Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer

Author:Germaine Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781551992150
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2008-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

I am afraid and yet I’ll venture it.

If I get down, and do not break my limbs,

I’ll find a thousand shifts to get away.

As good to die and go, as die and stay.

Which no sooner said the boy leaps off the wall and lies still. He stirs only to utter his consummatum est:

O me. My uncle’s spirit is in these stones.

Heaven take my soul, and England keep my bones. (IV. iii. 5–10)

The audience is the sole witness of what has happened. When the other characters come on they do not see Arthur’s body at first; when they do they go off on their own tangents, uselessly swearing revenge on the non-existent person who threw the boy over the battlements. There is no other coup de théâtre like this in British drama. The helplessness of the audience watching a child act his dismal scene alone is a pale reflection of parents watching a child struggle with a life-threatening illness. At the end Constance’s railing against fate is irrelevant; there is only the child’s struggle with the inescapable and the helplessness of the onlooker. I would never argue that Shakespeare put his own child on the stage; what seems clear to me is that he knew what a bereaved mother’s anguish was like, and he knew what it was like to live with a dying child who approached his fate more bravely and serenely than either of his parents could. Ann’s grief may not have been unmixed with bitterness. Perhaps her little boy had missed his young father terribly and had been pining for him. If for years Ann had had to coax the boy to get him to eat, say, she might have raged inwardly that his listlessness was all the fault of his uncaring father. There is no play in the Shakespeare canon that is anything like The Spanish Tragedy in which a father is driven literally mad with grief for the death of a son. In The Winter’s Tale Leontes causes the death of his son and heir Mamillius, who dies of grief at his father’s ill-treatment of his mother. When Leontes gets his wife back in the last scene of the play, the rejoicing is unalloyed by any mention of the boy who will not be coming back.

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