actors into account or how it differed from or complemented that of his writing partners. So, to cite two brief examples, while Astington neatly outlines the history of the Burbages theatrical activities and the wealth it brought them, he devotes only one sentence to Richard Burbage s performance of the great roles of Shakespeare s Jacobean period (258); and while Lucy Munro stresses the closeness of collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher in Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen and devotes a paragraph to the extent to which [their works] were already intertwined before 1612 (312), she does so with a minimum of supporting detail. Space guidelines imposed by the general editors may have something to do with this, but the effect is to limit the amount of reflected light on Shakespeare. A good example of what can be done in a small space is Bart Van Es s insightful chapter in The Shakespeare Circle about the contrasting impact on Shakespeare s comedies of Will Kemp s clownery and the more learned, intellectual wit of the company fool, Robert Armin, convincingly illustrated with excerpts from Kemp s and Armin s published writings. Van Es cites the malapropisms of the artisans in A Knack to Know a Knave, like those in A Midsummer Night s Dream, and the cuckoldry plot of Kemp s

6 298 BEN JONSON JOURNAL Singing Simkin, which employs the device of hiding in a chest like that in The Merry Wives of Windsor, as evidence of Shakespeare s ability at crafting parts that were specifically tailored to [Kemp s] skills (264), just as his fools in As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and King Lear draw on the self-proclaimed liberty and the physical and intellectual aggression of the personas established in Armin s pamphlets (see ). Van Es s demonstration here of how Shakespeare s dramatic vision changed with his comic personnel reworks several chapters in his larger project, Shakespeare in Company, which argues that shifts in Shakespeare s compositional method throughout his career can be related to an alteration in the conditions under which the playwright produced his work (74). The changing style and characterization of his plays, Van Es contends, correlate with his progress from his early role as an unattached, often-collaborative playwright to his position after 1594 as an actor-sharer and later householder in the most stable Elizabethan dramatic company and then to his return to coauthorship in semi-retirement in Stratford after Van Es s reading of the earliest part of Shakespeare s career may seem the most debatable. Following Lukas Erne, he claims that Shakespeare should not be characterized from the outset as a man of the theatre (74), but as a grammar-school-trained literary dramatist competing and at times collaborating with university graduates like Marlowe, Peele, Nashe, and Greene. His extended analysis of Shakespeare s early style emphasizes its Marlovian echoes, its rhetorical patterning, and its imitation of Ovid, Seneca, Plautus, and the Italian commedia erudita. Highlighting the literary ambition implicit in the Ovidian title-page motto of Venus and Adonis (17), he downplays Greene s parodic reference to Shakespeare in 1592 as a tiger s heart wrapped in a player s hide because it is the only reference that connects him with acting of any kind (108). This, however, is to ignore Henry Chettle s prompt defense of Shakespeare as someone excellent in the quality [i.e., occupation of player see OED I.6.a] he professes (see S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life [1977] 154). That he turned to narrative poetry in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, produced during the plague years of 1593 and 1594 when acting troupes endured a forced vacation, does not, after all, necessarily conflict with the assumption that he began

7 Book Reviews 299 writing for the stage as an actor in companies like those of the Earls of Derby, Pembroke, or Sussex that produced The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus, even though we have no direct record of that activity. Given Chettle s confirmation of Greene s statement about his occupation, it therefore seems to be an overstatement to claim that the events of 1594 [in which Shakespeare joined the newly-formed Lord Chamberlain s Men]... transformed, in an instant, his day-to-day working practice (108). What Van Es does show persuasively is that the distinctive organization of the Chamberlain s Men, where the leading actors were both sharers in the company profits and householders with a stake in their theater buildings, were responsible both for Shakespeare s growing wealth and for his developing ability to craft unusually well-balanced roles for actors whose capacities he knew intimately. The company s remarkable stability and Shakespeare s control over the casting of his plays, Van Es argues, impacted the psychological depth of his drama by allowing him to create physically distinct characters whose qualities emerge through their interaction with other speakers on stage (92 93). As an example of this new relational drama, he cites the even distribution of parts among the major figures of Richard II, noting how Shakespeare now employs carefully individuated speakers to focus on the distinct character trajectories of a small core of principal roles taken by known sharers (121). Van Es finds a potential parallel to Shakespeare s career in that of Thomas Heywood, whose role as a sharer in the newly-formed Worcester s Men in 1600 led to his close relationship with the principal comic actor in the company, Thomas Greene, and to more complex characterization in A Woman Killed with Kindness. However, since Heywood s company eventually failed under a burden of debt and his dramatic heritage was dissipated, Van Es considers Shakespeare s unique. Van Es does not examine every play in the canon to prove his thesis, but he does link major developments in the Lord Chamberlain s/king s Men s history to changing features of the plays, and he is always aware of how work by other playwrights may have impacted Shakespeare s writing. Modifying Alfred Harbage s sharp division in Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions between the coterie audience of the re-emergent private theaters

8 300 BEN JONSON JOURNAL in the early 1600s and the moral and patriotic tastes of the public theater audience, Van Es argues that Shakespeare s work in this period involves an ideological rejection of the new drama even as it adopts some of its gritty, urban, and satirical fashions (197). So, following James Shapiro, he sees in Henry V a more sophisticated form of the history play, informed by Tacitean politics, yet one in which aristocratic disdain for social inferiors is criticized; he notes the fabliau artifice in All s Well that Ends Well but explores its links to the sympathetic view of women in public-theater patient-wife drama; and he reads Othello as a mixed form combining popular domestic drama, comedy, and high tragedy while juxtaposing an aggressive male language of cuckoldry and a feminine language of suffering (229). In the plays written after the building of the Globe in 1599, he also finds a connection between the size of the leading parts and Richard Burbage s larger share in the theater s ownership. Van Es suggests that Burbage was the perfect vehicle for Shakespeare s great tragic roles because of his remarkable ability, mentioned by his eulogists, at portraying his characters shifting passions truly to the life (240 41). Shakespeare exploits this quality throughout Hamlet, where the stylized Marlovian rhetoric of the player s rugged Pyrrhus speech dramatizes the grief a man might play, in counterpoint to Hamlet s assertion that the interior reality [of his sorrow] negates outward performance (239) a claim Shakespeare could have him make with confidence in Burbage s mimetic capacities. In the last stage of his career, Van Es contends, Shakespeare s earlier tight connection with his company was altered by an expansion in the number of sharers, by extended plague closures, and by his remove to Stratford, so that he was now working more as a poet than as a director of actors (262). However, Van Es argues that Shakespeare s greater separation from his dramatic company brings him into closer collaboration with other poets. Even in soleauthored plays like The Winter s Tale and The Tempest, Van Es cites evidence of repeated lyric echoes from The Faithful Shepherdess, as well as such Fletcherian elements as a taste for tragic-comic artifice, pastoral settings, sudden dramatic revelations, and the opposition of sexual jealousy and innocent purity. By contrast, joint productions like Timon of Athens, Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen are distinguished by a retreat from relational drama

9 Book Reviews 301 into characterization that is scene specific and static, by radical breaks in locale, and by the greater use of spectacle and patterned language. Still, Van Es finds evidence that Shakespeare and his coauthors shared in common a humanist poetics that left room for creative imitation and competition even as they collaborated. Van Es s readings of the plays are sensitive both to their poetic texture and their dramatic aspects, bringing together theater history and critical insights in a challenging new synthesis. Some readers might wonder whether he does not at times overstate the deterministic impact of the company Shakespeare kept and understate his inner creative development, but all in all, he makes a credible case that Shakespeare s changing professional situation is mirrored in his works features. His effort to breathe life into the dry record of financial transactions, legacies, tributes, and company lists gives us the best account to date of Shakespeare s integration with the working patterns of early modern theatre (303 4) and stands as a model of what an alternative biography might be. W. David Kay University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign DOI: /bjj