Wang Chutong, one of the Siku quanshu editors, then went on to compile the Lianshi in the 1790s, the first modern encyclopaedia devoted entirely to the work and activities of women. Subjects covered marriage, physical appearance, weaving, poetry and the role of women across the social spectrum, from imperial princess to streetwalker. The work was edited by men, but as Dr Zurndorfer observes, of the hundred contributors to the Lianshi, a large proportion were married to women with prestigious literary reputations. ‘One may infer that their appreciation of these women’s talents spurred their involvement … and that the topics they pursued therein reflect that admiration.’*
Given the circumstances surrounding its inception, perhaps it was inevitable that the Yongle Dadian would meet a tumultuous end. Initially stored in the Ming Dynasty capital Nanjing, it moved with the emperor to the new capital Beijing in 1421, and for almost a century and a half it remained in the summer palace in the Forbidden City. When a fire almost destroyed the palace, two copies were finally made, one of them destined for the Beijing Hanlin Academy, China’s largest repository library established in the 1720s. The fate of the other copies and fragments of copies is uncertain, but many were burnt when British and French troops sacked the Imperial Archive in 1860.
The last remaining copy, the one at the Hanlin Library, met a lonely and unceremonious fate. That manuscript, writes Lauren Christos, the Librarian at Florida International University, ‘over time fell prey to poor preservation whether through theft, rodents or insects, warfare or fire.’ The rodents didn’t chew everything: of the original 11,095 volumes, about 800 were still readable in 1900. After the Siege of Peking in that year, and the fire that swept through the library, the number dropped to only 370, or 809 sections, the equivalent of having only entries for the letter A.*
The loss of the text heralded the loss of an entire culture, for what is a society without an archive of its history and the memory of its people? In some quarters, the destruction of physical evidence of a group’s culture is legally defined as genocide.*
And in time even the name disintegrated. Maybe it really was the Yongle Dadian or the Yung Lo Da Dian. Perhaps Wenxian Dacheng should still hold. We only have what we call it today, for tomorrow it is still not there.
DEVISE, WIT
Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio.
When the lovelorn Armado calls upon divine inspiration near the beginning of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the audience knows his quest is doomed. Here is the pompous Spanish braggart sure that he was the first man to fall in love, dropping his military pursuits to woo his intended with poetry. Alas he has neither the talent nor the learning to write the persuasive sonnet; he has only the pale prospect of parody.
For centuries, scholars have debated the learning of Shakespeare himself. We have little if any documentation of what he was taught at school, nor the historical volumes by his side as he wrote Henry VI in 1591 and Henry VIII in 1612, nor what informed his philosophical worldview as he framed the minds of Hamlet and Lear.
It’s unnerving to learn that for much of the eighteenth century Shakespeare was regarded as an ignoramus. His plays were castigated for their lack of chronological, historical and geographical accuracy, and his lack of bookishness was used by the academic elite as an assault on creativity. The modern view has changed. Though lacking a donnish background, we know that Shakespeare had access to several almanacs and encyclopaedias, and there are numerous direct correlations between passages in his plays and the widely available volumes he may have had at his elbow.
He wrote on the cusp of Copernican comprehension; that is, the gradual acceptance that if the earth revolved around the sun, we should adapt our philosophical and dramatic approaches accordingly. The first English translation of Copernicus, A Perfit Description of the Celestiall Orbes appeared as part of the Digges Almanac of 1576, a popular digest that was almost certainly within Shakespeare’s grasp.*
Another publication, a more general encyclopaedia commonly known as Batman upon Bartholomew, is widely regarded as his most likely companion. It was published in 1582, when Shakespeare was eighteen, and immediately entered university libraries and educated homes. Re-published is more accurate, for it was a reprinting and modest update of a thirteenth-century work by the Franciscan monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus, popularised when printed by Wynkyn de Worde in London in 1495, and finally updated by Stephen Bateman (or Batman) in Shakespeare’s time.* The whole was the traditional mixture of fact and fiction, and, as English professor Neil Rhodes points out, scholars have detected some possible direct borrowings: the encyclopaedia mentions the effects of the moon’s light as a cause of madness (alluded to in both Measure for Measure and Othello); the geometric properties of the soul and our energy patterns (King Lear); and the concept of beast-like men (The Tempest). Other entries would be reflected in his sonnets.*
One more publication stakes a claim: Pierre de la Primaudaye’s French Academie, first translated into English in 1586. This was primarily a modern work, its four volumes encompassing the creation, the cosmos, animals and plants, the human body and its diseases, and a Christian philosopher’s guide to life. How did this show itself in Shakespeare’s work? Convincingly. Professor John Hankins has traced elements of the French Academie in the ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech in As You Like It, and in Lear’s speech that ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools’. The references to the unweeded garden and the sleep of death in Hamlet may also derive from Primaudaye, as well as the many references to the force and influence of ‘custom’ in Hamlet and Pericles. Finally, Othello’s speculations on Desdemona’s supposed infidelity, and particularly the notion of the heart as a fountain, finds several parallel sources in French Academie.
It’s an exercise worthy of the best detectives. ‘None of this is conclusive,’ Neil Rhodes concedes, ‘but if Shakespeare did own an encyclopaedia – and in view of the enormous diversity of his subject matter it would have been a very useful companion – then this would almost certainly have been it.’ And beyond these forensics, one recurring theme in his plays – man as a microcosm of the workings of the universe – reflects the grand ambitions of every compiler of the modern encyclopaedia: the world in a book.
DOGMATIC DELIVERY OF KNOWLEDGE
In his later years, Shakespeare would have known of the far-reaching educational proposals of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and in his roles as attorney general and lord chancellor Bacon would have been known to those who saw Shakespeare’s plays. Bacon’s treatise The Advancement of Learning (1605) was a hugely influential work, an exuberant promotion of the idea that the health and wealth of human lives could be improved beyond measure by the application of intellectual pursuits. Bacon was a heavy-hatted cheerleader, leaving it to others to realise his ideology in practical form. But all future encyclopaedists would have reason to be grateful to him.*
Nothing if not precocious, Bacon attended Cambridge University at the age of thirteen, where his acquisitions included a bow and quiver of arrows, a pair of pantofles and a dozen new buttons for his doublet. He read Livy, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Xenophon and Hermogenes. For nine months his education was interrupted by the plague. On his return to Cambridge, he impressed Queen Elizabeth with his gravity and maturity. When she asked his age, he announced he was ‘two years younger than Her Majesty’s happy reign,’ the charm of which suggested to all present that he would go far in life.*