What Blest Genius?: The Jubilee That Made Shakespeare

261 Pages·2019·18.18 MB·English

by  Andrew McConnell Stott

What Blest
Genius?
THE JUBILEE THAT MADE
SHAKESPEARE
Andrew McConnell Stott
FOR MUM AND DAD
Since 1824, the Warwickshire town of Stratford-upon-Avon has held a birthday
celebration in honor of William Shakespeare, its most famous son. Music plays,
banners are unfurled, and town criers from surrounding communities lead the
celebrants in three hearty cheers as they parade through quaint and garlanded
streets. In 2016, to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death,
the celebration doubled also as a funerary parade, as by custom, Shakespeare is
said to have been born and died on the same date—April 23—which
(coincidentally or otherwise) also happens to be St. George’s Day, the national
day of England. The 2016 celebration acknowledged this duality by beginning in
funerary mode as hundreds of respectful devotees, including celebrities,
schoolchildren, and dignitaries from around the world, paraded mournfully until
the halfway point, when the mood was transformed by the arrival of a New
Orleans jazz band who led them joyfully to the poet’s graveside at Holy Trinity
Church for the laying of wreaths.
The night before the parade, Holy Trinity was the site for a performance that
it had first hosted 247 years earlier and never again since, a long poem in praise
of Shakespeare set to musical accompaniment that had originally been delivered
by the actor and theatre manager David Garrick. The “Dedication Ode,” as it
was known, was the centerpiece of the world’s first literary festival, the
Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769, and the subject of this book. Re-creating the ode
was an especially fitting way to mark a milestone anniversary, as it provided
Stratford with an opportunity to acknowledge the historical debt it owed to
Garrick not only for the role he played in making the town a site of tourism and
literary pilgrimage but in cementing forever its civic pride by ensuring
Shakespeare’s immortal fame.
AIR
I
Thou soft-flowing Avon, by thy silver stream, Of things more than mortal, sweet
Shakespear would dream, The fairies by moonlight dance round his green
bed, For hallow’d the turf is which pillow’d his head.
II
The love-stricken maiden, the soft-sighing swain, Here rove without danger, and
sigh without pain, The sweet bud of beauty, no blight shall here dread, For
hallow’d the turf is which pillow’d his head.
III
Here youth shall be fam’d, for their love, and their truth, And chearful old age,
feel the spirit of youth; For the raptures of fancy here poets shall tread, For
hallow’d the turf is that pillow’d his head.
IV
Flow on, silver Avon, in song ever flow, Be the swans on thy bosom still whiter
than snow, Ever full be thy stream, like his fame may it spread, And the turf
ever hallow’d which pillow’d his head.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Epilogue
Garrick’s Ode
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Prologue
King George III was not mad about Shakespeare. “Was there ever such stuff as
the great part of Shakespeare?” he complained to the novelist Frances Burney,
listing all the characters and plays he objected to. “Only it’s Shakespeare, and
nobody dare abuse him . . . one should be stoned for saying so!”
Why would the king, a monarch with dominions spanning five continents,
need to hide his opinion of a playwright? Yet at the time of this royal confession
in 1785, Shakespeare had attained near godlike status, and harboring an
opposing view ran the risk of seeming lunatic. Such veneration was still
relatively new, the result of a period of intense cultural and artistic focus that had
transformed Shakespeare from one writer among many to the “Blest Genius of
the Isle.” While this transformation occurred over several decades, one event
stands out as the moment at which his ascension into national icon and literary
deity was finally realized, the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769.
Following Shakespeare’s death in 1616, after two decades working in
London as an actor, manager, shareholder, and playwright of the King’s Men,
his plays fell quickly from the repertoire. Were it not for the outbreak of the
Civil War in 1642, they may never have survived at all. The war brought public
entertainments to a halt, and with them a rich theatrical tradition that had been
evolving since the Middle Ages. When the theatres reopened with the restoration
of the monarchy in 1660, the new king, Charles II, gave the job of reviving the
theatre to two of his loyal courtiers, Thomas Killigrew and Sir William
D’Avenant, presenting each man with a royal patent to open a playhouse. With
no new plays and few experienced actors, the task was a challenging one.
Killigrew had the advantage, as thanks to a close friendship with the king he was
allowed to style his troupe “the King’s Company,” and thus claim a direct
lineage from Shakespeare’s King’s Men, along with the rights to perform its
theatrical properties. While this included Shakespeare’s work, the real prize was
the enormously popular comedies of Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson,
as well as the tragicomedies of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Jacobean
writing partners still held in high esteem. By contrast, D’Avenant, a pug-faced
poet with a wig as thick as a privet hedge, was granted the rights to only two
plays from the old repertoire. After much grousing, he petitioned the Lord
Chamberlain with a “proposition of reformeing some of the most ancient
Playes,” presenting him with a list that included “Tempest, Measures, for
Measures, Much a doe about nothing, Rome and Juliet, Twelfe night, The Life
of Kinge Henry the Eyght . . . Kinge Lear, the Tragedy of Mackbeth, [and] the
Tragedy of Hamlet prince of Denmarke.”
D’Avenant got what he asked for, but only on condition that he make the
plays “fitt”—that is, adapt them for a culture that had essentially moved on. As
Shakespeare’s plays had first debuted when D’Avenant’s audience’s
grandparents were children, it was clear that he would need to revise heavily.
And this is what he did, changing endings and updating themes to suit the
newness of the age, adding music and spectacle to exploit the technologies
available in the new theatres, and introducing new characters and subplots,
especially ones that emphasized another innovation—female actors in female
roles. D’Avenant even conflated two plays to make one, all the while making
sure to plane the knots and tubercles from Shakespeare’s original language that
sounded archaic and tortuous to the Restoration ear. The result was a resounding
success, as epitomized by his 1664 production of Macbeth, which featured flying
witches, songs, dances, and a happy ending accompanied by a semi-operatic
score. This Macbeth was not a Shakespeare play so much as a Shakespeare-
inspired entertainment, one that had the contradictory effect of elevating
Shakespeare within the culture even as its popularity was based on how far it had
moved away.
The thought would not have crossed D’Avenant’s mind that Shakespeare’s
text was sacrosanct, an inviolate canon that couldn’t be touched. It was instead a
wellspring of concepts, characters, and situations to be plundered at will. This
was the paradox that fueled Shakespeare’s initial ascent to cultural icon: the
more that theatre audiences came to know him through versions that had been
altered, adapted, and heavily revised, the more his capital grew. By the advent of
the eighteenth century, this was buoyed by the appearance of many cheap
editions of his works, permitting a more private and contemplative relationship
with the plays to emerge. More often than not, these came prefaced with a
biographical sketch written by the poet Nicholas Rowe for his 1709 edition of
the works and reprinted in almost every edition of Shakespeare for the next
hundred years.
As is often noted, the verifiable facts of Shakespeare’s life can be written on
a postcard while still leaving room for a greeting: he was baptized, he married,
he owned some property and wrote some plays. Into this void, Rowe threw
unverified fragments and secondhand anecdotes to portray an Englishman of wit,
sincerity, compassion, and good fellowship, “Sweet Willy,” “the Bard of Avon,”
a raw talent tutored by nature and unhindered by the artificial prescripts of
formal literary culture. This was the hero championed by groups like the
Shakespeare Ladies Club, formed in the 1730s to oppose the influence of French
and Italian dramatic models on the British stage, promoting instead an English
drama that they felt represented “Decency and good Manners.” By the 1740s,
Shakespeare’s status was such that a marble statue was erected to him in
Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. Despite being praised by the London
Evening Post for its presentation of the poet in “the Dress of his
Time . . . natural, free and easy,” it was a highly Georgian vision of the past, not
so much a likeness as the apparition of genius within English literature’s holiest
spot.
Even as Shakespeare’s reputation grew, there was some way left to go before
he would reach his current status as the world’s most famous writer. For that, we
can thank the actor, dramatist, and theatre manager David Garrick, who, from his
debut in 1741 to his retirement from the stage in 1776, was the most famous man
in Britain after the king, not to mention a cultural broker so influential that the
poet William Whitehead wrote of him that “a nation’s taste depends on you /
Perhaps a nation’s virtue too.”
Garrick built his career around the performance and promotion of
Shakespeare, becoming so closely associated with him that the biographer James
Granger has written that “it is hard to say whether Shakespeare owes more to
Garrick, or Garrick to Shakespeare.” Having taken over the management of
Drury Lane in 1747, which, along with Covent Garden, was one of the most
important theatres in the kingdom, Garrick immediately declared it “the house of
William Shakespeare,” and embarked on a project intended to bring artistic and
intellectual gravity to the stage. But Garrick was no purist either, cutting,
adapting, and remodeling the works of his idol as he thought fit.
Sometimes, like D’Avenant before him, he made entirely new entertainments
from more unpopular plays—his Catherine and Petruchio, for example, was a
successful and much loved version of The Taming of the Shrew, which in its
unaltered form was considered wholly unwatchable by eighteenth-century
audiences. Even when largely following a text, he was unafraid to make
structural alterations. In 1756, he debuted a version of King Lear built on the
foundations of an earlier adaptation that gave the play a happy ending by making
Cordelia queen and allowing Lear “to pass away his Life in Quietness and
Devotion,” a version that was still standard when Queen Victoria came to the
throne. For the critics of the day, this was a marked improvement. Garrick,
claimed The London Magazine, had “assisted the deficiencies” of Shakespeare.
The Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 was the conclusive moment of Garrick’s
relationship with Shakespeare, a literal coronation of his muse witnessed and
legitimized by some of the most influential tastemakers in the nation. Garrick’s
friend James Boswell, the writer, lawyer, diarist, and future biographer of
Samuel Johnson, was one of them. Describing it as “an elegant and truly
classical celebration of the memory of Shakespeare,” he and his fellow attendees
(numbering in the thousands) enjoyed three days of songs, balls, and pageants
set in the “hallow’d turf” of Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon,
culminating in Garrick’s bravura reading of the Dedication Ode, a long,
rambling poem scored by the Drury Lane orchestra and delivered before a statue
of the Bard Garrick had gifted the town.
But while the Jubilee was a formal instantiation of Shakespeare as the
creative genius par excellence, capping a century of his movement toward the
center of the literary pantheon, it was a peculiar foundation on which to build an
enduring hagiography. The Jubilee was a hodgepodge, a gallimaufry of
inconsistencies and contradictory motivations that featured little of the work of
its honoree. Not a single scene from Shakespeare was performed, let alone an
entire play. Shakespeare was more like the Jubilee’s “sponsor,” presiding over a
series of events and entertainments that by themselves had very little to do with
him, the body of his work featuring only as echoes and fragments, or as song
lyrics and quotations, and allegorized images painted on the backlit
transparencies that illuminated the windows of the Town Hall. While Boswell
reveled in the event, others found the Jubilee bizarre. The writer Horace Walpole
blushed to hear of Garrick’s “nonsense,” while Samuel Johnson boycotted it
entirely. For the actor-manager Samuel Foote, a constant thorn in Garrick’s side,
the Jubilee was nothing more than “avarice and vanity,” such was Garrick’s
desire “to fleece the people and transmit his name down to posterity, hand in
hand with Shakespeare.” Personal and commercial ambitions were certainly
never far from the surface. This included the mayor and aldermen of Stratford-
upon-Avon, who hoped that the influx of visitors would boost their flagging
economy, as well as Garrick, whose own sense of finitude as he neared the end
of his acting career and managed his failing health played a big part in his plans.
There were political considerations too. By choosing to celebrate
Shakespeare in the town of his birth, with its timber-framed houses, reedy
riverbanks, and airy open fields, Garrick sought to deploy Shakespeare as a
soothing and bucolic parent to the nation at a time when Britain was in turmoil,
with riots and hunger commonplace and political institutions shaken by a strong
populist movement led by a pugnacious and resilient leader named John Wilkes.