Shakespeare in Love ends with Shakespeare's sweetheart, the film's heroine, swimming toward the coast of Virginia. Whatever the movie gets wrong with historical and literary facts, it has exactly right the spirit of the time. Behind both the exploration of the new world and the flourishing of the greatest era in the history of theatre lay the thrill of discovery. Shakespeare's England had a sense of unlimited possibility, and the movie's final image of a brave woman confidently swimming new waters against the odds is as apt for England's conquest of the stage as for its conquest of the new world. You can hear that sense of possibility and that confidence in the "mighty line" of Shakespeare's fellow playwright, Christopher Marlowe: "All things that move between the quiet poles shall be at my command."
But beyond any metaphorical connection between Shakespeare and Jamestown are historical ones. As you will see in this website, the wealthy aristocrats who filled the private theatres and whose friends were patrons and supporters of the theatre companies are some of the people who invested in the Jamestown expedition. Jamestown and the Blackfriars "opened for business" within a year of one another, and they had the same friends pulling for their success.
The connection between Jamestown's legacy and Shakespeare goes deeper than the network they shared in common; it goes to the heart of our language. In a real sense, America was the first country to speak "Shakespeare." A hundred years earlier, the English language was in a state of enormous flux. The printing press had made books affordable, and this new media, through translations, was "Englishing" the Renaissance on the continent. But the very attempt to put into English the variety of languages flowing in from Europe created a great debate about what English was. Into that debate came Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights.
They used their theatres and their actors to "mint" the language that we speak today. 2500 of the words in the Oxford English Dictionary first appeared in one of Shakespeare's works, and 98% of the words in Shakespeare's plays are current usage English. When people refer carelessly to Shakespeare's language as "old English," they have it wrong in two senses:
- First, Shakespeare's language, spoken in common by the settlers of Jamestown, is fundamentally the one we still speak in America today.
- Second, far from being "old," Shakespeare's language was, as Kevin Coleman of Shakespeare and Company likes to say, "young." It had passion, hormones, and energy.
Finally, the connection between exploration and the stages in London - particularly the Blackfriars - was one of keen audience interest. Many plays dealt with the perils and adventures of seafaring, with the idea of finding a new world, and with depictions of the natives that playwrights imagined inhabited there. They imagined these people as alien as we imagine extra-terrestials, and on this website you can see the actors of the American Shakespeare Center performing some of these scenes. There you can see that some playwrights envisioned native peoples as "noble savages," while other writers felt that only the lack of Christianity stood between natives and full-fledged humanity. In some of the dialogue you can see the ignorance and fear that made some Englishmen consider these people as less than human and even as devils.
This website is a tool for understanding how the founding of Jamestown brought America both the language and the expansive vision of an England in rebirth. It also shows you how one culture translates and mistranslates another.
The American Shakespeare Center and Jamestown 2007 are grateful for the creativity and the hard work of Jeremy Fiebig, Alisha Huber, and Katherine Mayberry, all graduate students in Mary Baldwin College's Masters of Literature and Fine Arts program.
