Shakespeare and Myths About Genius

[Retrograde]

28. The printing press was over a hundred years old

when Shakepeare was born, and books (and literacy) weren't as rare as before. He spent his adult years in one of the more global cities in Europe - and the wealthiest in England, with many booksellers, some of whom specialized in travel stories and thrilling tales of adventure (one of his contemporary Stratfordians, who also moved to London, was a printer who had apprenticed to a French bookseller - and later married his daughter). Shakespeare's business partner and fellow actor Will Kemp spent some time in Italy and elsewhere on the continent. From court records we know that Shakespeare boarded with a French family for at least some part of his stay in London. He also spent time in the courts of Elizabeth and James I performing his and others' plays (back then, theater companies had to have a royal patron to avoid being arrested as vagabonds. One of the companies he played with was Lord Strange's Men - Lord Strange, later Earl of Derby, was a cousin of Elizabeth I).

I've seen quite a few of Shakespeare's plays, and his geography of the settings is usually superficial and pretty general. Where he goes into more detail is in the lives of ordinary people - the laundry customs of the middle class in "Merry Wives of Windsor", the country folk buying trinkets and ballads from a traveling peddler in "The Winter's Tale", the rude mechanicals in "A Midsummer's Night's Dream". He also mocks the stiff and overblown court pageants in "Love's Labour's Lost" (and has the principal characters disguise themselves as Muscovites, since trade with Russia was a new thing then)

Two books I recommend are Peter Ackroyd's "Shakespeare" (which goes into details such as how the first act of "Romeo and Juliet" is set in daytime and the last at night, since outdoor plays started in mid-afternoon and continued til dark), and Shapiro's "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare", which is about how local and global events influenced his plays in the late 1590s. Shapiro's "Contested Will" is a good summary of various "Will didn't write this" claims - the current fad is to attribute them to the Earl of Oxford, but before that "Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare" was all the rage.

I'm getting off track: Shakespeare wrote plays for the money, and took plots and ideas from wherever and whoever he could. Like modern writers I know, he probably had a stash of possible plot points and ideas and strung them together to make a quickie entertainment for the masses - I think this was how "The Winter's Tale" was written ('Will - we need a new play ASAP!' 'Well, I have this bit about intrigue in a vaguely defined foreign court, and another bit about a rural sheep-shearing festival..' 'Great! See if you can knock them together somehow. And we need to get more use out of that costume the company bought - can you write a scene with a bear?')