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Shakespeare in Company. By BartVan Es. Pp. xiv, 357, Oxford University Press, 2013, $34.51.

2013; Wiley; Volume: 54; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/heyj.12043_102

1468-2265

Peter Milward,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

If one may compare the golden age of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama to a mighty forest, then the collected plays of William Shakespeare, as gathered together in the First Folio towards the end of that age, may be seen as a mighty oak in the midst of that forest. With due allowance for the insufficiency of this comparison, one may say that the present volume is concerned not so much with the mighty oak as with the surrounding trees, for the light or shadow they may cast on that one, unique, central tree. With this aim in mind, the author has investigated not only every aspect of the oak itself, but his all-embracing interest has led him to undertake a detailed exploration of each and every one of the surrounding trees. That has involved him in a careful reading of almost all the surviving Elizabethan and Jacobean plays that have any bearing on the plays of Shakespeare from first to last, of all the circumstances under which the plays were originally performed, when, where and by whom, and of how they variously relate to the plays of Shakespeare. Above all, his concern is, as his title proclaims, not so much with the great dramatist himself as with his acting companions in the Chamberlain's Men from 1594 onwards, and then in the King's Men as they were restyled from 1603 onwards in the new reign of King James I. It is, moreover, the principal aim of the author to show in detail how the formation of the Chamberlain's Men, with Shakespeare both as a prominent sharer in the company and as its sole playwright, made all the difference between his earlier plays, many of which show signs of collaboration with other dramatists of the time, and the subsequent plays from his annus mirabilis of 1595 onwards, when Shakespeare skilfully adapts his characters to the players in his company, notably Richard Burbage as the great tragedian, Will Kemp and Robert Armin as his two comedians. Up till 1594 Shakespeare had been more of a poet, as is to be seen in the extraordinary care he took over the printing of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece in his quest for the literary patronage of the dedicatee, the young Earl of Southampton – while he was still obliged to turn his pen for the sake of income to dramatic collaboration. From 1594 onwards, however, he became a fully committed dramatist, enabling him to refuse any kind of collaboration with another. And so, the author continues, he held to his single yet myriad minded course till the production of Coriolanus in 1608, when for some reason (which is never fully explained) he reverted to some degree of collaboration with younger dramatists connected with the King's Men, notably John Fletcher, even to the extent of going beyond the limits recognized by the editors of the First Folio, his former fellow actors, John Hemings and Henry Condell. As this all too brief survey may indicate, what the author has to say may well be of great interest to Shakespeare scholars, especially to those who are no less interested in the many surrounding trees of the forest than in the mighty oak at its centre. Only, I feel the necessity of taking the author to task for leaving certain obvious gaps in his narrative – apart from the biggest gap of all, concerning the quintessence of Shakespeare's dramatic genius. For it is the main point of his thesis that he is concerned not with one but with many points, like stars in the night sky, omitting ‘the one thing necessary’, like the sun at sunrise. Anyhow, the gaps of which I have to speak may be reduced, in Shakespearian fashion, to a convenient triplet. The first gap has to do with the editing of the First Folio by Shakespeare's fellow actors, who lay claim in their Preface to have collected and published the plays ‘cured and perfect of their limbs’ and ‘absolute in their numbers as he conceived them’. In spite of their claim, which is ignored by the author, his thesis is as thorough-going a refutation of that claim as I have ever seen, with reference as well to the early plays composed before 1594 as to the later romances composed after 1608. Yet in spite of his refutation of their claim, he makes no attempt to explain why, knowing Shakespeare as their companion for so long, his fellow actors dare to come out in their Preface with such a bare-faced lie. Maybe it is the author's delicacy that prevents him from coming out so strongly against them as they deserve. Yet there is no doubt that the text of the plays as left in the First Folio is riddled with mistakes and misprints such as to cause endless headaches to generations of editors till postmodern times – though today not a few editors take a perverse delight in thus finding themselves presented with material for more than one doctoral thesis. The second gap (apart from the above-mentioned unexplained transition from Coriolanus to the final romances) has to do with the sudden change in the company's sponsorship from the Lord Chamberlain to the King himself, as Shakespeare moves with his company from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean age and from the Welsh Tudor dynasty to the Scottish Stuart dynasty. Is it, one wonders, a mere change of title with the passing of the old chamberlain, not to mention the old queen, and the coming of a king who is more interested in court performances? Or isn't it because there is more implied than the author recognizes, with the addition of a new name to the newly entitled company, that of Laurence Fletcher, who had come with the new king from Edinburgh, and who had perhaps exerted some influence on the king? Or isn't it because the company had been associated with the Earl of Essex who had championed the Scottish king's claim to the English throne before he was executed on a charge of high treason as recently as 1601? In any case, what about the glaring contrast between the problem play of Hamlet, coming as it did towards the end of the Elizabethan age, and the tragedy of Othello, coming as it did at the beginning of the Jacobean age? Both plays may each signalize the uniqueness of Shakespeare's dramatic genius, with the hero in each play presented by the same Richard Burbage, and yet what a difference there is between them, almost as that between hell and heaven! And then there is the third gap, which has to do not so much with the mighty oak or its surrounding trees as with the very ground on which they are standing. In all his discussion of Shakespeare and his companions in the Chamberlain's/King's Men, and his probable or possible collaborators before 1594 and after 1608, the author is writing about them in a kind of vacuum without regard to their historical, cultural, social or religious background. About the trees in the forest he seems to know all there is to be known, and a lot more, but about the ground on which they stand he seems to know nothing. And yet, being trees, it is from the ground that they draw their sustenance in the form of the sap that flows up from their roots, as converted from the water in the moist earth. And that is surely what most contributes to the dramatic genius of Shakespeare, rather than his human relations with other players or playwrights – according to the original meaning in John Aubrey's note concerning him, that he wasn't ‘a company keeper’.