Why Shakespeare Is Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Education

Many of the people who have doubts about Shakespeare say that he couldn’t have written about some of the things he’s written about without having done them.  Simon Schama says that they’re underestimating the creative imagination.

Schama may be right.  To some degree at least--and to a bigger degree if you're Shakespeare--you can sound like a lawyer or a doctor, or a concert pianist or a cop, without being one.

Here’s how.

Many lovely middle-aged men and women in the mystery writing field have to write about police, private detectives, forensic chemists, or lawyers.  If you’re lucky, your sister-in-law is on the job and your hairdresser’s husband reconstructs faces from skulls.  If not, you go out and find someone.  You take them to lunch, you ask them if you can come on a ride-along, you get them to read your books in draft.  


And every moment you are talking to them, you are looking at the way they hold themselves, the kinds of words they use, the assumptions they make about the world.  


And if you are the kind of person who is able, just a touch, to "be no one and everyone," that negative capability to set yourself aside, then when you come to write your character, you can do a pretty convincing job of inhabiting their skin.

Shakespeare must have been superlatively good at this kind of self-education.  Shakespeare probably never walked into a bar without noticing the guy down at the end of the bar, the one with the perpetually not-quite-finished beer and the shabby cuffs, or the laughing man on his second six-pack with the minnows of uncertainty and desperation in his eyes.  Shakespeare sued lots of people; he knew lawyers.  Shakespeare had a friend who married a woman in the book trade.  Shakespeare knew lots of people, right down to their bones.

There are limitations to how well you can do this—maybe not if you’re Shakespeare.  We’ll get to them later. 

But now, let's talk about magpies and shiny things.

Why Shakespeare Is Shakespeare: Imagination and the Stuff on Your Shelves

Last time I threatened to talk about Shakespeare's imagination and the imagination of creative people I know.  I'm making an assumption you may disagree with.  The assumption is that Shakespeare isn't an alien.  He was better at what he did, enormously better, than other playwrights or poets.  But he wasn't entirely different.  When I start talking in a minute about modern popular writers and using them to talk about Shakespeare, I don't mean they are equal to Shakespeare--nobody is.  I'm using what they do to talk about forms of creative process.

"He was no one and everyone," Hazlitt said.  John Keats talked about the poet's "negative capability," the capacity of the poet to stand aside from himself, from all the personality and fear and limitation that trammel the individual person.   Or, as an expert on the subject put it, the poet puts flesh on "the form of things unknown":

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination...

Imagination is the center; imagination runs the show. 

So all Shakespeare has to do is to call on his imagination, right?

Maybe.  He's Shakespeare.

But, for the people I know who do creative work that way, there's more to it.

The creative imagination is hungry and it wants to be fed.  It doesn't require an education, but it shapes one.  It takes over your bookshelves and your hobbies.  It decides how your house looks, where you go on vacation, what you wear.  It wants you to go and find out about things, everything from "how to write better dialog" to "in what order did the social services get destroyed during the Paris flood of 1912."  It picks up magpie things on the street, quorking over them and muttering shiny.  

Let's have examples.  

I write fiction set around the turn of the last century.  I'm writing this in my living room.  Without even going out of this room, I see a typewriter from 1890, a toaster from 1920, two Victorian irons, a clock from around 1880, a gasogene, an apothecary jar.  I'm planning a book about Brazil, and in this same room are a couple of elegant wood statues, a bumba-meu-boi, a Brazilian hobby horse, a trickster-dancer's-head statue carved out of a coconut.  Ellen Klages, a prizewinning historical novelist, has a series set in the 1950s; her house has rooms of cool 1950s stuff.  Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman (fantasy, music, folklore, historicals) have musical instruments, thousands of CDs, Victoriana, artists' interpretations of folktales.  George R.R. Martin has historical dioramas, books about the Wars of the Roses, and medieval cookbooks.  Laurie King has busts of Holmes, magnifying glasses, and loads of other writers' interpretations of Sherlock Holmes.  

(And this seems to be true not only of writerly and poetic imagination, but of any kind of work pursued with passion.  If you're a carpenter, electrician, plumber, boat builder, and like your job, you may or may not get an official education, but you're always looking for new planes, Dremel bits, better boat design software.)

Part of your education is who you know, who among your contemporaries you read and talk to.  Look at most books and you'll see a list of acknowledgments, an interlocking grid of who knows who.  Laurie King knows all the Sherlockians.  Shakespeare apparently knew Marlowe--he quotes him and seems to refer to him in Sonnet 80.  Shakespeare (whoever he was) knew Burbage and Robert Armin and Edward Alleyn.

All these things are an education.  If your imagination tells you to write something, you go out and get that education.  It's not proper and blessed and academic.  It's the imagination feeding itself with whatever it can find.

So when Schama says “Shakespeare needed no education,” he means “he got his education at the theater, off the streets, through talking with friends.”  And that’s the way that most creative people work, no matter what other kinds of education they have.

Theoretically, at least, no problem there. 

In my next, I’ll explain how Shakespeare could have sounded educated in various fields without having had any sort of a formal training in them.

And then we’ll talk about magpies.

Why Shakespeare Is Shakespeare: Simon Schama

Simon Schama is a more interesting case.  He is really a major writer--certainly one I admire greatly and always try to take seriously.  And Schama says Shakespeare is Shakespeare too.  To doubt it is "snobbery" and "a fatal lack of imagination on the subject of the imagination."  


No question Shakespeare the poet had imagination; Shakespeare himself wrote some of the best descriptions of that visitor Muse.  "Such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends...."  Equally there's no question--or there shouldn't be--that imagination doesn't need an academic education.  Think of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman.  Think of Machado de Assis, the national novelist of Brazil, son of an illiterate slave.  Creative imagination needs academic education like a bird needs roller skates.

But creative imagination all by itself--?

This idea is not only true in its broad outlines, but has a pedigree as far back at least as the eighteenth century and Garrick.  "'Twas Nature taught him first to write."  Shakespeare didn't need travel; his imagination allowed him to comprehend more than other men.  Or, as Schama says, "He didn’t need to go to Italy because Rome had come to him at school and came again in the travels of his roaming mind. His capacity for imaginative extension was socially limitless too: reaching into the speech of tavern tarts as well as archbishops and kings." 


That's another assertion, and not so defensible.


Time to introduce my friends.


Start with me:  I have had the immense privilege of having students and readers come up to me and tell me that the books have changed their lives.  I have that academic education.  (B.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard; study at University of London and in Paris.  Fulbright, Mellon, other fellowships.  Studied Shakespeare with Harry Levin, Northrop Frye, William Alfred, and Robert Lowell.  For a number of years I taught English at Tufts.  As Kevin Kline says just after sniffing his armpits, "Don't ever call me stupid.")  


I've been telling stories since I was four, writing since I was eleven.  I have a few books out and some stories.  (They've been published in fourteen languages, made bestseller lists, made Best of the Year lists including the New York Times, twice, and the London Times.  I've won the Agatha and the Massachusetts Book Award.  Don't ever, etc.)  From time to time I teach writing, and I'm in two fairly high-powered writing groups.  


What this buys me is a lot of creative friends: writers, poets, actors, musicians.  Among them they have done a lot more than I have, and done it more intelligently and faster.


So next time, I'll talk about their imaginations, which they less grandiosely call "the writing process."

Why Shakespeare Is Shakespeare: James Shapiro

Roland Emmerich's ANONYMOUS opens Oct. 28.  It's a great entertainment (I'll post a review soon).  It's had some very good early reviews, and some really vitriolic ones.

Some of the vitriol comes from the basic premise of ANONYMOUS, a premise we've heard before:  Shakespeare didn't write the works.  In some sense, of course, this is nonsense:  Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's works, the way George Eliot wrote George Eliot's works and Currer and Ellis Bell wrote their works.  Pseudonyms are useful; Mary Anne Evans kept the George Eliot name all her life, though Charlotte and Emily Bronte discarded theirs.  The question is, was Shakespeare another useful pseudonym?  Was William Shakespeare the actor a front for, or a collaborator with, someone else?

The very thought is enough to infuriate some people.  "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's works," they say crushingly.  "It's obvious.  And if he didn't, who cares?  We have the plays."

To quote Errol Morris, "Nothing is so obvious that it's obvious."  But it's fascinating to see why people think so--both the good reasons and the bad.

Let's look at a couple of these critics, and why they think Shakespeare is Shakespeare.

James Shapiro first.  He's a New York academic, specializing in Shakespeare.  He's written a creative imagining of Shakespeare's life in 1599, focusing on the Essex rebellion and the question of who would succeed Elizabeth, and, more recently, a book called Contested Will. 1599 is his year, and ANONYMOUS is using the same year and the same material.

So you'd imagine that James Shapiro would be the perfect person to say how completely fictional ANONYMOUS is.  (And it is fictional--flagrantly, intelligently, entertainingly fictional.)   Shapiro should be the perfect person to tell us the facts instead.

Not so much. 

In a New York Times op-ed piece,  Shapiro says "…Court records and much else… confirm that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him."  Let's look at these court records.  Google "Shakespeare court records", click on one of the sites that list documentary records, and find "court" on the page.

• "William Wayte "swore before the Judge of Queen's Bench that he stood in danger of death, or bodily hurt," from "William Shakspere" and three others."  
• ""Willelmus Shackspere" brought suit against John Clayton for a £7 debt."  (This may not be our William Shakespeare, the actor.)
• "Shakspere sued the apothecary Philip Rogers for 35s.10d plus 10s damages, seeking to recover the unpaid balance on a sale of twenty bushels of malt and a small loan.'"

These prove that Shakespeare wrote the plays?  Really?

This is not to say Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare. 



It's a tactic Shapiro has used before.  In a debate with Roland Emmerich, Shapiro sneered at his opponents for not knowing that Shakespeare had left his books in his will to his son-in-law John Hall.  "On the second page," Shapiro specified.  Let's look at the will; the text is on the Net in several places.  Find one and search the will for "book."  Nothing.  Search for "paper."  Nada.  Search for "John Hall" and this is what you find, the only mention of anything given to John Hall anywhere in the will:

"All the rest of my goodes Chattels, Leases, plate, jewles and Household stuffe whatsoever after my dettes and Legasies paied and my funerall expences discharged, I gyve devise and bequeath to my Sonne in Lawe John Hall gent and my daughter Susanna his wief..."  <www.bardweb.net/will.html>

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion," Daniel Patrick Moynahan said, "but they are not entitled to their own facts."

Why should it be so important that we have "court records" proving Shakespeare wrote the plays and "books" mentioned in the will?  Why does Shapiro need these imaginary facts to exist?

Shakespeare monkeys hit all my geek buttons

Shakespeare, programming, data analysis, and MONKEYS.

Yes, monkeys can type all of Shakespeare's works.  But, as Jesse Anderson says, in what order?

http://www.jesse-anderson.com/2011/09/a-few-million-monkeys-randomly-recreate-shakespeare/

Boston Authors' Club

Look at the Web sites of all the great people who belong.  And they made The Other Side of Dark a Julia Ward Howe Prize finalist!  Ceremony this afternoon at the Boston Public Library.  I'm going to be a complete fangirl.

http://www.bostonauthorsclub.org/programs.html

Your favorite online collaboration site?

At my company, Pearson, we have a social media collaboration site, and someone recently asked what our favorite online collaboration sites are.  I liked my answer enough to post it here.  What are yours?

I'm liking Global Voices.  To quote from their site, they are  "a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.....Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices.....

Global Voices is translated into more than 30 languages by volunteer translators, who have formed the Lingua
 project. ...We also have an outreach project called Rising Voices to help marginalized communities use citizen media to be heard, with an emphasis on the developing world."

http://www.globalvoices.org

And, on a lighter note, the Harry Potter Alliance, working online to turn the energy of Harry Potter fans into fundraising for a multitude of good causes.

"Just as Dumbledore’s Army wakes the world up to Voldemort’s return, works for equal rights of house elves and werewolves, and empowers its members, we:Work with partner NGOs in alerting the world to the dangers of global warming, poverty, and genocide. Work with our partners for equal rights regardless of race, gender, and sexuality. Encourage our members to hone the magic of their creativity in endeavoring to make the world a better place. Join our army to make the world a safer, more magical place, and let your voice be heard!"  They're currently raising money and getting books donated for, among other causes, building a library in Brooklyn.

http://thehpalliance.org/