The Triumph of Will

An edict issued in 1605 by King James I directed citizens to grow mulberry trees wherever possible. The King was intent on establishing a native silk industry. William Shakespeare eventually planted one in 1609 at New Place, his Stratford-upon-Avon dwelling. The silk industry idea flopped, since most of the saplings planted had been the wrong sort, black mulberries instead of white, but Shakespeare’s tree inspired a cottage industry that flourished a century and a half later.

His tree was felled in 1756. Legend has it that the irascible Reverend Francis Gastrell chose to have the tree removed because of the numbers of visitors it attracted. Shakespeare-mania was playing games with his nerves. The local watchmaker, Thomas Sharpe, purchased the timber, supposedly for firewood, but then spent close to half a century forming the wood into tea caddies, toothpick cases, goblets, snuffboxes, tobacco stoppers and the like. Such was the demand for Sharpe’s tree that other carvers were soon supplying articles in mulberry, purportedly from the same source.

This essay appears in the latest Quadrant.
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In his own lifetime, Shakespeare had been considered just one of a bevy of capable and successful wordsmiths. In 1605, William Camden, who could then lay claim to being regarded as England’s most respected historian, opined in his Remaines Concerning Britaine:

what a world could I present to you out of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Hugh Holland, Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion, Michael Drayton, George Chapman, John Marston, William Shakespeare, and other most pregnant wits of these our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire.

John Webster, another playwright in an era that produced a truly staggering number of works for the stage, had praised Shakespeare for his “right and happy copious industry”. This was an accolade, however, that had also been applied to Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood. Dekker, in fact, had put his name to eleven plays in just one year, 1599. How was it then that, in the eighteenth century, the tourist traffic to Stratford was such that it forced the fed-up Gastrell to cut down Shakespeare’s tree?

We should begin with the First Folio, a compendium of thirty-six Shakespeare plays. It was published in 1623 at the instigation of the author’s long-time friends and colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell. Shakespeare had died seven years earlier. Only 750 volumes were printed, and according to The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio (2016), each would have cost what an ordinary skilled worker might have earned in two months, or to put it another way, about the same as the price of attending all the plays themselves some forty times. Readers were privy to the collection’s prefatory verses offering praise to the dead author. Ben Jonson claimed, for instance, that the Stratford man’s skills had outshone rivals such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and John Lyly, and exalted him as a “star of poets”, adding the now famous, “He was not of an age, but for all time.” In similar tones, the poets James Mabbe and Leonard Digges spoke of Shakespeare’s literary immortality. The American Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro suggests that this sort of Jacobean adulation was not atypical, and was never intended to be taken literally. Further to this, Digges’s sentiments—the impossibility that any future dramatist could be as gifted as Shakespeare—were simply in line with the tone of standard elegiac verse of the time. In other words, similar outlandish claims were frequently applied to figures far less eminent than Shakespeare. In a nutshell, such efforts were considered genteel rather than inarguable truth. It is worth considering that by the First Folio’s publication, both Jonson and another playwright, John Fletcher, were considered at the high point of their careers. Their works were already being spoken of as having qualities superior to all comers.

A brief overview of Shakespeare’s standing as writer beyond 1623, and throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century, reads as follows. During the eighteen-year closure of theatres (1642 to 1660) due to the Civil War, many of the Elizabethan/Jacobean works that were now referred to as the “old plays” were republished. Only three of these were Shakespeare’s: The Merchant of Venice in 1652, and Othello and King Lear in 1655. No edition of the collected works had been published since the reprint of the First Folio in 1632. Moreover, by the 1660 Restoration, knowledge of Shakespeare, the man, was still limited to the sparse biographical information in the Folio—namely that he had been an actor as well as an author, that he had been born in Stratford, and that curiously he had known little Latin and less Greek. None of this was considered praiseworthy.

Recorded knowledge of the many secret and private performances of plays held during the Interregnum (1649 to 1660) indicates a preference for the works of Francis Beaumont, his collaborator Fletcher, and works by Jonson. Other names, rarely discussed now, also crop up: Thomas Killigrew, James Shirley, Lodowick Carlell, William Berkeley and William Davenant. There is no mention of Shakespeare.

After the Restoration, the “old plays” were in great demand since, understandably, there were few new dramatists. This being the case, they were adapted both for the new theatres and for changed theatrical practices. Sets became more elaborate and transforming them into opera became increasingly popular. In the three years after 1660, eighty Elizabethan/Jacobean plays were performed in England, as opposed to nine new works. This was a far cry from 1590s London, where a single theatre would stage a new play, on average, every three weeks. Despite the dependence on past works, the notion of Shakespeare as drama’s guiding light is not apparent. Even as late as 1699, James Drake in his The Antient and Modern Stages Survey’d expressed what was still the commonly held view at that time: “Shakespear … fell short of the Art of Jonson, and the Conversation of Beaumont and Fletcher.”

Gary Taylor in Reinventing Shakespeare (1990) informs us that in 350 documented visits to the theatre between 1660 and 1669, Samuel Pepys mentions just fifteen performances of Shakespeare’s plays as opposed to seventy-six by those of Beaumont and Fletcher. Taylor adds that nowhere in Isaac Newton’s extensive professional and private papers is Shakespeare mentioned, and nor is he discussed anywhere by the great philosophers of the period, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. And yet, by the 1720s, while exiled in England, and having just visited Alexander Pope, Voltaire observed that Shakespeare was “rarely called anything else but divine”. What happened?

The actor Thomas Betterton is buried in the East Cloister of Westminster Abbey at a spot described as “against the third pillar from the south end next to the garden”. His grave bears no inscription and there is no monument. In 1709, Betterton played Hamlet for the last time after having done so for nigh on half a century. He died the following year. Pepys, who had recorded seeing Hamlet five times, spoke for many when he described Betterton’s acting of the role as “the best part, I believe, that ever man acted”. Even thirty years after Betterton’s death, one audience member could still vividly recall the effect of Betterton’s facial response as the ghost of Hamlet’s father left the stage:

The whole Audience … remain’d in a dead Silence for near a Minute, and then, as if recovering all at once from their Astonishment … joined as one Man, in a Thunder of universal Applause.

Thanks largely to Betterton, by 1700—and at a time when the new English theatre had shown itself more adept at comedies than at tragedies—Hamlet had become Shakespeare’s most popular play. 1700 also saw the retirement of William Congreve, the most successful writer of these comedies. The absence of Congreve from the new repertoire, together with the fact that during the first four decades of the new century, none of the most gifted writers working in England (Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, Pope, Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne) had focused on the theatre, meant a paucity of quality new drama. Daniel Defoe had always been decidedly anti-theatre, and the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737—which effectively limited the number of new plays that could be produced—had dissuaded the gifted satirist Henry Fielding from further pursuing a theatrical career. Nicholas Rowe, the editor of a 1709 edition of Shakespeare, had lamented in 1719: “’tis a melancholy thing to consider, that there is not at present in Great Britain one promising Genius, or promising Actor, growing up for the stage”.

Steele’s journal the Tatler—the precursor to his collaboration with Addison known as the Spec­tator—was first published in 1709, and Shakespeare was mentioned in its first issue (thanks to Betterton). From this point onwards, Shakespeare would be discussed more frequently than any other literary figure, since in the Tatler’s Whig-inspired pages, it was felt the man from Stratford could be an antidote to the perceived frivolity of post-Restoration comedy. Steele, who spoke against the “low Gratifications” of contemporary comedies, encouraged “the Presentation of the Noble Characters drawn by Shakespear and others, from whence it is impossible to return without strong Impressions of Honour and Humanity”.

While the Tatler saw itself as ultimately addressing a far wider range of social and political issues than just literary criticism, the fact remains that it quickly became influential as the arbiter of British standards and taste, regardless of the topic. At one point it went as far as to describe itself as the “Censor of Great Britain”. This augured well for Shakespeare. Indeed, one hero of the day, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough—whom the Tatler described as a new “Harry the Fifth”—was quoted in the magazine as saying that his entire understanding of English history had emanated from Shakespeare’s plays. In 1712 Addison asserted in the Spectator that Shakespeare “incomparably excelled all others”, a sentiment widespread enough, by 1715, for the Cambridge University Library to acquire its first copy of Shakespeare’s complete works (a 1685 edition).

This avid interest in the Shakespearean canon also saw hot competition between those who laid claim to editorial expertise. Rowe’s 1709 edition carried a foreword that attempted a basic biography of the man—one that would stand unchallenged for a century—while Pope’s 1725 edition slammed previous publishers of the plays for their “ignorance [that] shines on every page” and “almost innumerable errors”. Pope’s efforts were followed by the competitive spirits of Lewis Theobald, Thomas Hanmer, William Warburton, Samuel Johnson, George Steevens, Isaac Reed and Edward Malone. In the hundred years leading to Rowe’s 1709 edition, four Shakespeare editions had been published, while in the hundred years that followed the number extended to sixty-five.

On stage, and helped by a continued dearth of quality new plays—by now Edmund Burke believed the stage had sunk “to the lowest degree, I mean with regard to the trash that is exhibited on it”—Shakespeare increasingly became the go-to man. In 1740 and 1741—and incidentally this was the time in which the Shakespeare memorial was installed at Westminster Abbey—Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale and All’s Well That Ends Well were all revived for the first time in the eighteenth century, with the three last-mentioned plays all being performed for the first time since the closure of the theatres in 1642. Romeo and Juliet received its revival in 1744 and was received rapturously. And so it went. By now Shakespeare was truly thought incomparable.

While Shakespeare-mania could be said to have peaked some time between the death of Pope (1744) and the birth of William Wordsworth (1770), Taylor suggests that for the sake of convenience, we could do worse than settle on the year 1760. While William Hawkins had delivered the first academic lectures on Shakespeare at a university (Oxford), between 1751 and 1756, by 1760 the students of Thomas Francklin at Cambridge were being instructed that the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were “all united and surpass’d in the immortal and inimitable Shakespear”. In the same year Lord Lyttelton’s highly popular short work, Dialogues of the Dead, had it that if humanity were to be destroyed and no other evidence were left other than Shakespeare’s works, “other Beings might know what Man was from those writings”. During the 1770s, it became increasingly frequent to hear the plays quoted from the pulpit.

Shakespeare’s “divinity” became official in September 1769. The event was David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee, a three-day festival held at Stratford. The famous actor had performed in and produced many of the plays, and had been the first to accord Shakespeare the title “Bard”. He had also built a Palladian-styled temple devoted to Shakespeare on his Hampton estate, a shrine that drew admiration from his neighbour Horace Walpole, as well as literary luminaries such as Dr Johnson. It had also been considered impressive enough to warrant a visit from the King of Denmark, Christian VI, housing as it did a statue of Shakespeare (for which Garrick himself had been the model), a chair made from the timber of Gastrell’s infamously-felled mulberry (and according to Walpole designed by William Hogarth), and various Sharpe mulberry carvings. It also had on display an old leather glove which had purportedly belonged to the poet, as well as a dagger, and a signet ring with the initials “W.S.”

The plans for the jubilee (surprisingly free of the Bard’s own works) were reported by newspapers throughout Europe and, but for Garrick’s own pocket, in the long run it mattered not that the event was ruined by inclement weather. Though almost 3000 people attended on the first day—proceedings beginning with gusto at six in the morning with the firing of thirty cannons and much ringing of church bells—the second day brought forth continuous rain, which meant that most of the remainder of the carnival, including the gala parade and planned fireworks, had to be abandoned. At one point water in the main rotunda was knee deep and the structure itself threatened to collapse. James Boswell, writing in the London Magazine, summed up the thoughts of many: “After the joy of the jubilee came the uneasy reflection that I was in a little village in wet weather and knew not how to get away.” He compared the experience to that of eating an artichoke whole: “We have some fine mouthfuls, but also swallow the leaves and the hair, which are confoundedly difficult of digestion.”

The cost to Garrick amounted to £2000 (the equivalent of around a quarter of a million in today’s money) but the coverage in the press and the debate in the street as to the efficacy of the event—Johnson for instance refused to attend for he felt the exercise a folly—ensured that Shakespeare could be spoken of as the only English person, other than royalty, worthy of such a fuss. And Garrick had managed to get his message across: “England may justly boast the honour of producing the greatest dramatic poet in the world.”

Badly in need of funds, he now hastily organised a repeat event, in the form of a play, The Jubilee (1769) whose highlight was Garrick’s Ode (also reported as being the highlight of the jubilee itself). It reads in part:

’Tis he! ’Tis he—that demi-god!
Who Avon’s flowery margin trod.
’Tis he! ’Tis he
The god of our idolatry!

The play proved a staggering success and recouped Garrick’s losses four-fold after a then record run of 152 performances at Drury Lane.

On Garrick’s death a decade later, the poet William Cowper would designate him “Great Shakespeare’s priest”. His body was interred at the base of Shakespeare’s statue in Westminster Abbey (with Dr Johnson later laid to rest beside him). By now, such was the worship of Shakespeare that the painter Henry Fuseli was dreaming of executing a vast ceiling composition devoted to Shakespeare and the characters of his plays, something akin to that of Michelangelo’s masterwork in the Sistine Chapel. And while this never eventuated, fellow artist George Romney would complete, some time around 1790, the quasi-nativity scene The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions, in which baby Shakespeare fills in for the infant Christ, while figures representing nature and the passions are substitutes for the Magi and attendant shepherds. The apotheosis of William Shakespeare was now complete, and nobody found any cause for complaint.

Jane Austen gives us two characters in Mansfield Park (1814) who provide a summation of the view that had taken root and blossomed in the eighteenth century, and one which was clearly still prevailing in the early nineteenth century. Edmund Bertram intones:

No doubt one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree, from one’s earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions.

This was in response to his interlocutor, Henry Crawford, who had earlier observed:

one gets acquainted with [him] without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere, one is intimate with him by instinct.

Barry Gillard lives in Geelong. A frequent contributor on literature and history, he wrote on Virginia Woolf in the April issue.