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<i>They Gave Us Shakespeare</i> (review)

1984; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/bio.2010.0555

1529-1456

S. P. Cerasano,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Reviews Charles Connell, They Gave Us Shakespeare. London: Oriel Press, 1982. Pp. xiv + 110. $14.95. We have done our office to the dead without ambition either of selfe profit of fame, only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare. —Introduction to the First Folio, 1623 To twentieth-century readers it's the rare person who stands out as exceptional in the age of Shakespeare. Consequently, it would be easy to be skeptical about such a book as this. Perhaps, one wonders, the impossible has become a reality: we have finally run out of topics on Shakespeare and are starting to write about all of his associates. Fortunately , their contemporaries tended to regard John Heminges and Henry Condell somewhat otherwise, as actors of standing in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, as theatre managers, and as shareholders in the Globe Playhouse. Yet in all of this they failed to recognize their most distinctive feat. Not until 1896, the year a memorial was erected in the garden of St. Mary-the-Virgin, Aldermanbury, was it publicly noted that "to their disinterested affection the world owes all that it calls Shakespeare." There was a fourth Shakespeare—besides the actor and dramatist, and the man who left a wife for years in Stratford, seemingly alone with the children—whose personal influence remains as much a mystery as his "lost years." No doubt, like any young man of the day he 260 biography Vol. 7, No. 3 must have gone straight from his birthplace to the city, met some interesting , but not necessarily the most important, people, and never quite lost his provincial leanings. (The pastoral scenes in As You Like It are at least sympathetically, if not fondly, drawn.) As well, he found a trade as a playwright and an unceasing fascination with the transcience of the imagined worlds he created inside the Globe, so much so that he valued the printed text very little. Throughout twenty-odd active years Shakespeare neglected to see any of his work through the press. Therefore , it is strictly to his friendship with Heminges and Condell that we owe the preservation of those texts that comprise the First Folio. Whoever approaches Connell's account will not learn intimately the nature of their friendship from primary sources but through a reconstruction of circumstances at the Globe which brings playhouse management and company organization to bear upon Shakespeare's London experience. The author produces a "sense of environ," a kind of implied biography, a reflection of what we might reasonably expect relationships among players to have been. From the beginning, Connell 's eye is on known facts, and on how the players' centrality to the company effected direcly their position as Shakespeare's literary heirs. The opening chapters establish, as well as scant evidence will permit, the context of parochial history and the players' careers. To be sure, the original church at which Heminges and Condell attended services was destroyed in the Great Fire and rebuilt subsequently under the direction of Sir Christopher Wren. However, concerns more properly relate to the parish boundaries that defined the neighborhood in which the men worhsipped, baptized children, served as churchwardens, and were buried. If his last testament is reliable, Heminges died a citizen and a freeman of the Grocer's Company. His affiliation with one of the City livery companies was not at all unusual, although more of the actors from playing companies other than the Lord Chamberlain's Men sought the security that membership in a trade company provided. (Of the Lord Admiral's-Prince's Men, John Alleyn was an innkeeper; Anthony Jeffes, a brewer; Thomas Downton, a vintner.) As far as Heminges' acting career is concerned, in part he married into the profession by wedding Rebecca Knell in 1588. She was the widow of William Knell, a Queen's man deceased that same year, who Thomas Heywood applauded as having flourished well before his time. An undated letter to Edward Alleyn, the actor well known for his majestic characterizations in Christopher Marlowe's tragedies, referred to a theatrical wager that Alleyn could certainly equal Knell in any of his REVIEWS 261...