Contested Will by James Shapiro Page A

events and court intrigue, he found many more of them, or thought he did, reinforcing in a circular fashion his account of the plays’ chronology. While his primary aim was a working chronology, his sense of what counted as topical allusions, as well as his interpretation of them, led readers to believe that specific political messages were encoded in the plays.
    So, for example, when Malone came upon the comic scene in Antony and Cleopatra where the Egyptian queen strikes a servant who brings her news of Antony’s remarriage, he recalled reading in Elizabethan chronicles that Queen Elizabeth had once boxed the Earl of Essex on the ear for turning his back on her. Malone decided that Shakespeare may have been attempting in this scene to ‘censure’ Elizabeth – who at this point had been dead for three or four years – ‘for her unprincely and unfeminine treatment of the amiable Earl of Essex’. Why stop there? A few scenes later, when the same servant describes to Cleopatra her rival’s features, Malone interprets it as ‘an evident allusion to Elizabeth’s inquiries concerning the person of her rival, Mary Queen of Scots’. There’s so much wrong about this it’s hard to know where to begin. For one thing, it implies that conversations onstage shouldn’t be taken at face value; they are really about something else, if only we could connect the dots and identify that something. For another, why Shakespeare, a member of the King’s Men, would want to alienate his monarch by introducing into this scene a discussion of how unattractive James’s dead mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been is unfathomable, though it didn’t give Malone pause.
    Reductively identifying topical moments as Malone had, a by-product of trying to line up the life, works and times, became an easy and tempting game. Malone’s obsession with the Earl ofEssex carried over into his interpretation of Hamlet . He had read the penitent earl’s last words from the scaffold, before Essex was beheaded in 1601 for treason: ‘send thy blessed angels, which may receive my soul, and convey it to the joys of heaven’. The dying man’s conventional prayer sounded to Malone sufficiently like Horatio’s words spoken over the dying Hamlet: ‘flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’. Malone suspected that Hamlet had been staged before Essex was executed, but even that didn’t stop him. So eager was he to suggest that ‘Lord Essex’s last words were in our author’s thoughts’ that Malone supposes that the ‘the words here given to Horatio may have been one of the many additions to the play’. Are we then to conclude that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s secret lament for the defeated earl, who, like his play’s protagonist, would be king? This is shoddy criticism and bad editing. Moreover, the history that Malone draws upon in making these topical correspondences was limited to chronicles, centred on the court, mostly from the reign of Elizabeth. That’s understandable enough: he didn’t have access to the kind of gritty social history that’s now a bedrock on which our understanding of Shakespeare’s drama and culture rests. But it badly skews the plays, turning them into court allegories, in which a Jacobean Shakespeare seems stuck in an Elizabethan past, unable to get out of his mind a slap administered by his queen, in a very different context, many years earlier.
    I dwell on this at such length because Malone helped institutionalise a methodology that would prove crucial to those who would subsequently deny Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays (after all, the argument runs, how would anybody but a court insider know enough to encode all this?). First, however, this approach would influence traditional accounts of the plays, such as George Russell French’s Shakespeareana Genealogica (1869), which assures us that