12. Soul of the Age, by Jonathan Bate, pp. 343-372

Sixth Age: Pantaloon: Chapter 21, The Principal Comedians; Chapter 22, The Foolosopher

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Shakespeare's plays were inevitably shaped by the actors available to him, such as Richard Burbage and the clowns Will Kempe and Robert Armin.

Burbage the tragedian was supposedly like the shape-changing god of classical myth, Proteus: "so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tiring-house) assumed himself again until the play was ended." [An early method actor.] The original Richard III, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, and Lear, he was almost certainly the exemplary actor described by John Webster: "By a full and significant action of body, he charms our attention: sit in a full theatre and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears, whiles the actor is the centre."... Burbage played until his death in 1619, upon which he was mourned in an array of epitaphs.

John Hemings and Henry Condell, also actors in the company, are forever linked because of their efforts to put together the material for the First Folio in 1623. Condell, as well as Kempe, had been part of a troupe that toured Denmark and performed at the court at Elsinore; they may well have supplied some of the local color for Hamlet.

Kempe was one of the company's stars, in large part because of his role in the jigs, the bawdy musical skits that followed the play. One of his surviving jigs involved a scene in a graveyard that might have suggested the graveyard scene in Hamlet, while another bears a resemblance to some of the plot of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Though the question remains open as to whether the part of Falstaff was written for [Thomas] Pope or Kempe, the latter was undoubtedly Costard in Love's Labour's Lost, Peter (the Nurse's servant) in Romeo and Juliet, Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lancelet Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. He would have left a great hole in the company when he left in 1599.

Kempe was replaced by Robert Armin, who relied more on cerebral wit than physical comedy. As many critics have noticed, this accounts for the change of style in Shakespeare's later fools: Touchstone in As You Like It ... , Feste in Twelfth Night, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, Lavatch in All's Well That Ends Well, Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, and above all Lear's Fool are all to varying degrees wise, witty, and cynical.

John Marston's play The Malcontent gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the  King's Men in 1604 with a prologue in which Burbage, Condell, and several others in the company appear as themselves. A couple of years earlier, some student actors at Cambridge had played Burbage and Kempe in a Christmas show called The Return From Parnassus Part 2, which also features jokes alluding to Shakespeare and his works. It also alludes to Thomas Dekker's Satiromastix, a 1601 play lampooning Ben Jonson, and suggests that Shakespeare may have had a hand in it. But Shakespeare himself may have been the object of Dekker's satire in the character of Sir Adam Prickshaft: His opening lines echo the opening lines of Justice Shallow, and there is a running joke about Sir Adam's baldness. "The combination of the name, the direct allusion to Henry IV, and the fact that Sir Adam Prickshaft is a balding poet would be an extraordinary coincidence if the part had nothing to do with Shakespeare." On the other hand, it's also possible that Shakespeare was a good sport and played the part himself.

The word "philosopher" appears only ten times in all of Shakespeare's works: once in The Merchant of Venice, twice in As You Like It, once in Much Ado About Nothing, and three times each in Timon of Athens and King Lear. One of Portia's suitors in The Merchant is a melancholy man who is compared to "the weeping philosopher" Heraclitus. Another melancholy man, Jaques, calls the shepherd Corin "a natural philosopher," punning on the Elizabethan meaning of "natural" as an idiot, but also suggesting "that Corin speaks the truth of nature -- which is opposite to that of the court." The other use of the word in the play is in the phrase "'the heathen philosopher.' It occurs immediately after the saying 'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. This is the most famous saying of Socrates."

The fourth use in the comedies is Leonato's observation in Much Ado: "For there was never yet philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently." Bate comments, "The irony here is specifically directed against Stoicism, the philosophy that preaches 'patience' in the face of adversity and recommends that we aspire to be like the gods who are above fortune.... A testing of the limits of Stoicism is one of the principal motifs of the Roman plays."

The three references in Timon of Athens center on the character of Apemantus, who is "the only professional philosopher in Shakespeare." Apemantus "is an extreme embodiment of the philosophy embraced by Jacques: Cynicism. A Cynic takes the Stoic rejection of worldliness to an extreme.... Yet for Apemantus, as for Jacques, Cynicism is a pose, a performance -- they both actually rather enjoy company and food." In the play, Timon is the one who truly follows the precepts of Cynicism, "rejecting all worldliness, dying in his cave by the seashore."

Michel de Montaigne

The three instances of the word in King Lear all occur in the hovel on the heath, where Lear questions his philosopher: Tom o' Bedlam, an apparent madman. The play reduces all formal philosophies to an absurdity. When Gloucester blames the ills that befall humankind on the stars, Edmund remarks, "An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star." He sees himself as the victim of "custom," of societal conventions such as illegitimacy, and "commits himself to 'nature' as a principle of survival and self-seeking." Bate sees Edmund's position as "close to that of Michel de Montaigne in the closing section of his longest essay, 'An Apology of Raymond Sebond':  any custom abhorred or outlawed by one nation is sure to be praised or practiced by another." Edmund "has been seen as a proto-Hobbesian philosopher, espousing a doctrine of raw competition. Montaigne argues instead for Christian love and humility. Perhaps that is what Edmund moves toward at the end of the play, with his last attempt to do some good and his discovery that he was beloved."

Gloucester, on the other hand, turns toward Stoicism, trying to endure the misery he finds himself in until he dies, but after Lear and Cordelia are taken he can't maintain his resignation. Edgar encourages his Stoic resolve, "Men must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither, / Ripeness is all." But "by mistiming the revelation of his own identity to Gloucester, Edgar precipitates his father's death. The pattern, then, is of Stoic comfort not working."

Albany believes in divine justice, but finds his belief undone: "in response to the news that Cordelia is to be hanged, Albany says, 'The gods defend her,' only for Lear to enter with her in his arms already hanged -- the gods haven't defended her." And all of his efforts to set things to rights are failures.

Lear's observation, "Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou [Tom] art," has its possible origins in John Florio's translation of Montaigne, whose "whose point is that it is arrogant and illogical to suppose that humans are 'naturally' superior to animals, chosen by God as the supreme beings, since in our natural state of nakedness our bodies have defects, vulnerability, and 'manifold imperfections' in comparison with those of animals, adorned as they are with wool, hair, or feathers that we borrow in order to clothe ourselves."

Montaigne's work is a perpetual critique of abstract wisdom in the name of experience. As the passage about the philosopher and the toothache in Much Ado About Nothing suggests, Shakespeare had been engaging in a similar critique throughout his career. He always finds theory wanting in the face of action. He is more interested in how people perform than in what they profess. He was, after all, a performer himself.

Desiderius Erasmus

Shakespeare made two major changes from his source, the old King Leir play: he took away its happy ending, and he changed the action from a Christian setting to a pagan one, the latter change presenting "humanity as monsters, preying on one another." But he also made two important additions: the Fool and Poor Tom. As Bate sees it, this moves us from Montaigne to Erasmus, specifically The Praise of Folly. "The Fool's one-liners make more sense of Lear's predicament than do the Stoic rationalizations of Gloucester and Edgar." In the court, the licensed fool is the only one allowed to speak truth. "The tragedy of the court is that you can only gain advancement there through false speaking. Plain-speaking Kent is forced into disguise as servant Caius."

Under the aspect of Folly, we see that a king is no different from any other man. The trappings of monarchy are but a costume: this is both Folly's and Lear's discovery.... Folly tells us that there are two kinds of madness -- one is the thirst for gold, sex, and power. That is the madness of Regan, Cornwall, Edmund, and company.... The second madness is the desirable one, the state of folly in which "a certain pleasant raving, or error of the mind, delivereth the heart of that man whom it possesseth from all wonted carefulness, and rendreth it divers ways much recreated with new delectation." ... [Lear's] final words are spoken in the delusion that [Cordelia's] lips are moving -- "Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!" Her lips aren't moving, but it's better for Lear that he should not know this. Philosophers say that it is miserable to be deceived. Folly replies that it is most miserable "not to be deceived," for nothing could be further from the truth than the notion that man's happiness resides in things as they actually are.

As Lear loses everything, he actually improves, he "becomes kind. Little things show us this: in act one, he's still always giving orders. Even in the storm he continues to make demands: 'come, unbutton here.' In the end, though, he learns to say please and thank you: 'Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir." And although Shakespeare removed the specifically Christian setting of his source, "those essentials of the Erasmian and Montaignian ... Christian vision are still there: folly and love."

In The Praise of Folly, Erasmus coins the word "morosophos," from the Greek words for "foolish" and "wisdom." "The compound word may be attached most aptly to the Shakespeare of King Lear. In writing this play, he was not a historian. Nor was he a philosopher. He was a FOOLOSOPHER." 

7. Soul of the Age, by Jonathan Bate, pp. 162-185

Third Age: Lover, Chapter 11, Before the Bawdy Court

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In 1612, Shakespeare was a witness in a civil case in the Court of Requests at Westminster, Belott vs. Mountjoy. Mr. and Mrs. Mountjoy, from whom Shakespeare rented lodgings, had hired an apprentice, Stephen Belott, with a view to his marrying their daughter and taking over their business. But when they failed to pay the dowry agreed on, Belott took them to court. Shakespeare was called as a character witness for Belott, and revealed in the testimony that Mrs. Mountjoy had asked him to persuade Belott to go through with the marriage. Shakespeare knew something about persuading young men to marry, the subject of Venus and Adonis, the first group of sonnets, and the plays All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure.

Cases involving marital problems could be tried in either a civil court or an ecclesiastical one. "The church consistory courts ... heard many cases involving sex, marriage, adultery, and divorce. They were the place where love entered the public arena." So many of Shakespeare's plays hinge on love disputes that it's worth recalling that "he would have been exposed to questions of a similar kind when as a boy and a young man he witnessed his fellow townspeople doing penance in the church or the marketplace, or when -- as is bound to have happened in a small community -- he heard the gossip about the latest case to have come before the consistory court. Given the nature of its most interesting business, the people gave that institution a more colloquial name: the 'bawdy court.'"

In fact, Shakespeare's own daughter, Susanna Hall, was plaintiff in a bawdy court case in 1613, when she accused John Lane of slandering her by saying that she was a loose woman who had had an affair with a man named Rafe Smith. Lane failed to appear at the hearing and "was excommunicated and Susanna's name was cleared -- if a name can ever fully be cleared once an alleged scandal has reached the public domain." And in 1608 both his brother Richard and his sister Joan were defendants in cases in the bawdy court, although details of the accusations have not survived.

Women, who were habitually encouraged to be silent and submissive, had the opportunity to become active agents in the bawdy court, just as fictional women are active agents -- usually wittier and more eloquent than the men -- in Shakespeare's comedies. According to one historian, in the city of London in the early seventeenth century, 80 percent of sex and marriage cases were brought to the bawdy courts by women. 

In Shakespeare's plays, however, most of the "noxious gossips and accusers" are men: Iago, Claudio, Don John, Bertram, Posthumus, "and for that matter the entire body of the Greek generals slandering Cressida." Even the notorious "bed tricks" in which an unfaithful man is tricked into sleeping with his own wife, as in All's Well and Measure for Measure, are documented in the records of the bawdy court.

There is a sense, then, in which the theater, so often condemned as a place of extreme bawdry, functioned as an alternative bawdy court.... A church court case and a staging of The Taming of the Shrew: each in its way could be a testing of the limits of domestic violence and the language of sexual combat.... To a Shakespearean audience, the trial of Queen Hermione for adultery in The Winter's Tale would at one and the same time have evoked a high-level treason trial and a mundane bawdy-court marital case.... Shakespeare's most sustained dramatization of bawdy court matter occurs at the climax of All's Well That Ends Well, one of the bitter comedies that he seems to have written around the time that he was being dragged into the marital business of the Mountjoy household. 

As for Shakespeare's own extramarital sex life, Bate notes that he "seems to have had a reputation for being sexually active outside his marriage," as exemplified by the familiar story that when Richard Burbage was playing Richard III, Burbage made an assignation with a woman after the play, but Shakespeare got there first and enjoyed her favors. "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."

Inevitably, given that there is "a preoccupation with sexual disease in the plays written early in the reign of King James," some have speculated that Shakespeare himself contracted syphilis. "Given the close links between the theaters, the taverns, and the sex trade, Shakespeare would have seen many people suffering the grotesque symptoms of the pox. But we cannot rule out the possibility that he became infected himself.... The only women in Timon of Athens are a pair of prostitutes who put in a brief appearance in order to be abused by Timon in a series of speeches that allude to the symptoms of secondary and tertiary syphilis, including the playwright's own affliction of premature baldness."

The prolonged separation of William and Anne also raises the question of how faithful either of them may have been to the other. "The Winter's Tale was written sixteen years after 1594, the year when he became firmly established as a London-based writer and player with the formation of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Is it a coincidence that it is a play about a man who asks his wife for a second chance after sixteen years of separation?" And both The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline center on unfaithful wives. "If we are to play the game of inferring Shakespeare's love life from his plays, then we cannot rule out the possibility that he was -- or imagined himself to be -- the victim of marital infidelity as well as the perpetrator of it."

Such inferences underlie the speculations of those who see the bequest to Anne of the "second-best bed" as an insult to her. Others point to the scarcity of happily married couples in the plays:

Petruchio and Kate are a match for each other, but theirs is hardly a tranquil household. Hotspur and his Kate in Henry IV Part 1 have terrific gusto, but their relationship is tempered by the sense that he is happier astride his horse than his wife..... Aufidius in Coriolanus speaks of his love for his wife and his happiness on his wedding night, but suggests that he takes more pleasure in ... reminiscing about a dream of wrestling Coriolanus to the ground.... Of all Shakespeare's married couples, the pair who seem most intimate, whom the audience senses are in love as man and wife as they were when first they wooed, are the Macbeths. That is a fact that may give pause for thought.

The only one of Shakespeare's plays that has the word "love" in its title is Love's Labour's Lost. It bears some resemblance to a book by Peter de la Primaudaye, The French Academy, published in France in 1577 and in an English translation in 1586. Set at the time of the French religious civil wars in the second half of the sixteenth century, it tells of four gentlemen who retreat from the world and under the guidance of an elderly tutor study moral philosophy. The setup of Shakespeare's play is similar, and it "seems to have been written not long after the king of Navarre converted to Catholicism and took the French throne. 'Paris is worth a mass,' he was reputed to have said." In the play, Navarre suggests to three noblemen, whose names are those of actual nobles of the king's court, that they retreat from the world (and women), now that they have won the war, and devote themselves to study.

The premise of the exercise is that there is no place for love in intellectual life. Shakespeare, who did not of course spend three years in the all-male environment of an Oxford or Cambridge college, clearly thought that this was nonsense and set about mocking the idea. Love, he proposes instead, is at the center of intellectual life. The really interesting task is not to reject it, but to find the appropriate language to express it.

Berowne agrees to the king's plan, but like Shakespeare he is skeptical of it. "The unfolding action proves Berowne right. Wisdom, as often in Shakespeare, comes from the mouth of a fool: the clownish Costard's irrefutable statement that "It is the manner of a man to speak to a woman" comes to the core of the play.... Love's Labour's Lost is a play packed with wit, elegance, philosophical reflection, and filthy jokes. For Shakespeare, love meant immersing oneself in each of these four dimensions." In the end, the Princess of France arrives with three ladies, and they show the foolishness of the men's retreat.

2. Soul of the Age, by Jonathan Bate, pp. 13-29

First Age: Infant; Chapter 2, The Discovery of England

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The break with Rome and the end to the domination of a "universal" church led to a surge in English nationalism, "a perceived need to buttress the English nation by proving the dignity of the English language and the native culture." Elizabeth's decision to remain unmarried, rather than to see an alliance with a prince from another nation was prompted in part by the unpopularity of her half-sister, Mary, whose marriage to Philip II of Spain "effectively placed a foreign king on the English throne."

Her favorite, Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester, played an effective role in the development of English culture: "he commissioned an array of publications, including history books and translations of the Latin classics, as a way of flying the flag for English traditions and the English language." He was the patron of a troupe of players that in 1574 received a royal patent. Their leader, John Burbage, leased a site in London in 1576 and built a theater -- "simply called The Theatre." Puritan objections to the drama meant that "public playhouses were always built in the 'liberties' on the margins of London to the northeast or south of the river Thames." Their objections also led Shakespeare to create such characters as Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Angelo in Measure for Measure.

In 1581 Edward Tilney, the master of the revels in the lord chamberlain's office, was given jurisdiction over all plays, which he was to screen before allowing their performance. Bate comments, "This sounds like state censorship but was intended as an opportunity for him to familiarize himself with the repertoire in order to get the best shows to court." Two years later, twelve actors formed the Queen's Men, a traveling company whose itinerary included Stratford-upon-Avon. In 1587, a new theater, the Rose, opened in Southwark, managed by Philip Henslowe, and provided competition for the Queen's Men. One of the companies that played at the Rose was Lord Strange's Men, whose patron was Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. Shakespeare's first plays were performed by the company. The leading actor in Lord Strange's Men was Richard Burbage, who would form a new company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594.

When the Puritans took power in 1642, they closed the theaters. But quite intangibly, those same theaters had prepared the way for the moment seven years later when the ax came down on the king's head in Whitehall. Where was it that Londoners had previously confronted the image of monarchs being removed from their thrones? Where was it that they had seen ordinary people -- actors, who were still regarded as little better than rogues and vagabonds -- daring to look into the minds of princes, and in so doing showing that kings and queens are not so much God's vice-regents on earth as ordinary mortals like all the rest of us? In the theater. 

 In 1592 the Dutch artist Marcus Gheeraerts painted a portrait of Queen Elizabeth in a white dress standing on a map of England and Wales, as if shielding her country from the threatening storm in the painting's background. The map on which she is standing was drawn up by Christopher Saxton in 1579, and "was the first-ever accurate map of the whole country. It was one of the keys to the Elizabethans' discovery of their own land."

Christopher Saxton's Map of England and Wales, 1579

"Thanks to Saxton, the Elizabethans were the first English people to have a clear sense of the physical shape of their own nation. And that gave them a new sense of belonging." But "belonging" was a layered concept: "Elizabethans were as loyal to their county as they were to their country. William Shakespeare was renowned as a Warwickshire man, and Sir Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake were proud of their Devonshire heritage." They relished the individuality of their various regions, and Shakespeare is unique among the Elizabethan playwrights in setting scenes in Warwickshire and neighboring Gloucestershire. "This little-observed fact is something of a problem for those conspiracy theorists who do not believe that the plays were written by a grammar-school boy from Warwickshire."

In Henry VI Part 3, he introduces a character named Somerville, who doesn't appear in the chronicles from which Shakespeare took the historical material of the play. "To an Elizabethan audience, or at least to anyone from the West Midlands, the name would immediately have evoked a Warwickshire man ...:  John Somerville of Edstone, a village four miles north of Stratford." Somerville had been arrested in 1583 for allegedly boasting about a plan to kill the queen. He was the son-in-law of Edward Arden, a Warwickshire Catholic family very probably related to Shakespeare's mother, née Mary Arden. Somerville was killed in prison, but Arden was hanged, drawn and quartered. His wife, another Mary Arden, was reprieved. "The tiny role of Somerville in Henry VI Part 3 may have been Shakespeare's way of saying that it was possible to be both a Warwickshire Catholic and a 'true-hearted friend' of queen and country."

Another Warwickshireman, Michael Drayton, took it on himself to celebrate the whole country, county by county, in his poem Polyolbion, which he began in 1598 and published in 1612. The frontispiece shows Britannia wrapped in a map like Saxton's.  The implication is "that the essence of the nation lay not only in the monarchy but above all in the land itself."

Warwickshire came to be regarded as "the heart of England" in large part because of Shakespeare, with an assist from Drayton.

That identity perhaps becomes tangible at the moment in Henry IV Part 1 when Falstaff breaks his journey from London to Shrewsbury along the old Roman road of Watling Street near Coventry, the capital of the Midlands, the place where the boy Shakespeare would have gained his first smell of city life. And in Part 2, when Falstaff goes recruiting in Justice Shallow's parish in the neighboring shire of Gloucester, Shakespeare begins the invention of deep England.