Shakespeare

Shakespeare and deep England

Jonathan Bate's eloquent evocation of the man from Warwickshire

John Guy


At last we have a new kind of biography of Shakespeare. Starting from Ben Jonson’s description of Shakespeare as “Soul of the Age”, and shunning “the deadening march of chronological sequence that is biography’s besetting vice”, Jonathan Bate selects only the material that, he believes, will help to reveal Shakespeare’s cultural DNA. Structuring this loosely around the theme of the Seven Ages of Man from Jaques’s speech in As You Like It, Bate sweeps majestically backwards and forwards in time, moving between history and criticism, appropriating whatever best brings together Shakespeare’s life, work and world.
Ideas, texts and language are set by Bate in their different literary, philosophical and historical contexts. Blind alleys such as the identities of the Dark Lady or Mr W. H. are sidestepped, as is speculation about Shakespeare’s sexuality, religion or political beliefs, or even why he set out for London to become an actor. Rare exceptions to this reticence include a faltering sortie into whether Shakespeare might have been an Epicurean, and whether references to sexual disease, and especially to the “sweating-tub” in Sonnets 153 and 154, indicate that he was himself being treated for syphilis. Critical essays on Shakespeare’s works in relation to what he may be said to have been reading, as well as to cultural trends, more than compensate for this. One of the most stimulating is on the Sonnets. Stylometric analysis suggests that they were written over a decade or more. The later ones date to about 1603–5, and Bate argues that the “lovely boy” sequences, like the poetry of John Davies of Hereford, reflect the perplexingly bisexual, homoerotic milieu of the early Jacobean court, and have nothing to do with Shakespeare’s own encounters.
Of the many influences on Shakespeare, his Warwickshire origins were most important. As the grandson of a yeoman farmer and the son of a failing Stratford-upon-Avon shopkeeper, he belonged to the country, not the city. He did not accumulate property in London, and may even have felt uncomfortable there. Unlike his theatrical contemporaries, he set scenes in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire. He had a wide and detailed knowledge of country lore and the medicinal uses of plants, using names which baffled the London compositors who set his plays into print. Bate believes that Shakespeare invented “deep England”, a rustic idyll centred on the Midlands that delights in mingling morris men and royal spectacle. In As You Like It the action is set in Arden, not the Ardennes as in Shakespeare’s source, and the Duke and his men play at being “Robin Hood”. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Athenian wood is full of very English fairies and artisans. An idea of “deep England” first appears in Justice Shallow’s scenes in Henry IV Part 2, and is increasingly voiced in the History plays, until in King John Shakespeare asks who will speak for England during a bloody war of succession, when power-hungry leaders cannot agree. “Deep England” is part of the Elizabethan reshaping of national and regional identities. Map-making and “chorography” (the topographical and historical description of a locality) were in vogue. Men such as Christopher Saxton, John Norden, William Lambarde and their patrons were pioneers in a Protestant “redescription” of the nation. Shakespeare’s “reinvention” of England, however, lacked Protestant zeal: he was more interested in England’s ecology, as in Venus and Adonis, which Bate reads as a reaffirmation of Shakespeare’s “greenwood” credentials after the university-educated Robert Greene had attacked his “peasant” origins.
Venus and Adonis is used to show that Shakespeare could write elegant poetry in imitation of the ancients despite having no more than a basic grammar school education. His proficiency in Latin emerges from Bate’s reinvestigation of the syllabus he followed at school: after practising double-translation from Latin to English and back without a crib, students were trained in the art of rhetoric; they learned to mould language like wax, to argue in utramque partem (ie “for” and “against”) and to “move” audiences by their silver tongues. As Quintilian, the prince of orators, had explained, rhetoric “is an art which relies on moving the emotions by saying that which is false”. Or as Touchstone puts it in As You Like It, “The truest poetry is the most feigning”. The kinsman of the persuasive orator, Bate observes, is the convincing actor, and this gives fresh meaning to Shakespeare’s decision to embark on a stage career.
Related Links
Sexy Shakespeare
TLS Books of the Year 2008
Doctor Hamlet
Once Shakespeare advances from acting in plays and doctoring scripts to writing them, the rich variety of his sources becomes clear. Bate reveals how, for all his subject’s much-vaunted reliance on translations of Plutarch, Ovid and Virgil, he was able to base his Rape of Lucrece on a story in Ovid’s Fasti that had not been translated into English. His Latin was better than that of most modern classics graduates in Britain, and his rhetorical training taught him to pose problems and dramatize conflicting viewpoints in a non-partisan way. Bate sees this as the foundation of what he calls Shakespeare’s “theatrical magnanimity”. Never an apologist for any individual or moral standpoint, he was a writer whose plays can be reinterpreted by each successive age. But unlike Jonson, whom the great scholar William Camden had taught, Shakespeare was an “opportune” and not a methodical reader. Bate compares him to Autolycus – a “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles”. The priceless treasures would be his commonplace book or own library catalogue. In a captivating section, Bate attempts to reconstruct Shakespeare’s library. The thirty or forty books it contained include Golding’s Ovid, North’s Plutarch, Florio’s Montaigne, Chaucer, Caxton’s Trojan history, the chronicles of Ralph Holinshed and Edward Hall, and perhaps the Geneva Bible.
It seems that Shakespeare had access to a copy of the Geneva Bible when scripting Bottom’s dream in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The wit comes from its play on a passage from Corinthians, which speaks of how the human spirit searches “the bottom of God’s secrets”. Yet Bate underestimates the significance of claiming that Shakespeare owned one. The 1561 edition, with its marginal annotations, was certainly the most read Elizabethan Bible translation, but it was not the official one. Only a genuine Protestant – certainly no recusant, “church papist” or conservative in religion – would have chosen it. The dedicatory epistle, for example, would have outraged Queen Elizabeth, since it emasculated sacral monarchy and the Queen’s role as “Supreme Governor” of the Church. Bate concedes that, elsewhere, the phrasing of Shakespeare’s biblical allusions often resembles the officially sanctioned Bishops’ Bible, thus weakening his own case for Shakespeare’s ownership of the Geneva translation.
Bate writes with energy and panache, but occasionally protests too much. No evidence is offered for his claim that Elizabeth personally drafted a proclamation regulating players. What the source says is that “she wished to punish severely certain persons who had represented some comedies in which [she] was taken off”. Again, when the powers of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, were expanded, Bate insists that this had nothing to do with state censorship: the intention, he says, was to enable the Master to pre-empt the best shows for the court. The doubts arise when we later find Tilney ordering Shakespeare to cut the “Evil May Day” riots from the play, Sir Thomas More. The assumption that Elizabeth and her advisers, in 1559, created an “Anglican church” on a middle ground between Catholicism and Protestantism is also misplaced. Peter Lake has taught us to identify “Anglicanism” as a second wave of energy only emerging in the 1590s, emanating from the writings and sermons of Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes. The 1559 Religious Settlement, shaped by Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, not an “Act of Settlement”, established a Reformed theology. Some scholars have talked of a “Calvinist consensus”, which errs on the right side. The problem for the authorities was Elizabeth herself, who only wanted people to conform to the letter of the law on church attendance, not to be converts, which is most likely why Shakespeare fitted in so well.
Bate’s chapter on the Earl of Essex’s revolt in 1601 shows his strengths. The staging of a production of Richard II at the request of Essex’s men, who paid for a bespoke performance on the afternoon before the rebellion, is a set piece in every biography of Shakespeare. Bate corrects the common misapprehension that Essex wanted to plant the idea of a successful coup d’état in the minds of the London crowd: the State Papers prove that the trigger for Essex’s march into the streets came only after the play had been performed, when his enemies in the Privy Council struck out at him. Rejecting Blair Worden’s contention that Essex’s men had watched a dramatized version of Sir John Hayward’s The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV, Bate proves that Shakespeare’s play was staged. Richard II had for some years been the Essex faction’s “signature” text, since its “conceit” (as Sir Walter Ralegh put it) was ideally suited to their code of martial valour. Attending the play, therefore, was just one of a series of “bonding” sessions for Essex’s men.
Essex was more dangerous than Bate allows. The previous year, his men had urged Lord Mountjoy, his successor in Ireland, to send him 4,000–5,000 troops to remove “bad instruments” around Elizabeth. Mountjoy said he would have done so to save Essex from danger, but not to satisfy his “private ambition”. Still, Bate is right to say that the bespoke performance of Richard II was not meant to trigger a revolt, which is why Shakespeare escaped interrogation and a possible treason trial. Bate, less plausibly, doubts Lambarde’s report that Elizabeth famously compared herself to Richard II and complained of plays openly performed in the streets and houses of London. The source is Lambarde’s daughter, whose recollections had been transcribed by 1650. The Queen’s outburst is said to have occurred at a private audience at which Lambarde presented her with his Pandecta Rotulorum, a digest of records from the Tower of London. The Pandecta was most likely a unique presentation manuscript, and since it cannot be satisfactorily traced, Bate questions the entire episode. He seems unaware of an abstract from the lost work, once belonging to Thomas Astle, entitled “Mr Lambard’s Pandect of the Records in the Tower” which is now in the British Library and looks authentic.
These, however, are minor defects. Jonathan Bate sets out to write an intellectual biography, and he triumphantly succeeds. He knows an extraordinary amount about Shakespeare, and provocative, startling insights leap out from almost every page. His book is enthralling, the most eloquent evocation of Shakespeare one is ever likely to encounter: as bewitching as watching Hermione’s statue come alive in The Winter’s Tale.

Jonathan Bate SOUL OF THE AGEThe life, mind and world of William Shakespeare 500pp. Viking. £25.978 0 670 91482 1

John Guy is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. His most recent book, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More, appeared last year.