Shakespeare: For All Time by Stanley Wells, Oxford University Press, New York. 442 pp, $40 cloth.
Recently, in preparing for my production of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, I went to the playwright’s longtime home in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where I was granted entrance into his library. Dürrenmatt had categorized his collection of books by discipline and by nationality. To my surprise, I found William Shakespeare shelved in the German section. This celebrated German-Swiss playwright had adopted Shakespeare as an honorary member of the authors writing in his own mother-tongue. In that precise moment, I realized that I had done the same thing. As a North American, I, too, had claimed the English writer as my own.
This pervasive phenomenon is the central theme of Shakespeare: For All Time, a new book from scholar Stanley Wells, the title of which is taken from Ben Jonson’s 1623 poem. Written with generosity and humor, Wells’s book is an illustrated compendium encompassing new readings of the Bard’s Stratford-upon-Avon and London years, thoughtful observations of Shakespeare the writer and a lively history of the Shakespeare legend. Wells writes for a wide audience from his half-century’s study of Shakespeare. He is a Stratford man and a professional Shakespearean (emeritus professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Birmingham, a vice-chairman of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, general editor of the Oxford Complete Works, to name only a few of his distinctions).
Wells’s starting point is Shakespeare’s life. He begins with dramatic flair: “When the name first appears, it is in Latin…Gulielmus, filius Johannes Shakspere’…” One can almost hear the pen scratching the vellum register and wonder who was present.
Wells continues the Latin theme, as if answering the ever-louder contingent who would replace Stratford’s Shakespeare with a better-educated Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon or Duke of Something. Wells stresses the rigor of the Latin training Shakespeare received in 16th-century grammar school. “An Elizabethan boy of average ability would have acquired as good an education in Latin language and literature as an honours graduate of the present,” Wells avers, going on to observe that Shakespeare, sharpest of observers, could have been easily launched into his own private reading, even without a university education. He was most likely a self-made man, an upstart of sorts, and in that respect has more in common with devotees from the Americas, who revel in the invention of self.
But Wells’s book offers an unexpected speculation as well. He argues that Shakespeare was probably the “first literary commuter.” Contrary to the standard opinion that he lived in London and retired to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1612, Wells argues that the playwright never settled in London—that instead he regularly traveled back and forth to the city, a commute that would have taken three days at the most. In 1597, he purchased New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford, and moved in with his family. Wells proposes that Shakespeare had a study and library in New Place, where he would have done most of his writing. Here, the Bard would have consulted Plutarch’s Lives, Holinshed’s Chronicles, Montaigne’s Essays, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Gerard’s Herbal and a host of other sources.
Wells bases his theory of Shakespeare’s “continuing Stratford presence” on public records and private missives. W.S. seems to have been a practical man who wanted to make smart financial investments and to secure titles, land and money. Several records show him suing for debt. In his desire to draw a portrait of a real person, Wells consistently disputes the well-worn romantic proclivities that shape how: we like to think of our Shakespeare.
But Wells stakes a still deeper claim on Shakespeare the writer. He takes the reader through what could be gleaned from Shakespeare’s workshop process, citing examples from Love’s Labour’s Lost and Romeo and Juliet. He speaks of the tension in the texts between actuality and abstraction, a critical aspect of their canonical status as being “for all time.” He credits the modern theatre—in particular, the Royal Shakespeare Company—for recovering the muscularity of the rhetoric in Shakespeare’s language.
Wells gets to the heart of Shakespeare’s plays when he discusses “his technique of presenting characters and their actions from their own point of view.” In this regard, Wells posits Romeo and Juliet as Shakespeare’s “breakthrough play,” because the “stylistic range in both prose and verse is greater than that of any play previously written by Shakespeare or anyone else.” Citing the colloquial sound of the nurse’s speech as reflective of the undisciplined, digressive nature of her mind, Wells shows how this character from Romeo and Juliet anticipates the self-conscious language of Hamlet’s precociously tortured soliloquies.
Wells goes on to demonstrate how convoluted the writing became at the end of Shakespeare’s career. Much of the language pulls away from the dramatic and turns inward and complex—“surreal, almost mad.” Because Shakespeare “had lost the taste for over-theatricality,” Wells posits, the final plays (Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen) were written in collaboration with another writer. His colleagues may in fact have given him “the sack.” Shakespeare is, in the deepest sense, a religious writer, in that his plays reach beyond societal concerns to delve into man’s relationship to the universe, into the mystery of things. Still, while his characters’ thoughts penetrate the unseen and the unknown, their feet remain firmly planted on the stage.
As for those who would attribute Shakespeare’s greatness to the poetry alone, Wells will have none of it. He never lets the reader forget that Shakespeare was a poet who wrote for the stage. His texts are made complete only when partnered by the imaginative act in the theatre. His characters exist only in relationship to each other and are only fully realized when heard and seen by an audience. “As an artist, Shakespeare invites an aesthetic response,” Wells writes.
As if in reply to this invitation, the exuberant final section of Shakespeare: For All Time is a gallery of historical personages—sane and mad, high and low—who are credited with keeping Shakespeare alive over the centuries.
There was, for example, the 18th-century actor-manager David Garrick, who showed “a special talent for expiring on stage” and thus wrote a dying speech for Macbeth’s final moment—that Wells soundly labels “claptrap.” The pre-Victorian 19th century found the Bowdlers, a brother-sister acting team, scraping the plays clean of their biblical allusions and of all lewdness.
And then there was William Poel, known for revolutionary productions of Shakespeare as the 19th century edged into the 20th. Poel cast his actors exclusively according to their voice timbres. Having cast a deep-voiced woman to play Valentine in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Poel expressed great disappointment when she showed “no virility whatsoever.”
Beginning with William Davenant (possibly a godson or natural son of Shakespeare), who reorganized Macbeth according to neoclassical ideas, and concluding with a recent Norwegian production of Macbeth in which the title character was played by a tomato, the book’s survey of “aesthetic responses” spans the gamut—but its parade of theatrical caretakers of the Shakespearean legend mirrors the writer’s own idiosyncratic characters, who will often have their way in the plays. Shakespeare gives us room to do what we will.
As a North American director of Shakespeare’s plays, I, too, assert my ownership of the great writer. Deep within his words I hear a thread of sound that travels backwards to Old English and forward into today’s vernacular. Out of this earth come such words: “drink,” “thing,” “think,” “smack,” “shake,” “crack,” “might,” “right,” “spring,” “come” and so forth. The words are powerful and grim. Listen to Lear: “And thou all-shaking thunder / Strike flat the thick rotundity of the world / Crack nature’s moulds.” There’s a direct line from Beowulf through Shakespeare to Al Pacino. These words—the backbone of language—express an unvarnished fierceness together with a mordant humor; they are reborn in the North American vernacular.
Yet for a director it is what is unspoken in Shakespeare’s plays that needs to be confronted and tackled on stage. The audience has to conjure the ineffable through the characters’ physical presence (or absence) on stage. We meet Shakespeare in the silences—in the eyes of the bemused women who simply watch as the men mock the antics of the Nine Worthies in Love’s Labour’s Lost; or in the tragic image of Lear wrestling with infinity in the storm.
Wells navigates through Shakespeare’s afterlife with wit and authority. Whether dealing with his legacy in the fields of the visual arts, music, cinema, theatre or television, the book celebrates all Shakespearean manifestations, their imperfections notwithstanding. The result is that Wells brings us as close to an understanding of the man, the writer and the legend, as is possible in a one-volume study.
Shakespeare, Wells concludes, is in the water supply. It is no great wonder, then, that our various claims on him run deep (Dürrenmatt’s library, for instance). An earlier line in the same Jonson poem that declares Shakespeare as being “for all time” calls forth the spirits of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and the Roman dramatists, for the purpose of admonishing them to sit together in the the-atre—and hear Shakespeare’s plays “shake a stage.”
Karin Coonrod has directed Henry VI at the Joseph Papp Public Theater and King John and Julius Caesar at Theatre for a New Audience in New York City.
