Paul Edmondson - Shakespeare: Ideas in Profile

ALSO BY PAUL EDMONDSON

Twelfth Night: A Guide to the Text and its Theatrical Life Shakespeares Sonnets (co-authored with Stanley Wells) A Year of Shakespeare: Re-Living the World Shakespeare Festival (co-edited with Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan) Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy (co-edited with Stanley Wells)

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

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Text copyright Paul Edmondson, 2015

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ISBN 978 178125 3373

eISBN 978 178283 1037

Enhanced eBook ISBN 978 178283 1365

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For my godchildren:
Rowan Simpson
Eleanor Lofthouse
Harry Bate
Daisy Huish
and for
Freya Simpson
and
Sasha Hurley

This list (which includes collaborative works) is based on The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from this edition.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona (158990)

The Taming of the Shrew (15901)

The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (Henry VI Part Two, 15901)

The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry the Sixth (Henry VI Part Three, 1591)

The First Part of Henry the Sixth (1592)

The Most Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (1592)

The Tragedy of King Richard III (15923)

Venus and Adonis (15923)

The Rape of Lucrece (15934)

The Reign of King Edward III (1594)

The Comedy of Errors (1594)

Loves Labours Lost (15945)

Loves Labours Won (15956): lost

The Tragedy of King Richard the Second (1595)

The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (1595)

A Midsummer Nights Dream (1595)

The Life and Death of King John (1596)

The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice, or Otherwise Called the Jew of Venice (15967)

The History of Henry the Fourth (15967)

The Merry Wives of Windsor (15978)

The Second Part of Henry the Fourth (15978)

Much Ado About Nothing (15989)

The Life of Henry the Fifth (15989)

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599)

As You Like It (15991600)

The Tragedy of Hamlet (16001)

Twelfth Night, or What You Will (1601)

Troilus and Cressida (1602)

The Sonnets (15821609) and A Lovers Complaint (16039)

The Book of Sir Thomas More (16034)

Measure for Measure (16034; adapted 1621)

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (16034)

The History of King Lear (16056): The Quarto Text

The Life of Timon of Athens (1606)

The Tragedy of Macbeth (1606; adapted 1616)

The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra (1606)

Alls Well That Ends Well (16067)

Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1607)

The Tragedy of Coriolanus (1608)

The Winters Tale (160910)

The Tragedy of King Lear (1610): The Folio Text

Cymbeline, King of Britain (161011)

The Tempest (161011)

Cardenio (161213): lost

All is True (Henry VIII, 1613)

The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613)

A year before he died, a friend of mine gave me a Shakespeare sixpence. It has Queen Elizabeth Is profile on one side of it and the royal coat of arms on the other. Someone who badly needed my sixpence has bitten into one edge to check whether it was genuine. Certainly, its silver is airy thin. I call it a Shakespeare sixpence because it was minted in 1592, marking the time when Shakespeare was first mentioned in London. The Rialto Bridge in Venice was built that same year.

Shakespeare too was a coiner of words. He was someone who freshly minted language, and for whom poetry, laughter, tears, intellectual stimulus and sheer entertainment were a currency that had to flow. He died young, about the same age as my friend, and left behind a body of work and a reputation which are second to none. In Shakespeares time, sixpence would have bought me a place in the Lords Room at The Globe Theatre to watch his company perform, or admitted me to their indoor playhouse, at the Blackfriars. As I hold this ordinary sixpence smooth and bright with four centuries of touch it makes me feel as though Shakespeares own experience of the world is somehow within reach.

His words are a currency by which we can be transported, too. The poet John Keats wrote a long and loving letter to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana, over the Christmas of 1818 and into the New Year. Like all of Keatss letters it is immediate and companionable, warm and affectionate and, like many of them, it includes thoughts and ideas about Shakespeare:

Now, the reason why I do not feel at the present moment so far from you is that I remember your ways and manners and actions; I know your manner of thinking, your manner of feeling: I know what shape your joy and sorrow would take, I know the manner of your walking, standing, sauntering, sitting down, laughing, punning, and every action so truly that you seem near to me. You will remember me in the same manner and the more when I tell you that I shall read a passage of Shakespeare every Sunday at ten o clock you read one at the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room.

For Keats, Shakespeare represented a currency of friendship, a heightened but familiar way of acknowledging mutual affection. But there is a deeper, spiritual communion at work in Keatss words, too. Shakespeare (any passage will do) is to be read at the same time, a Sunday at ten o clock, and then they will feel as close together as it is possible to feel, though apart. Keats, incidentally, does not factor in the time difference: his brother and sister-in-law were living in North America.