on shakespeare and invention

I’m in your inbox again! How have you been? My Brooklyn sky just opened with rain, and the smell of wet wood and earth has calmed everything made restless by the wildfires.

Two bits of news, both good. First, with the recommendation of a wonderful mentor and the support of an incredible sister, I have been accepted to the CUNY Graduate Center’s Writer’s Institute this year. Second, I am a mere two months away from beginning medical school. I have a dizzying feeling like my life is about to begin anew. To combat this quarter-life vertigo, I went back to my first love, the good old Bard himself, and wrote a meandering ditty about him, Toni Morrison, and some new things I’ve learned about writing. As always, thank you for reading!

Toni Morrison once said of her Princeton writing class, “ [My students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends.” I am not imaging her brusqueness, because she is well known for it when speaking to journalists. Her disregard stemmed from how much of fiction was self-referential. Why, for instance, are there so many novels whose main characters are English professors, all set on college campuses? Such transparent replication in storytelling is terrifying in its plagiarism of life. The worst offenders read like gossip rags. Still, I have wondered why Shakespeare’s plays do not contain enough clues to his own life – why, despite his prolific output, his writings do not completely unveil him, or rescue his true personality from the mammoth, hagiographic one that centuries of devotees have ascribed to him.

If we forget the myth of Shakespeare for a second, the real man remains tantalizing in his obscurity. Stephen Greenblatt sketched a life of compelling ordinariness in his book Will in the World. The greatest playwright of all time, he suggests, was just a young Latin tutor from Stratford who, ill at ease with country life, ran away to the big city. He became an industrious actor-writer in London, spending all his time editing reams of manuscripts, or on stage. He rarely visited his wife and children in the country, but like a faithful émigré, sent them money every month. He was restrained, hardworking, and made highly sensible financial choices about his lands, his wills, his theater spaces.

One of his contemporaries roundly criticized him as an under-educated, plagiaristic outsider (an “upstart crow beautified with [other’s] feathers” no less) even as he drew crowds by the hundreds to the Globe Theatre. He died quietly in his home surrounded by family. There was no elegizing by famous poets, no extolling of artistic virtues, as there was for his brasher, vastly more charismatic peer Christopher Marlowe. There were no homages for the man who changed the English language. These were the lineaments of his little life. It is hard to discover who he loved, whether he was Catholic or Protestant, what his true nature as a man was. He has hidden the details of his larger private life so well, that it does not emerge even from his characters’ mouths.

Who wants to hear the life of a poor player from Stratford anyway? The groundlings, themselves poor and eager for entertainment, would have thrown something harder than tomatoes at the stage. No, a swashbuckling Italian romance makes for far better fare, as do tales of girls dressing up as boys, cynical jesters, puckish forest sprites, ambitious Scottish queens, and doomed Moroccan generals. Shakespeare sought first to entertain, and then proceeded to use the conceit of fantasy – of fiction – to reveal truths about ourselves. He remained mum on the contours of his own life. But if you look hard enough, as I have, he occasionally revealed a little something about himself.

[Image description: Portia, a painting by English realist painter John Everett Millais. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the wealthy heiress Portia famously pretends to be a male lawyer called Balthazar to trick Shylock out of his bond - a pound of flesh.]

In Much Ado About Nothing, the character Hero’s father, an old Italian lord called Leonato, delivers a moving monologue about his daughter’s recent humiliation. Hero has just been publicly left at the altar by her fiancé Claudio. Claudio also chose that moment to confront Leonato and publicly question his daughter’s virginity (“she knows the heat of a luxurious bed”), and make unforgivable comparisons to citrus (“give not this rotten orange to your friend!”). Hero faints in horror and shock, unable to defend herself, and once Claudio and his men leave, a very wily Friar suggests that everyone maintain the pretense that Hero is dead. If they grieve her death publicly, Claudio can stew in his guilt. Thus, we have Leonato’s monologue about his grief for his daughter.

In the past, I used to note Leonato’s anguish with some listlessness, nourishing that righteous anger only an audience can have for a fictitious character they loathe. Mere moments ago, Leonato had fully believed Claudio’s accusations, and had threatened to strike Hero, to tear her with his hands, to wish death on her (“O, she is fallen/ Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea/ Hath drops too few to wash her clean again/ And salt too little which may season give/ To her foul-tainted flesh!”) Now, dressed in insincere black, he stiffens his allegiance to fatherhood, forgetting how quickly he had disowned her just two scenes prior. Shakespeare invents Leonato’s grief, and my irritation at this invention only breeds dislike.

But the last time I watched Leonato’s monologue, I halted my studied dislike of him. I had just read Will in the World, and I remembered the chapters about Shakespeare’s children. Shakespeare wrote Much Ado About Nothing in 1599, three years after he lost his son Hamnet to the plague. He put up his play Hamlet either that year, or two years later in 1601. I hear Leonato talk of the impossibility of a father being patient while he is grieving the death of his child. He says that his grief is a measure of how much he loves his child, adding with sharp sorrow, “Men/ Can counsel and speak comfort to that grief/ Which they themselves not feel.” He says that other men’s counsel in his grief is like “charm[ing] ache with air and agony with words.” Now, there is no seeming insincerity. Now, a father’s grief at losing his child morphs into something beyond the play.

Shakespeare clearly digested his grief over his son’s death, and saw that an appropriate exorcism was impossible without the mediation of art. This invented father, this man grieving for a lost child surrounded by friends calling his sadness intemperate, can only find his release on stage, through Leonato’s mouth. An old Italian lord’s palace in Messina is a strange setting for Shakespeare’s catharsis over his son’s death. And that is perhaps the point – the setting, the characters, the contours of plot and circumstance, are only the fantastical purveyors of human truth. That lies and invention can reveal such necessary honesty – that only the most gorgeous lies can reveal Shakespeare’s grief – is perhaps what Toni Morrison meant when she placed the only injunction on writing that seems to make sense: “Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through. Imagine it, create it.” Do not speak to me about your little life. Invent it.  

Ms. Morrison’s entire quote can be found here, under the subheading “Don’t write what you know.”