The Shakespeare scholar Samuel Schoenbaum in his magisterial overview of the vast amount of theories and claims about the life of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), `Shakespeare’s Lives’ (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991) referred to a story about the task of trying to understand the personality and life of the playwright through his own words. This was, Schoenbaum said, akin to staring at a portrait in a darkened hall when dusk is coming on and thinking you can see the contours of the face portrayed, until you realise that what you are looking at is your own reflection in the glass frame staring back at you. This elusive quality was something the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges similarly alluded to in his `Shakespeare’s Memory’ from 1983 (`Collected Fictions,’ Tran Andrew Huxley, Penguin Books, London, 1998), a tale about a scholar who is suddenly troubled by memories and ideas he never remembered having before, and feeling that his mind is being taken over by the Bard. This deep intimacy with someone who in the end never quite reveals themselves is one familiar to readers of the writer’s work.
Shakespeare in Kent is every bit as ghostly as his presence elsewhere. There are the things that we can be certain about – the use of Kent as a location for key parts of some of his plays. And then there is his possible association with particular places as one of the acting groups he was linked to travelling and performing, possibly during times when London playhouses were closed due to plague and later. Finally there is his possible authorship of parts, or all, of `Arden of Faversham’.
The most important scene where Kent figures in Shakespeare’s work is in the `Tragedy of King Lear’, where the blinded Duke of Gloucester and Edgar, disguised as a peasant, stands before the cliffs of Dover. Earlier in the play, in Act 3, Scene 7, during the gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes, he had told his torturers that King Lear had gone to Dover. `Wherefore to Dover?,’ Lear’s daughter, Regan, demands. Gloucester replies, `Because I would not see thy cruel nails/Pluck out his poor old eyes.’ His own blinding follows immediately on from this. Surviving and stumbling to the place he had said the King was at, Gloucester asks Edgar to guide him to the top of a hill, and then describe to him what lies before. `Come on, sir, here’s the place,’ Edgard tells the Duke when they reach the place:
`Stand still. How fearful
And dizzy is to case one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce to gross as beetles. Halfway down
Hangs one that fathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fisherman that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice, and yon tall anchoring barque
Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy
Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge
That on th’unnumbered idle pebble chafes
Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more,
Lest by brain turn and the deficient sight
Toppled down headlong.’
In one of the great climatic moments of the play, after a declaration of earthly renunciation Gloucester throws himself forward, but because he is near the cliff edge, but not directly beside it, survives.
The broad location that Edgar presumably refers to is this day labelled `Shakespeare’s Cliffs’, part of the White Cliff country, a place of iconic importance as an historic entrance and departure point to Europe. It is the closest point of Britain to France, but also a place where, in the Victorian era, the first attempts were made to create a tunnel connection underneath the Channel. Samphire Hoe is a stretch of reclaimed land nearby. That it bears this name now (and has done at least since the middle part of the 19th century) is truly a case of relations with the physical landscape being formed and shaped by imagination and fiction, rather than the other way around (imagination and fiction being shaped by the physical world). It testifies to the immense impact of Shakespeare that an actual place can be framed by the way they figure in his work.
A lesser occurrence of a named Kent location which then went on to figure more in popular memory is in the opening of King Henry the Fourth Part 1, where Poins, the friend of the prince, and competitor to Sir John Falstaff, declares that `But my lads, my lads, tomorrow morning by four o’clock early, at Gads Hill, there are pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings, and traders riding to London with fat purses.’ (Act 1, Scene 2). Gads Hill here refers to the place just before Rochester from London, somewhere that figures in the biography of Charles Dickens as his home in the last years of his life, and a popular place for highwaymen for precisely the reason Shakespeare states.
Tracing Shakespeare’s life itself in Kent proves as vexed as finding tangible clues of him anywhere else that go beyond dry legal documents that have his name and little else. Much that is claimed, or could be claimed, about him physically being in the county is circumstantial. Chilham Castle provides one connection. It was built and owned by Sir Dudley Digges in the early 17th century. Digges’s brother Leonard wrote an eulogy in Shakespeare’s first folio, and his step-father Sir Thomas Russell was one of the overseers of the playwright’s will. Shakespeare, however, despite performance in recent years of the Globe Theatre at the location, could not have ever performed at Chilham, or not at least at the current castle, as that was not completed till the year of his death, 1616. Civic records show that one of the main companies that Shakespeare as an actor was associated with, the Lord Chamberlain’s men, visited Dover in 1597, and returned in 1606 and 1610. The group also visited Faversham at least twice, performing once in 1597 in the old Guildhall, which no longer exists, and a second time over 1605/6 at the new Guildhall, in the room above the market – a place which is still very much extant. On this latter tour, they also went to Fordwich, England’s smallest town close to Dover, performing in the Town Hall, one of the other few places standing which may have seen a performance of his work while he was still alive. The King’s Players, and Lord Strange’s Men, both companies that Shakespeare was also linked to, came to Kent in 1592 when plague closed theatres in London, and then in 1605, on a tour to Maidstone.
Of all the links though, the strongest, were it ever to be proved, would be through his authorship of `Arden of Faversham’, a play from the late 1580s or early 1590s which referred to the murder of Thomas Arden, some time Mayor of the town, by his wife Alice and her lover Mosby in 1551. The house in which the killing took place still stands in Abbey Street. Argument has continued over whether Shakespeare wrote the whole play, or parts of it – or whether in fact it was the product of a contemporary, Thomas Kyd. With wider understanding of the ways in which plays of this era were often collaborative efforts, the involvement of Shakespeare in the middle scenes of the play has become slowly more widely accepted. If so, this would be amongst the earliest works Shakespeare produced.