Bill Bryson - Shakespeare - The World as Stage

Among much else Hinman determined that no two volumes of the First Folio were exactly the same. “The idea that every single volume would be different from every other was unexpected, and obviously you would need a lot of volumes to make that determination,” said Rachel Doggett with a look of real satisfaction. “So Folger’s obsession with collecting Folios turned out to be quite a valuable thing for scholarship.”

“What is slightly surprising,” Ziegler said, “is that all the fuss is about a book that wasn’t actually very well made.” To demonstrate her point she laid open on a table one of the First Folios and placed beside it a copy of Ben Jonson’s own complete works. The difference in quality was striking. In the Shakespeare First Folio, the inking was conspicuously poor; many passages were faint or very slightly smeared.

“The paper is handmade,” she added, “but of no more than middling quality.” Jonson’s book in comparison was a model of stylish care. It was beautifully laid out, with decorative drop capitals and printer’s ornaments, and it incorporated many useful details such as the dates of first performances, which were lacking from the Shakespeare volume.

At the time of Shakespeare’s death few would have supposed that one day he would be thought the greatest of English playwrights. Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Ben Jonson were all more popular and esteemed. The First Folio contained just four poetic eulogies-a starkly modest number. When the now obscure William Cartwright died in 1643, five dozen admirers jostled to offer memorial poems. “Such are the vagaries of reputation,” sighs Schoenbaum in his Documentary Life.

This shouldn’t come entirely as a surprise. Ages are generally pretty incompetent at judging their own worth. How many people now would vote to bestow Nobel Prizes for Literature on Pearl Buck, Henrik Pontoppidan, Rudolf Eucken, Selma Lagerlöf, or many others whose fame could barely make it to the end of their own century?

In any case Shakespeare didn’t altogether delight Restoration sensibilities, and his plays were heavily adapted when they were performed at all. Just four decades after his death, Samuel Pepys thought Romeo and Juliet “the worst that ever I heard in my life”-until, that is, he saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he thought “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.” Most observers were more admiring than that, but on the whole they preferred the intricate plotting and thrilling twists of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy, A King and No King, and others that are now largely forgotten except by scholars.

Shakespeare never entirely dropped out of esteem-as the publication of Second, Third, and Fourth Folios clearly attests-but neither was he reverenced as he is today. After his death some of his plays weren’t performed again for a very long time. As You Like It was not revived until the eighteenth century. Troilus and Cressida had to wait until 1898 to be staged again, in Germany, though John Dryden in the meanwhile helpfully gave the world a completely reworked version. Dryden took this step because, he explained, much of Shakespeare was ungrammatical, some of it coarse, and the whole of it “so pester’d with Figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure.” Nearly everyone agreed that Dryden’s version, subtitled “Truth Found Too Late,” was a vast improvement. “You found it dirt but you have made it gold,” gushed the poet Richard Duke.

The poems, too, went out of fashion. The sonnets “were pretty well forgotten for over a century and a half,” according to W. H. Auden, and Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were likewise overlooked until rediscovered by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his fellow Romantics in the early 1800s.

Such was Shakespeare’s faltering status that as time passed the world began to lose track of what exactly he had written. The Third Folio, published forty years after the first, included six plays that Shakespeare didn’t in fact write-A Yorkshire Tragedy, The London Prodigal, Locrine, Sir John Oldcastle, Thomas Lord Cromwell, and The Puritan Widow-though it did finally make room for Pericles, for which scholars and theatergoers have been grateful ever since. Other collections of his plays contained still other works-The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Mucedorus, Iphis and Ianthe, and The Birth of Merlin. It would take nearly two hundred years to resolve the problem of authorship generally, and in detail it isn’t settled yet.

Almost a century elapsed between William Shakespeare’s death and the first even slight attempts at biography, by which time much detail of his life was gone for good. The first stab at a life story came in 1709, when Nicholas Rowe, Britain ’s poet laureate and a dramatist in his own right, provided a forty-page background sketch as part of the introduction to a new six-volume set of Shakespeare’s complete works. Most of it was drawn from legend and hearsay, and a very large part of that was incorrect. Rowe gave Shakespeare three daughters rather than two, and credited him with the authorship of a single long poem, Venus and Adonis, apparently knowing nothing of The Rape of Lucrece. It is to Rowe that we are indebted for the attractive but specious story of Shakespeare’s having been caught poaching deer at Charlecote. According to the later scholar Edmond Malone, of the eleven facts asserted about Shakespeare’s life by Rowe, eight were incorrect.

Nor was Shakespeare always terribly well served by those who strove to restore his reputation. The poet Alexander Pope, extending the tradition begun by Dryden, produced a handsome set of Shakespeare’s works in 1723, but freely reworked any material he didn’t like, which was a good deal of it. He discarded passages he thought unworthy (insisting that they were the creations of actors, not Shakespeare himself), replaced archaic words that he didn’t understand with modern words he did, threw out nearly all puns and other forms of wordplay, and constantly altered phrasing and meter to suit his own unyieldingly discerning tastes. Where, for instance, Shakespeare wrote about taking arms against a sea of troubles, he changed sea to siege to avoid a mixed metaphor.

Partly in response to Pope’s misguided efforts there now poured forth a small flood of new editions and scholarly studies. Lewis Theobald, Sir Thomas Hanmer, William Warburton, Edward Capell, George Steevens, and Samuel Johnson produced separate contributions that collectively did much to revitalize Shakespeare’s standing.

Even more influential was the actor-manager David Garrick, who in the 1740s began a long, adoring, and profitable relationship with Shakespeare’s works. Garrick’s productions were not without their idiosyncrasies. He gave King Lear a happy ending and had no hesitation in dropping three of the five acts of The Winter’s Tale to keep the narrative moving briskly if not altogether coherently. Despite these quirks Garrick set Shakespeare on a trajectory that shows no sign of encountering a downward arc yet. More than any other person, he put Stratford on the tourist map-a fact of very considerable annoyance to the Reverend Francis Gastrell, a vicar who owned New Place and who grew so weary of the noisy intrusions of tourists that in 1759 he tore the house down rather than suffer another unwelcome face at the window.

(At least the birthplace escaped the fate considered for it by the impresario P. T. Barnum, who in the 1840s had the idea of shipping it to the United States, placing it on wheels, and sending it on a perpetual tour around the country-a prospect so alarming that money was swiftly raised in Britain to save the house as a museum and shrine.)

Critical appreciation of Shakespeare may be said to begin with William Dodd, who was both a clergyman and a scholar of the first rank-his Beauties of Shakespeare (1752) remained hugely influential for a century and a half-but something of a rogue as well. In the early 1770s, he fell into debt and fraudulently acquired £4,200 by forging the signature of Lord Chesterfield on a bond. For his efforts he was sent to the scaffold-inaugurating a long tradition of Shakespeare scholars being at least a little eccentric, if not actively wayward.