In 1918, the critic Quiller-Couch wrote that a constant theme of Shakespeare's late plays was the attempt to 'reconcile the mistakes, wrongs, and sufferings of one generation of men and women in their hopes for the next.' One of the great mysteries of human life is how one man, William Shakespeare, could have achieved and known so much, seeming to understand all human life as he did, without the modern aids we now regard as essentials – electricity, fast transport, the internet with its world wide web – and how that man could possibly have written all the plays and poetry which still resonate so deeply with us today, some 400 years later.
My sister-in-law, who works one day a week as a volunteer guide at Stratford-upon-Avon, recently gave me a whistle-stop tour of Shakespeare's birthplace. Together, we visited the magnificently restored theatre, lost ourselves in the mirror maze, and learned, in some detail, about the glove-making business by which Shakespeare's father supported his family. The local Grammar school once attended by William is a stone's throw from his childhood home and gives one an idea of how small, and thriving Stratford must have been in the sixteenth century. The site of Shakespeare's own marital house, to which he returned permanently in the early 1600s, is now being excavated, but to date, it seems that only a few minor objects have been uncovered there. There are some indications that, in contrast to his childhood home, this must have been a house of substance.
The current outstanding and wide-ranging exhibition Staging The World at the British Museum, sets out to explore the life and times of our greatest poet and playwright by relating objects and artefacts of his time to relevant passages in the plays. We are reminded that Shakespeare arrived in London soon after Francis Drake had returned there, with a ship-load of gold, after circumnavigating the globe. The London in which Shakespeare lived and worked in the latter years of the sixteenth century was buzzing with confidence, enterprise and wealth. The visitor is given a vivid sense of the river pageants, the lively amusement parks and the drinking houses, as well as the cruelty of the bearbaiting and the infliction of pain on wrong-doers. As someone who recently stuck a twig in my eye whilst gardening, I found the display of the reliquary containing an eyeball, that had been plucked from the socket of a Jesuit priest, too terrible to contemplate. 'Out vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?' This 'object' is on display in reference to the terrible blinding of Gloucester in King Lear.
The final cabinet of the exhibition contains the modest copy of the complete works of Shakespeare that was passed around by the prisoners on Robben Island, from which they had each selected their favourite lines. It is unbelievably powerful to read the passage from Julius Caesar chosen and marked by the great Nelson Mandela on 16th December 1977:
Cowards die many times before their deaths: The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.
The mystery remains. How could one man, William Shakespeare, have understood so much about human nature – about our emotions, desires and our follies? A few years ago on a crowded train, I sat next to a precociously bright child of about ten years old. She was travelling to Stratford with her father, to see A Winter's Tale, which she had been studying at her school, and was engrossed in trying to solve a grown-up cryptic crossword. She was wearing a floral hair-band, and while chatting to the father, I remarked that his daughter might almost be Perdita. The father, knowing nothing of the play, asked me who Perdita was, at which his daughter looked up from her newspaper and told him that Perdita was the child from A Winter's Tale whose mother was no longer alive, and that her name – Perdita – came from the word meaning 'lost'. When the father offhandedly referred to a 'wife number 2', the girl then told me that her mother, 'wife number 1' had indeed, died.
Somewhat improbably, my own mother played Hermione in a student production of A Winter's Tale at RADA in the 1930s, and was fond of reciting the speech from her trial scene. When I was eight, my mother had developed TB and disappeared into a sanatorium in snow-bound icy Switzerland, where she spent much of my childhood. When she finally returned home, some part of me really did believe that, by magic means, she had been restored back to life.
Cicely Herbert is one of the trio who founded and runs Poems on the Underground in London.