30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (4 page)

If writers imagine, they also do research. Research takes many forms. It is clear that Shakespeare consulted multiple versions of history in the forms of prose (Holinshed's
Chronicles
), poetry (Samuel Daniel's
The Civil Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York
), and drama (the anonymous
Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth
) when writing his history plays. But there is another form of research that has no technical name: human observation. There is nothing in Shakespeare's plays that could not have come from close observation of the world around him: observation of human idiosyncrasy, hypocrisy, humanity, compassion, hierarchy, politics, paradoxes.

Although libraries contain annotated books that belonged to Jonson and Milton, we have none of Shakespeare's. He left no books in his will; most scholars assume that he had already given them to his son-in-law, the physician John Hall. Thus, we know of Shakespeare's reading only from our knowledge of the sources of his plays. For a long time it was believed that a copy of Florio's translation of the French humanist Michel de Montaigne's
Essays
(1603), now in the British Library, belonged to Shakespeare: its flyleaf bears the signature “William Shakespeare.” The bibliographical history of this volume's front matter and endpapers (which have been rearranged at various times) is complex, but the indisputable fact is that the paper that carries the signature is late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century. Presumably someone thought that Shakespeare's signature would increase the value of the book. (The British Library owns Jonson's copy but, although Jonson was in the habit of annotating his books, this one has no marginalia.)

We have been thinking so far about what Shakespeare read; it is also worth thinking about how he read it. John Florio's translation of Montaigne may help us. Shakespeare is intellectually attuned with Montaigne. Both are interested in human identity. Montaigne is a “psychological philosopher” and Shakespeare is a “psychological dramatist.”
²
We don't know how much Montaigne Shakespeare had read (there is a lot of it to read). Gonzalo's speech in
The Tempest
on the ideal commonwealth (2.1.153 onwards) comes from Montaigne's essay “On Cannibals.” There are general similarities in ideas elsewhere, but when two writers are interested in selfhood, inwardness, the individual, it is hard to distinguish confluence from influence. However, looking at Shakespeare's vocabulary, and in particular the effect on it of Florio's Montaigne, is instructive.

Montaigne's
Essays
were introduced to the English-speaking world through John Florio's translation of 1603. It was a massive enterprise: three volumes. Shakespeare clearly read it soon after it was published as it had a notable effect on his vocabulary from 1603 onwards. George Coffin Taylor first catalogued the parallels in 1925, identifying 750 words and phrases that were not in Shakespeare's vocabulary before 1603 but all of which appeared there after that date and are also in Florio's Montaigne.
³
Taylor wrote in a period of obsessive parallel-hunting when critics pounced on parallel phrases of such ordinariness that it is as easy to imagine the authors hitting on them independently as it is to see one author influencing the other. But most of Taylor's words do not come into this category: “hugger-mugger” (
Hamlet
4.5.82; this is its only appearance in Shakespeare), “marble-hearted” (
King Lear
1.4.237—again its sole Shakespeare usage). Florio is fond of compound coinages, and they seem to have impressed Shakespeare. Thus, although “holy-water” is recorded by the
Oxford English Dictionary
(
OED
) from 1583, it is not used by Shakespeare until
King Lear
, where it appears in the phrase “court holy water” (3.2.10); Florio writes (in a similarly ironic context) “seeke after court holy-water and wavering-favours of princes” (this is his imaginative version of Montaigne's prosaic “c[h]ercer le vent de la faveur des Roys” [seek the wind of kings' favors]).
⁴

Although
OED
researchers have since found earlier occurrences of words that Taylor claimed were introduced by Florio, these are not large in number and many of Taylor's distinctive words, first used by Florio, command attention: we find “concupiscible” in Florio and in
Measure for Measure
(5.1.98); “harping [up]on” in Florio and in
Hamlet
(2.2.189–90); and, close by, “pregnant wit” in Florio and “pregnant … replies” in
Hamlet
(2.2.210–11); “chirurgions” in Florio and “chirurgeonly” in
The Tempest
(2.1.146).When we come across “consanguinity” in Florio and in
Troilus and Cressida
(4.3.23, nowhere else in Shakespeare), we have to question the 1601–2 date of
Troilus
or assume that Florio's translation was circulating in manuscript.
⁵
The same applies to
Hamlet
(1600–1), where the coincidence of the two phrases above, both in Florio and contiguous in
Hamlet
, invites attention.

F.O. Mathiessen notes that Shakespeare's use of Florio's Montaigne forms an interesting pattern. The new words are used often in Shakespeare's vocabulary in 1603 and immediately thereafter, then gradually taper off, before reappearing in
The Tempest
in 1610. This suggests how Shakespeare read and responded to Montaigne: an initial immersion, a gradual distancing, and then a later rereading. Philippe Desan is concerned that Shakespeare seems to have been more interested in Florio's coinages than in Montaigne's ideas.
⁶
This, in fact, is precisely what interests us—what caught Shakespeare's
ear
when he read. Given his school training in rhetoric and his subsequent career as a poet, it is not surprising that he would react so enthusiastically to language.

So: was Shakespeare well educated? His schooling certainly gave him a substantial grounding in classical literature and in rhetorical structures; but he carried on building on this strong foundation himself.

Notes

¹
 Lois Potter,
The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 398.

²
 Peter Holbrook,
Shakespeare's Individualism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 187.

³
 G.C. Taylor,
Shakspeare's Debt to Montaigne
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), p. 5.

⁴
 F.O. Mathiessen,
Translation: An Elizabethan Art
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1965), p. 143.

⁵
 Philippe Desan suggests that “extracts of Florio's translation may have circulated in manuscript among the London literati as early as 1597–8”. Cited in Richard Scholar, “French Connections: The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Montaigne and Shakespeare,” in Laurie Maguire (ed.),
How To Do Things with Shakespeare
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), pp. 11–33 (p. 14).

⁶
 Scholar, “French Connections,” p. 14.

In Ben Jonson's comedy
The Alchemist
a character is asked to impersonate a Spanish count. He requires a Spanish suit (the dialogue makes clear that Spanish fashion differs from the English) and a temporary sartorial crisis occurs when no such costume is to hand. Another character proposes a solution: “Thou must borrow / A Spanish suit. Hast thou no credit with the players? … / Hieronimo's old cloak, ruff, and hat will serve” (4.7.67–71).
¹

The suggestion is satirical. It refers with parodic affection to one of the most popular stage-Spaniards—Hieronimo—in the most influential play of the Elizabethan period, Thomas Kyd's
The Spanish Tragedy
(see Myth 1). Costumes were a major expense. Theater companies did not rent them out. In fact, the traffic was in the other direction: many costumes came from real life. Expensive fashionable clothes were bequeathed to servants (for example) by rich employers. Sumptuary legislation prevented servants from wearing them (the legislation aligned social status with fabrics and accessories, dictating who could wear what; hence Faustus's anarchic vision of dressing the undergraduates in silk in Marlowe's
Dr Faustus
); and so the servants sold their inherited clothes to the players, turning their bequest into cash.

Jonson's
The Alchemist
is set in the period and location in which it was written—London in 1610. Like other city comedies, it depends on topicality: contemporary fashions are satirized in plays from Dekker's
The Shoemaker's Holiday
(1599) to Massinger's Caroline comedy
The City Madam
(1632). But there is some evidence to suggest that even historical plays were more conveniently contemporary than historically accurate in their costumes.

We have only one contemporary picture of a Shakespeare play: a sketch of
Titus Andronicus
, made
c
.1595 by the writer Henry Peacham (1578–1644). The drawing, often reproduced independently of the manuscript in which it appears, forms a horizontal band at the top of a manuscript page on which Peacham has written out forty lines from the play. The drawing depicts Tamora, queen of the Goths, pleading to Titus for the life of her sons. At the picture's far right stands the inked black figure of Aaron the Moor; at the picture's far left stand two soldiers; in the center are Titus and the kneeling queen. The drawing is unlikely to represent an actual performance (the prisoner Aaron freely brandishes a sword, for instance!), but it may combine Peacham's memory of a performance of
Titus
with his reading of the quarto published in 1594. Although the stage action at this point requires three of Tamora's sons, the stage direction (erroneously) provides an entry for only two (see Myth 8); the fact that Peacham draws two sons may suggest that he was illustrating a text he was reading rather than a performance he was remembering. However, the drawing's eclectic mix of styles and periods is more likely to derive from memory than from imagination. Consequently it is helpful in suggesting how one of Shakespeare's historical tragedies was costumed in the 1590s.

What is notable is that the costumes make no attempt at historical accuracy although there is considerable success in suggesting historical atmosphere. Tamora, fictional queen of a fifth-century people, wears a loose-bodied medieval- or Elizabethan-style gown. Titus wears a Roman toga and carries a spear, but the two soldiers behind him carry Tudor halberds, and one of them, perhaps both of them, also carries a scimitar (an Eastern curved sword). Both also wear wide, baggy pants—an Elizabethan fashion (called “Venetians”). They wear Elizabethan hats (one with a fashionable feather) and medieval body armor.
²
Shakespeare's theater company did not have the resources costume designers use today (books of pictures of historical costumes illustrating changing fashions). This was not a handicap: they had no desire for such resources. What the Peacham sketch makes clear is that the theater company was aiming for accessibility.

This does not mean that they were careless or cavalier in costume choices. Costumes were their single biggest expense. The canopy over the Globe stage was to protect the costumes, not the actors. Philip Henslowe's Diary records lavish expenditure on satin doublets, taffeta cloaks, silver and copper lace, cloth of gold, velvet breeches, and shagged cloth (worsted cloth with a velvet nap on one side), and is detailed about cuts and linings and ornament and color and design (pinking, facing, spangling). Theater companies' “greatest accumulation of capital was in their clothing stock, which might easily be worth more than the theatre in which they were performing.”
³

Figure 1
This drawing of characters from
Titus Andronicus
shows the Elizabethans' eclectic approach to historical costume.

Reproduced by permission of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire, Great Britain.

If Elizabethan costumes mixed the contemporary and the historical, so too did props and language. A clock strikes anachronistically in
Julius Caesar
, and the wakeful Brutus, inhabitant of a scroll culture, sees “the leaf turned down / Where I left reading” (4.2.324–5). Gloucester, resident in Lear's ancient Britain, makes a joke about spectacles, first known in medieval Italy. The medieval Hamlet attends a university (Wittenberg) not founded until 1502; in the Trojan war setting of
Troilus and Cressida
Hector quotes Aristotle, who lived and wrote many centuries after Hector (rather as the Fool in
King Lear
acknowledges, “This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time” [3.2.95–6]). Aristotle was standard academic reading in Shakespeare's day, just as clocks and books and spectacles were familiar objects. Shakespeare's plays are rooted in the present. If Shakespeare wrote about only one city—London (see Myth 14)—it was always
contemporary
London.

This is most obvious in the comedies.
The Comedy of Errors
changes the recognizably Roman slaves of its Plautine source to the more familiar Elizabeth servants. Elizabethan marriage conventions are very much to the fore in
Midsummer Night's Dream
,
The Taming of the Shrew
, and
Much Ado about Nothing
. In the comic-tragic world of
Romeo and Juliet
, Juliet leads the life of a typical cloistered wealthy Elizabethan daughter. It was natural for the Elizabethans to stage these plays in Elizabethan dress.