Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsThe Alleynian, February 1929
It is strange how little we really know of this, in many ways, highly capable poet and playwright. If you turn up your copy of Who’s Who, all you will find is:
SHAKESPEARE, William… Born, such-and-such a date… Author of so-and-so… Educ. privately and at Clark’s Correspondence College…… Hobbies: Golf, Gardening, and Mangling the Wurzel.
It tells us virtually nothing. Let us see if we cannot supplement this meagre note.
William Shakespeare, or Shakspere, or Shikspur—he was never a great speller—may be described as the Noel Coward of his day. He not only wrote plays, but also acted in them. Born in the year 1564, it was not immediately that he turned his attention to the stage. In his early youth he seems to have had the idea that there was a good living to be made out of stealing rabbits from the preserves of the local squires, and it was only when approaching years of discretion that he got on to the fact that where the big money lay was in stealing plots. In the year 1591 he began to write, and from then onward anybody who had a good plot for a play put it in a steel-bound box and sat on the lid when he saw Shikspur coming.
But we must not condemn him for this larcenous habit. He had a good deal of excuse. He was the official playwright of a company of actors, and they sweated him to such an extent that he simply had no time to think up plots of his own. In those days a good run for a play was two nights, and anything over three was sensational. Shakespeare would dash off Macbeth on Sunday night for production on Monday, and on Tuesday morning at six o’clock, as he lay in bed listening to the birds, round would come Burbage in a frightful state of excitement.
“Good heavens, Bill!” he would cry, “Why aren’t you working? Don’t you know we’ve got to give them something to-night?”
“What about Macbeth?” Shakespeare would say sleepily.
“Macbeth finished its long and successful run last night.”
So Shakespeare would heave himself out of bed, dig down into the drawer where he kept other people’s plots, and by lunch time he would hand Burbage the script of Hamlet. A dramatist cannot give of his best under these conditions, which accounts for a peculiarity in Shakespeare’s work which, we believe, has hitherto escaped the notice of critics, viz. that, while his stuff sounds all right, it generally doesn’t mean anything. There seems little doubt that, when he was pushed for time, William Shakspere just shoved down anything, and trusted to the charity of the audience to pull him through.
As, for instance, in Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene i, “Who set this ancient quarrel new abroach?” Of course, he knew perfectly well that “abroach” meant nothing, but it sounded good, and Burbage was popping in and out every two minutes asking when on earth he was going to get the thing finished, so down it went.
Things were not made easy for Shakespeare at any point in the career which he had decided to adopt. Just as he succeeded in getting a footing and was beginning to tot up how much his royalties would amount to if they played to fifteen ducats, four pieces of eight and a rose noble on the week, along came the Plague; and from the beginning of February, 1593, to the end of December the theatres were closed. Bearing up as well as he could under this blow, he wrote Titus Andronicus, and got it produced in 1594. Back came the Plague and shut the theatres again. But you cannot keep a good man down, and by that time Shakespeare had started to steal his plots, so that he could write plays now almost without conscious effort. The result was that when the theatres opened again, he bobbed up like a tidal wave and put on The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour Lost and Romeo and Juliet, before the year was over. After that, they saw it was no good closing the theatres.
Of his first piece little is known, but the fact that it is said to have been written in collaboration with Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, makes it seem probable that it was a musical comedy. It is supposed that Shakespeare wrote the original book, Marlowe added extra scenes, Greene contributed additional lines, and Peele inserted supplementary material. It does not seem to have been a great success, thus emphasising the folly of trying to do a piece of this kind without jazz music from America.
A good deal of mystery surrounds both the private life and the artistic career of William Shakespeare. Nobody seems to know what he did with his time, where he lived, whom he married, and what he looked like. He is generally supposed to have married Anne Hathaway, but there is an entry in an existing register relating to the marriage of “William Shakespeare” with “Annam Whately de Temple Grafton.” One can only assume that the clerk was a weaker speller than the bridegroom himself, and that this was his plucky, though unsuccessful, attempt at writing “Anne Hathaway.” At that, it would not have been at all a bad shot for those times.
As regards Shakespeare’s appearance, there are sixteen portraits of him in the book of reference to which we have turned for the material of this biography: and, except that they are all solid on the fact that he never shaved, each is entirely different from the other. We take it either that Shakespeare sat for his portrait on the correspondence method, describing by letter what he looked like and then leaving it to the ingenuity of the artist: or else the standard of art was low in those days.
Of course, we must not forget, it was not an easy job to paint the portrait of a man like Shakespeare. He was always either just rushing on to the stage to play a part, or else seated at Burbage’s desk in the room marked “No Admittance,” hustling away at a new drama; and you had to get the best view of him you could through the keyhole.
Notes:
A revision of “All About Shakespeare”. Combined with “What Really Happened to Hamlet” and reworked into ”An Outline of Shakespeare” in Louder and Funnier (1932).
The title is probably a joking reference to The Outline of History by H. G. Wells (1920).
Many passages herein are echoed in other Wodehouse works; see the references to Shakespeare, the man and his works in “Shakespeare Quotations and Allusions in Wodehouse” on this site.
Correspondence College: See the annotations to The Inimitable Jeeves.
Mangling the Wurzel: a mangled reference to the mangold-wurzel—a type of beet, grown for cattle food. Hugo Carmody attributes this activity to Father Mariana in Summer Lightning, ch. 4.2 (also 1929). See the Summer Lightning annotations for the probable source.
doesn’t mean anything: See the quotation from Joy in the Morning at the head of Shakespeare Quotations and Allusions in Wodehouse.
abroach: See Shakespeare Quotations and Allusions in Wodehouse.
Printer’s errors corrected above:
Magazine, p. 23, had “Authour” and a semicolon after “Hobbies”.