What did Shakespeare Read?

From: Cambridge University Press | By: Leonard Barkan

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION | What were the literary influences on Shakespeare, both in terms of his prose and in relation to his plots? In this feature from The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (available through Fathom), Leonard Barkan shows that Shakespeare's work was as much shaped by popular theatre as it was by high-brow literature. His interest in political intrigue and the lifestyles of the rich created some of the greatest dramatic scenes, but it was the way he absorbed text across every stratum of society that led to his extraordinary ability to play with language.

man is sitting in London around 1600 in the middle of a personal library whose catalogue corresponds precisely to the 'Sources of Shakespeare's Plays': what can we say about his reading taste? Voracious; more middle-brow than high-brow; heterodox; philosophically not of the avant-garde; Anglo-centric in certain ways, generally having to do with past and present public institutions, yet at the same time revealing a considerable fondness for continental story-telling. He is something of a history buff--in that field, his holdings range from the learned to the ephemeral. Theatre, represented a bit sparsely by comparison, is both classic and contemporary, with a sprinkling of university closet drama. There is a certain taste for current events, especially at the level of political intrigue and lifestyles of the rich and famous: these are often to be found in the pamphlet collection. As for high-brow literature, you are more likely to find a few well-thumbed volumes than a complete catalogue of the major works.

But let us name the names. As for the serious favourites, Ovid and Plutarch are visible everywhere, and Seneca is only a little less prominent. For classical history, apart from Plutarch, Livy was most often studied, but it is noteworthy that the real source may have been the Epitome of Livy written by Florus in the second century AD. Other historians seem to have been consulted only for specific projects: Scotland, Denmark, and Turkey (this last for Othello) occasioned specialized research, while Julius Caesar appears to have required a lot of supplementary reading, including Tacitus, Appian, and perhaps Sallust and Suetonius.

Among Shakespeare's sources in his own language, the largest share belongs to the chroniclers who furnished material for the history plays. The compendia that he read most exhaustively were Edward Hall's Union of the two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548), the Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed (1578, 1587) and John Stow's Chronicles of England(1580) and Annales of England (1592). Together, these offered the dramatist not only the raw data, both dynastic and anecdotal, but also the methodologies of history-writing and the special politics of the Tudor ascendancy. Of a different kind, but persistently influential, are such literary works as the didactic Mirror for Magistrates (1559) and Samuel Daniel's poetic First Fowre Bookes of the Civile Wars (1595), while yet another approach to the materials comes from the strenuous polemics for the Protestant cause offered by John Foxe in his Acts and Monuments, known as the Booke of Martyrs (first published in English, 1563). Figures of exceptional cultural fascination, including King John, Richard III, Henry V, and Falstaff had generated their own specialized source materials.

The literary texts

On what we would consider the more literary side, Shakespeare's English-language reading list tended to be similar to ours. So far as the fourteenth-century masters are concerned, Chaucer is writ large in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Troilus and Cressida, while John Gower makes his mark both at the very beginning of the dramatist's career (Comedy of Errors) and the very end (Pericles). The two greatest non-dramatic masterpieces of Shakespeare's own age, Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, find their way into comic, historic, and tragic works, with King Lear embracing elements of both.

The popular texts

Shakespeare's tastes were not exclusively highbrow, however. Among the works of prose fiction, Barnaby Riche's Apolonius and Silla (1581), Robert Greene's Pandosto (1588), and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (1590) might be forgotten today were they not the principal sources for Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, and As You Like It, but they prove to be lively works in their own right that vindicate Shakespeare's dependence on them. John Lyly's Euphues (1579), whose mix of wit and eros and pedantry swept through Elizabethan literate culture, can be detected in the language of every overwrought lover in the comedies. So far as theatrical literature is concerned, Shakespeare's tastes are decidedly popular. While Marlowe and Jonson exercise some influence, it appears that Anon. is virtually his favourite dramatist, as witness his careful reading of The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591), or the complex ways in which The Rare Triumphes of Love and Fortune (1589) and Mucedorus (first version, 1598) are woven into the plots of the late romances.

Lists of titles like these need to be grounded in a larger sense of the contemporary intellectual climate, particularly as regards book-making and book-reading. At the level of European culture in general, two factors must not be forgotten: first, the continental Renaissance, now more than a century old, had stimulated an enormous opening-up in the category of literature, both that which was revived from the past and that which was being newly produced; second, the invention and growth of printing continued to disseminate the material objects of reading in greater quantity and to a wider audience. England, besides feeling these effects, was by the later sixteenth century in the grip of a quite self-conscious drive to found and promote a national--or even nationalist--literary culture, the evidence of which is not only such highly visible careers as those of, say, Spenser and Ralegh, but also a flood of literary rivalries and disputes which generated a great deal of ink and rendered book-making itself a matter of public interest. Indeed, these sometimes became the actual stuff of drama, as is clear from the frequent appearance of names like Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, and George Chapman in the explanatory notes to Elizabethan playtexts.

Two other matters bear even more directly on Shakespeare's sources as a body of text. From the 1560s onwards, a gigantic industry of translation revolutionizes what it is possible for the English to read. Though the dramatist's familiarity with passages in the original is often demonstrable, Shakespeare's plays would scarcely have been possible without: Hoby's Castiglione (1561), Adlington's Apuleius (1566), Golding's Ovid (1567), North's Plutarch (1579), Harington's Ariosto (1591), Chapman's Homer (1598, in part), Holland's Livy (1600), Fairfax's Tasso (1600), and Florio's Montaigne (1603). To say that is, of course, to return to 'small Latin and less Greek': as a reader, Shakespeare was pretty much like most of us who have a reasonable command of a foreign language. Faced with the bulk of something like the Orlando Furioso, we would still prefer a reliable trot; and the chances of our experiencing the whole work and of going back to it in the original are vastly increased by the existence of a good translation. The translations cited above are, for the most part, better than good: they are brilliantly imaginative, if not always accurate by our standards, and some of them, particularly those in prose, helped create a new literary English. As Shakespearian reading, these works function in a variety of ways, ranging from idle perusal, to direct use as source, to material for minute verbal plagiarism. All the while they were putting him in touch with contemporary and past masterpieces, as well as with the phenomenon of multiple languages in the same space.

The other book-making circumstance, while related to the matter of translation, is much harder to pin down. The hypothetical Shakespearian source-library is notably rich in a kind of volume whose origins go back to the Middle Ages but whose international career is very much alive and well in the sixteenth century, namely, the compendium of stories. At the canonical peak of the genre is Boccaccio's Decameron (itself a Shakespearian source, relevant to All's Well, Cymbeline, and Merry Wives), other such texts include the Gesta Romanorum, which dates back to the thirteenth century, Il Novellino by Masuccio of Salerno (1476), the Novelle of Bandello (1554), Il Pecorone of Giovanni Fiorentino (1558), and Gli Hecatommithi of Giraldi Cinthio (1565), plus related versions in other languages including Histoires tragiques by Pierre Boaistuau (1559) and by François de Belleforest (1564), Geoffrey Fenton's Certaine Tragicall Discourses (1567), and William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1567). Collectively, this body of material touches upon a remarkable range of Shakespearian texts--not only, as one might expect, tales of fantasy and love such as Merchant, Pericles, and Cymbeline but also those set in very different universes like Merry Wives, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, and even Hamlet.

These collections of narratives in part represent an early modern codification (in some cases fabrication) of folktales; in their vast overlapping interrelations we can witness a whole field--call it literary bumper cars--where stories are made and remade via translation, imitation, elaboration, parody, and recombination. If, for instance, one follows the source trail of Romeo and Juliet or Othello, where there is a proximate originary work (Arthur Brooke's Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet and Cinthio's Hecatommithi) but behind it a tangle of versions coming out of Bandello and his inheritors, one is struck by the difficulty of pinning down Shakespeare's specific route of derivation, especially given questions concerning his familiarity with languages. But more than that, one notices that this range of material made available to the dramatist a kind of postgraduate course in comparative structural narratology. And even if these anthologies appear to be 'literature lite', they also remind us that some of Shakespeare's most prestigious source books, including the Metamorphoses and Plutarch's Lives, are themselves structured in the form of composite and detachable parts that invite comparison.

Did Shakespeare really read?

Now, having listed all these points of origin, ancient and modern, lofty and popular, we must ask the slightly ingenuous question, did Shakespeare really read his sources? It is clear enough that he read his school-texts quite independently of instrumentalizing them for some new piece of writing. It is also clear that there is a body of important works of such universal presence within early modern civilization--one might borrow Foucault's designation of 'transdiscursive', by which he refers to Marx and Freud--that they are present everywhere in the formation of the plays via some deep acculturation. One can hardly imagine, for instance, the erotic ideals of the Sonnets without Plato, or the politics of Milan and Naples in The Tempest without Machiavelli, or the transports of love, whether straight or parodied, from Love's Labour's Lost to Antony and Cleopatra, without Petrarch. Likewise, without the Bible we could not begin to account for turns of phrase like Hamlet's 'There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow' (5.2.157-8), or Bottom's 'The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen...' (Dream 4.1.204-5), or, indeed, the very title Measure for Measure, with its multiple reverberations from the Sermon on the Mount. All of these books, in whatever form and by whatever necessary intermediaries--he read.

But centuries of source study, applying itself to Bandello, or the anonymous playtexts, or even the canonical classics which form the basis of the dramatic plots, have suggested that Shakespeare did not so much read these works as cut and paste them--that is, he opportunistically stole what he needed, ignored the rest, and sublimed everything. These assumptions are well worth questioning. To put the matter in its simplest terms, authors generally can discover something in another book only once they have read that book independently of its precise future usefulness. Shakespeare, in other words, might have consulted Richard Knolles's Generall Historie of the Turkes when he had already worked out the circumstances of Othello, but he is less likely to have dreamed up a tale about a Moor marrying a Venetian lady and then gone to a first reading of Cinthio's Hecatommithi, 3.7, either accidentally or in the foreknowledge that he would find what he needed there. And by whatever chronology of consultation, exported material remains touched with its own original context. The source book, whether it is The Faerie Queene or The Three Ladies of London, enters a complicated calculus of inspiration for any author under its influence.

The sources for Shakespeare's plots

These abstract principles become concrete when we follow some quite specific paths of Shakespearian sourcing. In a set of interesting articles--'From Leir to Lear', Philological Quarterly 73, 1994--Martin Mueller has shown how certain stories, while providing the main point of origin for a single play, also haunt the dramatist's imagination repeatedly and throughout his career. Bandello's tale of Fenicia and Timbreo includes all the main events of the Claudio and Hero plot in Much Ado, but elements in this story continue to generate important moments in later plays, including Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, where Shakespeare seems to be trying to do different things--generally less rational and more magical--with the Bandello source. Plutarch's Life of Brutus is a primary source for Julius Caesar, but the relation between Brutus and his wife Portia weaves itself through a set of variations on the conduct of married life in The Merchant of Venice, I Henry IV, and Macbeth (as well as Lucrece). In an equally persistent way, The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir, before it reaches its fullest expression, has already helped shape the way Shakespeare represents the state of nature in As You Like It, assassination in Richard III and Hamlet, and the competition among suitors in The Merchant of Venice.

Some of the associations Mueller draws may be tenuous, but he makes a strong case that most of Shakespeare's favourite sources were known to him by the time he was in his twenties. (Interestingly, the notable exceptions are narratives drawn from current events, like the case of Cordell Annesley, which provided materials for Lear, and the writings about Virginia voyages that formed a basis for The Tempest.) As Martin Mueller writes in 'From Leir to Lear' (Philological Quarterly 73, 1994, p. 197): 'It should therefore be a fundamental axiom of source criticism to observe the consequences of the fact that Shakespeare's reading jostled each other in his memory and settled in a complex web of memory pathways long before they became sources for plays he intended to write.' In effect, source study becomes not the map for a uni-directional pathway but a means to trace the reciprocal relation between distinctive features in Shakespeare's creative imagination and a library of texts which are themselves subject to revisionary reading and adaptation in light of that imagination.

If, for instance, we imagine a cluster of narrative elements including nobly born wives who are entangled for good or ill with their husbands' public lives (e.g. Lucrece, two Portias, Lady Percy, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Hermione), calumniated women presumed dead but merely sleeping (e.g. Hero, Hermione, Innogen, and--stretching the point a little--Desdemona), and fathers and daughters (too numerous to list), not only do we refer to the plots of half the plays but we also map out a very broad field of source relation that goes back to a relatively small number of originary texts. To literalize the process: Shakespeare finds the stories that replicate his personal obsessions; the stories give those obsessions certain shapes; he in turn re-shapes them by producing ever-varying adaptations; in the end he becomes a reader of, and source for, himself.

Shakespeare's absorption of language

When Polonius asks Hamlet what he is reading, the Prince replies, 'Words, words, words' (2.2.192). It's a joke from Hamlet's antic disposition, and a good one, since both Renaissance and modern psychology can readily picture madmen as losing the thread of sequential discourse and focusing instead on syntactically disconnected verbal units. For the purposes of literary criticism, however, such madness may be prerequisite. To identify Shakespeare's reading only by the larger structures derived from a classical education or the plots derived from pre-existing narratives is to neglect the independent power of the word. This is not the place to rehearse all the by now familiar arguments from structuralism and post-structuralism concerning the 'death of the author'. Suffice it to say that both the structures of language and, more to the point, all the ambient vocabularies at a given historical or cultural moment contribute to the composition of any piece of writing as much as do the consciously manipulated materials traditionally classed as intellectual underpinnings or sources.

This kind of reading, for which Roland Barthes's felicitous term is the déjà lu, concerns us not just out of universal theoretical correctness but because Shakespeare proves to have been a kind of language sponge, a picker-up of specialized lexicons from every conceivable stratum of his society. In this field it would be impossible to give a full account of Shakespeare's library, or indeed of all the sequences of imagery and allusion in the plays that testify to his skills at absorption. Perhaps the clearest index to this phenomenon is the response of scholars who have attempted to account for this verbal adeptness by imagining a Shakespeare who was not so much a linguistic polymath as a real practising multi-professional. Shakespeare has been, over the centuries, a lawyer, a doctor, a thief, a theologian, a Catholic, a Protestant, a duellist, a military man, a falconer, a keeper of hounds--all because he had mastered their respective languages.

Let us permit one quite respectable instance to stand for this kind of argument in general. A. F. Falconer argues in his book Shakespeare and the Sea (1964, p. 39) that the opening scene of The Tempest is in every detail nautically correct. Expressions like 'take in the topsail' and 'lay her a-hold' do not represent mere colourful sea-talk but the perfectly phrased set of orders designed to save the ship under the given conditions of wind, shore, and ocean. From which Falconer concludes that Shakespeare 'could not have come by this knowledge from books'. That may be true: there is no surviving sixteenth-century text in which all of these locutions are neatly laid out, and it is possible that the man who lived his whole life many days' arduous travel from the sea had managed to do some apprentice work aboard a sailing vessel, preferably among tars who had colourful tales to tell of the Bermuda triangle. But it is more likely--and the same would go for many other first-hand vocabularies--that Shakespeare derived this knowledge from a combination of reading, listening, and loving the play of language.

Perhaps it is Shakespeare's own fascination with books--or some attempt to exorcise that fascination--that turns so many of his characters into readers. Most of the time when book-learning enters the dramatic scene, as the example of Love's Labour's Losthas already suggested, it is in opposition to real experience. Love in particular seems to keep little company with reading. Some amorous bookmen are hopeless: Slender reveals his ineptitude as a lover by regretting that he has not brought Tottel's Miscellany to help him woo Anne Page (Merry Wives1.1.165); nor do we entertain higher hopes for Malvolio's prospects with Olivia when he determines to 'read politic authors' (Twelfth Night 2.5.141). But when Juliet tells Romeo that he kisses by the book (1.5.107), or when Rosalind-Ganymede reports on an uncle who read out lectures against love (As You Like It3.2.312), or when Lysander reports the lesson of all those tales and histories that 'The course of true love never did run smooth' (Dream 1. 1. 134), the place of reading appears more complicated. It is not so much a contradiction of experience as a necessary first step along the way.

And that dynamic points finally to Shakespeare's two greatest dramatic scenes of reading, one from the beginning of his career, the other from the end. The raped, mutilated, and silenced Lavinia of Titus Andronicus, in an attempt to reveal the horrors of her own experience, can do nothing but point to a book in which the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela has pre-written the miserable sequence of events. The precision of the parallel--although Shakespeare's version is more horrific--enables both the characters and the audience to read experience as though it were a book and read the book as though it were experience. Prospero's book, which he prizes above his dukedom, is both the sign and the substance of his magical power. When, at the end of the play, he drowns it 'deeper than did ever plummet sound' (Tempest 5.1.56), he and all those who have survived the shipwreck are returned to Europe, to politics, to life, death, and marriage--in short, to the fullness of natural experience. Lavinia's volume is quite explicitly Ovid's Metamorphoses, and while Prospero's is less directly identifiable, it is signalled by an incantatio

What did Shakespeare Read?

From: Cambridge University Press | By: Leonard Barkan

The literary texts

The popular texts

Did Shakespeare really read?

The sources for Shakespeare's plots

Shakespeare's absorption of language

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