Shakespeare: The Biography

CHAPTER 20 To Morrow, Toward London

It was an explosion of human energy. He had to reach it. Scholars and biographers have argued about the exact date of his arrival, but his destination was not in doubt. Others had made the journey from Stratford to London in the same period. His contemporary Richard Field had gone from the King’s New School to be enrolled as an apprentice. Roger Lock, son of John Lock the glover, had also taken up an apprenticeship in the city. Richard Quiney became a London merchant, as did his cousin John Sadler. Another native of Stratford, John Lane, journeyed from London to the Levant on a merchant ship. They may all have agreed that “Home-keeping youth, haue euer homely wits” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2).

In Shakespeare’s plays, too, young men often chafe and complain at being kept “rustically at home”; they wish to speed away and be free, on the wind of their instinct and ambition. Goethe once wrote that “in stillness talent forms itself, but character [is created] in the great current of the world.” The case of William Shakespeare, however, is singular in more than one sense. None of his contemporaries made their departures from wives or children. It was in fact almost unprecedented for a young man to leave behind his young family. It was unusual even in aristocratic households. It suggests, at the very least, strong determination and single-mindedness on Shakespeare’s part. He had to leave.

He was a very practical person. So it seems unlikely that he abandoned his family in some indeterminate or undetermined way. It is also improbable that he decided to seek his fortune in London on the basis of some irrational impulse. Some have suggested that he was fleeing from a bad or forced marriage. There is no evidence for this. Nevertheless he can hardly have been part of a completely successful or happy marriage, for the very good reason that he would not then have considered leaving it. What contented husband would have left his wife and children for an unknown future in an unknown city? It is the merest common sense, then, to imagine him in some respects restless or dissatisfied. Some force greater than familial love drove him onward. He left with a plan, and a purpose. He may conceivably have been accepting an invitation from a group of players, and the prospects of making money as a player were greater than those currently available for a provincial lawyer’s clerk. It was soon commonly reported of players that some “have gone to London very meanly and have come in time to be exceeding wealthy.”¹ If the best means of supporting his young family were to be found in London, then to London he must go. In the lives of great men and women, however, there is a pattern of destiny. Time and place seem in some strange way to shape themselves around them as they move forward. There would be no Shakespeare without London. Some oblique or inward recognition of that fact spurred his determination. In his Observations on Translating Shakespeare, Boris Pasternak wrote that at this time Shakespeare was “led by a definite star which he trusted absolutely.” That is another way of putting it.

James Joyce noted that “banishment from the heart, banishment from home” is a dominant motif in Shakespeare’s drama. The perception may better fit Joyce’s own exilic status, but it has an authentic note. Shakespeare’s “star” may have led him from home, but it would still be natural to look back at what had been lost. Joyce could only write about Dublin after he had left it. Did Shakespeare have a similar relation to the fields and forests of Arden?

There were two roads to London. The shorter route would have taken him through Oxford and High Wycombe; the other arrived in the capital by way of Banbury and Aylesbury. John Aubrey connects him with a small village on a side-road of the Oxford route. In Grendon Underwood, the dramatist is supposed to have found the model for Dogberry. But any talk of “models” is misplaced. Shakespeare would in subsequent years, however, become thoroughly familiar with the wooded regions and ridges of the Chilterns, the valley of the Great Ouse, the villages and market towns that characterise these journeys. The modern roads follow much the same path, through a transformed landscape.

As sensible as Shakespeare was, he would have set out in late spring or early summer. It was good travelling weather. He might have gone in company, as a safeguard against thieves, or travelled with the Stratford — London “carriers.” The principal one of these, William Greenaway, was a neighbour in Henley Street; on his pack-horses he took cheese and brawn, lamb-skins and linseed oil, woollen shirts and hose, to the capital, where he exchanged them for city goods such as spices and silverware. The journey by foot lasted for four days; by horse it took only two.

And then, as Shakespeare approached the city, he saw the pall of smoke. He heard it, a confused roar striated with bells. He smelled it, too. The distinct odour of London penetrated some twenty-five miles on all sides. One route took him to the north by way of Highgate, but the more direct led him into the heart of the capital. It passed the hamlet of Shepherd’s Bush and the gravel pits at Kensington, crossing the Westburne brook and the Maryburne brook, until it reached the hanging-tree of Tyburn. Here the road parted, one path going towards Westminster and the other towards the City itself. If Shakespeare had chosen the City route, as is most likely, he travelled down the Oxford Road to the church and village of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. It was his first sight of the London suburbs or in the words of John Stow’s Survey of London, published in 1598, here “have ye many fair houses builded, and lodgings for Gentlemen, Innes for Travellers, and such like, up almost (for it lacketh but little) to St. Giles in the Fields.” But the suburbs also had a reputation for lawlessness where “a great number of dissolute, loose, and insolent people harboured in such and the lyke noysom and disorderly houses, as namely poor cottages, and habitacions of beggars and people without trade, stables, inns, alehouses, taverns, garden-houses converted to dwellings, ordinaries, dicyng houses, bowling-allies and brothel houses.”² The young Shakespeare had never seen anything like it before; he must have found it, in the phrase Charlotte Bronte used when she first entered the City, deeply exciting. Then onwards towards the bars of Holborn, past straggling lines of shops and tenements, yards and inns, and towards the terrible prison of Newgate. This was the gateway of London, “the floure of cities alle.”

A traveller entering the city for the first time could not help but be profoundly moved or disturbed by the experience. It assaulted all of the senses with its stridency and vigour. It was a vortex of energy. It was voracious. The traveller was surrounded by street-traders or by merchants beseeching him to buy; he was hustled and jostled. It was a city of continuous noise — of argument, of conflict, of street-selling, of salutations such as “God ye good morrow” and “God ye good den”—and more often than not it smelled terribly of dung and offal and human labour. Some of the phrases of the streets are deeply redolent of London life—“goe too you are a whore of your tung,” and “as much worth as a piss in the Thames.” If you were “snout-fair” you were good-looking, and to have sex was “to occupy.” There were merchants standing in the doorways of their shops, lounging about, picking their teeth; their wives were inside, sitting on joint-stools, ready to bargain with the customers. Apprentices stood outside the workshops of their masters, calling out to passers-by. Householders, as often as not, took up position on their doorsteps where they might trade gossip or insults with their neighbours. There was no privacy in the modern sense of that word.

There were rows of shops, all in one vicinity selling the same limited range of goods — cheeses, pickles, gloves, spices. There were dimly lit basements, entered by stone steps from the street, where sacks of corn or malt were stacked up for sale. There were old women crouched upon the ground with parcels of nuts, or withered vegetables, spread out around them. There were street-sellers with their goods piled high on wooden trays hung about their necks. There seemed to be endless numbers of men carrying sacks and burdens on their backs, weaving through the crowds that packed the narrow streets. The children were busily at work alongside the adults, too, wheeling barrows or calling out for trade. People ate pies or small roasted birds as they walked, throwing the bones of the thrush into the roadway. There were literally hundreds of ballad-sellers, “singing men” or “singing women” who stood at street-corners or on barrels to advertise their wares. There were alleys that seemed to lead nowhere, ruinous gates and tenements encroaching upon the streets, sudden flights of steps, gaping holes and rivulets of filth and garbage.

It was already an ancient place, inhabited for more than fifteen hundred years, and it savoured of age and decay. John Stow loved to survey the ruins of ancient times in the sixteenth-century streets through which he walked; in shape and texture it was still the medieval city, with the old walls and gatehouses, chapels and barns. The sites of the monasteries and priories, some of them dismantled as a result of Henry’s “dissolution” but others put to new use, were still marked out as precincts and liberties. The palace of the Savoy, linked with the French wars of Edward III, survived. The Earl of Warwick’s house, in Dowgate between Walbrook and the Thames, still stood. The Tower of London, to which Shakespeare adverted more than to any other edifice in his plays, still watched over the city. Stone House in Lombard Street was known as King John’s House. Crosby Hall, where Richard III was supposed to have accepted the crown of England, endured. It was only to be expected that Shakespeare’s history plays would be imagined within the very heart of the city where he lived and worked.

But the miracle of late sixteenth-century London lay in the fact that it was renewing itself. Its vigour and energy came from a fresh access of youthfulness. It has been estimated that half of the urban population was under the age of twenty years. This is what rendered it so strident, so tough, so excitable. Never again would it be so young. Apprentices made up 10 per cent of its population, and apprentices were known for their high spirits and for their occasional tendency towards violence. Londoners were often compared to a swarm of bees, quick to congregate and to act in instinctive union.

There is another aspect to this youthful city. The average expectancy of life in the parishes of London, rich or poor, was very low. An early sixteenth-century diarist noted that he was “growing towards the age of forty, at the which year begins the first part of the old man’s age.”³ The expectation of a relatively short life must have affected the conduct and attitude of many Londoners. They were consigned to a short burst of existence with the evidence of disease and mortality all around them. Their experience was all the more vital and intense. This is the proper context for the growth of drama. Elizabethan Londoners acquired, or amassed, experience with more eagerness and expedition. They were quicker, sharper, more colourful, than their contemporaries elsewhere in the kingdom. The reign of Elizabeth has often been seen as that of an ageing monarch surrounded by foolish and headstrong boys; strange though it may seem, it is part of an authentic historical picture. But the boys — and girls — were also on the streets of London, buying and selling, conversing and fighting.

That is why this is properly seen as the age of the adventurer and the projector, the dreamer of vast schemes. The formation of joint stock companies and the promotion of colonialist enterprises, the voyages of Martin Frobisher and Francis Drake, were all part of the same quickening energy and activity. It was a young man’s world in which aspiration and ambition might lead anywhere and everywhere. This was where Shakespeare belonged.

CHAPTER 21 The Spirit of the Time Shall Teach Me Speed

The city was expanding quickly. It lured both the poor and the wealthy, the immigrant and the agricultural labourer. The aspiring youth of the country came to the Inns of Court, while the gentry haunted the legal courts and royal court of Westminster. The London “season,” for gentry and nobility, really only developed between 1590 and 1620. But there were also more beggars in London than in the rest of the country combined. The city was in a ferment of building and rebuilding, with tenements being erected on any and every vacant spot or spare piece of land. Proclamations of 1580 and 1593 attempted to halt the spread of new construction, but they might as well have tried to halt the tides. Houses and hovels were built away from the streets and the alleys, in gardens or in courtyards, and existing houses were divided up into smaller and smaller dwellings. The graveyards had houses built upon them. A population of approximately fifty thousand in 1520 had reached two hundred thousand by 1600. The shock of the new, for the young Shakespeare, was in part the shock of great numbers of people huddled together in a vast effusion of life.

That is why the city was pushing westward and eastward, too, beyond the city walls. The road between London and Westminster was as busy as the streets within the City, filled with litters and hackney coaches, carts and drays, wagons and pack-horses and four-wheeled carriages called “caroches.” Shakespeare may have been surprised by the narrowness of some of these streets that had not been built for the access of new traffic: the principal streets of Stratford were wider.

London was unique. It was the only city of its kind, and of its size, in England. So there grew a unique form of self-awareness among Londoners. It would be absurd to suppose some sudden change of consciousness — most citizens were too busy to be reflective in that manner — but there was an instinctive awareness that they were engaged in forms of life that had no real precedent. This was no longer a medieval city. It had suffered a sea-change. It was a new kind of thing, an urban mass comprised of people who related to each other in specifically urban ways. It is of vital consequence in the context of Shakespeare’s plays.

The city created, and existed upon, confusion. Thomas Dekker, in The Honest Whore, asked: “Is change strange? ’Tis not the fashion unless it alter …” The rise of the gentry and the merchant class steadily eroded the position and privileges of the old nobility. Kinship counted for less, and civic society for more; privately sworn obedience gave way to more impersonal bonds. It has been described as the transition from a “lineage society” to a “civil society.”

Costume is of the utmost significance in determining the quality of the Elizabethan urban world. Appearance indicated status and position as well as wealth. The emphasis among all groups of citizens — apart, that is, from the Puritan elect and the more staid members of the merchant aristocracy — was upon brightness or originality of colour and upon the wealth of minute detail lavished upon each article. One fashion was that of wearing a very large rose, made of silk, on each shoe. The nature of your dress also indicated the nature of your profession. Even street-sellers dressed in the clothing that would signify their role. Prostitutes made use of blue starch to advertise their trade. Apprentices wore blue gowns in winter and blue cloaks in summer; they were also obliged to wear blue breeches, stockings of white cloth and flat caps. Beggars and vagrants dressed in a way that would elicit pity and alms. In the theatres themselves infinitely more money was spent on costumes than on hiring playwrights or actors. It was a young city in this sense, too. More and more significantly the city itself became a form of theatre. London was a forcing house for dramatic improvisation and theatrical performance. It encompassed the ritual recantation of the traitor at the scaffold and the parade of the merchants in the Royal Exchange. It was the world of Shakespeare.

The city became the home of the pageant, in which all the spectacle and colour of the urban world were on display. On these festival occasions, arches and fountains were especially built, thereby turning London into a piece of moving scenery; the members of the various guilds and the aldermen, the knights and the merchants, dressed in their appropriate costume and were accompanied by ensigns and bannerets. There were platforms and stages upon which tableaux were performed. There was no real distinction between those who participated in, and those who watched, the moving displays. It was a piece of intense theatricality in which life and art were lit by the same pure, bright flame. It was also a means of expressing the power and wealth of the city. In the same spirit an historian has noted, of Elizabethan style, that “it was magnificent by design and saw magnificence the sum of all virtues” with “a glorious ostentation of random craftsmanship” that endlessly diverts: “it never rests; it demands response and elicits pleasure; there is no concession to order or to simplicity.”¹ It might in part be a definition of Shakespeare’s own art. The predilection was for bold colour, and intricate pattern, all designed to elicit wonder or amazement. These were also the characteristics attributed to Shakespearian drama. In any one period, all the manifestations of a culture are of a piece.

This sense of magnificence was particularly pertinent to royalty. Elizabeth I declared that “we Princes are set as it were upon stages in the sight and view of the world,” an opinion echoed by Mary Queen of Scots who at her trial explained to her judges that “the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.” Shakespeare, with sure dramatic instinct, populated his stage with monarchs and courtiers. It is the world of his history plays, where ritual and ceremonial play so large a part. But there are surely risks in such an enterprise. A player can be a king, or a queen. What if the sovereign herself were no more than a player? It is a potentially delicate question that he broaches in Richard II and Richard III.

As the Church became desacralised, its candles and its images removed, so urban society became more profoundly ritualistic and spectacular. This is of the utmost importance for any understanding of Shakespeare’s genius. He thrived in a city where dramatic spectacle became the primary means of understanding reality. The pulpit just outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, known as Paul’s Cross, was defined as “the very stage of this land”² where the preacher played his part, and John Donne declared that “this City is a great Theatre.” An early dramatist, Edward Sharpham, echoed this sentiment with his observation that “the Cittie is a Commedie, both in partes and in apparel, and your Gallants are the Actors.”³ Just as in more recent times New York has become a cinematic city, known primarily through the images in film and television, so London was the first theatrical city. The success of the drama in London, whether presented at the Globe or at the Curtain, had no parallel in any other European capital. From the production in 1581 of Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, there were innumerable plays that used the city as their setting.

The London playhouse was a new kind of building, erected for the first time in this period. People watched the actors in order to learn how to behave, how to speak and how to bow; the audience applauded individual speeches. The drama was also used as a means of conveying a social or political message to those assembled. A preacher complained that “plays are grown nowadays into such high request, as that some profane persons affirm they can learn as much both for edifying and example at a play, as at a sermon.”⁴ For the majority of the English, the drama of the mystery plays and the morality plays had until recent times been the major vehicle for spiritual instruction and doctrinal fable. It still retained its authority as an instructor. It was not simply an entertainment in the modern sense.

There was a profound recognition of life as a play. Jaques’s metaphor, “All the world’s a stage …” in As You Like It, was already a Renaissance commonplace. In sixteenth-century London, however, the truism acquired a more powerful resonance. For some the conflation of life and theatre was a source of comedy and high spirits; for others, like the Duchess of Malfi in Webster’s melodrama, it provoked sadness rather than mirth. Whatever its precise connotation, it consorted with what may be called the London vision. This has a direct bearing on Shakespeare’s drama. If life was a play, then what was a play but heightened life? The action on stage might be artificial, and might even draw attention to its artificiality, but it was still deeply authentic.

What were the characteristics of this London vision? It combined mockery and satire, discontinuity and change. It included cruelty and spectacle, where bears were tied to the stake and baited until death. It was mixed and variable, conflating satire and tragedy, melodrama and burlesque. It was the context for what Voltaire described as “les farces monstrueuses” of Shakespeare. It often depended upon coincidence and chance encounter. It was interested in the behaviour of crowds. It was bright and garish. It jostled for attention: Walt Whitman believed that Shakespeare “painted too intensely.” It was also implicitly egalitarian. Once the actors had taken off the robes of king or common soldier, all were equal. On the stage itself the queen shared the same space — had the same presence — as the clown. As Hazlitt said at a later date, “it raises the great, the remote, and the possible to an equality with the real, the little and the near.” This was Shakespeare’s experience of the city.

CHAPTER 22 There’s Many a Beast Then in a Populous City

Visitors to London registered their surprise or disapproval at the level of intimacy between the sexes. Erasmus mentions that “wherever you come, you are received with a kiss by all; when you take your leave, you are dismissed with kisses.”¹ It was customary, at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, for women to wear dresses in public that exposed their breasts.

The proximity of brothels and playhouses was always a matter for comment among contemporary moralists; they were both erected beyond the strict jurisdiction of the city, outside the walls or on the south bank, but there was a closer connection. The owners of the playhouses, the respected Henslowe and Alleyn among them, were also the owners of brothels. Alleyn’s wife was paraded in an open cart because of her connection with one such place of assignation. There were over one hundred bawdy-houses in the suburbs, and Shakespeare mentions the sign of the blind Cupid over their doors. Near the theatres, too, were “garden walks” and “garden alleys” where prostitutes gathered. The young women came from all over England. Contemporary legal documents reveal that two young girls, contemporaries of Shakespeare, had come from Stratford-upon-Avon to find an illicit income. There is a clear association between play-going and sexual indulgence, perhaps because both represented a temporary relief from the usual world. The theatre and the brothel both offered a release from conventional ethics and social morality. Shakespeare’s plays are filled with bawdy and sexual innuendo. He was catering to the tastes of a large section of the crowd.

Of disease, there was no end. The playhouses were closed down at the time of plague, precisely because they were considered to be the prime agent of infection. Waves of epidemic illness swept away the urban crowd in the most terrible ways. In 1593 more than 14 per cent of the population died of plague, and twice that number were infected. Sex and disease were closely associated. The plague was ascribed by some to “sodomitical sins.”² Plague was also associated with the characteristic smell of the city, so that London became an organism of death as well as depravity. Few could ever have been wholly well. Mortality and anxiety were part of the air that the citizens breathed. The frontispiece of a production by Thomas Dekker in 1606 reads as The Seven Deadlie Sinns of London: Drawn in seven severall Coaches, Through the seven severall Gates of the Citie. All of Shakespeare’s plays allude to disease in one or other of its myriad forms, to agues and fevers, to palsy and sweating-sickness. In his drama, the notion of infection is associated with breathing itself.

The poor and the vagrant, also, have always been part of London’s life. They are the shadow that the city casts. In this period they comprised some 14 per cent of the population. There were the labouring poor who eked out their livings as porters or sweepers or water-bearers. There were the “sturdy beggars” who as often as not were whipped out of the city; a second or third appearance would incur the penalty of death. There were the masterless men who earned a small living by plastering or building or other casual trades. There were the destitute who lived off the parish and begged in the streets. These are “the famisht beggers” in Richard III (3374) who are “wearie of their Hues.” Shakespeare was acutely aware of this group of the dispossessed who appear, appropriately enough, in the margins of his plays; but, unlike the pamphleteers and the divines, he did not launch any great invectives against the conditions of the time. The parlous conditions of the poorer sort emerge fitfully in Coriolanus, for example, but without any great expressions either of pity or contumely.

The presence of these outcasts, who had little or nothing to lose, encouraged crime and violence on a large scale. It has been estimated that there were thirty-five serious disturbances or riots in the city between 1581 and 1602. There were food riots, riots between apprentices and the gentlemen of the Inns of Court, threats of riots against immigrants or “aliens.” In the first part of Henry IV the king blames “moody beggars staruing for a time” for causing “pell-mell hauocke and confusion” (2578). Of course in a city where male citizens customarily carried daggers or rapiers, apprentices had knives, and females were armed with bodkins or long pins, there was a constant danger of violence. Daggers were generally worn on the right hip. Shakespeare would have carried a rapier or a broadsword as a matter of habit. Cases of violent assault, brought before one of the under-sheriffs, were as common as cases of theft or over-pricing. There were criminal gangs, difficult to distinguish from gangs of disbanded soldiers, threatening the stability of certain areas of the city such as the Mint by the Tower and the Clink in Southwark.

In the course of his life Shakespeare came to know this city very well. He resided at various times in Bishopsgate, in Shoreditch, in Southwark and in Blackfriars. Well known to his neighbours and fellow parishioners, and recognisable by sight to the citizens who crowded the public theatres, he was in no sense an anonymous person. He knew the bookshops of St. Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Row; the title pages of his plays published in quarto list some sixteen different premises, from the sign of the Fox near St. Austin’s Gate to the sign of the White Hart in Fleet Street. He knew the taverns, where Rhenish and Gascony wines were sold, and the inns where beers and ales were purveyed. He knew the eating houses, or banqueting houses, such as the Oliphant in Southwark and Marco Lucchese’s in Hart Street. He knew the Royal Exchange, where free concerts were held on Sunday afternoons in the summer. He knew the fields to the north of the walls, where wrestling and archery contests were held. He knew the woods that encircled the city and, when in his plays he arranged meetings in the woods outside the town, the majority of his audience would have thought of London’s retreats. He also became very well acquainted with the Thames in all of its moods. He crossed it continually, and it became his primary form of transport. It was shallower, and wider, than it is now. But in the stillness of the night it could distinctly be heard, rushing between its banks. “Tut, man, I mean thou’lt loose the flood, and in loosing the flood, loose thy voyage.” So speaks Panthino in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (607-8). Shakespeare did not need to address London directly in his work; it is the rough cradle of all his drama.

CHAPTER 23 Sir I Shall Study Deserving

In his first arrival in London, how did he appear to his contemporaries? When in The Taming of the Shrew Lucentio leaves Pisa to “plunge” into Padua, that “nurserie of Arts,” he arrives expectantly and “with sacietie seekes to quench his thirst” (298). The young Shakespeare was eager for experience, in all of its forms; in some way he wished for “satiety” in the manifold life of London. In his fancy, or fantasy, he might “heare sweet discourse, conuerse with Noble-men” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 318). His aspiring spirit might there find its true setting. He also wished to test himself in the forcing house of thought and drama. This youthful ambition emerges in the most surprising contexts. In Antony and Cleopatra (2120-1) Antony remarks of the morning that it resembles:

… the spirit of a youth

That meanes to be of note.

Was he then eager for the fame that, as the King of Navarre puts it, “all hunt after in their lyues” (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1)? Many have assumed it, but the fame of an actor or a dramatist was in this period a highly perishable commodity. He would have felt the mental power of the city, however, and with it an inkling of his own destiny.

We might remark upon Shakespeare’s intense and overwhelming energy. It manifests itself at all stages of his career, and in his youth it must have been irrepressible. We might also remark upon his buoyancy, an inward easiness of spirit. As an actor he was trained to be quick and nimble, but that vitality was an essential part of his being; the images of his plays are filled with flight and with swift action, with movement and lightness. He is the poet of speed and agility. His characters are not of the study or the library but of the busy and active world. His is a drama of the sudden moment or change, and one of his most powerful images is that of the lightning strike “which doth cease to bee / Ere one can say, it lightens” (Romeo and Juliet, 892-3). All the myriad imagery, from the social as well as the natural world, suggests that he was a man of preternatural alertness. And he was known, like the characters within his comedies, for the quickness of his repartee. John Aubrey, acquiring his information from the theatrical Beeston family, noted that Shakespeare possessed “a very readie and pleasant smooth Witt” and also scribbled down that “he was a handsome well-shap’t man.”¹ Actors, with the exception of those who specialised in comic roles, were expected to be handsome and well shaped.

No remarkable young man or woman is devoid of energy, but many are also beset by self-consciousness and embarrassment. It is the price of eminence. There are many passing references in Shakespeare’s drama to blushes and to flushed faces, when emotions suffuse the countenance in unanticipated ways; it is an almost unwitting habit of Shakespeare to include such details. Charles Lamb mentions his “self-watchfulness.” There are also references in his dramas to stage-fright.

Everyone remarked upon his sweetness and courtesy. He was variously called “ciuill,” “generous” and, most often, “gentle.” Despite spiteful allusions to his past as a law-writer or country schoolmaster he was generally considered to be well bred and indeed “gentle”—not meaning mild or tender, in the modern sense, but possessing the virtues and attributes of a gentleman. He would later demonstrate to the world that he was indeed “well bred.”

Gentility implies instinctive courtesy towards those of inferior rank or position, pleasing modesty towards those of equal status, and proper respect towards superiors. Bernard Shaw put the point differently when he speculated that Shakespeare “was a very civil gentleman who got round men of all classes.”² The vogue for Castiglione’s The Courtyer, published in English translation in 1561, had not yet passed; it was a manual of civil conduct to which all gentlemen (including lawyers and the wealthier merchants) subscribed. It is clear, from many allusions, that Shakespeare had read it. His own plays have indeed been read as a “pattern book” in courteous speech. That is why he was described by his contemporaries as “mellifluous” and “honie-tongued.” Castiglione himself recommends one who is “in companie with men and women of al degrees [and who] hath in him a certaine sweetnes, and so comely demeanour, that who so speaketh with him, or yet be-holdeth him, must needes beare him an affection for ever.”³ Did this come to Shakespeare instinctively, as most have surmised, or was it in part the result of practice and education?

This view of his character was in any case established very early when, in 1709, Nicholas Rowe depicted him as “a good-natur’d Man, of great sweetness in his Manners, and a most agreeable Companion.”⁴ This comes as a surprise to those romantics who believe that he must have shared the horrors of Macbeth or the torments of Lear. He is not jealous Othello, nor rumbustious Falstaff, except in the moment of conceiving them. Sophocles, the author of some of the most desperate Greek tragedies, was known as the happy playwright. Authors, at least when they are in the company of other people, can be most “unlike” their work — and Shakespeare generally was in company. It was not an age of privacy.

John Aubrey also passed on the information that he was “very good company.” He was affable and convivial, according to contemporary testimony. He was amiable, and undoubtedly funny. Much of the surviving testimony concerns his sudden jokes, and a prevailing wit which tended towards irony. He manifested a continual subtle humorousness, like some stream of life. J. B. Yeats passed on a remarkable insight to his son, W. B. Yeats, in a letter of 1922. “I bet that the gentle Shakespeare,” he wrote, “was not remarkable for his gravity, and I think that in his plays, he is always maliciously on the watch for grave people as if he did not like them.”⁵

He did not stand out as a man of eccentric or extraordinary character, and it seems that his contemporaries sensed a deep equality with him. He effortlessly entered the sphere of their interests and activities. He was in that sense infinitely good-natured. The apparent ordinariness of extraordinary men and women is one of the last great taboos of biographical writing. It would not do to admit that nineteen-twentieths of a life, however great or enchanted, is plain and unexciting and not to be distinguished from the life of anyone else. But there should be a further admission. The behaviour and conversation of even the most powerful writer, or statesman, or philosopher, will in large part be no more than average or predictable. There is not much to differentiate the mass of humankind, except for some individual action or production. Shakespeare seems to embody the truth of this.

That is why his contemporaries came away from Shakespeare’s company with no overwhelming sense of his personality. Would he have recounted his sexual conquests or commented upon other writers? Would he have become drunk, in an effort to douse his furious energy? Ben Jonson remarked upon his “open, and free nature,” echoing Iago’s description of Othello. Open may mean accessible and transparent; but it can also mean receptive, like an open mouth. His amiability may not have been so apparent in his professional capacity. It has often been pointed out that he did not become engaged in the more pugnacious writers’ quarrels of the period, and seems in general to have steered clear of public conflict and controversy. They were a waste of time and energy. But he parodied his contemporaries’ styles in his plays, and caricatured their persons in figures such as Moth. It is easy to exaggerate Shakespeare’s poise and detachment; he may not have been argumentative in public, hating controversy of every kind, but he may have been sharp and acerbic in private.

Much speculation has been devoted to his “feminine” characteristics and, in particular, to his extraordinary compassion and sensitivity. Yet many men have been known for their yielding sympathy and consideration; as attributes, these are not sexually exclusive. It was not because he had some “soft” aspect of his character that he chose not to enter into fights and disagreements, but because he could see every side of every argument. It was once said of Henry James that he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it; we might say of Shakespeare that he had a sympathy so fine that no belief could injure it.

But, when he left the company of others, what then? In remarkable people there is always an inward power propelling them forward. Shakespeare was very determined. He was very energetic. You do not write thirty-six plays in less than twenty-five years without being driven. So, on his first arrival in London, his contemporaries would have encountered a highly ambitious young man. He was ready to compete with his more educated contemporaries, from Marlowe and Chapman to Greene and Lyly. In certain respects he resembles the adventurers in other fields of Elizabethan endeavour, and he would come to master the contemporary drama in all of its forms. To succeed in Elizabethan society, too, it was necessary to be quick, shrewd and exceedingly determined. We may assume that he was not sentimental. The young men in his early plays are remarkable for their humour and their energy, amounting almost to self-assertion; they are not troubled by inward doubt. Shakespeare himself had a sure sense of his own worth. One of the themes of his sonnets, for example, lies in the full expectation that his verse would be read in succeeding ages. It is hard to believe, however, that he was free from interior conflict. His plays are established upon it. He was a man who had left behind his wife and children, and whose plays are filled with images of loss, exile and self-division. He had a desire to act, even at the cost of his reputation as a poet, and the sonnets are in any autobiographical reading touched by melancholy brooding and even self-disgust.

Yet he was also exceedingly practical. He could not otherwise have written, acted in, and helped to “direct” dramas that appealed to all of the people. It is a matter of common observation that a “genius” in one field is likely to be supremely able in other spheres of life. Turner was a sterling businessman. Thomas More was an expert lawyer. Chaucer was an excellent diplomat. Shakespeare was skilful, not to say hard-headed, in money matters. He acquired a reputation among his fellow countrymen as a money-lender. He bought up properties and tithes. He speculated on corn and malt at times of dearth. His will is an eminently pragmatic and unsentimental document. And, by the time of his death, he had become a very rich man.

CHAPTER 24 I Will Not Be Slack to Play My Part in Fortunes Pageant

There were innumerable inns where he could have lodged, on his first arrival in London. The Bell Inn, in Carter Lane by St. Paul’s Cathedral, was the inn used by such Stratfordians as William Greenaway, but it is just as likely that he stayed with a fellow countryman who had been approached in advance. The Quineys or the Sadlers may even have written for him letters of introduction to friends or relatives in the city; Bartholomew Quiney, for example, was a rich cloth-maker who had settled in the capital. It is even possible that he stayed with his friend Richard Field; but Field was still an apprentice, and may not have been able to offer suitable accommodation.

His first employment was in the theatre, but it is not clear in what capacity. His earliest biographer states that “he made his first Acquaintance in the Play-house … in a very mean Rank.”¹ This has been variously construed as meaning that he became a prompter, a call-boy, a porter or a patcher-up of other men’s plays. It could also imply that he began as a young actor or “hired man.” The tradition in Stratford itself was of the same import. A visitor to the town in 1693 records that “the clerke who shew’d me this church is above eighty years old” and that this old man recalled how the young Shakespeare had gone to London “and there was received into the play-house as a serviture.”²

A lineal descendant of Joan Shakespeare, the poet’s sister, stated “that Shakespeare owed his rise in life, and his introduction to the theatre, to his accidentally holding the horse of a gentleman at the door of the theatre on his first arriving in London; his appearance led to enquiry and subsequent patronage.”³ This sounds too good to be true. But flesh was added to these bones in the eighteenth century by Samuel Johnson, who repeated the story that the young Shakespeare earned his living by holding the horses of theatrical patrons. In The Plays of William Shakespeare, published in 1765, he added the information that many such patrons “came on horseback to the play” and when Shakespeare arrived in London “his first expedient was to wait at the door of the play-house, and hold the horses of those who had no servants, that they might be ready again after the performance. In this office he became so conspicuous for his care and readiness, that in a short time every man as he alighted called for Will Shakespear.”⁴ It is true that two of the earliest theatres, the Theatre and the Curtain, were best reached on horseback. But the only real evidence for this claim lies in the fact that Shakespeare did indeed know a great deal about horses and could distinguish a Neapolitan from a Spaniard; he even knew the slang of the horse-yard. Since horses were the primary means of transport, however, that knowledge was widely shared. There are other reasons for Shakespeare’s interest in horsemanship; it was considered to be an intrinsic part of gentlemanly and especially noble conduct.

The authority of Samuel Johnson was not, in any event, sufficient to sway other commentators. The Shakespearian scholar and editor Edmond Malone stated that “there is a stage tradition that his first office in the theatre was that of Call-boy or prompter’s attendant; whose employment it is to give the performers notice to be ready to enter.”⁵

There is no reason to suppose that a “call-boy,” if such a post existed, or a horse-minder would automatically rise very high in the theatrical profession. Common sense suggests that he was hired as an actor, in which capacity he later emerges in the public record. By this time acting was a profession to which it was customary to become informally “apprenticed.” Certainly it required an intense and specific training, in the arts of deportment and vocal technique as well as swordsmanship, memory and dancing. There are two principal candidates for the honour of first employing him, the Queen’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men. Some of the earliest versions of his plays were the property of the Queen’s Men, as we have observed, and it is likely that he joined them for a limited period. He may well have been looking around for the best possible opportunities, in any case, and moved from company to company. There is evidence that he joined Lord Strange’s Men, perhaps as early as 1588. Certain juvenile plays of his were also performed by that company. They were established in Lancashire, and we may conjecture that he was taken on by players who already knew or recognised his abilities.

Lord Strange — Ferdinando Stanley, later the fifth Earl of Derby — was one of the wealthiest and most influential of the English nobility. The earls of Derby, whose family name was Stanley, based their power in Lancashire. Henry VII, to whom Lord Strange was related, had modelled his palace at Richmond upon the Stanley castle at Lathom. Strange had his own court, retinue and, of course, players. It is known that he delighted in drama, and that he witnessed the last performance of the Chester mystery cycle. Even though the presentation of these religious plays had been banned by official interdict, since they were considered too close to the dramatic rituals of the old faith, the mayor of Chester ordained in 1577 a special production for the grandees “at the hie Crosse.”⁶ It is an indication of Lord Strange’s affinity with the old faith and suggests, too, that for him drama was more than mere tumbling. His own players were no doubt largely occupied in performing at one or another of the various great houses of the Stanleys in Lancashire, which is where the young Shakespeare, in service with the Hoghtons or the Heskeths, is likely to have encountered them.

Lord Strange was only five years older than Shakespeare, and from a relatively early age gained a reputation for learning and for artistry. In Colin-Clout’s Come Home Again (442-3), a poem in which Shakespeare himself is mentioned, Edmund Spenser refers both to Lord Strange’s munificent patronage and to his native abilities:

Both did he other, which could pipe, maintaine,

And eke could pipe himself with passing skill.

It is not at all unlikely that he might have spotted the superlative talents of young Shakespeare.

Lord Strange has also been associated with a group of noblemen and scholars who have become known as “the school of night.” It met at Sir Walter Raleigh’s London dwelling, Durham House, and included among its members Raleigh himself, the Earl of Northumberland, George Chapman, George Peele, Thomas Heriot, John Dee and perhaps even Christopher Marlowe. This esoteric group of projectors and speculators engaged in discussion of sceptical philosophy, mathematics, chemistry and navigation. They were taunted with atheism and blasphemy, but they were in effect part of the speculative and adventurous spirit of the period in which mathematics and occultism were seen as aspects of the same great design. Shakespeare possibly alludes to them in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a play that was written as a kind of “in-house” entertainment. Although he was not a member of the “school of night,” he knew its purposes.

Lord Strange had been a contemporary of the precocious and witty playwright John Lyly, at Oxford, and numbered among his acquaintance what might be called a theatrical “set.” Christopher Marlowe claimed to be “very well known” to him.⁷ This is not hard to believe, since Lord Strange’s Men performed Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris. Thomas Nashe in Pierce Penniless praised Strange as “this renowned Lord, to whom I owe the utmost powers of my love and duty.” Strange was also well acquainted with Thomas Kyd, whose The Spanish Tragedy was part of his players’ repertoire. Since versions of Shakespeare’s plays also became part of that repertoire, we may safely conclude that there is some connection between these playwrights. It seems likely that Shakespeare acted in The Jew of Malta and The Spanish Tragedy. He was part of the same group.

It was perhaps a chance of cultural history that this particular collection of young men arose in the same period, and became dedicated to the same new profession. There are other parallels to this sudden burst of efflorescence and magnificent achievement — among English poets, for example, in the late fourteenth century and in the late eighteenth century. In the popular imagination Shakespeare stands alone and inviolable among his contemporaries — quiet, gentle, modest, perhaps rather retiring. But is the popular imagination altogether correct? Instead we will begin to see him as part of a competitive and restless world, where the palm was awarded to the shrewdest, the most energetic and the most persevering.

Strange was also considered to be Catholic or crypto-Catholic, and around him grew a network of suspicion, espionage and intrigue. In 1593 Richard Hesketh delivered a letter to Strange, by then Earl of Derby, asking him to stand as leader of a plot against the queen; Strange surrendered Hesketh to the authorities, but died suddenly in the following year. His unexpected death was popularly ascribed to witchcraft or to poisoning. Is it any wonder that Shakespeare steered clear of contemporary factions and quarrels?

CHAPTER 25 As in a Theatre, Whence They Gape and Point

In 1572 two Acts of Parliament materially affected the status of the players. The earlier of them, promulgated in January, restricted the number of retainers that any nobleman might keep in his service. It was a device by which Elizabeth and her advisers hoped to curb the power of over-mighty lords, but it had an effect upon certain troupes of actors who were cut adrift from noble patronage. So James Burbage wrote to the Earl of Leicester, asking him to reaffirm his patronage of his players.

The urgency of his request is explained by the second Act of Parliament of 1572, which set down conditions for “the punishment of Vagabondes”; among such vagabonds were included “all fencers, bear-wards, common players in interludes, & minstrels, not belonging to any Baron of the realm or towards any other personage of greater degree.”¹ If you were not a retainer of a great lord, you could be whipped and burned through the ear. So these were the conditions that created the new world of players that Shakespeare entered. By force of necessity they had grouped themselves around certain settled employers or patrons. They were also searching for fixed and stable premises where they might perform in London. It was a way of acquiring respectability and of escaping legal punishment. The stratagem was not completely successful — actors and playwrights were routinely hauled before investigations or consigned to prison — but in hindsight it can be seen as a first step in the creation of the London theatrical world and the eventual emergence of the “West End.”

When Shakespeare arrived in London there were several familiar venues for theatrical performances. The oldest of them were the inns or, rather, large rooms within inns which would otherwise have been used for meetings or assemblies. There is a belief that inn-yards, with covered galleries all around them, were the first public theatres; but a moment’s consideration reveals the impracticality of such an arrangement. Inn-yards were places where travellers arrived, where horses were tethered, and where supplies were delivered: places of public ingress and egress. These are not the ideal circumstances for public performances. The only exception occurred in an inn such as the Black Bull, where there was an extra yard connected to the rear yard by a covered alley.

There must have been many more places for performance than are currently known, but a few have been recorded for posterity. The Cross Keys was in Gracechurch Street, where Lord Strange’s Men performed, and the Bell Inn was on the same street. The Belsavage was located on Ludgate Hill, the Bull in Bishopsgate Street and the Boar’s Head was on the north side of Whitechapel Street beyond Aldgate. It is not clear how much they resembled theatres rather than inns; it seems likely, given the continuities of London life, that they were close to the early nineteenth-century “musical saloons” or “music halls” where drink or “wet money” was served to paying customers. Certainly it would be a mistake to think of them as inns that simply put on plays as additional entertainment. The Boar’s Head, for example, had erected a permanent theatrical space on its premises, and for the Earl of Worcester’s Men “the house called the Bores head is the place they haue especially vsed and doe best like of.”² Some of the earliest companies employed, for a stage, wooden planks placed across beer barrels that had been roped together. The great companies worked in the inns, and one contemporary described “the two prose books played at the Bel-savage, where you shall never find a word without wit, never a line without pith, never a letter placed in vain.”³ These are precisely the places where Shakespeare learned his craft at first hand.

By the time of Shakespeare’s arrival, however, there were at least four large structures built as general resorts for entertainment in which the theatre took its place alongside wrestling and bear-baiting. The first ever recorded in London documents, the Red Lion at Mile End, had been constructed in 1567 by John Brayne, citizen and grocer, as a financial speculation. Since he was also brother-in-law to James Burbage, there may have been some family interest in profiting from various forms of public entertainment. James Burbage began as a player but, in the changed circumstances of city life, he became a noted theatrical entrepreneur and father of the celebrated actor who played many of Shakespeare’s most important roles. He was one of those skilful businessmen who seem to sense the movement of the time.

The growth of the city, and the increasing appetite for urban entertainment, presented Brayne and Burbage with an opportunity. The Red Lion sounds like an inn but it was in fact a permanent playhouse, attached to an old farmhouse. Its stage was 40 feet wide and 30 feet deep; there was a trap-door for special effects, and an 18-foot “turret of Tymber” was built above the stage for scenic ascents and descents. The coherence of its design suggests that it was based upon previous models, and was therefore not the first of its kind. It is sometimes suggested that the drama before Shakespeare’s arrival was coarse and rudimentary, complete with wooden daggers and bladders of ox blood. But that is not necessarily so. Of course there must have been much trash, as there has always been — trashy plays were known colloquially as “Balductum” plays — but it would be unwise to underestimate the skill and subtlety of early writers and performers. There is no progress or evolution in theatrical matters — the nineteenth-century theatre is signally worse than the sixteenth-century theatre — and plays now lost were no doubt excellent of their kind.

The Red Lion was followed by a joint venture between John Brayne and James Burbage. They picked another spot outside the city walls, in Shore-ditch, and there in 1576 erected a public building known as the Theatre. They deliberately chose the name from the Latin “theatrum,” and may have hoped that the classical connotation would augment the status of their enterprise; they could not have anticipated that the word would take on generic status. It was a large building, with capacity for some fifteen hundred people seated in three levels of galleries around an open yard; the yard was also used by members of the audience, and the stage was set against one side. This fixed stage had a roof, supported by pillars, and a “tiring-house” at the back that was used for exits, entrances and changes of costume. It resembled the general shape of all future public theatres of the period, in other words. It became the formal setting for Shakespeare’s own plays. Its coherent design again suggests, however, that it was based upon lost originals. It was polygonal in structure, plastered black and white, with a tiled roof. There was a principal entrance, but two external staircases led to the different levels.

It was located in the ancient land of Halliwell or Holy Well, so named from a holy well harboured within a Benedictine nunnery in the vicinity. The name of Holywell Street survives to this day. It marks an interesting association, since other theatrical sites have sprung up beside holy wells. The first miracle plays in London were performed at Clerkenwell beside the clerks’ well, for example, and the Sadlers Wells theatre was erected beside a healing well of the same name. The association has never been properly examined, but it suggests that the theatre was still in a subliminal sense seen as a sacred or ritual activity.

The Theatre itself was erected on the site of the convent, just west of its old cloister. It was close to a horse pond and a great barn. Bordered on its southern and western sides by the Finsbury fields and open ground, it had Shoreditch High Street to the east and private gardens to the north. A ditch and a wall separated it from the fields, and a breach was made into the wall to allow the citizens to walk or ride up to the playhouse. Two years after the establishment of the Theatre a preacher asked: “Will not a fylthye playe with the blast of a trumpette [sooner] call thither a thousande … so full as possible they can thronge?” ⁴ At the blast of a trumpet, then, the people gathered. It is depicted as if it were a relatively new phenomenon, the urban crowd out in force to seek entertainment. In Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory, Richard Tarlton narrated how “I would needs to the Theatre to a play, where when I came, I founde such concourse of unrulye people, that I thought it better solitary to walk in the fields, then to intermeddle myselfe amongst such a presse.” He fell asleep close by, in Hoxton, and when he awoke “I saw such a concourse of people through the fields that I knew the play was doon.”⁵

Where there were crowds, there were also riots and affrays. Four years after the construction of the Theatre, Brayne and Burbage were indicted for causing “tumults leading to a breach of the peace” as a result of showing “playes or interludes.”⁶ In 1584 there was a serious riot involving gentlemen and apprentices. The official documents of the period constantly refer to “the baser sorte of people,” “the refuse sorte of evill disposed and ungodly people,” “maisterles men and vagabond persons,”⁷ who haunted the vicinity of the Theatre.

And what were the entertainments on display there? There were “playes, beare-bayting, fencers and prophane spectacles.” Among the “playes” were The Blacksmith’s Daughter, Catiline’s Conspiracy, The History of Caesar and Pompey, and The Play of Plays. It was the occasion for spectacle and melodrama as well as stage fighting and bawdry. Mention is made of “a baudie song of a maide of Kent and a litle beastly speech of the new stawled roge.”⁸ Yet this was also the setting for some of Shakespeare’s earliest plays. There is an allusion to “the visard of the ghost which cries so miserably at the Theator, like an oister-wife, Hamlet, revenge!” The playwright, Barnaby Rich, wrote of “one of my divells in Dr. Faustus, when the olde Theatre crackt and frighted the audience.”⁹ Marlowe and Shakespeare were on the same ground as the fencers and bear-baiters. They had to match them.

It was a commercial venture by Brayne and Burbage, and was so successful that only the year after it opened another Londoner, Henry Laneham, built a new playhouse a few hundred yards away. This was named the Curtain — not after any theatrical curtain, which did not exist in the period, but after a wall on its ground that offered some relief from wind and bad weather. It was built on the same plan as the Theatre, with three tiers of galleries surrounding an open yard and raised scaffold as stage. A foreign visitor noted that it cost a penny to stand in the yard, and a further penny to sit in the gallery. It cost 3d, however, for the most comfortable seats with cushions. There is an engraving of the period, “View of London from the North,” showing both theatres with flags flying from their roofs; there are fields to the south of them but, to the east, are closely congregated thatched dwellings and barns. These were the suburbs of Shoreditch, where Shakespeare would dwell.

The Curtain and the Theatre soon ceased to compete with one another, and came to a profit-sharing arrangement whereby the Curtain became an “easer” or second home for the theatrical companies. With the presence of two playhouses Shoreditch enjoyed a novel reputation as a place of resort and entertainment, on a larger and more garish scale than any other part of London. It was a centre for passing trade of every description — for sales of food and beer, for trinkets and playbills — and the site of taverns and of brothels. It became a fairground and a market, quite unlike anything else, and was no doubt deeply unpopular with the older residents of the area.

The playhouses themselves were decorated and gilded; the wooden pillars upon the stage were painted so that they resembled gold and marble, while all the accoutrements were designed to be as gaudy and as elaborate as possible. There were painted walls, carvings and plaster modellings. If the Theatre itself was named after alleged classical predecessors, then it was important that it had the air of glamorous antiquity. When Thomas Nashe attempts to describe a Roman banqueting house in The Unfortunate Traveller, he says that “it was builte round of greene marble, like a Theatre without.” In that respect the sixteenth-century playhouses were close in spirit to late nineteenth-century music halls or to early twentieth-century picture palaces. A new communal art demanded new and enticing surroundings. These were the circumstances in which some of Shakespeare’s dramas were performed. Romeo and Juliet “won Curtain plaudities,”¹⁰ and when the Prologue in Henry Prefers to “this wooden O” he is alluding to the Curtain. It is often suggested that Shakespeare himself played the part of the Prologue, in Henry V, and so we can place him on the creaking boards of this theatre.

There was at least one older playhouse south of the river, on the road leading from Southwark High Street and crossing St. George’s Fields. It was erected in 1575 or 1576 and is known to historians only as the playhouse at Newington Butts, after the locality in which it was built. It does not seem to have been as great a success as the Theatre and the Curtain in the north. Nevertheless this southern playhouse was the home of the Earl of Warwick’s Men for four years from 1576, after which it was leased to the Earl of Oxford’s Men.

Even as Shakespeare made his way through London, a new theatre called the Rose was being erected on the south bank of the river by Paris Garden. It seemed to be a harbinger of popular and successful times for plays and players. The Rose itself was being financed and managed by one of a new breed of theatrical entrepreneurs. Philip Henslowe plays a large role in Elizabethan cultural history, in part because of the survival of his “diaries” or registers of payment. In true sixteenth-century fashion the dry account of receipts and payments is interrupted by notations on magical spells and astrological matters. He was a merchant and commercial speculator, only thirty-two at the time of the building of the Rose. It might seem that the Elizabethan theatre was a young man’s game and opportunity, especially when the average age of mortality was forty. Henslowe owned much property in Southwark already, having married a wealthy widow of that neighbourhood, and earned his living from starch-making and money-lending as well as the theatre. But he was another of those businessmen who sensed the direction of their time; he became involved in the building and leasing of three other theatres. It was the “growth industry” of the period that also became a highly profitable one.

The Rose itself was situated on Bankside in Southwark, close to the High Street and in the parish of St. Saviour’s. It was smaller than its predecessors, in large part because of the premium on building land. Its walls were of lath and plaster, its galleries roofed with thatch. It was situated beside two houses for the baiting of bulls and bears, suggesting that it harboured a distinct but associated activity. The discovery of a bear skull and other bones, in recent excavations, does suggest that it also reverted to type. The actors performed among the very reek of animals. The theatre itself was built upon the site of a former brothel, “rose” being the slang name for a prostitute as well as an heraldic emblem, and there were many houses of assignation in the vicinity. Philip Henslowe owned some of them.

In his contract for the theatre there was a clause concerning the repair of bridges and wharves that were part of the property, suggesting the marshy and riverine nature of the area. The excavations have revealed that the Rose was a fourteen-sided polygon, which was the closest approximation to a circle then possible. The advantages of a “wooden O” had become obvious from the success of the Curtain. The archaeologists have come to the provisional conclusion that the theatre was in fact built without a stage, suggesting that Henslowe conceived a multitude of purposes for the space. But then in the course of the first year a stage was added. It stretched out into the yard, and was so located that it received the full light of the afternoon sun; the yard itself was “raked” or sloped downwards, presumably to allow a better angle of vision for the audience congregated there. When the site was investigated in 1989 it revealed, among other items, “orange pips, Tudor shoes, a human skull, a bear skull, the sternum of a turtle, sixteenth-century inn tokens, clay pipes, a spur, a sword scabbard and hilt, money boxes, quantities of animal bones, pins, shoes and old clothing.”¹¹ So the life of the period is retrieved.

It has been calculated that in its original form the Rose held some nineteen hundred people and, after a remodelling of its interior five years later, some 2,400 customers. But the diameter of the theatre measured only 72 feet, roughly the size of London’s smallest contemporary theatres. The diameter of the inner yard itself was some 46 feet. When it is recalled that one of London’s largest theatres, the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, has a maximum capacity of less than nine hundred, the sheer accumulation of people in the Rose is little short of astonishing. It was jammed at least three times as full as any modern place of entertainment. It smelled of rank human odours, of bad breath and of sweat, of cheap food, of drink. The theatres were open to the air in part to expel this miasma of noisome savours. That is perhaps why Hamlet, when meditating upon the stage scenery of the world with its “majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” then alludes suddenly to “a foule and pestilent congregation of vapoures” (1233-4). This was the atmosphere in which the young Shakespeare acted and in which the plays of Marlowe were performed.

These theatres, north and south of the river, north and east of the city walls, varied in size and in construction. It has long been debated whether they were built upon classical principles, or whether they were modelled upon the more impromptu art of the street theatre. Theatrical historians have reached some consensus, however, that these buildings represented the first public theatres in London. But there is reason to doubt that claim. There were certainly public theatres in Roman London, and it seems likely that there were popular venues in the period after the re-emergence of London in the ninth century. In the early twelfth century William Fitzstephen, the first historian of London, noted the prevalence of dramatised saints’ lives in public places. There are also references to “spectaculis theatralibus” and “ludis scenicis.”¹² In 1352 Bishop Grandisson of Exeter referred to “quondam ludum noxium,” a certain unpleasant entertainment, “in theatro nostrae civitatis” in the theatre of our city.¹³ This plainly suggests that there was a building in Exeter which was popularly known as a “theatrum.” If there was one in a provincial city, it seems likely that there was also one and perhaps more in London itself. All the evidence suggests that there was much more secular dramatic activity than is generally recognised, and that certain places in the city were designated as playing areas. Why not, for example, the old amphitheatre that has recently been discovered by the Guildhall? There was also an amphitheatre at Southwark at a very early date.

It has also been argued that the mimi and histriones of medieval provenance continued their work well into Shakespeare’s own period. The mimus put on an ass’s head, as did Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; he worked with a dog, as did Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Thus Shakespeare, and other sixteenth-century dramatists, emerged from many hundreds of years of cultural practice. What could be more natural — inevitable, almost — than continuity rather than abrupt or unanticipated change? Life is a process rather than a hurdle race. It is wrong to assume that somehow the English drama began with the emergence of Shakespeare. He entered what was already a swiftly flowing stream.

CHAPTER 26 This Keene Incounter of Our Wits

Shakespeare arrived in the city at the most opportune possible moment, when the drama of Peele and Lyly had become highly fashionable and the new drama of Kyd and Marlowe was just emerging. By the late 1580s and early 1590s the theatrical companies were performing six days a week with a different play each day. The Admiral’s Company launched twenty-one new plays in one season, and performed thirty-eight plays in all. The Queen’s Men were performing on different occasions and in different seasons at the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, the Belsavage on Ludgate Hill, the Theatre and the Curtain. Lord Strange’s Men were at the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street, the Theatre and then the Rose. There was much movement and change in the theatrical world. The Queen’s Men lost their position of primacy in 1588, as we have observed, and were supplanted by the combined talents of the Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men. This may have been the moment when Shakespeare himself joined Strange’s company.

There were, in addition, such groups as the Earl of Warwick’s Men, the Earl of Essex’s Men and the Earl of Sussex’s Men; they made extended tours of the country, but of course they also performed in London. Gabriel Harvey, a close companion of Edmund Spenser, wrote to Spenser of “freshe starteupp comedanties” with “sum newe devised interlude, or sum malt-conceivid comedye fitt for the Theater or sum other paintid stage whereat thou and thy lively copesmates in London maye lawghe ther mouthes and bellyes full for a pence or twoepence apiece.”¹ We may assume that all the possible venues for theatrical performance were fully booked, by the companies then being formed or consolidated, and that Shakespeare had stepped into an environment where his talents could be fully exploited.

The principal theatrical companies themselves were significantly larger than they were at a later date, but this may in part have been the result of loose associations and amalgamations. The number of players in each company, men and boys, rose from an average of seven or eight to more than twenty. A play like Peek’s The Battle of Alcazar demanded a stage company of some twenty-six players. As a result of larger companies, too, there was more ingenuity in staging, with rapid scene-changing and more spectacular effects. The playwrights themselves grew more ambitious, and began working on a larger scale; by some strange natural process, too, the plays themselves grew longer. All of these forces helped to create a truly popular drama, of which Shakespeare was the principal beneficiary. It was a small world, comprising no more than two or three hundred people at most, but it had a disproportionately large effect upon the London public. It was the most urgent and the most popular form of artistic expression, and in that sense helped to create the new atmosphere of urban life.

The boys’ companies were the darlings of the hour, taking their roles in allegorical drama, classical drama and satirical drama. It may now seem to be an odd taste, among the Elizabethans, for child actors rather than adult actors; but it is connected with the sacred origins of the drama and with the desire to purge it from all associations with vulgarity or vagabondage. Theirs was a form of “pure” theatre in every sense. There were the Children of St. Paul’s, who performed in the precinct of the cathedral, and the Children of the Chapel Royal, who made use of rooms in the old monastery of Blackfriars by the river. They became part of the theatrical ferment of the time. After James Burbage had erected the Theatre in 1576 a musician and playwright, Richard Farrant, rented a hall in the Blackfriars which became known as “the private house in the Blackfriars”; here, under the pretext that they were rehearsing for the queen’s court performances, the Children of the Chapel Royal could attract high-paying customers. From so early a date, therefore, there was in London an “indoor” as well as an “outdoor” playhouse. It would have been inconceivable at the time that the “indoor” theatre would eventually become the choice of the world.

In 1583—through the agency of the Earl of Oxford — the Children of the Chapel Royal secured the services of John Lyly who, with euphonious and stylised dramas such as Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, diverted the more discerning playgoer with displays of courtly dialogue and intricate plots. Lyly had already gained a considerable reputation with his narratives Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and His England, two prose romances which with their intricate and rhetorical style created the literary fashion known as “euphuism”; it was a style that Shakespeare imitated and parodied in equal measure, but it is true to say that none of his comedies is unaffected by it. It was the modern style. Anyone who wished to be contemporary, and of the moment, used it. Like all egregiously modern styles it faded very rapidly.

The residents of Blackfriars were not happy with the press of people who attended the productions of the Chapel Royal Children, however, and in 1584 the owner of the building forced out the boys and masters. So Lyly transferred his attentions to the Children of St. Paul’s, and for some years his “court comedies” continued to charm private audiences. More importantly, for him if not for posterity, his plays were also regularly performed at court, where Elizabeth herself was entertained by the classical allegories he devised. His was in a sense a royal art. When Shakespeare arrived in London Lyly was reaching the height of his success; the most distinguished and artful of all his productions, Endimion, was performed in 1588. He wrote about the mysteries and possibilities of love, both in comic and in sentimental manner; he employed pastoral settings; he created intricate patterns of human behaviour as if they were part of a measured dance; he mixed farce and bawdry with romance and mythology; he charmed audiences with the beauty of his expression; he infused his plots with comedy and with an overwhelming geniality of mood. It is easy to understand the effect upon the young Shakespeare, who had never before seen such plays. It was a new dramatic world of lyrical statement and romantic intrigue. Where would Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream be without the influence of Lyly? There are many passages in Shakespeare’s plays that are strikingly reminiscent of Lyly. Shakespeare was indeed a great cormorant of other writers’ words. Moreover Lyly, just ten years older than Shakespeare, was already a fashionable and relatively wealthy man who was about to be appointed as a Member of Parliament. There was no better advertisement for the rewards of the theatre, albeit of the courtly or private kind. He spurred Shakespeare’s ambition as well as his creation.

Yet the rise of the professional adult companies, employing young playwrights and larger bands of actors, steadily eclipsed the popularity of the boys and displaced the reputation of John Lyly. By 1590 the children had effectively disappeared, only to emerge a decade later under the guidance of yet another new wave of playwrights. Lyly spent his last years vainly seeking court preferment, as aspiring Master of the Revels, and living in what might be called genteel poverty. He wrote nothing for the last twelve years of his life, since the wheels of fashion and literary taste had turned a revolution. “I will cast my wits in a new mould,” he wrote in 1597, “for I find it folly that one foot being in the grave, I should have the other on the stage.”²

The luxury of choice was not given to another contemporary dramatist, George Peele, of whom there is a memorable image in a small volume entitled The Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele. He is described in this catchpenny pamphlet as lodging with his wife and family in Southwark beside the playhouses; here he is to be seen wrapped in a blanket, writing furiously, while his wife and young daughter cook larks for supper. He is also described as “of the poeticall disposition, never to write so long as his mony lasted.” The real and historical Peele became acquainted with Shakespeare soon after Shakespeare’s arrival in London. Peele had a measure of success with drama, but he was equally well known to his contemporaries as an inventor of street pageants and other public shows. That is why his plays were notable for their ceremonial and ritual aspects, and for the expressive clarity of their language. He also catered to the popular taste in blood and gore, in murder and madness. One of his stage directions records the entry of “Death and three Furies, one with blood, one with Dead mens heads in dishes, another with Dead mens bones.” Shakespeare is widely credited for having taken over the first act of Titus Andronicus from Peele and completing the play, while elaborating upon the older writer’s sensationalistic effects. This was the theatrical world that Shakespeare inherited.

Shakespeare was later to parody Peek’s bombast in his history plays, and there may have been some cause for disagreement between the two men. Peele, the son of a London charity school clerk, was proud of his education at Oxford and his status as Master of Arts. Yet it was difficult for even a university-educated dramatist to make his way in the capital; there were too many clerkly writers and too many claimants to noble purses. There is every reason to suppose that young writers were attracted to London because of the rise of the playhouses there, but expectations of plenty are not always rewarded. So Peele tried his hand at various kinds of verse and drama — translations, university plays, pastorals, patriotic shows, biblical plays and comedies. Like literary young men of any and every period, he had to make money whatever way he could; he could have come out of George Gissing’s New Grub Street rather than a sixteenth-century chapbook.

Like literary young men in London, too, he and his contemporaries tended to congregate together. In his lifetime Peele was associated with Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene — all of them “university wits,” spirited, reckless, drunken, promiscuous, wild, and in the case of Marlowe dangerous. As Nashe said of his erstwhile companions, “wee scoffe and are iocund, when the sword is ready to goe through us; on our wine-benches we bid a Fico for tenne thousand plagues.”³ They were the roaring boys of the 1580s and 1590s, doomed to early deaths from drink or the pox. It would be mistaken to view them as some coterie, but they were part of the same literary (and social) tendency. Shakespeare knew them well enough, but there is no evidence that he consorted with them. He had too great a respect for his own genius, and thus a much greater sense of self-preservation. He was too sane to destroy himself — or, rather, he had a much greater need for permanence and stability. It is not known how Peele reacted to a collaboration with this apparently uneducated young actor from the country, but it provoked fury and resentment in at least one of his university colleagues.

So the stage was always ready for new voices. Even as Lyly was being performed at court and in the undercroft of St. Paul’s Cathedral, there were new dramas and new dramatists coming into the ascendant. Shakespeare entered London at a moment of dramatic revelation. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy had caused something of a sensation, and it was swiftly followed by Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. The Spanish Tragedy inaugurated the fashion for revenge tragedy on the London stage; it directly inspired a very early version of Hamlet, which there is some reason to suppose was written by the young Shakespeare. The Spanish Tragedy has many parallels with the more famous play. It has a ghost; it has a variety of murders; it has scenes of madness, real and feigned; it stages a play within a play that promotes revenge; it has a great deal of blood. Unlike the later version of Hamlet, however, it is suffused by an unvarying rhetoric of vengeance and retribution that thrilled its first auditors. It was an immensely powerful and seductive language filled with sensationalist imagery. It became a form of secular liturgy. When Hieronimo advances upon the stage, in a state of undress, he calls out (II, v, 1–2):

What outcries pluck me from my naked bed,

And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear?

The lines became catchphrases, repeated and parodied by other dramatists. They were picked up and redeployed by Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus, when Titus appears in a similarly discomposed state to cry: “Who doth molest my contemplation?” (2106).

Kyd himself was still a young man when he wrote the play. He was born in 1558, just six years before Shakespeare, and was the son of a London scrivener; like Shakespeare he endured a relatively brief education at grammar school, and seems then to have entered his father’s trade. Little is known about him because, as a writer for the playhouses, little was required to be known. One of the few references to him is that of “industrious Kyd,” which suggests that he wrote a great deal for his daily bread. He seems to have begun his career as a playwright for the Queen’s Men in 1583, but by 1587 he and Christopher Marlowe had both entered the service of Lord Strange’s Men. Shakespeare may have followed them. The Spanish Tragedy was enacted by that company, as was Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris.

It is important to note that playwriting was a young man’s occupation — Kyd and Marlowe being no more than twenty-three or twenty-four (and perhaps even younger) when they began their work. “My first acquaintance with this Marlowe,” Kyd later wrote in an exculpatory letter, “rose upon his bearing name to serve my Lord [Strange] although his Lordship never knewe his service, but in writing for his plaiers.”⁴ This immediately raises an intriguing possibility. If Shakespeare joined Lord Strange’s Men in 1586, then he would very soon have become acquainted with Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe; he would, as it were, be part of the same affinity of writers. He acted in their plays. He may even have collaborated with them. It has often been observed how, in his earliest dramas, Shakespeare seems alternately to imitate and parody both dramatists. What could be more natural in a junior member of this confraternity than to copy those whom he was ambitious to succeed? It was the time, after all, of their maximum effectiveness and success. The Spanish Tragedy was so popular that it propagated a number of imitations and was revised in 1602, after the playwright’s death, with additions by Ben Jonson. So for almost twenty years it remained part of the staple fare of theatrical entertainment. What else would the young Shakespeare do but copy it?

There was one other association between Kyd and Shakespeare. Neither had been to university. As products of the grammar school only, they were both criticised by the “university wits” for their lack of learning. They were condemned by Nashe, Greene and other graduates as ex-scriveners or ex-schoolmasters, in terms that make it very difficult to know which of the two is being addressed. So there was a connection.

It was a small and intense world. These young dramatists stole lines and characters from one another. They criticised one another. Their plays were put on in competition, one with another, like the works of the Greek tragedians. The success of The Spanish Tragedy in 1586 seems to have inspired, or provoked, Marlowe into writing another play of bombastic eloquence. The two parts of Tamburlaine were acted at the end of the following year, but the speed of production and performance suggests that Marlowe had already written the plays in outline. They did constitute a revolution in English drama, however, but like other young artists Marlowe quickly acquired notoriety for his life as much as for his art. He was generally regarded as an atheist, a blasphemer and a pederast. He had become, after his first success upon the stage, a notorious renegade.

He was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker who was first shaped by the same kind of grammar-school training that Shakespeare experienced at Stratford; but, unlike Shakespeare, he moved on to university. Even before he attained his degree, however, he was involved in some kind of clandestine government activity. Like the salamander he seemed to live and thrive in fire. His comments, repeated at second hand, were themselves incendiary. He is supposed to have said that “all protestantes are Hypocritical asses” and “all they love not Tobacco and Boies were fooles.” He has been associated with the “school of night,” as we have observed, and is reported to have remarked that “Moyses was but a Jugler & that one Heriots being Sir W Raleighs man Can do more than he.” Heriot and Raleigh were members of that esoteric society. Marlowe was also engaged in various forms of surveillance activity, particularly in regard to Catholics, but it is not at all clear whether he was a government agent, a double agent, or both. He was not in any case someone to be trusted. In 1589 he and another “university wit,” Thomas Watson, were assailed by the son of an innkeeper; Watson stabbed the man to death, with the result that Watson and Marlowe were consigned to prison. Both Watson and Marlowe lived and worked in the theatre district of Shoreditch, which is perhaps where the young Shakespeare encountered them.

Marlowe was in one sense the marvellous boy of English drama. He was the same age as Shakespeare and made the journey to London at approximately the same time. It is convenient to consider Shakespeare as somehow “after” Marlowe, but it is more appropriate to see them as exact contemporaries, with Shakespeare having fewer obvious advantages.

The success of the two parts of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, for example, was immediate and profound. It was an act of dramatic independence on his part to present a pagan protagonist without in any sense disavowing him. Since it is in large measure a drama of conquest and success, it has been suggested that there is no play of contraries to enliven the action; but the contraries exist in the relationship between author and audience. He is perhaps the first dramatist in English to assert himself in the manner of the poets. The drama of the preceding period had remained to a large extent communal or impersonal; but Marlowe changed all that. He introduced a personal voice. It is the voice of Tamburlaine, but within its register there is the unmistakable accent of Marlowe himself (I, ii, 175-8):

I hold the Fates bound fast in yron chaines,

And with my hand turne Fortunes wheel about;

And sooner shall the sun fall from his Spheare

Than Tamburlaine be slaine or overcome.

It excited the audience because it caught the burgeoning mood of ambitious purpose and spirited individualism. It was an Elizabethan voice. If Tamburlaine was guilty of hubris, then so were many other Elizabethan adventurers. It was the penalty of “aspiring minds,” to use Tamburlaine’s own phrase. The thumping rhythm of the verse, comprised of what were called “high astounding terms,” earned the rebuke of a young playwright clearly envious of Marlowe’s sudden success. In a pamphlet published the year after the productions of Tamburlaine, Robert Greene complained that he was being criticised “for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the fa-burden of Bow Bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlan …”⁵ Another Elizabethan pamphleteer, Thomas Nashe, was also caustic about Marlowe’s declamatory verse, describing it as “the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon.”⁶ It was such a new voice that it had suddenly become disconcerting.

It was a voice that Shakespeare heard and internalised; it became one of the many voices that he could call upon at will. In such a relatively small and enclosed world, of course, influences and associations can be traced in every direction. Tamburlaine influenced the shape of Shakespeare’s history plays, and the history plays in turn seem to have affected Marlowe’s composition of Edward II. It is even possible that they collaborated on aspects of the trilogy concerning Henry VI. As has already been observed, the young Shakespeare no doubt also acted in The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris. That he was mightily impressed and influenced by Marlowe is not in doubt; it is also clear that in his earliest plays Shakespeare stole or copied some of his lines, parodied him, and generally competed with him. Marlowe was the contemporary writer who most exercised him. He was the competitor. He was the antagonist to be mastered. He haunts Shakespeare’s expression, like a figure standing by his shoulder. But Shakespeare’s muse was an envious one, ready to deflate or destroy any contestant.

It is possible, however, that the young Shakespeare kept his personal distance from Marlowe. Marlowe’s reputation always preceded him. In the language of another era, he was generally considered to be mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But there was another distinction between the two playwrights. Marlowe, like the other writers trained at university, came to the theatre from the outside. Shakespeare was the first who emerged as a writer through the ranks of a company. He came from the inside, as a fully theatrical professional. He did not consider actors to be hirelings, or servants, but as companions. It is a fundamental difference. In a later play, The Second Return to Parnassus, the actors Burbage and Kempe criticise the “university wits” for writing plays that “smell too much of that writer Ovid, and talk too much Proserpina and Jupiter.” In contrast to these allegorising and mythologising writers “our fellow Shakespeare … it’s a shrewd fellow indeed … puts them all down.” The emphasis here is upon “our fellow,” one of the actors, an integral part of the company rather than some hired hand. It is significant that at first Shakespeare surpassed his university contemporaries in stagecraft rather than in plot. His association with Kyd and Marlowe, through Lord Strange’s Men, nourished strange rivalries.

CHAPTER 27 My Sallad Dayes

Within a few years Lord Strange’s Men had acquired an enviable reputation. This can be measured by the fact that when Leicester’s Men were disbanded, on that nobleman’s death in 1588, many of the players chose to join Strange’s Men. They had good material with which to work. Two of Shakespeare’s earliest plays were already part of the repertoire. We can trace some of their tours in this early period — Coventry in 1584, Beverley in 1585, and Coventry again in 1588—and their likely London venues are well known. In the 1580s, with Shakespeare as one of their number, they played at the Cross Keys Inn, the Theatre and the Curtain. The eclipse of the Queen’s Men after 1588 helped Lord Strange’s Men rise to eminence, and by 1590 they were sometimes acting jointly with the Admiral’s Men as the paramount companies of the period. This meant that they had also acquired the services of Edward Alleyn, the prime actor of the Admiral’s Men and already regarded as the great tragedian of the period. It was he who made such a success of Marlowe’s plays, having taken the leading parts in Tamburlaine, the Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus. Since he acted with Shakespeare, and may have played Talbot in King Henry VI as well as the title role in Titus Andronicus, his acting style is of some interest.

He was very tall, and at a height of over 6 feet towered over contemporaries who were on average 6 inches shorter than their counterparts in the twenty-first century. As a result he was very striking, and excelled in what were known as “majesticall” parts; Ben Jonson alluded to him at a later date in Discoveries with references to “scenicall strutting and furious vociferation.” His role in Tamburlaine, for example, became a byword for “passionate” or “stalking” action — a success all the more remarkable because he was only twenty-one at the time. Nashe said of him that “not Roscius and Aesop, those tragedians admired before Christ was born, could ever perform more in action than famous Ned Allen.”¹ He was in the tradition of non-naturalistic acting, grand and exaggerated. He could, in the phrase of the time, tear a cat upon the stage. It is likely that Shakespeare condemned his style in the words of Hamlet, where “it offends mee to the soule, to heare a robustious perwigpated fellowe tere a passion to totters, to very rags … it out Herods Herod” (1736-7); and indeed Alleyn was better suited to Kyd or to Marlowe. Shakespeare worked much more successfully with Richard Burbage; Burbage was a tragic actor who may have rendered character and feeling with less circumstance and, as it were, subdued himself to his parts. But it would be unwise and unhistorical to draw too broad a distinction between the two actors. Both were conventionally compared to Proteus for their ability to assume a part, and Elizabethan acting was never — and never could have been—“naturalistic” in the contemporary sense. It was always in part a rhetorical performance. The playhouses exhibited the art of speech. The twin reputations of Burbage and Alleyn also throw an interesting light on the larger conditions of the theatre. The 1570s and the 1580s had been the decades of the comic actors, Tarlton and Kempe principal among them, while the 1590s and early 1600s witnessed the rise of the tragic actor as a symbol of Elizabethan drama itself.

In 1590 the Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men had come to some reciprocal arrangement whereby the Admiral’s performed at the Theatre and Strange’s at the adjacent Curtain. In plays that required a large number of performers, they acted together in one or the other of the playhouses which were both now owned by James Burbage. In the following season of 1591-2 the joint company was commanded to perform six times at court. Since Lord Strange was related to the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, there may have been some prejudice in their favour. But they could not have been a disappointment; they returned to court in the following Christmas season, with three separate performances. We have a picture, then, of the young Shakespeare acting before the queen. Among the other twenty-seven actors in Lord Strange’s company, and thus Shakespeare’s colleagues, were Augustine Phillips, Will Sly, Thomas Pope, George Bryan, Richard Cowley and of course Burbage himself. The remarkable fact is that all of these actors worked with Shakespeare for the rest of his life, and that their names are appended to the First Folio of his work published in 1623. They eventually joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Company with him, and stayed within it. It is a plausible supposition that they formed a small body of talent that remained relatively stable in very difficult circumstances. Shakespeare was loyal to them, remembering some of them in his will, and they remained loyal to him.

The titles of some of their early plays have survived, and we can assume that the young Shakespeare at some point acted in such popular dramas as The Seven Deadly Sins, A Knack to Know a Knave, Friar Bacon, Orlando Furioso and Muly Molloco. There is a “plot” or stage précis of one of these plays, The Seven Deadly Sins, in which many of the actors are named — among them Pope, Phillips, Sly and Burbage. There is also a stray reference to the actors who played female parts — among them Nick, Robert, Ned and Will. “Will” is interesting. It may seem implausible that an actor, now in his mid-twenties, would play a female role; but it is not inconceivable. It is, in any case, intriguing.

In these early years Shakespeare’s relationship with Lord Strange himself may have been amplified by a poem. “The Phoenix and Turtle” has puzzled many critics and scholars with its recondite meaning and esoteric vocabulary; but its purpose has also proved perplexing. It is not known to whom it is addressed or upon what occasion. It might have been written for Lord Strange’s sister upon her marriage in 1586.² If that is indeed the case, then the young dramatist’s relationship with this noble family was equivalent to that of a household poet. It has sometimes been suggested that Lord Strange himself directly commissioned Shakespeare to compose the cycle of history plays, as a tribute to Elizabeth and the nation equally. Shakespeare, in his historical narratives, awarded Lord Stanley’s ancestors with notably patriotic and benevolent roles. Lord Strange’s relatives, the Stanleys and the Derbys, are prominent in all three parts of Henry VI; in Richard III the victorious Henry Bolingbroke is crowned by the Earl of Derby. The praise of Clifford in Henry VI, for example, may well be a reflection of the fact that Lord Strange was the son of Margaret Clifford. What better way of acknowledging a patron?

It is not at all clear, however, when Shakespeare began writing these histories, or when he embarked upon comedies such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and melodramas such as Titus Andronicus. Biographers and scholars have argued over these dates for years, if not for centuries, and there is still no agreement. The theatrical records of this period are notoriously imprecise and muddled. The provenance and ownership of early plays are notoriously difficult to prove. Companies of players owned certain plays, as did the managers of the London theatres. There was a great deal of movement between companies, and actors sometimes brought plays with them. Companies also sold plays to one another.

Various inferior plays have been ascribed to Shakespeare as juvenile work, written when he first became acquainted with the stage. Other, more mature, plays have been described as later versions of his apprentice work. Perhaps his first plays have simply disappeared, lost in the voracious maw of time and forgetfulness. Certain surviving plays bear traces of the young Shakespeare’s additions and interpolations. In his first years he may have worked as a reviser of botched or incomplete plays. He may simply have revived old plays by adding new colour. There may, in other words, be a great deal more Shakespeare than is currently included in scholarly editions. Did he collaborate with other dramatists? It is impossible to tell. In his early years he may not even have been particularly “Shakespearian.”

The supposition must be that he began to write long before he came to London — poetry, if not drama, came instinctively and easily to him. Given the large number of plays that have been ascribed to him, it is also fair to assume that he began writing drama soon after first joining the theatre as an actor. His earliest known plays are so expert in construction and so plausible in speech that it is hard to believe that they represent the first exercise of his pen, adept though that pen was. There are certain early plays that may be in part or in whole his work. There was an early version of Hamlet, and perhaps of Pericles. There are other plays which bear the unmistakable impress of Shakespeare’s imagination, Edmund Ironside and Edward the Third. They are well shaped and confident, with a steady mastery of the verse line and a fine ear for invective and declamation. They lack the Shakespearian timbre or tone, but even Shakespeare had to begin somewhere. And there are the strangest moments of recognition — of half-familiar cadences and half-shaped images — as if the shadow of Shakespeare had passed over the page. Textual analysis also suggests that The Troublesome Raigne of King John and Edmund Ironside were both written by the same person, a “young writer, glowing but dimly in the predawn darkness of Elizabethan drama, just before the morning stars sung together.”³ There is one other question that has never satisfactorily been laid to rest. Who else could have written them?

Their inclusion in any list of tentative Shakespearian titles is not surprising, since in many instances they represent the germ or seed from which his more recognisable plays emerge. Nor is it inconceivable that he revised his apprentice work at a later date. It is generally accepted that he continued to revise his plays all his life, keeping in mind the demands of performance and contemporaneity. The suggestion has been rejected by some editors and textual scholars, on the very good grounds that it would make their task of publishing a “definitive” edition of any play quite impossible. But there is every reason to believe that the plays currently available in print offer only a provisional version of the plays actually performed.

So we see Shakespeare attending the plays of John Lyly and George Peek as well as watching the first performances of Tamburlaine. He knew The Spanish Tragedy very well. He was all too aware of Marlowe’s brilliant success. Contemporary literature was also around him. The manuscript of the first three books of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was in London, and the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles had just been published. If he now felt impelled to write for the stage, all these sources and influences were at hand. We also have the alleged “early” plays by Shakespeare that, at a conservative estimate, account for three years of his writing. Indeed they all fall within the period 1587 to 1590. During this period, too, the pamphleteer Robert Greene mounted a number of attacks upon an unnamed dramatist, whom he considered to be both unlearned and a plagiarist of other men’s styles. Who was that particular dramatist?

CHAPTER 28 I See Sir, You Are Eaten Vp with Passion

Robert Greene himself” was one of the “university wits,” a friend to both Nashe and Marlowe, who like many of his Oxbridge contemporaries was obliged to earn his living by hack-work. He was very popular at the time — plays like The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and The History of Orlando Furioso were “box-office successes” for Philip Henslowe at the Rose Theatre. His pamphlets are still considered to be unrivalled accounts of the life of sixteenth-century London. But he was sensitive to slights and extremely envious of his talented contemporaries.

He first attacked Shakespeare overtly in 1592. But earlier and more circumspect criticisms were also directed against him and Thomas Kyd. In 1587 Greene condemned those “scabd lades” who among other things “write or publish anie thing … [which] is distild out of ballets.”¹ The argument still continues whether the plot of Titus Andronicus is derived from a ballad. It was a slight and fleeting reference, but suggestive. In the following year Greene’s companion and fellow wit, Thomas Nashe, continued the assault with an attack upon those writers who “seek with slanderous reproaches to carp at all, being often-times most unlearned of all.”² Kyd and Shakespeare were the only “unlearned” playwrights who had achieved success upon the public stage by this time. In 1589 Greene composed a romance entitled Menaphon in which a “countrey-Author” “can serve to make a pretie speech”but his style is “stufft with prettie Similes and far-fetched metaphors.”³ These would become characteristic criticisms of Shakespeare’s style.

In the preface to Menaphon, Nashe amplified the attack. In 1589, Shakespeare was twenty-five years old. Nashe had just come down from Cambridge, and had decided to live upon his wits; he was the son of a curate from Lowestoft, and his subsequent career seems to fulfil the Greek proverb — son of a priest, grandson of the devil. He colluded with his friend Greene, and soon carved out a career for himself as a satirist and pamphleteer, poet and writer of occasional plays. He was well acquainted with Shakespeare; he hovered in the immediate vicinity of Lord Strange and the Earl of Southampton, looking for patronage and praise, and did not always evince the benign spirit of his contemporary. He was three years younger than Shakespeare and seems to have possessed the hardness or cruelty of early ambition; he resented the success of Shakespeare, and wished to rival or even surpass it. He never could accomplish that goal, and quickly became a bitter and disappointed young man. He was incarcerated in Newgate and died at the age of thirty-four or thirty-five.

In the preface of 1589 Nashe first attacks certain unlearned writers who are happy to appropriate the work of Ovid and of Plutarch and “vaunt” it as their own. “It is a common practice now a daies,” Nashe writes, “amongst a sort of shifting companions, that runne through every arte and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint wherto they were borne, and busie themselves with indeuors of Art, that could scarcelie latinize their neck-verse if they should haue neede.” The trade of Noverint was that of the law-clerk, to which we have tentatively assigned Shakespeare in his youth. The charge that he could scarcely Latinise may be an anticipation of Jonson’s remark about “small Latin and less Greek,” with the obvious implication that this unnamed writer had not attended university. Nashe goes on to remark that “yet English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences, as Bloud is a begger, and so foorth; and if you entreat him faire in a frostie morning, he will afford whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches. But o griefe! Tempus edax rerum, where’s that will last always?” So whom is Nashe attacking? The reference to “English Seneca”—the unnamed writer did not have enough Latin to read it in the original — would yield the thunderous melodrama of Titus Andronicus. The reference to Hamlet is self-explanatory, and in its original form this play may very well have tried to out-Seneca Seneca. And the quotation? “Tempus edax rerum” appears in The Troublesome Raigne of King John, the clear forerunner of Shakespeare’s more famous King John. It is now also a critical commonplace that Shakespeare adapted Ovid and Plutarch.

There is then a description of those dramatists who “intermeddle with Italian translations, wherein how poorelie they have plotted,” a plausible allusion to one of the earliest of Shakespeare’s extant plays, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The playwright is also deemed to “borrow invention of Ariosto”; the plot of The Taming of a Shrew derives in part from I Suppositi of Ariosto. It concludes with a reference to those who “bodge up a blanke verse with ifs and ands”; then, on a more personal note, they are accused of “having starched their beards most curiouslie.” There are later references to starched beards, as well as other allusions to law-clerking and schoolmastering as the unfortunate attributes of a certain country writer. It is an interesting mixture, out of which seems to emerge the elusive form of Shakespeare — indeterminate, not yet full shaped, not yet wholly familiar or recognisable, but Shakespeare.

There are many other specific references, rushing headlong over one another in Nashe’s cryptic and densely allusive prose. “To be or not to be” is ascribed to Cicero’s “id am esse am non esse.” The author is accused of copying Kyd and of trying to “outbrave” Greene and Marlowe with his own brand “of a bragging blank verse.” Can we see also in a reference to “kilcowconceipt” a nod to Shakespeare’s alleged origins in a butcher’s shop? The conclusion must be that these allusions are all pointing in the same direction, to the unnamed author who by 1589 had written early versions of Turn Andronicus, The Taming of a Shrew, King John and Hamlet. Who else might it have been? It was a relatively small world with a limited number of occupants, and there are very few other candidates as the targets for the combined scorn of Greene and of Nashe.

In 1590 Robert Greene returned to the attack. In Never Too Late he abuses an actor whom he names Roscius, after the famous Roman player. “Why Roscius, art thou proud with Esops crow, being pranct with the glorie of others feathers? Of thyself thou canst say nothing …”⁴ He repeats this attack two years later, when he refers to his opponent as “Shake-scene.” But common sense would suggest that this was a long-running campaign inaugurated by a “university wit” who believed himself to be unfairly criticised or neglected in favour of an “unlearned” and imitative “countrey-Author”—who, it seems, never once responded to the attacks upon him.

If the intended target is indeed Shakespeare, then we have evidence that he had a distinctive presence in the London theatrical world by the late 1580s.This means that he had begun writing for the stage very soon after his first arrival in London. The fact that he is also named as “Roscius” suggests that he had already won some acclaim for his skills as an actor. Scholars and critics disagree about any and every piece of evidence; but there is an old saying that, when doctors disagree, the patient must walk away. The figure walking away from us may be the young Shakespeare.

CHAPTER 29 Why Should I Not Now Have the Like Successes?

So we can create a plausible chronology of this earliest period. In 1587, when part of the Queen’s Men, Shakespeare wrote an early version of Hamlet. This juvenile Hamlet has disappeared — except that from Nashe’s account of 1589 we know it contained the words “to be or not to be,” as well as a ghost crying out “Revenge!” There is a long tradition of anecdotal evidence that Shakespeare played that ghost, which would also make sense of Nashe’s otherwise incomprehensible aside on the unnamed writer—“if you entreat him faire in a frostie morning.”

Was King Leir, also written in 1587, an earlier version of Shakespeare’s tragedy? It begins with the famous division of the kingdom, but then diverges from the later version; there are more elements of conventional romance, derived from the popular stories of the period. In particular King Leir has a happy ending in which Leir and his good daughter are reunited. King Leir was performed by the Queen’s Men at a time when it is conjectured that Shakespeare was part of that company, and it is in many respects an accomplished and inventive piece of work. But it is so utterly unlike anything written even by the young Shakespeare that his authorship must be seriously in question. Another possible form of transmission suggests itself. If Shakespeare did indeed act in it, the plot and characters of the original may have lodged in his imagination. In the other early dramas related to Shakespeare, there is a notable consonance between lines and scenes. There is no such resemblance between Leir and Lear, except for the basic premise of the plot. So it seems likely that, on this occasion, Shakespeare was reviving an old story without much reference to the original play. King Leir is utterly unlike King Lear.

There is a third play that can be dated to 1587, if only because of a reference to it in Tarlton’s Jests. “At the Bull in Bishops-gate was a play of Henry the fift, where in the judge was to take a box on the eare; and because he was absent that should take the blow, Tarlton himselfe, ever forward to please, took upon him to play the same judge, beside his owne part of the clowne.” The Bull here is the Red Bull; the clown, Tarlton, died in 1588 and so this version of King Henry V must predate that time. Tarlton was also a member of the Queen’s Men, so the associations are clear enough. The Famous Victories of Henry V, “as it was plaide by the Queenes Maiesties Players,” has survived in an edition published in 1593. It is not a particularly graceful or elegant piece of work, but it does contain scenes and characters that were later taken up by Shakespeare in the two parts of Henry IV and in Henry V. In particular the “low” acquaintances of Prince Harry, Falstaff and Bardolph and the others, are anticipated in the crude but effective humour of Ned and Tom, Dericke and John Cobler, in The Famous Victories. Other incidents in Shakespeare’s plays are also based upon scenes in this earlier drama. Again, as in the case of King Leir, it seems likely that he acted as a member of the Queen’s Men in The Famous Victories and then at a later date employed the elements of the plot that most appealed to him.

There are other intriguing productions that, from internal and external evidence, we may ascribe approximately to 1588. One of the most significant is The Taming of a Shrew, which without doubt is the model or forerunner of The Taming of the Shrew. There are of course differences between A Shrew and The Shrew. A Shrew is set in Greece rather than Italy, employs different names for most of the characters and is little more than half the length of the more famous play. But there are also strong resemblances, not least in the storyline, and a large number of verbal parallels — including exact repetitions of such recondite phrases as “beat me to death with a bottom of a brown thread.” The conclusions are clear enough. Either Shakespeare took over lines and scenes from the work of an unnamed and unknown dramatist, or he was improving upon his own original. On the principle that the simplest explanation is the most likely, we can suggest that Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew was a revision and revival of one of his first successes. The later version is immeasurably deeper and richer than the original; the poetry is more accomplished, and the characterisation more assured. Since they were published some twenty-nine years apart, the author certainly had time and opportunity to re-create or reinvent the text. We may use a simile drawn from another art. A Shrew is a drawing, while The Shrew is an oil-painting. But the difference in execution and composition, the difference between a sketch and a masterpiece, cannot conceal the underlying resemblance. This was obvious enough to the publishers and printers involved in producing editions of both plays; they were both licensed under the same copyright. The publisher of A Shrew went on to print editions of The Rape of Lucrece and the first part of Henry IV, so he retained his Shakespearian connections.

The most intriguing factor, however, in this early play of Shakespeare is the habit of purloining Marlowe’s lines; most of the interpolations were removed at a later date, when they were no longer considered timely, but to a large extent they characterise A Shrew. The two parts of Tamburlaine had been performed in 1587, and when A Shrew’s Fernando (aka Petruchio) feeds Kate from the point of his dagger, he is satirising a similar scene in Marlowe. The young Shakespeare also continually parodies the language of Doctor Faustus, which strongly suggests that it was the successor of Tamburlaine on the stage in 1588. There is the old proverb about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, and from the evidence of A Shrew Shakespeare was mightily impressed by Marlowe’s rhetorical verse. But it is clear that he already had a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, and realised that the bravura of Marlovian poetry might seem inept in a less rarefied context. At a later date he would contrast the high rhetoric of the heroic protagonists with the low demotic of the ordinary crowd. The young Shakespeare had, in other words, an instinctive comic gift.

In both versions of the drama he also reveals a highly theatrical sensibility. The play is set within a play; the themes of disguise, of changing costume, are central to his genius; his characters are very good fantasists who change identity with great ease. They are all, in a word, performers. The whole essence of the wooing between Kate and Petruchio is performance. There is here a plethora of words. The young Shakespeare loved word-play of every kind, as if he could not curb his exuberance. He loved quoting bits of Italian, introducing Latin tags, making classical allusions. For all these reasons the play celebrates itself. It celebrates its being in the world, far beyond any possible “meanings” that have been attached to it over the centuries.

The Taming of a Shrew was in turn satirised by Nashe and Greene in Menaphon, published in 1589, and in a play entitled A Knack to Know a Knave, reputed to be the fruit of their collaboration. We must imagine an atmosphere of rivalry and slanging which, depending on local circumstances, was variously good-humoured or bitter. Each young dramatist quoted from the others’ works, and generally added to the highly coloured and even frenetic atmosphere of London’s early drama. Only Shakespeare, however, seems to have quoted so extensively from his rival Marlowe; the evidence of A Shrew in fact suggests that there was some reason for his being accused, by Greene, of decking himself in borrowed plumes. It is all very high-spirited stuff, and A Shrew is nothing if not swift and vivacious, but the egregious theft of Marlowe’s lines suggests that he did not intend the play to be taken very seriously. It was simply an entertainment of the hour. Yet, like many English farces, it proved to be a popular success.

If he could already triumph in comedy, there was no reason why he should not have tried his hand at history. Two of the other plays emerging in 1588, plausibly attributed to the young dramatist, are Edmund Ironside and The Troublesome Raigne of King John. Edmund Ironside has been the subject of much scholarly dispute,¹ the controversy further inflamed by the fact that a manuscript version of the play can be located in the Manuscript Division of the British Library. It is written in a neat legal hand, on partly lined paper also used for legal documents, and displays several of Shakespeare’s characteristic quirks of spelling and orthography. The eager student may call up the document, and gaze with wild surmise on the ink possibly drawn from Shakespeare’s quill. Like the mask of Agamemnon and the Shroud of Turin, however, the relics of the great dead are the cause only of bitter rivalries and contradictory opinions. Palaeography is not necessarily an exact science.

The play itself concerns Edmund II, best known for his spirited defence of England against Canute in the early eleventh century. Canute and Edmund are seen in conflict, military and rhetorical, but their high intentions are often thwarted by the machinations of the evil Edricus. When the play ends in concord Edricus, in uncanny anticipation of Malvolio, stalks off the stage with the words “By heaven I’ll be revenged on both of you.” The part of Edmund may have been meant for Edward Alleyn, fresh from his success as Tamburlaine and Faustus. The drama is in any case fluent and powerful, with a steady attention both to rhetorical effect and to ingenuity of plotting. It still seems fresh upon the page which, by any standard, must be a criterion for its authorship. It was not immediately licensed for performance, however, because the spirited dispute between two archbishops in the play was considered indecorous in a period when the clergy were lampooning each other in the religious squabble known as the “Martin Marprelate Controversy.” It was not in fact performed until the 1630s.

It is in essence a revenge tragedy, on the model of The Spanish Tragedy, complete with the amputation of hands and the mutilation of noses. It also marks, in Edricus, the first appearance of the theatrical Shakespearian villain:

They cannot so dissemble as I can

Cloak, cozen, cog and flatter with the king

Crouch and seem courteous, promise and protest…

The genuine Shakespearian note once more emerges, the words an obvious preliminary to those of Richard III. Edmund Ironside has been described as the first English history play, but in fact that honour can be claimed by the unknown play on the exploits of Henry V staged at the Red Bull. But Edmund Ironside is the first history play derived from an imaginative reading of historical sources; the story is in part based upon Holinshed’s Chronicles, the source from which King Leir also springs. It uses Ovid. It uses Plutarch. It uses Spenser. It is permeated by legal and biblical phraseology in a manner to which successive generations of Shakespearian scholars have become accustomed. It incorporates “low” comedy in prose beside high rhetoric in verse, placing both in an intriguing perspective. It shares the same misunderstandings of classical mythology as does the work of the young Shakespeare. It uses the imagery of “butchery” for the first time in English drama, imagery which became something of a Shakespearian speciality. It has the phrase “all hail,” and the immediate reference to Judas, which is a hallmark of Shakespeare’s plays.² There is also an odd interpolation on the subject of the parting of a newly wedded couple:

as sadly as the late espoused man

Grieves to depart from his new-married wife.

How many sighs I fetched at my depart

How many times I turned to come again …

All the characteristics conspire to make one pertinent question. Who else but the young Shakespeare could possibly have written it in 1588? Marlowe, Kyd, or Greene? None seems so appropriate or so convincing as Shakespeare himself.

Edmund Ironside can be adduced, then, as evidence of the young Shakespeare’s talent for re-creating historical narrative on stage. Other dramatists copied him, Marlowe’s Edward II being the most famous example, but none had his instinctive ability to create memorable action out of the sometimes laboured descriptions of the chroniclers. He was able to depict character in expressive speech, to summarise the manifold causes of action with significant detail, and to invent memorable plots. His greatest and earliest gift, however, was perhaps the introduction of comedy as a respite from tragical or violent action. He had a perfect “ear” for variation and change.

These early plays are not admitted into the official Shakespeare “canon.” Many scholars believe there is no evidence, external or internal, to indicate who wrote them. Could it be simply that they are not considered sufficiently “Shakespearian”? But Shakespeare himself was not immediately “Shakespearian.” Early Wilde was not “Wildean,” and the young Browning was not in the pattern of the mature Browning. Shakespeare’s plays were published long after they were written and performed; many were not printed until after his death. He had time, in other words, to revise and embellish.

His earliest plays are written in the approved “new” style of his contemporaries; they are fluent, even if on occasions they show facility rather than inventiveness. They use end-stopped declamatory verse with Ovidian and Senecan flourishes; they include Latin tags and general classical allusiveness. They are also written with great spirit and bravura, as if the words and cadences emerged effortlessly from some source of overflowing energy and confidence. But he was also learning his craft all the time, and the astonishing fact of his early development is the speed of his progress. He learnt from the reactions of the audience, and the responses of the players; the range of his language was immeasurably enlarged and deepened as he experimented with the various forms of drama. He was highly attuned to the language all around him — the poems, the plays, the pamphlets, the orations, the speech of the street — and he absorbed everything. There was perhaps no greater assimilator in the history of English drama.

It has also been plausibly conjectured that in 1588 Shakespeare wrote another play, based upon the chronicles, which was later published as The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England. Shakespeare’s King John is certainly closely modelled upon it, to the extent that it can best be seen as a revision or adaptation of the older play. There is not one scene in King John which is not based upon an original scene in The Troublesome Raigne. One nineteenth-century critic remarked that “Shakespeare has no doubt kept so closely to the lines of the older play because it was a favourite with the audience.”³ It is much more likely, however, that he kept closely to the earlier scenes because he had written them. Otherwise once more we are presented with the strange anomaly of Shakespeare extensively purloining the work of an unknown and unnamed writer and passing it off under his own name. He even copied the historical errors of the original.

The later publishers of The Troublesome Raigne, in 1611 and in 1622, were in no doubt about the matter; they accredited it as the work of “W Sh” and “W. SHAKESPEARE” without ever being corrected. It is sometimes suggested that sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century publishers were in some way incompetent or negligent, and that they regularly put false names on their title pages. This is in fact not the case. They were stringently regulated by their guild, the Stationers’ Company, and could incur large fines for any breach of standards. There were of course occasional rogue printers who would try to pass off inferior work as that of “W.S” or some other suggestive name, but the printer of the 1611 edition of The Troublesome Raigne, Valentine Simms, was well known to Shakespeare and was responsible for the first editions of four of his plays. He would not have put “W Sh” on a book without some warrant for doing so.

The play itself takes its place in the continuing rivalry between the playwrights of the period. It is written in two parts, imitating Marlowe’s Tamburlaine of the previous year. But its address to “the Gentlemen Readers,” printed as a prologue in imitation of the prologue to Tamburlaine, criticises “the Scythian Tamburlaine” as an “Infidel” and thus an inappropriate subject for the stage of a Christian country. Where in his own prologue Marlowe scoffs at the “jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,” the author of The Troublesome Raigne is at some pains to compose many such rhymes. The Troublesome Raigne was in turn parodied by Nashe in the following year. All this was part of the battle of the young writers, which in this period was conducted at a level of comic aggression and burlesque. It gives Shakespeare a context, however, and a character.

But the extant play does provide difficulties of identification and interpretation that, incidentally, throw light upon the dramatic conditions of the period. There is one scene in The Troublesome Raigne, concerning the pillaging of an abbey for its gold, which is utterly unlike anything Shakespeare ever wrote. It is a comic scene, but of a very degraded kind. So we might infer that someone else added this scene — perhaps the comic actor who played one of the parts. It was quite usual for the comedians to write their own lines. The fact that Shakespeare did not include this scene in his revised King John suggests that it was not his work. So we have a play of mixed parentage.

We can then see the genesis of his drama in three separate but related circumstances. He wrote several early dramas that he later revised; he acted in certain plays, particularly when he was a member of the Queen’s Men, which he then recalled and re-created in his own versions; he collaborated with other dramatists and actors. It is a muddle that cannot at this late date be resolved, but it has at least the virtue of indicating the confused and confusing circumstances in which Shakespeare emerged.

CHAPTER 30 O Barbarous and Bloody Spectacle

There is little argument that the young Shakespeare did indeed write most of Titus Andronicus, a stirring classical melodrama, a blood-and-thunder piece designed for the popular market of the public playhouse. The first act was almost certainly composed by George Peek and Shakespeare was brought in to finish the work, another example of early collaboration. It is just possible that Shakespeare wrote the entire play, having decided to imitate Peek’s ceremonial and processional style, although the motive for doing so is unclear.

Titus Andronicus is a play that attempts to beat Kyd and Marlowe at their own game, a revenge tragedy on a large and bloody scale. Shakespeare borrows structure and detail from Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and renders them more colourful and theatrical; already his sense of stagecraft is much more assured than that of his older contemporary. He took his stage villain, Aaron, from the model of Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta; but he made him much more wicked. He echoes Marlowe all the time, just as he had explicitly done in The Taming of a Shrew. The drama has lashings of Ovid and Virgil, as if to prove the point that Shakespeare had also been given a classical education. He quotes lines from Seneca in the approved fashion of the day, and at one point a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is brought on stage like some memorial to his schooldays. But in dramatising Ovid, as it were, he is engaged in quite a new enterprise. He is in a sense dramatising poetry itself. He was developing his own earliest gifts.

Titus Andronicus has violent deaths, and equally violent mutilations and amputations. The heroine, Lavinia, has her tongue cut out and her hands lopped off. She is then obliged to write down the name of her murderer with her remaining stumps, holding a stick in her mouth. The right hand of Titus is cut off on stage. The horror reaches a climax in the concluding scene when the wicked queen eats the flesh of her two sons, baked in a pie, before being stabbed to death by Titus, who is himself murdered. It is so extravagant a drama — and one still very shocking to a contemporary audience — that it has been supposed that Shakespeare was parodying the worst excesses of the genre. But there is no evidence at all for that assumption. It would also run against all the practice of the sixteenth-century stage, where the revenge tragedy was still too novel and exciting a form to be ridiculed in that self-reflecting manner. It is unlikely, for example, that an Elizabethan audience would have laughed at the sight of Lavinia with her hands chopped off; it was still a punishment deployed in public places. There is a case for saying that Shakespeare pushed the spectacle of bloodshed to its extremes precisely because he was writing for citizens inured to violent and painful deaths. He wished his audience to sup its full of horrors, and he entered the spirit of the proceedings with such gusto and relish that he forgot or abandoned any sense of theatrical decorum. It was a case of declamation rather than explanation. It may of course be doubted whether such a sense of decorum existed in public playhouses that could also be used for bear-baiting and bull-baiting. Everything was permitted at this early stage in public and professional drama; there were no rules and no conventions.

His is in any case the pure joy of invention, beyond the boundaries of comedy or tragedy. He is captured by the sheer enthusiasm for display and rhetoric and spectacle. That is why he wrote fluently and quickly, even borrowing a line verbatim from The Troublesome Raigne in the process. There were a few dramaturgical errors and inconsistencies, but we may recall the words of the German critic A.W. Schlegel when writing of Titus Andronicus. “It is even highly probable,” he suggested, “that he must have made several failures before he succeeded in getting into the right path. Genius is in a certain sense infallible, and has nothing to learn; but art is to be learned, and must be acquired by practice and experience.”¹

Titus Andronicus was in any case not seen as a “failure” at the time. A hugely popular play, still praised and performed thirty years after its first production, it conferred upon the young Shakespeare reputation and prestige. The actual date of the first production cannot now be verified; it might have been first performed under the title of tittus & vespacia before being revised three or four years later. It had music and spectacle. It required a large cast for the various ritual and processional scenes. It was so scenically interesting, in fact, that it inspired the first known drawing of a Shakespearian production; this was executed by Henry Peacham, the author of The Complete Gentleman, but it is not at all clear whether it is a record of a stage performance or of some idealised reconstruction. The action and the attitudes, however, can be taken as authentic of Elizabethan acting.

It is a curious fact that the earliest productions of writers and dramatists contain the seeds of their future works, as if in embryo, so that in Titus Andronicus we can see the first stirrings of Caliban and Coriolanus, Macbeth and Lear, all as it were vying for attention. On more than one occasion Shakespeare adverts to the “prophetic soul.” Great writers are much more likely to be inspired by their unknown future than by their known and constricted past. Expectation, rather than experience, fuelled his genius.

And then, as seems to have been his custom, he revised the play in later years for different actors or for different productions. He even added an entire scene that has very little relation to the plot but does bear upon the revelation of character. It seems likely that he had a ready and instinctive grasp of stagecraft before he turned his attention to expression. Unlike his contemporaries he was already possessed by a firm idea of characters in action and of characters in response to action. When they emerged from his pen they were already engaged in the game.

So from a possible early version of Hamlet to Titus Andronicus we have some six or seven plays which might have been composed by the young Shakespeare in the first two years after his arrival in London — among them The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The Taming of a Shrew, Edmund Ironside and The Troublesome Raigne of King John. It has been objected in the past that he could not possibly have written so many plays in so short a space of time — at any reckoning, some three or four a year. But that is completely to misapprehend the conditions of the sixteenth-century theatre. He was not a modern dramatist. The wonder is that he did not write more. Indeed other plays, or parts of plays, have been ascribed to him. Plays were composed,performed and discarded at an astonishingly rapid rate — with seven or eight new plays performed by each of the companies in any one season. Contemporaries like Robert Greene produced them on demand, and were lucky if their works had a dramatic life of a month or a week. They were not considered to be literature in any sense. In addition Shakespeare wished to make his name, and fortune, in the theatre. Comparisons with his later rate of production are not appropriate. He wrote quickly, and furiously, filled with the first momentum of his genius.

There is a portrait of a young man known as the Grafton Portrait, from its ownership by the Duke of Grafton in the 1700s. In this picture the age of the sitter is given as twenty-four, and the date of composition is 1588. On the back has been written “W + S.” Its association with Shakespeare might be easily dismissed as wishful thinking, except that the young man bears a striking resemblance to the engraving of the older Shakespeare in the First Folio. The mouth and jaw are the same, as are the ridge of the nose and the almond-shaped eyes. The whole set of the expression is the same. This young man is dark-haired, slim and good-looking (in no way precluding the image of the somewhat stout and bald gentleman of later years); he is dressed in fashionable doublet and collar, but his expression is alert if also somewhat pensive. He is one who could, if necessary, take on the romantic lead. It has been suggested that the young Shakespeare, at the age of twenty-four in 1588, could not possibly have afforded such fashionable and expensive clothing. And how could he or his father have paid the portraitist? But if he were already a successful dramatist, what then? It is in any case a glorious supposition.

CHAPTER 31

Ile Neuer Pawse Againe,

Neuer Stand Still

So a picture emerges of the young dramatist, still in his mid-twenties but already achieving considerable popular success with a multifarious range of histories, comedies and melodramas. He turned his hand to anything with the expedition and confidence of one who seems able to give his words wings. He wrote; he collaborated with others. The qualities with which he was later associated, abundance and copiousness, were evident from the beginning. Yet he was also earning his living as an actor, a “hired man” who was already playing demanding roles. He had moved to Lord Strange’s Men by 1588, confirming Henslowe’s later note that the company owned a play entitled “harey the vi.” In the early months of 1589 they were travelling in the country. But there is a lacuna in the records, and it is impossible to trace the course of their theatrical journeys. They were back in London by the autumn of that year at the very latest, however, where they are recorded as playing at the Cross Keys Inn.

There had been some public controversy over certain farces referring to religious disputes of the time, and the Lord Mayor of London summoned the Admiral’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men to prohibit them from performing in the city. It was an indication of the constant tension between the civic authorities and the playing companies. A letter from the Lord Mayor, of 6 November, declared that the Admiral’s Men had obeyed the request but that Lord Strange’s Men “in very Contemptuous manner departing from me,went to the Crosse keys and played that afternoon, to the greate offence of the better sorte that knewe they were prohibited.” As a result “I coulde do no lesse but this evening Comitt some of them to one of the Compters.”¹ It is possible that Shakespeare was one of those consigned to prison.

Lord Strange’s Men then proceeded from the Cross Keys, where they were now banned, to the Curtain, which was outside the jurisdiction of the city authorities. The Curtain was their “summer” house, but it was fortunately empty in this period. In the early months of 1590 they were performing such entertainments as Vetus Comoedia while their rivals, the Admiral’s Men, were playing beside them at the Theatre. But by late 1590 they were collaborating again. In the performances given at court before the queen, in December 1590 and February 1591, the company is officially named Strange’s in one document and Admiral’s in another. They had become indistinguishable, in other words, and together they would have had the resources to mount the large and lavish productions that were never rivalled in later years. And this combined company was the one in which Shakespeare and his principal history plays were to be found.

But where was he to be found in a more local sense? John Aubrey described the young dramatist as “the more to be admired because he was not a company-keeper; lived in Shoreditch; wouldn’t be debauched; and if invited to, writ he was in pain.” He acquired this information at second hand, but it was accurate enough. Shoreditch was the neighbourhood where actors and playwrights consorted together in the same lodgings and taverns. There were even specific streets where the actors were located. This was the pattern of habitation in sixteenth-century London, where trades and tradesmen congregated. Shakespeare lived where he worked, close to the playhouses in which he was engaged, a neighbour of his fellow actors and their families.

Among Shakespeare’s neighbours in Shoreditch in the late 1580s were Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, together with their respective families, living in Holywell Street. The comedian Richard Tarlton resided in the same street with a woman of dubious reputation known as Em Ball. Gabriel Spencer, the actor later murdered by Ben Jonson in a brawl, lived in Hog Lane. The Beeston family also lived in this lane. A few yards down the thoroughfare, in a small enclave known as Norton Folgate, lived Christopher Marlowe and Robert Greene. Thomas Watson, the playwright, also lived there.

If Shakespeare had wished to be “debauch’d” there were plenty of opportunities in that neighbourhood. The presence of the theatres attracted inns and brothels. It was in Hog Lane that Watson and Marlowe were involved in a murderous fight with the son of an innkeeper, for which they were committed to Newgate. In The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, the neighbourhood is described as one where “poore Scholers and souldiers wander in backe lanes and the out-shiftes of the Citie with never a rag to their backes” in the society of “Aqua vitae sellers and stocking menders” together with prostitutes “sodden & perboyled with French surfets”; there were fortunetellers and cobblers and citizens on the search for “bowzing and beerebathing.” When Shakespeare introduced the “low life” of his plays, the pimps and the pandars and the prostitutes, he knew at first hand of what he wrote. There was a row of houses along both sides of Shoreditch High Street and it is possible that the young Shakespeare lodged in one of them, within a few yards of the old stone-and-wood church of St. Leonard where were eventually buried many of the players with whom he worked. If he had not returned to Stratford before his death, this might have been his last resting place. It was famous for its peal of bells.

By late 1590 the Admiral’s Men were once again playing at the Theatre and Lord Strange’s Men at the Curtain; there is evidence, for example, that the former acted Dead Man’s Fortune at one theatre and the latter performed The Seven Deadly Sins at the other. Shakespeare was working alongside the greatest tragedians of his generation, Alleyn and Burbage, as well as assorted comics and character actors. It was a highly combustible mixture of individual talents, and there is much historical evidence of violence, argument and affray between actors, between actors and public, between actors and managers. One incident occurred in the winter of 1590, when the widow of John Brayne — who, as we have seen, was one of the original owners and builders of the Theatre — fell into dispute with James Burbage over the division of the takings. The widow and her friends arrived at the gallery entrance, one November night, and demanded their share of the money. Burbage then described her as a “murdering whore” and went on to say, according to later court testimony, “hang her hor” and “she getteth nothing here.” Richard Burbage, the tragic actor, then came forward with a broomstick in his hand and began to beat the widow’s men. They had come for a moiety of the takings, he said, “but I have I think deliuered a moytie wt this & sent them packing.” When someone spoke out in defence of Mrs. Brayne, “Ry. Burbage scornfully & disdainfullye playing wt this depotes Nose sayd that yf he delt in the matter he wold beate him also and did chalendge the field of him at that tyme.”² It is part of the rumbustious texture of the sixteenth-century London world and would deserve no notice here, were it not for the fact that certain scholars have traced the presence of this quarrel in Shakespeare’s rewriting of King John. Shakespeare of course often introduced contemporary material for the sake of his audience. In this production it is likely that Richard Burbage played the quasi-heroic figure of the bastard Faulconbridge. To have Burbage playing himself — as it were — as well as Faulconbridge would have been the cause of some amusement. We can never hope to recover the full range of allusions that Shakespeare introduced within his drama, but it is important to realise that they are nonetheless embedded in his texts.

A theatrical quarrel of more serious consequence took place six months later, in the spring of 1591, when Edward Alleyn was engaged in a dispute with James Burbage. The precise cause and nature of their controversy are not known, but no doubt it had something to do with money. Burbage may have been treating his actors in the same high-handed manner which he had shown to the widow Brayne. The consequence was that Alleyn decamped to the Rose, the theatre on the other side of the Thames that was owned and managed by Philip Henslowe. He also took with him a large part of the combined Admiral’s and Strange’s company of players as well as certain play-books and costumes. Richard Burbage of course stayed in the northern suburbs, in the theatres owned by his father, together with a group of players who had not wished to set up with Alleyn in a new playhouse. Among those who stayed with Burbage were John Sincler, known as Sinklo, Henry Condell, Nicholas Tooley, and Christopher Beeston. All of them, with the exception of Tooley, would also work with Shakespeare for the rest of his life. It is interesting that, in his revision of King John, Shakespeare gives Richard Burbage the most heroic part in the play. From the evidence of the surviving playbooks, too, it can be assumed that he was one of those who decided to stay with the Burbages and the others at the Theatre. They were eventually granted the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke, and became known as Pembroke’s Men.

Shakespeare no doubt decided to remain with Burbage and his men because he would then be the principal writer of the company. It was gratifying to have a company at hand to give expression to his vision of the world. As resident playwright he seems also to have brought some of his plays with him, as if he exercised a proprietorial right over them. This was unusual, since the plays generally belonged to the companies or to the managers of the playhouses, but it suggests that even at this early stage he was not lacking a certain business acumen or professional expertise. That is how Burbage’s players were able to perform Titus Andronicus and The Taming of a Shrew.

They also performed two other plays, The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, which anticipate the second and third parts of Henry VI. They may in fact have been written before the separation between Alleyn and Burbage. Another form of contention now surrounds these two early dramas, predictably between those who believe that they were written and subsequently revised by the young Shakespeare, those who argue that they were composed by one or two unknown and unnamed dramatists, and those who insist that they are later reconstructions. The first supposition seems the most likely. Both plays were published by reputable stationers, and a later combined edition of 1619 is declared to be “Written by William Shakespeare, Gent.” The First Part of the Contention anticipates the second part of Henry VI in almost every respect, from whole scenes to individual lines and the smallest phrases. The True Tragedy bears an equally strong resemblance to the third part of the historical trilogy. The order of the scenes is the same; the long speeches are the same; the dialogue is the same. There can scarcely be any doubt that they are the originals of, and models for, the later and more accomplished plays.

There are certain scholars, however, who suggest that The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy actually came later and were in effect “memorial reconstructions” of Shakespeare’s own plays. By “memorial reconstruction” is meant the theory that a group of actors, who had played in both parts of Henry VI, came together and tried to recall the words and scenes of the plays so that they might act or publish them for their own purposes. They remembered what they could, and invented the rest. The texts themselves do not bear out this interesting hypothesis. Many of the longer speeches are remembered word for word while other shorter scenes and passages are not remembered at all. It is odd that, despite their lapses of memory, they were able to produce coherent plays that manifest integrity of plot, language and imagery. Which inspired actor, for example, produced the line “Et tu Brute, wilt thou stab Caesar too?” He could not have been “reconstructing” Julius Caesar because it had not yet been written.

The simple response, to textual evidence such as this, is to agree that the young Shakespeare wrote these early plays and then over the course of time revised them for performance. The overwhelming similarity between The Contention and The True Tragedy and the second and third parts of Henry VI rests on the fact that they were all written by the same person with the same skills and preoccupations. There is no evidence for any theatrical conspiracy, and it is hard to imagine an occasion when it would be deemed necessary. Who were these actors who patched up plays already known to be composed by Shakespeare? To what company did they belong? And why was no action taken to prevent their publishing their speculative and illicit ventures? It is scarcely likely that, in 1619, Shakespeare’s name would be attached to the re-publication of their fraudulent endeavours. The theory defies common logic.

It is significant, too, that these plays represent further ventures into the genre of the history play that he had already fashioned in The Troublesome Raigne of King John and Edmund Ironside. He returned to the chronicles for much of his information, and again produced an historical spectacle complete with processions and battles. He knew that he excelled in this kind of work, and he knew also that it was extraordinarily popular.

All of the formidable qualities of the second and third parts of Henry VI are to be found in The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy. There is in all of them a truly epic breadth of scale with wars and rebellions, battles on the field and confrontations in the presence chamber; there is the poetry of power and of pathos, as well as the more martial clangour of duel and dispute; there are fights at sea and on land; there are murders and a plentiful supply of severed heads; there are death-beds and scenes of black magic; there is comedy and melodrama, farce and tragedy. Shakespeare invents passages of history when it suits his dramatic purpose. He revises, excises and enlarges historical episodes in the same spirit. It is clear that the young dramatist was revelling in his ability to invent paradigmatic action and to orchestrate great scenes of battle or procession. From the beginning he had a fluent and fertile dramatic imagination, charged with ritual and spectacle. The public stage was not then fixed; it was fast and fluid, capable of accommodating a wide range of effects. There was no dramatic theory about historical drama; playwrights learned from each other, and plays copied other plays. Shakespeare was still imitating Marlowe and Greene at this early date in his career, to such an extent that one or two scholars have ascribed these plays to them. This is most unlikely. The best analogy at this later date is with the historical films of Sergei Eisenstein, in particular the two parts of Ivan the Terrible where grave ritual and grotesque farce are held together in a context of overwhelming majesty. We may imagine the Shakespearian actors to have been as stylised, in action and in delivery, as the performers of the early Russian cinema. The plays represented a ritualised and emblematic society where matters of heraldry and genealogy were of immense importance. They themselves are a form of ritual, like a religious ceremony assisted by chanting and incantation.

Shakespeare was an apologist for royal power. He makes the Catholic distinction between the priest and his office — the weak priest or king must still be obeyed because of the sacredness of his role. His sympathies may be found also in the fact that he describes the followers of Jack Cade as a “rabblement,” quite different from the presentation of them in the chronicles. Cade was the leader of the disaffected multitude who in 1450 constituted the “Kentish Rebellion” against the government of Henry VI. It was an unsuccessful uprising, yet Cade himself is vilified by Shakespeare in a manner wholly at odds with his immediate sources. Shakespeare seems to have been averse to any kind of popular movement. In particular he ridicules the illiteracy of the London artisanal class, as if to be literate (as he was) was a singular mark of distinction and separation from the mass. He felt himself to be apart.

But there is a curious paradox here, one which he and his audience may have observed. The sixteenth-century theatre is a democratising force. Common players assume the roles of monarchs. On the space of the stage itself nobles and commoners are sometimes engaged within a shared action. There is no dramatic difference between the varying ranks of society. In the history plays Shakespeare creates ironic associations and parallels between the chivalric action of the nobles and the comic action of the commoners, as if he were testing the true potential of the theatre. It is a complicated point, perhaps, but one that suggests the subversive or revolutionary potential of the stage. It was in essence a populist medium.

In revising at a later date The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, he changed the sentence structure of certain scenes, added or excised stray lines and even words, removed local London detail and furnished more set speeches. He did not touch the actual structures of the plays but merely embellished and elaborated upon them. He also widened and deepened the characterisation. In the process of revising The True Tragedy, for example, he significantly added to the part of the Duke of York. It is most likely that when Shakespeare effected these revisions he already had in mind, or had written, The Tragedy of King Richard III. In The True Tragedy Richard compares himself to “the aspiring Catalin,” Catiline being a noble conspirator against the Roman Republic, but in the revised version Richard compares himself more villainously to “the murtherous Macheuill.”

Shakespeare also changed the parts in order to complement the actors. He altered the characterisation of Jack Cade, for example, to incorporate the talents of Will Kempe, who had become the principal comic of his company; he added the detail that Cade is a wild morris-dancer, at which dance Kempe was known for his skills. In the revised version of the play, too, the stage-directions refer to “Sinklo,” “Sink.” and “Sin.”; this was not a character in the play but, rather, the name of the actor John Sinklo or Sincler, who was well known for his extreme slenderness. This suggests that Shakespeare was rewriting the part with Sincler fully in mind and eye.

These revisions and alterations were no doubt part of his practice with all of his drama. It is only through chance or fortune that copies of The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy, Edmund Ironside and The Taming of a Shrew, have survived. Shakespeare was also learning and changing his craft in another sense. His later historical dramas, in particular the two parts of Henry IV, display much more subtlety and inwardness both in their characterisation and in their action. The demonstrative and oratorical mode of the earliest plays is subdued in favour of Falstaff’s wit and the old king’s melancholy. It has even been suggested that Shakespeare’s histories led him directly towards his experiments with tragedy and that one form cannot really be separated from the other. Certainly Shakespeare himself does not seem to have distinguished between them. The cry of “Et tu, Brute” in the drama appropriately entitled The True Tragedy points in that direction; the English history plays lead to Julius Caesar, which in turn proceeds towards Hamlet.