Joining the Dots

Suppose I could convince you that William Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night for a performance before Queen Elizabeth I on Twelfth Night, 6 January 1601/02? Suppose I demonstrated that Shakespeare laced his plays with anagrams because the Queen loved word-games, and anagrams were all the rage at Court? What if I persuaded you that Thomas Nashe (masquerading as the court fool Will Sommers) was his inspiration for Feste? And I deciphered the name of the mysterious Quinapulus as an anagram of two saints–and Pigrogromitus as the anagram of a Pope? To ice this improbable cake, what if I could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that, by royal fiat, the 'twelfe day of December' was Christmas in Elizabeth's England–and Sir Toby's mock-carol is only one of the play's calendrical pranks? Finally, suppose I could persuade you that Shakespeare's comedy about fraternal twins (with the boy believed lost at sea and drowned) is the playwright's attempt to reconcile himself to the death of his only son?

If I could do all that, it would change the way you (and the rest of the us) think about Twelfth Night–wouldn't it? (p. 77)

As he sets out on an ambitious re-situation of Twelfth Night in the particulars of its historical moment, Steve Sohmer asks what may look like a rhetorical question, except it is not a rhetorical question, because my simple answer is 'No'. A fuller answer is that for me, and surely for quite a few others, there are many things about Shakespeare's play that are unaffected by arguments for creative origins and local pointedness. It is not read or watched, very often, for its biographical poignancy or its digs at the queen, and that is not because of an absence of knowledge about those things. Its sadness and joy, its weariness and spontaneity, its achievements in verse and prose, and so on are (I would say) largely insulated from the questions being raised in the challenge above.

This does not mean, however, that Sohmer's book is not interesting or well handled; in fact it is mostly both. There are moments where it claims too much, and moments where the evidence assembled creaks under the strain it has to take. Most of all, I welcome a turn towards the grounded, situated, world-aware aspects of Shakespeare's plays. Although it might well be true to some extent that 'every fiction writer's oeuvre constitutes an autobiography' (p. 146), the parts of Sohmer's book that seems more successful to me are the ones that offer to uncover the networks of gossip, insider knowledge, and unstated assumptions in which Shakespeare's plays first emerged. Surely there are indeed patterns of thought that we cannot easily inhabit, many things we do not recognise but which animated the first audiences' encounters with his plays. Historicist scholars have helped us reach after the ways in which many among Shakespeare's first audiences and readers would have thoughts about his work. An understanding of Calvinism, and other aspects of the Elizabethan religious balance, surely helps us understand points of tension and release in the writing of the time. The same goes for aspects of mental life that are not so rigorously theorised and debated. Then, as now, there were things that 'everyone knew' in an informal way, even an unwitting way. Some of these things might be called 'memes' today: fragments of culture that become embedded in individuals' thinking for a while, are current for a while, then grow stale, gained and lost without a particular intention to do either. These are surely worth pursuing.

An example of this might well be the link made between the bastard Faulconbridge in King John and the Elizabethan court's own royal bastard, Henry Carey. As Lord Chamberlain, patron, and noted warrior, Carey had a profile that, after his death in 1596, might well have reverberated in the contemporary imagination enough to elicit (and then enliven) literary shadows of his...