If people know anything about George Gordon, Lord Byron,
it is likely to be that he had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister,
had sex with the majority of women and most of the men of his acquaintance,
drank wine from a cup made from a skull, kept a tame bear while at university,
suffered a club foot, sired a daughter, Ada Lovelace, who became the world’s
first computer programmer, swam the Hellespont, was a friend of Shelley and
died of fever whilst fighting for Greek independence from the Turks. After
which John Murray destroyed his memoirs as too scandalous for publication, thus
ensuring his reputation for degeneracy. They may also know he wrote a few poems
and a pile of letters, though I doubt many these days would have read all, or
even extensive parts, of Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage or Don Juan.
In other words, much is known about Byron, if his work is unfamiliar. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since he was, in effect, one of the
first modern celebrities. Famously, he awoke and found himself famous after
publication of the first two cantos of Childe
Harold and he has remained famous ever since, though mostly for his sexual
adventuring, political radicalism and mountainous debts.
Byron wasn’t the first aristocratic poet to live fast and
die young. In the 1670s John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, had
fornicated himself through Restoration London in a drunken haze, one
contemporary writing of him that ‘for five years together he was continually
Drunk… [and] not… perfectly Master of himself… [which] led to him to… do many
wild and unaccountable things.’
Wilmot died of venereal disease aged thirty three, having
had a multitude of affairs, including one with actress Nell Gwyn, later mistress
to Charles II. He also found time to pen some of the rudest poems in the
English canon as well as a play, Sodom,
or the Quintessence of Debauchery, though its authorship is uncertain. On
top of everything else, he was also a war hero, having shown conspicuous
bravery in two sea battles.
So why didn’t John Wilmot become the first literary
superstar, rather than Byron? More importantly, what about Shakespeare? As far
as Rochester is concerned, a big problem was simply his work was so bawdy it
was never going to find its way into polite society; after his death, Sodom was prosecuted for obscenity and
almost all copies destroyed.
Another crucial factor was timing. Rochester’s world was
still semi-feudal with a restricted press and widespread illiteracy. By the
early nineteenth century, the industrial revolution was well underway. Rising prosperity
had created a leisured class with time to read, increased literacy meant an
appetite for literature of all kinds while mechanization provided the means to
produce and distribute vast numbers of books, papers and journals.
All that was needed was a superstar. Enter George Gordon,
Lord Byron, Stage Right. In the same way that post-war affluence and
technological innovation created conditions first for Elvis and then the
Beatles and Rolling Stones, Byron was ideally placed to exploit a vast new
market. Notoriety fed sales and booming
sales increased scope for extreme behaviour which in turn stoked his notoriety.
The pattern has become familiar, including, often, exile, early death and
enduring fame.
In his way, Shakespeare as much became a beneficiary of
the same commercial and social forces that helped propel Byron. For he hadn’t
always enjoyed superstar status; in his lifetime he had been relatively uncelebrated.
And within thirty years of his death, the Puritans had closed the theatres as
ungodly.
By the 1650s the prohibition was slightly relaxed and
William Davenant, thought by some to be the playwright’s illegitimate child,
was licenced to produce adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in musical
adaptation. It was after the monarchy’s Restoration in 1660 and Charles II’s
passion for theatre as well as actresses, that plays were once again produced, with Hamlet performed in 1661. Productions
became lavish, but often bore little relation to Shakespeare’s original
stagings.
Outside London, relatively few people other than the
wealthy would have been familiar with his work since books were expensive
commodities. This began to change in the 1730s when single editions of his
plays became available and thus more affordable. Around the same time, the
Licencing Act of 1737 indirectly created a larger audience for Shakespeare’s
work.
The Act was effectively a form of government censorship
and required all new plays to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain and remained
in force until the 1960s. It was introduced because playwrights such as John
Gay and Henry Carey (who wrote Chronohotonthologos
in 1734) used their productions to attack Robert Walpole’s administration.
It closed some theatres altogether and made many
companies wary of producing new work, inclining them instead to stage approved
or non-controversial pieces – by the
1740s Shakespeare’s plays represented a quarter of all performed in the decade.
Perhaps coincidentally, it was in 1740 that he was finally accorded a statue in
Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey.
Although Shakespeare’s popularity grew throughout the
eighteenth century, neither he nor modern audiences would have recognized much
about the productions. They were loose interpretations at best as theatre
companies weren’t too bothered about the text. Amongst other things, the plays
were re-shaped so they conformed to Aristotle’s classical precepts, vulgarities
were excluded, the puns were dropped (they got something right, at least) and
were made more didactic and morally improving – while at the same time extra
parts were added for women. This wasn’t an attempt to enhance female equality
but an opportunity for them to appear on stage in breeches and show off their
legs.
Bizarrely, a production of Macbeth in 1726 included interludes after each act, and featured a wooden
shoe dance after the third, a ‘Dutch Skipper’ after the fourth and Pierrot
dance after the fifth. Similarly in 1774, King Lear was livened up by fireworks
during the storm scene.
The actor David Garrick did much to promote Shakespeare and he instituted
the first Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford in 1769. Designed to celebrate the
bi-centenary of the playwright’s birth, if five years’ late, it opened with the
firing of thirty cannons and ringing of church bells. Curiously, the Jubilee
didn’t offer a production of any of the plays, but this didn’t matter very much
as most of it was washed out after heavy rain caused the Avon to burst its
banks. Even so, bardolatry was now well under way.
In 1755 Samuel Johnson had done as much to promote the bard in the
national consciousness, since his use of quotations from the plays and poems in
his Dictionary referenced Shakespeare
17,500 times. Perhaps as influentially, Johnson later published Prefaces to Shakespeare. He was
intimately acquainted with the works, and though he deplored the propensity to
wordplay and lack of moral justice, valued them for their understanding of
character and insight into human nature. Johnson’s approach to Shakespeare was
developed further by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, famed for his opium use, Ancient Mariner and the Man from
Porlock.
A contemporary of Byron’s, with whom he is generally
lumped as a Romantic, Coleridge’s criticism of Shakespeare was defined by close
analysis of the text, study of its imagery and interest in psychology. His
perceptions helped mature our understanding of Shakespeare and defined study of
his work for more than a century, even if it didn’t stop the Victorians putting
on garishly spectacular and extravagant productions and changing the endings
when it suited them.
By the nineteenth century, Shakespeare had become an
unchallengeable part of our culture, part of our national myth, an expression
of our collective Genius, and a self-sustaining industry. The same engines of
literacy, prosperity and technical innovation that helped Byron become a
superstar pushed Shakespeare even higher while the Empire carried him around
the world.
Now a global brand, it’s hard to imagine his work was
almost lost to us. Had Condell and
Hemminge not bothered to compile the First Folio, The Licensing Act of 1737 not
favoured production of his work or Garrick produced the Shakespeare Jubilee a
few years later he might have remained in the shadows.
He might, but then he is Shakespeare. If he overtops even
his great contemporaries such as Marlowe or Jonson, it’s because his greatness
trumps theirs. Such dominance inevitably has a downside, since while provincial
theatres may offer the occasional Shakespeare, few would risk staging The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Changeling - or Chronohotonthologos for that matter. Cash flow wins. Diversity
is lost.
On the other hand, faced with the choice between a rare
revival of Fletcher’s The Faithful
Shepherdess or a new production of The
Winter’s Tale, I guess I’d go Shakespeare almost every time.
