From The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al

From The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2000

General Introduction
By Stephen Greenblatt

"He was not for an age, but for all time."

The celebration of Shakespeare's genius, eloquently initiated by his friend
and rival
Ben Jonson, has over the centuries become an institutionalized rite of
civility. The person
who does not love Shakespeare has made, the rite implies, an incomplete
adjustment not simply to a particular culture -English culture of the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries-but to "culture" as a whole, the
dense network of constraints and entitlements, The celebration of
Shakespeare's genius, eloquently initiated by his friend and rival
Ben Jonson, has over the centuries become an institutionalized rite of
civility. The person
who does not love Shakespeare has made, the rite implies, an incomplete
adjustment not simply to a particular culture --English culture of the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries--but to "culture" as a whole, the
dense network of constraints and entitlements,
dreams and practices that links us to nature. Indeed, so absolute is
Shakespeare's achieve
ment that he has himself come to seem like great creating nature: the
common bond of
humankind, the principle of hope, the symbol of the imagination's power to
transcend
time-bound beliefs and assumptions, peculiar historical circumstances, and
specific artistic conventions.

The near-worship Shakespeare inspires is one of the salient facts about his
art. But
we must at the same time acknowledge that this art is the product of
peculiar historical circumstances and specific conventions, four centuries
distant from our own. The
acknowledgment is important because Shakespeare the working dramatist did
not typically lay claim to the transcendent, visionary truths attributed to
him by his most fervent admirers; his characters more modestly say, in the
words of the magician Prospero, that their project was "to please" (The
Tempest, Epilogue, line 13). The starting point, and perhaps the ending
point as well, in any encounter with Shakespeare is simply to enjoy him, to
savor his imaginative richness, to take pleasure in his infinite delight in
language.

"If then you do not like him," Shakespeare's first editors wrote in 1623,
"surely you are
in some manifest danger not to understand him." Over the years,
accommodations have
been devised to make liking Shakespeare easier for everyone. When the stage
sank to
melodrama and light opera, Shakespeare-in suitably revised texts-was there.
When the
populace had a craving for hippodrama, plays performed entirely on
horseback, Hamlet
was dutifully rewritten and mounted. When audiences went mad for realism,
live frogs
croaked in productions of A Midsummer Night.'s Dream. When the stage was
stripped bare and given over to stark exhibitions of sadistic cruelty,
Shakespeare was our contemporary.

And when the theater itself had lost some of its cultural centrality,
Shakespeare moved
effortlessly to Hollywood and the sound stages of the BBC. This virtually
universal appeal is one of the most astonishing features of the Shakespeare
phenomenon: plays that were performed before glittering courts thrive in
junior high school auditoriums; enemies set on destroying one another laugh
at the same jokes and weep at the same catastrophes; some of the richest
and most complex English verse ever written migrates with spectacular
Success into German and Italian, Hindi, Swahili, and Japanese. Is there a
single, stable, continuous object that underlies all of these migrations
and metamorphoses? Certainly not. The fantastic diffusion and long life of
Shakespeare's works depends on their extraordinary malleability, their
protean capacity to elude definition and escape secure possession. At the
same time, they are not without identifiable shared features: across
centuries and continents, family resemblances link many of the wildly
diverse manifestations of plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and
Twelfth Night. And if there is no clear limit or end point, there is a
reasonably clear beginning, the

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England of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when the
plays and poems
collected in this volume made their first appearance.

An art virtually without end or limit but with an identifiable, localized,
historical origin: Shakespeare's achievement defies the facile opposition
between transcendent and timebound. It is not necessary to choose between
an account of Shakespeare as the scion of a particular culture and an
account of him as a universal genius who created works that continually
renew themselves across national and generational boundaries. On the
contrary: crucial clues to understanding his art's remarkable power to soar
beyond its originary time and place lie in the very soil from which that
art sprang.

Shakespeare's World: Life and Death

Life expectation at birth in early modern England was exceedingly low by
our standards: under thirty years old, compared with over seventy today.
Infant mortality rates were extraordinarily high, and it is estimated that
in the poorer parishes of London only about half the children survived to
the age of fifteen; while the children of aristocrats fared only a little
better. In such circumstances, some parents must have developed a certain
detachment--one of Shakespeare's contemporaries writes of losing "some
three or four children"--but there are many expressions of intense grief,
so that we cannot assume that the frequency of death hardened people to
loss or made it routine.

Still, the spectacle of death, along with that other great threshold
experience, birth, must have been far more familiar to Shakespeare and his
contemporaries than to ourselves. There was no equivalent in early modern
England to our hospitals, and most births and deaths occurred at home.
Physical means for the alleviation of pain and suffering were extremely
limited -alcohol might dull the terror, but it was hardly an effective
anesthetic -and medical treatment was generally both expensive and
worthless, more likely to intensify suffering than to lead to a cure. This
was a world without a concept of antiseptics, with little actual
understanding of disease, with few effective ways of treating earaches or
venereal disease~ let alone the more terrible instances of what Shakespeare
calls "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to."
The worst of these shocks was the bubonic plague, which repeatedly ravaged
England, and particularly English towns, until the third quarter of the
seventeenth century. The plague was terrifyingly sudden in. its onset,
rapid in its spread, and almost invariably lethal. Physicians were helpless
in the face of the epidemic, though they prescribed amulets, preservatives,
and sweet-smelling substances (on the theory that the plague was carried by

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noxious vapors). In the plague-ridden year of 1564, the year of
Shakespeare's birth, some 254 people died in Stratford-upon-Avon, out of a
total population of 800. The year before, some 20,000 Londoners are thought
to have died; in 1593, almost 15,000; in 1603, 36,000, or over a sixth of
the city's inhabitants. The social effects of these horrible visitations
were severe: looting, violence, and despair, along with an intensification
of the age's perennial poverty, unemployment, and food shortages. The
London plague regulations of 1583, reissued with modifications in later
epidemics, ordered that the infected and their households should be locked
in their homes for a month; that the streets should be kept clean; that
vagrants should be expelled; and that funerals and plays should be
restricted or banned entirely.

The plague, then, had a direct and immediate impact on Shakespeare's own
profession. City officials kept records of the weekly number of plague
deaths; when these surpassed a certain number, the theaters were
peremptorily closed. The basic idea was not only to i
prevent contagion but also to avoid making an angry God still angrier with
the spectacle of idleness. While restricting public assemblies may in fact
have slowed the epidemic, other public policies in times of plague, such as
killing the cats and dogs, may have made
matters worse (since the disease was spread not by these animals but by the
fleas that bred: on the black rats that infested the poorer neighborhoods).
Moreover, the playing companies, driven out of London by the closing of the
theaters, may have carried plague to the provincial towns.


Even in good times, when the plague was dormant and the weather favorable
for farming, the food supply in England was precarious. A few successive
bad harvests, such as occurred in the mid-1590s, could cause serious
hardship, even starvation. Not surprisingly, the poor bore the brunt of the
burden: inflation, low wages, and rent increases left large numbers of
people with very little cushion against disaster. Further, at its best, the
diet of most people seems to have been seriously deficient. The lower
classes then, as throughout most of history, subsisted on one or two
foodstuffs, usually low in protein. The upper classes disdained green
vegetables and milk and gorged themselves on meat. Illnesses that we now
trace to vitamin deficiencies were rampant. Some but not much relief from
pain was provided by the beer that Elizabethans, including children, drank
almost incessantly. (Home brewing aside, enough beer was sold in England
for every man, woman, and child to have consumed forty gallons a year.)

Wealth

Despite rampant disease, the population of England in Shakespeare's
lifetime was steadily growing, from approximately 3,060,000 in 1564 to
4,060,000 in 1600 and 4,510,000 in 1616. Though the death rate was more
than twice what it is in England today, the birthrate was almost three
times the current figure. London's population in particular soared, from
60,000 in 1520 to 120,000 in 1550, 200,000 in 1600, and 375,000 a
h