Twelve Days of Shakespeare 1/12

Introduction: Ben Jonson and the Art of Shakespeare

On November 8th, 1623, publisher Edward Blount registered 18 previously unpublished plays by the author William Shakespeare with the Stationer’s Guild in London. Jacobean England did not offer authors copyright protection for their work. Instead, the guild of printers and publishers protected their own members who made the expensive investment of typesetting and printing a volume from competition from anyone (including the author) offering the same material (Taylor’s Version was not a thing of this past). Registration prevented licensed printers from offering competing editions (unlicensed printers faced loss of their hands or hanging so this was reasonably effective as deterrence). At the same time works were registered they could be reviewed and approved for sale by the revels office, a function of the Lord Chamberlain which regulated both printing and public performance of plays. For the forthcoming Folio collection of Shakespeare’s plays this was especially important because the Lord Chamberlain, William Herbert Earl of Pembroke, had placed an interdiction on the publication of any new work from Shakespeare. In 1619 printer William Jaggard had attempted to get out a selection of Shakespeare plays (known today as the “false” folio) by ante-dating previously unreleased works but the revels office had caught the deception and the effort had to be abandoned. In waiting so long to license the work Blount has taken a substantial risk. Printing the 36 plays of the folio, over 900 pages of material, had taken almost two years and cost almost 300 pounds just for paper and printing. Blount must have had strong advance assurances from Pembroke that the work could be sold when completed.

We don’t know when the last page came off the press and the volume was first offered for sale in the bookstalls around St. Paul’s cathedral in the center of London. The first documented sale was to Sir Edward Dering, a 25-year-old antiquarian and book collector who recorded the purchase in his account book on December 5^th 1623. He bought two copies. As the title page does not indicate a precise date of publication these two dates a month apart are all we have to mark the release of what has subsequently become the most valuable and arguably most important book in the English language.

You have likely noticed the fuss as the literary and theatre world commemorates the anniversary with print and video tributes (the BBC has dedicated an entire month of programming).

I have been working the last few years on a book about Shakespeare and the folio with a particular focus on Ben Jonson and the other figures who played a role with Shakespeare in the writing and eventual publication of the works. In honor of the 400^th anniversary I intend to offer excerpts each day through December 5^th (Twelve days of Shakespeare) to share what I have learned. It is a fascinating and largely unknown story, full of the literary and political figures whose lives shaped a critical moment in which our modern world began to take shape. Somewhat surprisingly over and over the figure at the center of that story is a woman most people have never heard of, Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke.

In this first installment I introduce Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson who, as Shakespeare Birthplace Trust chairman Stanley Wells says, “is the person who tells us most about Shakespeare.”

Twelve Days of Shakespeare:

1.       Ben Jonson and the Art of Shakespeare

2.       The Five Shakespeares

3.       Heart of Darkness: My journey into the madness of Shakespeare Authorship

4.       Why Ben Jonson Writes Not of Love

5.       The Upstart Crow

6.       Jonson, the Herbert Family and the First Folio

7.       To the Memory of My Beloved

8.       Bauds, Whores and William Basse

9.       Wits to Read: Francis Meres and Shakespeares Small Latin

10.   Praise to Give

11.   Shakespeare’s Shadow

12.   Women are but Men’s Shadows

Ben Jonson and the Art of Shakespeare

To be or not to be, that is the question.

                                                Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

“That Shakespeare wanted Arte” is just one of a series of provocative judgements recorded by the Scottish lawyer, poet and inventor William Drummond during Ben Jonson’s visit to his home over the Christmas season of 1618-1619. Jonson had just completed his much celebrated 400 mile “long walk” from London to Edinburgh when he joined Drummond at his castle Hawthornden, 7 miles south of the city. What prompted the famously sedentary Jonson to undertake such an adventure is not clear. He may have been inspired by a quote from Seneca about the need to get out and see the world to make the sort of personal discoveries that drive great art; the quote provided the title for his personal notebooks published as Discoveries after his death. Whatever was the initial impetus, the decision was apparently confirmed with the lure of a wager. The wealthy gentlemen who supported and entertained Jonson found the prospect of the notoriously portly and self-indulgent writer ambling his 280 lb. bulk entirely on foot across the length of England too ludicrous to pass up. In order to certify Jonson’s compliance with the terms of the bet, he had a companion who kept a diary (still extent) recording every step of the journey, the dignitaries and friends who met him along the way and offered lodging, and the swelling crowds who gathered to observe the progress of the famous wit then recognized as England’s greatest writer.

Jonson stayed with Drummond for a few weeks during the early part of 1619, enjoying Drummond’s generous larder and repaying his host with wide ranging conversations about Jonson’s life and the writers and other prominent individuals he had come to know. We do not know exactly how these came to be written down, whether Drummond took contemporaneous notes or compiled what he remembered later, nor do we know what purpose if any Drummond intended for the information he compiled. After both were long dead, Drummond’s son gathered his papers into a notebook and arranged for their publication, the notes of discussions with Jonson appearing as “Heads of a Conversation” in the 1711 volume The Works of William Drummond of Hawthorndon.

Drummond’s modern editor Mark Bland notes that what survive from those conversations are provocative snippets, devoid of context, that give the impression that Drummond is an inveterate gossip snatching up anything that might offer offence or at least an amusing quip.

Jonson seems to have been aware of Drummond’s predilections, appreciative of his kindness, and sceptical of his pedantry. Drummond is reminiscent of Sir Politic Would-Be in the way that he fails to distinguish between fact and fiction, or between serious observation and his being gulled. He records, for instance, the anecdote about Queen Elizabeth being `uncapable of man', another about the packet of mail that was swallowed by a fish, and a third about the origins of the word harlot that Jonson had drawn from Sir John Hayward. Drummond appears to be baffled by Jonson's wit; and Jonson comes across as someone who has found one of his favourite characters and is overly enjoying the joke. Perhaps that is why Drummond observed that he was `given rather to losse a friend, than a Jest'. The `Certain Informations' is a remarkable document, but it conveys a feeling that Jonson's difference from his host was a little too obvious, and that he was endured for longer than Drummond might have cared.

Nonetheless, “That Shakespeare wanted arte” would shape views of both Shakespeare and Jonson for centuries. However sparse and unreliable, Drummond’s Informations offered something which had suddenly become valuable, recollections of the writer William Shakespeare, from someone who apparently knew him.

Shakespeare’s First Folio collection of thirty-six plays reached the public in December of 1623, ten years after the last play was written and thirty years after the name William Shakespeare first appeared in print in the narrative poem Venus and Adonis. The initial printing, probably around 750 copies, sold out within ten years, prompting a second in 1632 with only minor corrections of typographical errors. Assembling the folio is now understood to be primarily the work of Ben Jonson, following the mode of his own folio published in 1616. Jonson provided a brief poem To the Reader which opposes the enigmatic engraving of the author on the title page and an eighty-line elegy, To the Memory of my Beloved, The Author, William Shakespeare and what he hath left us that served for nearly a century as virtually the only information available about the author. Modern scholars also attribute to Jonson most if not all of the dedicatory epistle and letter to readers credited to the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell who nominally arranged to have the plays published in honor of their “friend and fellow.”

In 1642, all English theaters were closed by act of the long Parliament citing the inappropriateness of “lascivious Mirth and Levity” during the terrors of the English Civil War. There followed in 1648: “An Ordinance for the utter suppression and abolishing of all Stage-Plays and Interludes, within the Penalties to be inflicted on the Actors and Spectators therein expressed.” Dramatic performances did not resume until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, by which time the players of pre-war companies and their scripts and experience were all lost. Anxious to return the splendor of the Elizabethan court already becoming idealized as a golden age, the court and theaters turned to the three great folio editions of plays by Jonson, Shakespeare, and Fletcher and Beaumont which had survived in private libraries. Of these the plays of Shakespeare were not immediately most popular but grew in importance once modified to suit post-restoration sensibilities (Romeo and Juliet and Lear got happy endings in restoration versions). Two more editions of the Shakespeare folio appeared during this time, which added 6 new works (of these only Pericles is still believed to be substantially written by Shakespeare).

By the early eighteenth century, growing interest in Shakespeare inspired publisher Jacob Tonson to acquire the rights to publish the plays for an eight-volume octavo edition that would be more accessible to readers than the previous massive folio versions. He hired Nicholas Rowe, a successful writer of stage tragedies, to compile the new edition with modern act and scene divisions and to provide a biography of Shakespeare to meet the growing interest in the life of the author.

It was not long after the 1623 publication that readers began to put “Sweet Swan of Avon” from Jonson’s poem together with a line in a poem by Leonard Digges which appears later in the volume referring to a “Stratford monument” as instruction to seek the author in Stratford on Avon. There they found something similar if not identical to the Shakespeare monument that graces the wall of Trinity church today. Lacking any other information about the author, the date, April 1616, from the monument’s inscription became attached to the William Basse elegy for Shakespeare referenced by Jonson in the folio poem (I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye a little further, to make thee a roome). When the poem was printed with the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems that date became the only biographical detail about the author published in the century in which he died.

Unfortunately, Rowe found little to add to the sparse details of a common merchant’s life that could be gleaned from the town records of Stratford. Birth (at least baptism), death, marriage to Anne Hathaway (or perhaps Agnes Whatley to whom he was apparently contracted the day before), children, some purchases of land and fines for hoarding grain told the story of a successful and opportunistic capitalist, but not of a great writer. Somewhat disconcertingly, the Stratford Corporation that served as town council appears to have effectively banned theatrical performance starting almost exactly at the time that Shakespeare was making a name in London. After dozens of performances in the 1580s reflected in payments on the company books, there are none in the subsequent three decades. In 1618 there is a record of six shillings to the King’s Men to not perform in the Guild Hall and skip Stratford on their summer tour of Warwick.

Looking for something more literary to intrigue readers, Tonson advertised for recollections of Shakespeare in London, and assigned researchers to canvas the countryside around Stratford. He gained only an easily discredited story of young William poaching deer in Chilcothe and writing a scurrilous poem about the local earl when caught, which necessitated his removal to London and explained his start in the theatre. Unfortunately, the deer park which purportedly tempted the young man into a life of crime and poetry did not exist until decades later.

All that remained for Rowe was to rely on the scraps of biographical material that could be gleaned from Ben Jonson’s poem in the Folio itself. Jonson’s apparent backhanded compliment, that Shakespeare had triumphed despite having only “small Latin and lesse Greek,” and the confusing lines that proceed it with cryptic references to bauds and whores could be conjectured into a narrative in which Jonson resented the success of the natural genius from a country town in Warwickshire and only grudgingly if poetically praised his work. Jonson’s notebooks, published after his death as Discoveries, revealed that while “the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech.” When Drummond’s Conversations with Jonson were published a few years later Jonson’s assessment that “Shakespeare wanted arte” settled the narrative once and for all. The courtly and learned Jonson with his preferences for classical authors and allusions never got over his resentment that the rough lad from Stratford won the hearts of the masses as Jonson never could. Shakespeare was recast from the Stratford property owner and money lender into a carefree rogue who escaped the drudgery and possibly the law of his provincial hometown to become an actor and then on the power of his natural genius to produce the greatest works ever written in the English language. That Jonson was himself the son of a bricklayer who got his grammar school education on scholarship and only managed a month or so at Cambridge before poverty forced him to join the army in the Low Countries and therefore fit the Horatio Alger mold every bit as well meant little. His satirical city dramas filled with incisive portraits of middle-class scoundrels did not fit the romantic visions of eighteenth and nineteenth century readers. Nor were they apparently much troubled by the contrast between the extensive documentation of Jonson’s literal and literary footprints as he traversed the path from laborer to actor to writer for the court while Shakespeare’s similar journey left no records at all of his education, acting, patronage and connection to the world of the court, theater or literature.  

In 1776 a new editor of Tonson’s Shakespeare engaged lawyer turned literary scholar Edmund Malone to revisit the topic of Shakespeare biography. Malone was astonished that Rowe’s Account remained the only attempt to offer biographical details about Shakespeare: “That almost a century should have elapsed, from the time of his death, without a single attempt having been made to discover any circumstance which could throw a light on his private life, or literary career; that, when the attempt was made [by Rowe in 1709], it should have been so imperfectly executed by the ingenious and elegant dramatist who undertook the task; and that for a period of eighty years afterwards, during which this “god of our idolatry” ranked as high among us as any poet ever did in any country, all the editors of his works, and each successive biographer, should have been contented with Mr Rowe’s meagre and imperfect narrative; are circumstances which cannot be contemplated without astonishment (1821 ii. 10-11). Malone eventually generated the first chronology of Shakespeare’s plays, still largely accepted today, but abandoned his plans to write a literary biography based on insufficient evidence. His judgement was echoed by twentieth century scholars. E. K. Chambers and Samuel Schoenbaum, at opposite ends of the century scrupulously compiled the known and documented material about the author and debunked the forgeries and superstitions that had grown around the now legendary figure. Schoenbaum eventually changed his mind, and his attempts at assembling a biography from the documentary evidence opened the door to the modern biographies from Wells, Bryson, Bate and many others.
Still little of substance has been added to our knowledge of Shakespeare since the Folio was published in 1623. As Stanley Wells says, “Ben Jonson is the person who tells us most about Shakespeare. Ben Jonson was a colleague of Shakespeare, in the sense that some of his plays were put on by Shakespeare’s company, or one of them was, and he clearly, he writes very intimately about Shakespeare, he writes sometimes critically about Shakespeare, but he also writes that he loved him this side idolatry, he writes the first full critical appreciation of Shakespeare, the Ben Jonson elegy in the First Folioʼs a very important piece of criticism, the finest piece of Shakespeare criticism before Dryden, later in the seventeenth century.” Despite the recognized centrality of Jonson to understanding Shakespeare, shockingly little effort has been made over the centuries to understand Jonson. While his other works, especially his poem “To Penshurst” lauding the hospitality of the Sidney family country estate in Kent, have generated extensive academic work exploring their meaning and references, few have done more than highlight a few apparently key words in the Folio encomium to argue for or against the proposition that William of Stratford was the author of the works of Shakespeare. Jonson promised the author, “Thou art alive while thy book doth live.”

The remainder of this series will attempt to read Jonson as he wished, “with understanding,” in order to determine what exactly this most important source of information has to tell us about the art and the identity of the greatest writer who ever lived.