Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Shakespeare
In my last post, I reviewed Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare, his light and lively overview of the bard’s life and times. Bryson made it fairly clear that we know a lot less about Shakespeare than one might imagine or hope for considering his contribution to the English language and to English literature. As always, we are here to help, especially if you find yourself cornered by some pedantic English major at a cocktail party and need a few tantalizing nuggets to drop into the conversation.
To this end, we called on Kate Welch, a Graduate Student Associate of the Making Publics Project at McGill University. (For info on Making Publics, see below.) Kate’s primary research interests include Shakespeare and early modern publics, grief in the theatre and the Reformation in literature. We asked her to come up with 10 things about Shakespeare that you probably didn’t know. Here is her list:
William the Conqueror
Apparently, the bard was a bit of a cad. John Manningham, a law student at the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple back in 1601, kept a diary (currently housed in the British Museum) in which can be found this story about Shakespeare beating Richard Burbage, one of the actors in Shakespeare’s company, to a female fan’s bedroom.
“Upon a time, when Burbage played Richard III, there was a citizen grown so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before and was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.”
No word on whether “Richard the Third” had his revenge on the witty conqueror. While this could simply be a bit of scandalous gossip, the story did circulate during Shakespeare’s lifetime.
Because you’re worth it
Another glimpse into Shakespeare’s personal life also proves titillating. The only mention of Shakespeare’s wife, Ann Hathaway, in his will is when he leaves her the “second-best bed”. At first glance, this seems pretty tight, but Germaine Greer recently made the point that the best bed was usually reserved for guests, and the second-best bed was probably the one the married couple shared. You be the judge.
Back to basics: how many plays did Shakespeare write?
The generally accepted answer is 37, but if we include The Two Noble Kinsmen (written in collaboration with John Fletcher), and two lost plays which are attributed to Shakespeare, Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won, the number jumps to 40. There is also some debate about whether Shakespeare wrote a play called Edward III. While some people (on the fringe) wonder if Shakespeare wrote the plays we do give him credit for, there are some plays which he may have written for which he is not getting the credit. We simply don’t know for certain.
Don’t know much about history / Don’t know much geography
There’s the clock chiming three times in Julius Caesar, although ancient Roman sundials and rope clocks were silent, and then Hamlet attends a university that did not exist until a few hundred years after the time when the play is set. These examples are favoured illustrations of anachronism in high school English classes, but you may not have learned about Shakespeare’s slapdash approach to geography.
In The Tempest, Shakespeare writes about a sea voyage from Verona to Milan: two inland cities. Rather than a simple 80 mile overland trip on the excellent Roman-built roads, the characters have seemingly taken a 1,000 mile, two-week long voyage all around Italy, before a final 80 mile trip inland from Genoa to Milan. Shakespeare also describes a “sail maker in Bergamo” in The Taming of the Shrew; but Bergamo is in the foothills of the Italian Alps, over 130 kilometres from the nearest coast, and an odd choice for locating a sail-making business. In the same play, he refers to Padua, another inland city, as a port city, and describes Mantuan ships, another oddity since Mantua is also landlocked.
Well, sometimes you’ve got to go around to get around. And next time you don’t want to ask for directions, you can point out that genius needs no direction.
Rowdier than a wrestling crowd
Unlike the more demure theatre we know today, Shakespearean audiences did not sit quietly in the dark to watch. They ate and drank and shouted and booed the actors if they didn’t like the play, and got into shouting matches with the clown. The way we hiss now at the villain in a play comes from the hissing sound of bottles of ale being opened. Playgoers would also pelt actors with nuts and apples. Prostitutes moved among the crowd looking for business, as did thieves, (or “cutpurses”), who took advantage of spectators being distracted by the play. Gallants (we might call them posers today) could sit on the stage, and their huge feathered hats often blocked the view of the action. Both writing and acting had to be compelling to hold the attention of these playgoers.
Globe on fire! Bring the beer!
During a performance of Henry VIII, on Tuesday, June 29, 1613, a burning scrap of rag from a cannon fired as a sound effect ignited the thatched roof of the Globe Theatre. In under an hour, the theatre had burned to the ground, but miraculously, everyone escaped alive. In a letter to his nephew, Sir Henry Wotton wrote:
“…nothing did perish but wood and straw and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire that would perhaps have broiled him if he had not by the benefit of provident wit put it out with bottle ale.”
I smell the blood of an English…Pig?
Early modern theatres used real animal blood on the stage. Records show bills of payment to the butcher shop for pig’s blood and entrails for some pretty gory special effects. And when Cornwall gouges out Gloucester’s eye in King Lear and stamps on it? Yup, a real eye, courtesy of some poor pig, but it probably popped to great effect.
Meanwhile, alternative forms of entertainment just outside the playhouse included bear-beating rings, where chained bears were set upon by dogs, or people could go to see a public hanging for free. Blood sold, even in Shakespeare’s time.
If you reconstruct it, they will come
There’s an interesting story behind the building of Shakespeare’s famous Globe playhouse. The Burbage family built one of the first public theatres in 1576, called, appropriately enough, The Theatre. However, they were only leasing the land on which this theatre stood. The lease ran out in 1597 and negotiations for a renewal failed. The owner of the land decided to pull down the theatre and put the wood to better use. But the Burbages knew there was a clause in the lease which specified that the physical structure belonged to them, and so, armed with swords and daggers and axes, they dismantled the Theatre piece by piece. They carted the timbers through London and rebuilt the theatre across the river bank, naming this structure the Globe and now enjoying the rights to both the land and the building.
“Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
We take it for granted now that Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers of all time, but he wasn’t always considered this way. Although his plays were successful during his lifetime, there’s no evidence that he cared about publishing them. In 1642, the theatres were shut down for nearly twenty years, due to the volatile political situation and Puritan displeasure with the rowdy, risqué stage. When theatres opened up again in 1660, Shakespeare’s language was already considered obscure and his plays were seen as decent raw material that could be polished up and perfected. Many of the plays were replaced by adaptations. Some Shakespeare plays disappeared from the stage for over a century. It was only in the eighteenth century that Shakespeare started to become known as the national poet, promoted – we should say, hyped – as the Bard “for all time” by marketing-savvy stage managers. This is not to say that Shakespeare’s reputation is undeserved, but rather that his fame was not as inevitable as it may now appear.
Bonus Baby
Though we’re not quite sure about Shakespeare’s exact date of birth, the generally accepted date is April 23, 1564. Conveniently - for the whole national poet aspect of things - April 23rd is also St. George’s Day. St. George, of course, is the patron saint of England. Isn’t it great when a plan comes together?
Editor’s note: For those who would like to know more about the fascinating Making Publics project, start by thinking about the people going to see Shakespeare’s plays; they were forming a theater-going public, a community based on a shared interest. The Making Publics Project brings together scholars in art history, education, geography, history, history of religion, history of science, literary studies, media studies, music history, sociology and theatre history from leading research institutions in North America and Europe. For more info, click here.
When I visited Stratford-on-Avon, and went to the museum, one of the things that stuck out to me was the fact that Shakespeare’s wife was (a) older than him, by quite a bit, and (b) three months pregnant at the time of their marriage.
He was definitely not one of the tame, proper gentlemen we think of as being typical of that time period!