Shakespeare on Money and Love
Many scholars consider that Shakespeare is the greatest playwright in English, and his plays and poems have been intensively studied and analyzed for centuries. However, very little is known about him as a person. Very little documentary evidence has been found about him, apart from his will and a few records of legal proceedings in which he was involved. Any biography is necessarily speculative, since the available evidence is skimpy and often ambiguous.
I recently finished reading Stephen Greenblatt's new book "Will in the World." This has received excellent reviews, which is not surprising because Greenblatt writes in a very elegant and informative style about subjects in which many people are interested. He clearly is very familiar with how people were educated, how the Elizabethan class system was organized, how plays were performed, and so on. Most of the book is concerned with what actually is known about the period, together with plausible speculation about how Shakespeare might have reacted to different experiences that he is likely to have had.
Overall, I'm glad that I read the book, and in general I felt that I learned a lot from it about the cultural environment of the period. But I did find myself disagreeing with some of Greenblatt's reasoning, particularly on the topics of creativity and love.
Greenblatt talks extensively about Shakespeare's contemporaries such as Marlowe and Kyd. He notes that many of them were also fine playwrights and poets, but they tended to lead rather dissolute lives and to die young. Shakespeare seems to have been one of the few who lived past his early thirties. Greenblatt suggests that Shakespeare was probably much more hardworking than them, or he would not have been able to write so much and become so rich.
Hmm, well maybe. I think Greenblatt is going a considerable way beyond what the evidence can actually support. Greenblatt himself gained tenure at Berkeley and was then recruited to Harvard, and he has published umpteen books and articles during his career. Clearly, he knows exactly how much work is required to produce a modern scholarly text. And Greenblatt apparently belives that Shakespeare must have had some of the "Sitzfleisch" of an academic scholar in order to be so successful.
There are certainly creative people who have disciplined themselves to working consistently hard throughout their lives -- Bach and Trollope, for instance. But such people are actually quite rare. And many creative people lead complicated, dissolute lives, and yet they manage to survive and even to produce outstanding work. I don't see why Greenblatt is so determined to assume that Shakespeare was a sort of working-class hero who had to show his superiority by working harder and more consistently than his effete rivals.
Also, I would point out that Shakespeare didn't actually write that much. The collected works can be fitted into a single rather thick book -- much less than Lope de Vega or Cervantes in Spanish, or Balzac or Zola in French, or Dickens or Trollope in English. Yes, some of the plays are great, but others are pretty weak. It's not at all impossible that Shakespeare was not at all like a tenured academic professor, and that his inspiration just wasn't particularly long-lasting.
Certainly there's no evidence that he wrote anything at all after he left London, which Greenblatt interprets as being "a final, fantastic theatrical experiment: the everyday life of a country gentleman" (pages 387-8). Hmm. I think this is a big rhetorical stretch. It seems to me equally likely that Shakespeare felt relieved that he no longer had to write plays, and that he was quite content to potter around Stratford and spend time with his friends and family, without feeling any need to continue writing plays or poems.
With regard to "love," Greenblatt recognizes that the available evidence on Shakespeare's lovelife is almost non-existent. Greenblatt thinks that the first sonnets were probably written to the Earl of Southampton, but he is as baffled as everyone else about who might have been the intended audience for the later sonnets. Greenblatt seems to believe that the plays were written to make money, but that each of the sonnets were written for delivery to a specific person, and that they represent what Shakespeare was really thinking and feeling at the time.
Well, maybe. It seems to me that if a poet now can write a poem which is not addressed to a particular individual, then that was probably also possible in Shakespeare's time. Yes, some of the poems and plays might have been dedicated to one person, but others might just have been the product of Shakespeare's fertile imagination. I would have liked to see Greenblatt at least mention this possibility.
Also with regard to "love," Shakespeare was married to Anne Hathaway for 34 years, but it seems that they spent very little time together, because she lived in Stratford while he lived in London. Greenblatt thinks it's quite possible that Shakespeare had to marry her because she became pregnant, and he thinks it's virtually certain that she was illiterate and thus wouldn't have been able to take much part in Shakespeare's creative life. Greenblatt also comments that although many of the plays involve love and marriage, Shakespeare hardly ever depicts a married couple who are affectionate towards each other.
I'm not really convinced by this reasoning. Among the novels and plays and poems that I've read, in English and other languages, there just don't seem to be many stories in which a husband and wife are happy together. At least in my experience, it's actually very common that marriage is seen as being somewhat painful, filled with mutual incomprehension and fears of infidelity.
I don't think this is actually accurate -- I know plenty of happy families, and (contrary to what Tolstoy said at the start of Anna Karenina) they are just as different from each other as the unhappy families that I've known. But for some reason, it seems to be difficult to write compelling drama in which a husband and wife trust and respect and love each other. I suspect this probably says more about the willingness of writers to borrow each other's plots than it does about the actual attainability of love and affection in the married state.
I recently finished reading Stephen Greenblatt's new book "Will in the World." This has received excellent reviews, which is not surprising because Greenblatt writes in a very elegant and informative style about subjects in which many people are interested. He clearly is very familiar with how people were educated, how the Elizabethan class system was organized, how plays were performed, and so on. Most of the book is concerned with what actually is known about the period, together with plausible speculation about how Shakespeare might have reacted to different experiences that he is likely to have had.
Overall, I'm glad that I read the book, and in general I felt that I learned a lot from it about the cultural environment of the period. But I did find myself disagreeing with some of Greenblatt's reasoning, particularly on the topics of creativity and love.
Greenblatt talks extensively about Shakespeare's contemporaries such as Marlowe and Kyd. He notes that many of them were also fine playwrights and poets, but they tended to lead rather dissolute lives and to die young. Shakespeare seems to have been one of the few who lived past his early thirties. Greenblatt suggests that Shakespeare was probably much more hardworking than them, or he would not have been able to write so much and become so rich.
Hmm, well maybe. I think Greenblatt is going a considerable way beyond what the evidence can actually support. Greenblatt himself gained tenure at Berkeley and was then recruited to Harvard, and he has published umpteen books and articles during his career. Clearly, he knows exactly how much work is required to produce a modern scholarly text. And Greenblatt apparently belives that Shakespeare must have had some of the "Sitzfleisch" of an academic scholar in order to be so successful.
There are certainly creative people who have disciplined themselves to working consistently hard throughout their lives -- Bach and Trollope, for instance. But such people are actually quite rare. And many creative people lead complicated, dissolute lives, and yet they manage to survive and even to produce outstanding work. I don't see why Greenblatt is so determined to assume that Shakespeare was a sort of working-class hero who had to show his superiority by working harder and more consistently than his effete rivals.
Also, I would point out that Shakespeare didn't actually write that much. The collected works can be fitted into a single rather thick book -- much less than Lope de Vega or Cervantes in Spanish, or Balzac or Zola in French, or Dickens or Trollope in English. Yes, some of the plays are great, but others are pretty weak. It's not at all impossible that Shakespeare was not at all like a tenured academic professor, and that his inspiration just wasn't particularly long-lasting.
Certainly there's no evidence that he wrote anything at all after he left London, which Greenblatt interprets as being "a final, fantastic theatrical experiment: the everyday life of a country gentleman" (pages 387-8). Hmm. I think this is a big rhetorical stretch. It seems to me equally likely that Shakespeare felt relieved that he no longer had to write plays, and that he was quite content to potter around Stratford and spend time with his friends and family, without feeling any need to continue writing plays or poems.
With regard to "love," Greenblatt recognizes that the available evidence on Shakespeare's lovelife is almost non-existent. Greenblatt thinks that the first sonnets were probably written to the Earl of Southampton, but he is as baffled as everyone else about who might have been the intended audience for the later sonnets. Greenblatt seems to believe that the plays were written to make money, but that each of the sonnets were written for delivery to a specific person, and that they represent what Shakespeare was really thinking and feeling at the time.
Well, maybe. It seems to me that if a poet now can write a poem which is not addressed to a particular individual, then that was probably also possible in Shakespeare's time. Yes, some of the poems and plays might have been dedicated to one person, but others might just have been the product of Shakespeare's fertile imagination. I would have liked to see Greenblatt at least mention this possibility.
Also with regard to "love," Shakespeare was married to Anne Hathaway for 34 years, but it seems that they spent very little time together, because she lived in Stratford while he lived in London. Greenblatt thinks it's quite possible that Shakespeare had to marry her because she became pregnant, and he thinks it's virtually certain that she was illiterate and thus wouldn't have been able to take much part in Shakespeare's creative life. Greenblatt also comments that although many of the plays involve love and marriage, Shakespeare hardly ever depicts a married couple who are affectionate towards each other.
I'm not really convinced by this reasoning. Among the novels and plays and poems that I've read, in English and other languages, there just don't seem to be many stories in which a husband and wife are happy together. At least in my experience, it's actually very common that marriage is seen as being somewhat painful, filled with mutual incomprehension and fears of infidelity.
I don't think this is actually accurate -- I know plenty of happy families, and (contrary to what Tolstoy said at the start of Anna Karenina) they are just as different from each other as the unhappy families that I've known. But for some reason, it seems to be difficult to write compelling drama in which a husband and wife trust and respect and love each other. I suspect this probably says more about the willingness of writers to borrow each other's plots than it does about the actual attainability of love and affection in the married state.
posted by Chris_G at 1:23 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home