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Bard’s silent debt Shakespeare & Co Stanley Wells. Penguin, UK. Pages 304. `£ 22.50. It may sound mad, but The Lord
Admiral’s Men in 1598, in their home at the Rose Theatre, made full
inventories of their properties and costumes. Though these remarkable documents
are reproduced at the close of Stanley Wells’s book, they offer a good
starting-place for appreciating the sheer, outrageous, world-consuming zest of
the theatre in Shakespeare’s day. Limits were few. The poet, as Sir Philip
Sidney said "goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the
narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his
own wit"; he delivers a "golden" world. Hamlet’s economic
gesture towards his own "distract’d globe" encompassed head,
theatre, world and all. Let us for all love remember, though, as 21st century
shelves fill with yet more books detailing Shakespeare the man, his genius, and
his "lost years", that in his time, his head was not the only one
busy transforming worlds. Stanley Wells is a significant figure in the
contemporary understanding of Shakespeare and his works, but his years of
invaluable scholarship, his editing of Shakespeare’s plays, his collaborative
anthologies and numerous works of synthesis and explanation of the man and his
legacy have not led to tunnel vision. Here he turns his attention to "and
Co", and "attempts to place Shakespeare in relation to the actors and
other writers, mainly playwrights, of his time in an accessible and where
possible entertaining manner". Yet Wells is splendidly placed to
make a comprehensive and colourful job of understanding in new ways Shakespeare’s
debt to his peers. This is illuminating, well-planned and suggestive work, not
only for those readers who have little acquaintance with the subject, but also
for those already familiar with it. Thomas Heywood knew: "Our English tongue,
which hath been the most harsh, uneven and broken language of the world, is
now, by this secondary means of playing, continually refined, so that it is
grown to a most perfect and composed language." In Hamlet alone, there are
170 usages of words or phrases new to English. Effects slip over into prose,
and the astounding Thomas Nashe does things to words from which they’ve never
quite recovered. Wells laments that Nashe never found a literary form that
could contain his talents, but let’s be pleased about this: the rigid
categories into which writing is nowadays confined were blessedly absent. Wells’s
experience and wisdom is invaluable in helping cut through the tangles of
doubtful attributions and hazy collaborations. How much of The Two Noble
Kinsmen did Shakespeare write, and with whom? Shakespeare’s debts to
Marlowe are well acknowledged, but what does Macbeth owe to Middleton’s
Yorkshire Tragedy? Other writers were sometimes better: in Henry VIII,
the introversion of late Shakespearean verse is contrasted unfavourably with
the "orderliness" of Fletcher. The idiosyncrasies of individual
actors—real boys and men—help in Shakespeare’s construction of character.
Most importantly, Wells helps us understand the damage that Shakespeare’s
status has done his contemporaries. At Shakespeare’s shrine, the sweet
cruelties and comic asperities of this drama are often neglected: all of
Marlowe, and Nashe, with his "brightness falls from the air", the
self-referential glories of Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, and the
forensic, bitter Webster. Richard Eyre has spoken recently about Shakespeare:
his drama helps us "uncover the spiritual". Indeed, Eyre suggested,
he is a "secular saint", but, as Wells shows in this well-judged tour
of this human, smelly, collaborative—and sometimes desperate—lost world,
the truth is more interesting than that. —by arrangement with
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The "where possible" is rather
charming, and indicates correctly that there is something of a holiday mood
about all this. While responsibility to his subject never wavers, he allows
himself licence, quoting from the (monstrously unjust) portrayal of the boy
Webster torturing mice in Shakespeare in Love, and exhibiting some
relishable dry wit. Explaining the theoretical implications of Ben Jonson’s
preamble to Every Man Out of His Humour, he can’t resist suggesting
that latecomers might nevertheless "be relieved if they had known what
they had missed". To insist on Shakespeare as one among others is neither
novel, nor even very exciting; after all, many undergraduate courses on
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama are designed to do just this. Goethe in 1824
compared Shakespeare with Mont Blanc: if the mountain was on a flat plain
"we should find no words to express our wonder"—surrounded by other
peaks his magnitude becomes more explicable.