Free Will

Art and power on Shakespeare's stage

Richard Wilson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526111043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A study of theatre and sovereignty that situates Shakespeare's plays in the contraflow between two absolutisms of early modern England: the aesthetic and the political

1

The picture of Nobody

Shakespeare in the time of the political

Bare life

At the end, ‘his nose was as sharp as a pen’ as he ‘babbled of green fields’ [Henry V, 2,3,15]. In September 1615, a few weeks before Shakespeare began to make his will and a little over six months before his death, Thomas Greene, town clerk of Stratford, wrote a memorandum of an exchange biographers treasure as the last of the precious few records of the dramatist’s spoken words: ‘W Shakespeares tellyng J Greene that I was not able to beare the enclosinge of Welcombe’.¹ John Greene was the clerk’s brother, and Shakespeare, according to previous papers, was their ‘cousin’, who had lodged Thomas at New Place, his Stratford house. So the Greenes had appealed to their sharp-nosed kinsman for help in a battle that pitted the council against a consortium of speculators who were, in their own eyes, if ‘not the greatest … almost the greatest men of England’.² The plan to enclose the fields of Welcombe north of the town was indeed promoted by the steward to the Lord Chancellor, no less. But the predicament for Shakespeare was that it was led by his friends the Combes, rich money-lenders from whom he had himself bought 107 acres adjacent to the scheme. This land was his daughter Susanna’s inheritance, and he had raised her interest in its development by investing in a half-share of the tithes on Welcombe’s corn and hay. Critics like to read into Prospero’s vision of ‘nibbling sheep and flat meads thatched with stover’ [Tempest, 4,1,62–3] ‘Shakespeare’s figurative return home’.³ But at the close of his life, the dramatist was pitched into the thick of the epoch-marking conflict that was tearing this English idyll apart, for he now had to weigh his rental income from arable farming against the potential profits from those sheep.⁴

In his last days the great dramatist of indecision had to make a momentous decision. For the certain losers from sheep farming on Stratford’s ‘flat meads’ would be the tenants, who when ‘woolly breeders’ [Merchant, 1,3,79] ate fields, in a notorious image from More’s Utopia, must ‘depart away’ with babes and chattels on their backs.⁵ Shakespeare had set these wrenching words in Sir Thomas More, where More’s phrase about the destitute with babes and baggage at their backs was reassigned, however, to asylum-seekers [Add.II, 81–2]. When it came to evictions on his own turf his last recorded utterance that ‘I was not able to bear the enclosing’ is harder to read. Was his parting word on the most divisive social problem of the age that he could not bear or bar the change? Did he regret he had not barred the enclosure? Or that he could not bear its cost? And was the ‘I’ who he said ‘could not bear the enclosing’ even Shakespeare, indeed, or Greene? It seems more than chance that the Bard’s valediction is such a bar to understanding we cannot tell whether he could not prevent, endure or carry the enclosing. We know he was aware of such ambiguities because he had a joke that sheep ‘make me cry “baa”’ [Two Gents, 1,1,91]; his Macbeth would sooner bar the door than ‘bear the knife’ [Macbeth, 1,7,16]; and he has Antigonus abandon a bairn in bearing-cloth before he is eaten by a bear [Winter’s, 4,1,105]. But was Shakespeare, as a landowner and interested party, unable to stop, suffer or support the barring of his neighbours? In what did this lack of success consist? We cannot find our bearings. For as Terence Hawkes comments, ‘an entire spectrum of potential meaning’ is offered by the indeterminacy of these famous last words, as if their weakness and indecision were signifiers of some irresolvable confusion not only over the barring of real estate, but the bearing on the writer of his own life and times:

Plurality invests all texts of course, but none more so than this. Its very subject guarantees it a talismanic, even votive status in our culture which offers to propel the words beyond the page. They seem to present, after all, a record of oral utterance, of actual speech on the Bard’s part which, at this date, might almost lay claim to the aura of last words, significant beyond the context of their saying.⁶

Whatever their meaning Shakespeare’s last words seem to speak of a profound failure. Yet in his critique of speech act theory Jacques Derrida opened a new itinerary for criticism by connecting art precisely with the experience of failure or ineptitude, and with the counter-intuitive idea that what is most powerful is ‘often the most disarming feebleness’; so as a sign of the queer power of weakness, we might perhaps consider Shakespeare’s reported statement that ‘I was not able to bear the enclosing’ as what Roland Barthes termed a biographeme: that quantum of truth that embodies a life’s work.⁷ For ‘Who would fardels bear?’ asks his Hamlet [Hamlet, 3,1,75]; ‘I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out’, responds Gloucester [Lear, 4,6,75]; and Macbeth: ‘bear-like I must fight the course’ [Macbeth, 5,7,2]. But ‘I had rather bear with you than bear you’, sighs Touchstone [As You, 2,4,8]; and ‘He’s a lamb indeed that “baas” like a bear’, sneer the Citizens of Coriolanus [2,1.10]. Baring, in all its multiple connotations of comportment, endurance, exemption, exposure, orientation and prevention, seems to have been this writer’s habitual mode. We would thus surely like to know what the author of such lines thought about the condition of bare life, for human beings cannot bear too much reality, quips Hawkes, after T.S. Eliot, which is why they tell tales to paper over the cracks.⁸

Shakespeare span many sad stories about the ‘bare / ruin’d choirs’ [Sonnet 73] and ‘thorny point of bare distress’ [As You, 2,7,94], caused by England’s textile-driven capitalist revolution. Yet when his townsmen gave him a leading part to play in this historic tragedy, it appears he almost literally sat on the fence, retreating behind a barrier of words into what Stephen Greenblatt calls the double consciousness with which an actor hides from view, and echoing his questioners with what they already knew, or even had themselves just said.⁹ And this impression is reinforced by an earlier interview when Shakespeare had tried to calm their fears. For on 17 November 1614 Thomas Greene called on the great man at his London house in Blackfriars. But what the town clerk did not know, as Shakespeare and his son-in-law Dr. John Hall gave reassurances about going with the flow of events, was that on 28 October the poet’s pen had signed a secret covenant to secure his own compensation ‘for all such loss detriment or hindrance’ as he might suffer ‘by reason of any Enclosure’:

At my cousin Shakespeare, coming yesterday to town, I went to see him how he did. He told me that they assured him they meant to enclose no further than to Gospel Bush and so up straight (leaving out part of the dingles to the field) to the gate in Clopton hedge, and take in Salisbury’s piece. And that they mean in April to survey the land and then to give satisfaction, and not before. And he and Mr Hall say they think there will be nothing done at all.¹⁰

Perhaps his cousin Greene called ‘to see how he did’ because Shakespeare was already ill, and so too infirm to join the fight. Certainly, his reported attitude seems of a piece with the wish that warms his plays, to ‘laugh this sport o’er by a country fire’ [Merry Wives, 5,5,219]. Yet when the town clerk returned to Stratford he learned that ‘the survey there was passed’, despite his cousin’s certainty that it would not take place until spring, and by the first days of December the trenches were being dug for the fences. Embarrassingly, when Greene tried to halt the developers on the 10th he went looking for their lawyer at Shakespeare’s New Place, though it would be a month before lawyers tipped him off about the secret pact.¹¹ Biographers wring their hands at this sequence of events, which ‘reveals a hitherto unseen side to the playwright of the people … quietly hedging his bets’, in Anthony Holden’s words, ‘by doing clandestine deals with the enemy’.¹² ‘Either Shakespeare was lied to or he was lying’, as Greenblatt admits.¹³ So was he ‘disinterested, or was he a schemer?’ wondered Dennis Kay: ‘Was he duplicitous or naive?’¹⁴ Peter Levi feared the moneymen were ‘too sharp for him’; and René Weiss thinks him too ‘casual’; but Park Honan accepts his ‘wish to protect the value of his assets’ with the tired excuse that ‘he had earned some rest’.¹⁵ Likewise, while allowing that enclosure would be in his financial interests, Peter Ackroyd exonerates his reluctance to align himself as the result of a temperamental ambivalence: ‘He seems to have been incapable of taking sides and remained studiedly impartial in even matters closest to him’.¹⁶ Thus, as Greenblatt sums up a sorry story, ‘Shakespeare stayed out of it, indifferent to its outcome perhaps. He did not stand to lose anything, and did not choose to join in a campaign on behalf of others who might be less fortunate’.¹⁷

If the spy Marlowe was transfixed by how much theatrical and political plotting had in common, the property-owner who called England a ‘blessed plot’ [Richard II, 2,1,50] liked to pun on the topos that made his old plays exchangeable for a New Place. So his ambiguity over this plot of green fields has become an epitome for his biographers of Shakespeare’s famed disinterestedness. Yet it is the interest in his disinterest that is a focus of the most unforgiving treatment of the business, when a suicidal Shakespeare is portrayed in Edward Bond’s 1973 drama Bingo. ‘You read too much into it’, Bond’s playwright tells William Combe, as though addressing his later critics: ‘I’m protecting my own interests. Not supporting you, nor fighting the town’. The banker knows, however, that Shakespeare’s covert indemnity means he will never lift a finger against the plan. Thus, ‘Be noncommittal’, Combe slyly urges, ‘or say you think nothing will come of it. Stay in your garden. It pays to sit in a garden.’¹⁸ Bond sets his play in the bleak midwinter of the Christmas after Shakespeare struck his deal, when the town council begged him and other freeholders to prevent ‘the ruin of the borough’, and the confrontation turned violent as two aldermen mandated to fill the ditch were roughly thrown into it by Combe, who ‘sat laughing on horseback and said they were good football players’ but ‘puritan knaves’.¹⁹ In Bingo one of the protestors who cry for liberty is shot dead in the snow, while Shakespeare frets about the ice in his own soul: ‘I must be very cold … Every writer writes in other men’s blood.’²⁰ These winter words may well be melodramatic, but they underline Bond’s message, which is that Shakespeare’s creative freedom, as the sovereignty of an artist who sits serenely cultivating his own garden, is the aesthetic interest earned from a deadly non-commitment:

I howled when they suffered, but they were whipped and hanged so that I could be free. That is the right question: not why did I sign one piece of paper … Stolen things have no value. Pride and arrogance are the same when they’re stolen. Even serenity.²¹

‘It pays to sit in a garden’: for Bond Shakespeare’s serenity in his country garden was the stolen fruit of a ruthless privatization. From the opposite ideological perspective Jonathan Bate agrees it was this private place, and the selfishness of ‘keeping to oneself’, that sustained the public plays. Just as Montaigne retreated from the French court ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on texts
• Introduction
• 1 The picture of Nobody: Shakespeare in the time of the political
• 2 Welsh roots: Shakespeare’s brute part
• 3 O World: The echoes of Rome in Julius Caesar
• 4 Denmark’s a prison: Hamlet and the rules of art
• 5 Great stage of fools: King Lear and the King’s Men
• 6 Double trouble: Regime change in Macbeth
• 7 Your crown’s awry: The visual turn in Antony and Cleopatra
• 8 Like an eagle in a dovecot: The intrusion of the time into the play
• No sovereignty: Shakespeare’s voyage to Greece
• Index