Shakespearean, p.1
Shakespearean, page 1
ROBERT
McCRUM
SHAKESPEAREAN
On Life & Language
in Times of Disruption
For Emma
I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford . . . To-day we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)
Contents
PART ONE, 1564–2016:
‘Who’s There?’
Prologue: ‘Was This the Face?’
One: ‘The Book of Life’
Two: ‘To Be, or Not To Be’
Three: ‘The Whirligig of Time’
Four: ‘Something Is Rotten in the State’
PART TWO, 1585–1593:
‘Shake-scene’
Five: ‘The Very Cunning of the Scene’
Six: ‘Hot Ice’
Seven: ‘The Death of Kings’
Eight: ‘Upstart Crow’
Nine: ‘Dead Shepherd’
PART THREE, 1594–1599:
‘Words, Words, Words’
Ten: ‘Sin of Self-Love’
Eleven: ‘Wood’
Twelve: ‘W. Shake-speare’
Thirteen: ‘A Kingdom for a Stage’
PART FOUR, 1600–1609:
Shakespearean
Fourteen: ‘Distracted Globe’
Fifteen: ‘What You Will’
Sixteen: ‘Tell Me Who I Am’
Seventeen: ‘Shameful Conquest’
Eighteen: ‘Brave New World’
Nineteen: ‘A World Elsewhere’
PART FIVE, 1610–1616:
‘Exit Ghost’
Twenty: ‘Chaos Is Come Again’
Twenty-One: ‘Our Revels Now Are Ended’
Twenty-Two: ‘Sans Everything’
Twenty-Three: ‘The Undiscover’d Country’
Epilogue: ‘Remember Me’
Postscript
Footnotes
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
Select Book List
PART ONE, 1564–2016:
‘Who’s There?’
Shakespeare then and now. How he’s always modern, and why we turn to his ‘book of life’ in years of crisis and disruption.
Prologue
‘WAS THIS THE FACE?’
The Portrait of a Young Man, 1585
1.
Through the darkness, under a brilliant spotlight, the enigmatic portrait of the anonymous young man glows like an icon in the dining hall of the Cambridge college where I grew up. After more scrutiny, this late-Tudor treasure, painted on wood, will furnish two dates – Aetatis suae 21 Anno Domini 1585, the sitter’s age, plus the year in which he was posing – and a sombre, transgressive motto, Quod me nutrit me detruit, meaning, ‘That which nourishes me also destroys me.’
The young man’s costume is rich and fashionable, a gorgeous midnight-black velour doublet, cut to flash some peachy silk, and studded with exquisite gold buttons. His expression is confident but opaque. Pausing in front of this eye-catching scholar, we might be drawn to his face, framed by that androgynous mane of auburn hair. His lips are full and sensual. Do they express a smile? Possibly we are still guessing. Is there, in those dark-brown eyes, at once fearless and provocative, a challenge or an invitation? Perhaps he doesn’t know, either. The shadow of his beard and that wispy moustache tells us he’s barely out of adolescence. In the England of 1585, his inky costume alludes to Machiavellian thought, atheism and fashionable melancholy. Quod me nutrit me detruit. What unrequited love does this effeminate youth refer to? What existential torment? Who is he, and what are his circumstances?
Slowly, as we study this inscrutable image, he comes into focus as a university scholar, born in 1564, the same year as William Shakespeare. Further investigation, which now morphs into informed guesswork, even wishful thinking, yields an Elizabethan high-flyer, a godless poet, a homosexual, a secret agent – and finally, a name.
The most famous playwright in Elizabethan England, Christopher Marlowe is still remembered for the lyrical rhetoric of ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’, and perhaps for revolutionizing English theatre. Familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries as ‘Kit’, he is the author of poems like ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, and plays such as Dr Faustus and The Jew of Malta. Yet, more than four centuries on, Marlowe and his work can seem as antique as oil-paint on wood.
This ‘putative portrait’ is an image I grew up with. My father, Michael McCrum, was the senior tutor of Corpus Christi College when, in 1954, an undergraduate brought him some dusty pieces of scrap he’d rescued from a skip, an obscure picture of a young man in sixteenth-century dress, which he thought might be of interest. ‘Since Marlowe was born in 1564,’ my father later recalled, ‘the dates fitted, and the Latin motto seemed appropriate. So it was possible that this was a portrait of the playwright, an alumnus of the college. We took the picture to our resident medievalist, who insisted that it should be cleaned and restored.’
Since then, although there has been no further proof of identity, the picture, which hung for many years in the college hall, has become the accepted likeness of Christopher Marlowe. It’s a haunting work of art, widely reproduced, that acts as a poignant reminder of a life cut short by sinister violence. Marlowe’s melancholy image also suggests a greater truth: namely, that the deeper we enter this singular universe, the more remote it becomes. Indeed, it’s chiefly the language and literature of Renaissance England which links us to a society so distant, strange and potent as to be simultaneously enthralling yet unknowable.
This anonymous portrait, which is almost contemporary with the year of Will Shakespeare’s hasty wedding to Anne Hathaway, provokes many questions. None is bigger than this: how is it that one sixteenth-century English writer no longer enjoys even a fraction of the acclaim he knew in his prime, while another continues to speak to us, from day to day, almost as our contemporary? Today, Marlowe and his work are familiar mainly to specialists. The dangerous aesthete, who is a perennial topic of conspiracy theory, remains a tantalizing source of academic speculation, whereas Shakespeare will always be . . . Shakespeare.
2.
My question is: how did this happen? Why does Shakespeare live on as one of us, not merely in Britain, but across the globe? Posterity is fickle, and literary afterlives capricious, but Shakespeare’s universal fame is spectacular and unprecedented. What is his secret as a vibrant part of modern culture, as well as a touchstone of English, American, and even the world’s literature? How did a young man who grew up in rural Warwickshire, who did not go to university, who forged his early career paying Marlowe the sincere tribute of imitation, and who died at the age of fifty-two, far from court or cloister, become not merely ‘Shakespeare’ but also the global icon for something far more influential: namely, that quality we call ‘Shakespearean’? What follows is a highly personal inquiry into the making, and perpetual remaking, of the greatest writer who ever lived, in relation to his time and our own. This investigation explores the paradox that, where Marlowe subordinated much of his art to his life – and is remembered accordingly – Shakespeare sublimated experience through art: in his plays, indeed, art and life become inextricable and timeless.
I will argue that today, in finding so many points of relevance and sympathy, we are closer than ever to Shakespeare and his world. His name conjures a universe of characters, poetry, scenes and ideas undergoing constant reinterpretation by audiences, actors and artists across the world, for more than four hundred years. It’s through the dialogue of these incessant metamorphoses that, now more than ever, this ‘Shakespeare’ is as much a part of our time as of his. Moreover, it’s as our contemporary that he remains modern, a writer with whom we inevitably engage, often not knowing precisely how or why. I am also concerned to examine the mystery of that transaction, by anatomizing the nature of the dialogue Shakespeare always sponsors with those, like me, who attend his plays or read his poetry, poised between the two worlds of then and now.
To write Shakespearean, I have immersed myself in the Elizabethan age of Marlowe and Shakespeare, although this remains a moving target. Pre-modern, and on the cusp of change, it does not always answer to the kinds of biographical inquiry we are used to. There are tantalizing gaps in the record of both lives, and in the many mysteries surrounding their work. Plays, players, and playwrights had neither the recognition nor the status they enjoy today. Yet both men left behind a treasure house of poetry and prose. Accordingly, I have grounded my argument in black and white – the words on the page – those surviving texts from a world now otherwise lost.
These words remain as fraught with significance as ever. In his essay, ‘Shakespeare Four Hundredth’, the scholar and critic George Steiner once wrote:
The words with which we seek to do him homage are his. We look for new celebration and find echo. Shakespeare has his mastering grip on the marrow of our speech. The shapes of life which he created give voice to our inward needs. We catch ourselves crooning desire like street-corner Romeos; we fall to jealousy in the cadence of Othello; we make Hamlets of our enigmas; old men rage and dodd
Steiner acknowledged that he was only echoing ‘the din of commemoration’. If you exclaim, ‘How noble he was in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable,’ he conceded, you are simply quoting. But the question remains: is his genius a sufficient explanation for the reverence towards Shakespeare? Yes, of course. But how was it – to address the matter another way – that he became, and still becomes, ‘Shakespearean’?
To start with, there are his arresting first lines, which always dive in at the deep end.
One
‘THE BOOK OF LIFE’
When sometime-lofty towers I see down razed.
Sonnet 64, 3
1.
‘Who’s there?’
Bernardo the watchman’s terror-struck challenge in the opening line of Hamlet signals an emergency. It’s a question which reverberates throughout the drama that follows, alerting the audience to something life-threatening at stake. More universally, it is a question for everyone in dramatic and disturbing times. With so many dangers on hand at every turn, ‘Who’s there?’ becomes a chyron for the way we live now. Spontaneous expressions of fear will become the first clue in my search for the meaning of Shakespearean, a quest that starts with the new millennium.
Not one thousand days into the twenty-first century, the sky came crashing down. For a few apocalyptic hours, on 11 September 2001, the earth itself seemed to explode in fire and fury. With hindsight, the inferno at the foot of Manhattan, a snapshot of American trauma televised across the world, became the fiery emblem of millennial catastrophe. Worse still, these upheavals were being experienced, in various iterations of chaos and disruption, throughout many different countries across the world. Once upon a time, in 1989, we had been instructed in ‘the end of history’. Now we were living with a time ‘out of joint’, and a history which seemed to fast-forward so precipitously that we could scarcely draw breath before the next crisis, still less make sense of what was happening. As I write, in the shadow of Covid-19, these first twenty-one years of the twenty-first century have become long decades of imminent dread, an age of profound anxiety, a state of mind Shakespeare would understand.
Against a backdrop of the Internet boom, the biggest communications revolution in five hundred years, 9/11 morphed into the war on terror, which in turn inspired the invasion and then the horrors of the war in Iraq, the tortures of Abu Ghraib, and the medieval atrocities of ISIS. Then, just as the next US election seemed to offer new hope for change in the skinny, rhetorical figure of Barack Obama, the roof fell in, almost literally, with the bursting of the American housing bubble, and the ‘credit crunch’ of 2007–8. In 1Q84, his 2011 novel, the writer Haruki Murakami captured the mood of the moment: ‘Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.’
For a while, Obama’s silver oratory was able to spin an elevated narrative line, until even his words were not enough. Other great communicators – from Bill Clinton to Nelson Mandela – withdrew, or fell silent. In the past, it would have been the voices of the world’s leaders who provided the most comfort. Now, it seemed, there was only a rogues’ gallery of rabble-rousers, a jarring and raucous Babel, while the economies of the West set about rebuilding their shattered banking systems.
As the Obama presidency stumbled to an end in race riots, there was at least the prospect, for progressives, of the first woman president in the Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. Simultaneously, on the other side of the Atlantic, the daily news was unfolding in more traditional ways. In Scotland, a knife-edge referendum on independence confounded many pollsters when the Scots decided, by a clear margin, not to leave the United Kingdom. For a moment, we could begin to breathe again.
History and hubris are cousins, however. After the Scottish vote, having barely broken a sweat during the Brexit referendum, the British political class went to bed on the night of 23 June 2016 secure in the expectation that there would be no change to the status quo. In the first of many rude awakenings that year, the next morning brought the news that a fiercely committed majority of insular Britons wanted to ‘take back control’. By the end of the day, the prime minister had resigned. Within weeks, a new government was in power, the old order in the dustbin of history, and the progressive commentariat dumbfounded.
Not since its army of redcoats marched out of Yorktown to the tune of ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ in 1781 had the British establishment suffered such a humiliating defeat. In the bitter aftermath, ‘Brexit’ became the shorthand for a universal expression of utter incomprehension: a profound national dismay about Britain’s prospects, with almost nobody – apart from a few deluded Brexiteers – having any clarity about the future, in an angry clash of tribes.
Lack of certainty was one thing. Unthinkable outcomes were something else. In November 2016, Mrs Clinton’s failure to reach the White House was, for democrats in the United States, a seismic political event commensurate to the UK’s Brexit vote. On college campuses across America, a generation of young voters phoned their parents, wept, threw up, suffered panic attacks, and launched a tsunami of tweets, a harbinger of things to come.
On Friday 20 January 2017, at the inauguration of the new president, this bafflement reached to the very top. When the former host of Celebrity Apprentice concluded his first address to the American people, a raw expression of domestic ‘nativism’, ex-president George W. Bush turned to his neighbour on the podium and muttered, ‘That was some weird shit.’
Henceforward, the headline news, in Britain and America, throughout Europe and across the developed world, was the growing recognition of a deeper and more pervasive disruption – to some ‘the new normal’ – that seemed to threaten the established order of things. Worst of all, for many, even once-familiar paths into the future seemed obscure and uncertain.
This was especially true in the bitterly disputed world of climate change, whose debates became turbocharged by the appearance of Greta Thunberg. After 2015, the Paris Accord, which had seemed to offer a glimmer of hope for the future, was rejected by US republicans, but vindicated by some apocalyptic weather conditions in 2018–19. Elsewhere in the public arena, there was only confusion and mistrust. Finally, amid the cacophony, there was a familiar voice, one that seemed to understand our predicament, a voice of vision and clarity that offered a secure narrative line through the constancy of its focus on states of risk: the words of William Shakespeare.
2.
As it turned out, Shakespeare had already anticipated this moment of disruption in sonnet 64:
When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,
When sometime-lofty towers I see down razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage,
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate:
That time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
Not only had Shakespeare already painted a picture of a world in terrifying flux; further, he’d addressed many multiplying anxieties in the words of the king in 2 Henry IV, ‘O, God! That one might read the book of fate, And see the revolution of the times [3.1.44–6]’.
Amid a rising sea of troubles, as every generation in society came to terms with the challenges of the present, from populist nationalism to ‘Fake News’ and #MeToo, the plays of William Shakespeare were once again finding an audience in answer to the needs of the moment. Some two hundred years earlier, the great American critic Ralph Waldo Emerson had saluted Shakespeare as the author of ‘the book of life’, and a sublime master of literary omniscience: ‘What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man’s work, has he not remembered? What sage has he not outseen?’ Bewildered progressives today, possibly resistant towards such quasi-ecstatic sentiments, could still share the idea. After 2016, ‘Shakespearean’ became a buzzword that surged back into the language in two senses:
