Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

  E. A. J. Honigmann’s important Shakespeare: The Lost Years (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) focused attention on the young Shakespeare’s possible Lancashire connection, which continues to be intensely investigated and debated. Christopher Haigh’s Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975) provides a useful account of the religious stuggle in that region. Some of the most tantalizing findings for Shakespeare studies are reported in Richard Wilson’s “Shakespeare and the Jesuits,” in The Times Literary Supplement (December 19, 1997): 11–13, and explored in Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, ed. Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003). Here too there are dissenting views, including those presented by Robert Bearman in “‘Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte?’ Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53 (2002): 83–94. Bearman’s arguments are countered by Honigmann in “The Shakespeare/Shakeshafte Question, Continued,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003): 83–86. Jeffrey Knapp, in Shakespeare’s Tribe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), strenuously argues that the adult Shakespeare was committed to a broad-based Erasmian Christianity, carefully limited in its central doctrinal tenets, tolerant of the range of beliefs and practices that lay outside those tenets, and steadfastly communitarian. I have also had the benefit of reading in manuscript Wilson’s book Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion, and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). In Wilson’s view, the young Shakespeare was linked in some way to the Jesuits’ “terrorist cells” in Lancashire. Though he became wary of fanaticism, Wilson argues, Shakespeare remained a Catholic throughout his life and coded many cryptic Catholic messages in his plays.

  On Campion, Richard Simpson’s 1867 biography, Edmund Campion (London: Williams and Norgate), remains authoritative; Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935) is eloquent and highly partisan. See also E. E. Reynolds, Campion and Parsons: The Jesuit Missions of 1580–1 (London: Sheed and Ward, 1980); Malcolm South, The Jesuits and the Joint Mission to England during 1580–1581 (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1999); and James Holleran, A Jesuit Challenge: Edmund Campion’s Debates at the Tower of London in 1581 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999).

  CHAPTER 4: WOOING, WEDDING, AND REPENTING

  On Shakespeare’s marriage, the principal source remains J. W. Gray, Shakespeare’s Marriage (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905). David Cressy’s Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) is an illuminating guide to the contemporary conduct of the major life-cycle events. For the demographic estimates, I have relied on E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Anthony Burgess’s amusing novel, Nothing Like the Sun, is built around the presumption that Anne Whatley of Temple Grafton was a real person, Shakespeare’s lost love, rather than the trace of a clerical error.

  For the sentimental picture of Shakespeare in the bosom of his family, see the nineteenth-century lithograph, by an unknown artist, reproduced in Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: Records and Images, 199. The idea that sonnet 145 might be an early poem to Anne Hathaway is discussed in Andrew Gurr, “Shakespeare’s First Poem: Sonnet 145,” Essays in Criticism 21 (1971): 221–26.

  The second-best bed is interpreted as a “tender remembrance” in Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents, 2:491, who cites Joseph Quincy Adams. For a more realistic reading of Shakespeare’s last will and testament, see E. A. J. Honigmann, “Shakespeare’s Will and Testamentary Traditions,” in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware, 1994), 127–37. Frank Harris, in The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life-Story (New York: Michael Kennerley, 1909), depicts a Shakespeare consumed with loathing for his wife; it is from Harris that I take the suggestion that the curse on the person who moves his bones was Shakespeare’s way of keeping his wife from being laid, at her death, by his side. On the late seventeenth-century visitor to the grave who was told that the curse was Shakespeare’s last poem, see Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:259.

  CHAPTER 5: CROSSING THE BRIDGE

  On hunting (and its illegal cousin, poaching), see Edward Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Samuel Schoenbaum’s irenic view of Thomas Lucy’s character is found in William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, 107. There is a suggestive chapter on Somerville in Stopes, Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries. In Secret Shakespeare Richard Wilson revives the theory, first advanced by the Victorian critic Richard Simpson, that Somerville was not an isolated lunatic but rather a participant in a serious conspiracy. He did not commit suicide in the Tower, the theory goes, but was murdered by fellow conspirators in order to prevent his revealing incriminating evidence at the moment of his execution. (Why he should have waited until that moment is not readily apparent.) At some point before he wrote Hamlet (1600–1601), Shakespeare probably read Luis de Granada’s Of Prayer and Meditation (1582), but the link to Somerville should not be exaggerated: there was another edition of Luis’s work, published in 1599, without the incendiary dedicatory letter by Richard Harris that led Somerville to his fatal resolution.

  On touring, the ongoing volumes of the Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979–) are invaluable. Peter Greenfield, “Touring,” in New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 251–68; and Sally-Beth MacLean,” The Players on Tour,” in Elizabethan Theatre, vol. 10, ed. C. E. McGee (Port Credit, Ontario: P. D. Meany, 1988), 55–72, are useful and suggestive. On the possible connection of Shakespeare to the Queen’s Men, see McMillan and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays.

  For the impression London made upon first-time visitors, the place to begin is William Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners (London: John Russell Smith, 1865). See also A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay, eds., London 1500–1700: The Making of a Metropolis (London: Longman, 1986); N. L. Williams, Tudor London Visited (London: Cassell, 1991); Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and David Harris Sacks, “London’s Dominion: The Metropolis, the Market Economy, and the State,” in Material London, ca. 1600, 20–54. The characterization of London as “the Fair that lasts all year” is cited in Sacks.

  A crucial primary source for this and the following chapter is John Stow’s 1598 Survey of London, available in a modern edition, ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971).

  On the legal concept of Benefit of Clergy, see my “What Is the History of Literature?” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 460–81. On the concept of “moral luck,” see Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

  CHAPTER 6: LIFE IN THE SUBURBS

  Ian Archer has a useful account of “Shakespeare’s London,” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 43–56. On London’s “entertainment zone,” see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). On bearbaiting, see S. P. Cerasano, “The Master of the Bears in Art and Enterprise,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 5 (1991): 195–209; and Jason Scott-Warren, “When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens; or, What’s at Stake in the Comedy of Manners,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003): 63–82. The contemporary amused by the spectacle of the ape on the pony was the Spanish secretary to the Duke of Najera, who visited Henry VIII in 1544 (cited in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, from whence the Dekker quotation and the account of the Southwark spectacle also come).

  A mid-sixteenth-century undertaker kept a gruesome contemporary record
of London’s “theater of punishments”: The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563, ed. John Gough Nichols (London: Camden Society, 1848). Machyn’s diary stops before Shakespeare’s birth, but there is no sign in the later sixteenth century of a substantial reduction in the punishments he so assiduously notes.

  On the design and operation of the principal London playhouses in Shakespeare’s time, see, in addition to Chambers’s Elizabethan Stage, Herbert Berry, Shakespeare’s Playhouses (New York: AMS Press, 1987); Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642,3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Arthur Kinney, Shakespeare by Stages (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Many of the finer details of theatrical architecture and finance remain in dispute.

  A famous resource for Elizabethan theater studies is the detailed account book kept by the impresario Philip Henslowe. The book, Henslowe’s Diary, has been edited by R. A. Foakes (2nd ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). One problem, even with this remarkably detailed record, is to understand the contemporary significance of the charges and payments. Helpful guidance may be found in Roslyn L. Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); and Peter Davison, “Commerce and Patronage: The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s Tour of 1597,” in Shakespeare Performed, ed. Grace Ioppolo (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 58–59.

  The attacks on the stage by Northbrooke and Gosson, along with the ironic dialogue by Florio, are conveniently assembled in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage. There is an excellent account of the anxieties of Elizabethan officials in Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). On the government’s attempts to regulate the theater, see Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels (London: Macmillan, 1991), and Janet Clare, “Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority”: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990).

  All citations of the plays of Christopher Marlowe, with the exception of 2 Tamburlaine, are from English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). 2 Tamburlaine is cited from Christopher Marlowe, Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). The large critical literature on the impact of Marlowe on Shakespeare includes an illuminating article by Nicholas Brooke, “Marlowe as Provocative Agent in Shakespeare’s Early Plays,” in Shakespeare Survey 14 (1961): 34–44.

  On Edward Alleyne, see S. P. Cerasano, “Edward Alleyn: 1566-1626,” in Edward Alleyn: Elizabethan Actor, Jacobean Gentleman, ed. Aileen Reid and Robert Maniura (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1994), 11–31. There is no proof that Edward Alleyne was the first Tamburlaine, but he was famous for the part, and Nashe’s reference to him in 1589 as the Roscius of the contemporary players suggests that Alleyne created the role.

  On Shakespeare’s relation to the printing press, see David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Peter W. M. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). On Shakespeare’s reading, in addition to Bullough’s eight-volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I have found useful Henry Anders, Shakespeare’s Books: A Dissertation on Shakespeare’s Reading and the Immediate Sources of His Works (Berlin: Reimer, 1904); Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Methuen, 1977); Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Leonard Barkan, “What Did Shakespeare Read?” in Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 31–47.

  CHAPTER 7: SHAKESCENE

  On the competitive world in which Shakespeare worked, see James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), and James Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). On the collaborations that coexisted with the rivalries, see Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Jonathan Hope, The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). It is striking that the five plays to which Vickers devotes his lengthy study—Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen—are, by a wide consensus, among the weakest to bear Shakespeare’s name. The odd effect, then, of the most recent account of collaboration is to reinforce a highly traditional account of Shakespeare’s singular creative genius.

  Helpful and informative on the way in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries organized and conducted their professional lives are Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642;Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Professional Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); and Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time. Though not always reliable, T. W. Baldwin, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), lays out most of the key information. T. J. King, Casting Shakespeare’s Plays: London Actors and Their Roles, 1590–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and David Bradley, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), are illuminating, along with G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). In Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Lukas Erne argues that Shakespeare was more interested than scholars have usually recognized in the printed as well as the performance aspect of his plays.

  On Shakespeare as performer, see Meredith Skura, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and David Mann, The Elizabethan Player: Contemporary Stage Representation (London: Routledge, 1991), are useful, as is Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994).

  Shakespeare’s extraordinary talent was not ignored by his contemporaries and rivals. For some of their responses, see E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare’s Impact on His Contemporaries (London: Macmillan, 1982), and the two-volume Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700, ed. John Munro (London: Oxford University Press, 1932). Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), is illuminating on the first flowering of this talent.

  Marlowe’s strange and violent life has been the subject of many biographies, including Charles Nicholl’s engagingly speculative The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), Constance Kuriyama’s Christoper Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), and David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber, 2004). Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592) is available in an informative edition by D. Allen Carroll (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1994).

  CHAPTER 8: MASTER-MISTRESS

  On Southampton’s claim to be the fair young man of the sonnets, see, especially, G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). On the career of the possible go-between, see Fra
nces Yates, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934).

  Joel Fineman, who had little or no interest in Shakespeare’s biography, has, in my view, written the most psychologically acute study of the sonnets, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). The editions of the sonnets by Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), Katherine Duncan-Jones (Arden Shakespeare, 1997), and Colin Burrow (Oxford Shakespeare, 2002) each provide abundant commentaries, as does Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Duncan-Jones rehearses in detail the competing identifications of the principal figures in the sequence. In Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), Ted Hughes has brilliant pages on Venus and Adonis, which he views as the key to unlocking Shakespeare’s whole poetic achievement. Leeds Barroll’s Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) describes the circumstances that led to the periodic closing of the theaters on public health grounds. In “Elizabethan Protest, Plague, and Plays: Rereading the ‘Documents of Control,’” English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996): 17–45, Barbara Freedman argues against the view that plague closures were always enforced.

  The homoeroticism of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence was registered with shock at least as early as the eighteenth century, when the editor George Steevens remarked, “It is impossible to read [it] without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation.” On the complex erotic environment in which Shakespeare lived, worked, and (presumably) loved, see Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), as well as his Shakespeare and Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s chapter on the sonnets in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) is also extremely interesting.