Macbeth and King Lear
Macbeth (1605) is a terrible picture of absolute evil. To keep to the facts Shakespeare could have repeated Holinshed, but in deep despair he made the story darker. In King Lear (1606) his emotional state reached its extreme and his art its height. The story had first been told with embellishment by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Holinshed took it from him. Then a dramatist whose name is now unknown staged it as The True Chronicle History of King Leir. The plot belonged to everyone. In the earlier play, based on Holinshed, Lear joined Cordelia, regained his throne and ended well. Shakespeare apparently is responsible for Lear's madness, dethronement and death, and he too blinds Gloucester on the stage. In the speeches of this embittered Lear, virtue and piety are only a cloak for lust, every government is a form of bribe-taking, and all of history is the tale of man hunting man. Seeing how widespread and apparently victorious evil is, Shakespeare is driven almost mad, and he gives up hope in a god who protects justice.
Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens
Antony and Cleopatra (1607) has less depth and grandeur. There is more greatness in Antony's defeat than in Lear's rage, and in his love for the Egyptian queen something more believable and bearable than Lear's improbable cruelty to a daughter who is ridiculously blunt and outspoken. Cleopatra, a coward on the battlefield, gains a grand character in her death. Here too Shakespeare used and improved other plays, and he renewed this much-told story with sharp analysis of its heroes' traits and with the magic and beauty of his language.
In Timon of Athens (1608) pessimism appears in a cynical and unmitigated form. Lear lashes out at women but then pities mankind; Coriolanus counts men fickle, flattering, brainless, the offspring of carelessness and neglect; but Timon despises high and low alike and curses civilization, which in his view corrupts morals. Plutarch in his life of Antony portrayed Timon as a hater of mankind; Lucian made him a speaker in a dialogue; and about eight years before Shakespeare took up the play with a collaborator whose name is unknown to us, an English play about him had already been written. Timon is a millionaire surrounded by flattering and agreeable friends. When he loses his fortune and finds his friends suddenly vanished, he shakes the dust of civilization from his feet and, like Jaques, decides to live apart in a corner of the woods where, as he says, the unkindest beasts are kinder than mankind. He wishes Alcibiades were a dog so that he might be loved a little. Timon lives on roots, and in digging the earth he strikes gold. His friends reappear, but he drives them all off with curses. (His long speeches of loathing, which call on every kind of ruin to fall on humankind, are omitted here.) Then, in an outburst of hatred, he begs nature to stop producing men and hopes that harmful vermin will multiply and wipe the human race from the earth. This excess of hatred makes the play seem unreal, and we cannot believe that Shakespeare felt such mocking superiority over sinful mankind or was so unable to bear life. The nausea shows that the sickness is healing, and a smile appears again on Shakespeare's lips.
The artist: what Shakespeare knew
How could a man without a proper education write so many plays and show mastery in every one? Yet it is not a matter of mastery alone, for he has no wide and exact knowledge in any field except psychology. Of the Bible Shakespeare knew only what he had perhaps read in childhood, and his allusions to it are casual and common. His knowledge of Greek and Roman literature is also casual and apparently limited to translations. He knew most of the pagan gods, even the minor ones, but probably from the English version of Ovid's Metamorphoses. He made small slips that Bacon, for example, would never have made: he called Theseus a duke, had Hector, who lived in the eleventh century before Christ, mention Aristotle, who lived in the third, and had a character in Coriolanus (fifth century BC) quote Cato (first century BC).
Shakespeare knew a little French and less Italian, and had slight knowledge of geography. His plays use foreign place names from Scotland to Ephesus, yet he put Bohemia on the seacoast (as Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden; he took it from a story by Robert Greene, a university man, and in the time of Ottokar II Bohemia's borders did reach the Adriatic), sent Valentine from Verona to Milan by sea, and had Prospero sail from Milan in an ocean-going ship. His historical knowledge came largely from Plutarch, and a large part of English history from Holinshed and earlier plays. He also made several historical errors that do not matter to a dramatist: a striking clock in Caesar's room, billiards in Cleopatra's time, King John without Magna Carta, and Henry VIII with no thought of the Reformation; here again past and present are used for each other. In general those of his plays that deal with English history are true to us in outline, though their details cannot be trusted, and they even carry a patriotic tinge: Joan of Arc, for instance, is a witch in his view. Yet many Englishmen, Marlborough among them, admitted that most of what they knew of English history came from Shakespeare's plays.
Like many Elizabethan dramatists, Shakespeare used many legal terms, and sometimes misused them; perhaps he learned them in the Inns of Court, where three of his plays were staged, or in lawsuits he or his father was party to. His works are full of musical terms, and he apparently loved music: is it not strange, he asks, that the guts of sheep should draw the soul out of a man's body? He names England's flowers with love, strings them together in The Winter's Tale, adorns Ophelia with them in her madness, and in all refers to some 180 different flowers. He knew field sports and horsemanship. But he took little interest in science, which enthralled Bacon. Like Bacon he believed in the Ptolemaic system, and at times (Sonnet 15) he seems to accept astrology, speaking of Romeo and Juliet as 'star-crossed lovers'; yet Edmund in King Lear and Cassius in Julius Caesar reject it: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.
All in all, the evidence suggests that Shakespeare gathered his learning by chance, like a man too busy with work, management and living to have time for books. He took up the more startling of Machiavelli's ideas, alluded to Rabelais and borrowed from Montaigne, but it is unlikely that he read their works. Gonzalo's description of an imaginary land in The Tempest may come from Montaigne's essay on cannibals, and Caliban's speeches in the same play may be Shakespeare's own satire on Montaigne's account of the peoples of America. It is unclear whether Hamlet's skepticism relates to Montaigne's brilliant doubts; the play appeared in 1602, a year before Florio's translation, but Shakespeare knew Florio and may have read his manuscript. Montaigne's shrewd criticism of old beliefs may have cleared Shakespeare's mind, but nothing in the French writer resembles Hamlet's talks with himself or the bitter complaints of Lear, Coriolanus, Timon and Macbeth about life. Shakespeare is Shakespeare: he pilfers plots, themes, phrases and lines from others, yet he is the most original, most distinctive and most creative writer in the world.
His originality lies in language, style, imagination, the craft of drama, wit, the creation of varied heroes, and (the sentence is cut at this point by the chunk boundary; the next post completes it).