Imagine: How Creativity Works (28 page)

The surplus of literature proved especially important in the beginning of Shakespeare’s career. In 1587 — the very same year that Shakespeare began writing his fi rst play — Richard Fields, a childhood friend of his from Stratford who had become a printer, published Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Shakespeare couldn’t afford the book, but it seems likely that Fields allowed the young playwright to treat his store like a lending library. Before long, Shakespeare was mining the Chronicles for plots, searching for stories that could compete with the spectacle of Tamburlaine. He began with the reign of Henry VI, an era when the English court was torn apart by petty jeal-ousy. There was lust and blood, love and vengeance, murder and conspiracy. Shakespeare had found his subject.

The play premiered at the Rose Theater in 1592, and it was an instant theatrical success. The London crowds were thrilled to watch their own history onstage; there was something electrifying about seeing an English king played by a commoner. And then there was the violence. Shakespeare had learned from Marlowe that audiences relished blood, and so he filled the scenes with sword fights and stab wounds. By the time the historical trilogy was complete, Shakespeare had become one of the most popular playwrights in London.

Shakespeare, however, was only beginning to learn his craft.

In fact, the Henry VI plays were so deeply infl uenced by Tamburlaine that eighteenth-century scholars assumed Marlowe had written most of the lines. It didn’t help that several of the characters were crudely drawn caricatures utterly lacking the humanity of Shakespeare’s later creations. If these plays were all that was known of Shakespeare, then today we wouldn’t know him. His writing wouldn’t deserve to be remembered. It’s not that Shakespeare wasn’t a gifted young playwright — it’s that he had yet to become a genius.

And this is why culture matters. While Shakespeare is often regarded as an inexplicable talent — a man whose work exists outside of history — he turns out to have been profoundly dependent on the age in which he lived. It was the welter of Elizabethan England that inspired him to become a playwright and then allowed him to transform himself from a poor imitation of Marlowe into the greatest writer of all time. Shakespeare is a reminder, in other words, that culture largely determines creative output.

Unfortunately, this is often because our culture holds us back. Instead of expanding the collective imagination, we make it harder for artists and inventors to create new things. We stifl e innovation and discourage the avant-garde. We get in the way of our geniuses.

Every once in a while, however, we get it right. We stumble upon an ideal cultural mix that allows people to create in new ways. The result is a surplus of geniuses, an outpouring of talent so extreme we assume it can never happen again.

And this brings us back to Elizabethan England. Here is a society that got it right, allowing its writers to reach their full creative potential. Consider the list of geniuses who surrounded Shakespeare. There was Marlowe, of course, but also Ben Jonson, John Milton, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Fletcher, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Kyd, Philip Sidney, Thomas Nash, John Donne, and Francis Bacon. Although most of these men came from modest backgrounds, they were able to invent a new kind of literature.

We are still scribbling in their shadows.

The triumph of Shakespeare is intertwined with this literary fl ourishing. Just look at his library, which must have been fi lled with a staggeringly diverse collection of texts. If Coleridge was, as they say, the last man to have read everything, then Shakespeare was the first. 
(Prospero, in The Tempest: “My library / Was dukedom large enough.”)
While his shelves featured respectable fi ction like the Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, the Decameron, and the Heptameron, they also included a wide range of popular romance stories. (Shakespeare had a particular weakness for Italian pulp fiction.) He drew from Ovid and Plutarch, but he also borrowed from history books, giving his kings lines straight from the Chronicles. And then there were the popular pamphlets, the literature of the street, which Shakespeare constantly worked into his plays. Shakespeare read Edmund Spenser and Chaucer — his English predecessors — but he also read younger poets, like John Donne, in manuscript form. And then there were Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights, whom he tracked like a spy. He studied Thomas Watson’s sonnets and ripped off the story of Greene’s Pandosto. (In fact, virtually all of Shakespeare’s plots, from Hamlet to Romeo and Juliet, were adapted from other sources.) He never stopped stealing from Marlowe.

But Shakespeare didn’t just read these texts and imitate their best parts; he made them his own, seamlessly blending them together in his plays. Sometimes, this literary approach got Shakespeare into trouble. His peers repeatedly accused him of plagiarism, and he was often guilty, at least by contemporary standards.

What these allegations failed to take into account, however, was that Shakespeare was pioneering a new creative method in which every conceivable source informed his art. For Shakespeare, the act of creation was inseparable from the act of connection.

Ben Jonson famously wrote that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time!” On the one hand, Jonson was right: Macbeth and King Lear and The Tempest are immortal works of art.

We don’t read these plays — they read us. Although Shakespeare was surrounded by literary geniuses, his genius remains unsurpassed.

And yet, Jonson was also profoundly wrong about Shakespeare. In many respects, the Bard was entirely of his age, an artist who could only have existed in the London of the late sixteenth century. The point isn’t that Shakespeare stole. It’s that, for the fi rst time in a long time, there was stuff worth stealing — and nobody stopped him. Shakespeare seemed to know this — he was intensely aware that his genius depended on the culture around him. One of the most famous speeches in Hamlet comes when the protagonist is addressing a troupe of actors and dispensing advice on their craft. Hamlet urges them to refl ect “the very age and body of the time,” to transform their surroundings into their

“form and pressure.” The character is describing the reality of creativity. For Shakespeare, art was inseparable from the whirligig around him, which is why he pilfered his plots and read Italian ro-mances and listened to the feedback of crowds. Shakespeare, of course, was a playwright of unprecedented talent. But that talent was not enough. Shakespeare was for all time, but he could only have existed in his time. 
(Tragically, the creative flourishing of English literature was brief: in 1642, the Puritans closed down the public theater.)

2.

In 1990, the economist Paul Romer invented a new theory of economic growth. Although his theory depends on a long list of abstruse equations, its basic premise is incredibly simple: ideas are an inexhaustible resource. While economics has always been rooted in the scarcity of the material world, Romer pointed out that ideas are a nonrival good. When knowledge spreads from person to person, that knowledge isn’t diminished or worn out. Instead, ideas tend to become more useful when they become more popular — their consumption leads to increasing returns and new innovations. “The fundamental premise of the theory is that there’s a big difference between objects and ideas,” Romer says.

“When we share objects, we make them less valuable. You don’t pay as much for a used car because it’s already been used. But ideas don’t work like that. We can share ideas without devaluing them. There is no inherent scarcity.”

Romer’s theory comes with very clear implications for creativity. In essence, it suggests that the increased sharing of information is almost always a good thing. “The thing about ideas is that they naturally inspire new ones,” Romer says. “This is why places that facilitate idea sharing” — think of, for instance, Silicon Valley or Elizabethan England — “tend to become more productive and innovative than those that don’t. Because when ideas are shared, the possibilities do not add up. They multiply.” The question, of course, is how to create a multiplier culture.

While cities naturally inspire the sharing of information — all those people can’t help but interact — even the most innovative urban areas require help. As Romer points out, Lagos has plenty of human friction, but that friction doesn’t lead to new patents — it generates traffic jams that last for days. The favelas in Port-au-Prince are some of the densest settlements in the world, but that density doesn’t unleash the potential of its residents — it breeds disease and criminal gangs. “It’s important to not be naive about the power of cities,” Romer says. “Of course, it’s great to concentrate people and give them the freedom to exchange information.

But that’s not enough. You still need the right set of rules and customs in place to make sure all those people can take advantage of their interactions. You need to have institutions and laws that ensure the costs of density don’t outweigh the benefi ts. Sewage in the streets is never good.”

Romer refers to these social concepts as meta-ideas — they are ideas that support other ideas — and he argues that they enable the creativity of a culture. In his academic talks, Romer often shows a photograph of teenagers in Guinea huddled under a streetlamp. At fi rst, it’s not clear what the kids are doing or why they’re all gathered together in the dark. But then Romer points out the textbooks and pens and calculators — the kids are doing their homework. Although many of these students are wealthy enough to own cell phones, they still live in homes without electricity, which is why they’re forced to study in the street. According to Romer, the photograph illustrates the importance of meta-ideas. Because of corruption and price controls in Guinea, most homes remain disconnected from the electrical grid. The country lacks access to a nineteenth-century technology.

But meta-ideas explain more than our societal failings — they also explain our triumphs. Take those ages of excess genius. For too long, we’ve pretended that these sudden flourishings are mere accidents of history, unworthy of serious investigation. We’ve told ourselves that they’re just periods of freakish genetic gifts, or statistical flukes, which is why we shouldn’t bother imitating them.

But this is mistake. By looking at the meta-ideas that defi ne a time, we can fi nally understand why some cultures are so much more creative than others. There is talent everywhere. The only question is whether or not we are taking advantage of it.

Look, for instance, at Elizabethan England. While the period experienced a dramatic increase in knowledge spillovers and urban interaction, this can’t fully explain the rise of Shakespeare and his peers. That’s because the country didn’t simply unleash its bottom-up creativity — it also pioneered a set of meta-ideas that allowed all this creativity to multiply, transforming the density of London into a place of excess genius.

The first important meta-idea developed in sixteenth-century England involved a benign neglect of the rules. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, there was an unprecedented relaxation of censorship laws for playwrights. While the government still claimed the right to strictly monitor all speech — in 1581, Elizabeth set up the “master of revels,” an official in charge of “regulating” theatrical performances — writers were rarely punished for overstepping the line. This new freedom of expression allowed Shakespeare to criticize the government in his plays, such as his fierce indictment of injustice in King Lear: Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw doth pierce it.

These are the lines of a fearless writer. Shakespeare knew that even if his plays did manage to offend the queen’s censors, 224

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he probably wouldn’t be thrown into a dungeon. (Shakespeare was born into one of the fi rst societies that didn’t treat writers like criminals.) Instead, his punishment would be literary; he might be asked to revise the play in the next version, or cut the offending lines from the printed edition. This forgiving attitude encouraged playwrights to take creative risks, to see how much honesty they could get away with. As Shakespeare discovered, the answer was a lot.

Another crucial meta-idea of the time was the concept of intellectual property. While the Elizabethan age had few rules on copyright — Shakespeare was free to steal stories and lines from other writers — it developed new rules for inventions. In the 1560s, the English government began granting exclusive “monopolies for production” to the pioneers of such things as hard soap, glass bottles, and writing paper. Although this patent system was originally designed to lure skilled foreigners, it soon morphed into an important new cultural concept: ideas have value. (Francis Bacon declared that the queen would grant a “letter of patent” for any invention deemed useful to the country.) It was no longer enough to protect physical property only — the government needed to protect intellectual property also, so that people had an incentive to invent. For the fi rst time, creativity had become a potential source of wealth. (
It’s at this time that the word innovation entered the English language. The noun is derived from the Latin innovatus, which roughly translates as “into the new.”)

Perhaps the single most important meta-idea of Elizabethan England involved the spread of education. During the sixteenth century, there was a concerted effort to educate the young males of the middle class, those sons of bricklayers and wool merchants and farmers. A student no longer needed to be vested with a vast estate in order to learn the classics. (Queen Elizabeth’s tutor Roger Ascham summarized this modern trend: “All men covet to have their children speak Latin.”) Consider the biography of Shakespeare: despite the fact that his father, a glover, was barely literate — John Shakespeare signed his name with a mark — William was sent to the free Stratford grammar school at the age of seven. The school guaranteed an education for most young men, even if their parents were poor and illiterate. (To enforce equality of access, the Oxford-educated schoolmaster was prohibited from accepting payment from his pupils.) While Shakespeare’s school day was often tedious, full of rote memorization and corporal punishment, it was also an astonishing opportunity. The son of a rural glover was given access to knowledge that only a few decades before would have been reserved for the privileged few.