Shakespeare

In these last plays (which he did not necessarily know were his last) he was opening the gates. What is important in Cymbeline is the note of sustained feeling, what Hazlitt describes as “the force of natural association, a particular train of thought suggesting different inflections of the same predominant feeling,”⁷ which is evidence of continuous excitement in the process of writing. He uses the broken language of passion and of intimate feeling with many asides and colloquialisms, ellipses and elisions; he even seems to transcribe the language of thought itself, as it is turning into expression. His language rises upwards in endless ascent, with the soaring of the cadence matched with aspiring feeling and unforced fluency. The Jacobean audiences were entranced by it. They sucked up extravagant words like sweets.

The music for Cymbeline was especially written by the court lutanist, Robert Johnson, who had been brought in by the King’s Men to arrange the musical settings for the Blackfriars plays. One of the songs from the play, “Hark, hark, the lark,” survives in a manuscript score which may be Johnson’s own.

Two brothers are about to sing a dirge, the justly celebrated “Feare no more the heate o’th’ Sun,” when one of them explains that “our voyces Haue got the mannish cracke”(2188). The other then adds, in parentheses, “I cannot sing: Ile weepe, and word it with thee”(2191). It is clear that the voices of the two child actors had unexpectedly broken and, without replacements for them, the apology was added at a late stage of rehearsal. Shakespeare was accustomed to last-minute revisions, and in this broken music we discern the circumstances of the time.

CHAPTER 85. So There’s My Riddle, One that’s Dead Is Quicke

In the spring of 1611 Simon Forman, the Elizabethan doctor and magus, made notes upon the productions he had seen recently. He was among the thousands at the Globe who had gone to performances of Macbeth, Cymbeline and a brand-new play entitled The Winter’s Tale. Of Macbeth Forman principally noted the supernatural events and the prodigies. It seems from his account that the most extraordinary and effective scene was that in which Banquo’s ghost appears at the banquet. The witches obviously had a sensational effect, too, but from Forman’s account it is clear that they were played as “3 women feiries or Nimphes,”¹ perhaps by the boy actors. Forman made a professional note to himself when he observed “Also howe Makbetes quen did Rise in the night in her slepe, amp; walke and talked and confessed all, amp; the doctor noted her wordes.”² Forman also watched Cymbeline, for which he gives a bald summary of events; the spectacle of “a cave” impressed itself upon his imagination, so it must have been a striking effect somewhere within the “discovery space” of the stage. Forman is circumspect about The Winter’s Tale, although it is clear that the character who most entertained him was Autolycus “the Rog that cam in all tattered like coll pixci.” The part was no doubt played to great effect by Robert Armin, and led to Forman appending a note to “beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellous.”³

Shakespeare had been writing The Winter’s Tale in the preceding year, and its overwhelmingly pastoral setting has suggested to some critics that he wrote it at New Place in Stratford. The same reasoning would suggest that he wrote The Tempest while temporarily residing on an island in the Mediterranean. The Winter’s Tale is a play that could have been performed at the Blackfriars playhouse as well as the Globe; since they remained open for ten months of this year, 1611, it is likely to have been presented at both the indoor and outdoor theatres. The elaborately staged drama is crowned by the ultimate scene in which the supposed statue of Hermione is miraculously restored to life in front of her astonished husband and daughter. It is an exhilarating theatrical moment. Shakespeare may have previously seen it in action at two royal events. During the king’s entry into London in 1604, and during his opening of the New Exchange in 1609, statues also stirred into life and spoke. It may in fact have been one of the boys from the King’s Men who performed the feat at the New Exchange. Once Shakespeare had seen it, however, he had to use it.