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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maguire, Laurie E.

30 great myths about Shakespeare / Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-65850-5 (hardback : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-470-65851-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616— Criticism and interpretation. I. Smith, Emma (Emma Josephine) II. Title. III. Title: Thirty great myths about Shakespeare.

PR2976.M36 2013

822.3′3— dc23

2012026659

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This memorial monument in the garden of the church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, London, is actually a double tribute. It commemorates Shakespeare and the two editors who collected his plays in the posthumous memorial volume of
Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies
(1623).

Photo: Col. Peter J. Durrant MBE.

Introduction

This book attempts to interrogate the things we think we know about Shakespeare, and we have called this body of knowledge “myths.” Why “myths”? We were drawn to this term for the Shakespeare content in each of our chapters because “myth” foregrounds the act of storytelling; because it underlines the cultural work these stories do rather than their accuracy; because it is not about a specific point of origin but about accepted beliefs; because it is about the people who accept or invent or need these stories as much as it is about the stories themselves. Not all of our myths are untrue: in calling these beliefs “myths” we are less interested in stigmatizing them as foolish or unsubstantiated than we are concerned to understand how they become ossified and block, rather than enable, our interpretation of Shakespeare's works.

Karen Armstrong's
A Short History of Myth
(2005) offers some pithy observations. Myths are dynamic: they change over time, they adapt themselves to cultural and historical developments, they have accretions and deletions, they iron out—or accumulate—contradictions. Myths are not historically accurate: they do not work by being factual; they are interested in what an event meant, not in what actually happened; they are designed to be effective, not true. Myths provide explanations for something we might not otherwise be able to make sense of; they give us comfort. Myths serve different purposes at different times, being factored into a culture's national or religious or political history. And, she argues, humans are myth-seeking creatures.
¹That is to say, we are creatures drawn to stories. Myth, from the Greek
muthos
, means something that is told, a speech, a narrative, a fiction, a plot. From here it comes to mean a set of beliefs (personal or collective).

Myths abound about Shakespeare in part because of half-remembered or out-of-date scholarship from schooldays, because Shakespeare the man is such an elusive and charismatic cultural property, and because interventions in Shakespeare studies, particularly biographical and theatrical ones, make headline news: witness the “authorship question” (Myth 30) or speculation about Shakespeare's beliefs or sexuality (Myths 7 and 18). Put simply, myths are told and retold about Shakespeare because no other writer matters as much to the world: nineteenth-century Germany had a flourishing academic Shakespeare criticism before England did; India had a Shakespeare Society before England; Shakespeare is regularly performed at amateur and professional levels, in translation, worldwide. Shakespeare is not just English (as Germany's “unser [our] Shakespeare” attests). Thus myths about Shakespeare go some way toward telling us stories about ourselves.

As Armstrong details, myths can be fictional and erroneous—and many, but not all, of these Shakespeare myths are—but more often they turn out, in important and revealing ways, to follow two related definitions of the word “myth” from the
Oxford English Dictionary
. The first is

A traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon.

While Shakespeare is not quite a “supernatural” being, many of the myths we discuss explain or justify widely held, often unexamined, beliefs about art, authorship, and cultural value. The second relevant definition of myth is “a popular conception of a person or thing which exaggerates or idealizes the truth.” Many of our myths are just that: popular, often reiterated ideas which may have a basis in fact, but which over-emphasize the available evidence or speculate to fill in gaps in the documentary record. Often the honest answer to our questions about Shakespeare has to be that we are unsure: in place of that uncertainty, myths provide comforting and positive “truths” about the subject. In this book we try to peel our collective fingers from this comfort blanket, even though sometimes the unsettling outcome is that we know less than we thought we did.

This book arose from our interest in a related book in a different field:
Fifty Great Myths of Popular Psychology
(2009). The book includes such familiar propositions as: opposites attract; we use only 10 percent of our brain power; playing Mozart to babies boosts their intelligence; it's better to express anger than to hold it in. These are myths that have become traditional truths; in fact, they have attained proverbial status, as the epigrammatic chapter headings show. The book's subtitle,
Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior
, indicates its purpose: it is a demythologizing book. The authors explain: “In this book, we'll help you to distinguish fact from fiction in popular psychology, and provide you with a set of myth-busting skills for evaluating psychological claims scientifically.”
²What, we wondered, were the equivalent myths that populate popular understanding of Shakespeare?

A book exploring this question already exists: Stanley Wells'
Is it True What They Say about Shakespeare
?
³Wells' encyclopedic Shakespeare knowledge is here put to the service of eighty-nine myths about Shakespeare's life and authorship. He considers whether Shakespeare “had a shotgun wedding,” “was gay,” “died of syphilis,” “wrote a play called
Cardenio
,” “portrayed himself as Prospero,” or “uses an exceptionally large vocabulary.” Like
Fifty Great Myths of Popular Psychology
, Wells' is a myth-busting book. Wells interrogates the categories with invigorating briskness, and ends each chapter with a verdict: “unlikely,” “maybe,” “I remain sceptical.” Although we investigate many of the same categories as Wells, it is not because we disagree with his conclusions but because we are interested in different things. When we consider the question of whether “Shakespeare was the most popular writer of his day,” for instance, we are interested in the daunting question of how one would even
begin
to evaluate such a proposition, where one might go for evidence to support or refute it, in fact, what constitutes “evidence” (print runs? reprints? references to Shakespeare? audience attendance?); we are not interested in reaching a Yes or No conclusion.

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