He was born in 1564 at Stratford-on-Avon, his father being a merchant who early fell into misfortune. There are legends that the son was wild, and ran away to London to escape prosecution for deer-stealing. He became a hanger-on of theatrical companies, held horses at the doors of theaters, became connected with the Duke of Leicester’s company, acted in various plays, was called upon to revise and patch up manuscripts, and finally wrote plays of his own which were popular successes. He made money, bought several pieces of property at Stratford, won the friendship of some of the powerful and great, and finally returned to his home town, to die at the age of fifty-two.
That is all we know about the greatest poet of all time. How he managed to escape attention, how above all he failed to see to it that the world got authentic copies of his plays, is a mystery only partly explained by the fact that playwriting and acting were disreputable occupations. Actors had been strolling vagabonds, liable to be thrown into jail by any constable, like a workingman out of a job in the United States. Only by getting the protection of some noble earl could they be safe from persecution; and if you had become a friend of noble earls, and a gentleman of property in your home-town, you did not boast of plays you had written, any more than if you lived on Fifth Avenue today you would boast of a saloon you had once kept.
Shakespeare’s first plays are romantic comedies in the style of the time. It was the tradition of the pastoral, fostered by elegant ladies and gentlemen who know nature as a place for picnics. It is a world of beauty, wit and “charm”; everybody is young, everybody’s occupation is falling in love with some other pretty body, and problems exist only to be solved in the last act.
When I was young I saw Julia Marlowe in “As You Like It,” and was ravished with delight. Now I look back on it, in the broad daylight of my present knowledge about life; I recall the thousand traps into which I fell because of ignorance of sex, ignorance of money, ignorance of almost everything about my fellow human beings. I recall the people I have known who fell into these same traps, and were not able to extricate themselves, but paid for their romantic illusions with poverty, drunkenness, disease, divorce, insanity, suicide. So I am compelled to declare that these “charming” comedies are as false to life as the average moving picture of our time, in which the problems of labor and capital are solved by the honest labor leader marrying the daughter of the great captain of industry.
I have to go further and maintain that this betrayal of life was deliberate; the writer himself knew more than he told us. Shakespeare is fond of jeering at the “groundlings,” and those who stoop to tickle their unwashed ears. In the Shakespearean theater the cheap seats were in the pit, or what we call the orchestra; the aristocrats sat on the sides of the stage, and frequently got drunk, and amused themselves by sprawling in their seats and tripping up the actors and guying the show. These elegant ones were not “groundlings,” and it was no disgrace to a romantic poet to rise in the world by giving them what they wanted. Shakespeare was even cynical enough to laugh at them for their silly taste; he called one of his comedy successes “As You Like It,” and another “Twelfth Night, or What you Will.”
This man was gifted with the most marvelous tongue that has yet appeared on earth. Golden, glowing, gorgeous words poured out of him at a moment’s notice all his life; he covered everything he wrote with the glamour of poetry. This gift was his fortune; but also it was a trap, because it saved him the need of thinking. It is a trap for us, because it tempts us into sharing his emotions without thinking. But force yourself to think, ask yourself what is the actual value of the ideas the mighty poet is expressing, and you discover that many of them are commonplace, many are worldly and cheap, many are the harsh prejudices of his time and class.
In these early days Shakespeare wrote a long narrative poem, which helps us to know him. It is dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton, his patron, and is called “Venus and Adonis”; a typical example of the pseudo-classical romantic rubbish which the cultured world of that time called “art.” Nature has provided for the mixing and distributing of the qualities of living creatures by a system of sex exchanges. Throughout the higher forms of life, and with men and women in their primitive, natural condition, the act of sex fertilization occupies less than the entire time of the creature. But now a leisure-class arises, parasitic upon its fellows; and the members of this class seek to divert their idle time by the endless elaboration of the sex function.
“Venus and Adonis” tells the story of an effort of the goddess of love to secure the sexual attentions of a reluctant youth. The striking thing about the poem is the extent to which the Greek ideal of the goddess of fecundity has been debased—I will not say to the animal level, because the animals are decent and sensible in their sex affairs; I say to the level of the high-priced brothel, where the jaded rich are beguiled. Venus in this poem has no idea of making herself spiritually or intellectually attractive to the youth; she does not know how to be sublime and goddess-like, she does not know how to be wise, or even to be witty and gay. She only knows how to force her unwanted flesh more and more persistently upon the youth, to wallow upon his body, disgusting both the youth and the reader.
The fact that “Venus and Adonis” is full of verbal splendor, like everything else that Shakespeare wrote, makes it more and not less offensive to an intelligent person. By means of our intelligence we have invented the microscope, and thereby we know that decay is not less decay because it happens to be phosphorescent. We can surely say that there was decay in the fashionable world of Shakespeare’s time, when twelve editions of “Venus and Adonis” were called for, while for a mighty tragedy like “Othello” there was not demand enough to secure its printing until six years after its author was dead!