|
|
|
|
|
![[Book reviews]](/images/boston/arts/books_header.gif){kind=small}
Shakespeare comes to new life BY JEFFREY GANTZ
William Shakespeare:A Popular Life
There’s nothing barred when it comes to new books about the Bard. It seems we have more middle-length Shakespeare biographies than we do Shakespeare plays, and a number dedicated to his life in the theater: Peter Levi’s The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, A.L. Rowse’s Shakespeare the Man, Robert Speaight’s Shakespeare: The Man and His Achievement, Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life, and Peter Thomson’s Shakespeare’s Professional Career come immediately to mind. We’re not exactly hurting for editions, either, what with the Penguin Shakespeare, the Pelican Shakespeare, the Bantam Shakespeare, the Folger Shakespeare, the Signet Shakespeare, the Riverside Shakespeare, the Oxford Shakespeare, the Cambridge Shakespeare, the New Cambridge Shakespeare — and, of course, the Arden Shakespeare, which is now on its third go-round. How many versions of Henry VI do you need? All the same, I’ll be making room for these two populist Bard bios on my Shakespeare shelf (okay, in my two-bookcase alcove). The problem with the standard works is that the little information we have about Will has been scrutinized and dissected till there’s hardly any life left in it. Gary O’Connor and John Southworth cross over into undiscovered territory by giving free rein to their imagination. The Shakespeares they depict are quite different from each other: at age 21, Southworth’s Bard is touring England as an apprentice with the Earl of Worcester’s players while O’Connor’s has joined Her Majesty’s armed forces and is mucking about in the Netherlands. But both are broadly plausible, and neither is ever boring. Southworth himself is a former Shakespearean actor (he made his Old Vic debut as Florizel in The Winter’s Tale), so it’s not surprising that his Bard is from adolescence devoted to the theater. The Earl of Worcester’s men make frequent visits to Stratford during the late 1570s and early 1580s, and young Will, captivated, joins up as an apprentice. His marriage and the birth of his children (Susanna in 1583, twins Hamnet and Juliet in 1585) are of less moment than the dispersal of Worcester’s men and his joining the Admiral’s men. He works his way up the company ladder, acting in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and, in the late ’80s, learning to write his own plays, Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew and the Henry VI trilogy, eventually becoming a star at the Rose in the plague-shortened 1592 season. Throughout, Southworth makes educated and often shrewd guesses as to the role Shakespeare took in each play. He adduces evidence not found in the major editions of Titus Andronicus (Oxford, New Cambridge, Arden) to the effect that the lost Titus and Vespasian that played at the Rose in 1592 may well have been an early version of Shakespeare’s drama; in an appendix he posits that the unusual pattern of receipts taken in for " harey the vj " may indicate how the three Henry VI plays were staged as a cycle. He takes us " on tour " with the company in 1603 (after the plague had again closed the London houses), reminding us that, even after the Globe was built, Shakespeare and his men spent much of their lives playing outside the capital. At times, though, Southworth’s picture of the Bard and his world reads like Masterpiece Shakespeare. And his frequent sniping at academics would go down better if he read them more carefully. We’d all love to believe that Shakespeare was a major actor who portrayed, as Southworth argues, Henry VI, King John, Julius Caesar, Orsino in Twelfth Night, Claudius in Hamlet, and Iago in Othello; but in light of the more modest roles indicated by the massive rare-word lexical database on Donald Foster’s Shaxicon Web site, Southworth’s attributions seem like wishful thinking. His argument that all three parts of Henry VI played the Rose in 1592 overlooks the fact that owner Philip Henslowe typically marked multi-part plays as such; his contention that Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night for the court visit of Duke Virginio Orsino in 1601 ignores the rebuttals presented in every major edition. Some welcome attention to the anonymous Arden of Faversham aside, he has little to say about Shakespeare’s roles in the works of other playwrights, like Ben Jonson; neither does he consider the real possibility that some of the Folio plays may have been collaborations. And his insights into the Bard’s writing are often perfunctory, as in this observation about Romeo and Juliet: " We know how the story is to end because Shakespeare tells us in the Prologue, but nevertheless are kept in a state of suspenseful anxiety as we watch it unfold. He makes us care very much about the fate of all his characters. " THERE’S NOTHING PERFUNCTORY about director (at the Royal Shakespeare Company) and critic (for the Times) Gerald O’Connor. A Popular Life (which appeared last year in hardcover) is anchored in Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway and in his Catholic sympathies; it’s a psycho-biography in which the plays reflect the life. When John Shakespeare suffers financial reverses, around 1576, Shakespeare is " fostered " out to a Catholic-oriented Lancashire noble family; back in Stratford, this lusty young man impregnates and then marries Anne, whom O’Connor believes " was a much more complex, better educated and more many-sided woman than has generally been depicted. " After that it’s the military. Perhaps he was drafted, perhaps he joined up seeking adventure and booty. Either way, he gets a first-hand look at war in the Netherlands. After being demobbed, he somehow finds his way into a theater troupe and winds up at the Rose in 1592. O’Connor is better at describing the world of the London theater than he is at explaining how Shakespeare came to be part of that world, and he’s given to untethered pronouncements like " Shakespeare reached his peak as an actor by the age of twenty-eight " and " To Marlowe Shakespeare owed everything. " But he sets before us plenty of food for thought: Shakespeare as the one who ditched both Southampton and the Dark Lady; The Taming of the Shrew as Will’s fantasy revenge on Anne; Mercutio’s death in Romeo and Juliet as a recollection of Christopher Marlowe’s; Antonio’s devotion to Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice as a reflection of Shakespeare and Southampton (repeated by Antonio and Sebastian in Twelfth Night — both Antonios were likely played by Shakespeare himself); the Earl of Essex as Hotspur in 1 Henry IV, and the change in tone in 2 Henry IV as brought about by the company’s move from Shoreditch (the Theatre/Curtain) to Southwark (the Globe); Jaques in As You Like It and Malvolio in Twelfth Night as versions of Ben Jonson; Essex as Cassius and Elizabeth as Caesar in Julius Caesar; Hamlet as Shakespeare’s reflection on the shortcomings of his own parents; Sebastian and Viola in Twelfth Night as recalling Hamnet and Juliet; All’s Well That Ends Well as Will wanting Anne to forgive him. Like Southworth, O’Connor shoots from the hip, but it’s hard not to indulge someone who can write thus of Romeo and Juliet: " But from the moment their love catches fire they lose touch with reality. Romeo never comes to know who Juliet is, nor does she see in him more than an excuse for a rising inner intensity. Their love is not a love for one another as they really are; their love is based on a false reciprocity, which conceals a twin narcissism. They love in one another the reflections of themselves. " THE NEW ARDEN EDITIONS of the first two parts of Henry VI (the third is forthcoming) are also welcome. It’s not that Henry VI is such a hot item: you could go a lifetime without seeing any of these three plays, which were the toast of London in the early 1590s but became dinosaurs upon the emergence of the proscenium stage. And there’s no textual controversy worth mentioning: even the cheapest editions give you pretty much the same plays. No, it’s the lengthy and edifying introductions — 103 pages for Part 1, 139 for Part II — and appendices that put these volumes at the head of the Shakespeare class. Both Burns and Knowles offer compelling evidence that Parts 2 and 3 actually began life, probably in 1591, as The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, with the Death of the Good Duke Humphrey and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Death of Good King Henry the Sixth (mind you, those are the short titles), and that their popularity prompted Rose owner Philip Henslowe to commission — from Shakespeare and perhaps Thomas Nashe and others — what may have been the stage’s first " prequel, " Henry VI. You don’t have to be a Shakespeare junkie to get caught up in the mystery of how Will’s earliest histories took shape, and if you flipped for Shakespeare in Love, you’ll enjoy this look into the wild and woolly world of Elizabethan theater. What’s missing from Burns is the list of Henslowe’s takings for " harey the vj " that Southworth provides, and neither Burns nor Knowles explains why the Contention and the True Tragedy don’t show up at the Rose in 1592 along with Henry VI (maybe Shakespeare and friends were freelancing for another playhouse?). Knowles, however, supplies the text of the 1594 Contention Quarto (a first in editions of 2 Henry VI as far as I know; I hope Arden’s 3 Henry VI will append the True Tragedy). And both editors revel in these plays not just as spectacular popular entertainments (which they were — they’d look great on Boston Common) but as incisive political and personal dramas whose characters include martyr Joan of Arc (Henry VI’s virgin/whore) and revolutionary Jack Cade (the Contention’s Lord of Misrule). Early and probably not all Shakespeare’s, the Henry VI trio has been relegated to the margins of legitimacy, but these new editions stand up for bastards. Issue Date: August 30 - September 6, 2001
|
|
|