In Praise of the Provincial

AN UPSTART CROW.”

That this should be the first mention of William Shakespeare as a public person in re­corded history is always a surprise. It’s 1592, and Shakespeare, the son of a glove maker, is about twenty-eight years old; Robert Greene, a well-known poet and playwright of the time, writes a pamphlet called Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit that contains these words: “Yes, trust them not, for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and be­ing an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie.”

Robert Greene is one of the University Wits, a group of men who have gone to university, in Oxford and Cambridge, and then, coming to London to find jobs as tutors, have gone on to become playwrights. Christopher Marlowe is the most well known in the group; there are others: George Peele, John Lyly, and the three Thomases—Kyd, Nashe, and Lodge.

Shakespeare, born in the small town of Stratford-upon- Avon, hasn’t had the benefit of a proper education. In that sense, he has indeed had to fend for his own learning like a crow scavenges for food—it is, of course, an ad hoc ethic, of letting the impress of whatever comes his way annotate his learning. This autodidacticism is inevitable—he only has, as Ben Jonson, another contemporary who was quick to criticize him, said, “small Latin and less Greek.” Latin and Greek, the foundational languages of European culture. How could such a man have the audacity to write plays, and how would it be possible for the classicist Jonson and the well-educated University Wits to tolerate a person like William?

William Shakespeare was—let us admit it—a provincial. The crude attacks on him by his contempo­raries were evidently by people who, apart from the obvious benefits of class and education, also had the privilege of place: Oxbridge and London. Greene’s criticism of him as an upstart and a crow, a scavenging bird, who “beautified” himself with borrowed feathers, and who used “bumbast”—bombastic language— is not unique. That annoyance and sarcasm rises to the surface in a Hindi idiom such as “Raju ban gaya gentle­man,” Raju’s become a gentleman. Gentleman is the only English word in this Hindi phrase— it’s meant to remind us of the impropriety of location: just as English doesn’t really belong to this Hindi phrase, so too the provincial in a city. It’s meant to mock the person who has to pretend to be some­one they are not—someone who has to “beautify” himself with borrowed feathers. William is Raju, trying to become a gentleman. Greene says “our feathers,” making the superior­ity clear—it’s a version of the animal tale where the crow resorts to borrowing peacock feathers or where the jackal must dye itself into a shade of blue. “Shake-scene”— the Stratford-upon-Avon guy is so disgusting that Greene refuses to even give him the respect of calling him by his surname; he excretes a portmanteau word, marrying one half of the man’s name to his profession, the scene in a play. But that is not all—Shakespeare, or Shake-scene, which would make an efficient name for a rapper today, is a “Johannes Factotum,” a jack of all trades.

All this characterization of Shakespeare is true. He was indeed writing in a language that would have disturbed the educated and the powerful—he was adding to and remaking the English language without caring for any such ambition or even knowing that he was. It was a practical necessity, not a deliberate aesthetic choice: a hungry person will put together something—anything—to eat from whatever they find from foraging. When Greene accuses him of borrowing our feath­ers, he is making an accusation against the outsider William. There are other accusations: of plagiarism and of copying Marlowe, the most successful of the playwrights. That he himself is borrowing this metaphor—and expression—from Horace would seem ironic, except that Greene would have justified it as intellectual lineage.

Shakespeare is an outsider—both to London and to lineages, social and intellectual. He is an autodidact, teaching himself, often by copying, like apprentice artists do. “Imma­ture poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different,” T. S. Eliot would say four hundred years later. Both Shakespeare and his critics at that time were doing the same—it is just that the rest of them, because of the power that had accrued to them from institutional learning, could lay claim to Horace in a way that William and other provincials like him could not. “It was a terrible time in Shakespeare’s life. He hadn’t been writing plays for a long time. He’d probably been acting for longer. He had also been adapting other people’s plays, and to get attacked like this would be insulting…Theatres were closed for the plague, so he is in a lousy line of work. He isn’t making any money. Then this guy goes after him for plagiarism and bombast.”

None of this would have mattered, neither to Shakespeare nor to us, to literary history, had the provincial not responded to Greene’s criticism through his writing. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, with its many biographies of Greek and Roman rulers; Holinshed’s Chronicles and in it the histories of England, Ireland, and Scotland, on which Shakespeare would base— never faithfully, of course—his historical plays; Boccaccio, ever-present Boccaccio: his “plots” derived primarily from these sources. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Bible, particu­larly its use in The Book of Common Prayer, supplied him with classical and Christian references. All of this is only to reiterate that Shakespeare, without the benefit of university training, was groping and grabbing for anything out of which he could conjure a play, its particular vocabulary. Everything was found art, found poem. “It’s weird how he responds to Greene. He wrote a play called Titus Andronicus—a gory play, possibly more bombastic than any play then in the London theatre. It is kind of as [if] he is digging back at Greene: ‘You want bombast? I’ll show you bombast.’ He wrote Midsum­mer Night’s Dream, which is a play built up out of so much borrowed material, borrowed from Chaucer, borrowed from Ovid. It is a play basically beautified by other people’s feathers. So I think Greene hit a nerve, but the response was to say, ‘You want bombast, you want plagiarism? I’ll show you bombast, I’ll show you plagiarism.’

William Shakespeare was—let us admit it—a provincial. The crude attacks on him by his contemporaries were evidently by people who, apart from the obvious benefits of class and education, also had the privilege of place: Oxbridge and London

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Reading Shakespeare as a provincial—being able to iden­tify the irony in the “Tyger’s heart” in Robert Greene’s critique as actually being a borrowing from Shakespeare’s own play Henry VI (“O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide”), or understanding what Shakespeare was doing to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy in his play Hamlet, or recognizing Christopher Marlowe’s words in the same play, where Marlowe himself is remembering Virgil, the poet of Aeneid— brought moments of epiphanous awareness, of recognising how provincial energy, working through deprivation and accidental fits, would gradually grow into an aesthetic. Two things need to be reported here. The Winter’s Tale, possibly the last play Shakespeare wrote, is based on Pandosto or The Triumph of Time, a piece of prose fiction that was written by Robert Greene. By closing his creative life with an homage to his harshest critic, Shakespeare was perhaps showing what borrowing feathers could achieve. The second thing—three months after the death of Robert Greene, in December 1592, his publisher and printer Henry Chettle issued a public apology to the “Upstart Crow” for having published the Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit.

A BEARDED UPSTART.”

I reread the phrase and close the book temporarily to check whether I’m reading the book I think I am reading, just to confirm that it is not a description of Shakespeare. It is not. The book is Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence.

1. H. Lawrence, the writer of stories, poems, and essays, best known for the novels Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and The Rainbow (and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which, in places like ours, Siliguri, lived like a smuggled good, mostly in thin abridged editions), was a boy from Nottingham, and even though he would exile himself to other cultures and conti­nents, he would try to find some version of Nottingham every­where. His mother, Lydia Lawrence, was a “snobbish and un­happy woman who wrote verse and liked reading”; his father, Arthur, “was a happy traditionalist who loved the intimacy of pub and pit.” He spoke in the local dialect, she the King’s English. “He loathed a fork: it is a modern introduction which has still scarcely reached common people. [He] preferred . . . a clasp-knife.” As he writes in the poem ‘Red Herring,’ his father was a “working man,” a collier, his mother “a superior soul” who was cut out to play that superior role “in the god-damn bourgeoisie”; their children, including David himself, were “little nondescripts,” “in-betweens” who called each other you indoors, but “outside it was tha and thee.” ….

The provincial’s fear of the metropolitan gaze never left Lawrence: “I feel frightfully important coming to Cambridge . . . quite momentous the occasion is to me. I don’t want to be horribly impressed and intimidated, but am afraid I may be,” he told Bertrand Russell. Wilson writes about how this world that “intimidated” him perceived him: “Lawrence told Forster that he had become ‘classless,’ but this was neither how he was seen by others nor how he really saw himself. Only David Garnett told the truth about how Lawrence was per­ceived among the upper-class literati: he was a ‘mongrel ter­rier among a crowd of Pomeranians and Alsatians,’ he looked ‘underbred,’ his ‘nose was short and lumpy,’ his chin ‘too large and round like a hairpin,’ and his ‘bright mud-coloured’ hair was ‘incredibly plebeian.’” He was “the type of plumber’s mate who goes back to fetch the tools, the weedy runt you find in every gang of workmen. . . . He was the type who provokes the most violent class-hatred in this country: the impotent hatred of the upper classes for the lower.”

As I read this, I felt protective of him—I hoped that Lawrence hadn’t known of this. A moment later, when I remembered how Cambridge had “disgusted” him and he had found the place “dreadful,” I realized that he knew. “Provin­cial,” “upstart,” “mongrel,” “underbred,” “plebeian”—they belong to the same family. “Lumpy” and “mud-coloured”— both marking his relationship to soil, to the earth, to the underground. The more the upper class characterized him as an underclass, stressing his relationship of birth to a place and a people, the more he claimed the “under” for himself. In The Rainbow, for instance, he imbues the world with a spiri­tuality as much as the upper class choose the sociological: “there was something subterranean about him, as if he had an underworld refuge.”“He saw coal as a ‘symbol of something in the soul’ and never lost the sense that his real being belonged to this glossy inner darkness.” It made him angry, this charac­terization of the unformed provincial, animal-like, clod-like. In shorthand, he would call them “Europe,” the same Europe that his contemporary T. S. Eliot used as a shorthand for civilization: “The root of all my sickness is a sort of rage. I re­alise now, Europe gets me into an inward rage, that keeps my bronchials inflamed.”

The provincial is a classist category, and some of Lawrence’s critics would find it hard to be forgetful of Lawrence’s origins— it must have been hard for them to see a novelist as the son of a miner. The characters in his novels were described by one as “lower than the lowest animal in the zoo.” Both the noun and the adjective are telling: the provincial as animal is an internal­ized axiom in most cultures, manifesting itself in the idiomatic. “Lower than the lowest” is not just metaphor in Lawrence’s case—it derives from his father’s location, the underground, a province inside a province as it were. The son of the miner, touchy as he was, and touchy as the humiliated are, would have noticed this. He was fierce in distinguishing the dark and dusty and lively mines from the underground in the city. The London Underground was “a tube full of spectral, decayed people,” he writes in a letter; London, the city, was “a hoary massive underworld, a hoary ponderous inferno. The traffic flows through the rigid grey streets like the rivers of hell.”

The provincial is a classist category, and some of DH Lawrence’s critics would find it hard to be forgetful of Lawrence’s origins—it must have been hard for them to see a novelist as the son of a miner. The characters in his novels were described by one as ‘lower than the lowest animal in the zoo’

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Stung by the response to The Rainbow, how neither his pub­lisher Methuen nor his contemporaries defended the right for the novel to exist and be read—the novel was banned for being obscene, unsold copies were confiscated—Lawrence, venturing to leave this place that had banned him for a new continent and leaning on an America of possibilities, saw it as a continuation of the underland that had brought some­one like him into being. In America, “life comes up from the roots, crude but vital.” It is not hard to see that he is making a connection between two provincial places, for that was what America was then, as its writers Henry James and T. S. Eliot, who were turning to Europe, felt and knew, as he is in striking a connection between vitality and the “underworld.”

I think of the word upstart used for him, of its etymology— “one newly risen from a humble position to one of power, importance, or rank, a parvenu, also start-up, from up (adv.) + start (v.) in the sense of ‘jump, spring, rise’”—and of Mrs. Lawrence’s words (“We must all rise into the upper classes! . . . Upper! Upper! Upper!”), and it is the phoenix and the rising and jumping and moving upward that refuses to leave me. Ursula, in The Rainbow, seems to answer them all: “Why must one climb the hill? Why must one climb? Why not stay below? Why force one’s way up the slope? Why force one’s way up and up when one is at the bottom?” In writing his father in the way he did, diminishing him without taking away his effervescence and greed for joy, even in something like the raindrops deflecting from an umbrella, Lawrence was recounting intergenerational accumulated humiliation, the smallness of place turned into the equivalence of the smallness of person: “There was a slight shrinking, a diminishing in his assurance. Physically even, he shrank, and his fine full presence waned. He never grew in the least stout, so that, as he sank from his erect, assertive bear­ing, his physique seemed to contract along with his pride and moral strength.” Small, “shrinking,” “diminishing,” “shrank,” “contract”—Derrida would notice something similar in his father: “stooped.” And yet the boy David was able to see in his father’s torso, “coiled and shrunken by humiliation, a sublime superiority, both coming from the place he lived in and dived into every morning.”

Everywhere Lawrence went, he sought this riskiness of provincial living—risk had a radiance for him, the aleatory that he could not associate with the solidified destinies of upper-class urban life. In Cornwall, which Wilson calls “a prehistoric version of his birthplace,” he found tin mines; in Eastwood, the England of Robin Hood, “the cold-blasted earth held for him a biblical beauty.” Heaven and hell were, after all, very provincial places—insulated and reductive. To invert the top-bottom and high-low model of class infra­structure remained Lawrence’s preoccupation in his intel­lectual and emotional life: the Breach, where the Lawrences lived, became The Bottom in the novel—it was above Hell Row. His father’s journey to the underworld and back above he saw metaphorically, biblically—it was as much escap­ism as intellectual justification, that this iteration of days, of lives such as theirs, had something hidden with possibility as a seed had inside the earth. Lawrence had turned his back on the afterlife very early (“Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh”)—who knew whether social hier­archies trailed one after death?—and it was in this life, this only thing available, that one was to experience all the lives imagined, in heaven, hell, and the in-between: “Mrs Morel always said the after-life would hold nothing in store for her husband. He rose from the lower world into purgatory, when he came home from the pit, and passed into heaven in the Palmerston Arms.” One of the ways in which this hierarchy could be inverted, the constant tug for the up-up-up, was to embrace the in-between.

(This is an edited excerpt from Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries  by Sumana Roy)

About The Author

Sumana Roy

Sumana Roy is the author of a work of non-fiction, a novel and two poetry collections

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