Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

LET US IMAGINE that Shakespeare found himself from boyhood fascinated by language, obsessed with the magic of words. There is overwhelming evidence for this obsession from his earliest writings, so it is a very safe assumption that it began early, perhaps from the first moment his mother whispered a nursery rhyme in his ear: Pillycock, pillycock, sate on a hill, If he’s not gone—he sits there still.

He heard things in the sounds of words that others did not hear; he made connections that others did not make;

So it was that Will’s father and mother wanted their son to have a proper classical education. John Shakespeare himself seems to have had at most only partial literacy: as the holder of important civic offices in Stratford-upon-Avon, he probably knew how to read, but throughout his life he only signed his name with a mark. Judging from the mark she made on legal documents, Mary Shakespeare, the mother of England’s greatest writer, also could not write her name, though she too might have acquired some minimal literacy. But, they evidently decided, this would not suffice for their eldest son. The child no doubt began with a “hornbook”—a wooden tablet with the letters and the Paternoster printed on a piece of parchment covered with a thin sheet of transparent horn—and with the standard primary school text, The ABC with the Cathechism.

But probably starting at age seven, he was sent to the Stratford free grammar school, whose central educational principle was total immersion in Latin.

Perhaps there was a time, a year or so before Will left school, when the teacher—Oxford-educated Thomas Jenkins—decided to have the boys perform Plautus’s frenetic farce about identical twins, The Two Menaechmuses. And perhaps on this occasion, Jenkins, recognizing that one of his students was precociously gifted as both a writer and an actor, assigned Will Shakespeare a leading role. There is hard evidence from later in his life that Shakespeare loved this particular play’s combination of logic and dizzying confusion, the characters constantly just missing the direct encounter and the explanation that would resolve the mounting chaos. When he was a young playwright in London casting about for the plot of a comedy, he simply took over The Two Menaechmuses, added a second set of twins to double the chaos, and wrote The Comedy of Errors.

That writing builds upon two crucial expectations the morality plays instilled in their audiences: first, the expectation that drama worth seeing would get at something central to human destiny and, second, that it should reach not only a coterie of the educated elite but also the great mass of ordinary people.

Shakespeare also absorbed specific elements of his stagecraft from the moralities. They helped him understand how to focus theatrical attention on his characters’ psychological, moral, and

spiritual life, as well as on their out...

Shakespeare grasped that the spectacle of human destiny was, in fact, vastly more compelling when it was attached not to generalized abstractions but to particular named people, people realized with an unprecedented intensity of individuation: not Youth but Prince Hal, not Everyman but Othello.

such plays as The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III, was capable of a very different kind of dramatic speech, altogether tougher and leaner, but in A Midsummer Night’s Dream he gave full scope to what is, to borrow one of the adjectives he uses here, luscious poetry. Among Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the very few for which scholars have never located a dominant literary source; its vision of moonlit, fairy-haunted woods evidently sprang from more idiosyncratic and personal imaginative roots.

When in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the thirty-year-old Shakespeare, drawing deeply upon his own experiences, thought about his profession, he split the theater between a magical, virtually nonhuman element, which he associated with the power of the imagination to lift itself away from the constraints of reality, and an all-too-human element, which he associated with the artisans’ trades that actually made the material structures—buildings, platforms, costumes, musical instruments, and the like—structures that gave the imagination a local habitation and a name. He understood, and he wanted the audience to understand, that the theater had to have both, both the visionary flight and the solid, ordinary earthiness.

That earthiness was a constituent part of his creative imagination. He never forgot the provincial, everyday world from which he came or the ordinary face behind the mask of Arion.

The most obvious access to the theater companies for a talented young man was through apprenticeship. But Will’s marriage license places him securely in Stratford in November 1582, at the age of eighteen, and the baptismal records of his children—Susanna, christened on May 26, 1583, and the twins Hamnet and Judith, christened on February 2, 1585—strongly suggest that he still lived there or at the very least continued to make regular visits. Apprentices were usually taken on as adolescents and were not allowed to marry (let alone to father children in their late teens).

Still, the skills that theatrical apprentices acquired provide a clue to some of the things that the young Shakespeare must have been learning to do, however he earned his living, in the years after he left school.

actors were supposed to be gifted musicians, able to play at least the impressive range of string instruments that Phillips evidently played—the guitar-like cittern, the mandolin-like bandore (from which we get the word “banjo”), the immensely popular lute, and the bass viol. Second, they were expected to be able to fight—or at least convincingly to mime fighting—with sword and dagger. More generally, they had to be agile: there is often dancing, as well as fighting, in Elizabethan drama, and all performances of plays, whether tragic or comic, ended with complex dances. (It takes some adjustment to imagine the players in Hamlet or King Lear brushing off the stage blood at the play’s end, joining hands, and performing a set of elaborate figures, but so they did.)

Third, as the bequests strongly imply, they were expected to wear clothes gracefully: Phillips’s “mouse-coloured velvet hose” were no doubt designed to show off his legs—in this period of long dresses, it was men’s legs, rather than women’s, to which eyes were drawn.

The musical ability, sword fighting, and above all the costly clothing of velvet and silks (for taffeta in this period referred to a kind of plain-woven silk) together point to what was probably the most significant aspect of the Elizabethan actor’s training: players were supposed to be able to mime convincingly the behavior of gentlemen and ladies. That is, boys and men, drawn almost entirely from ...

Elizabethan society was intensely, pervasively, visibly hierarchical: men above women, adults above children, the old above the young, the rich above the poor, the wellborn above the vulgar. Woe betide anyone who violated the rules, forgetting to cede place to someone above him or attempting to pass through a door before his betters or thoughtlessly sitting somewhere at church or at a dinner table where he did not belong.

The dream of restoration haunted Shakespeare throughout his life. In The Comedy of Errors, a merchant of Syracuse, in search of his lost twins, is arrested in the rival city of Ephesus and is threatened with death if he cannot pay a heavy fine. At the end of a zany tangle of confused identities, in which one of his sons is arrested for debt by a leather-clad officer (of the type that used to accompany the bailiff John Shakespeare), the father is reunited with the twins and with their mother, the beloved wife from whom he had been separated in a shipwreck thirty-three years before.

The merchant’s life is spared, his fine is forgiven, the son’s debt is settled, and the family is magically restored. In The Merchant of Venice, a wealthy merchant loses all of his wealth in a series of shipwrecks and is about to be carved up by a merciless Jewish creditor, until, through a clever interpretation of the law, he regains everything he has lost and acquires the creditor’s money as well. In Twelfth Night, the son and daughter of a nobleman are separated from one another and shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria. The son wanders through his life as if he is in a dream. The daughter takes a new name and pretends she is a young man, Cesario. In her assumed identity, she has suffered a steep loss in social standing—Cesario is a servant—but even in her disguise she clings to her origins.

At the climax of King Lear, the old king’s wicked daughters are defeated, and, after all his losses and his atrocious sufferings, the king is restored to “absolute power” (5.3.299). But it is too late: his beloved daughter Cordelia is dead in his arms, and he dies in an agony of despair mixed with the delusive hope that she might still be alive. A similar fate befalls Timon of Athens, who finds when he has lost his wealth that he has no friends and goes off to live alone in the woods. Digging in the earth for roots to eat, he finds gold, the last thing he desires, and once again becomes, to his virtually fatal disgust, an immensely wealthy man. And in The Winter’s Tale, King Leontes, after sixteen years, recovers the wife and daughter whom his paranoid jealousy had seemed to destroy.

Near the very end of his career Shakespeare returned one more time to this plot structure, giving it in almost pure form in The Tempest: a ruler is thrust from his dukedom, cast out to sea in a leaky boat with his infant daughter, and shipwrecked on a strange island; years later, through the exercise of his magic, he triumphs over his enemies and recovers his lost realm. These are familiar, highly traditional motifs, and yet the peculiar intensity with which Shakespeare repeatedly embraces the fantasy of the recovery of a lost prosperity or title or identity is striking.

There is no direct relation between the staging of various forms of restoration in Will’s plays and the renewal of the lapsed application for the status of gentleman. Art rarely emerges so transparently from the circumstances of life and would be far less compelling if it did. Shakespeare was in the business of reaching thousands of people, none of whom had any reason to be interested in the business affairs and social status of a Stratford glover. But there were many ways in which he might have tried to reach his audience, and his fascination with a particular set of stories—his sense that these might work and, still more, that he might have it in him to work with them—does not seem entirely random. Though his imagination soared to

faraway places, the fantasies that excited his imagination seem often to have had their roots in the actual circumstances of his life or rather in the expectations and longings and frustrations generated by those circumstances. Hence, in settings as remote as the mythical Athens of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the romantic Bohemia of The Winter’s Tale, there are notes that take us back to the young man who grew up on Henley Street in Stratford and dreamed that he was a gentleman. Sometime in his late adolescence, the young man awoke to find that the dream had ...

The age of questing knights and wandering minstrels was over—if indeed it ever existed except as a fantasy.

Stratford had nominally become Protestant, like the rest of the kingdom, when in 1533 Henry VIII—bent on getting a divorce and on seizing the enormous wealth of the monasteries—had himself declared “Supreme Head of the Church in England.” Officially, England had decisively broken away from Rome. But in matters of religious belief, families in early-sixteenth-century England were characteristically fractured, and many individuals were similarly fractured inwardly. It would have been an unusual extended kin group that did not have at least some of its members holding on to the old faith, an unusual convert to Protestantism who

did not feel on occasion at least some residual Catholic twinges, and an unusual lay Catholic who did not feel a current of national pride and loyalty when Henry VIII defied papal authority. This ambivalence remained true even during the reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI, from 1547 to 1553, when England’s ruling elite moved decisively to a serious embrace of Protestant doctrine and practice. But significant steps were taken in these years to make a return to Catholicism, even in imagination, more difficult.

Salvation, the leaders of the new English church said, came not through the Mass and the other rituals of Roman Catholicism, but through faith and faith alone. Now it was not only the venerable monasteries and...

Already by the acts that established the Church of England, the Mass was outlawed; it was made illegal to hold any service, except those contained in the Book of Common Prayer. A fine of one shilling was imposed for failure regularly to attend the parish church.

Parliament made it treason to reconcile oneself or anyone else to the Catholic Church with the aim of dissolving allegiance to the monarchy. By 1585 it was treason to be a Catholic priest, and by law it was illegal (and after 1585 a capital offense) to harbor priests or, knowingly, to give a priest aid or comfort.

The penalty for failure to attend Protestant services in the local parish was raised to an astronomical twenty pounds per week. Though the fine cannot have been imposed very often, it hung, as a threat of ruin, over everyone who stayed away from church. Even the very few who could afford to pay such a penalty began to imitate poorer Catholic families: once their children reached the age of sixteen—the age at which the fines took effect—parents would send them to distant neighborhoods, where they were less likely to be caught by the oppressive system.

Hamlet is the greatest example—he seems at once Catholic, Protestant, and deeply skeptical of both. But though the adult Shakespeare was deeply marked by the religious struggles, what the adolescent believed (if he himself even knew what he believed)

Shakespeare did not entirely understand saints, and that what he did understand, he did not entirely like. In the huge panoply of characters in his plays, there are strikingly few who would remotely qualify. Joan of Arc appears in an early history play, but she is a witch and a whore. King Henry VI has a saintly disposition—“all his mind is bent to holiness / To number Ave-Maries on his beads” (2 Henry VI, 1.3.59–60)—but he is pathetically weak, and his weakness wreaks havoc on his realm. The elegant young men in the court of Navarre swear to live a “Still and contemplative” existence, the lives of ascetic soldiers who war against “the huge army of the world’s desires” (1.1.14, 10), but Love’s Labour’s Lost shows them quickly succumbing to charms of the princess of France and her ladies. The severe Angelo in Measure for Measure is a man who “scarce confesses / That his blood

flows” (1.3.51–52), but he soon finds himself contriving to compel the beautiful Isabella, a novice in a nunnery, to sleep with him. Isabella, for her part, is impressively true to her chaste vocation, but her determination to preserve her virginity, even at the cost of her brother’s life, is something less than humanly appealing. There are many forms of heroism in Shakespeare, but ideological heroism—the fierce, self-immolating embrace of an idea or an institution—is not one of them.

Anne Hathaway must have represented a startling alternative. Will’s family almost certainly leaned toward Catholicism, and Anne’s almost certainly leaned in the opposite direction.

Anne Hathaway represented an escape in another sense: she was in the unusual position of being her own woman. Very few young, unmarried Elizabethan women had any executive control over their own lives; the girl’s watchful father

and mother would make the key decisions for their daughter,

So at least one might conclude from the centrality of wooing in Shakespeare’s whole body of work, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew to The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Lovemaking, not in the sense of sexual intercourse but in the older sense of intense courting and pleading and longing, was one of his abiding preoccupations, one of the things he understood and expressed more profoundly than almost anyone in the world.

Romeo and Juliet’s depiction of the frantic haste of the rash lovers blends together humor, irony, poignancy, and disapproval, but Shakespeare conveys above all a deep inward understanding of what it feels like to be young, desperate to wed, and tormented by delay.

In the great balcony scene, though they have only just met, Romeo and Juliet exchange “love’s faithful vow” with one another. “If that thy bent of love be honourable, / Thy purpose marriage,” Juliet tells Romeo at the close of the most passionate love scene Shakespeare ever wrote, “send me word tomorrow.” When she knows “Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite,” she declares, “All my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay, / And follow thee, my lord, throughout the world” (2.1.169, 185–86, 188–90). Hence the urgency of Romeo’s visit to the friar early the next morning, and hence the wild eagerness of Juliet for the

return of her nurse, whom she has sent to get R...

Romeo’s urgency is sketched rather cursorily; it is Juliet’s that is given much fuller scope and intensity. Similarly, it is eminently likely that Anne, three months pregnant, rather than the young Will, was the prime source of the impatience that led to the bond. To be sure, this was Elizabethan and not Victorian England: an unmarried mother in the 1580s did not, as she would in the 1880s, routinely face fierce, unrelenting social stigmatization. But the shame and social disgrace in Shakespeare’s time were real enough; bastardy was severely frowned upon by the community, as the child would need to be fed and clothed; and the six pounds thirteen shillings fourpence would only be given to Anne when she found a husband.

It is, perhaps, as much what Shakespeare did not write as what he did that seems to indicate something seriously wrong with his marriage.

The question here and elsewhere in the plays is the degree of intimacy that husbands and wives can achieve, and the answer Shakespeare repeatedly gives is very little. Shakespeare was not alone in his time in finding it difficult to portray or even imagine fully achieved marital intimacy. It took decades of Puritan insistence on the importance of companionship in marriage to change the social, cultural, and psychological landscape. By the time Milton published Paradise Lost, in 1667, the landscape was decisively different. Marriage was no longer the consolation prize for those who did not have the higher vocation of celibacy; it was not the doctrinally approved way of avoiding the sin of fornication; it was not even principally the means of generating offspring and conveying property.

It was about the dream of long-term love. But it is not clear how much of this dream could have been envisaged when Will agreed, whether eagerly or reluctantly, to marry Anne Hathaway.

Many of the significant married pairs in Shakespeare have been divorced by death long before the play begins. For the most part it is the women who have vanished: no Mrs. Bolingbroke, Mrs. Shylock, Mrs. Leonato, Mrs. Brabanzio, Mrs. Lear, Mrs. Prospero.

Demographers have shown that the risks of childbirth in Elizabethan England were high, but not nearly high enough to explain the wholesale absence of spouses from the plays.

IN THE SUMMER of 1583 the nineteen-year-old William Shakespeare was settling into the life of a married man with a newborn daughter, living all together with his parents and his sister, Joan, and his brothers, Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, and however many servants they could afford in the spacious house on Henley Street.

Whether in the wake of Hamnet’s death Shakespeare was suicidal or serene, he threw himself into his work. The later 1590s was an amazingly busy and productive period in his life, with a succession of brilliant plays, frequent performances at court and in the public theaters, and growing celebrity and wealth.

it could hold over three thousand spectators, an astonishing figure for a city London’s size and a tribute to the actors’ immense power to project complex words and emotions. (Today’s Globe, on the Bankside, has about half the capacity.)