Primrose Road

1. Shakespeare was different from other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. Shakespeare was the most published (though not most prolific) of 16th/17th century playwrights, and Hemings and Condell were probably the first -- but definitely not the last -- to harness the "selling power" of Shakespeare's name. The ol' Bard did, however, borrow his plots from other plays and from the same sources that his contemporaries did; he also, much like them, wrote Senecan revenge tragedies that incorporated fascinating turns of plot and character. In fact, if anyone writes radically distinct revenge tragedies, it's Marlowe, whose Tamburlaine Part II erases the supernatural element (a ghost) from the classic son-avenges-father tale. A few years ago, there was a webpage (which I cannot find at the moment!) that demonstrated how difficult it is to differentiate Shakespeare's words from those of other 16th and early-17th century playwrights. The "sounds like Shakespeare" argument often fails to hold water because almost every writer "sounded like" Shakespeare. 2. Shakespeare wasn't different from other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. At the same time, Will is also probably one of the most naturalistic playwrights of his time: his characters often act on humanlike instinct. When they rely on reason (Hamlet) or tradition (Titus Andronicus), they fail miserably. 18th century Romantics adored naturalism and therefore adored Shakespeare, whose sensitive, intellectual (kind of whiny?) Hamlet character reminded them of themselves. 20th century Freudophiles adored Shakespeare's thinking characters for many of the same reasons. So in some ways, Shakespeare was just different enough from, say, Marlowe or Middleton to win an important place in British and American cultural narratives. 3. Shakespeare was a creative writer who invented plots and characters. No, he never wrote a first draft of Romeo and Juliet called "Romeo and Ethel, The Pirate's Daughter." (Those scenes in Shakespeare in Love are meant to poke fun at this misconception -- in the same vein, Shakespeare also did not visit a psychoanalyst. ;)) Romeo and Juliet's direct source was Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, itself drawing on a host of Italian tales. Much like his contemporaries, Shakespeare also found material for his own work in Holinshed's Chronicles and the Gesta Romanorum. This was a period of early capitalism, before the principles of copyright and intellectual property took hold, and if you were a playwright, borrowing was the way to go. 4. Because he didn't live with her in Stratford, wrote sonnets about a love triangle among two men and a woman, and willed her his "second-best bed," Shakespeare didn't love his wife. First, Shakespeare's sonnet sequence does not necessarily reflect or resemble "real life": the perception that fiction writers must quite literally "write what they know" is a post-Freudian one. But even if Shakespeare really was involved in a love triangle of sorts, it is important to remember (as Lawrence Stone and Catherine Belsey have pointed out) that the past was not all "Puritannical" (in the present-day American sense of the word) and that concepts of the family did not begin to rigidify until after Shakespeare's time. When Shakespeare writes about marriage -- for example, in Measure for Measure -- he's concerned about the institution become more and more rigid and legislated. An extra-marital affair was not necessarily an indicator of marital strife. Also, people at the time often willed their "best" items to their children, not their spouses. Following the custom of his time, he would have saved the "best" for his children; indeed, Shakespeare left much of his property to his older daughter Susanna Shakespeare Hall. Interestingly, shortly after Shakespeare's death, we see an example of marriage becoming more of a legislated institution when his younger daughter's husband, Thomas Quiney, has to make a court appearance because of an adultery charge. (Rumor has it that Tom Q. was not quite an upstanding gentleman, though.) 5. Shakespeare wrote almost every word attributed to him. Perhaps surprisingly to some, no. Because copyright and intellectual property were not yet widely circulating concepts (in fact, copyright belonged to printers, not writers), writing was a collaborative process. Printed plays could be analogized to the "movie scripts" sold on folding tables in the East Village today; they weren't authoritative, and rarely represented "shooting scripts." And scholars have recently determined that Thomas Middleton edited, revised, and added to Macbeth, a fact that has been incorporated into Oxford University Press's recent Middleton Project.

It's Will Shakespeare's birthday (maybe; it's a guess based on his baptismal date and the fact that it would be kind of cool if he was born and died on the same date). If you're in Washington DC by any chance this weekend, be sure to catch the Shakespeare's Birthday Open House at the Folger Shakespeare Library this Sunday. There will be Shakespeare-related fortune telling. And a "Happy Birthday"-singing Queen Elizabeth. I'm excited. ;)

Mark Anderson, author of "Shakespeare" by Another Name, an Oxfordian biography of Shakespeare (or Shakespearean biography of Oxford?), references Indiana University's Arden Project on his blog this week:

As this month's Technology Review reports, a $250,000 project (funded by the MacArthur Foundation) to adapt the Shakespeare canon into a multiplayer video game has ended in failure. "Arden"'s founder, Edward Castronova, told TR that the problem was simple. "It's no fun," he said.

I've never designed a video game before, so I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm missing out on. But if all that we have of "Shakespeare" is a practically random assortment of plays and poems, without a real, discernible human being that links them together, then it's no wonder "Arden" never took off. Here's a counter-proposal: The life story of the author "Shakespeare" and the works he produced are intimately and intricately interwoven. The reason 20,000 hours and $250,000 can't put "Shakespeare" back together again is the same reason American and British publishers have pumped out some 20 traditional Shakespeare biographies in the past decade alone.

Though I'm usually not much for Bardography, there was a neat article in yesterday's Guardian about the wealth of biographical information that can (surprisingly) be derived from a court deposition signed by Shakespeare. Charles Nicholl's book, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, will discuss the case, what we know about the Mountjoys (a family Shakespeare stayed with in London), and what that can tell us about Shakespeare-the-man. And interestingly,

Shakespeare's deposition in the Belott-Mountjoy case has been known for nearly a hundred years, but has been oddly neglected as a biographical source. It was found in 1909, along with others in the case, at the public record office in London. Its discoverer was a 44-year-old American, Dr Charles William Wallace, associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska.

In an earlier post, I referenced a 1916 book which suggested that Shakespeare gained a working knowledge of medicine from his son-in-law, physician John Hall. This got me thinking: while we have a body of information concerning Shakespeare-the-actor and Shakespeare-the-playwright, we don't have much regarding Shakespeare-the-family-man. This may be a blessing in disguise, since biographical criticism can be downright creepy at times (even Freud said that experienced fiction writers and dramatists don't put their entire life and "character" into their works), but I have to wonder if we might have had a lot more information at our fingertips if someone had sat down with Shakespeare's granddaughter Elizabeth Hall in the 1660s. With William Davenant, Shakespeare's godson, promoting his own plays by claiming to actually be Shakespeare's illegitimate son, it's somewhat surprising that no one went up to Stratford to ask Elizabeth a few questions. She would have probably remembered her grandfather, who died when she was eight years old and was likely in Stratford with the family for at least the last three years of his life. And Hall's aunt, Shakespeare's daughter Judith Quiney, was still alive in the early 1660s! Unfortunately, one of Judith's children died in infancy and the other two died as teenagers; Elizabeth, who was married twice, remained childless. Perhaps one day a line of illegitimate Shakespeares will pop up ...