Shakespeare: The Biography

CHAPTER 37 Stay Goe, Doe What You Will

Shakespeare did not stay within Southampton’s immediate circle. With the disintegration of Pembroke’s Men in the late summer of 1593, and perhaps after a short period as Southampton’s secretary at the time of the plague, he joined another theatrical company. The sequence of attributions in the playbooks of his drama suggests very strongly that he served briefly with the Earl of Sussex’s Men until the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the following year. If he had in fact joined Sussex’s Men soon after leaving Pembroke’s, then he is likely to have toured with them in the autumn and winter of 1593. They were at York in late August, moving on to Newcastle and to Winchester. At the beginning of 1594 they had returned to London, where the theatres had been permitted to reopen for the Christmas season. They performed Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus on three occasions at the Rose before the theatres were again closed down as a result of the plague. In his diary Henslowe registered it as “ne,” but the significance of this is unclear. It cannot mean “new,” as is sometimes supposed, since one play is twice given the same notation. It may mean that the play has been newly licensed by the Master of Revels, the censor of the period, or it may mean that it was new to a particular company’s repertory. Other theatrical historians have supposed that it is an abbreviation for Newington Butts. The most likely meaning, in the context of Titus Andronicus, is that it was newly revised from an original play entitled by Henslowe tittus & vespacia and performed by Lord Strange’s Men three years before.

On the last day of performance, 6 February, Titus Andronicus was entered on the Stationers’ Register for publication. Shakespeare had brought it with him from Strange’s Men to Pembroke’s Men, and then from Pembroke’s Men to Sussex’s Men; on his joining the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in the summer of 1594, the new company performed his play once more. If we follow the successive productions of the play, we are also following Shakespeare’s own trajectory. The publication of Titus Andronicus immediately after the theatres were closed down suggests that Shakespeare saw a chance to make some profit out of a successful venture; the publisher or stationer, John Danter, by chance Nashe’s friend and landlord, also issued a ballad on the same subject as a way of gaining some additional pennies.

In the Easter season of 1594, the theatres were again opened for a short period. For eight evenings Sussex’s Men joined with the Queen’s Men to perform at the Rose, their combined forces perhaps signalling the hard times of the previous months, and in the first week of April King Leir was performed on two occasions. This was the play in which Shakespeare acted and which at a later date he transformed utterly.

He changed his address in this period, and in the available records he is found to be living in Bishopsgate rather than in Shoreditch. The two neighbourhoods are in fact only a short distance apart — no more than five minutes’ walk — but Bishopsgate was a more salubrious area, with less taint of the brothel and the low tavern. He was part of the parish of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, just by the wall in the north of the city, and close to the church that was reputed to have been founded by the Emperor Constantine. This was the church where he was obliged to worship, and where he would surrender a metal token at the communion table as a sign of his presence. In the assessment roll of the parish he is listed nineteenth, and the relatively small valuation of 13s 4d reflects the value of his furniture and his books. He lodged in a set of chambers within one of the tenements here.

It was a residential area favoured by the richer merchants, among whose number could be counted Sir John Crosby and Sir Thomas Gresham. Crosby Place was in the parish, a late fifteenth-century mansion in which Richard III had lodged when he was Lord Protector; Shakespeare knew it well, and set part of The Tragedy of King Richard III there. It had also been owned by Sir Thomas More and, at the time of Shakespeare’s residence, it was inhabited by the Lord Mayor. The parish was also a harbour for several families of French or Flemish origin, and in fact there was a slightly less agreeable area known as “Petty France.” At a later date he would lodge with a Huguenot family in Silver Street; he preferred the company of what were termed “strangers” in the course of his restless London life. Another neighbour was Thomas Morley, the madrigalist and gentleman of the Chapel Royal; since Morley wrote the music for two or three of Shakespeare’s songs, at some stage they became acquainted. As an actor Shakespeare would also have been trained as a singer, and in his plays he displays a technical knowledge of musical terms. Is it too much to speculate that he and Morley joined in the universal Elizabethan pastime of music-making?

John Stow, the sixteenth-century London topographer, described the parish as containing “divers fair and large built houses for merchants and such like … many fair tenements, divers fair inns, large for receipt of travellers, and some houses for men of worship.” There was a new water conduit in the neighbourhood which, in the sanitary conditions of the period, was of great local benefit. So Bishopsgate had certain advantages over Shoreditch. The large inns here — among them the Bull, the Green Dragon and the Wrestlers — were well known for their commodious quarters. One of them, the Bull, had its own public stage where the Queen’s Men used to perform.

If Shakespeare was not quite yet a “man of worship,” in Stow’s sense, he was travelling ineluctably in that direction. His move to Bishopsgate may in fact have coincided with his admission into the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in which he also progressed from “hired man” to “sharer.” The company was established in the spring of 1594 by Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, who wanted to bring order into the general confusion of the London playing companies. The connection of the companies and the court should never be forgotten, since the principal purpose of the players was theoretically to provide entertainment for Her Majesty. The quality and continuity of that entertainment were now in jeopardy. The plague and the subsequent closure of the theatres had affected all of the companies. Some of them, like the Queen’s Men, had divided. In April Lord Strange had died, under mysterious circumstances, and Lord Strange’s Men came under the less certain patronage of his widow. So it became the Lord Chamberlain’s business to provide a durable and reliable source for the queen’s entertainment.

And so Hunsdon advanced an ambitious scheme. He established a duopoly in the city. He would patronise a new company to be called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men while his son-in-law, Charles Howard, the Lord High Admiral, would patronise and support a group of players to be known as the Lord Admiral’s Men. The Lord Admiral’s Men would be led by Edward Alleyn, and would perform at the Rose in Southwark owned by Philip Henslowe; the Lord Chamberlain’s Men would be led by Richard Burbage, and would perform at James Burbage’s theatres at Shoreditch. One troupe would command the south of the river, in other words, and the other would dominate the northern suburbs. As a concession to the civic authorities, who were not happy to see playhouses formally established in the suburbs, Huns-don agreed that no inns would be employed for the staging of the drama. It was a very neat arrangement that, in its pristine form, did not last for very long.

Hunsdon acquired the players for his new venture by poaching the best actors from a variety of companies — among them Lord Strange’s Men, the Queen’s Men and Sussex’s Men. From Sussex’s Men, he took William Shakespeare. Several of the players in Sussex’s Men went over to the Lord Chamberlain’s with Shakespeare; among them we find John Sincler and Richard Burbage himself. There seems to have been one other division of the spoils. When the Lord Admiral’s Men took Alleyn they were also granted the bulk of Marlowe’s dramas. When Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain’s, he brought with him all of his plays. This was their great advantage. From this time forward the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were the sole producers of Shakespeare’s drama. In the whole course of his career only they ever performed his plays. Soon after their union, in fact, they were performing Titus Andronicus, The Taming of a Shrew and a play called Hamlet. At the time of their formation they may also have inherited plays from other companies. They may have given these plays, such as Hamlet and King Leir, to their resident playwright for the purposes of reshaping and rewriting for the new cast of players. It is also likely that, in these circumstances, Shakespeare would feel moved to rewrite his own earlier plays for the new company. It was, after all, a fresh start. The company was an innovation. It deserved new-minted texts. It has been estimated that 90 per cent of their plays have not survived the trials of time and usage; certainly almost half of their extant texts are by Shakespeare himself, which at least testifies to his endurance and popularity. They were saved and reissued; the others were simply discarded and forgotten.

CHAPTER 38 We few, We Happy few, We Band of Brothers

This extraordinary group of players, known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, became Shakespeare’s good companions for the rest of his life. He wrote for, and acted with, them only. They were his colleagues but, on the evidence of wills and other documents, they were also his intimate friends. They were also the most enduring company in English theatrical history, maintaining a recognisable identity from 1594 until 1642, a period of almost fifty years in which they performed the greatest plays in the history of world theatre.

We know the identity of some of them. Apart from Richard Burbage there were Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, George Bryan, John Heminges, John Sincler, William Sly, Richard Cowley, John Duke and the comedian Will Kempe. Heminges seems to have had a reputation for his business acumen as well as his acting; he became the financial manager of the company, and was named frequently as the overseer or trustee in his fellows’ wills. He died a wealthy and respectable citizen, given the title of “Gent.” in the confirmation of his arms by the College of Heraldry; he was also a “sidesman” or official in the parish of St. Mary Aldermanbury, an indication that the status of the acting profession had risen considerably during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Heminges may well have played older character parts, such as Polonius and Capulet.

Augustine Phillips was another actor who, like Heminges and Shakespeare, was granted a coat of arms. He also died a wealthy man, with a country estate at Mortlake. He was a leading member of the company, and it was he who was once called in front of the Privy Council to represent his fellows. He seems to have been primarily a “straight” player, acting as “second” to Richard Burbage in parts such as Cassius and Claudio; but he could also entertain the audiences with farcical comedy. There is a notation in the Stationers’ Register of spring 1595 for “Phillips his gigg of the slyppers”—a “gig” or “jig” being an interlude of music, dancing and comic repartee. An Elizabethan actor had to be versatile. He had to be able to dance, to sing, to play an instrument, and if necessary to fight a convincing duel upon the stage. Thomas Pope, for example, was an excellent acrobat and clown as well as a player; he, too, took out a coat of arms. John Sincler, known as “Sinklo,” was a man of extraordinary thinness and as a result of his uncommon appearance played a number of comic roles including Pinch in The Comedy of Errors and Justice Shallow in the second part of Henry IV. He is also likely to have played such parts as the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet. It is clear, in fact, that Shakespeare created several roles with Sincler in mind.

Yet the most versatile comic actor in the company was undoubtedly William Kempe. The most famous clown in the country, he was small and stout, especially with padding or “bombasting,” but quick and nimble on his feet. He was well known, in particular, for his gigs and his morris-dancing. There are many references and allusions to his dances. When not dressing up as a female street-seller he wore the costume of a country clown; he had shaggy and unruly hair; his humour was farcical and often obscene; he had a great gift for extempore repartee, or “gagging,” with the audience. He could “make a scurvy face” and “draw his mouth awry,”¹ indicating that comic routines have not necessarily changed very much over the centuries. The humour of the Elizabethan stage, and indeed the humour of the medieval mysteries and interludes, survives still in farce and in pantomime. It is one of the unchanging features of the English imagination.

Kempe would often perform his own “routines” during the course of the play, and thus temporarily bring the action to a halt. Hamlet complains of the habit in his directions to the players, when he instructs them to “let those that play your clownes speake no more then is set downe for them, for there be of them that wil themselues laugh, to set on some quantitie of barraine spectators to laugh to”(1767–9). This was a direct hit against Kempe, who had just left the Lord Chamberlain’s Men after some disagreement with his fellows. The quarrel may have been over just such a matter of comic performance. It is possible that in an earlier version of Hamlet Kempe “gagged” too often in his role as the clown and gravedigger; there would be a certain poetical justice in reprimanding him in a later version of the same play.

At an earlier date, however, other playwrights welcomed his dances and improvisations. It saved them the labour of invention. There are even indications that they would mark Kempe’s entry in the playbooks, and then leave the rest to him. In one version of Hamlet (in this play, as in so many others, there is evidence of continual revision) Shakespeare even quotes some of Kempe’s catchphrases—” cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?” as well as “My coat wants a cullisen [scutcheon]” and “Your beer is sour,” the last line no doubt delivered with the mouth famously “awry.” There is no doubt, too, that when they first worked together Shakespeare fashioned parts specifically for Kempe. In a similar spirit of professionalism Mozart wrote operatic roles for specific singers, and often would not write an aria until he had heard the voice of the singer who would take the part. So when Grumio saws cheese with a dagger, or when Cade dances a morris or laps up drink from the earth, Shakespeare had Kempe’s drolleries very much in mind. Kempe played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. He played Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV. In the second play there is a stage direction, “Enter Will,” a few lines before Falstaff begins singing a ballad “When Arthur first in court …” So Kempe was cued to enter, no doubt to the delight of the audience, a minute or two before breaking into song. At the end of the play Kempe appeared upon the stage, still dressed as Falstaff, and asks the audience: “If my tongue cannot intreate you to acquite mee, will you commaund me to vse my legges?” This is the cue for a jig, in which the rest of the players are likely to have joined. Shakespeare would have danced with him, too, and in that “merry moment”—to use an Elizabethan expression — we gain an authentic glimpse of the Elizabethan theatre.

In this same epilogue Shakespeare promises a further episode in the story “with Sir Iohn in it.” But in the succeeding play, Henry V, Falstaff mysteriously disappears and his death off-stage is merely described. There have been many critical and artistic interpretations for this absence, but the true reason may be more prosaic. In the interval between Henry IV, Part Two and Henry V, Will Kempe had left the company. Without the star comic player, there was no point in bringing back Falstaff. There was no one to play him. It is best to remember that the plays of Shakespeare are dependent upon theatrical circumstance. It may go against the current grain of interpretation to see Falstaff as a wholly comic character, complete with dances and extemporal quips; but, again, it is part of the more strident nature of the Elizabethan theatre. Falstaff’s wooden stick, red face and great belly would have immediately reminded the audience of the stock figure of the clown; anachronistically, Falstaff has more than a trace of Punch about him. But the clown was also a theatrical version of the Lord of Misrule, and what better description could there be of Falstaff himself?

When Kempe left the Lord Chamberlain’s Men he performed a “wonder” by dancing all the way from London to Norwich, and described himself in a pamphlet as “Caualiero Kempe, head-master of Morrice-dauncers, high Head-borough of heighs, and onely tricker of your Trill-lilles and best bel-shangles betweene Sion and mount Surrey”²—a sentence suggesting that some elements of English humour have been lost for ever. If he had indeed left after a disagreement with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men it gives added resonance to his address to “My notable Shakerags” in the same pamphlet, by which name he subsumes all of his enemies or “witles beetles-heads” and “block-headships” who had been spreading rumours and slanders about him. In the same place he refers to “a penny Poet whose first making was the miserable stolne story of Macdoel, or Macdobeth, or Macsomewhat: for I am sure a Mac it was.” It is generally assumed that he is not referring to Shakespeare’s Macbeth but, rather, to a ballad on the same subject. Nevertheless it is an interesting allusion.

In the company of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men there were some sixteen actors, including five or six boys who played the female parts. Although there was no guild of actors in sixteenth-century London these boys served an unofficial “apprenticeship”; their training was not fixed at the seven years required in other trades, and its length seems to have varied from three years to twelve years. The boys had a “master” in one of the older actors, with whom they lodged and by whom they were instructed. One contract reveals that the boy, or in fact the boy’s parents, paid a specified sum of £8 so that he could be taken into service; the master then promised to pay his charge 4 pence a day and to teach him “in playinge of interludes and plaies.” The ambition of these stripling players was to rise into the profession by degrees, and if possible become an integral part of the company with whom they were trained. As the wills and estates of Shakespeare’s fellow actors prove, it was about to become a very lucrative employment indeed. The boys were generally treated as part of the master actor’s family, and were often held in great affection by their theatrical parents. Edward Alleyn’s wife wrote to her husband, when he was on tour, asking if “Nicke and Jeames be well & commend them.” Shakespeare could not have had an apprentice because, unlike some of his colleagues, he belonged to no guild.

It is generally believed that only boys played the female roles on the Elizabethan stage, but there is some cause to doubt that assumption. Young adult males possibly took on the mature role of Cleopatra, for example, where the resources of even the most skilful boy might prove ineffectual. That there were very accomplished child actors is not in doubt. In Shakespeare’s company we know that there was a tall fair one and a short dark-haired one, simply because there are references in the texts to that effect. There is a remarkable sequence of comedies in which two girls vie for theatrical attention — Helena and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Portia and Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice, Beatrice and Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It, Olivia and Viola in Twelfth Night. It seems likely that the same gifted pair of boys played all of these parts, providing further evidence of the extent to which Shakespeare’s art was defined by the potential of his company.

There are other influences. The members of the company may have suggested to Shakespeare stories that were suitable for dramatisation; they may have lent him books and the texts of old plays. In rehearsal, too, there would undoubtedly have been suggestions from the actors on the revision of a scene or dialogue. His was not a case of single-handed or single-minded invention. There can be no doubt at all that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men helped to create Shakespeare as an “author”.

As well as the actors and apprentices in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men there was a book-keeper who also acted as prompter with perhaps an assistant stage-keeper, a wardrobe-keeper or “fireman,” stage musicians, a carpenter or two, “gatherers” who collected the money at the doors before each performance, and of course stagehands. There were differences in status and income among them, the most important distinction being that between “sharer” and “hired man.” A “sharer,” as Shakespeare was in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, put up a sum of £50 on joining the company. He was then eligible for a share in its income, once a portion of the receipts for each performance had been paid to the owner of the playhouse and to the rest of the company. It was a theatrical version of the “joint stock company” which played so large a part in the economics of the late sixteenth century. At a later date Shakespeare also became a “house-keeper,” when he was part of the group who owned the Globe playhouse. It was a way of cutting out the “middle men” or theatrical entrepreneurs such as Henslowe; since the house-keepers took half of the proceeds from the gallery, it proved to be highly profitable.

Each of the nine “sharers” in the company was also one of the principal actors, and it has been estimated that their roles took up some 90 or 95 per cent of the dialogue in each play; the “hired men” were minor actors who played only the smaller roles that could be learned without undue delay or extensive rehearsal. It seems likely that the “sharers” made their decisions, financial or artistic, by means of majority voting. Heminges and Shakespeare were no doubt known for their business acumen, and it is more than likely that the advice of Shakespeare was sought on new plays and new playwrights. He is credited, for example, with bringing the plays of Ben Jonson to his company. According to Nicholas Rowe the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were about to reject Every Man in His Humour “when Shakespear luckily cast his Eye upon it, and found something so well in it as to engage him first to read it through.” The story may be apocryphal but it accurately reflects his task of “reading through” new plays for their dramatic potential. The “sharers” were also required to arrange rehearsals, purchase costumes, put up playbills, plan for future productions and engage in all the general administration which a busy theatre requires. They paid for all those involved in the theatre, of course, from book-keeper to gatherer; they also paid for new plays and new costumes as well as the costs of licensing plays with the Master of Revels. They were also obliged, by Elizabethan custom, to give money to the needy poor of the parish.

It was a society of friends and colleagues, in other words, with common interests and common obligations. It was an extended family, with the actors living in the same neighbourhood. The actors married into one another’s immediate families, too, uniting with various sisters, daughters and widows. In their wills they left money, and various tokens, to one another. It was a family that played together and stayed together. They were “ffellowes,” to use the word they themselves employed.

They were also zealous and industrious. Alone among the companies of the period the Lord Chamberlain’s Men avoided serious trouble with the civic authorities and stayed out of prison. When one contemporary satirist exonerated certain actors from his aspersions, calling them “sober, discreet, properly learned honest householders and citizens well thought of among their neighbours at home,”³ it was of just such men as Shakespeare and Heminges that he was writing. In a volume entitled Historia Histrionica they are described as “Men of grave and sober Behaviour.”⁴ More than any other company of their generation they helped to elevate the status of actor beyond that of the vagabond and the acrobat.

CHAPTER 39 Lord How Art Thou Changed

The actual nature of their acting is still not fully understood. There is some argument, for example, over the rival claims of traditionalism and realism in the Elizabethan theatre. Did the actors rely upon formal techniques of oratory and gesture or were they exploiting a new vein of naturalism in their movement and their delivery? The published reports of Burbage, for example, tend to emphasise his naturalness and fluency. His method was described as “personation,” and was deemed to be the way of projecting an individual character “to the life” or “with lively action.” It was a way of “counterfeiting” passions that avoided what was known as “pantomimick action”.

Shakespeare often alludes to what was clearly considered to be an old-fashioned style of acting — when actors sawed the air with their arms, stamped upon the stage, interrupted their speeches with sighs, and rolled their eyes to signify fear. The old mode of walking across the stage was strutting. The word “ham,” used as a description of bad acting, comes from the visibility of the ham-string of the leg. Strutting was apparently accompanied by ranting. It is what Thomas Nashe described as “ruff raff roaring, with thwick, thwack, thirlery bouncing.”¹

Burbage’s style could then be described as a drift away from external symbolism towards imitation. In an earlier period the essential purpose of the actor had been to represent passion; it seems likely that Burbage and his colleagues had initiated or exploited a style of acting in which the player tried to feel or express that passion. This new emphasis can be identified with the new role of individualism in social and political life, displacing any sense of symbolic or divinely appointed hierarchy.

It may well be that some new art of emotive or emotional action, employed by Burbage and his colleagues, would help to explain the impact of Shakespeare’s plays upon his contemporaries. He may have written in a new “inward” style precisely because there were players who could readily create such effects. Shakespeare differs from his predecessors in the amount of self-awareness that his characters possess. This, too, may have been a consequence of a new style of acting. Yet it should also be remembered that the company performed many plays other than those of Shakespeare, plays that were written to accord with more conventional styles of action and gesticulation.

Of course the definition of what is “natural” changes with every generation. In the sixteenth century there were “Marks, or Rules, to fix the Standards of what is Natural.”² All that can be said with any precision of Shakespeare, in this respect, is that he understood the technical language of the psychology of his period. It was required of actors, in the words of a contemporary dramatist, to “frame each person” so that “you may his nature rightly know.”³ By “nature” he meant the dominant humour, sanguine or phlegmatic, choleric or melancholic, which in turn would seem to require some traditional representation. The aim of the sixteenth-century actor was to impersonate a specific passion or range of passions as they impinged upon an individual temperament; the majority of characters and situations on the Elizabethan stage, for example, are concerned with the tension between reason and passion in human behaviour with all its potentially comic or tragic consequences. It was also important for the actor to be able to enact “reversals” or “transitions” in which one passion suddenly gave way to another. The actors played a part, and not a character. That was why the art of “doubling” had become so important, and why boy actors were perfectly acceptable in female roles; the spectators were aware of the difference in sex, but they were more concerned with the action and the story. That is why there is very little, if any, “motivation” or “development” in a modern sense. Why is Iago malicious? Why did Lear divide his kingdom? Why is Leontes jealous? These are not questions to be asked. There was no appetite for realism as it is presently understood, which is why Shakespeare was able to set his plays in distant and enchanted places with no loss of power.

So a modern audience would no doubt be surprised by the amount of formality involved in all types of Elizabethan acting. It might find the acting at times risible or grotesque. The fact that at the Globe and elsewhere so many plays were produced and acted so quickly, with as many as six plays in a single week, does suggest that there were elements of “shorthand” in the performance which the actors adopted quite naturally.

Improvisation was known as “thribbling.” The players would cluster, or confront one another, in traditional formal arrangements. There were orthodox ways of signalling love or hate, jealousy or distrust. The actor would find it perfectly natural to address the audience in aside or soliloquy, but in a formal rather than confidential or colloquial way. The great set speeches were recited rather than impersonated, and would have been accompanied by traditional gestures. The only general lighting effect was daylight, and so facial expressions would have been exaggerated and deliberate. The actor was advised to “looke directly in his fellowes face.”⁴ A spectator of Othello in 1610 recalled of Desdemona that “at last, lying on her bed, killed by her husband, she implored the pity of the spectators in her death with the face alone.”⁵ Yet all of these effects would have been accompanied at the Globe by soaring poetry and words so enthralling that they took the audience with wonder.

The other consideration must rest with the size of the audience, to be numbered in thousands rather than hundreds. There could be no attempt at intimacy. The action was vivid, strident and compelling. It is clear enough that some of the surviving texts are long, and that the actors would have spoken very quickly to compress the plot within two or even three hours. Action, too, was brisk as well as lively. Without the aid of artificial tools, their voices were open and full, their speech distinctive and resonant. The word “acting” itself derives from the behaviour of the orator, and some of those oratorical gifts were still required. That is why Richard Flecknoe stated that Burbage “had all the parts of an excellent orator (animating his words with speaking, and speech with action).”⁶ Burbage knew, for example, how to change the pitch or tone of his voice; he was trained to abbreviate or lengthen syllables to register the stress of emotion. His delivery itself may have been rhythmic or “musical,” distinctly at odds with the rhythms of contemporary speech. Shakespeare often uses the effect of very brief sentences, one after another, in a rhetorical device known as “stichomythia.” This required a highly theatricalised version of dialogue. There was no such thing as a “normal”voice in the Elizabethan theatre, and it is extremely unlikely that the modern tones of “dialogue” were ever heard upon its stage.

Action and gesture, as any orator knew, were as important as voice. The technique was known as “visible eloquence” or “eloquence of the body.” This encompassed “a gracious and bewitching kinde of action,”⁷ using the head, the hands and the body as part of the total performance. Much of the audience was not able to see the actor’s face, except occasionally, so the player was obliged to perform with his body. To lower the head was a form of modesty. To strike the forehead was a sign either of shame or admiration. Wreathed arms were a sign of contemplation. There was a frown of anger and a frown of love. Dejection of spirit was noted by the pulling down of the hat over the eyes. The hand in motion must travel from left to right. There were in fact fifty-nine different gestures of the hands, to signify various states ranging from indignation to disputation. Thus in Hamlet’s soliloquy he would have extended his right hand for “To be” and then the negative left hand for “or not to be”; he would bring them together in the deliberative mode for “that is the question.” Shylock would have his fists closed for the most important scenes. The physicality of the acting was an important — perhaps the most important — aspect of the total theatrical effect. As the classical physician Galen had taught the Elizabethans, there was a vital union between mind and body. It was believed that the four humours actually changed the body and the physiognomy; sorrow literally contracted the heart and congealed the blood. When an actor suddenly changed his dominant passion in a “reversal,” everything about him changed. It was an act of self-transcendence, associated with the legendary figure of Proteus, and an act of magic. It was believed also that the overflowing animal spirits of the actor could affect the spirits of the audience. To act meant to act upon the spectators. That is why the Puritans considered the playhouses to be such dangerous places.

We may speculate, then, that the acting of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men did not represent a complete break with the conventions or the traditions of the theatre. A completely new or revolutionary style would have attracted adverse comment. Of course the audience was unlikely to be aware of any distinction between the “artificial” and the “real”; it could not have occurred to them to wonder, in these first days of the public theatre, whether a particular play was real or unreal. Whatever moved their passions was real enough. For the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, therefore, it was a question of adding new techniques and attitudes to the old ones. It was no doubt characterised by a mingling of formality and naturalism which would look decidedly odd in a modern theatre but might have been exciting or “realistic” for the late sixteenth-century audience. It is a combination that can never, and will never, be repeated.

CHAPTER 40 Bid Me Discourse, I Will Inchaunt Thine Eare

It is interesting to contemplate Shakespeare as actor. At grammar 7 school he would have had some rudimentary training in oratory, and one educationalist described the requirement for schoolboys “to pronounce with pleasing and apt modulation, tempered with variety.”¹ The emphasis was upon “sweete pronunciation” which, given Shakespeare’s general disposition and reputation, would seem to have been one of his attributes. Like his colleagues he must have possessed a truly phenomenal memory, having had to learn literally hundreds of parts. There was a section of rhetoric, taught at school, which dealt with precisely this matter. It was called mnemonics.

He remained an actor for more than twenty years, a longevity that required considerable energy and resilience. He knew that actors were recommended to exercise the body, to practise moderation in meat and drink, and to sing plainsong. He was originally taught to sing and to dance, possibly to play a musical instrument and to tumble like an acrobat. English actors were well known, on the continent, for their skills in “dancing and jumping”² as well as music. They performed in English in such countries as Germany and Denmark, but they were still widely admired. English actors were generally believed to “excel all other in the worlde,”³ a statement that may be true still. Shakespeare was also taught how to wrestle. He learned to fence, too, in what were highly realistic bouts with rapier and dagger or broadsword. Actors were often trained at the fencing school of Rocco Bonetti, in Blackfriars, and Shakespeare may well have attended. There are a great many stage-fights in his plays; no other dramatist of the period used them so frequently or with such dramatic effect, which suggests some particular interest on his part. His audiences were in any case thoroughly acquainted with the art of fencing in all of its forms. It was an aspect of daily life. Most males above the age of eighteen would carry a dagger.

There has been endless speculation about the roles Shakespeare played, ranging from Caesar in Julius Caesar to the Friar in Romeo and Juliet, from Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida to Orsino in Twelfth Night. It has been suggested that he played the Chorus as well as the Friar in Romeo and Juliet and Egeon in The Comedy of Errors; he was Brabantio in Othello and Albany in King Lear. Theatrical legend has claimed over the centuries that he played the Ghost in Hamlet and the part of Adam, the aged retainer, in As You Like It. He is also presumed to have enjoyed “kingly” roles. It is supposed that he played the king in both parts of Henry IV. We can speculate that he was the monarch in Henry VI, King John, Henry IV and Cymbeline as well as the dukes of The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We may expect, then, an authoritative and even regal bearing with resonant voice. He seems also to have impersonated dignity and old age. There is a preoccupation with encroaching old age in the sonnets — was he exorcising his fear by acting it out? He is said to have played “a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person.”⁴ If the account is not wholly apocryphal, this would be Adam in As You Like It. These characters also have a tendency to be of, but somehow apart from, the action. One biographer has described it as a “blend of centrality and detachment,”⁵ which seems curiously like Shakespeare’s general bearing in the world. No doubt, in the process of composition, he had a pretty shrewd idea of what parts he himself would play.

He rarely played comic roles, and might have “doubled” two or three minor parts rather than the central or principal part. It is sometimes suggested that he would say the first line, or the last line, of the play: an attractive idea, but one that could not always have been possible. It does seem likely, however, that he took on the character of prologue and epilogue or chorus in those plays where they were introduced. In that sense he was what the French called the “orator” of the company, coming on stage at the beginning or end of the play to represent all of the players. This was the role of Moliere, the author and actor who most resembles Shakespeare, at the Palais-Royal Theatre. It has been said of Moliere that he “was all actor from his feet to his head; it seemed as though he had several voices; everything in him spoke; and by a step, a smile, a glance of the eye or the shaking of the head he suggested more things than the greatest talker could have said in an hour.”⁶ Given the difference in nationality and culture, this seems like an approximate description of Shakespeare himself.

It would also be sensible to suppose that Shakespeare played those roles in which he could simultaneously watch or “direct” the other actors in rehearsal, rather like the conductor of an orchestra. In many of the parts to which he has speculatively been assigned, he would remain on stage for much of the action. He may have choreographed the exits and the entrances, for example, and given a structure to the duelling scenes. Moliere was also considered to be a highly skilful trainer of other actors, and one colleague said that he could make a stick act. Perhaps Shakespeare had the same gift.

It is well enough known that the authors themselves did on occasions intervene. In the Induction to Cynthia’s Revels Jonson alludes to the author’s “presence in the tiring-house, to prompt us aloud, stamp at the book-holder, swear for our properties, curse the poor tireman, rail the music out of tune, and swear for every venial trespass we commit.” Shakespeare is unlikely to have sworn or stamped — Jonson himself is a much more likely candidate for that role — but as actor as well as author he is likely to have intervened in the first staging of his dramas.

There was a long theatrical tradition that Shakespeare instructed the actors in the performance of their parts. A chronicler of Sir William Davenant’s company of players, formed at the time of the Restoration, records that the part of Henry VIII in All Is True was “rightly and justly done by Mr. Betterton, he being instructed in it by Sir William, who had it from Old Mr. Lowen, that had his Instructions from Mr. Shakespear himself.” When Thomas Betterton also acted Hamlet, “Sir William (having seen Mr. Taylor of the Black-Fryars Company Act it, who being Instructed by the Author Mr. Shaksepear) taught Mr. Betterton in every Particle of it.”⁷ Stage traditions of this kind often contain more than a grain of truth.

There are conflicting reports about the quality of Shakespeare’s acting. John Aubrey reports that he “did act exceeding well,” and Henry Chettle described him as “excelent in the qualitie he professes.” Nicholas Rowe, on the other hand, believes that he was no “extraordinary” actor and that “the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet.”⁸ At the end of the seventeenth century it is reported that Shakespeare “as I have heard, was a much better Poet than Player.”⁹ Yet he was fully employed by the most important theatrical company of his generation, acting for more than twenty years in parts large and small. He must, if nothing else, have been a resourceful actor. The testimony of his contemporary, Henry Chettle, is perhaps the most accurate.

His progress through the ranks of the theatrical and literary world might have earned him barbs from his more envious contemporaries. A volume dedicated to the memory of Robert Greene contained an attack upon those who had “Eclipst his fame and Purloyned his Plumes.”¹⁰ A play of 1593 on the theme of Guy of Warwick has the following piece of dialogue. “I’ faith Sir I was born in England at Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire … I have a fine finical name, I can tell ye, for my name is Sparrow … but I am a high mounting lofty minded Sparrow.”¹¹ It may be coincidence, but it may not. “Sparrow” was close in pronunciation to “spear,” and was a slang word given to a lecher; sparrows were known for their lust. The Stratford man who calls himself a “bird of Venus”(the author of Venus and Adonis) has got his wife with child, and then abandoned her in Warwickshire. We may also recall the story of William the Conqueror coming before Richard Burbage. In a play of this period, too, Shakespeare is mildly lampooned as a character named Prickshafte. So there is a tendency, to put it no stronger, to associate Shakespeare with lustfulness.

He is also called “finical,” meaning finicky or fastidious, and we may recall Aubrey’s testimony that in Shoreditch Shakespeare would not be “debauched” with his colleagues. The reference here is to carousing or drinking, not to sexual misdemeanours, and so we gain a picture of a man given to lustfulness but fastidious in other particulars. By curious chance this consorts well with the imagery of the plays where there are plentiful references to bawdiness, but also evidence of a general sensitivity to unpleasant sights or smells.

Further suggestions of Shakespeare’s amorousness emerge in a curious doggerel poem, with a prose prologue, entitled Willobie His Avisa. It purports to be written by Henry Willobie, who was related by marriage to a friend of William Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Russell, although the connection may be fortuitous. The poem concerns an innkeeper’s wife, Avisa, who is pursued by several extra-marital suitors. One of them, “H.W,” is helped by a friend named “W.S” or, in a punning reference, “Will.” The relevant portion of the text suggests that “W.S” was possessed by a similar passion. H.W

bewrayeth the secresy of his disease vnto his familiar frend W.S who not long before had tryed the curtesy of the like passion, and was now newly recouered of the like infection; yet finding his frend let bloud in the same vaine, he took pleasure for a tyme to see him bleed … for that he would now secretly laugh at his frends folly, that had giuen occasion not long before vnto others to laugh at his owne.

The writer continues: “in vewing a far off the course of this louing Comedy, he determined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor, then it did for the old player.”¹²

It is one of those Elizabethan prose riddles that may admit to several meanings. One theory suggests that the innkeeper’s daughter is in fact an emblem for Elizabeth herself. But the essential situation, of “H.W.” and “W.S” in pursuit of the same young woman, is close enough to the plot of the “Dark Lady” sonnets to suggest parallels. “H.W.” may be Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and “W.S” or “Will” or “the old player” may be Shakespeare. The suggestion of lustfulness, and of resulting venereal disease, is also part of the speculation. If there were a “true story” behind the sonnets, this passage would seem to confirm that “W.S” was not immune to the favours of young women. All must remain speculation, however, with the words of the poem’s preface that “there is some thing under these false names and showes that hath bene done truely”.

There were in this period the usual assaults upon Shakespeare’s propensity for plagiarism as well as amorousness. But the charge of plagiarism was formulaic, a ritualised insult in the world of the theatre. Imitation and borrowing were part of the craft of composition. It is the normal story of influence and gradual change. The great eighteenth-century phrenologist, Franz Joseph Gall, believed that the mental organ for robbery was the same as the organ for the formation of dramatic plots; this may be one explanation. It should also be remembered that as an actor Shakespeare was obliged to learn the lines of other dramatists, including those of Marlowe himself, and he may have reproduced them inadvertently. But he had no interest in inventing plots or incidents; for these he went to his multifarious sources, the narratives of which he borrowed wholesale. He would sometimes copy a source line by line, and even word for word, when he knew that he could not surpass it. His interest lay in reimagining events and characters.

But Shakespeare seems primarily to have borrowed from himself. He was a self-plagiarist who reused phrases, scenes and situations. The phrase “go to thy cold bed and warm thee” occurs in both The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear, it is a small example, but it is indicative of how a particular set of words was retained in his memory over many years. In his late plays he can sometimes revert to an earlier style, as if all stages of his growth were still within him. He will use the same scenario — that, for example, of a father reading the purloined letter of a son — again and again. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona there are anticipations of scenes and events in Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and As You Like It. There are also many scenic and structural parallels between the plays; there are strong resemblances between As You Like It and King Lear, for example, as well as between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. That was how his imagination worked. It took on archetypal forms. In the process of imitating himself, however, he also revises himself; he knew by instinct what was worthy to be preserved, so that there is a continuing process of self-distillation.

CHAPTER 41 Doth Rauish Like Inchaunting Harmonie

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men began performing in June 1594, but before that date Shakespeare had completed his second long narrative poem. The Rape of Lucrece may have been written at Titchfield, while the writer was working under the auspices of the Earl of Southampton, and it is in any case dedicated to the young earl in effusive terms. “The loue I dedicate to your Lordship,” Shakespeare writes, “is without end.” He goes on to claim that “what I haue done is yours, what I haue to doe is yours, being part in all I haue, deuoted yours.” What he had “done” was to compose a poem on the rape of Lucrece, the wife of Collatine, by Sextus Tarquinius. The mythical event is dated 509 BC, and has been used as an explanation for the rise of the Roman Republic. Shakespeare obtained his theme from the Fasti of Ovid and from the Roman history of Livy. They were standard grammar-school texts with which he was well acquainted. There is no direct copying of Ovid’s Latin, however. He takes the plot but not the poetry. This suggests one method by which he worked. He took up a copy of the Fasti, read it quickly, and then put it down without further reference to it. He needed only the raw materials to excite his imagination.

The history is not, however, what interests the poet. Shakespeare is concerned with the play of feeling between the two protagonists, as Tarquin prepares himself to rape the lady and then, after the deed, slinks away. The poem is chiefly remarkable for Lucrece’s sorrowful meditations after the event, in the course of which she determines to kill herself in front of her husband. The energy and fluency of Shakespeare’s verse are again immediately apparent. The poem, like his drama, begins in medias res with a rushing speed and it maintains its dramatic momentum throughout. He even introduces the word “Actor” into the proceedings. Shakespeare renders everything instinct with palpitating life. The Rape of Lucrece is extravagant in diction, elaborate in cadence, filled with paradoxes and oppositions, epithets and exclamations, conceits and images; it has a vaunting rhythm and an arresting rhyme-scheme. It is, in other words, a high-spirited performance in which Shakespeare displays all of his excitement and eloquence. Once more the pleasure of the reader is equalled only by the pleasure of the writer.

The general movement of Shakespeare’s dramatic verse can be characterised as one from formal regularity to irregularity. Rhymes, for example, become much less common. In his later plays, too, he pitches the natural stress of English speech against the melodious form of the iambic pentameter; he introduces parentheses, exclamations and “run on” lines that continue the cadence past its usual conclusion. He will also complete a sentence in the middle of the line, with a caesura, thus imitating the more irregular and disjunctive passages of thought and expression within his characters. There has been traced a characteristic curve in Shakespeare’s composition, a rhythmic evolution that reflects the unceasing development of the music of his being. As Pasternak observed, “rhythm is the basis of Shakespeare’s texts”;¹ he composed, and imagined, in cadences; his head was filled with cadences, waiting to be born.

The Rape of Lucrece can also be seen as a mine of gold for Shakespeare’s later dramas; he becomes fascinated by the idea of the unquiet conscience and by the murder of innocence. The poem may also be the forerunner of murders in the bed, among them those of Duncan and Desdemona. The musings of Tarquin, the rapist, might almost be read as the inner history of Richard III for which there is no space on the stage. It is the procedure of the great writer — Shakespeare knew what interested him, and what preoccupied him, only after he had written it down.

The dedication of Lucrece may solve a problem concerning Shakespeare’s financial status at this time. Where did he obtain the £50 that was needed as his premium to become a “sharer” in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men? Much of his income must by now have travelled back to Stratford in order to support a wife and young family. It may be that the fee was waived on the understanding that he would write a certain number of plays each year; he may have bequeathed to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men the ownership of the plays he had already written. Or he may have been lent or given the money. There is a report by Nicholas Rowe that “my Lord Southampton, at one time, gave him a thousand Pounds, to enable him to go through with a Purchase which he heard he had a mind to.” Rowe had acquired the story from one “who was probably very well acquainted with his Affairs.”² Southampton was notably generous, but the sum seems extravagant even by his profligate standards. There is no indication that Shakespeare ever possessed, or invested, so large an amount of money at any one time. In fact “a thousand pounds” is a conventionally hyperbolic expression used by Shakespeare himself; it is the sum Falstaff believes that he will receive after Hal’s coronation. We may conjecture a figure nearer £50 or £100. The young earl may have rewarded the author of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis with this more modest sum.

There is another intriguing connection between The Rape of Lucrece and a noble family. It has been suggested that the poem was conceived and written under the auspices — or at least under the influence — of Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.³ She was the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, and had in direct tribute cultivated her brother’s own literary ideals within her circle. She completed his poetic rendering of the psalms, and was herself a notable translator. She had also created an informal network of literary patronage, and under her direction three neo-classical tragedies were written or translated from the French. Mary Herbert herself translated one of them. Each of these tragedies concentrated upon the sufferings of noble heroines, among them Cleopatra and Cornelia, and in deference to Mary Herbert takes an almost “feminist” reading of women betrayed by a hostile male world. The Rape of Lucrece is very much part of this tradition. It is not otherwise clear why Shakespeare would have chosen such an apparently unpromising subject. Samuel Daniel wrote a poem, The Complaint of Rosamond, and dedicated it to the Countess of Pembroke; this poem also expresses the sorrows of a suffering woman. Shakespeare borrowed Daniel’s rhyme-royal stanza for his own narrative. In the same fashion the dramatic eloquence of Shakespeare’s poem also aligns it with the neo-classical tragedies that were part of Mary Herbert’s literary circle. So the connections are there. It should be recalled that Shakespeare was for a period a member of Pembroke’s Men, and it is known that Mary Herbert took a personal interest in the players. One of the actors named her as a trustee in his will. The association lends further significance to Shakespeare’s early sonnets, which may have been commissioned by Mary Herbert.

The Rape of Lucrece itself was almost as popular with the reading public as the earlier Venus and Adonis. It was reissued in six separate editions during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and in two after his death; in the year of its publication it is mentioned in several poems and eulogies. A university play of the period exclaims: “Who loves not Adon’s love, or Lucrece rape!” A reference in William Covell’s Polimanteia claims “Lucrecia” by “sweet Shakespeare” to be “all-praise-worthy,” and an elegy on Lady Helen Branch of 1594 includes among “our greater poets … you that have writ of chaste Lucretia.”⁴ “The younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Gabriel Harvey wrote, “but his Lucrece” is considered “to please the wiser sort.”⁵ In poetical anthologies of the period it was extensively quoted and in England’s Parnassus of 1600, for example, no fewer than thirty-nine passages were extracted for the delectation of the readers.

This in turn raises an interesting, if unanswerable, question. Why at the age of thirty did Shakespeare effectively give up his career as a poet and turn back to play-writing? From the extensive comment and praise that he received for his two narrative poems, his future and fame as England’s principal poet would seem to be assured; in one essay on the English tongue, written in 1595, he is placed in the same company as Chaucer and Spenser. But he chose another path. Perhaps he considered that his life with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men offered him financial security, away from the perilous world of private patronage; in this, his judgement proved to be correct. As Jonson wrote in The Poetaster, “Name me a profest poet, that his poetrie did ever afford so much as a competencie.” Shakespeare wanted more than a “competency.” In any case he loved the work of acting and play-writing at the heart of his own company. Otherwise he would not have chosen to continue it.

Yet the larger reason must reside in the promptings of his own genius; his instinct and judgement informed him that drama was his peculiar skill and particular speciality. Attention must also be paid to the urgency of his literary ambition and inventiveness. He had already excelled at stage comedy, at melodrama and at history. Where else might his genius take him? He knew well enough that he could write poetic narratives with ease and fluency, but the form did not challenge him in the same fundamental way as the newly emerging drama. As Donne said in a private letter, “The Spanish proverb informes me, that he is a fool which cannot make one Sonnet, and he is mad which makes two.”⁶ He may have found it just too easy, which is perhaps why he carries his poetic effects to excess and why in Venus and Adonis he interleaves lyrical pathos with deliberate farce. He was even then beginning a sonnet sequence that would test the medium to breaking point, but it was not enough. He could perhaps have settled for a life as a “gentleman-poet,” like Michael Drayton, but that also was not enough.

CHAPTER 42 To Fill the World with Words

Soon after the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men Shakespeare and his fellows began a shared run with the Lord Admiral’s Men at the playhouse in Newington Butts. This association with their principal rivals did not last for long; it was a very wet summer and the takings were low. After about ten days the Lord Admiral’s Men decamped to the Rose.

The unique position of the two companies in the Elizabethan theatre of course created competition and rivalry. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men put on Shakespeare’s plays of Richard III and Henry V, the Lord Admiral’s Men retaliated with Richard Crookback and their own version of Henry the Fifth. The Admiral’s Men performed The Famous Wars of Henry the First as a crowd-puller to rival Shakespeare’s episodes of Henry IV. When that was not successful they tried once more with The True and Honourable History of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle, an echo of Falstaff’s original name of Oldcastle. But the traffic was not always in one direction. When the Lord Admiral’s Men staged at least seven plays on biblical subjects, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men replied with Hester and Ahasuerus and other similar dramas. The Admiral’s Men performed two plays on the life of Cardinal Wolsey at the Rose, a theme that Shakespeare would later take up in All Is True; the Admiral’s Men also played a version of Troilus and Cressida at the same theatre, before Shakespeare had written his own variation upon an identical theme. While one group had The Merry Wives of Windsor, the other staged a drama concerning the wives of Abingdon. Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness vied at the Rose with Othello at the Globe, and they were no doubt viewed in the same light by the audiences who went from one theatre to the other. Two plays on the subject of Robin Hood, written by Munday and Chettle, were proving very popular at the Rose in 1598; Shakespeare retaliated with the sylvan romance As You Like It. So there was a constant cross-fertilisation of themes and ideas between the companies, fuelled by fashion and inspired by rivalry. The success of Hamlet provoked the Lord Admiral’s Men into reviving another revenge drama, The Spanish Tragedy, with special additions written by Ben Jonson. The popularity of Shakespeare’s play in fact unleashed a whole sequence of imitations such as Hoffman, or A Revenge for a Father and The Atheist’s Tragedy, or The Honest Man’s Revenge. It was not unusual for playgoers to attend the various productions of these theatrical rivals, and compare notes on their respective strengths. Was Burbage superior to Alleyn in such-and-such a role? Was Mr. Shakespeare — he had become “Mr.” on the playbills when he became a “sharer”—as excellent as Kyd?

After appearing at Newington Butts the Lord Chamberlain’s Men toured parts of the country, including Wiltshire and Berkshire, before returning to London for the winter season. On 8 October Lord Hunsdon, their patron, wrote to the Lord Mayor requesting him to allow his servants to play in the City; his new company were already at the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street, and he wished to prolong their engagement. It is curious that they were not using the Theatre or the Curtain, but it is likely either that the playhouses were in a state of disrepair or that they were not considered suitable venues for the darker winter season. Hunsdon promised that they would begin at two in the afternoon rather than at four, and that they would use no drums or trumpets to advertise their presence. The Lord Mayor and his colleagues gave way to the Lord Chamberlain’s wishes, but this was the last time that any playing company ever used a city inn. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men also performed at court this winter, and played on two occasions before Elizabeth; on 26 and 28 December they attended her at her palace in Greenwich.

The actors did not simply arrive, with their costumes and instruments. They first had to rehearse the plays intended for Her Majesty’s pleasure before the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney. His suite of apartments and offices was in the former Hospital of St. John in Clerkenwell; by one of those strange coincidences of London life, Clerkenwell had once been the site of the London mystery plays. Since the company performed at the playhouses during the afternoon, these royal rehearsals must have taken place early in the morning or late at night. The chandler’s bill for the Office of the Revels records large payments for candles, coal and firewood. Tilney would act as censor, removing those lines that might be indelicate or offensive to the royal ear. He also loaned the company more sumptuous costumes if they were needed; at the court, some of their dresses and cloaks might have seemed threadbare. There are references to the actors borrowing “the monarch’s gown,” to save embarrassment before the great original, and “armor for knightly combatants” in case they were ridiculed by the more martial courtiers. The Master of the Revels also lent them “apt houses made of canvas,”“necessaries for hunters” and “a device for thunder and lightning.”¹

When all was settled they took a boat downriver from one of the London wharves or “stairs,” with an attendant barge for their costumes and devices. The great hall at Greenwich had been cleared for the performance; the stage was at one end, decked out with perspective scenery devised by the Office of the Revels, and the royal dais was at the other. The hall, on this later winter afternoon and evening, was illuminated by candles and torches. The musicians were placed on the wooden balcony above the stage, and the actors could use the passage behind the screen as their “tiring-room.” The audience, invited at royal discretion, assembled in their formal robes before the arrival of the queen herself. It was the most fashionable entertainment of the year, and it would have been natural for Shakespeare and his fellows to experience a little nervousness. The names of the plays they performed on this occasion are not recorded, but it has been suggested that the queen witnessed Love’s Labour’s Lost as well as Romeo and Juliet. What better fillip for an ageing queen than tales of young lovers?

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were a success, and became something of a royal favourite. The extant records show that on this first occasion the Lord Admiral’s Men performed three times, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played twice, but in later years the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were called more often. In the winter season of 1596 and 1597, for example, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played six times and the Lord Admiral’s Men did not appear at all. A reference to William Shakespeare occurs in the payment for the royal entertainment at Greenwich in 1594, when £20 was granted to “William Kemp, William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage” for “two comedies showed before Her Majesty in Christmas time last.” It is an indication of Shakespeare’s seniority in the company that he should be listed before the principal actor — unless, of course, he was the principal actor. It suggests in any case that he was a leading member at the time of its inception, and already active in the company’s business. The entry in the treasurer’s account has the distinction of being the only official reference to Shakespeare’s connection with the stage.

On the night of the last day they performed at Greenwich, 28 December 1594, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men also gave a performance of The Comedy of Errors in the hall of Gray’s Inn. The play was part of the Christmas revels of that Inn, presided over by a lord of misrule known as “the Prince of Purpoole.” Shakespeare may have been chosen as the dramatist through his association with Southampton; Southampton was a member of Gray’s Inn. The play of twins and of mistaken identity, with all the complications of evidence involved, was naturally popular among students of the English law. For the purposes of the Inn, Shakespeare also revised The Comedy of Errors. He introduced more legalisms and two trial scenes. A special stage had been built for the production, as well as “Scaffolds to be reared to the top of the House, to increase Expectation.” So there was to be an element of spectacle in the proceedings. But the play hardly received a fair hearing. The numbers of invited guests were so large, and the event so badly managed, that the entertainments had to be curtailed. The senior members of the Inner Temple, who had been invited by their colleagues, left the hall “discontented and displeased”; spectators then invaded the stage to the obvious detriment of the players. A report in Gesta Grayorum concludes that “that Night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon it was ever afterwards called, The Night of Errors”. Two days later the members held a “mock trial,” one of the enduring features of the Inns, at which “a Company of base and common Fellows” from “Shoreditch” was berated for making up “our Disorders with a Play of Errors and Confusions.”² It was not a serious rebuke, and the allusion to the “base and common” actors is an arch legal joke. The person blamed for the fiasco was in fact a member and “orator” of the Inn, Francis Bacon, a keen spectator of the drama and a writer sometimes deemed to have composed Shakespeare’s plays himself. The contemporaneity of the two men has itself led to “nothing but confusion and errors.” Shakespeare has been accused of writing Bacon, and Bacon accused of writing Shakespeare, while a third party has been held responsible for the productions of both men.

The connection between the legal Inns and the drama is a very close one. Many of the poets and dramatists of the age were attached to one of the four Inns of Court — Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, the Middle Temple and the Inner Temple — and it has plausibly been asserted that formal English drama itself originated in those surroundings. One of the earliest of English tragedies, Gorboduc, was written by two members of the Inner Temple and first performed at the Inns of Court. The “moots” or mock trials, as well as the legal debates and dialogues that were performed by the students, bear an interesting relation to the short interludes of the early sixteenth century. The Inns were also famous for their organisation of masques and pageants; the writers of these masques then began to write for the boy actors of the private theatres, St. Paul’s and Blackfriars. The Middle and the Inner Temple were next door to the theatre at Blackfriars. There is contiguity as well as continuity.

The legal ceremonies at the courts in Westminster Hall of course involved their own kind of theatre. Lawyers, like actors, had to learn the arts of rhetoric and of performance. It was known as “putting the case.” In the course of their disputations the students of law were instructed to assume the voices of different characters in order to promulgate different arguments; they were taught how to frame narratives that might include improbabilities or impossibilities in order to lend conviction to their suasoria and controversia. At a certain stage in their respective developments, then, the set speeches of English drama and the oratorical persuasions of English law looked very much alike. In sixteenth-century London, as in fifth-century BC Athens, public performance was always seen in terms of competition and contest.

In certain of his plays Shakespeare introduces references and allusions that were understood only by the students of the law; they in fact formed a large or at least recognisable part of his audience. They were the “coming men,” trained to be the judges and administrators and diplomats of the next generation. Many of Shakespeare’s own friends and acquaintances came from that circle. It was also widely reported, and believed, that the members of the Inns harboured papistical tendencies; Lord Burghley was obliged in 1585 to write to the treasurer of Gray’s Inn, for example, complaining that “to our great grief we have understood that not only some seminary popish priests have heretofore been harboured in Gray’s Inn but also have their assemblies and masses.”³

The members of the Inns were known as “Afternoon’s Men” for their habit of frequenting the playhouse in those hours, and were described by one contemporary as the “clamorous fry” who stood with the groundlings in the pit or “filled up the private rooms of greater price.”⁴ A moralist, William Prynne, stated that “this is one of the first things they learne as soone as they are admitted, to see Stage-playes.”⁵ One judgement in the civic courts charges a member of Gray’s Inn “for that he brought a disordered company of gentlemen of the Inns of Court”⁶ to the playhouse. They were clamorous because they hissed and booed with their fellows in the pit, but they were also known for shouting out themes or topics to be addressed by the actors; the actors would then extemporise comically or wittily. This was an extension of their practice at their “moots” in the Inns, and is again an indication of the association between law and drama in London.

It is important to understand this connection, if only to bring life to Shakespeare’s use of law and of legal terms in his plays and in his poetry. A drama like The Merchant of Venice can be properly understood only in this context, with the civil law of Portia pitted against the common law of Shy-lock. It is one of the defining structures of Shakespeare’s imagination.

CHAPTER 43 See, See, They Ioyne, Embrace, and Seeme to Kisse

The new company had the benefit of new, or almost new, plays. It is clear enough that Shakespeare revised The Comedy of Errors, and it is likely that he “improved” the other plays he had already written. But it is also worth noting the new vein of romantic drama that Shakespeare began at this time, the principal plays of this period being Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The precise order cannot now be ascertained and, in any case, it is not of much consequence. The general tendency of his art is of much more significance. The hard edges of the early Italianate comedies, and the ornate rhetoric of the first history plays, now give way to extended lyricism and to more tender or perhaps just more complex characters. He was assured of a range of actors who could convey every mood and every sentiment. He was now the single most important dramatic poet of the period, and he had the incalculable advantage of a stable group of actors for whom to write.

We may plausibly imagine the cast list of Romeo and Juliet. We know that Will Kempe played Peter, the bawdy servant of the Capulets, and that Richard Burbage played the leading role of Romeo. One of the boys played Juliet, and another boy — or perhaps an older actor — played the garrulous Nurse. It is generally assumed that Shakespeare played the part of the Friar and the Chorus, as we have seen, but Dryden, in “Defence of the Epilogue”to The Conquest of Granada (1670), says that “Shakespeare showed the best of his skill in Mercutio, and he said himself that he was forced to kill him in the third Act, to prevent being killed by him.” Mercutio is the bawdy, gallant, quicksilver friend of Romeo whose speech on the activities of Queen Mab is one of the most eloquent and fanciful in all of Shakespeare; his is the soaring spirit, buoyant and fantastical, unfettered by ideals and delusions, which Shakespeare had to kill in order to make way for the romantic tragedy of the play’s conclusion. Such a free spirit does not consort well with a tale of love’s woe. There is melancholy as well as bawdry in Mercutio’s speeches, and it becomes clear that much of that melancholy springs from sexual disgust. Dry-den believed that this voice was closest to that of the dramatist himself, who could not delineate a tragedy without introducing farcical elements and who evinces all the manifestations of the same disgust. Mercutio has been described by some critics as heartless, even cold, but then so has been Shakespeare. That is perhaps why even in the midst of this lamentable tragedy there is more than a trace of commedia dell’arte; it has even been surmised that there were certain scenes staged in dumb-show.

The mood and imagery of the play is that of summer lightning, flashing across the sky (892-3):

Too like the lightning which doth cease to bee

Ere one can say, it lightens, sweete goodnight…

Shakespeare had heard the phrase “Gallop apace” in Marlowe’s Edward the Second, and had remembered it; he gives it to Juliet as she yearns for the end of the day. “Enter Juliet,” Shakespeare puts in a stage-direction, “somewhat fast, and embraceth Romeo.” It is a play of youthfulness, of youthful impulsiveness and of youthful extravagance; it is a play of dancing and of sword-play, both measuring out an arena of energy with sudden violence and swift transitions. In this play he incorporates sudden changes of mood and of thought; he follows the quicksilver thread of consciousness in expression. But if it is seized by transitoriness it is also touched by mystery. As Juliet and her Nurse converse on Romeo, an unnamed and unknown voice off-stage calls out “Juliet”; it is as if some guardian spirit were entreating her.

It has often been stated that Romeo and Juliet are all that lovers were, and all that lovers ever will be, but it is important to notice the sheer artistry with which Shakespeare entwines them. They echo each other’s speech, as if they saw their souls shining in each other’s faces, and in one wonderful passage a formal sonnet emerges out of their dialogue like Aphrodite rising out of the sea (666-9):

If I prophane with my vnworthiest hand,

This holy shrine, the gentler sin is this,

My lips two blushing Pylgrims readie stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kis.

This had never been achieved on the English stage before, and must have been as miraculous for the first auditors as it has been for subsequent generations. Shakespeare had taken the conventions and traditions of courtly love poetry, and had dramatised them for London audiences that had probably never picked up a sonnet sequence from the stationers’ stalls. There are other themes that seem to exfoliate through Shakespeare’s drama — the theme of banishment, of inequality in love, of honour and reputation — but the dramatic invocation of love remains the central and abiding impression.

The play ends in a house of tears, but that is where all dreams end. It concluded formally with a funeral procession, one of the standard spectacles of Elizabethan drama, but the dirge was succeeded by a merry jig. This was assisted by the presence of Will Kempe in the final tragic scene. He accompanied Romeo to his rendezvous with mortality at the tomb, and no doubt clowned his way through the soliloquies on dust and death. It is another indication of the essential stridency of Elizabethan drama, where there is no necessary composure or middle tone. All extremes are possible. Romeo and Juliet can be interpreted as a comedy as much as a tragedy, but of course it can also represent both.

Shakespeare had taken the story from a poem by Arthur Brooke, entitled The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, but he condensed it; he shortened the time span, from nine months into five days, and imposed upon the narrative a careful and intricate pattern of symmetries. More significantly, perhaps, he alters the moral scheme and burden of the narrative by overtly sympathising with the lovers. That is the difference between poetry and drama. The religious imagery of the play has often been discussed, in particular its atmosphere of the old faith. Any play set in Italy is bound to be mingled with Catholicism, of course, but there is a larger point. It is characteristic of those who have forsworn their faith to cling to its vocabulary, and never more so than when describing the profane. Shakespeare also introduced far more bawdry and comedy, giving Mercutio in particular a greater role. He also changed Juliet’s age from sixteen, in Brooke’s poem, to thirteen. He was aware that he was thereby catering to the lasciviousness of the citizens, but he was a shameless master of effects. He recognised, too, that the crowds would enjoy the sword-fight that opens Romeo and Juliet.

The play was successful, therefore, and on the title page of the first published text it is referred to as one “that hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely.” The phrases of Romeo and of Juliet were on everyone’s lips. The students of Oxford University, at a later date, wore through by intensive studying and copying the pages of Romeo and Juliet in a chained edition of the First Folio. There were two versions published in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The first is considerably shorter than the second, and is likely to have been the text actually used by the performers. In this version there is even a joke about the actor (“faintly” speaking the prologue “without-booke”) who needed the prompter to help him through it. In asides like this, the life of the Elizabethan stage revives. The second version seems to be transcribed from Shakespeare’s own papers, before the text had been altered and condensed in the course of rehearsals or in the process of rewriting. After the play was performed he added some passages, for example, and reassigned certain lines to other characters; he seems to have elaborated on Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech by inserting words in the margin of his copy, which the printer mistook for a prose addition. There are also minor inconsistencies in stage-directions and speech prefixes.

But this was undoubtedly his usual procedure: to alter, expand or cut, after seeing the play in performance. It is exactly what any playwright would do. And then he went on to the next venture, a more overt comedy in which star-crossed lovers eventually find fulfilment.

It has been suggested that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written in order to celebrate the marriage of Southampton’s widowed mother, Mary, Countess of Southampton, to Sir Thomas Heneage. It took place on 2 May 1594, and was perhaps celebrated by the dramatist in the summer of that year. This may seem a trifle early for so accomplished a play, but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility. The play itself seems to bear witness to the terrible summer of that year— “very wet and wonderful cold”¹ according to Simon Forman — in the long complaint by Titania that “the seasons alter”(462). But other noble marriages have been identified as the occasion for this paean to the married state. At the beginning of 1595 the new Earl of Derby, William Stanley, married Lady Elizabeth de Vere. They both had a connection with Shakespeare. William Stanley had inherited the earldom on the sudden death of the Earl of Derby, who was Shakespeare’s patron, Lord Strange, and Lady Elizabeth had been the intended bride of Southampton. The associations are not the most auspicious, however, and a more plausible candidate for the occasion must be the marriage of Thomas Berkeley and Elizabeth Carey at Blackfriars on 19 February 1596. The bride was the granddaughter of Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, and it seems a suitable occasion for him to deploy his players. Previously she had been the intended spouse for William Herbert, heir to the earldom of Pembroke, and there is evidence to suggest that the earliest of Shakespeare’s sonnets were designed to encourage that match. So he might have been considered the perfect dramatist to celebrate her eventual union. It is ironic that historians, looking for the wedding that A Midsummer Night’s Dream might celebrate, have found no fewer than three possibilities. But the world in which Shakespeare moved was a small one, in which affinities are not hard to find, and in any event these real Elizabethan marriages make no difference to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

With its woodland setting, its noble protagonists, and its fairies, it can be deemed wholly Shakespearian; this is the “sweet Shakespeare” of contemporaneous discourse, the Shakespeare of burlesque humour and lyricism and dream. All of his reading, of Chaucer and of Ovid, of Seneca and of Marlowe, of Lyly and of Spenser, combines to create an enchanted landscape — where the mythical Theseus and Hippolyta celebrate their marriage, where Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, squabble over the possession of a changeling child, where Bottom and his country players put on an entertainment, and where star-crossed lovers are allowed at the close to fall into one another’s arms. The moon is the mistress of these proceedings, and all within her silver empire are touched by mystery. It is a play of patterns and of symmetries, of music and of harmony restored. One of its great delights lies within the formality and fluency of its design.

There are three plays of Shakespeare that seem to be without a primary “source”: Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All of them are highly patterned, in a manner that seems intrinsic to the English imagination;² they are all carefully and symmetrically structured, all touched by mystery or enchantment — two of them have elements of the supernatural — and all include dramatic entertainments within their overall structure as if in parody of the somewhat artificial plots. They are a window into Shakespeare’s art and thus, perhaps, into the English imagination itself. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is his first great contemplation of drama itself, so fresh and novel an art that it could elicit extremes of wonder and surprise. Anything might be achieved within it.

Like all Shakespeare’s plays of this period A Midsummer Night’s Dream is composed in a highly wrought and polished English, where lyrical grace is not incompatible with a hundred different rhetorical “schemes.” The play is suffused with the atmosphere of dream, as its title suggests, and yet it is a magnificent piece of theatre. The characters sleep upon the stage, and when they awake they find themselves transformed. What is the connection between the theatre and the dream? In dreams nothing is real, nothing is burdened with responsibility, nothing has meaning. This mimics Shakespeare’s attitude towards the drama itself. In plays, and in dreams, problems are expressed and resolved by means other than rational intelligence. It has often been said that a sense of the mystery of life is intrinsic to tragedy. But it is also part of Shakespearian comedy, where the irrational and the penumbral are of more consequence than that which is known or understood. The motives and impulses of his creations are not governed by the laws of reason or of conscience but by shape-shifting fancy and intuition.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the occasion, too, for Theseus’s remarks upon the imagination itself when he suggests (1707-8) that:

The lunatick, the louer, and the Poet

Are of imagination all compact.

It is all the more interesting on the assumption that Shakespeare himself played the part of Theseus. It is doubly interesting when an examination of the text reveals that the lines upon the imagination were added later, in the margins of his papers, as a kind of after-thought. We might, then, fruitfully speculate upon the nature of Shakespeare’s imagination.

CHAPTER 44 What Zale, What furie, Hath Inspirde Thee Now?

His was in part a bookish imagination. There are times when he had the sources open beside him, and transcribed passages almost line for line; yet somehow, in the alchemy of his imagination, all seems changed. Words and cadences, when they pass through the medium of Shakespeare, are charged with superabundant life. To work on existing material — to pull out its associations and implications — was profoundly congenial to him. That is why he was prepared to revise his own work, as well as that of other dramatists, in the course of his professional career.

On occasions he read several books on the same topic, and their texts combined somewhere within him to create a new reality. There are times when he relied upon books rather than upon his own immediate experience. In his creation of the trickster in The Winter’s Tale, Autolycus, he borrowed from one of Robert Greene’s urban pamphlets, Second Cony-Catching, rather than employing his own observations of city life. He had learnt in his schooldays that one of the first characteristics of invention was imitation, and he was an imitator of genius. He possessed a most retentive memory as well, and could summon up phrases and quotations from his childhood reading; he could effortlessly revert to outworn dramatic or rhetorical styles.

He worked on words, not necessarily on thoughts or images. Words elicited more words from him in an act of sympathetic magic. But then one word called forth another word of quite opposite intent. In the second part of Henry IV there is just such a transition (412-14):

JUSTICE: There is not a white haire in your face, but should haue his effect of grauity.

FALSTAFF: His effect of grauy, grauie, grauie.

The collocation of gravity and gravy amply testifies to the mood of the play and, more importantly, the sensibility of Shakespeare. On an earlier occasion he was reading Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid, in preparation for Titus Andronicus, and read the line “desyrde his presence too thentent”; the last word became transmogrified into “the Thracian Tyrant in his Tent” (138). A particular word seems to elicit from him a cluster of words, in this case alliterative; the connection is often one of sound rather than of sense. Geese are constantly associated with disease, the eagle with the weasel. There are other strange synaptic leaps. Turkeys and pistols are often associated, no doubt because of the common linkage with cock. For some reason he connects peacocks with fish and with lice in the same compound of images. On twelve occasions the word “hum” is intimately connected with death, as in Othello (2936-7):

DESDEMONA: If you say so, I hope you will not kill me.

OTHELLO: Hum.

And in Cymbeline (1760-1):

CLOTEN: Humh.

PISANIO: He write to my Lord she’s dead.

It is as if language was muttering to itself.

Yet words flew so freely from him that he distrusted them; on many occasions he revealed suspicions about their duplicity and inauthenticity. There were times, even, when fluency disgusted him. The finest poetry may be feigning; the oaths pledged on stage may be hypocritical. “Alas, I tooke greate paines to studie it,” Viola says in Twelfth Night (471—3), “and ’tis Poeticall.” “It is the more like to be feigned,” Olivia replies, “I pray you keep it in.” That is perhaps why there are many plays in which Shakespeare emphasised the artificiality and unreality of his drama; his narratives were meant to be improbable, even impossible.

It seems likely, also, that he did not know what he was writing until he had written it. He discovered his meaning only after he had conceived it in words. There is a wonderful remark of Coleridge’s in Table Talk of 7 April, 1833, that “in Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere.” He explored the consequences of his words by seeing how a metaphor or an image might emerge from them and take on its own life; how one word would by assonance or alliteration suggest another; how the cadence of a sentence or a verse would curve in one direction rather than another. The most perceptive account of Shakespeare’s method occurs, perhaps surprisingly, in a late eighteenth-century treatise. In A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare, published in 1794, Walter Whiter remarks on the power of association that leads Shakespeare to link words and ideas “by a principle of union unperceived by himself, and independent of the subject to which they are applied.” He does not know what guides his hand, in other words, or what force impels him. The meaning is somehow innate within the words themselves.

There have been many studies of his imagery, from which various conclusions have been drawn — that he was fastidious, sensitive to smells and to noise, that he engaged in outdoor sports, that he knew the natural life of the countryside very well, and so on. In the interplay of his imagery, we chance upon strange conjunctions; he associates violets with stealing, and books with love. His imagination is awash with centaurs and shipwrecks and dreams, part of the magical world that always surrounded him. But it is perhaps more appropriate to note that his images are the womb or source of further images which spring forth effortlessly. Each play has a continuous stream of images or metaphors that are intrinsic to that play. They convey a unity of feeling rather than one of meaning, rather in the way that film-music works in the cinema. There is a cohesiveness, an internal harmony, within each play; it touches even the most minor character, and places all of the protagonists together in the same circle of enchantment. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the rude mechanicals are quite unlike the fairies, but they partake of the same reality. They have been touched by the same lightning.

Yet that lightning was for Shakespeare a source of perpetual novelty and surprise. He did not necessarily know what was within himself. His imagination quickened as it proceeded along its ordained course; a scene will suddenly appear that elicits a powerful response, or a character emerges who will proceed to steal the best lines. There is a precise moment in Henry IV when Pistol develops the characteristic of quoting or misquoting lines from old dramas. It must have delighted Shakespeare, since from that moment Pistol does nothing — or hardly anything — but that. The Wife of Bath came up and took Chaucer unawares; Sam Weller popped up from nowhere in The Pickwick Papers. It is the same process.

A complementary path can also be traced in the shape of his career. He began as an ambitious and prolific dramatist, ready to take on any subject and any form. He excelled in melodrama as well as history, in farce as well as lyrical pathos. He could do everything. He seemed to have a natural genius for comedy, in which he could improvise effortlessly, but he learned very quickly how to employ other materials. It was only in the course of writing his plays, however, that he managed to discover his vision. It had been waiting for him all along, but he did not properly find it until the middle stage of his life. It was only then that he became truly “Shakespearian.” It may even be that, in the later years, he astounded and terrified himself with these great acts of creation.

CHAPTER 45 Thus Leaning on Mine Elbow I Begin

John Keats wrote that the poetical character “is not itself — it has no I self — it is every thing and nothing — It has no character — it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.” And thus “a Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity — he is continually in [forming] and filling some other Body.”

All of Shakespeare’s characters have an exultant and self-sufficient energy that lifts them above the realm of nature. That is why the greatest tragic characters are also close to comedy. Their expansiveness and self-assertion provoke delight. It is also why Shakespeare betrays no real interest in motive. His characters are fully alive as soon as they come upon the stage, and no excuse for their conduct is ever necessary. He will even excise their motives, outlined in his sources, simply to augment their inward or obsessive energy. They become mysterious and more challenging, provoking the audience to wonder or alarm. There are other occasions when motive has to be inferred from conduct; the characters have acquired a reality so strong that you must try to see around them.

Their speech and action are all of a piece, and their utterances are so knit together that they manifest a complete and coherent spirit or soul. The very cadence of the voices creates a unique and identifiable personality. In the second scene of the play, on the occasion of his first appearance upon the stage, the rhythms of Othello are deeply embedded in the structure of the verse with a series of half-lines—“’Tis better as it is … Let him do his spite … Not I, I must be found … What is the news? … What’s the matter, think you?” It is the rhythm of Othello’s being.

As far as the great tragic heroes are concerned, there is a corresponding belief in the ruling power of the self. Their destiny does not lie in the stars, in some abstract notion of Fate or, least of all, in some scheme of divine providence. Their movement is so irresistible, their inner life so powerful, that they gather momentum as the drama proceeds. Even in their fall they are wonderful.

Genius must find its time, too, and can quicken only in the general atmosphere of its period. It has been claimed, for example, that the sixteenth century was the age of the adventurer and of the striving individual. We see him first, on the English stage, in Faustus and in Tamburlaine. In that interim between the imperatives of a sixteenth-century religious culture and the claims of “society” in the seventeenth century, the individual being emerged as the object of speculation and enquiry in Montaigne’s work no less than in Marlowe’s. This was also the Shakespearian moment.

Shakespeare’s major protagonists have all the strength and vitality of their creator. Their capacity for life is astonishing. They have a mental, as well as a physical, energy. Even Macbeth retains a mysterious optimism. They are at one with the forces of the universe. Shakespeare’s true villains are pessimists, denying human energy and the capacity for human greatness. They are self-absorbed and melancholy, the enemies of movement and vitality. And here, if anywhere, the true sympathies of Shakespeare’s own nature can be found. Studies of his imagery have also shown that he was in love with movement in all of its forms, as if only in that quick sway and acceleration could he catch the vital life of things.

There was, naturally and inevitably, a particle of himself in all of his characters; that is what brings them alive. He is the source of their being. He adverts to that fact in the plays themselves. Richard III declares that “a thousand harts are great within my bosome,” and in Richard II Aumerle cries out: “I have a thousand spirits in one breast”; in the same play the king himself reveals that “play I in one person many people.” It is an odd but insistent emphasis. As Hazlitt said of Shakespeare, “He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it.”¹ He had a preternaturally sensitive imagination, which could clothe itself in the being of another. This gift or capacity expresses itself in terms of another insistent Shakespearian theme. I am not what I am. Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Since there is an element of Shakespeare in all the myriad heroes and heroines of his plays, they must also remain fundamentally mysterious. They are not governed by rational choices; their logic is always the logic of intuition and of dream. Their dilemma often concerns the role that they must play, and the part they must assume in the world. It is the secret of his heroines. His characters are witty, and cryptic, and whimsical. They are sometimes inscrutable, and more than a little fantastical. As Ophelia remarks to her father of Hamlet’s behaviour, “I doe not knowe, my Lord, what I should thinke”(517). They partake of their maker. That is also why Shakespeare’s characters still seem “modern,” since they are based upon diversity and indeterminacy. It is sometimes said that he invented individual consciousness on the stage but it would be more true to say that, taking his cue from Montaigne, he conveyed the idea of consciousness as unfixed and unstable. This was almost certainly not a deliberate ploy on his part but, rather, the natural expression of his own genius.

It also reflects an actor’s consciousness. As the hero of Sartre’s novel Les Maim Sales reveals, “You think I am in despair. Not at all. I am acting the comedy of despair.” It has been remarked that in Shakespeare’s plays the language of self-knowledge is the language of acting; by impersonating others he became more himself. Or, to put it another way, Shakespeare understood himself by becoming someone other. He often resorts to metaphors of the stage, and one of his favourite phrases is “to play the part.” His lovers learn to perform and improvise before one another. His most interesting characters are actors at heart. No other dramatist of his age maintains such an emphasis. He did not owe this interest to the fact that he was a player; rather, he became an actor because he already possessed that interest. His plays, with the possible exception of those of Moliere, are the most entirely suited to the theatre in the history of world drama.

In the speech by Theseus on the nature of imagination, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there is an apparently fluent and straightforward passage (1715–1717):

… the Poets penne

Turnes them to shapes, and giues to ayery nothing,

A locall habitation, and a name.

But in the vocabulary of the Elizabethan drama “shape” was the name for the actor’s costume, “habitation” for his place upon the stage, and “name” for the scroll on the actor’s chest revealing his identity.

When in his speech Hamlet adverts to “this goodly frame the Earth,” to this “sterill Promontory” and “this Maiesticall Roofe, fretted with golden fire” his audience would know that he was referring in turn to the walls of the theatre, to the bare stage, and to the roof of the pent-house above his head spangled with stars. The theatre was the occasion for the speech. Shakespeare is saturated with the language of the stage. Who would dream, in all his talk of “shaddowes,” that “shadow” was a technical term for the actor? Thus at the close of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Robin Goodfellow declares that “If we shadowes haue offended” he is speaking for the cast. When the actor playing Buckingham in All Is True declares that “I am the shadow of poore Buckingham”(258) he is making an overtly theatrical reference. The connection also lends resonance to Macbeth’s remark that “Life’s but a walking Shadow, a poore Player” (2004). In one of Shakespeare’s most theatrical plays, Richard II, there is a constant interplay between shadow as reflection of what is real and shadow as insubstantiality or unreality itself. There are shadows everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays. There is also a curious fact about shadows that he understood very well: however insubstantial they may be, they lend depth and delight to any view.

Shakespeare sees his characters as an actor would, not as a poet. It is noticeable, for example, how many of his characters blush. That is for the stage. Dickens said that he had only to imagine a character, and that character would appear before him. Shakespeare had the same power in excelsis. And the central point is that Shakespeare sees before him not just the character but the actor playing the character. That is why he, of all contemporary playwrights, had the surest command of stagecraft. It was an instinct. He saw gestures; he saw groups of actors moving across the stage. There are some scenes that are dominated by one gesture or by a series of parallel gestures, such as kneeling or sitting on the ground as a token of abasement. Characteristically, a scene with many characters will be preceded by a scene with few characters, both as a principle of contrast and as a means of giving time for the larger cast to be assembled. He also gave 95 per cent of the lines to the fourteen principal actors in the company; this was partly a matter of seniority, but it was also the carefully planned economy of a practical manager. It permitted rehearsals to go ahead without the presence of the hired men.

One stage direction in Timon of Athens has all the marks of Shakespeare’s imaginative vision: “Then comes dropping after all Apemantus discontentedly like himselfe.” In Antony and Cleopatra there is the direction: “Enter the Guard rustling in.” He hears, as well as sees, the players. In such business, as he himself wrote, action is eloquence. He must have visualised the costumes also since, in Elizabethan drama, clothes made the man (or woman). There are scenes in which he ordains the use of masks, or of clothing all in black. The visual imagery of the play was of the utmost importance. That is why he was aware of the passage of time and of daylight across the open stage, so that he wrote shadowy scenes for the hour when the shadows begin to deepen across London itself. In the last act of Romeo and Juliet Romeo and his servant enter “with a Torch”; in the last act of Othello, the Moor enters “with a light.” So each scene or episode has its own form and tempo, with the overriding emphasis being given to the continuity and the coherence of the action. That is why in the Folio he is described as “the Famous Scenicke Poet,” and why Tolstoy believed that Shakespeare’s principal gift lay in his “masterly development of the scenes.”²

It has become clear that he saw certain performers, Kempe or Burbage, Cowley or Sincler, in the roles he had assigned to them in his imagination. Most of the actors had their own particular speciality, at which he aimed his art. He heard their voices; he knew in advance their individual presence upon the stage. Why does Gertrude say that Hamlet is “fat and scant of breath” (3508) when fighting Laertes, if Burbage himself were not inclined to perspire during the duelling scene? There is no other indication of Hamlet’s weight. The development of Burbage as an actor had a direct influence upon the growing depth and complexity of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. They also gradually age with Burbage. Shakespeare wrote progressively more challenging parts for Kempe, too, leading him up to the supreme achievement of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where his genius for clowning is touched by lyricism and by mystery.

It is possible that a character would somehow acquire added qualities by virtue of being performed by one particular actor. It was reported by Charles Gildon in 1694, for example, that “I am assur’d from very good hands, that the person that acted Iago was in much esteem for a comedian, which made Shakespeare put several words and expressions into his part (perhaps not agreeable to his character).”³ Inadvertently, perhaps, Othello has therefore been sometimes considered as a form of commedia dell’arte.

There are some theatrical historians who have explained the development of his art in terms of different players and different venues. It has been asserted, for example, that he wrote the “cheerful” comedies of his early period for Kempe and composed the “bitter-sweet” comedies of his middle years for Kempe’s successor. It is an argument that has the undoubted advantage of being incapable of proof. It does have the merit of emphasising, however, the close bond between play and players. There were no doubt also occasions when Shakespeare took up suggestions from his fellow actors, on matters of staging or even speech.

It is clear enough that Shakespeare gave much thought to doubling, where one actor played more than one part; obviously he had to ensure that the same characters were not on stage at the same time which, with a cast of twenty-one actors perhaps playing in some sixty different parts, was in itself a feat of theatrical memory. But in doubling he could also create some wonderful effects. Thus the doubling of Cordelia and the Fool in King Lear— the Fool mysteriously disappears when Lear’s good and faithful daughter reappears in the plot — allowed for deeper ironies beyond the reach of words. He also created parts for himself, as we have observed, and in each of the plays there will be one character that he intended to perform. The character may not have resembled him at all, but he is the one Shakespeare wished to play.

His amenability to actors is evident elsewhere. It has been remarked by generations of actors that his lines, once remembered, remain in the memory; they are, to use the word of the great nineteenth-century actor, Edmund Kean, “stickable.” This of course was an enormous advantage for the first players, who might have to repeat several plays on various occasions during one theatrical “season.” The words are also attuned to the movement of the human voice, as if Shakespeare could hear what he was writing down. They possess a natural speech emphasis, quite unlike the stiffness of Kyd or of Marlowe. Actors have, in addition, commented upon the fact that the cue for movement or stage business is implicit within the dialogue itself. He was also able to exploit the dramatic possibilities of silence in many of the plays. He used off-stage cries or sounds to suggest turns in the plot, like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth or the shouts of the crowd in Julius Caesar. There never has been a more professional or accomplished master of all the devices of the stage.

As an actor, too, he was in intimate communion with the audience. His purpose was to please the spectators, and every episode in the play was designed to engage their attention. There are passages of dialogue which are clearly meant to signal, to those parts of the audience who might not be able to see clearly, what is happening upon the stage. When Macbeth calls out “Why sinkes that Caldron,” he is telling the spectators that the vessel is now going through the trap-door. Ben Jonson wrote his plays ultimately to be read; Shakespeare wrote his for performance.

If there is a certain modesty in this, it is a virtue he learned early. He was obliged, after all, to act in many ill-written plays composed by his contemporaries; the greatest dramatist of the age had to subdue himself, and bring to life, the words of deeply inferior playwrights. He went from King Lear to Barnaby Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter in one season and, in another, from The Taming of a Shrew to The Ranger’s Comedy. In a lifetime of reticence and self-effacement it is perhaps the greatest act of self-abnegation that Shakespeare ever endured; it may account for his occasional expressions of dissatisfaction with his chosen profession.

Fluency or fluidity is also the form of his thought. He delights in pairs, in doubleness, in oppositions. He cannot conceive a thought or sentiment without reversing it. Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher who had a preternatural sense of style and tone, perhaps expressed it best when he declared that the “art of writing lines, replies, which express a passion with full tone and complete imaginative intensity, and in which you can none the less catch the resonance of its opposite — this is an art which no poet has practised except the unique poet, Shakespeare.”⁴ He is preoccupied by change and contrast, as if only in the play of differences can the life of the world be expressed. The clown continues his farce as Romeo enters the tomb of Juliet and as Hamlet stands by the grave of Ophelia. In the quick changes of the stage the solemn councils of the court are followed by the pantomimic revels of the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap. The King and the Fool are true companions in the storm. Tolstoy complained that these scenes in King Lear were barren of meaning or consolation but, for Shakespeare, there is no meaning other than these two bare figures upon the stage. Lear can no more exist without the Fool than the Fool can exist without Lear. Thus is the spirit of difference, and of opposition, played out. In the most sublime reaches of Shakespeare’s art there is no morality at all. There is only the soaring human will in consort with the imagination.

The dispassionate nature of his genius, the almost impersonal intensity of his art, persuaded many eighteenth-century critics that he was kin to nature itself; he had the same indifference to the life of his creations. There is no reason to believe that he was deeply disturbed or troubled by the death of Desdemona, for example — deeply excited, of course, because he was involved in all the power and momentum of his expressiveness. But not deeply moved. It may have been remarked that he was particularly cheerful that day.

CHAPTER 46 So Musicall a Discord, Such Sweete Thunder

It is in the spirit of change and difference, too, that the plays are best understood. They seem positively to invite conflicting notions of their meaning so that Henry V, for example, can be played as heroic epic or as cruel bombast. Shakespeare’s art is open to both interpretations equally. The nature of Hamlet is eternally in question. The ending of King Lear is endlessly debated. The purpose of Troilus and Cressida is now all but lost in the fog of conflicting critical commentaries. In that play he establishes a code of value, through the speeches of Ulysses, which is then undermined or ignored by all of the characters in the play.

Shakespeare grew up with a profound sense of ambiguity. It is one of the informing principles both of his life and of his art. In the plays themselves the themes and situations are endlessly mirrored in the plots and sub-plots, so that the reader or spectator is presented with a series of variations on the same subject without any one of them given pre-eminence. Shakespeare will begin two or three stories at once, all of which share the same trajectory. The bond between Hamlet and his father, for example, is echoed both in the relations between Laertes and Polonius and in the kinship between Fortinbras and his father. Certain characters, generally one from a high and one from a low estate, seem deliberately to parallel or parody one another; they are paired visually and scenically.

Shakespeare uses all the tricks of Elizabethan stagecraft, including simultaneous staging, in order to show that the dramatic world is mixed and uncertain. Entire plays seem to be made up of parallels and contrasts and echoes. All of his characters have mixed natures. Despite the apparently orchestrated harmony of his endings, there are in fact very few genuine resolutions of the action. The closing scenes are deliberately rendered ambiguous, with one character generally excluded from the happy picture of reconciliation. That is why some critics have agreed with Tolstoy that Shakespeare really had “nothing to say.” He simply showed action and rhetoric upon the stage for the purposes of spectacle and entertainment. Yet generations of readers have also been affected by his apparent profundity. There has never been a great English dramatist whose art has remained fundamentally so mysterious. That is why he retains all of his power.

The stuff of Shakespeare is endlessly variable, but the connections or associations become darker. The comic servants of the first dramas become Iago or Malvolio; the clown of the early comedies becomes the Fool of King Lear or the gravedigger of Hamlet; the sexual jealousies within The Merry Wives of Windsor turn murderous in Othello; the joyous misrule of Falstaff becomes rancid and acrimonious in Thersites or in Timon. His imagination was drawn to the same patterns again and again. The same rushing power, the same imaginative furia, is evident in all of them. You can often tell, in little asides or allusions, that Shakespeare is thinking of the next play even as he is completing the one to hand. In Macbeth, for example, there is a clear signal of Antony and Cleopatra. The language of Henry V anticipates that of Julius Caesar. The plays are all of a piece and are best seen in relation to each other.

The majority of the plays open in medias res, as if a conversation had already been taking place which the audience has just joined. It is part of Shakespeare’s fluency that he creates a world already in process. The art of Elizabethan stagecraft is the art of the entrance, since there are no formal divisions into acts, and in Shakespeare the players enter from an ongoing world which is fully alive in some enchanted space elsewhere. The action is conceived as a sequence of intense episodes; but his pacing, his sense of variety and change, are so fluent that this action proceeds without impediment or hesitation. It is a continuous stream, mimicking the process and activity of life itself.

It has become apparent that Shakespeare was a master dramatist who was also a consummately practical man of the theatre — or, rather, he was a master dramatist because he was a practical man of the theatre. He was actor, playwright, sharer in the proceeds and, eventually, part-owner of the theatre itself. He seems to have ensured that all of the cast were used in his plays, and it is possible that he kept extra costs to a minimum. Hence the conspicuous absence of expensive “special effects” in his drama. Such effects do in any case distract the audience from a plot based upon human conflict. The great advantage of his position, however, lies in the fact that he was able to write very much as he wished; he was not a hired writer obliged to accede to the pressures and fashions of the moment. Once his popularity and success had been assured in his early days with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, he was able to strike out in whatever direction he wished. This in part explains the boldness and variety of his drama. If he wished to write a play with a Moor as the tragic hero, or a play with an enchanted island for its setting, the rest of the company were prepared to trust his judgement. As long as he provided two or three plays each year, his “fellows” were satisfied.

His whole social, financial and imaginative life was therefore implicated in the stage. There was no one in his period with the same range of connections; he was uniquely theatrical. There were other playwrights, for example, who were not concerned to have their work performed. George Chapman grandly declared: that “I see not mine own plays.”¹ But Shakespeare was present at every part of the life of his plays, from the first words written down in a fury to the last words refined at rehearsal. When they were acted he knew every sigh or shout they elicited from the audience.

There were other tasks to perform. It was he who perused plays submitted for approval by other writers, and it was no doubt his task to revise and generally to prepare manuscripts for performance. He was asked to rewrite difficult passages or introduce a speech at an opportune moment. He provided prologues or epilogues for the revival of old plays, and rewrote contentious passages to avoid the censorship of the Master of the Revels. He was a swift worker. It should always be remembered that the great majority of the plays written in this period have wholly disappeared. Within the hundreds that have been lost, there will have been many touches of genuine Shakespeare.

His role as a company man may help to explain why he was not perhaps concerned with the publication of his plays in his own lifetime. The fellowship of the players was so intense that the plays themselves may have been considered to be in a sense common property, a communal effort that should remain within the community. It would have been considered inappropriate, and against the spirit of their fellowship, for him to cause to be published these works under his own name. One contract survives for another dramatist in which it is stipulated that the author “should not suffer any play made or to be made or composed by him” to be printed “without the license from the said company or the major part of them.”² Shakespeare’s agreement is unlikely to have taken the form of a contract, but he felt a deep obligation to give them his work. The great virtue of this informal understanding was that the company preserved his plays; the work of no other playwright, with the possible exception of Jonson, was kept intact in this manner.

The difference between Shakespeare and Jonson is in any case instructive. Jonson was willing to introduce himself as an author, as an individual outside the bounds of any company or fellowship; Shakespeare, of an older generation, was much more at ease in the collaborative and guild-like venture of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men where the individual was subsumed within the group. His status was much closer to that of a craftsman than an “artist” in any modern sense. It was only after his death that his fellow professionals, in an act of group piety, formally published his plays.

CHAPTER 47 I Vnderstand a Fury in Your words

From the evidence of the manuscript of Sir Thomas More Shakespeare wrote at extreme speed and intensity; he seems to have been able to summon up the energy and the inspiration at will, with the words and cadences emerging from some deep well of his being. He left some lines unfinished in the rapidity and restlessness of creation. In Timon of Athens the protagonist is described as begging “so many” talents; Shakespeare clearly meant to add an exact figure at a later stage. But he simply had to get on. He hardly ever punctuated, preferring to rely instead upon the roll and rush of creation. In some instances he seems to have left spaces between his words, where punctuation marks could be inserted after the fit had passed. He did not mark act or scene divisions. Ludwig Wittgenstein gained the impression that his verses were “dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything, so to speak.”¹ Samuel Johnson remarked that the endings of his plays were sometimes written with undue haste, as if the exigencies of the moment forced him to hurry.

It seems likely that he wrote on loose sheets of paper, and he may have embarked upon separate scenes as his inclination took him. He might, for example, have completed the first episodes and the last episodes before turning his attention to the intervening scenes. There is a report by Ben Jonson, in his notebooks, of a contemporary writer, that may bear some relation to this. He was one who when “he hath set himself to writing he would join night and day and press upon himself without release, not minding it till he fainted.”² If this is a description of Shakespeare, however, it is odd that Jonson does not name him.

There are of course more precise descriptions of his practice from his contemporaries. John Heminges and Henry Condell concluded, in their joint preface to the First Folio, that “His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers.” That may not be altogether true, but Heminges and Condell were concerned to emphasise the extraordinary facility of his invention. His ease or “easinesse,” too, was part of the wondrous effect; the verse flows naturally and instinctively from each character.

Ben Jonson was less sanguine about his fluency. In Timber, or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter he wrote that

I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted.

He goes on to conclude that “hee flow’d with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d; Sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his owne power; would the rule of it have beene so too.” Shakespeare may not have been the most prolific of his contemporaries — Thomas Heywood seems to have written wholly or in part some 220 plays — but it is clear enough that he had a reputation for rapid and inspired composition.

So we may plausibly see him at work, sitting in a standard panel-backed chair at his table. If he had a study, it was one that he had fitted up for himself in the sequence of London lodgings that he rented. It is sometimes suggested that he returned to his house in Stratford in order to compose without noise or disturbance, but this seems most unlikely. He wrote where he was, close to the theatre and close to the actors. It is doubtful if, in the furia of composition, noise or circumstance affected him. It is likely in any case that, as a result of his various employments in the theatre, he was obliged to write at night; there are various references in the plays to “oil-dried lamps,” to candles, and to “the smoakie light” that is “fed with stinking Tallow”(Cymbeline, 632–3).

He would have possessed a small “desk box” together with pen-case, pen-knife and inkwell; he is also likely to have owned a book-chest and a book-rest for the proper perusal of the bulky histories and anthologies from which he gathered his material. He may also have made notes in what were known as “table-books” or bound notebooks; Hamlet calls for “my tables” to “set it downe”(725). He could have jotted down notes or passages that occurred to him in the course of the day; other writers have found that walking through the busy streets can materially aid inspiration.

When he sat down at his desk he wrote on thick, coarse paper with sharpened pens or pencils; he used the conventional quill of goose-feathers, firm and reliable. He wrote on both sides of the folio-sized paper — paper was expensive — with approximately fifty lines on each side; in the left margin were the speech-prefixes and, in the right margin, the hasty stage-directions. He would often omit the name of the speaker, in his rush to go on, and only add it at a later stage.

Time is a fluid and capacious medium in his plays. He shortened or lengthened it at will so that it would fit the scale of his plots. He was so enveloped in the medium of the play that he created his own time within it; there is “stage time” and “real time” which only occasionally correspond. In Julius Caesar the passage of a month, between the Night of Lupercal and the eve of the Ides of March, takes place within one impassioned night. This is not Newtonian time but medieval time, shaped by sacred meaning. In Othello and Romeo and Juliet there is the presence of what has become known as “double time,” accommodating both the swift passage of event and the slow growth of feeling; the success of the device is manifest in the fact that no audience seems to notice it.

He was, as we have seen, generally in a hurry to complete a play. But this emphasis upon his fluency and facility must be tempered by his evident hesitations and revisions. He often seems to pause in mid-verse, as it were, pen held over paper, ready to strike out a word or improve it with a better one. There are occasions when he loses his way with a speech or passage of verse, and so returns to the beginning and tries all over again. It is a question of mustering the right impetus and fury. In his earliest plays there is at times evidence of “padding,” when he runs out of inspiration or energy; but these longueurs occur far less frequently in the plays of his maturity. More often than not he works at white heat. There are moments when he does not know whether he was writing prose or verse. In the second part of Henry IV, for example, Falstaff delivers some lines that could be printed in either mode. In Timon of Athens some of the original prose actually rhymed. His phrases are filled with the natural cadence of the English pentameter and the discrimination between poetry and prose might have seemed to him unimportant. There are occasions in which he runs verse lines together in order to save space; the lines of songs are joined together for the same reason. In the manuscript of Sir Thomas More he compresses three and half lines of verse into two lines of prose, just so that he can finish a speech at the end of the page. Again the formal difference between prose and poetry melts away in his compulsion to set it all down. It could in fact be argued that his texts were always in a fluid and incomplete state, waiting for the actors to lend them emphasis and meaning.

There are, as a result, confusions. He sometimes muddled names, or gave characters different names in the course of the same play. Characters are also given different descriptions or professions; in Coriolanus Cominius is at one moment a consul and at the next a general. There are often loose ends, when a plot line is begun but never completed. There are inconsistencies of time and place. The space of nineteen years is suddenly contracted to fourteen years in succeeding scenes of Measure for Measure, suggesting that he did not necessarily write scenes consecutively; otherwise he would have remembered the span of time from one scene to the next. A character suddenly “forgets” information that he or she has just imparted, or asks the same question on separate occasions. In Julius Caesar Brutus receives the first news of Portia’s death having just announced the same fact to Cassius; he also gives inconsistent answers to the same question. Shakespeare was in the process of creating Brutus’s character, and may inadvertently have left both first and second thoughts upon the page. At the close of Timon of Athens Timon’s epitaph says in one line, “Seek not my name” and in the next line continues “Here lie I, Timon.” Again it is an example of Shakespeare trying out two versions, both of which somehow survived for the printer to translate into type and therefore to posterity. When in his famous soliloquy at the beginning of the third act Hamlet (1617-18) describes death as

The vndiscouer’d country, from whose borne

No trauiler returnes …

he seems to have forgotten that he has already seen his father’s ghost. The speech “To be, or not to be” is probably an interpolation within the text. It may have been a speech that Shakespeare composed for an earlier version of Hamlet or for another play altogether; it may have been a speech he jotted down in a table-book for unspecified later use. It was in any case too good to abandon, and so he placed it in this version of Hamlet.

His stage-directions are a good indication of his method. Sometimes they are misplaced. He abbreviates or omits them in a haphazard manner, as if the speed and urgency of his composition drove all before them. The fact that he did not write coherent notes or systematic directions is a sure sign that he knew he would be engaged in the rehearsals at some later time. All would then be made clear. He forgets to “exit” some characters, an omission that would of course have been picked up at just such a rehearsal. Sometimes he hopelessly confuses the speech-prefixes of minor characters, so that it becomes difficult to tell who is addressing whom. In King John the French king is sometimes known as Philip and sometimes Lewis. Shakespeare introduces characters who never speak at all; he may have intended them to play a part but in the quick working of his invention forgot about them entirely. In Much Ado About Nothing Leonato apparently has a wife called Innogen, but she never makes an appearance. The name reappears in Cymbeline. Sometimes he will add the stage-direction “with others,” and only gradually will the members of this unknown assembly reveal themselves in individual parts. Some of his plays seem too long for conventional or average performance. It has been suggested that these are reading versions of his dramas, but it is more probable that they are examples of allowing his invention to advance unimpeded. He had in any case no need to curb his flowing pen; he knew that cuts could be made in rehearsal. As an epistle at the beginning of Beaumont and Fletcher’s published works testifies in 1647, “When these comedies and tragedies were presented on the stage, the actors omitted some scenes and passages, with the authors’ consent, as occasion led them.” There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare reacted any differently.

It is sometimes suggested that his hesitations and inconsistencies are the mark of every dramatist. But that is not necessarily the case. Moliere, for example, has practically none. They are much more the token of Shakespeare’s uniquely fluid imagination and fluency of language. He was neither a cautious nor a deliberate artist. As the Poet confesses in Timon of Athens (21-5):

Our Poesie is as a Goume, which ouses

From whence ’tis nourisht: the fire i’th’Flint

Shewes not, till it be strooke: our gentle flame

Prouokes it selfe, and like the currant flyes

Each bound it chafes.

Poetry creates itself in the act of being created; it needs no external stimulus but provokes itself and streams forth with its own insistent momentum. He was always, as it were, in a state of suspenseful attention, not knowing precisely where he was going. That may help to explain his more than usually erratic spellings; in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, for example, there are five different spellings of “sheriff” in five consecutive lines. The name of “More” is spelled in three different ways in the same line. It is as if he wished his meaning to be indeterminate, to be open to any and every interpretation. This was also his professional method, leaving as much as possible to the process of rehearsal and the interpretation of the player. But the effect of course is further to heighten what has been called his “invisibility” as if the words, like the oozing gum, came from some natural source.

Yet there is an apparent paradox here. In the course of revision or rewriting, he often changes the most minute details out of some general desire to polish the verse still brighter. It may have been an instinctive, and for him a barely noticed, process; but of course there were occasions when he changed the general tenor of a scene. It has already been noticed that Shakespeare continued to revise his plays throughout his career. The new Oxford edition of his plays, for example, prints two versions of King Lear composed at different times. All the evidence suggests that some of his more accomplished dramas, such as The Taming of the Shrew and King John, are rewritten versions of his earlier originals. Othello was revised in order to augment the part of Emilia; she needed to be more sympathetic in order to avert any dissatisfaction in the audience at her giving Iago the handkerchief. Iago must be the sole architect of evil in the play. Shakespeare presumably registered the ambivalent reaction of the first audiences to her role, and changed the text accordingly. There are interpolations in many of the plays; the diversion upon the misfortunes of the players in Hamlet is one example. In Romeo and Juliet the speech beginning “The grey eyed morne smiles on the frowning night” is transferred from Romeo to Friar Lawrence in a significant change of emphasis. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Berowne gives two different versions of the same speech, one much more lyrical than the other; one was presumably added in the margin, or on a separate piece of paper, at a later date without the printer noticing that the other had been cancelled.

This is a very common phenomenon in the plays of Shakespeare. There are single lines that contain intact Shakespeare’s first and second thoughts. In the second quarto of Romeo and Juliet, for example, there exists the strange and unmetrical line “Rauenous douefeatherd rauen, woluishrauening lamb”; here the process of his thought from ravenous through dove to raven is made clear; if the editor removes the first “Rauenous,” a certain sense emerges. The ending of Troilus and Cressida has been heavily restructured, and it can in fact fairly be claimed that there are few plays in which there is no evidence of rewriting or structural revision. He often cut lines at a later date. In the two sequences of history plays, concerning Henry VI and Henry IV respectively, there is some evidence that he added speeches which would knit the plays together and thus provide a more unified structure of action. He added material for plays to be performed at court, and was sometimes obliged to rewrite existing material. Thus Oldcastle became, in a later version, Falstaff. He also changed material to accommodate the changing cast of players. This need not necessarily negate the impression given by his contemporaries that he wrote speedily and easily; it implies only his plays were always in a provisional or fluid shape. It is clear enough that at some point he generally went back over what he had written. It may have been at the moment of making a fair copy for his earliest manuscript pages; it may have been at the time he revised a play for a new season of performances.

One example may stand for many. In Hamlet his first version of the Player Queen’s speech runs:

For women feare too much, euen as they loue,

And womens feare and loue hold quantitie,

Eyther none, in neither ought, or in extremitie.

But this was too prolix and confusing, so he tightened up the verses in a succeeding version (1888-9):

For womens feare and loue, holds quantitie,

In neither ought, or in extremity.

He would have had to ensure that these changes met with the approval of the actors, who of course would have had to learn the new lines; he must also have made certain that the revisions were not so drastic that the play had to be resubmitted to the Master of Revels for approval. Within these constraints, therefore, his plays were never fixed or finished; he was continually remaking them and, to the horror of editors who would prefer a definitive text, we may fairly assume that each play was slightly different at every performance.

There were ideas and projects that he abandoned as unpromising or unworkable. And of course he changed his mind about plot and characterisation as he went along. He had already read around the subject, perhaps over a period of weeks or even months, and the principal lines of action were clear to him. It is not necessary to suppose that he kept elaborate synopses or schemes before he began composition, and it is in fact more likely that he retained the entire play in his capacious memory. The play hovered in the air, as it were, in inchoate shape. That is why he could change direction as he wrote; he could alter motive and character, create fresh scenes and provoke new debates. In his speech-prefixes stock names slowly give way to personal names as Shakespeare deepens and extends their characterisation; in All’s Well That Ends Well, for example, “Clown” becomes “Lavatch” and “Steward” becomes “Rynaldo.” They are coming to life in front of him.

He lost interest in certain plot lines after he had introduced them. Nothing, for example, is made of the Princess’s early demands for the territory of Aquitaine in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The business between Lorenzo and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice is left unresolved. In that play, too, it is clear that Shakespeare gained interest in Shylock while at the same time noticeably losing enthusiasm for Antonio. Antonio opens the play in an intriguingly melancholy style, but thereafter is never properly developed. The public context of Coriolanus is rapidly succeeded by private communings; the character of Hamlet is transformed in the last two acts of the play. Of course it could be argued that these were long-considered decisions on Shakespeare’s part, but they bear all the hallmarks of improvisation and spontaneous invention.

CHAPTER 48 So shaken as We Are, So Wan with Care

In the summer of 1595 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men went on tour. In June they were at Ipswich and at Cambridge, in each place receiving the not inconsiderable sum of 40 shillings. There had been a time when a university town such as Cambridge had shunned the presence of common players, but their status and prestige had risen. William Shakespeare already had, as we have seen, an eager audience among the educated young; it is not too much to suggest that he might have been a “draw” for the members of the various colleges.

They had left London for the very good reason that the theatres had once again been closed. There had been a number of food riots, over the soaring costs of fish and butter, in the late spring and early summer; there were twelve affrays in June alone. The apprentices had taken over the market in Southwark, and then subsequently the market at Billingsgate, to sell the staples of food at what they considered to be an appropriate rate. Then, on 29 June, a thousand London apprentices marched on Tower Hill to pillage the shops of the gun-makers there, clearly with nefarious intent. The pillories in Cheapside had been torn down, and a makeshift gallows was erected outside the house of the Lord Mayor. There were pamphlets circulated on the “rebellious tumults” and in subsequent legal proceedings the apprentices were charged with attempting to “take the sword of auchtoryte”¹ from the mayor and aldermen of the city. Five of their leaders were hanged, drawn and quartered, thus incurring an unusually severe punishment. So London was placed under the Elizabethan version of martial law, and of course the theatres were out of action.

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men had in any case begun their career in London during a generally troubled period. One alderman complained to the Privy Council in 1596 of the “great dearth of victual which hath been continued now these three years, besides three years’ plague before.”² Weavers’ apprentices were part of the summer riots of 1595, and a silk weaver was incarcerated in Bedlam for accusing the mayor of insanity. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bottom, the leader of the artisans, is himself a weaver. It has been suggested that Shakespeare was transforming violence into farce and comedy. Certainly this would resemble his practice on other occasions. There are, of course, many other contemporary allusions in his plays that are now irrecoverable. He may also have taken advantage of the interval of closure to travel back to Stratford: there is a local record of “Mr. Shaxpere” purchasing “one book” from “Jone Perat”³ at the end of August. Aubrey reports on unknown authority that he “was wont to goe to his native Country once a yeare.”⁴

When the company resumed acting in London at the end of August the Lord Mayor demanded that their resident theatres, the Curtain and the Theatre, should be pulled down in order to avoid the threatening presence of crowds and disorder in that neighbourhood. The virtues of the players, however, were more widely appreciated by the gentry than the City fathers. At the beginning of December Sir Edward Hoby wrote to his first cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, member of the Privy Council, asking “your grace to visit Canon Row; where as late as it shall please you a gate for your supper shall be open, and King Richard present himself to your view.”⁵ This may allude to a late-night performance of The Tragedy of King Richard III but it has generally been interpreted as referring to The Tragedy of King Richard II that had just lately been written. It is in certain respects a contentious play, concerned as it is with the forced abdication and murder of a legitimate sovereign, and Cecil may have been invited to check its suitability for the court. The scenes directly concerned with those events may have been acted within the lifetime of Elizabeth I, but they were never printed in the period. That would have incurred too great a risk.

The censored play was a popular success, however, with three quarto editions printed in the space of two years; the last two of them included the name of William Shakespeare as author. Its popularity may in fact have helped to promote the life of Richard II in the public imagination. There is a letter from Raleigh to Robert Cecil written in the summer of 1597, shortly before the publication of the play in quarto form, in which he states that “I acquainted my L: generall [the Earl of Essex] with your letter to mee & your kynd acceptance of your enterteynemente, hee was also wonderfull merry at ye consait of Richard the 2.”⁶ Here the name of the dead king is a joking pseudonym for the living queen.

Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of King Richard II in verse, and it has all the splendour of his lyric impulse. That is why it is associated with A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as Romeo and Juliet. The verse shimmers and soars as the history of England is mingled with enchantment — not the enchantment of legend or of faery, but of a theatrical and lyrical sovereign who laments the end of his reign in soliloquies of dust and desolation. He is the monarch of metaphor and simile. His is in every sense a wonderful performance. Shakespeare has followed the symbolic logic of his dramaturgy by combining king and actor in one role, with all the spectacle and vainglory the combination implies. That is why it is also a play of ritual and rhetoric, with elaborate effects of staging as well as language. Richard finds his deepest being while musing upon his role or part within the world. He is depicted here as a highly self-conscious and dramatic monarch; he is the only person in the play to be granted soliloquies while his enemy and supplanter, Henry Bolingbroke, remains resolutely unyielding and external. The declining king seems to grow in interest as he approaches his defeat and death — or, rather, Shakespeare becomes more interested in his temperament and situation. At the beginning of the play he is depicted as somewhat callous and avaricious but, as he figuratively and literally bends lower to the earth, he inspires some of Shakespeare’s greatest verse. The dramatist is always engaged by failure, especially failure on such a cosmic scale. It summons up all the grace and sympathy of his nature, which may in part be connected with some tenderness towards his father, and in this play he proves himself beyond doubt to be the master of pathos.

It may be that the role of the declining king was played by Shakespeare himself, while the part of Bolingbroke was taken by Burbage. Yet, characteristically, Shakespeare does not judge between the deposed monarch and his supplanter. Henry Bolingbroke emerges as the victor, but there is no hero in this race. That is why Shakespeare only alludes to the possibility that Richard II was responsible for the murder of his uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, even though it was the pivotal plot of a very successful contemporary play entitled Thomas of Woodstock, which may have been part of the Lord Chamberlain’s repertory; it is clear that Shakespeare relied upon the audience’s knowledge of it as a preliminary to his own less partisan drama. It was not a question of right or wrong; it was a question of magnificence. The English loved spectacle and rhetoric; they loved sweet and powerful orations. That was what the sixteenth-century stage was about.

It has been surmised that there is some lost source play for Richard II, but the material for the tragedy was already to hand. There were of course the chronicles of Hall and of Holinshed, from whom he lifts some lines almost verbatim. But there was also the particular example of Samuel Daniel’s The Civile Warres betweene the two houses of Lancaster and Yorke, published in 1595, although it is not altogether clear who borrowed from whom. Daniel was a poet of courtly, rather than theatrical, circles; his sonnet sequence, Delia, had been published in 1592 and had some influence upon Shakespeare’s own ventures in that medium. There was a further association with the dramatist. Until this time Daniel had been part of the household of the Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton; he was tutor to her son, William Herbert, with whom Shakespeare may have had a direct connection through those same sonnets. Daniel was also the brother-in-law of John Florio, whom Shakespeare knew well. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of the Earl of Essex; once more the Essex affinity emerges in this narrative.

If Shakespeare borrowed from Daniel, then in turn the poet borrowed from the dramatist; some effects from Antony and Cleopatra become part of Daniel’s verse drama on the same theme. So there was, in a sense, a meeting of minds. Samuel Daniel is an image of what Shakespeare might have been — a writer of obscure country origins who, by dint of learning and skill, fashioned a career for himself as poet and retainer. There is even the story that, in 1599, Elizabeth had chosen him as unofficial poet laureate in succession to Edmund Spenser; whatever the truth of the matter, there is no doubt that Daniel was considered highly at court.

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men returned to that court for the Christmas season of 1595 about three weeks after their performance at the house of Sir Edward Hoby in Canon Row. It is not known whether they played Richard II before the ageing queen. Six years later she told a visitor to Greenwich Palace that “I am Richard the Second, know ye not that?” and complained that the tragedy “was played fortie times in open streets and houses.” It is not clear what she meant by “open streets” but by “houses” she must have been alluding to private performances of the play, indirectly providing further evidence that the players were indeed hired by nobles or rich men. So, at the very least, she was aware of the play’s existence. Could it have been acted at court at the end of the year?

There was a gap in their performances from 28 December to 6 January, in which interval they travelled to Rutland. In the household of Sir John Harington, at Burley-on-the-Hill, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men gave a performance of an old favourite, Titus Andronicus, as part of the New Year celebrations of 1596. They acted on the evening of their arrival, and left on the following day. Presumably they were well rewarded. It may seem unusual for an entire company to travel over a hundred miles into the heart of Rutland, in order to give one performance of an old play, but as is so often the case in the sixteenth century there are relations and affinities that help to explain the journey. Sir John Harington was an intimate friend of the same Hoby of Canon Row, with whom he had been at Eton. In addition the French tutor in the household, Monsieur Le Doux, was later financed by the Earl of Essex on various expeditions to the continent as an intelligence agent. The mystery deepens in the knowledge that Anthony Bacon’s confidential secretary, Jaques Petit, was also at Burley-on-the-Hill this Christmas and was according to one report posing as Monsieur Le Doux’s valet.⁷ It was he who wrote a letter describing the performance of Titus Andronicus.

So we have Shakespeare and his company paying an especial favour, or tribute, to one of Essex’s affinity. It reaffirms the suggestion that Shakespeare himself was close to the circle of Essex’s supporters, most notable among them the young Earl of Southampton. The familial association between Hoby and Cecil — Hoby’s maternal uncle was William Cecil, Lord Burghley — renders this whole network of friends and relations even more significant, especially since in this period Essex and the Cecils were on friendly terms. Shakespeare, if only briefly, was moving in a world of confidential agents and secret missions, of plot and counter-plot. It was a world that many of his contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe chief among them, knew very well. It must have been a world that Shakespeare himself understood.

So there is an air of unfamiliarity, and perhaps mystery, about his appearance in the grand house at Rutland. It has even been suggested that “Monsieur Le Doux” was a pseudonym for an English secret agent, and perhaps even a pseudonym for a resolutely undead Christopher Marlowe.⁸ On a more prosaic note we may simply record that Jaques Petit said in his letter that “on a aussi joué la tragédie de Titus Andronicus mais la monstre a plus valu que le sujet.”⁹ The “monstre” or spectacle was more interesting than the plot. The same might be said of this particular gathering. The stage of Rutland is suddenly lit, and Shakespeare is glimpsed in the company of people with whom he is not ordinarily associated. If ever there was a “secret Shakespeare,” as a hundred biographies testify, it lies in obscure moments such as these.

CHAPTER 49 Ah, No, No, No, It Is Mine Onely sonne

The immediate problems of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had not been lifted by royal or noble favour. The city authorities still seemed eager to close down the Theatre and the Curtain, and James Burbage had already been making plans to convert part of Blackfriars into a roofed playhouse; since Blackfriars was a “liberty,” an area where the City’s powers of arrest did not run, it was not under official jurisdiction. Burbage had also been involved in difficult negotiations with the landlord of the Theatre, Giles Allen, who wished to profit from the success of the playhouse. He increased the ground rent from £14 to £24 per annum, and Burbage agreed that Allen would eventually be able to take possession of the building after a number of years. But Allen seems to have gone too far in his demand that the Theatre become his property after only five years; Burbage demurred, and began to invest in Blackfriars. Throughout the summer of 1596 he was engaged in tearing down tenements, and converting an old stone building known as the “Frater” or refectory in the precincts of the ancient monastery. It was his insurance policy. He even arranged that his master carpenter, Peter Streete, should move down to the river in order to be close to the site.

On 23 July 1596 Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, at the age of seventy, died at Somerset House. His successor as Lord Chamberlain, Lord Cobham, was much less sympathetic to the theatrical profession; one of his ancestors, Sir John Oldcastle, had been mocked in the first part of King Henry IV. So relations between the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were not necessarily benevolent. The players may even have feared that Cobham would support the Lord Mayor’s request permanently to close down the public playhouses. As Thomas Nashe put it in a letter of this time: “howeuer in there old Lords tyme they thought there state settled, it is now so uncertayne they cannot build upon it.”¹ The players had begun a tour of Kent soon after Hunsdon’s death — they were playing at the market hall of Faversham on 1 August — but once more they found themselves in an insecure profession.

A few days after playing in Faversham, however, Shakespeare suffered a greater blow. His son of eleven years, Hamnet Shakespeare, died. There is every reason to suppose that Shakespeare hastened from Kent to Stratford, for the funeral on 11 August. The death of a young son can have many and various effects. Did Shakespeare feel any sense of guilt, or responsibility, at having left his family in Stratford? And how did he respond to his grieving wife, who had been obliged to care for the children without his presence? The questions cannot be answered, of course. There are some powerful lines in the second part of Henry IV, written shortly after these events, when Northumberland’s wife blames his absence for the death of their son (985-6). The child

Threw many a Northward looke, to see his father

Bring vp his powers, but he did long in vaine.

Many of Shakespeare’s later plays have the pervasive theme of families reunited and love restored. In The Winter’s Tale the son, Mamillius, dies as the result of his father’s conduct; the boy who plays this part doubled as Perdita, the daughter who at the end of the play is restored to her errant father. In her form and figure the dead son is also revived.

The death of children was much more common in the sixteenth than in the twenty-first century. Elizabethan families were also more “extended,” with various cousins and other kin, so that sudden death had a natural buttress against prolonged or severe grief. It is not necessary to fall into the delusion that sixteenth-century parents were less caring or less emotional than their successors, but it is important to note that the death of a child was not an unusual experience. The cause of the death of Shakespeare’s son is not known, although at the end of this year Stratford suffered a severe rise in mortality from typhus and dysentery. Hamnet’s twin sister Judith, however, lived to the great age of seventy.

So Shakespeare had lost his only son, the recipient of his inheritance. In the sixteenth century the blood line was charged with significance, and in his subsequent will he went to elaborate lengths to provide for an ultimate male heir, suggesting that the matter still provoked his attention and concern. He had lost the image of himself.

It is of course impossible to gauge the effect upon the dramatist. He may, or may not, have become inconsolable. He may have sought refuge, as so many others have done, in hard and relentless work. The plays of this period have nevertheless been interpreted in the light of this dead son. One critic has described Romeo and Juliet as a “dirge for the son’s death”;² this stretches chronology, if not credulity. In James Joyce’s Ulysses Stephen Dedalus declares that his “boyson’s death is the death-scene of young Arthur in King John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare.” Indeed it cannot be wholly coincidental that Shakespeare was drawn at a later date to the tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, who is haunted by the spectre of his dead father. In Twelfth Night, the story of identical twins — boy and girl — is resolved by the miraculous reappearance of the male child from apparent death. The twin is restored to life. In the period immediately following Hamnet’s death, as Stephen Dedalus noted, Shakespeare also rewrote the play concerning King John. One of his additions is a lament by Constance on the untimely death of her young son, which begins (1398–1405):

Greefe fils the roome vp of my absent childe:

Lies in his bed, walkes vp and downe with me,

Puts on his pretty lookes, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffes out his vacant garments with his forme;

Then, haue I reason to be fond of griefe?

Fareyouwell: had you such a losse as I,

I could giue better comfort then you doe.

It may not be appropriate to draw strong lines between the art and the life but, in such a case as this, it defies common sense to pretend that Constance’s lament has nothing whatever to do with Shakespeare’s loss of Hamnet.

The comicall History of the Merchant of Venice, or otherwise called the Iewe of Venyce, written in this same period for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, begins in mournful tone. It is one of the strangest, and most arresting, openings in Shakespeare:

In sooth I know not why I am so sad,

It wearies me, you say it wearies you..

It is often assumed that Shakespeare himself played this part of Antonio, implicitly enamoured of his friend Bassanio. Antonio appears at crucial moments of action, but he is generally a lower-keyed figure who in rehearsals could have guided the others. The play does not linger on his sentimental tragedy, however, but mounts higher with the story of Shylock and his bloody bargain.

It was Shakespeare’s practice to combine elements from what would seem irreconcilable sources, and thereby create new forms of harmony. For The Merchant of Venice he no doubt plundered an old stage drama, The Jew, which had been played at the Bull Theatre almost twenty years before; a spectator there described it as representing “the greedinesse of worldly chusers and bloody mindes of Usurers.”³ That itself is a reasonable if brief summary of Shakespeare’s play. It would have been just like Shakespeare’s ordinary practice — to take an ancient “potboiler,” which he must have seen and remembered, and to infuse it with fresh life. He had also witnessed The Jew of Malta, since the role of Shylock is in part based upon that of Marlowe’s Barabas; the instinct for imitation is implicated in the desire to out-write his dead rival. The story of Shylock acted as the catalyst, whereby these two plays came together in new and unusual combination. He also makes use of an Italian story from Ser Giovanni’s Il Pecorone; it had not been translated into English at this time, and so we are led to the conjecture either that Shakespeare could read Italian or that he picked up the story at second hand. He remembered, too, the story of the Argonauts from his schoolboy reading of Ovid. There are of course other sources, many of them now unknown or forgotten, part of the texture of Shakespeare’s mind; but with the plays, the Italian story and the school reading of set texts, we may gain some inkling of the combinatory power of Shakespeare’s imagination.

The character of Shylock has provoked so many different interpretations that he has turned into the Wandering Jew, progressing through a thousand theses and critical studies. He may have been the model for Dickens’s Fagin but, unlike the entrepreneur of Saffron Hill, he could never become a caricature; he is too filled with life and spirit, too linguistically resourceful, to be conventionalised. He is altogether too powerful and perplexing a figure. It is almost as if Shakespeare fully intended to create a character drawing upon conventional prejudices about an alien race, but found that he was unable to sympathise with such a figure. He simply could not write a stereotype. He would later explore the nobility of an alien or “outsider” in Othello. It is likely that the sound and appearance of Shylock led Shakespeare forward, without the dramatist really knowing in which direction he was going. That is why he is perhaps, like so many of Shakespeare’s principal figures, beyond interpretation. He is beyond good and evil. He is simply a magnificent and extravagant stage representation.

But we must never forget the stridency of the Elizabethan theatre. Shy-lock would have been played with a red wig and bottle nose. The play is, after all, entitled the “comicall History.” The play retains strong elements of the commedia dell’arte, and can indeed be seen in part as a grotesque comedy which includes the figures of the Pantaloon, the Dottore, the first and second lovers, and of course the zanies or buffoons. But Shakespeare cannot use any dramatic convention without in some way changing it. In The Merchant of Venice the usual rules of the commedia dell’arte are subverted. The fact that it also incorporates fanciful elements from other sources, such as Portia’s riddle of the caskets, only serves to emphasise the highly theatrical and dream-like world in which it is set. There was perhaps a masque introduced in the course of the narrative, which in turn suggests that at least one version of the play was designed to be performed at Burbage’s newly refurbished Blackfriars; an indoor playhouse was the appropriate setting for an elegant entertainment of that sort. There are, indeed, images of music throughout the play which reach the peak of their crescendo in the last scene at Belmont (2340-4):

… looke how the floore of heauen

Is thick inlayed with pattens of bright gold,

There’s not the smallest orbe which thou beholdst

But in his motion like an Angell sings.

All of the scenes are wrapped in the greater unreality of sixteenth-century theatrical convention, which veered closer towards nineteenth-century melodrama or pantomime than twentieth-century naturalistic theatre.

There were a small number of Jews in sixteenth-century London, as well as ostensible converts from Judaism known as Marranos, generally living and working under assumed names. In 1594, only two years before the first production of The Merchant of Venice, the Earl of Essex had been instrumental in the apprehension, torture and death of Roderigo Lopez, a Jewish doctor accused of attempting to poison the queen. There is an allusion to that affair in the play itself. But the stage image of Jews essentially came from the mystery plays, where they were pilloried as the tormentors of Jesus. In the dramatic cycle Herod was played in a red wig, for example; it represents the origin of the clown in pantomime. It was the costume of Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. It is, in effect, the image with which Shakespeare was obliged to work. Yet out of the character he created something infinitely more interesting and sympathetic than the stock type. As a result Shylock has entered the imagination of the world.

CHAPTER 50 What Are You? A Gentleman

Less than three months after Hamnet’s death, John Shakespeare was awarded a coat of arms by the Garter King of Arms. He became a gentleman, and of course his son would share that appellation by inheritance. It is more than likely, in fact, that Shakespeare himself was responsible for the renewal of an application that his father had made — and then dropped — twenty-eight years before. The cost of obtaining the coat of arms had then seemed prohibitive but, in the milder climate of Shakespeare’s new-found affluence, that impediment had gone. It is difficult to be sure of the time needed to procure such a suit, but Shakespeare must have entered his father’s submission before Hamnet’s death. It would have been fitting and appropriate for Shakespeare to wish to pass on his new status to his only son, a natural succession that Hamnet’s death frustrated.

The coat of arms was a rebus, or pun on the name of Shakespeare. On the grant of arms an heraldic drawing was sketched at the top of the page; it showed a falcon, holding a spear, perched above a shield and crest. The falcon is displaying its wings, in the action known as “shaking.”¹ The motto included here, “Non sainz droict,” means “Not without right.” The shaken spear was of gold tipped with silver, as if it were some courtly or ceremonial staff, and the falcon itself was considered to be a noble bird. The livery of the Earl of Southampton contained four falcons, and it is possible that Shakespeare was claiming some kind of relationship with him. The whole device is somewhat assertive, and no doubt reflected the conviction of the Shakespeare males (or at least of one of them) that they were indeed gentlemen.

The Garter King of Arms had granted these arms to John Shakespeare “being solicited and by credible report informed” that his “parentes & late Grandfather for his faithfull & valeant service were advaunced & rewarded by the most Prudent Prince King Henry the seventh of famous memorie.”² This seems to have been sheer invention on the Shakespeares’ part; there is no record of any Shakespeare being honoured by Henry VII. But it may have been one of those “family stories” that are believed without necessarily being investigated.

Shakespeare seems to have been preoccupied with heraldry. In Richard II he displays considerable technical knowledge of the subject, while Katherine says in The Taming of the Shrew (1028-30):

If you strike me, you are no Gentleman,

And if no Gentleman, why then no armes.

To which Petruchio replies:

A Herald Kate? Oh put me in thy bookes.

There is in the same play an episode clearly taken from a volume of heraldry, Gerard Legh’s Accedens of Armory ³ suggesting that Shakespeare was reading such books as early as the 1580s. He wished to demonstrate, and to publicise to the world, his “gentle” state. It was a way of setting himself apart from the still ambiguous reputation enjoyed by most players. It was also an indirect way of associating himself with the Ardens of his mother’s line. In a more immediate sense he was restoring his family’s reputation after the sudden and perplexing withdrawal of John Shakespeare from public business.

At this late date it may seem a mere contrivance, an honorific without meaning, but in the late sixteenth century it was a sign and emblem of true identity. It afforded the bearer proper individuality as well as a secure place within the general hierarchy of the community. By combining emblem and reality, spectacle and decoration, heraldry truly became a Tudor obsession. There were no fewer than seven standard texts on the subject. In this, at least, Shakespeare was very much a man of his age. The world of his drama is that of the great house or of the court; none of his central protagonists is “low born,” to use the phrase of the time, but is a gentleman, a lord or a monarch. The only exceptions are the protagonists of The Merry Wives of Windsor, citizens all. The common people are, in the mass, described by him as “the rabble.”

But John Shakespeare’s right to bear arms was not without critics. From the late 1590s onwards the York Herald, Sir Ralph Brooke, had challenged the decisions of the Garter King of Arms, Sir William Dethick, in granting arms to apparently unworthy recipients. There were accusations of malfeasance, if not explicitly of fraud and bribery. In Brooke’s list of twenty-three “mean persons” who had been granted arms wrongly, the name of Shakespeare came fifth. The qualities of the recipient were called into question, to which William Dethick replied that “the man was a magistrate of Stratford-upon-Avon: a Justice of the Peace. He married the daughter and heir of Arden, of a good substance and ability.” There is at least one false note in this defence. Mary Arden was the daughter and heir of a very obscure branch of the Arden family, and it is likely that the Shakespeares exaggerated her ancestry. As in their former claim of a forefather rewarded by Henry VII, the ambition outran the reality.

The fact that the dispute had become public knowledge must have been an irritant, to put it mildly, to Shakespeare, whose assertive emblem and motto had now been cast into doubt. This did not prevent him, however, from applying three years later for the Shakespeare arms to be impaled with the arms of the Arden family. He may have done this “to please his Mother, and to be partly proud” (35-6), as the citizen says of Coriolanus, but it suggests the persistence and quality of his interest in such matters.

He also received some barbed criticism from a dramatic colleague. In Every Man out of His Humour Ben Jonson introduces a vainglorious rustic, Sogliardo, who acquires a coat of arms. “I can write myself a gentleman now,” he says; “here’s my patent, it cost me thirty pounds, by this breath.” The arms include a boar’s head to which an appropriate motto is suggested, “Not without mustard.” This has generally been taken, not without reason, as an allusion to Shakespeare’s “Not without right.” The mustard may also refer to the bright gold of the Shakespearian coat. So his newly found eminence did not go without some malicious comment.

Yet, characteristically enough, Shakespeare was also able to satirise his own pretensions. In Twelfth Night, performed in the period when Brooke was challenging Dethick’s bestowal of arms upon the Shakespeares, the steward Malvolio has pretensions to gentility. He is persuaded to wear yellow stockings “cross-gartered”—with a garter crossing on each leg — and his lower body would therefore have been seen as a grotesque parody of Shakespeare’s coat of arms.⁴ These arms were also yellow, with a black diagonal band. Malvolio is by far the most deluded and ridiculous character in the entire play, and in the cross-gartering episode he ambles and simpers upon the stage in a caricature of gentility. “Some are borne great … Some atcheeue greatnesse,” he declares. “And some haue greatnesse thrust vpon them” (1516-20). If Shakespeare played the part of Malvolio, as seems to be likely, the joke could not have been more explicit. It would have come naturally to Shakespeare — to parody his pretensions to gentility at the same time as he pursued them with the utmost seriousness, to mock that which was most important to him. It was a part of his instinctive ambivalence in all the affairs of the world.

CHAPTER 51 His Companies Vnletter’d Rude, and Shallow

James Burbage’s plan to convert part of Blackfriars into a private I theatre, and thus circumvent the authority of the City fathers, was not advancing. In the early winter of 1596 it was criticised by thirty-one residents in the immediate vicinity. Their petition objected to the erection of “a common playhouse … which will grow to be a very great annoyance and trouble, not only to all the noblemen and gentlemen thereabout inhabiting, but also a general inconvenience to all the inhabitants of the said precinct, by reason of the gathering together of all manner of lewd and vagrant persons.” There were allusions to “the great pestering and filling-up of the same precinct,”¹ and to the loud sound of drums and trumpets coming from the stage.

Another piece of playhouse business was responsible for Shakespeare’s next entry in the public records. He had played some part in aborted negotiations for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to use Francis Langley’s theatre, the Swan, on Bankside. It was a readily available alternative to the Curtain and the disputed Theatre. The Swan had been erected by Langley two years before in the neighbourhood of Paris Garden. It was the latest, and grandest, of the public theatres. There is a famous drawing of it by Johannes de Witt, and such was the ubiquity of this print that for many years it was taken as the model of all the sixteenth-century playhouses. Since each playhouse differed from every other, it was an unwarrantable assumption. In his notes de Witt explains that the Swan is “the largest and most magnificent” of the London playhouses, capable of holding three thousand spectators; it was constructed of “a mass of flint stones (of which there is a prodigious supply in Britain), and supported by wooden columns painted in such excellent imitation of marble that it is able to deceive even the most cunning.” He also disclosed that “its form resembles that of a Roman work.” ² Langley’s intent was that of somewhat cheap magnificence. Despite its exterior lustre, however, the Swan never achieved any great theatrical eminence. If the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had moved there, in the winter of 1596, its theatrical history would have been very different.

The connection between Shakespeare and Langley is to be found in a petition of a certain William Wayte who, in the autumn of 1596, named them both — together with Dorothy Soer and Anne Lee — in a writ ob metum mortis. Wayte was alleging that he stood in danger of death or grave physical harm from Shakespeare and others. This was a legal device for the completion of a writ, however, and did not necessarily mean that Shakespeare had threatened to kill him. It transpired that Francis Langley himself had previously taken out a writ against Wayte and his stepfather, William Gardiner; Gardiner, Justice of the Peace with special jurisdiction in Paris Garden, had a reputation in the district for corruption and general chicanery, and had apparently sought to close down the Swan Theatre. Wayte may have encountered some kind of resistance from Shakespeare and his co-defendants while in fact attempting to do so. But that is supposition. We only know for certain that Shakespeare was somehow involved with the imbroglio. It has in fact been suggested by some theatrical scholars that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played at the Swan for a short season, but there is no evidence of this except for a stray reference in Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix— “My name’s Hamlet revenge: thou hast been at Paris Garden, hast not?”

It is perhaps worth noting that Langley himself enjoyed a somewhat dubious reputation as a money-broker and minor civic official who had managed to accumulate a large fortune; he had been charged by the Attorney General, in no less a tribunal than the Star Chamber, of violence and of extortion. Sharp practice has always been a London speciality. He had purchased the manor of Paris Garden in order to build and let out tenements, and of course there were also brothels in that particular neighbourhood. One of those named in the petition, Dorothy Soer, owned property in Paris Garden Lane and gave her name to cheap lodgings known as “Soer’s Rents” or “Sore’s Rents.” It is more than likely that some of the tenements in that lane were of low repute.

Shakespeare may even have lived among them. The eighteenth-century scholar, Edmond Malone, has left a note stating that “from a paper now before me, which formerly belonged to Edward Alleyn, the player, our poet appears to have lived in Southwark, near the Bear garden, in 1596.”³ That paper has never been recovered. But whatever the date of Shakespeare’s removal to the south bank of the Thames, Wayte’s petition reveals one salient fact. Shakespeare was associated with people not altogether dissimilar to the comic pimps and bawds of his plays. He was thoroughly acquainted with the “low life” of London. It was an inevitable and inalienable part of his profession as a player. The fact is often forgotten in accounts of “gentle” Shakespeare but it is undoubtedly true that he knew at first hand the depths, as well as the heights, of urban life.

And then, for the winter season, he was once more in front of the queen. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men gave six performances at court, among them of The Merchant of Venice and King John. It is also possible that Falstaff made his appearance before the sovereign, in the first part of Henry IV. There is a long-enduring story that Elizabeth was so taken with the comic rogue that she requested a play be written in which Falstaff falls in love; the requests of Elizabeth were never lightly refused, and so appeared The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is a charming, if unconfirmed, story.

The nature of The Hystorie of Henry the Fourth, otherwise known as the first part of Henry IV, has also been the subject of debate. It is not clear whether Shakespeare wrote it with Part Two in mind, or whether the narrative grew under his hand. The first part did in any case provoke controversy of another kind. The Lord Chamberlain, Sir William Brooke, Lord Cobham, had been alerted to the fact that the play’s principal comic character was named Sir John Oldcastle. He may well have first seen the play in the presence of the queen at court. He was related to the original Oldcastle, and was not pleased with the farce surrounding the theatrical namesake. The real Oldcastle had been a supporter of the Lollards who had led an abortive insurrection against Henry V; subsequently he had been executed for treason. But he was considered by many to have been a proto-Protestant, and thus an early martyr to the cause of Reformation. His descendant did not approve of his presentation as a thief, braggart, coward and drunkard.

So Cobham wrote to the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, who in turn passed on the complaint to Shakespeare’s company; Shakespeare was then obliged in the second part of the play to change the name of his comic hero, from Oldcastle to Falstaff, and publicly to disavow his original creation. It is not clear why in the beginning Shakespeare chose the name of Oldcastle. It has been suggested that Shakespeare’s “secret” Catholic sympathies led him to lampoon this Lollard and anti-Catholic. In his Church History Thomas Fuller writes of Shakespeare’s original use of Oldcastle, “but it matters as little what petulant Poets as what malicious Papists have written against him.” But it seems unlikely that any overt Catholic bias entered the play. The name of Oldcastle had already appeared in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, and Shakespeare may simply have borrowed it without considering the connection with Cobham.

It was in any case changed, and not without a certain humiliation on Shakespeare’s part. In an epilogue to the second part of Henry IV he himself came upon the stage and announced that “for any thing I knowe Falstaffe shall die of a sweat, vnlesse already a be killd with your harde opinions; for Oldecastle died a Martyre, and this is not the man …” (3224–7). Then he danced, and afterwards knelt for the applause.

The connection was not wholly erased, however. In a letter to Robert Cecil the Earl of Essex gave out the news that a certain lady was “maryed to Sir Jo. Falstaff” —this was the Court nickname now given to Lord Cobham. The name of Oldcastle was also still associated with Henry IV, and in fact the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played for the Burgundian ambassador a play entitled Sir John Old Castell. Shakespeare’s inventions have a habit of lingering in the air.

Oldcastle, or Falstaff, is at the centre of the play. He is the presiding deity of the London taverns who takes the young Prince Hal, heir to the throne, within his paternal and capacious embrace; he is discomfited only when Hal, on becoming sovereign, repudiates him in bitter terms. Hal has been compared to Shakespeare in that respect, disowning such supposed drinking companions as Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe. It may be significant that Greene had a wife known as “Doll” and that Falstaff’s weakness is for a prostitute known as Doll Tere-Sheete, but this may be coincidental. In any case Falstaff is too large, too monumental, to be identified with anyone in life. He is as mythical as the Green Man.

He has become perhaps the most recognisable of all Shakespearian characters; he now appears in a thousand different contexts, from novel to grand opera. He became famous almost as soon as he appeared upon the stage. One poem notes “but let Falstaff come” and “you scarce shall have a roome” in the theatre, and another celebrates how long “Falstaff from cracking nuts hath kept the throng”:⁴ when Falstaff came on stage the audience were silent with anticipation. It was indeed the presence of Falstaff that rendered these plays so popular; the first part of Henry IV was reprinted more frequently than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. The first quarto edition was read so often and so widely that it survives only in fragments; there were three reprintings in the first year of publication.

The boisterous, extravagant, rhapsodical figure was at once recognised as a national type; he seemed to be as English as beef-pudding and beer, a great deflator of authority and pomposity, a drinker to excess, a rogue who concealed his crimes with wit and bravado. He is an enemy of seriousness in all of its forms, and thus represents one salient aspect of the English imagination. He is filled with good humour and good nature, even when he is leading conscripted soldiers to their certain death, and in that sense he is above mere censure; he is like one of the Homeric gods whose divinity is in no way impeded by their wilful behaviour. He is free from malice, free from self-consciousness; he is in fact free from everything. He is the thorn to the rose, the jester to the king, the shadow to the flame. His instinct for bawdry and subversion are part of his language that parodies the rhetoric of others and follows its own anarchic chain of associations; we have already seen how he translates “gravitie” into “gravie.” Whatever can be thought of, Falstaff says. Shakespeare took comedy as far as it can possibly go.

He was played by William Kempe, the pre-eminent clown in England, and Inigo Jones gives a fine contemporaneous description of “a Sir John fall staff” with “a roabe of russet Girt low … a great belley … great heade and balde” and “buskins to shew a great swollen leg.” ⁵ He was great in every respect, therefore, and Kempe provided the perfect model of the comic fat man. The actor was also famous for his jigs, and so he would have set Falstaff dancing and singing on the stage. He is in any case conceived in great theatricality and, as William Hazlitt puts it, “he is an actor in himself almost as much as upon the stage.” ⁶

Inigo Jones’s coincidental spelling of “fall staff” makes a phallic pun not unlike those connected with shake-spear, and it has been suggested by the more analytical critics that in Falstaff Shakespeare is creating an alter ego through which all his unruly energy, all his defiance and instinct for subversion, can be channelled. Behind the face of Falstaff we can see Shakespeare smiling. Falstaff deflates the claims of history and of heroism on every level, even as his creator was writing plays about those subjects. How can the creator of Henry V also be the writer who revels in Falstaff’s unheroic antics upon the battlefield, with his parodies of martial ardour and even his parody of death itself? In that sense Falstaff is the essence of Shakespeare, cut free of all ideological and traditional notions. He and his creator go soaring into the empyrean, where there are no earthly values. It would of course be absurd and anachronistic to portray Shakespeare as a nihilist; nevertheless the dissolute and antinomian Falstaff is powerful and energetic because he has the power and energy of Shakespeare somewhere within him. It is also worth observing that in the first part of Henry IV there are certain words of Warwickshire dialect, among them “a micher” (one who sulks by straying from home), a “dowlas” and “God saue the mark” (from ancient Mercia, of which Warwickshire was a part). In a play concerned with fathers and with father figures, Shakespeare seems instinctively to revert to the language of his ancestors.

Hegel said that the great characters of Shakespeare are “free artists of themselves” engaged in fresh and perpetual self-invention; they are surprised by their own genius, just as Shakespeare was surprised when the words of Falstaff issued from his pen. He did not know where the words came from; he just knew that they came. It has become unfashionable in recent years to discuss Shakespeare’s characters as if they somehow had an independent existence, outside the boundaries of the play; but it was not unfashionable at the time. Falstaff and his comic colleagues proved so successful that they were brought back by Shakespeare, for an encore, in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

There is perhaps a further connection between Falstaff and Shakespeare. The relation of the fat knight to Prince Hal has often been taken as a comic version of the relationship between Shakespeare and the “young man” of the sonnets in which infatuation is succeeded by betrayal. The twin “act” of older and younger man in that sonnet sequence has also been related to Shakespeare’s longing for his dead son. These were some of the forces in his life that, in this period, propelled him towards a supreme poetic achievement.

CHAPTER 52 You Haue Not the Booke of Riddles About You. Haue You?

Are Shake-speares Sonnets authentic representations of Shakespeare’s inner experience, or are they exercises in the dramatic art? Or do they exist in some ambiguous world where both art and experience cannot be distinguished? Could they have begun as testimonies to real people and real actions, and then slowly changed into a poetic performance to be judged on its own terms?

There were many models for their composition. Shakespeare was entering a crowded arena where poets and poetasters regularly published sequences of sonnets to various real or unreal recipients. The unofficial publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, in 1591, was an indication of the demand for such works; the pirated edition was withdrawn but in its preface the sonnets were described by Nashe as “a paper stage strewed with pearl … whiles the tragicomedy of love is performed by starlight.” ¹ This suggests the overwhelming theatricality or artificiality of the genre, for which the expression of private passion was by no means a necessary condition. They were primarily designed to display the wit and ingenuity of the poet, and to test his ability in handling delicate metres or sustained conceits. The publication of Sidney’s collection was followed by Samuel Daniel’s Delia, Barnaby Barnes’s Parthenophil and Parthenophe, William Percy’s Coelia, Drayton’s collection of fifty sonnets entitled Idea’s Mirror, Bartholomew Griffin’s Fidessa, Henry Constable’s Diana and a host of other imitators. Sonneteering had become the English literary fashion.

Many of these sonneteers characteristically make use of legal imagery in the course of their poetical love-making. This may perhaps be part of their vocabulary as members of the various Inns of Court, but it suggests some instinctive doubling of law and love in sixteenth-century England. Shakespeare’s own sonnets are filled with the language and imagery of the law. But his mercantile and legalistic mind is at odds with his generous muse, just as his plays often stage the contention of faith and scepticism; from that strife emerges his greatness.

Of course he may not have wanted his sonnets to be printed; there was, after all, an interval of approximately fifteen years between composition and publication. Like Fulke Greville, whose sonnet sequence Caelica languished in a drawer, he may have considered them to be private exercises for a select audience. But this does not imply that they are accounts of an authentic passion; Fulke Greville’s poems are governed by a literary rather than a real mistress.

One sonneteer, Giles Fletcher, admitted that he had embarked upon the poetic enterprise, “only to try my humour”;² that may also be the explanation for Shakespeare’s performance. There is evidence that throughout his career he was inclined to experiment with different forms of literature simply to prove that he could successfully adapt them to his purposes; there was a strong streak of competitiveness in his nature, already manifested in his overreaching of Marlowe and of Kyd, and the sonnet had in this period become the paramount test of poetic ability. So Shakespeare used many of the stock themes — the beauty of the beloved, the cruelty of the beloved, the wish to confer upon him or her the immortality of great verse, the pretence of age in the poet, and so on — and gave them a dramatic emphasis while at the same time handling the form of the sonnet superbly well. He sat down and wrote the best sonnets of all.

The first of them are overtly addressed to a young man, who is encouraged to marry and to breed so that his beauteous image may persist in the world. There has been endless speculation about the recipient of this loving advice, and for many biographers the palm must be awarded to the Earl of Southampton. He had refused to marry Lady Elizabeth deVere, granddaughter of Lord Burghley, and that is supposed to be the occasion for the early sonnets — commissioned, so it is said, by his irate mother. But this imbroglio occurred in 1591, an early date for the composition of the sonnets, and by the more likely date of 1595 Southampton had begun a notorious liaison with Elizabeth Vernon.

A more appropriate candidate appears to be William Herbert, the future Earl of Pembroke. In 1595, at the age of fifteen, he was being urged by his immediate family to marry the daughter of Sir George Carey; but he refused to do so. This might have been the spur for Shakespeare’s early sonnets. Since William Herbert’s father was the patron of the company for which Shakespeare acted and wrote plays, it would have been natural for him to ask Shakespeare to provide some poetical persuasion. The poems, alternatively, may have been written at the instigation of William Herbert’s mother, the illustrious Mary Herbert; she was the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, and the presiding spirit of a literary coterie in which Shakespeare played a part.

There was another fruitless marriage plan for William Herbert, concocted by his family in 1597, which could have provided a similar opportunity. But the reluctance of the fifteen-year-old Herbert seems a better context for Shakespeare’s advice. It may also help to clear up the confusion concerning the publisher’s later dedication to “Mr. WH.” Could this not be William Herbert, surreptitiously addressed? It would help to explain Ben Jonson’s cryptic dedication to Herbert on the publication of his Epigrammes in 1616, “when I made them, I had nothing in my conscience, to expressing of which I did need a cypher.”

William Herbert entered Shakespeare’s life at an opportune moment, but the connections between them can only be puzzled out of inference and speculation. The First Folio of Shakespeare’s works was dedicated to him, and to his brother, Philip, Earl of Montgomery, and in the course of that dedication the author is described to the Pembrokes as “your seruant, Shakespeare.” Of the plays, it is stated that the Pembroke brothers “haue prosequuted both them, and their Author liuing, with so much favour” and that “you will use the indulgence toward them, you have done vnto their parent.” There is also a reference to their lordships’ “liking of the seuerall parts, when they were acted.” This implies some deep reserve of affection, and respect, towards Shakespeare. It has sometimes been suggested that noblemen so eminent as the Pembroke brothers would not have formed any attachment for an actor and playwright, but that is not the case. William Herbert, in particular, was to lament the death of Richard Burbage in 1619 and to write from Whitehall to the Earl of Carlisle that “there was a great supper to the French Ambassador this night here, and even now all the Company are at the play, which I being tender-harted could not endure to see so soone after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbadg.”³ The loss of his other old acquaintance, William Shakespeare, three years before, had no doubt aroused similar sentiments.

There have been many attempts to construct a coherent narrative out of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence. The first seventeen are overtly concerned with pressing matrimony upon the sweet boy whom the poet addresses, but thereafter the sonnets assume a more intimate and familiar tone. The young man is addressed as the poet’s beloved with all the range of contrary feelings that such a position might inspire. The poet promises to confer immortality upon him but then bewails his own incapacities; the poet adores him but then reproaches him with cruelty and neglect; the poet even forgives him for stealing the poet’s mistress.

Then the sequence once more changes direction and sentiment, with the final twenty-seven sonnets concerned with the perfidy of a “Dark Lady,” by whom the poet is obsessed. The sonnets are also caught up in the soul of the time, with the politics and pageantry of the period, with its informers and flatterers, with its spies and its courtiers, all invoking the panoply of the Elizabethan state lying behind the impassioned speech of the poet to his beloved.

Certain sequences are united by mood and tone rather than by story, and there are various lacunae that make interpretation more like supposition. It is not even clear that the sonnets are addressed to the same persons throughout. One of them, No. 145, appears to have been written to Anne Hathaway at a much earlier date, and there may be other unknown recipients. And of course many of them may have been addressed to no one in particular. In certain places Shakespeare seems to be taking on the conventional themes of sonneteering — the eternal conflicts between Body and Soul, Love and Reason, are just two examples — in implicit competition or rivalry with other poets. The last sonnets on the theme of the “Dark Lady” have been read as an exercise in anti-sonneteering, in which the conventions of the form are used to overturn the usual subject matter. There are hints of supreme dramatic levity here, in the sheer triumph of inventiveness that these sonnets evince. Shakespeare was already well known for his gift of dramatic soliloquy — it was one of his additions to the play on Sir Thomas More — and it is perfectly natural that he should take that form of internal debate and project it upon a sequence of poems. He was trying out different possibilities within the range of human feeling. We might say that, in the sonnets, he imagined what it would be like to be in the situations he describes. If a consummate actor wrote poetry, this is what it would be like.

There are very clear associations between the sonnets and some of the earlier plays, which seem to clinch the argument that Shakespeare began his sequence in the mid-1590s at the time when the fashion for sonneteering was at its height. There are particular associations with The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost and the disputed Edward the Third. A dramatic replay of the scenario in the poems, where a compromised poet seeks the love of a high-born young man, occurs in the relationship between Helena and Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well; it is one of the patterns that Shakespeare’s imagination formed. There are of course complete sonnets in Love’s Labour’s Lost, suggesting the complementarity of Shakespeare’s invention; in that play there is also a dark beauty, Rosaline, who may or may not be related to the unfaithful lady of the poetic sequence. We can only say with certainty that Shakespeare was playing with the dramatic possibilities of a black mistress. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, also, Valentine renounces Silvia for the sake of his friendship with Proteus; it is another formative situation replicated in the sonnets. When in the ninety-third sonnet the narrator refers to himself behaving “like a deceived husband,” he is following the pattern of many of Shakespeare’s plays.

The poems are perhaps best seen as a performance. All of them are informed by a shaping will, evincing an almost impersonal authority and command of the medium. Shakespeare seems to have been able to “think” and write in quatrains without effort, which presupposes a very high degree of poetic intelligence. No one would have read such a sequence for autobiographical revelations — they were quite foreign to the genre — and at this late date it would be anachronistic to look for any outpouring of private passion or private anguish. It was in fact only in the early nineteenth century, at the time of the Romantic invention of the poetic selfhood, that the sonnets were considered to be vehicles for personal expression. We may recall Donne’s words on his own love poetry: “You know my uttermost when it was best, and even then I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.”⁴ It is of some interest that, on five occasions in his plays, Shakespeare associates poetry with “feigning.” So on the sonnets themselves we may remark with the Clown in As You Like It (1582) that “the truest poetrie is the most faining.”

What had perhaps begun as a private exercise, commissioned by the Pembrokes, then became an enduring project; sonnets were added at intervals, some of them being dated as late as 1603, until they were finally arranged for publication by Shakespeare himself. In fact the first reference to Shakespeare writing “sugred Sonnets among his private friends”⁵ appeared in 1598. Some of them were then printed in an anthology of 1599, entitled The Passionate Pilgrime by W. Shakespeare; it was suggested at a later date that Shakespeare had been “much offended” with the publisher of this unofficial or pirated edition “that altogether unknowne to him presumed to make so bold with his name.”⁶ Shakespeare may have been particularly irate because the volumes contained other, manifestly inferior, poems that were not composed by him.

He also added some sonnets at a late stage, and cancelled others, shaping them all into some semblance of dramatic unity. There is evidence of revision, in at least four of the sonnets, which was undertaken later with the purpose of unifying the sequence. There is also a confluence of what scholars called “early rare words” and “early late words”; this mixture suggests that Shakespeare first worked on the sonnets in the early and mid-1590s and then went back to them for the purposes of revision in the early seventeenth century. Other sonnets seem to have been added at intervals between those dates. This intermittent composition also throws doubt upon the presence of any coherent story of love and betrayal within the sequence.

In the first publication of 1609 the sonnets were followed by a longer poem, “A Lover’s Complaint”; that was also standard procedure in the style of Spenser’s Amoretti and Daniel’s Delia. The whole exercise was perhaps for him a way of asserting his worth as a poet. The question that has exercised scholars for many generations — are these ventures in dramatic rhetoric or are they impassioned messages to a lover? — becomes therefore unanswerable. And that is perhaps what is most significant. Wherever we look in Shakespeare’s work, we see the impossibility of assigning purpose or unassailable meaning.

This of course flies in the face of those who have looked for parallels in Shakespeare’s private life for the characters in the poems. The references to a rival poet, claiming the favour of the young man, have been interpreted as allusions to Samuel Daniel, Christopher Marlowe, Barnaby Barnes, George Chapman and assorted other versifiers. The “lovely Boy” and object of the poet’s passion has been identified with the earl of Southampton. In the late sixteenth century, however, the impropriety of addressing a young earl in that manner would have been quite apparent; to accuse him of dissoluteness and infidelity, as Shakespeare accuses the unnamed recipient, would have been unthinkable. The “Dark Lady” has been variously identified as Mary Fitton, Emilia Lanier, and a black prostitute from Turnmill Street in Clerken-well. Elaborate stories have been written, therefore, about Emilia Lanier abandoning Shakespeare for a passionate affair with Southampton; the suggestion has been made that the whole experience of loss was then darkened by the threat of contracting venereal disease from this faithless woman. It is very dramatic, but it is not art. It seems to have been forgotten by these clandestine biographers that one of the conventions of the sonnet sequence consisted in the poet magnanimously awarding his mistress to his close friend. Shakespeare was following the tradition in his own explosive way. The fact that the collection was greeted with almost universal silence on its publication in 1609 suggests that there was no inkling of controversy or private scandal connected with it; it is, in fact, likely that the audience of the day found the poems slightly old-fashioned.

Emilia Lanier was certainly well known to Shakespeare. She was the young mistress of Lord Hunsdon who had been the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and was also related to Robert Johnson, a musician who collaborated with the dramatist on several occasions. She was a poet, too, who at a later date dedicated one of her volumes to the Countess of Pembroke. Born Emilia Bassano, she was the illegitimate daughter of Baptist Bassano, one of a Jewish family from Venice who had become the court musicians. He had died early and, in her youth, Emilia had become the ward of the Countess of Kent before attending court where she “had been favoured much of Her Majesty and many noblemen.” Among those noblemen was the old Lord Hunsdon, fifty years her senior; but, when she became pregnant, she was married off “for colour” to a “minstrel”⁷ named Alphonse Lanier.

Members of the Bassano family accompanied the performances of Shakespeare’s plays in the royal palaces. They were dark-skinned Venetians, and some of Emilia’s relatives were described as “black men.” It may not be entirely coincidental, therefore, that Shakespeare wrote a play about a Jewish family in Venice and that one of the central characters is named as Bassanio. Here we may remark upon Shakespeare’s manner of invention. Baptist Bassano is split into two. He becomes Shylock, the Venetian Jewish merchant, and also the Venetian Bassanio. Shakespeare loved the process of self-division. There may of course be some association, too, with Othello, also set in Venice. And there is the connection already noted with Rosaline of Love’s Labour’s Lost who is described as being “black as ebony.”

Emilia Lanier née Bassano appears most clearly in the historical record by way of the journals of Simon Forman, the Elizabethan magus whom she consulted over the fortunes of her husband. It is also clear that the good doctor seduced her, and that he was neither the first nor the last to do so. It cannot be known if she ever became Shakespeare’s lover and, even if she was, whether she is memorialised as the faithless lady of the sonnets. There is, however, one suggestive detail. Simon Forman notes that Emilia Lanier has a mole below her throat; in Cymbeline Shakespeare describes a mole under the breast of the beautiful (and chaste) Imogen.

CHAPTER 53 You Would Plucke Out the Hart of My Mistery

Instead of speculating about the personages addressed, it is more appropriate to speculate about the speaker. In the only sense that matters Shakespeare addresses the sonnets to himself; his muse here is midwife rather than mother. That is why he continually transforms his love of a person to love of an idea or essence. The poems themselves are maintained within a very direct form of address, a piercing eloquence that is controlled, convincing and fluent. They show great strength of mind, well ordered and well sorted. They display enormous self-confidence as well as inordinate cleverness. The speaker is heavily addicted to puns. There is the occasional tincture of false modesty, but the tone is generally enterprising and bold. The speaker takes a great deal of pride in his performance, and is insistent that his poetry will confer everlasting fame. The poems represent a narrator who is sexually alert and eager, but who is also capable of intense infatuation and no less extreme sexual jealousy. This is not necessarily William Shakespeare; it is William Shakespeare as poet.

It would be wrong to argue, of course, that the plethora of outside parallels means that there is no parallel at all. It is certainly possible that elements of Shakespeare’s emotional life entered the poems just as they entered the plays. We may note, for example, the strain of keen competitiveness within his nature. He seems to have been charged by the prospect of literary challenge and by the presence of literary rivalry. It is most plausible, then, that he invented or concocted the idea of a rival poet as a spur to his invention; the idea of “a better spirit” gave him a sense of limitation which he could then transcend.

It is interesting that throughout his career he never once praised a fellow dramatist. He was highly ambitious, energetic and resourceful. Who else would have conceived of the great range of history plays at such a young age? In his earlier plays he thrived upon parody of the fashionable authors, such as Marlowe and Lyly, which can of course be interpreted as a form of aggression. He was very good at creating slyly or openly aggressive characters, such as Richard III and Iago. It is intriguing that much of the dialogue in his plays takes the form of competition or contest of wit. There is much scorn and impatience, anger and fretfulness, in the sonnets. Shakespeare was spurred on by his predecessors, by his “sources,” in the continuing pursuit of mastery. It should be added that Shakespeare did not become the most eminent dramatist in London by chance or accident; he actively wished for it.

This may have some connection with another persistent tone in the sonnets, where the narrator seems to be essentially a solitary. It is significant that the “beloved,” if one existed, is never mentioned by name — especially given the fact that Shakespeare assures him that he will be rendered immortal. Shakespeare wanted the world to honour and remember his love rather than any recipient of it. In the sonnets Shakespeare is musing essentially upon the true nature of the selfhood. His subject was his own self, and in that cunning and witty solipsism others were lovable in so far as they loved him.

We may recall Aubrey’s remark that, in Shoreditch, he declined to join the “debauchery” of his colleagues. For most of his professional life he lived in lodgings, away from his family. No letters survive. He may have written very few. There are few reminiscences of him and he was of course singularly reticent about himself. Was he shy, or reserved, or aloof? One or all of these terms may fit his being in the world. We have also found him by report to be amorous, witty, fastidious and fluent. There is no necessary discrepancy. It should be recalled that he played his own role in the world with supreme success; he invested with great joyfulness those characters who, like Falstaff, create and re-create themselves for any conceivable situation.

It is also the mark of his powerful presence, and authority, that he is utterly and uniquely “Shakespearian” in all of the themes and moods inherent within the sonnets. This may sound like the merest commonplace, but it is a phenomenon worthy of contemplation. There is no other writer quite with his consistent and continuing identity through comedy and tragedy, verse and prose, romance and history. He plagiarises himself; he parodies himself. His plangent words in the sonnets on love and obsession echo those of Richard II immured in prison; whenever Shakespeare is inclined towards meditation, he reverts to the idiom of that player-king. There are so many echoes of Twelfth Night in the sonnets that the strident figure of the man/woman Viola might almost be considered to be the master/mistress of the sequence.

There is a phrase in the 121st sonnet, the words of which echo through his plays, “I am that I am.” It is of course a repetition of God’s words to Moses on Mount Horeb. But the phrase may also be compared to Iago’s remark that “I am not what I am.” Shakespeare is both everything and nothing. He is many and yet no one. It might almost be a definition of the creative principle itself, which is essentially a principle of organisation without values or ideals. Virginia Woolf described Shakespeare as “serenely absent-present”¹ and that strange counterpoise seems to summarise the evanescent yet ubiquitous shape of his genius in his works. His presence is conspicuous by its absence. He had an excess of selflessness, a negative so deep that it became a positive. This may have been at first a matter of instinct, or of vital necessity, but at some point it became part of a deliberate pattern.

There is, therefore, the mystery of his invisibility, his self-effacement and self-depreciation. We may plausibly imagine that he accommodated himself to every situation and to every person whom he encountered. He had no “morality” in the conventional sense, since morals are determined by dislike and antipathy. There is nothing of personal vanity or personal eccentricity about him.

In his sonnets, too, there is the occasional element of self-abasement and even self-disgust. It is the key to part of the meaning of the sequence. Knowing himself guilty, he was drawn to those who would hurt him. And then, baffled by that injury (even if it were only indifference), he seeks solace in thought. For most of his life he was Shakespeare the player rather than Shakespeare the gentleman, and the taint of the public theatre never completely left him. In the 110th sonnet the narrator regrets that he has “made my selfe a motley to the view,” and in the following sonnet he laments “that my name receiues a brand” from the element in which he works. There are many critics who have therefore detected in Shakespeare a revulsion from the stage and a distaste for the business of writing, and acting in, plays. One of his persistent metaphors for human futility and pretension is the theatre. When he compares one of his characters to an actor, the allusion is generally negative.

This is particularly true of his later plays. How much this was a commonplace of the age, and how much a reflection of Shakespeare’s true attitude, is difficult to discern. It may have been a piece of rhythmic grumbling, not to be taken very seriously. If we assume it to be genuine, it is one of the indications of his divided self. If he felt scorn, he felt at the same time what it was to be scorned.

The poems to his “black mistress” contain allusions to sexual disgust and sexual jealousy that are also to be found in his drama. There is a hint of homosexual passion in The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Othello and elsewhere — a passion not unlike that evinced by the writer of the sonnets to his favoured boy. There are also the veiled references to venereal disease in connection with the “Dark Lady.” Shakespeare’s sonnets are suffused with sexual humour and sexual innuendo. The language of the poems is itself sexual, quick, energetic, ambiguous, amoral. From the evidence of the drama alone it would be clear that he was preoccupied with sexuality in all of its forms. He outrivals Chaucer and the eighteenth century novelists in his command of smut and bawdry. He is the most salacious of all the Elizabethan dramatists, in an area where there was already stiff competition. There are more than thirteen hundred sexual allusions in the plays, as well as the repeated use of sexual slang.² There are sixty-six terms for the female vagina, among them “ruff,” “scut,” “crack,” “lock,” “salmon’s tail” and “clack dish.” There are a host of words for the male penis as well as insistent references to sodomy, buggery and fellatio. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Armado declares that he allows his royal master “with his royall finger thus” to “dallie with my excrement” (1700).

Shakespeare is never more lively, or more alert, or more witty, than in dealing with sexual matters. They are such a pervasive presence that they quite overshadow the ending of The Merchant of Venice, for example, where a number of obscene puns dominate the closing dialogue. The English crowd has always enjoyed sexual farce and obscenity, and he knew that such comedy would please the spectators of both “higher” and “lower” sort. But in his plays sexual puns and sexual allusions are more than just a dramatic device; they are part of the very fabric and texture of his language. His writing is quick with sexual meanings.

It could be argued that this is in part the sexual expressiveness of a celibate, or a faithful if absent husband, but common sense suggests otherwise. The printed reminiscences (or gossip) of his contemporaries strongly indicate that he had a reputation for philandering. He may have been “pricked out,” as he puts it, for women’s pleasure in a world where sex itself was a dark and dangerous force. The writer of the sonnets seems to have been touched by the fear and horror of venereal disease, and some biographers have even suggested that Shakespeare himself died from a related venereal condition. Nothing in Shakespeare’s life or character would exclude the possibility.

The Elizabethan age was one of great and open promiscuity. London women were known throughout Europe for their friendliness, and travellers professed to be astonished by the freedom and lewdness of conversation between the sexes. It was not only in the capital, however, that sexual activity was commonplace. It has been recorded that, out of a population of forty thousand adults in the county of Essex, some fifteen thousand were brought before the church courts for sexual offences in the period between 1558 and 1603.³ This is an astonishingly high number, and can only reflect upon the even more obvious opportunities and attractions of the city.

It was not always a clean or hygienic period in matters pertaining to the body, at least from a modern perspective, and the sexual act veered between mud wrestling and perfumed coupling. In order to avoid the more unpleasant sights and odours, it was customary for men and women to have sexual congress almost fully clothed. It was in many respects a short and furtive act, a mere spilling of animal spirits. In certain of the sonnets that act provokes shame and disgust. Hamlet is a misogynist. Loathing for the act of sex is apparent in Measure for Measure and in King Lear, in Timon of Athens and in Troilus and Cressida. This is of course a function of the plot, and cannot be taken as an expression of Shakespeare’s opinions on the matter (assuming that he had any at all), but it is a mirror of the reality all around him.

The poet’s passionate attachment to the young man of the sonnets, whether real or assumed, suggests that Shakespeare had an understanding of devoted male friendships. We have already noticed the presence of such friendships in the plays. It is also the case that Shakespeare was a “born” actor, and it has become apparent through the ages that actors are often possessed by an ambiguous sexuality. A great actor must always have a uniquely sensitive and yielding temperament, capable of assuming a thousand different moods, and psychologists have often assumed this to be a “feminine” component inherited from love or imitation of the mother. We do not need to go far down the by-ways of psychology to find this an eminently sensible observation. From the time of the Greek dramas of the fifth century BC, actors have been classified as wanton or effeminate, and in the late sixteenth century London preachers and moralists inveighed against the uncertain sexuality of the players. Acting was also deemed to be unnatural, an attempt to escape from nature and an act of defiance against God. It does not prove anything about Shakespeare, but it does help to explain the context and society in which he worked.

In his writing he knew what it was like to be both Cleopatra and Antony, both Juliet and Romeo. He became Rosalind and Celia, Beatrice and Mistress Quickly. More than any of his contemporaries he created memorable female roles. This does not imply that he was in any sense homosexual but suggests, rather, an unfixed or floating sexual identity. He had the capacity to be both female and male, and the scope of his art must have affected his life in the world. We may recall here the recently discovered portrait of the Earl of Southampton apparently dressed as a woman. In the late sixteenth century it was considered natural and appropriate that high-born males should assert the feminine aspect of their natures; it was a part of the Renaissance humanism considered essential for “gentle” conduct. The concept of divine androgyny was an element in the popular and fashionable teaching inspired by Renaissance Platonists. This is the proper context in which to understand Shakespeare’s invocation of the “master-mistress” of his passion. His was not an invitation to sodomy, which remained a capital offence in sixteenth-century England together with heresy and sorcery. Even arguably homosexual poets such as Marlowe draped their allusions in appropriately classical garb. It has also been demonstrated that, in sixteenth-century texts, what may be described as theoretical homosexuality was considered to be a predilection of the noble and the well-born; so it would not have been unthinkable for the “gentle” Shakespeare to make poetical allusions to the subject. It was a love not of the phallus, but of the mind.

It is instructive to compare the women in his plays with the “Dark Lady” of the sonnets. His comic heroines are lively and self-assured, which may also be an implicit reference to their sexual vitality; they have enormous powers of will, in a world where “will” also meant sexual power and potency. Will Shakespeare was fully aware of this. But there are other females touched by more desperate and dangerous forces. Ted Hughes has noticed in the plays evidence of Shakespeare’s loathing of the lustful female together with an “obsession with chastity.”⁴ This may be true of the late plays, where Miranda and Perdita and Imogen are altogether non-sensual beings. But it is not clear in these accounts whether the preoccupations of Shakespeare have been confused with those of his commentators. There is really no typical Shakespearian woman, in other words, and it is perhaps more interesting to study the responses they elicit from men. The most obvious and most common reaction is one of sexual jealousy, whether Othello at Desdemona or Leontes at Hermione. This is also the dramatic situation of the sonnets. There is much suspected betrayal and some real infidelity. It has become a commonplace of Shakespearian biography, of course, that Shakespeare suspected his absent wife of unfaithfulness. It is plausible but unprovable. We can only say that infidelity, true or false, plays as large a part in the plots of his plays as in the sequence of the sonnets.

It is of course true that most of Shakespeare’s plays involve the promise and the problems of love, in all its forms, and that his is the most profound treatment of love in the English language. It is natural and inevitable, therefore, that he should be preoccupied with sexual, as part of amatory, relationships. But that does not explain why sex is often treated with shame, horror and disgust. In his treatment of love he frequently uses the metaphors of warfare. The only couple who seem to be happily married in the plays are Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet although, of course, Macbeth and his wife are not without fondness for each other. But these fortunate pairs are hardly what in the modern world would be called “role-models.” Unhappy love and amatory conflict are the staple of drama, and dramatic convenience does not necessarily reflect Shakespeare’s personal misgivings. There is no need to introduce a poignant autobiographical note.

CHAPTER 54 And to Be Short, What Not, That’s Sweete and Happie

James Burbage had died at the end of January 1597, and was buried in the little church of Shoreditch in the presence of his family and of the players. It has been assumed by some that he expired from disappointment or depression at the failure of his scheme to convert the Black-friars refectory into a playhouse, but he was probably too tough and experienced a manager to succumb to local difficulties. He was in any case past his mid-sixties, and in sixteenth-century terms had reached an advanced age. He left everything to his two sons who had continued in their father’s theatrical business. He gave the Theatre to Cuthbert Burbage, company sharer but not an actor, and the Blackfriars property to Richard Burbage, actor and company sharer; both properties may have seemed to his sons at the time to be the theatrical equivalent of the poisoned chalice, especially since Cuthbert was still not able to reach a satisfactory agreement with the landlord of the Theatre. The ground lease was set to expire in April 1597; Giles Allen agreed to an extension of the lease, but then objected to Richard Burbage as one of its guarantors. So it seems that in the late spring and early summer of 1597 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at the Curtain, while dispute continued over the now deserted Theatre. It was at the Curtain that the two completed parts of Henry IV were played.

Shakespeare had in fact stopped work upon the second part of Henry IV in order to concentrate upon The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is generally supposed that this latest comedy was written for the Garter Feast celebrated at Whitehall on 23 April 1597. Specifically it was a feast held in honour of the election of George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, as Knight of the Garter; he had just been appointed Lord Chamberlain after the death of Lord Cobham and had become the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The actors’ winter under Cobham’s rule had turned to glorious summer with the son of their former patron and supporter. The first Lord Hunsdon had been a welcome patron, and it seemed likely that his son would carry on that honourable tradition. It is reported that the queen asked for a drama about Falstaff in love, as we have already observed, and it is further reported that Shakespeare wrote the play in two weeks. Lord Hunsdon doubtless relayed the royal request, and Shakespeare immediately set to work. It is clear enough, given the number of their performances at court, that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were singled out for royal attention. Shakespeare may not have been court poet, but he was certainly favourite dramatist.

The Merry Wives of Windsor was set in Windsor simply because the new knights were ceremonially installed at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. There is no indication of any full-length drama being presented at such Garter celebrations, but the masque at the end of the play in which Mistress Quickly, absurdly disguised as the Fairy Queen, trips a measure, might have been perfomed at the castle rather than at the feast in Westminster Palace. A fortnight seems a reasonable time for its composition, together with other incidental stories or pieces of dialogue. Shakespeare then subsequently wrote the rest of the play to lead to this celebratory climax.

The characters of Falstaff and Shallow, Pistol and Bardolph, were just too good to relinquish; by dint of popular applause they came back. In the first printed edition the principal attraction is made clear in the description of “an excellent and pleasant conceited commedie of Sir John Faulstof and the merry wyves of Windesor.” Shakespeare may also have included material that he was unable to use in the history plays themselves. He was thrifty in such matters. He also added a contemporary note. One of the exasperated husbands in the play, concerned about his wife’s possible adultery with Falstaff, takes on the assumed name of “Brooke.” It seems to be a clear if harmless hit against the Brooke family whose paterfamilias, Lord Cobham, had recently died. Yet it may also be a hit against Sir Ralph Brooke, the York Herald who was disputing the Shakespeares’ right to bear arms. Whatever the truth of the matter Shakespeare was obliged by the Master of the Revels to turn “Brooke” into “Broome.” The joke is in any case lost upon posterity. There were other jokes, one about a German count who had been made a knight in absentia, suggesting that Shakespeare still had an eye for contemporaneous affairs.

The fact that the drama flowed so fluently from his pen suggests that it was an emanation from his natural wit — which means, in turn, that it can be interpreted as a traditional English comedy. Here are all the ingredients of English humour — a continual bawdiness of intention, a salacious narrative, and a man farcically dressed in “drag” as Falstaff escapes detection by posing as the fat woman of Brentford. There is also a comic Frenchman and, in true native style, a sudden turn towards supernaturalism at the end. More importantly, perhaps, sexual desire is continually transformed into farce. It is the stuff of a thousand English comedies, and in this place the sexual innuendo and the blue joke find their locus classicus. Others have noticed how in the play the English language is twisted and turned in a hundred different ways, in the mouths of a Frenchman and a Welshman, but this is only another aspect of the variability and variety of Shakespeare’s style when he is writing at the height of his invention. Words themselves become farcical in a world where improbability and incongruity are the only standards. In one sense The Merry Wives of Windsor resembles the “citizens’ plays” that had become very popular, but it is governed by a more genial spirit. By setting it in a country town, outside London, Shakespeare avoids the kind of urban satire that Jonson and Dekker employed.

The comedy would have been a gift to his players, too, with the emphasis on mistaken identities and sudden changes of plot. If Kempe continued to play Falstaff, he would have proved a singular “hit” dressed up as the fat woman of Brentford; the spare Sinklo would have played Slender. It has often been supposed that Shakespeare borrowed his comic plots from Italian drama, but in the crossing they have suffered a sea-change. It is characteristic of the English imagination, of which he is the greatest exemplar, to incorporate and to alter foreign models.