Shakespeare: The Biography

CHAPTER 59. A Pretty Plot. Well Chosen to Build Vpon

In the summer of 1598 there were still demands from the civic authorities and indeed from the members of the Privy Council that the theatres should be “plucked down” as a result of the “lewd matters that are handled on the stages.” ¹ This had become something of an occupational hazard, and the playhouses simply ignored the injunctions. Given the undoubted popularity of plays and playhouses there was also going to be competition, official or unofficial, springing up to challenge the two established companies. The Earl of Pembroke’s Men had put on The Isle of Dogs at the Swan, as we have seen, before being disbanded.

New theatres were about to be erected in the city and northern suburbs, also, among them the Fortune and the newly refurbished Boar’s Head. In addition, the boys’ companies were soon to be in operation again. In the following year an indoor playhouse was opened in the precincts of St. Paul’s grammar school, where the children of St. Paul’s performed two plays by a new writer, who referred to himself as the “barking satirist,” John Marston. The competition demonstrated the vitality of theatrical life in London, but it was an annoyance to the already established players. Nevertheless the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were still at the Curtain, and the Admiral’s Men across the river at the Rose. There is no record of the players touring in this year, so it can be supposed that Shakespeare and the rest of the company were playing in the capital. We know that they were performing Ben Jonson’s new play, Every Man in His Humour, in the autumn of 1598. So Shakespeare acted in a drama written by one whom posterity has declared to be his “rival.” Reports of such rivalry are always greatly exaggerated by various partisans. We may place them against the testimony that Shakespeare became godfather to one of Jonson’s children.

The wayward, obstinate and bad-tempered character of Ben Jonson is well enough known. But it is often forgotten that he was a supreme literary artist who wrote for the play-going public only on his own terms. Unlike Shakespeare he was not born to please. He had genuine faith and pride in his achievement, however, and ensured that his dramas were properly collected and published. His opinion about Shakespeare’s work seems to have been one of admiration only slightly modified by misgivings about what he considered to be his excessive fluency and his dramatic “absurdities.” Jonson was a classicist by inclination and by training. He recognised Shakespeare’s genius but considered it prone to extravagance and unrealism. “In reading some bombast speeches of Macbeth,” according to John Dryden, “which are not to be understood, he [Ben Jonson] used to say that it was horrour.”² There are also reports of conversations between the two men at the Mermaid Tavern. The tavern itself lay back from Bread Street, with passage entries from Cheapside and Friday Street. Since Jonson had a reputation for a loose tongue, flowing with sexual innuendoes and sexual gossip, these dialogues were perhaps not always very edifying; we have seen that Shakespeare himself was not averse to bawdry. Modern auditors would no doubt be shocked. “Many were the wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Johnson,” wrote Thomas Fuller in his Worthies of England:

which two I behold like a Spanish great Gallion and an English man of War; Master Johnson (like the former) was built far higher in Learning; Solid but Slow in his performances. Shake-spear, with the English-man of War, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention.³

This itself is a pleasing invention. Fuller has captured something of the spirit of both men but, having been born as late as 1608, can hardly be cited as a witness.

In this period Sir Walter Raleigh established a “Mermaid Club” that met on the first Friday of every month; among its members, according to one of Ben Jonson’s early editors, were Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Donne and Jonson himself. Beaumont wrote some verses to Jonson in which he remarks:

What things have we seen

Done at the “Mermaid”? Heard words that have been

So nimble, and so full of subtle flame …⁴

Whether any of those “words” came from Shakespeare is open to doubt. Among the members of the Mermaid Club, however, was Edward Blount; Blount was one of the publishers of Shakespeare’s First Folio. So there are connections. Jonson at this time was an avowed Catholic who used to meet his co-religionists at the Mermaid. The previous owner of the Mermaid had been the Catholic printer John Rastell, who was also brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More. Certain associations cling to specific sites. At a later date Shakespeare purchased a house harbouring Catholic associations; one of his co-purchasers was the landlord of the Mermaid, William Johnson.

Very shortly after the production of Every Man in His Humour Jonson became involved in an argument with an actor and erstwhile colleague from the Admiral’s Men, Gabriel Spencer. The quarrel may have arisen from Jonson’s recent defection to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, or it may have been entirely personal. Whatever the cause a duel was fought in the fields of Shoreditch, close to the Theatre, and Spencer was killed by Jonson’s sword. The playwright only saved himself from the gallows by pleading benefit of clergy — that is, by proving he was literate and could read. His thumb was branded with the letter “T,” for Tyburn, so that he would not escape a second conviction.

In this same period Burbage and Shakespeare, together with their colleagues, had arrived at an important decision which would also have consequences for the young Ben Jonson. Their negotiations concerning the lease with the landlord of the Theatre had got precisely nowhere. They had read the existing contract very carefully, over the period of these strained discussions, and its wording seemed to offer a solution. The landlord owned the land upon which the Theatre stood, but he did not own the theatre itself. So he could keep the land, and they would take away the theatre. They literally moved it. Three days after Christmas 1598, on a day of heavy snow, the Burbage brothers, Cuthbert and Richard, and their mother, together with twelve workmen and their surveyor and carpenter, Peter Streete, arrived in front of the Theatre in Shoreditch. The aggrieved landlord, Giles Allen, has left a picturesque description of the extraordinary scene.

The Burbages and their cohorts did “ryotouslye assemble themselves” armed with “swords daggers billes axes and such like,” whereupon they “attempted to pull downe the sayd Theater.” Allen alleges that diverse people asked them “to desist from their unlawfull enterpryse,” but the Burbages violently resisted their objections and then began “pulling breaking and throwing downe the sayd Theater in verye outragious violent and riotous sort.” In the course of this operation they were responsible for “the great desturbance and terrefyeing” of the local inhabitants of Shoreditch.⁵ It is interesting how Tudor legalese encourages melodrama; it was a dramatic society on every level.

The great and terrifying disturbance, if such it was, lasted for some four days. Within that period the Burbages and their employees took down the playhouse’s old timbers and loaded them onto wagons; the tiring-house, the beams, the galleries, were all taken up and transported across the river by ferry or by means of London Bridge. There is no reference to the ironwork that was also employed in its construction, although they are unlikely to have left such a valuable asset on site. Much had to be discarded, however, as a result of the speed of the operation. The appurtenances of the Theatre were then deposited south of the river on some land that the Burbages had recently leased for thirty-one years. The plot of ground was a little to the east of the Rose, in the pleasure grounds of Southwark, but further back from the Thames. Ben Jonson described the area as “flanked with a ditch and forced out of a marsh.”⁶ It would have been filled with tidal waters, ooze and garbage. At the time of its redevelopment by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men it comprised seven gardens, a house, and a row of tenements that held fifteen people.

In these watery and insalubrious surroundings the Globe would rise. It was a bold and enterprising decision. The landlord of the plot where the Globe was erected, Nicholas Brend, was in fact brother-in-law of the queen’s Treasurer of the Chamber. So he had impeccable references. But the trustees engaged in the negotiation also throw a little light on the intricate social networks of Elizabethan society. One of them, a goldsmith called Thomas Savage, came from the town of Rufford in Lancashire — where it has been deemed that the juvenile Shakespeare was once in the employment of Sir Thomas Hesketh as schoolmaster and actor. Savage’s wife was a member of the extended Hesketh family. It may simply be coincidence, in a relatively small society, but it is suggestive. The other trustee was a merchant named William Leveson, who became a part of the colonial enterprise to Virginia that also involved the Earl of Southampton. Two of Shakespeare’s early patrons, therefore, can be glimpsed in the dramatist’s later career.

Giles Allen was obviously surprised and angered by the sudden disappearance of the playhouse. He sued the Burbages for £800 in damages, and the litigation lasted for two years through various courts and tribunals. But the Burbages had in fact behaved within the strict interpretation of the law, and Allen received no compensation.

The building work on the new theatre, however, did not proceed as quickly as had been anticipated. So the Burbages spread the financial responsibility. They created five “sharers” who between them would put up half the costs, and who would in return become “house-keepers” or part owners of the new theatre. One of those sharers was William Shakespeare, who now had the advantage of owning one-tenth of the theatre in which he acted and for which he wrote. It was the most complete association possible between playwright and playhouse. His other sharers were the principal actors of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Will Kempe and Thomas Pope, John Heminges and Augustine Phillips. They had all grown moderately wealthy out of their new-found profession.

Peter Streete contracted to finish the construction of the Globe within twenty-eight weeks, although that may be an example of perennial builders’ optimism. Strong foundations had to be laid, since the Globe was erected on watery soil; wooden piles were driven into the Southwark earth, and a ditch had to be bridged to allow public access. This operation would have taken some sixteen weeks. By May 1599 a legal document refers to a “domus” with an attached garden in the parish of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, “in occupatione Willielmi Shakespeare et aliorum” — in the occupation of Shakespeare and others, the prominence given to the dramatist’s name suggesting that he was considered to be the first mover in this enterprise. Intriguingly enough “domus” may be interpreted to mean either the theatre itself or a house adjoining that structure. A picture of Shakespeare living in a house beside the playhouse proper is not inconceivable.

CHAPTER 60 Thou Knowest My Lodging, Get Me Inke and Paper

There is no doubt that Shakespeare lived south of the river, but his exact location is not known. The immediate vicinity of the Globe Playhouse was described by John Stow’s editors in the eighteenth century as a “long straggling Place, with Ditches on each side, the Passage to the Houses being over little Bridges, with little Garden Plotts before them.”¹ It was no more salubrious in the period when Shakespeare himself moved to Southwark. Nevertheless it was important for him to be close to the centre of all his activities. Here he joined his colleagues from the Globe, Thomas Pope and Augustine Phillips; Phillips lived with his large family close to the river. Southwark was in fact something of an actors’ district. Shakespeare also had, as neighbours, Edward Alleyn and Philip Henslowe, who already possessed extensive interests in the vicinity. Henslowe’s address was “on the bank sid right over against the clink,”² the “clink” itself being the small underground bishop’s prison by the river.

Shakespeare himself could have taken up temporary residence at one of the three hundred inns of the neighbourhood. The Elephant was on the corner of Horseshoe Alley, for example, just a few yards from the Globe. In Twelfth Night, written a year or two after his removal to that district, Antonio remarks (1467–8):

In the South Suburbes at the Elephant

Is best to lodge …

But this may be no more than a local joke. If he had lived in the liberty of the Clink, as the records of non-payment of property tax imply, then he would have inhabited the long street which runs beside the Thames just north of Winchester Palace Park. This was the street in which Henslowe also dwelled. In a memorandum, quoted by the eighteenth-century scholar Edmond Malone but no longer extant, Alleyn records that Shakespeare lived close to the Bear-Garden, and in fact the distance is only a few hundred yards. Edmond Malone further claims that Shakespeare lived in this neighbourhood until 1608, a residence of some ten years. For a peripatetic dramatist, that is a long sojourn indeed. He might almost have been described as a gentleman of Southwark rather than as a gentleman of Stratford.

The history of Southwark had for many hundreds of years been associated with public entertainment. A gladiator’s trident has been found here, which suggests that a Roman arena was once constructed in the vicinity of the Globe. In the years immediately preceding the late sixteenth century, however, the area was known for bull-baiting and bear-baiting, for exhibitions of wrestling and acrobatics. It was also the venue for various forms of drama. When the priests of St. Mary Overie (now known as Southwark Cathedral) were singing “Dirige” for the soul of Henry VIII in 1547, their prayers were interrupted by the noise of players performing in the neighbourhood. Thirty-one years later the Privy Council was still complaining to the Surrey justices about the prevalence of play-acting in the same vicinity. The evidence suggests that Paris Garden itself had been used as the venue for medieval “folk festivals,” under which quaint term we may include a great many crude entertainments as well as cruel and violent sports.

Chief among those sports has always been animal-baiting. It was a peculiar love of the English, and conducted with a ferocity that horrified continental visitors. A Venetian traveller noted two hundred dogs in “traps,” ready to be set upon bulls and wild bears. There was another sport in which a blind bear was tormented by men with whips; occasionally the maddened animal was known to break free of its chain and run among the crowd. When Shakespeare includes the famous stage-direction in The Winter’s Tale, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” the audience would have been able to picture the scene quite precisely.

There was a bull-ring in Southwark by 1542 at the latest, and a new bullring was being built on Bankside in the 1550s. Shakespeare would have heard the roaring from his lodgings by the Clink. The cost of admission was a penny, with an additional penny for a good place in the galleries. In 1594 Edward Alleyn secured the lease of the bear-baiting ring at Paris Garden, in the neighbourhood of the Globe, for £200. A few years later he and Henslowe purchased the office of mastership of the “Queen’s Games of Bulls and Bears.” The bear-pits were an adjunct, not a cheap alternative, to the playhouses. On Thursday and Sunday of each week, the theatres were closed and the animal-pits opened. At a slightly later date Alleyn and Henslowe built the Hope Playhouse, close to the Globe, which was both theatre and animal-pit; the bears were baited on Tuesday and Thursday, plays performed on every other day (except Sunday). It was the same business, run by the same operatives. The reek of the animals must have sullied the actors’ costumes. It is a condition of London life that the atmosphere of a neighbourhood lingers like some fugitive odour in the air; we can say with some certainty, therefore, that Shakespeare lived and worked in a parish characterised by violence and casual cruelty. That is perhaps why Southwark provided more soldiers for the realm than any other area apart from the city of London itself. More than a third of its householders were watermen, and watermen were well known throughout England for their abusive behaviour and foul language.

There was a “sanctuary” at Paris Garden from the early fifteenth century, and the neighbourhood had a history of criminal association and criminal practice. It had also been a haven for many and varied groups of immigrants, known as “aliens,” among them Dutch and Fleming. The topography of the neighbourhood is perhaps then predictable. There were larger houses and gardens for the more notable residents, such as Henslowe and Alleyn (and perhaps Shakespeare himself), but for the rest it was an area of packed tenements and swarming streets, of stables and alleys. What were known as the “stink-trades” were also congregated here, brewing and tanning among them. There was a busy ferry-crossing at Paris Garden Stairs, transporting passengers over to Blackfriars on the opposite bank. But even here the generally rough reputation of the neighbourhood intervened. A civic edict of the sixteenth century ordered wherrymen to moor their boats on the northern bank at night to ensure that “thieves and other misdoers shall not be carried”³ to the brothels and taverns of Southwark. There were indeed many brothels, some of them owned by the ubiquitous business partners Alleyn and Henslowe. Henslowe’s playhouse, the Rose, was named after a well-known house of assignation in the vicinity. They were, you might say, all-round entertainers. And Shakespeare knew them well.

It may seem odd that Alleyn and Henslowe were also vestrymen of the church of St. Saviour’s, and that Henslowe became churchwarden. Yet in a more youthful and enterprising society, established upon the active pursuit of profit, such dual allegiances were not unusual. Prostitutes had been known as “Winchester Geese,” after the Bishop of Winchester’s manor in which they operated. One inn and brothel was called the Cardinal’s Hat, not necessarily because of any ecclesiastical connection but because red was deemed to be the proper colour for the tip of the penis. The sacred and the secular were still thoroughly mingled. Only after the parliamentary wars was the effort made to separate them.

It is of course easy to exaggerate the stench and horrors of the south bank. There were fields and woods within easy reach of the busy streets, and the herbalist John Gerard was agreeably surprised by the number of flowers he observed in the water ditches of the neighbourhood. In Paris Garden Lane, for example, he found the “water yarrow” and “plentie” of “water gilloflower.”⁴So it was not an altogether disagreeable area. Demographic surveys also suggest that its inhabitants did not move away from it in any significant numbers; like Londoners elsewhere, they were happy to remain in the familiar neighbourhood. So life in Southwark was not necessarily insupportable, only colourful and occasionally inconvenient. It was always a lively and active area. Why else should Shakespeare choose to remain there for so long? In twenty-first century London, people do not choose to move out of Soho. Southwark, then, was the centre of genuine and teeming life.

CHAPTER 61 This Wide and Vniuersall Theatre

And so the new Globe arose. It was considered at the time to be the most splendid of all the London theatres. Its name implies that it was the theatre of the world itself and, as the arena in which Othello and King Lear, Macbeth and Julius Caesar, were first performed, it can lay some claim to that title. It has been suggested that Peter Streete, carpenter and builder, followed the precepts of Vitruvius in designing this space. The book of Vitruvius known as Architectura was available in England at the time, but it is highly unlikely that Streete ever consulted it. His immediate model is more likely to have been that of the animal-baiting ring, with which he and his contemporaries were intensely familiar. Nevertheless its design has been interpreted as a copy of the amphitheatre of the antique world, or of the holier circles of primeval Britain. That circular shape has also been supposed to suggest the womb or the embrace of encircling maternal arms. It even bears a passing resemblance to the magician’s circle, in which bright visions might appear. But no wooden building in the sixteenth century could be entirely circular. It was in fact polygonal in shape, accommodating some fourteen sides, with three galleries surrounding the stage and the open yard or “pit.”

The Globe’s structure was of timber, made up of prefabricated oak posts (some of them over 30 feet long) infilled with wattle-and-daub and with a finished exterior of white plaster; its roof was thatched. It is possible that the plaster was designed to resemble stone, so that the building of the theatre was itself theatrical. The playhouse was 100 feet in diameter, and is supposed to have held some 3,300 people. Each of the two lower galleries could hold one thousand people. It was in other words very tightly packed with Elizabethan bodies, accommodating audiences two or three times the size of those in a modern London theatre. Indeed the atmosphere would have been more like that of a football stadium than a playhouse. It also had some elements of the funfair.

It has been supposed that the Globe had a “sign” for ready identification above the stage or perhaps above the principal entrance. That would be quite usual in Elizabethan London and, if it existed at all, stray references suggest that it was an image of Hercules holding a globe upon his shoulders. The Shakespearian scholar, Edmond Malone, has stated that the playhouse also displayed a motto above its entrance or within its interior—” Totus mundus agit hlurionem,” which may be translated as “The whole world plays the actor.” The interior would have been colourful if not gaudy, with classical motifs and statuary prominent among the paintings and decorations. We know well enough from other interiors, with their satyrs and herms, their paintings of gods and goddesses, that the Elizabethans loved bright patterning and intricate carving. Nothing was too extravagant or too elaborate. At the Globe the wood was painted to resemble marble or jasper, and there were various hangings or tapestries to add to the impression of pseudo-classical luxury. The colours were vivid, with much gilt and gold, and the general effect was one of elaborate splendour. The theatre, after all, was a world of artifice in what was already a highly scenic and ritualistic culture. It vied with the court as the central point of ritual and display. It was the very fulcrum of art as demonstration.

The stage itself was just under 50 feet in width. It was so placed that it stayed out of direct sunlight, and remained in shadow for the duration of the afternoon’s performances. When an actor stepped forward to the front of the stage, however, his face would have been significantly lightened. It had two exits/entrances, one on either side; between them was the curtained “discovery” space in which characters might be found asleep, dead, or privately employed; it could be used, for example, as a tomb or a study. Jutting out upon the stage itself was a canopy held up by two wooden pillars. This was also known as the “heavens,” and was decorated with stars and planets against a celestial blue background; the pillars are also supposed to have defined “front stage” and “rear stage.” It was an exceedingly simple arrangement, taken from classical stagecraft, and was designed to emphasise the bodily presence of the actor. On the level above the stage was a balcony employed by the musicians, and hired sometimes by the most privileged of the audience; but it could also be used as part of the theatrical stage. When a general appeared on the ramparts of a city, or when a lover climbed up to his mistress’s bedchamber, this was the space that was used. Beneath the stage was the area known as “hell.” A trap-door allowed personages magically to ascend or descend, but it was also the area where the “props” were kept. There does not seem to have been any machinery in the Globe, however, for tricks of “flying” or descending upon the stage. This would not become available to Shakespeare, and the players, until they began to use an indoors playhouse at Blackfriars.

On the stage of the Globe an actor would enter at one door and exit at another. When a character or characters left the stage, they would not be the first to appear in the subsequent scene. These were important principles, designed to lend the impression of a dramatic world in process; theatrical life continued, as it were, “behind the scene.” There was an illusion of a flowing imaginative world, of which the actors on the stage were the visible token. It is also an indication of the formal fluency of Elizabethan drama, depending as it does upon contrast and symmetry, balance and opposition, of finely poised forces. The wide space allowed for speed and flexibility of plot. It is possible that the words were spoken much more quickly than in any modern performance. There were no acts, only scenes signalled by the various exits and entrances of the actors themselves. Act breaks were not introduced until approximately 1607. After a general exit, for example, a stage-property might be carried on by stagehands (wearing their blue livery) before other characters entered. The Elizabethan stage was not self-conscious about its procedures, the mechanics of stage “business,” and of course neither were the plays themselves. There was no appetite for realism, or naturalism, in any of its current senses.

The drama of the Globe, then, was largely built upon a succession of scenes. The sequence of scenes conforms to the English love of interdependent units, a series of variations upon a theme that encourages variety rather than concentration and heterogeneity rather than intensity. That is why a new entrance was always significant, and why it is heavily emphasised in the stage-directions. “Enter Cassandra with her hair aboute her eares … Enter a Troian in his night-gowne all vnready … Enter Godfrey as newly landed & halfe naked … Enter Charles all wet with his sword … Enter Er-cole with a letter …” These were defining moments in the creation of a scene. They represented purpose and character, setting in motion the subsequent action. The presence of the actor, what was known as “the ability of body,” was the paramount element of the dramatic entertainment. It is also possible that the player sometimes made his entry from the yard, perhaps from one of the entrances to the theatre, and then vaulted onto the stage.

The actor would come forward, and then deliver his lines to the audience. He did not enter a particular location; he entered in order to address or confront another actor. Speakers were also separated from non-speakers in the dramatic space. There were set patterns for scenes of greeting and of parting; there were stage conventions for kneeling and embracing. There were no doubt also accepted theatrical codes for asides and soliloquies, perhaps a particular placing of the body on stage. At the close of the performance the highest-ranking character left on stage delivered the final lines. The audience loved processions and marches and dumb-shows; it loved colour and display. There is a large element of ceremony or ritual about this theatre, in other words, which remained an important part in its staging.

It was a general setting, a blank space that actor and playwright could manipulate with perfect imaginative freedom. It has been suggested by some theatrical historians that place cards were set up to inform the audience of a particular setting, but this is perhaps too prescriptive. It was enough for the actor to announce his location. And of course the nature of the costumes also determined the nature of place. The green garment of a forester would signify a wood, a set of gaoler’s keys a prison. Costume was a most important theatrical device. In a visual culture it was the key to all levels of society and all forms of occupation. Elizabethan actors, and audiences, also delighted in disguise as a plot device. More was spent on costumes than on texts or actors’ salaries, and the inventory of the company wardrobe includes robes, cloaks, jerkins, doublets, breeches, tunics and nightshirts. And of course there was always a need for armour. In one of his inventories Henslowe also lists a range of more exotic costumes — a suit for a ghost and a senator’s gown, a coat for Herod as well as apparel for a devil and a witch. A good wardrobe master kept cast-offs and oddments of clothes, and there is reason to believe that the companies were sometimes given the remnants of a nobleman’s wardrobe of worn-out clothes and garments that had gone out of fashion. Clothing also determined the identity of the character. There were conventional costumes for the Jew and the Italian, the doctor and the merchant. A canvas suit indicated a sailor, and a blue coat was the token of a servant. Virgins wore white, and doctors were dressed in scarlet gowns. The female characters sometimes wore masks, as an overtly theatrical way of disguising their fundamentally male identity. In that sense the Elizabethan theatre has affiliations with classical Greek and Japanese drama.

There was no scenery as such, but on occasions painted cloths were used. In Henslowe’s theatrical accounts there is a description of “a clothe of the Sone & Moone.” They were not naturalistic, but were designed to convey an atmosphere or to suggest a theme. When romances were to be played, for example, there were cloths painted with cupids. When tragedies were to be performed, the stage was hung in black draperies.

There were a few stage-properties for each production, notably beds or tables and chairs. Allusions in play texts to trees may refer to the two pillars, holding up the canopy, which could be employed for a multitude of purposes. Realism was not an issue. Stools were left on stage for histrionic use; an actor might wish to sit upon them or to brandish them at an opponent. A scaffold could double as a monument or a pulpit. The list of properties for the Lord Admiral’s Men has survived; among them are noted a rock, a cave, a tomb, a bedstead, a bay tree, a boar’s head, a lion’s skin, a black dog and a wooden leg. Bladders of sheep’s blood were readily available for murders and battle scenes. It has been calculated, however, that 80 per cent of Shakespearian scenes written for the Globe needed no props at all.¹ Shakespeare was content with a bare space in which to create his dramatic narratives. It is a very clear indication of his bounding imaginative energy.

CHAPTER 62 Then Let the Trumpets Sound

Words were not the only theatrical reality. There was much music. The little group of musicians in the balcony, no more than six or seven, would have included a trumpeter and a drummer, as well as players of horns, recorders, “hoboyes” or “hautboys” and lutes. There are also reports of actors playing instruments upon the stage itself. Alleyn was a lutanist, for example, and on his death Augustine Phillips bequeathed a bass viol, bandore, cittern and lute. The players certainly performed songs and ballads on stage, and they were chosen in part for the quality of their voices. Certain plays must have resembled “musicals” rather than dramas. Music was associated on the stage with sleep and healing, with love and death. It was employed as a prelude to supernatural visitations. And of course it accompanied the numerous dances of Shakespearian drama. In the combination of music and movement we may glimpse the harmony of the spheres.

Many of the lyrics of the songs in Shakespeare’s plays were written by the dramatist himself, and there is evidence in his later life of collaboration with such skilled musicians as Thomas Morley and Robert Johnson. Morley had been his neighbour in Bishopsgate, and was also part of the circle around the Countess of Pembroke; so there were many opportunities for their meeting. It was Morley who wrote the musical setting for one of Shakespeare’s most famous songs, “It was a lover and his lass.” Robert Johnson was related, as we have seen, to Emilia Lanier, who through her influence had him indentured to Sir George Carey; he collaborated extensively with Shakespeare in the music of the late plays. Johnson is largely remembered for two songs from The Tempest, “Full fathom five” and “Where the bee sucks,” but at the time he played a not inconsiderable role in the staging and effects of dramas such as Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. It is significant that when Shakespeare does import songs from other sources, however, he generally chooses the popular ballad material of sixteenth-century England. These were the ballads he had heard in childhood.

From the references in his drama it is clear that Shakespeare had a technical knowledge of music and of musical terms. This was almost a commonplace skill in the period, where music-making was an indispensable aspect of social life; sight-reading of music was a familiar accomplishment. All the evidence suggests that Shakespeare possessed an acute and sensitive ear. He was a hater of discord in all its forms, even though his plays thrive upon a kind of harmonious discord. He would in any case have been required to sing, and perhaps also to play an instrument, upon the stage. His characters frequently burst into song, among them such unlikely vocalists as Hamlet and Iago, and there are endless references in his plays to the power and sweetness of music. The songs of Ophelia and of Desdemona are employed to touch the scenes of tragedy with eternal harmonies. The music of The Winter’s Tale and of The Tempest is an important part of their meaning. It can be argued, in fact, that Shakespeare was the first English dramatist to make song an integral part of the drama, apart from the anonymous chants of the medieval Mysteries, and can thus be seen as the begetter of the musical theatre. In that, as in so many other matters, he was a divining rod for the nation’s genius. It is worth remarking that he was the contemporary of two of the greatest composers in the history of English music, William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons. It was an epoch of profound musical accomplishment. It has been said that England was once “a nest of singing birds,” and it was a matter of particular comment among foreign visitors that music was closely woven within London stage performances.

Towards the end of Shakespeare’s career, the “outdoor” playhouses were being replaced by “indoor” theatres. In those quieter surroundings, there was music between the recently introduced “acts”—in fact acts may have been devised solely for the purpose of affording musical accompaniments — and there was often a musical performance before the play actually began. Conditions at the Globe, in the open air and in front of a larger and more restive audience, were not conducive to such refined entertainment.

The stage itself was full of noises. Plays were acccompanied by the simulated sound of horses’ hooves and of birdsong, of bells and of cannons. Voices off-stage amplified battle scenes with cries of “Kill, kill, kill,” loud shouts, shrieks and general clamour. There were fireworks available, for lightning, and smoke was used to imitate fog or mist. When the directions called for “thunder” a sheet of metal was shaken vigorously, and squibs were let off, behind the scene. The sound of pebbles in a drum could counterfeit the sea, and a piece of canvas tied to a wheel could mimic the wind. The sound of dried peas upon a metal sheet would substitute for rain.

Lighting was another source of stage-effects. Torches or tapers were used to signify night. There were certain scenes where supernumeraries would come upon the stage carrying candles as an indication of a night-time banquet or meeting. On occasions lights were placed behind bottles of coloured water to provide sinister or supernatural illumination. In the late sixteenth century the stage was the centre of public enchantment.

CHAPTER 63 Why There You Toucht the Life of Our Designe

The repertoire of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe was extensive and various. Quite apart from Shakespeare’s plays they seem to have owned approximately one hundred other dramas ranging from Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose to Stuhlweissenburg, from The London Prodigal to The Fair Maid of Bristol. In all of these plays it is likely that Shakespeare played his part. It is not clear how long it required to stage a revival, but it took between two and three weeks to prepare a new play. Since on average fifteen new plays were performed each year, the schedule of business was extremely tight. The records of the Globe have not survived but related material from the Rose suggests that the players there gave 150 performances of thirty separate plays during one winter season. In any week a different play was performed each afternoon. Nothing can better capture the vitality and excitement of the new medium. The constant demand was for novelty.

There was a tested procedure for the production of these new plays. The author or authors, as we have noted, would approach the playhouse with a skeleton narrative for a new play. On the basis of this scenario the playhouse might commission the drama, with a series of part payments followed by the remainder when a satisfactory manuscript or “book-of-the-play” was delivered. At the time of its final delivery the players met in order to listen to the playwright reading out the entire text. There is a note in Philip Henslowe’s diary, in May 1602, for two shillings “layd owt for the companye when they read the playe of Jeffa for wine at the tavern.” It may have been at this juncture, or slightly later, that the “book-keeper” prepared a “plot” or outline of the action in which the names of the actors, the stage-props required, and the requisite stage-noises, were written down. But by far the most important function of the “plot” was to list the sequence of entries, and thus the number of scenes. It was a way of adjusting the play, in other words, to the available resources and numbers of the company. One task, for example, was carefully to allot the roles to individual actors so that “doubling” (one actor taking two parts) became easily achieved. The player, however skilled, could not be in two places on the same stage. The plot was divided into individual scenes by the simple expedient of a line ruled across the various columns, and each scene began with the direction “Enter.” This was also placed on pasteboard and hung in the tiring-house behind the stage as an aide-memoire to players.

A member of the company, perhaps the book-keeper himself, also copied down the individual actor’s parts on a “scroll” or long strips of paper. It was this that the player carried about with him and memorised. One of those given to Edward Alleyn, for the part of Orlando in Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso, has survived. It is made up of fourteen half-sheets of paper pasted together so that it forms a continuous roll some 17 feet in length and 6 inches in width. The speeches are given “cues” in the last words of the previous speaker, and there are occasional directions.

The author’s original manuscript became the “play-book,” known also as the “Book.” It was used to adapt the manuscript for theatrical performance, but such was the speed and professionalism of the theatrical company that in practice little was done. In certain circumstances stage-action was simplified and speeches shortened. But these were rare interventions. The more usual notes were simply concerned with the traffic of the stage. The author’s list of characters, for example, was substituted by the names of individual actors. The stage-properties, and the “noises off,” were incorporated. The author’s own stage-directions were occasionally revised; entrances, for example, were marked earlier so that the actor had more time to cross the stage. Other stage-directions by the author were left, although they must often have been ignored. His vision was no longer important. It had become a collective reality.

It seems likely that the “book-keeper” also superintended the rehearsals of the play, with prompt-copy in hand, and also acted as prompter during the performance itself. The prompter did not perform his modern task of whispering lines to an actor who was “out”; his role was to co-ordinate entrances and expedite the use of properties and “noises off.” There is a reference in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour to a choleric gentleman who “would swear like an Elephant, and stamp and stare (God blesse us) like a play-house book-keeper when the actors misse their entrance.” We may only conclude that the book-keeper was sometimes also the prompter, and sometimes not. The player himself, however, was assisted neither by prompter nor by bookkeeper. Once he was on the stage he relied upon his own resources and his own professionalism, as well as the support of the rest of the players, who no doubt covered any lapse of memory or mistake in timing.

Before any play could be performed, the finished text had to be despatched to the Master of the Revels in Clerkenwell for possible alteration and censorship. For a fee, which rose steadily through the years from 7 shillings to £1, the Master licensed each drama for public performance. With his signature appended to the manuscript it became the “allowed” book, available for performance throughout England. It was a most important document indeed and one that in ordinary circumstances the company would keep within its possession.

Obvious allusions to current events were of course examined very carefully by the Master of the Revels. Any challenge to the established authorities, overt or implied, was taken out. As the authors and actors of The Isle of Dogs discovered, there were also civil penalties for public disrespect. That is why the deposition scene of the monarch in Richard II was removed during Elizabeth’s lifetime. To the book of Sir Thomas More the Master of the Revels has added: “Leave out the insurrection wholy & the cause thereoff”; the caution was necessary in a period when the threat of civic violence in London was strong. Blasphemy was of course forbidden. One manuscript is marked by the command to remove “Oathes, prophaness & publick Ribaldry.” ¹ The evidence, however, suggests that relations between the theatrical companies and the Revels Office were generally good. They were, in a sense, in the same business.

Assuming that all the formalities and the stage-mechanics had been satisfactorily completed, a play could be performed upon the stage within a few weeks of its being handed to the company. There was a premium on speed and professional competency. The rehearsals of new plays, and of revivals, occurred in the morning. There was no director in the contemporary sense but, as has been suggested, the book-keeper may have played that role in many productions. There is the strong probability that Shakespeare himself performed that duty when his own plays were in rehearsal. It would be the natural thing to do. An excellent dancer such as Will Kempe was responsible for the choreography, and a musician such as Augustine Phillips arranged the music.

A German traveller noted, on a visit to London in 1606, that the players were “daily instructed, as it were in a school, so that even the most eminent actors have to allow themselves to be taught their places by the dramatists.”² This may have been a misunderstanding, so common in foreign reports of sixteenth-century London, since it is unlikely that an eminent actor would have endured direction from a young or minor playwright. But it would have been different with Shakespeare. Evidence to that effect comes in Richard Flecknoe’s Short Discourse of the English Stage, published in 1664, in which he describes how in the time of Shakespeare and Jonson “it was the happiness of the Actors of those Times to have such Poets as these to instruct them, and write for them; and no less of those Poets to have such docile and excellent Actors to Act their Playes as a Field and Burbidge.”³ They were not directed; they were “instructed.”

The actors had the “scrolls” of their own lines, but no complete script. They memorised or part-memorised their words before beginning the rehearsal itself. It can be inferred that approximately thirteen principal actors and boys were gathered together on this occasion. The smaller roles need not have been rehearsed. At this stage jokes were added or taken out, difficulties of action overcome, and obscurities of plot or dialogue clarified. At this point, too, the problems attendant on “doubling” were resolved. This was often done unobtrusively, but there were occasions when the Elizabethan players revelled in the artificiality of the procedure. Doubling was an obvious excuse for comedy as well as mystery. It also provided the actor with an opportunity to display his virtuosity and versatility, and it has been calculated that a player needed the time of just twenty-seven lines to change roles. In certain plays Shakespeare will allow precisely that amount of time for the transformation. There were occasions, too, when the audience revelled in “doubling.” When an actor dies on stage as one character, but then re-emerges as another living — this must often have been the cue for shouts of approval.

There is every reason to believe that actors and writers in rehearsal behaved very differently from their modern counterparts, who seem to be held in thrall to their director. In contrast the Elizabethan actor suggested lines, or ways of delivering lines, and may even have helped to invent new scenes to assist the progress of the plot. In the “epistle” to a publication of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher it is announced that “when these Comedies and Tragedies were presented on the Stage, the Actours omitted some Scenes and Passages (with the Authour’s consent) as occasion led them.”⁴ The plays of Shakespeare were not treated very differently. The play is not a piece of writing, but a collaborative event; it is never finished, in other words, but subject to a continuous and inevitable process of change. There was in the sixteenth century a well-understood set of stage conventions, however, which helped the process of rehearsal; there were principles of movement and gesture that the good actor would have known instinctively. It is interesting, for example, that exits are rarely mentioned in stage texts; it was assumed that competent performers would know exactly when to leave the stage.

A general “run” of a new play was between four to six weeks, played at intervals, but of course there were always revivals and reworkings whenever the occasion required them. The general business of the day would include rehearsals in the morning, playing in the afternoon, and the learning of innumerable lines in the evening. In the case of Shakespeare this was complemented by the necessity of writing plays in relatively quick succession. He was continually, and exhaustingly, occupied. J. M. W. Turner once said that the secret of genius was “hard work,” a sentiment with which Shakespeare would have agreed.

CHAPTER 64 See How the Giddy Multitude Doe Point

Everyone knew when the playhouse was open. A flag was flown from the roof, announcing the news, and a trumpet was blown to alert those in the vicinity. Playbills advertising the forthcoming entertainment had already been pasted onto walls and posts, as well as the doors of the Globe itself. These “bills” gave the time and place, title and company, as well as sensationalist details to attract the public— “the pittiefull murther … the extreame crueltie … the most deserved death” and so on. The play itself began with three “flourishes” from the small orchestra, designed in part to still the ever restless audience. Then there came upon the stage the “prologue,” attired in a long black velvet cloak, false beard and a wreath of bay-leaves. It was he who introduced the play and pleaded for the audience’s attention.

At the end of the play, after the epilogue had been concluded, the next and forthcoming drama was announced to the audience. There then followed the prayers for the monarch, when all the actors knelt upon the stage. And then there came the jig. Its name suggests a merry folk dance, but its provenance goes wider. The stage jig was a comic afterpiece accompanied by dancing, lasting for approximately twenty minutes, in which some or all of the players joined. Its principal exponents were of course the comedians in the company who, like Will Kempe, gained a reputation for their extempore dancing; they turned like a “gig,” or top, and sang ribald or personal songs.

The jigs often included folk dances and ballads as well as what are euphemistically termed “figure dances” by the comedians and boys. They were characterised and criticised for their bawdiness, described variously as “a nasty bawdy Iigge” and “obscaene and light Iigges.”¹

Shakespeare’s comedies generally end with a wedding rather than with a marriage (the auspices are rarely favourable), and the couples are in a sense unconsummated; that consummation may have been depicted in the jig. And it was a jig in which Shakespeare himself would have joined. In many instances it seems to have been the most popular part of the afternoon’s entertainment, “called for” by the impatient audience at the end of the play. The crowd could also demand the performance of a favourite jig such as “master Kemps Newe jigge of the kitchen stuffe woman” or “a ballad of Cuttinge George and his hostis.”²

It is not at all clear when, or even whether, the performance of jigs was discontinued at the Globe. It is sometimes conjectured that Will Kempe’s departure from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599 was the signal for their demise. When a playgoer, Thomas Platter, refers to a jig at the end of a performance of Julius Caesar at the Globe in that year he was apparently chronicling one of its last appearances. But at the close of Twelfth Night, written and performed in 1601, a clown is left on stage with a song. Where there is a song, there is a dance. There is in fact no real evidence to suggest that the jig came to a sudden or inglorious end in the Bankside theatre. Why remove one of the most popular entertainments that the theatre could provide? Ben Jonson may have complained about the jig but Jonson was not an enthusiast for populist theatre in any of its forms. It certainly flourished in the theatres of the northern London suburbs for many years. It seems unlikely that the “southern” theatres, catering for a similar audience, would discontinue the practice. The jig served a great purpose, not unlike that of the satyr plays which were performed at the end of the dramatic trilogies in fifth-century BC Athens. It was part of the dramatic celebration. It may seem inappropriate after the last scenes of King Lear or Othello, but there is somehow a dramatic rightness about ending any play with a song and a dance. It suggests that the drama is an aspect of human joy. The original meaning of “mimesis,” the word for mimicry or imitation, is “expression in dance.” It is perhaps the oldest form of human activity or human game.

The experience of the play has in fact been described as that of a ritual, in which the stage represents a heightened reality not unlike the gestures and movements of a Catholic priest at the altar. It is almost commonplace to suggest that the Elizabethan drama, emerging to full life after the reformation of religion under the Anglican supremacy of Henry and Elizabeth, served as a substitute for the rituals of the old English faith. It fulfilled the audience’s appetite for significant action and iconic form. The Globe announced itself to be a cosmos in miniature, like the operations of the Mass. It is well known that ecclesiastical vestments were sold to the players, when their sacred-ness fell out of use, and that Puritan moralists denounced Roman Catholicism as “Mimic superstition.”³ A company of Catholic travelling players performed King Lear in the households of Yorkshire recusants. Shakespearian tragedy, in particular, has some deep affinity with the experience of Catholic worship and the sacrifice of the Mass. Simon Callow, the English actor, has suggested in a modern context that “Catholicism (and its English variant) is another great manufactory of actors …”⁴ So there is a connection. But the historical argument can be taken too far. The stage may have been inclined to ritual but, throughout the period of Shakespeare’s career, it also became an arena for the presentation of human character and of individual striving.

The play began at two o’clock in the winter, and three o’clock in the summer. Its average length was approximately two hours, some plays perhaps thirty or forty minutes longer. Since the length of Hamlet and of Bartholomew Fair is some four thousand lines, the actors in these and plays of similar length must have spoken very rapidly indeed. The average length of an Elizabethan play, lasting the conventional two hours, is 2,500 lines. Shakespeare’s plays average 2,671 lines; as always he stays close to accepted stage procedure. He was in every sense a professional.

The Globe has often been considered to be a summer theatre, but the records show that it was also used in the months of winter. Elizabethan audiences wrapped up more warmly than their modern counterparts, and were in any case hardier, so that the chilly temperatures would not have discouraged them. Playgoers were drawn from all classes, except from the vagrant and the very poorest who could scarcely earn or even beg enough to eat. It is a matter of common sense that there were more middling than lower people, to use a distinction of the period, and that it would be mainly “gentry” and their consorts who would have the leisure or opportunity to spend their afternoons in this fashion. Among this latter class would be included “all Martial men … all Students of Artes and Sciences, and by our English custome, all Innes of Court men, professors of the Law.”⁵ To this list must be appended courtiers and assorted noblemen; London merchants and their wives, as well as apprentices, may be added on the presumption that some of them were willing or able to break off their business for two or three hours. The important point is that the Globe was not filled only with the plebeians of sixteenth-century London, as is sometimes suggested, and there was thus no need for Shakespeare to write “down” to his audience.

There was of course one division, between those who paid a penny for the pit and those who paid a penny more for a seat in the galleries. In the galleries “each man sate downe without respecting of persons, for he that first comes is first seated.”⁶ As a general rule the porters and carters and apprentices would have been content with their standing room in the pit; these were described as the “under-standers.” The pit itself was paved with ash and industrial “slag,” such as clinker, with a plentiful covering of hazelnut shells, and probably sloped downward towards the stage. The gentlemen and the richer Londoners (with their ladies) would have preferred the relative comfort of a wooden bench. Once they had paid for their token they could proceed either to the left or right in order to enter the galleries. Yet no doubt it was more random and haphazard than this neat formula would imply. It is possible, for example, that the groundlings did not necessarily stand at all. They may have been able to sit upon rushes strewn across the yard. Some of them, according to Thomas Dekker in The Gull’s Hornbook, brought with them a “tripos or three-footed stool.”⁷

It has also been inferred that the “stinkards,” or lower classes of Londoners, congregated at suburban theatres such as the Red Bull and the Fortune; these theatres then become harbingers of the music halls of the East End in the late nineteenth century. But such segregation is very doubtful. When Stephen Gosson disparaged the playhouse audience for being a loose assemblage of “Tailers, Tinkers, Cordwayners, Saylers, olde Men, yong Men, Women, Boyes, Girles and such like”⁸ it is clear that the “such like” included a very wide spectrum of humanity indeed. The Globe did truly encompass the human world, or at least that portion of it residing in late sixteenth-century London.

CHAPTER 65 And Here We Wander in Illusions

The playhouse crowd was egalitarian in tendency. A gentleman took as much room as a student or a merchant, and was engaged in the same communal atmosphere. As one contemporary put it, “every lewd person thinks himself (for his penny) worthy of the chief and most commodious place.”¹ It is a matter of disapproving comment, therefore, that the “lewd” are allowed within the same space as the gentle. Dekker makes the same point in The Gull’s Hornbook when he reports that “your Car-man and Tinker claime as strong a voice in their suffrage, and sit to giue iudgement on the plaies life and death, as well as the prowdest Momus among the tribe of Critick.” It could happen nowhere other than in the playhouse. The inevitable levelling tendencies of the city were here given their first and fullest expression. The theatre must also be associated with the great extension of literacy, and the efflorescence of male education, in the same period. All these things worked together to make Shakespeare’s plays what they were. His audience was eager, alert and excited by this new form of entertainment.

Shakespeare’s plays are often very demanding, as modern playgoers know, but sixteenth-century audiences were equally capable of picking up the intricacies of the rhetoric as well as the harmonies of the verse. Some of Shakespeare’s more recondite phrases would have passed over them, as they baffle even the most highly educated contemporary audience, but the Elizabethans understood the plots and were able to appreciate the contemporary allusions. Of course scholars of a later age have detected in Shakespeare’s plays a subtlety of theme and intention that may well have escaped Elizabethan audiences. But it may be asked whether these are the inventions of the scholars rather than the dramatist. Shakespeare relied upon the audience and, with such devices as the soliloquy, extended the play towards it; the drama did not comprehend a completely independent world, but needed to be authenticated by the various responses of the crowd.

Some of those responses were very noisy indeed. In 1601 John Marston characterised hostile comments as “Mew, blirt, ha, ha, light Chatty stuff,”² while at the Fortune the noise was described as that “of Rabies, Apple-wives and Chimney-boyes” whose “shrill confused Ecchoes loud doe cry.”³ Shakespeare himself evoked the behaviour of playgoers through the description of Casca in Julius Caesar, “If the tag-ragge people did not clap him, and hisse him, according as he pleas’d, and displeas’d them, as they vse to doe the Players in the Theatre, I am no true man” (334–7). Since Julius Caesar was played at the Globe, rather than the Theatre, he could not be accused of attacking this particular audience.

“Mew” was a favourite signal of displeasure, from which we get the more recent expression “cat-call.” The audiences in the galleries might stand up during a particularly exciting duel or battle, urging on the participants. They would applaud individual speeches. There were hisses and shouts, tears and applause, but all these responses were part of an intense emotional engagement with the play itself. It is almost impossible to replicate the experience of the first theatres. It was an astounding reality, quite unlike anything ever seen before. The mystery plays on the streets, or the interludes in the halls, offered no true comparison. In modern terms the sixteenth-century theatre was television and cinema, street festival and circus, all in one.

There was of course much eating and drinking during the course of the performance, and sellers went around with oranges, apples, nuts, gingerbread and bottled beer. There is a description of a nervous playwright who is so fearful of his play’s reception “that a bottle of ale cannot be opened but he thinks somebody hisses.” ⁴ There was a “tap room,” or bar, attached to the Globe itself. Pipes of tobacco could be purchased for 3 pence, and one contemporary moralist noted with disquiet that these pipes were offered even to the women. There was no doubt casual or opportunistic prostitution and pickpocketing. Wherever there are large groups of people in London, there are bound to be thieves and ladies of the game. That is the nature of the city. On a more genteel note there are reports that books were for sale in the Globe, with the cry of “Buy a new book!” There was of course no interval, so refreshments were consumed throughout the duration of the play.

Stories of fights and riots in the theatre are essentially of the eighteenth century. The worst that is noted of the sixteenth-century playhouse is the occasional hurling of fruit or nuts at the stage, particularly if the players were late to begin. It was still too novel and exciting an experience, too much a matter of general interest, for a London crowd to permit violent interruption. There was such a thing as “the justice of the street,” and no doubt it was visited upon anyone who interfered with the playgoers’ pleasure. The plays of Shakespeare were not attended by raucous scenes, or by the yells and shouts of drunken apprentices. It is worth remarking in this context that English drama began its precipitous decline in the late seventeenth century precisely when the theatres became more private and apparently more refined places.

In Every Man out of His Humour Ben Jonson wrote of “attentive auditors”; he considered himself to be poet as much as playwright and wished for an understanding or listening audience. The published descriptions of plays by contemporary playgoers are not generally revealing about the level of sensibility in the playhouse. The fact that most audiences were accustomed to listening to sermons, however, must have helped to shape their response. That is why they tend to describe the individual characters and actions, and on occasions the moral lessons that might be adduced from them.

There were, however, some very attentive playgoers who would bring with them “table-books,” in which they would note down significant passages. It should be remembered that poetry was still considered to be a matter of speech rather than of writing. So any alert Elizabethan would have been highly sensitive to the range and nuance of the spoken word. There would have been little or no difficulty, for example, in following some of Shakespeare’s more complex speeches. If there had been any problems of comprehension, he would not have written them in the way he did.

But there was a significant part of the audience derided by Jonson in A Staple of News as “Nut-crackers, that only come for sight.” It is as well to remember the Elizabethan addiction to spectacle and to display. There is also Volumnia’s advice to Coriolanus (1859–60) that

Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ignorant

More learned then the eares …

There has been much speculation about the relative importance of sight and hearing in the Elizabethan theatre, with the usual assumption that the more intelligent members of the audience listened while the others watched. Volumnia’s words are those of a patrician, who may well have been hissed by the audience, and cannot be taken for Shakespeare’s own thoughts on the matter. Indeed it is clear enough that in his later plays Shakespeare actually augmented the spectacle in his drama. He knew very well that it was an essential element of stage illusion, and an important contribution to the excitement and satisfaction of the playgoers. He never lost his desire to impress and to entertain. He never shared Jonson’s low opinion of the popular theatre. Indeed he was in large part responsible for creating that theatre.

It seems likely, however, that there was no real distinction between sight and hearing as agents of understanding. The whole point of the drama is that it represented a mingling of both, a synaesthetic experience which in the words of one playgoer combined “Ingeniousness of the Speech” with “the Gracefulness of the Action.” ⁵ The life of the drama consisted in character and movement.

The finances of the Globe were carefully reckoned before the venture began, and Peter Streete would have been asked to accommodate the largest possible audience. For the first performance of the new play, on the day of the Globe’s opening, prices were doubled. But the general run of performances was at fixed prices. It has been calculated that between 1580 and 1642 playgoers made fifty million separate visits to the London theatres; the Globe became a thriving business from which all parties might do well. In any one year there would have been £1,500 to share among all the actors, giving them an approximate annual income of £70. In addition it has been estimated that the house-keepers at the Globe earned between them £280 per annum. On Shakespeare’s death his one share in the Globe had an income of £25, therefore, while his share in the Blackfriars playhouse earned him £90.

There has been much speculation about Shakespeare’s own income, deriving money as he did from his writing, his acting, his position as a “sharer” and his new status as “house-keeper” or part owner of the Globe. There have been differing estimates, perhaps set off by a notebook entry by John Ward in the early 1660s that the dramatist “had an allowance so large” that he “spent att the Rate of a 10001. a year as I have heard.’”⁶ This is surely a wild exaggeration. From the reckoning of all the sources of income, we reach a more likely figure of approximately £250 per annum. This was during a period when the average wage for a schoolmaster was £20, and for a journeyman labourer £8. In his will Shakespeare left bequests to the value of £350 and an estate worth £1,200. He was not spectacularly rich, as some have suggested, but he was very affluent.

CHAPTER 66 Sweete Smoke of Rhetorike

A horoscope was consulted to determine the exact day for the opening of the Globe. The play chosen for that auspicious occasion was Julius Caesar and, from allusions in the text itself, it is clear that it was first performed on the afternoon of 12 June 1599. This was the day of the summer solstice and the appearance of a new moon.¹ A new moon was deemed by astrologers to be the most opportune time “to open a new house.”² There was a high tide at Southwark early that afternoon, which helped to expedite the journey of the playgoers coming from the north of the river. That evening, after sunset, Venus and Jupiter appeared in the sky. These may seem to be matters of arcane calculation but to the actors and playgoers of the late sixteenth century they were very significant indeed. It has been demonstrated, for example, that the axis of the Globe is 48 degrees east of true north, and so was in fact in direct alignment with the midsummer sunrise. Astrological lore was a familiar and formative influence upon all the affairs of daily life. It is also the context for the supernatural visitations and prognostications in Julius Caesar itself.

There is other evidence of the play’s summer opening. In June 1599 the takings at Philip Henslowe’s Rose, neighbour to the new Globe, registered a sharp fall which must have been the result of new competition. It is a matter of record that Henslowe and the actor-manager Alleyn soon decided to depart with the Admiral’s Men from the Rose, and to resume acting at the newly built Fortune in the northern suburbs. The proximity to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had been bad for business. Henslowe was too good a manager to lose an asset, however, and he leased out the Rose to Worcester’s Men.

Julius Caesar was Shakespeare’s first Roman play, attuned to the gaudy “classicism” of the Globe interior. A Roman setting, complete with marbled pillars, needed a Roman play. The stage-directions for “thunder” and for “thunder and lightning” also provided an opportunity to display the sound effects of the new theatre. Unlike the extravagant playhouse, however, the play itself is a triumph of simple diction and chaste rhetoric; it is as if Shakespeare had somehow been able to assume the Roman virtues and to adopt the Roman style. His deployment of forensic oratory is so skilled that it might have been composed by a classical rhetorician. He had the ability to blend himself with different states of man. In the very cadence and syntax of the words, he is Caesar. He exists within the formal periods of Brutus’s prose and within the self-serving mellifluousness of Antony’s verse.

The novelty of the new playhouse also aroused Shakespeare’s ambitions, since in this play there is a more subtle sense of character, of motive, and of consequence. The emphasis is not so much upon event as upon personality. The action is so skilfully balanced that it becomes impossible to apportion praise or blame with any certainty. Is Brutus deluded or glorious? Is Caesar matchless or fundamentally flawed? Shakespeare seems almost deliberately to have established a new kind of protagonist, whose character is not immediately apparent or transparent to the audience. Shakespeare always finds it difficult to defend those things towards which he is most sympathetic, and in this particular play the distrust of the new is matched only by scepticism about the old. It is a play of oppositions and of contrasts in which there is no final resolution. In this same spirit it can be seen as a history play or as a revenge tragedy, or as both combined. It is a new kind of drama. He knows the sources, North’s translation of Plutarch principal among them, but he changes their emphasis and direction. He invents Caesar’s deafness, too, as well as the scene in which Brutus and his co-conspirators steep themselves in the murdered Caesar’s blood. There were other Roman plays in the period, written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, but they were content to give the historical narratives a spectacular and theatrical decoration. Shakespeare goes to the heart of the matter.

Ben Jonson resented its production, not least since it came from the pen of a man who had “little Latin.” Jonson’s play, Every Man out of His Humour, was performed later in the same year and within it are references to Julius Caesar which may be construed as playful or sarcastic. At one point the dying fall of “Et tu, Brute!” is satirised; this in itself is a clear indication that the original phrase was now known to playgoers. Among Shakespeare’s audience in 1599 were two young men who knew very well the nature of betrayal. A letter of the period reveals that “my Lord Southampton and Lord Rutland come not to the Court … They pass away the tyme in London merely in going to plaies every day.”³

There is a reference to Julius Caesar in Henry V, which was composed a few months after. There are also references in Henry V to the expedition by the Earl of Essex to Ireland that was rumoured to have failed by the summer of 1599 and ended in disgrace that autumn; so Henry V is likely to have been written before those dates. Whatever the question of date, however, the two plays are complementary. The English history is just as much an exercise in ambiguity, in opposition and contrast, as Julius Caesar; but it is screwed to an even higher pitch. Is Henry a bullying thug or a great leader of men? Is he made of valour or formed from ice and snow? Is he an image of authority or a figure fit for ridicule? The scenes of military prowess and achievement are framed by a comic plot that subtly deflates this heroic tale of success. The king’s speech beginning “Once more vnto the Breach, deare friends …” (1038) is immediately succeeded by the braggart Bardolph’s “On, on, on, on, on, to the breach …” (1073). The burlesque may not have been deliberate. Shakespeare did not have to stop and think about it. He did it naturally and instinctively. It was as inevitable as a pianist using both the black and the white keys.

On the character and motives of the king, black or white, it is possible that Shakespeare himself was not sure. But, clothed in the shimmering veil of Henry’s rhetoric, they do not matter; Shakespeare was entranced by the idea of magnificence, and there is nothing like the exercise of power to create memorable lines and powerful scenes. Henry overbears judgement; he transcends or dissolves questions of morality. As William Hazlitt said in discussing Coriolanus, “the language of poetry is the language of power.”⁴ It is not of much consequence whether that power is nobly or ignobly used. The imagination itself is a form of power, and will incline towards any sympathetic object. That is why the presence of Henry, even in the comic scenes, is continually invoked. It is worth remarking, too, that the cadences of Henry’s speech are uncannily similar to those of Richard III.

When Shakespeare follows Holinshed, his principal source, he runs the risk of tedium; when he follows his instincts, he is sublime. His “Muse of Fire” rises into the air, and his imagery is concerned with soaring. The long speeches are rich in texture and strident in delivery. There is one phrase, however, that has a more particular resonance. At one point the Chorus of the drama, generally performed by Shakespeare himself, beseeches the audience to sit and watch, “Minding true things, by what their Mock’ries bee” (1780). It is a true indication of Shakespeare’s imaginative sensibility. Whereas most craftsmen judge the false according to their knowledge of the genuine, Shakespeare works the other way round.

Henry V is in fact the culmination of Shakespeare’s preoccupation with kingship. Shakespeare invented the role of the player king. Certainly, more than any other dramatist before or since, he popularised the role of sovereign and managed infinitely to extend its range, while the imagery of the player king is unique to him. In his history plays, of course, the part of the monarch is the most significant and effective on the stage; but there are also Lear, Macbeth, Duncan, Claudius, Ferdinand, Cymbeline, Leontes and a host of noble rulers. He uses the word “crown” 380 times, and Edmond Malone commented perceptively that “when he means to represent any quality of the mind as eminently perfect, he furnishes the imaginary being whom he personifies, with a crown.”⁵ One of his abiding images is that of the king as sun and, in his dramaturgy, he loves what is stately and what is grand. He was concerned with tragic narratives only in so far as they were concerned with persons of high degree; tragedies of “low life,” which were written in this period, held no interest for him. But kings appear in his comedies as well as in his tragedies. They may not always be portrayed in a flattering light, but nevertheless he evinces collaborative sympathy with them. It is notable that in his tragedies the person of highest rank speaks the last lines of the play, and in his later comedies it is always the king or principal nobleman who pronounces the verdict upon what might be called the final state of play. There is a prince in the concluding scene of thirteen out of his sixteen comedies.

It should not be forgotten that throughout his career he was a regular receiver of court favours and that in the latter part of his life he wore the royal livery as the king’s true servant. There was of course a Renaissance tradition of the courtier as actor and, as John Donne wrote, “Plays were not so like Courts, as Courts are like plays.”⁶ In turn the tone and attitude of Shakespeare’s sonnets prompted the late Victorian critic and biographer, Frank Harris, to describe him as a snob. That is not the correct description for a man of infinite sympathies. A writer who can create Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet is not a snob. But he was possessed, or obsessed, by the inwardness of the ruler rather than the ruled. The role of monarch seems to spring naturally and instinctively from his imagination, and one close student of Shakespeare’s imagery has pointed out “how continually he associates dreaming with kingship.”⁷ Did he enjoy fantasies and day-dreams of power? There is indeed a natural consonance between the player and the king, both dressed in robes of magnificence and both obliged to play a part. It may have been one reason why Shakespeare was attracted to the profession of acting in the first place.

Among his contemporaries he was well known for playing kingly parts upon the stage. In 1610 John Davies wrote a set of verses to “our English Terence, Mr. Will Shake-speare” in which he declared that

Some say (good Will) which I, in sport, do sing,

Had ‘st thou not plaid some Kingly parts in sport,

Thou hadst bin a companion for a King.⁸

The assumption seems to be that his manners would have been gracious and “gentle” enough to enjoy high companionship, had it not been for the fact that he was an actor. In another poem the same author considered that “the stage doth staine pure gentle bloud.” In Measure for Measure there is an implicit comparison between the powers of the playwright and the power of the ruler of Vienna, guiding and moving human affairs from a distance.

Shakespeare did indeed play “kingly parts.” It is surmised that he played Henry VI in the trilogy of that name, and Richard II against Burbage’s Bolingbroke. Long theatrical tradition maintains that he played the ghost of the dead king in Hamlet, and that he might have doubled as the usurping king. The assumption of these parts was no doubt the result of an instinctive grace and authority, deepened by the theatrical assumption of gravitas, but it may also be evidence of some natural predilection. He had a noble bearing and a graceful manner. Yet, somewhere within him, there is always the voice of Bardolph mocking the king.

He is unlikely to have played the king in Henry V. That role was reserved for Burbage. Shakespeare is much more likely to have taken on the part of the Chorus, addressing the playgoers as “Gentles all” and referring to “this Woodden O” of the Globe in which the action of the play is about to take place. It is an appropriate opening to be spoken by Shakespeare himself; he is, for example, alternately deferential and self-confident. The persona of this Chorus has often been compared with the persona of the sonnets, and there is indeed some resemblance in that powerful combination of enormous pride in creative achievement and personal self-abnegation. And so he paces upon the stage with sovereign words:

A Kingdome for a Stage, Princes to Act

And Monarchs to behold the swelling Scene.

If we accept the pattern of Julius Caesar, followed by Henry V, we may note in their composition the harbinger of Shakespeare’s great tragedies.

CHAPTER 67 Well Bandied Both, a Set of Wit Well Played

Of the two comedies written at this time, Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, the evidence suggests that Much Ado About Nothing was written first. It may indeed have been performed at the Curtain, with Will Kempe in the immortal role of Dogberry, before the Lord Chamberlain’s Men removed to the Globe. Shakespeare’s plays were being launched and performed even as the Globe was being constructed. Much Ado About Nothing remains one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, largely because of the wit combats of Beatrice and Benedick. “Let but Beatrice and Benedicke be seen,” one versifier wrote in 1640, “the Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes are all full.” ¹ Theirs is a wit of high order, anticipating Congreve and Wilde, subtly shadowed by the farcical humour of Dogberry and his cohorts.

The entire play in fact provides a significant insight into the range and nature of Elizabethan comedy, consisting of fast repartee, complicated wordplay, extravagant conceits, endless sexual innuendo and what can only be described as a form of reckless melancholy. The Elizabethan age seems always to be on the edge of despair or dissolution, with the prospect of everything crashing down in flames; hence all the bravura and defiance of its major players.

The title of the play itself is indicative of its plot, in which the protagonists are led forward by a series of false reports and mistaken impressions. It has also a predictably bawdy significance since “nothing” was a slang word for the female genitals. It is a play of improbabilities and coincidences lovingly embraced by Shakespeare, who seems to have countenanced everything for the sake of theatrical effect. It resembles one of those light dances often mentioned in the text, the cinque pace or the Scotch jig, where the swiftness and the delicacy of the pattern are paramount. We may recall here the Elizabethan love of artifice for its own sake.

As You Like It was certainly performed at the Globe, not at the Curtain; Jaques’s speech, beginning “All the world’s a stage,” makes reference to the motto of the Globe on the world as a player. Perhaps more importantly, the character of Touchstone was played by a relatively new recruit to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The part was written for Robert Armin, comedian and musician, who was the replacement for Will Kempe. Kempe left the company at a point in 1599 with some ill-humour. It may have been suggested that his own brand of foolery would seem somewhat old-fashioned in the changed circumstances of the Globe, or he may have become disenchanted with the range of parts created for him. From various veiled references and allusions it seems that Shakespeare did not instinctively appreciate the type of humour in which Kempe himself was the star performer (and even, on occasions, writer). Kempe was too obstreperous and unpredictable; he insisted on making his personality central to his role. In turn Kempe may not have recognised the subtleties of Shakespeare’s art, being more used to an earlier generation of the theatre where writers were mere hired hacks. They represented a clash of two cultures. In any case, in Kempe’s own words, he “danced out of the world” or globe.

Whatever the circumstances of Kempe’s departure, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men decided to replace him with a new kind of comic player. Armin had begun the world as apprentice to a goldsmith in Lombard Street, but very quickly earned some kind of reputation as a dramatist and ballad writer. He wrote such popular plays as The History of the Two Maids of More-clacke and A Nest of Ninnies. Even if his principal career was as comic actor, he never gave up his profession as a writer; so he manifested some instinctive sympathy with Shakespeare that Kempe had lacked. He has even been described by one theatrical historian as an “intellectual.” ² Certainly he knew Latin and Italian. He became a member of Lord Chandos’s Men, and must then have gained his reputation as a comic player or a natural wit. One of his publications was credited to “Clonnico de Curtanio Snuffe,” which intimates that he was Snuff the clown at the Curtain, followed by a later edition in which he is described as “Clonnico del Mondo Snuffe”³ or Snuff at the Globe itself. He was also known as Pink. There are two possibilities. He was already in the employment of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and simply took over from Will Kempe. He certainly assumed the role of Dogberry at a later date, since he is described in one source as “his Constableship.” ⁴ Or it may be that Armin was performing with Lord Chandos’s Men at the Curtain, and replaced Kempe on his departure at the end of 1599.

It is worth remarking that Shakespeare started writing parts for “fools” only after Armin had joined the company. Since Armin was also known for his singing voice, Shakespeare wrote many songs for him. From Touchstone forward emerge the fools who break into song. It is a moot point whether Shakespeare fashioned his new “fools” in the image of Armin, or whether Armin’s persona was fashioned by Shakespeare. No doubt both elements were at work in the creation of Touchstone and Feste, the Fool in King Lear and the gravedigger in Hamlet. With their mixture of melancholy and whimsicality, song and learning, mimicry and word-play, wit and proverb, satire and philosophy, they are of a distinctive and instantly recognisable type. Their costumes are motley, and their language is motley.

Armin had studied what were known as “natural fools” and with his instinctive skills in mimicry he had learned to imitate them; so he brought a self-consciousness or interiority to the role of clown that Kempe himself never provided. He did not “ad lib” or make impromptu jokes in the manner of his predecessor; he studied each role with care, and differentiated one from another. That was why he was important to Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. Since Armin played the part of the foul-mouthed and pustular Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, it is clear enough that he could undertake what at a later date would be called “character parts.” He may have played Casca in Julius Caesar, for example, and Caliban in The Tempest. This also makes a difference to the interpretation of Shakespeare’s drama. It is sometimes supposed that Menenius in Coriolanus is the voice of good sense or worldly wisdom; but if he were played by Armin, as has been suggested, he would have become a grotesque.

So he first appears as Touchstone in As You Like It, proclaimed as “Nature’s naturall.” He does not wear the conventional russet outfit of the clown but instead the fool’s costume of motley that included a long coat woven of green and yellow, an eared hood and a baton. For Armin Shakespeare invented the character of Touchstone, without relying upon his usual multifarious sources. He also gave Armin an extensive part, the third largest in the play, with 320 lines of dialogue. In the third act he sings snatches of a song, “Wind away, Be gone, I say,” before he runs off the stage with Audrey. He probably doubled as Amiens — Armin/Amiens — with more lyrical ballads from the repertoire. There are in fact more songs in As You Like It than in any other Shakespearian play, and they are clearly related to the use of Armin as counter-tenor. When, a year later, Armin played the Clown in Twelfth Night he is given a significant compliment (1244-5):

This fellow is wise enough to play the foole,

And to do that well, craues a kinde of wit.

Given the enclosure riots of the period, and the general fear of those who lived in forests as “outlaws” and “robbers,” it would have been relatively easy to turn As You Like It into a satirical portrait of greed and corruption; but he chose another path. By adopting the plot of Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, he writes charming pastoral satire with the additional figures of Jaques and Touchstone to lend comic depth to the proceedings. He was a literate man who preferred romance to reality. The forest prompts the characters, not into rapine or violence, but into poetry and song. It is a haven for generosity of spirit and for melancholy musing, a place where love is celebrated and confirmed; it is a locale in which the audience witnesses the conversion of evil to good as well as supernatural visitations. The spell of enchantment is upon everything.

CHAPTER 68 Now, One the Better; Then, Another Best

Yet it was in many respects a hard and disenchanted age. Satire was very much in the air. Given the macabre atmosphere ‘ around the declining queen, it could hardly fail to be so. The final stages of an ancien régime always provoke black humour. It was the age of Donne’s satires and of such books as Lodge’s Wits Miserie and the Worlds Madness.

On I June 1599 the Archbishop of Canterbury banned all satire in verse. The Privy Council ordered that the number of plays be restricted. But the new vogue for satire came directly to involve Shakespeare in what is known as the “Poets’ War.” Like all internecine conflicts its origins are uncertain, and have as a result been endlessly debated. We may trace a source or origin, however, in John Marston’s association with the Middle Temple and with the choirboys of St. Paul’s who performed dramas in their singing-school by the cathedral.

John Marston had acquired a reputation as a precocious satirist, especially of those older writers who had attained success or renown. One of his earliest productions, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image, was a burlesque upon Venus and Adonis. His satire at Shakespeare’s expense, however, did not prevent him from borrowing or copying extensively from the work of the older dramatist. Marston is a familiar type. Shakespeare already knew him; as a member of the Middle Temple Marston’s father had stood surety for Shakespeare’s cousin, Thomas Greene, to become a member of that institution. For the members of the Middle Temple, in late 1598 or early 1599, Marston wrote a satirical play, Histriomastix, in which he glances unfavourably at both Shakespeare and Jonson.

Ben Jonson, never one to ignore or forgive an offence, then parodied Marston in Every Man out of his Humour. He had some reason to be sensitive. He had already been touched by Shakespeare. In Henry V the character of Nym continually repeats “That’s the humour of it,” a direct echo of Jonson’s favourite theatrical device. In As You Like It the character of Jaques, melancholy and voluble in his “humorous sadness,” has often been taken as a satirical if good-humoured presentation of Jonson himself.

Jonson was a less endearing humorist. In Cynthia’s Revels, in 1600, he pilloried Marston as well as his play-writing colleague, Thomas Dekker; one was “a light, voluptuous reveller” and the other “a strange arrogating puff.” In his next play, The Poetaster, he ridiculed Marston as a hack poet and plagiarist. Marston eventually counter-attacked with What You Will, in which Jonson was lampooned as an arrogant and insolent failure. In his aggressive manner Jonson then challenged Marston to a duel; since he was already branded on the thumb for murder, this was a foolhardy strategy. He probably guessed, however, that Marston would decline the challenge. Jonson then sought his man in the taverns of London, and found him. Marston pulled a pistol, whereupon Jonson took it from him and thrashed him with it. That is the story that went around London. Jonson repeated it later.

Dekker had already returned to the fray in Satiromastix in which Shakespeare is gently lampooned as the lecherous playwright Sir Adam Prickshaft but in which Jonson is more cruelly ridiculed as a failed court dramatist. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men nevertheless agreed to perform Dekker’s Satiromastix. At this point the literary feud ceased to be the “Poets’ War” and became known as the “War of the Theatres.”

The problem came with the boy-actors. Both Marston and Dekker had written their satirical and cynical plays for the Children of St. Paul’s. The boys’ companies had a long history, and in the early years of the reign of Elizabeth they were the dominant force in the London theatre. The rise of the public playhouses had somewhat dimmed their lustre but, in this era of satire in the late 1590s, they had returned to popularity. They performed a large number of “railing plays,” and one contemporary condemned those “committing their bitternesse, and liberall invectives against all estates, to the mouthes of Children, supposing their juniority to be a priviledge for any rayling, be it never so violent.” ¹ The connection between boys and adult satire was an aspect of a larger tradition. It is in part the legacy of the boys’ dramas written by John Lyly a generation before, which deployed a setting of classical history and legend. Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster, among other plays of the Poets’ War, used similar classical settings. It is also likely that the connection of the boys’ companies with court and Church, as well as their status as private companies, rendered them relatively immune to the usual condemnations of the civic authorities and the Privy Council. The experience of watching children playing adult parts was in any case quite a different thing. They could, as it were, mock adults in a different key. To be a boy, and to play an adult passion, is to throw that passion in sharper perspective. The emotion, or obsession, is more purely defined. In a theatrical culture which encouraged unreality and artifice, the mimicry of the boy-players was thus doubly attractive.

But why did the Lord Chamberlain’s Men agree to perform Dekker’s Satiromastix in which Ben Jonson is caricatured? The immediate cause is not hard to discern. Jonson had begun writing for the Children of the Chapel Royal at Blackfriars. He and the adult players may have been involved in some kind of quarrel or conflict in connection with their productions of Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour. It is perhaps more likely that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had rejected a new play offered to them by Jonson. Had he expected Cynthia’s Revels to be performed at the Globe? There was another irritant, however. The boys’ companies readily asserted their “gentle” associations and the exclusiveness of the private theatres. The playwrights who wrote for them took some delight in mocking the “common players” of the public playhouses. And this is what Jonson did. In the plays he wrote for performance at Blackfriars he ridiculed the “common actors,” “the decayed dead arras in a public theatre” and those who “will press forth on common stages.” He also accused the actors of being “licentious, rogues, libertines, flat libertines.” ² The players of the Globe took their revenge.

It is even possible that Shakespeare wrote a scene for Satiromastix in which Horace, aka Jonson, comically labours over the composition of an ode. The author of the Parnassus trilogy refers to that “pestilent fellow,” Ben Jonson, and to the fact that “our fellow Shakespeare hath giuen him a purge that made him beray his credit.” ³ In a prologue later written for Poetaster, Jonson ruefully berated “some better natures” who had been persuaded to “run in that vile line.” At the time, however, Jonson was not so sanguine. In Poetaster itself he had attacked the Globe for ribaldry and its actors for hypocrisy and stupidity. But one of them in particular is addressed as “proud”: “You grow rich, do you, and purchase?” ⁴ The same actor is also mocked for his coat of arms, when it is made clear that his real pedigree is listed in the Statute of Rogues and Vagabonds that controlled the activities of players. It was in the autumn of 1599 that the Shakespeares had sought to impale their arms with those of the noble family of the Ardens.

Shakespeare did not reply directly. That was not his way. Instead he refers to the whole controversy in Hamlet, the play most notably established upon the devices of the theatre. Rosencrantz remarks to Hamlet that “there is Sir an ayrie of Children, little Yases [an eyas was a young hawk], that crye out on the top of question; and are most tyrannically clap’t for’t; these are now the fashion, and so be-ratle the common Stages (so they call them)” that as a consequence there was “for a while no mony bid for argument, vnlesse the Poet and the Player went to Cuffes in the Question” (1269-85). Hamlet’s uncharacteristically reasonable response is that the boys should not disparage the “common players” when, at a later stage, they were likely to become them.

The whole controversy faded away, and soon enough the major antagonists were working together once more. It had elements of “ado” about “nothing,” too, in the sense that Richard Burbage himself had leased the Blackfriars Playhouse to the Children of the Chapel Royal; the owner of the Globe was making money from his apparent rivals, and it is possible that the “war” was in part an advertising opportunity for the sake of attracting more custom. The nature of Elizabethan society in any case encouraged sudden “flares” followed by equally sudden reconciliations. The rumblings of the controversy, however, can still faintly be heard in Twelfth Night and Troilus and Cressida.

At the end of the century there was a positive rush of Shakespeare’s plays to the printers, which is some indication of his prevailing popularity. In the autumn of 1599 there were new editions of Romeo and Juliet and of the first part of Henry IV; there was also another edition of Venus and Adonis, suggesting that his standing as a poet was still as high as that of playwright. At the beginning of 1600, in fact, a “staying entry” was placed in the Stationers’ Register for “A booke called Amours by J.D. with certain other sonnetes by W.S.” In the previous year, as we have seen, some of Shakespeare’s sonnets had been pirated for a volume entitled The Passionate Pilgrim. It may have been that Shakespeare wanted his real work to be duly registered and noted.

The new edition of Romeo and Juliet was described as “Newly corrected, augmented and amended,” while the new edition of Henry IV was described as being “Newly corrected by William Shake-speare.” It may have simply been an advertising device, to persuade readers of the “newness” of the edition. In the same period the Admiral’s Men, about to move into the recently built Fortune, were also advertising their wares by publishing the works they owned. The two companies, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Admiral’s Men, had a virtual monopoly on play texts as well as on plays. But in the phrase “newly corrected” there is at least a suggestion that Shakespeare was actually revising and rewriting his plays ahead of publication. His name was in any case at a premium, and had gone beyond the usual bounds of the universities and the legal Inns. In the summer of 1600 The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It were placed in the Stationers’ Register “to be stayed,” so that the very latest plays would at least in theory soon become available. It certainly meant that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, no doubt including Shakespeare himself, were eager to safeguard what was becoming more valuable literary property. These entries were followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the second part of Henry IV, credited as being “written by master Shakspere.” Curiously enough Julius Caesar was not registered at all. This might suggest that the play was less than successful on the public stage, but there is a more pertinent explanation. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign it was not considered prudent or appropriate to publish a play in which a ruler is assassinated by his courtiers.

The number of Shakespeare’s plays published through 1599 and 1600 also suggests that the printed versions were becoming a staple part of the city’s literary currency, akin to pamphlets and to sermons. For a previous generation they had been catchpenny curiosities. Now they were regularly to be found on the bookstalls. Shakespeare was in the air. The Countess of Southampton was making playful allusions to Falstaff in the same year as verses were being written by admirers “Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare” in which he is praised as “honie-tongued.” ⁵

It was not an easy time, however, for the companies. In June 1600, the Privy Council limited playing time to two performances a week. The order did not preclude royal performances, of course, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played twice before the queen during the Christmas season. They were, however, about to encounter royal disapproval.

CHAPTER 69 I Must Become a Borrower of the Night

The official documents of the case tell their own story. “The Erle of Essex is charged with high Treason, namely, That he plotted and practised with the Pope and king of Spaine for the disposing and settling to himself Aswell the Crowne of England, as of the kingdome of Ireland.” In one count of the indictment he was charged with “permitting of that most treasonous booke of Henry the fourth to be printed and published … also the Erle himself being so often present at the playing thereof, and with great applause giving countenance and lyking to the same.” ¹ The treasonous book was John Hayward’s account of the abdication and murder of Richard II. The drama that the Earl of Essex greeted with great applause was Shakespeare’s play of the same name. It would seem, therefore, that Shakespeare was somehow implicated in treason and conspiracy. Essex had planned an uprising on the streets of London that would be a prelude to the invasion of the court, ostensibly to protect the monarch from her advisers. Yet the main purpose of the rebellion was to protect Essex himself who, after his failure in Ireland, had been placed under house arrest and was fearful of even more serious consequences.

It is well enough known that Shakespeare was connected with the Essex “circle.” His past and present associations with Southampton, with Lord Strange, with the Countess of Pembroke, with Samuel Daniel, with Sir John Harington, and with others, make this clear. But the events of early 1601 might have placed him in real jeopardy. The Earl of Essex believed himself to be the victim of manifold court plots organised by Sir Robert Cecil, and decided to strike first lest he be struck. So, together with such followers and supporters as the Earl of Southampton, he determined to seize the court itself. He would then free the queen of her advisers, and eventually secure the succession of James I. He had ill-advisedly believed that the populace of London would rise up and take sides with him when he declared his intentions. One way of alerting the populace was to stage a play at the Globe on the day before the insurrection.

On that day, Saturday 7 February 1601, some of Essex’s supporters — among them Lord Monteagle, Sir Christopher Blount and Sir Charles Percy-dined at Gunter’s eating house by the Temple. Lord Monteagle was a staunch Roman Catholic, but he was a loyalist who would later be instrumental in uncovering the “gunpowder plot”; Sir Christopher Blount had formerly been the Earl of Leicester’s Master of Horse and was Essex’s stepfather; Sir Charles Percy was the scion of a famous Catholic family from the North of England. After dinner they took a wherry across the Thames and walked into the Globe Theatre before the start of that afternoon’s play. It was an especially commissioned performance. On the day before some of their number had visited the same theatre, “tellyng them [the players] that the play wold be of Harry the Fourth,”² the monarch who had deposed Richard II. In a later account of Essex’s treason, written by Francis Bacon, the play is described as “the play of deposing King Richard the second”;³ in other words it contained the scenes of Richard’s forced abdication that had not appeared in the printed version of the drama. The intention of Essex’s supporters was clear enough. The power of the theatre could be used to justify their removal of Elizabeth. It could be used, too, to strengthen their resolve. Whatever the excuses and tergiversations of the Earl of Essex later, it was a clear case of “imagining” the sovereign’s death.

One of the players, Augustine Phillips, later deposed that he “and hys fellows were determyned to have played some other play, holdyng that play of Kyng Richard to be so old & so long out of vse as that they shold have small or no Company at yt.” ⁴ This was simply an excuse, born out of fear. Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Comedy of Errors, plays written before Richard II, were both performed at much later dates. At which point it seems that one of Essex’s allies, Sir Gilly Meyrick, offered to pay 40 shillings for this uniquely commissioned production. The players acquiesced, and accepted the offer. In hindsight this was not a wise decision, since they could have been implicated in the charge of treason. They may have had no advance notice of Essex’s plans and could have claimed that they innocently took part in the production; yet in the highly charged atmosphere of the time, when rumour and counter-rumour were flying about the city, this was highly unlikely. They were afraid. They could hardly have done it simply for the additional payment of 40 shillings. It is much more likely that they were bullied and cajoled, perhaps even threatened, by these grandees. Note that the lords were reported “telling,” not asking, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to perform that play. It is an indication of the ready professionalism of the players, however, that they were able to reproduce the play from memory after a long period in abeyance. Richard II had been written and played six years before and, although it had no doubt been revived in the interim, its reconstruction at such short notice is still a very remarkable achievement.

In the event Essex’s uprising failed disastrously. The people did not rise to his banner, as he had hoped, and the earl (together with Southampton and other followers) was besieged in his house along the Strand. He surrendered, was tried and eventually executed. Southampton would have followed him to the block, but for the pleas of his mother to the queen. Instead the young nobleman was indefinitely incarcerated in the Tower. Such was the fate of Elizabeth’s enemies and false friends.

Of course the production of the play had not gone unnoticed by the authorities. Augustine Phillips, who seems to have been equivalent to the business manager of the company, was ordered to appear before an examining committee of three chief justices. There he explained the circumstances, and the payment of 40 shillings. It should be remembered that, four years before, the actors and writers of The Isle of Dogs had been summarily imprisoned and perhaps even tortured for performing a “seditious” play. On this hypothetically more dangerous occasion, however, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were relieved of any fine or penalty. They were effectively “let off” with perhaps a reprimand.

Many theatrical historians have puzzled over this lenity. But if the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had indeed been threatened and cajoled by the plotters, the members of the committee may well have decided to exercise clemency. Tudor law is often regarded as inconsistent and draconian, but there was still a measure of fair play and common sense in its decisions. The players also had a reliable patron in the Lord Chamberlain, a loyal and trusted servant of the queen to whom he was also closely related. If they had been charged with treachery would not the shadow of suspicion, however unjustified, have fallen upon him also? That was unthinkable. Others have suggested that the good report of Francis Bacon, a friend of the players, saved the company. It is also evident that Elizabeth herself regarded the Lord Chamberlain’s Men with particular favour — especially, perhaps primarily, because of their Shakespearian repertoire. So, by the grace of God and Her Majesty, Shakespeare and his fellows avoided the prison or even the gallows. In fact, a week after Phillips’s interrogation, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were once more playing before the queen. On the day after that performance, Essex was beheaded.

CHAPTER 70 Cut I Am in Their Bosomes

The affairs of Stratford also claimed Shakespeare’s attention. For a moment his wife, Anne, re-enters the historical record in a minor role. The will of a neighbouring husbandman, Thomas Whittington of Shottery, left 40 shillings to the poor of Stratford “that is in the hand of Anne Shaxspere, wyf unto Mr. Wyllyam Shaxpere, and is due debt unto me.” ¹ It has been suggested that Anne Shakespeare had been forced to borrow money from Whittington, whom she had known since childhood, because her husband was not maintaining her in proper fashion. This is most unlikely. She was ensconced in New Place, one of the most valuable properties in the town, and it would have been a disgrace to the name and reputation of the whole Shakespeare family if she had not been given the means both for its upkeep and for her standing in the town. All the evidence suggests that Shakespeare, far from being a negligent or parsimonious husband, regularly sent relatively large sums of money to his family. What other way would there have been of maintaining appearances, one of the essential characteristics of a sixteenth-century gentleman? The will in fact means only that Anne Shakespeare owed Whittington 40 shillings in a technical sense; it is likely that he gave the sum to her for safe-keeping, confirming the impression of her as a reliable and trustworthy housekeeper.

There is one small episode of the period that also merits attention. At a slightly later date William Shakespeare sued a Stratford apothecary, Philip Rogers, for non-payment upon a consignment of malt. He had sold 20 bushels, at a price of 38 shillings, and then lent Rogers a further 2 shillings. Rogers himself had repaid only 6 shillings of the total amount, and so Shakespeare went to court for the remainder with a further demand for 10 shillings in damages. Nothing more is known of the case, and so it is likely that Rogers made reparations. It testifies, if nothing else, to Shakespeare’s strong sense of financial justice. It also suggests that Anne Shakespeare, in charge of domestic arrangements, ran something of a small household business in Stratford itself.

There were in fact alarms and excursions in the town which find a strange reflection in the drama that Shakespeare was about to compose. At the beginning of 1601 the lord of the manor of Stratford, Sir Edward Greville, had challenged the rights of the borough by enclosing some common land. Six of the town’s aldermen, among them Shakespeare’s acquaintance Richard Quiney, then levelled the hedges that marked the enclosures; whereupon Greville accused them of riot. Quiney and Shakespeare’s cousin, Thomas Greene, travelled to London to enlist the advice and assistance of the Attorney General; among those who had signed a statement concerning the town’s rights was John Shakespeare. But no immediate aid was forthcoming. Quiney was elected bailiff that autumn, against the wishes of Greville, and the whole affair turned into an aggressive confrontation between the two parties. There are reports of “minaces” and of “braweling,”² and in the spring of 1602 Quiney was attacked in an affray and wounded. He died soon after. It is a nasty story of rivalries between the local people and the avaricious lord. It has its counterparts in other country towns where the problem of enclosures had arisen, but in this case it implicated people well known to Shakespeare. It is not stretching credulity too far to see something of this local drama in the plot of Coriolanus, whereby the tribunes of the people are matched against a haughty and domineering patrician.³ Yet, even here, it is impossible to say that Shakespeare takes “sides.” He needed this detachment from the events around him in order to invest so much energy in his imagined drama.

CHAPTER 71 And So in Spite of Death Thou Doest Suruiue

On 8 September 1601, John Shakespeare was buried in the old church at Stratford. His son was undoubtedly present, and walked in procession with the new bailiff Richard Quiney. John Shakespeare was in his seventies but seems to have left no will. By natural right, therefore, Shakespeare inherited the double-house in Henley Street as well as agricultural land belonging to his father. John Shakespeare was in fact more prosperous than is generally assumed. He may have characterised himself as a man of small wealth in the Westminster courts, but the reality was very different. In the following year, Shakespeare began to invest a great deal of money amounting to approximately £500.

He kept the house, where his widowed mother continued to live in the company of her daughter, Joan Hart, and her daughter’s family. Joan Hart had married a local hatter, William Hart, but remained in the family dwelling to look after her mother. Shakespeare seems to have left his mother’s affairs in her hands, since the Harts looked after Mary Shakespeare’s estate upon her death seven years later.

The death of John Shakespeare himself has been considered a defining event in his son’s progress. It has been characteristically associated with the writing of Hamlet, for example, a play that was composed during the obligatory period of mourning. In the first scene the ghost of Hamlet’s father comes back from the flames of purgatory, a wholly Catholic territory, in order to haunt the earth. The available evidence supports the belief that Shakespeare himself played the part of the dead father. It is a suggestive impersonation, adding to the fact that the title of the play invokes the name of his own dead son. In this period fathers and sons are deeply implicated in the workings of his imagination. In this play, too, the inheritance from father to son is riven and brutally distracted. It is also Shakespeare’s longest play, and it has been calculated to require a playing time of four and a half hours — far too long to be performed entire in the sixteenth century, even if the playing time were stretched to the maximum. It suggests that he wished, or was determined, to include all its connections and associations. We must not use the anachronistic vocabulary of obsession or compulsion in this matter. We can only say, with certainty, that there was much for Shakespeare to dramatise.

Richard Burbage played the titular hero. It was a part in which he could excel, and proves to an almost excessive degree that the art of Elizabethan drama was the art of character. There is an allusion to Burbage’s acting of Hamlet in a poem of 1604, which describes how the apparent madness of the prince was signified by Burbage sucking on a pen as if it were a tobacco pipe and drinking from an inkpot as if it were a bottle of ale. It seems to have been a memorable piece of stage “business.” If we were to provide a Jinglelike anatomy of Hamlet’s changing passions, however, it would read something like this. In turn Hamlet displays himself as ironic, sincere, obedient, despairing, disgusted, welcoming, questioning, disgusted, speculative, impetuous, angry, scholarly, antic, jocular, actorish, despairing, of mimic disposition, sarcastic, welcoming, speculative, despairing, exuberant, self-punishing, changeable (very), confused, contemptuous, actorish, courteous, playful, threatening, hesitant, fierce, scornful, rhetorical, bewildered, soul-searching, macabre, furious, mocking, stoical, parodic, and resigned. It has become well known as a part to challenge actors; to play it competently, by general consent, they have to drag into the light parts of their personality they thought they had lost.

Shakespeare was known to be the master of soliloquy long before Hamlet — it was one of his “strengths” that could be called upon in patching up a play such as Sir Thomas More— but in this play he refines his art to the extent that the soliloquy seems to become the index of evolving consciousness. It is no longer a summary of “this is what I am” but, rather, of “this is what I am becoming.” It has been remarked that, in the same period, the growth of literacy was leading to a great extension of letters and private diaries; writing itself encouraged “introspection and reflection.” ¹ This throws new light on the often noticed allusions to books in Hamlet.

But can we speak of interiority on the Elizabethan stage, where a whole set of theatrical conventions determined staging and acting? It is perhaps with Hamlet that it first becomes possible to do so. For the first time it is not anachronistic to discuss the “character” of Hamlet even if it remains utterly mysterious, not least to Hamlet himself. Julius Caesar and Henry V live in a world of circumstance and event; they are lodged, as it were, in a real world. Hamlet’s reality, in contrast, is almost entirely self-created. His soliloquies often have a dubious relation to the action of the plot, which is why they can be added or removed in the various versions of the play without any noticeable interruption to the story. Nevertheless Hamlet remains the very pivot of the narrative. Like his creator, his centre is nowhere and his circumference is everywhere.

Hamlet has no reason to exist except as a projection from Shakespeare. He is a master of every mood and subject to none. He is possessed by an extraordinary mental agility and energy. He has many voices, but it is hard to locate any central or defining voice. No one is so free with words and yet so secretive about himself. He is addicted to puns and to word-play, but his obscenities are matched by what Sigmund Freud called his “sexual coldness.” ² The play is invaded by the theme of duality and doubleness, of appearing to be what you are not. That is why it is also suffused with the spirit of playing. It is not too much to say that Hamlet could only have been written by a consummate actor.

It soon became one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated dramas. It seems to have the singular distinction of being the only play performed, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, at both the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This was a sea-change in the academic response to contemporary vernacular drama. Before this period plays in English were considered to be below serious consideration. Sir Thomas Bodley banned plays from his new library at Oxford, stating that they were “of very unworthy matters” and that the keeper and underkeepers of the library “should Disdain to seek out … Haply some Plays may be worthy the Keeping: But hardly one in Forty.” ³ He was probably correct about the proportion, but Hamlet itself was certainly considered to be “worthy.” There is a reference in 1604, stating that “faith, it should please all, like Prince Hamlet.” ⁴ Three years later, it was performed off the coast of Sierra Leone by a group of seamen. Hamlet was referred to in private, and diplomatic, correspondence. The young John Marston paid the ultimate compliment of copying from it with a remarkably similar revenge tragedy entitled Antonio’s Revenge. It has in fact been suggested that the order of composition should be reversed, and that Shakespeare copied Marston’s play. There is no reason why he should not have been inspired by an ingenious original to produce a compelling masterpiece of his own. He had been doing it all his life.

Yet the origins of Hamlet are much more complicated than that. There was a true and “original” Hamlet on the public stage by 1589, since it is mentioned by Nashe in that year. There was also a version of Hamlet being performed by the combined forces of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Admiral’s Men in the summer of 1594 at Newington Butts; this production is confirmed by the notes of Philip Henslowe. At some point between 1598 and 1601, the remark being privately transcribed in a book, Gabriel Harvey referred to Shakespeare and “his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke.”⁵

The complex matter is further complicated by the presence of a printed version of the play, issued in quarto form in 1603. It has generally been described as a “bad” quarto, but at a length of 2,500 lines it is in fact a perfectly good acting version of the long drama marred by stylistic infelicities. The publishers, Nicholas Ling and John Trundell, had known associations with Shakespeare’s plays and with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, so there is no question of its being a “pirated” edition. On the title page it is described as “By William Shake-speare.”

A second edition was published in the following year and, with twelve hundred extra lines, was advertised as “newly imprinted and enlarged” according to “the true and perfect copy.” In the first version Hamlet is younger, and some of the names are different; Polonius, for example, is called Coram-bis. More importantly, perhaps, in the first version Gertrude becomes convinced of her second husband’s guilt and colludes with her son. The first and shorter drama is an exhilarating and exciting piece of work, in no way inferior as a stage production to the second version. The second version is more rhetorical and deliberate, with much greater attention paid to the text itself.

The most likely explanation for these different versions seems to be that Shakespeare took an old play of Hamlet and fashioned it into new and surprising shape for the performance at Newington Butts in 1594. This is the version printed as the first quarto. Then, at a later stage, he revised it for a new production at the Globe in 1601. This is the second quarto. It should be noted that Shakespeare then seems to have revised Hamlet for a third time, adding and subtracting material for a version that became the Folio edition of the play published in 1623.

The purists insist that the less than perfect text of Hamlet is “corrupted” by actors’ reports or faulty shorthand reporting; and that the second edition was Shakespeare’s attempt to supplant a botched job. Other scholars believe that the first text was a version of Shakespeare’s early work, hasty and jejune as it may sometimes be, and that the second version is evidence of Shakespeare’s habit of revision. One image is of Shakespeare as perfectionist, producing more or less the orthodox canon of the plays as printed in “good” quartos. The other image is of Shakespeare in a continuous state of evolution, moving between early versions and revised versions, short versions and long versions. The latter alternative seems more plausible.

There is one other piece of literature that emerged in 1601. Attached to a volume celebrating “the love and merit of the true-noble knight, Sir John Salisburie” were sets of verses written by “the beste and chiefest of our moderne writers.” Sir John Salisbury had been knighted in the summer of 1601 for his services in helping to suppress the Essex rebellion. Among these verses was Shakespeare’s poem now known as “The Phoenix and Turtle,” as complex and as riddling a piece of work as anything to be found in Hamlet. On a mundane level Shakespeare may have been happy to disassociate himself from the Essex episode, in which Richard II had been so unfortunately imbroiled. But it is also possible that the poem had originally been written in 1586 when Salisbury had married Ursula Stanley, half-sister to Lord Strange.

But the poem itself rises above its immediate circumstances. It is a threnody upon the indivisibility of lovers and the divine union of love:

Beautie, Truth, and Raritie,

Grace in all simplicitie,

Here enclosde, in cinders lie.

It has been treated as an allegorical work or, in more modern terms, as an exercise in “pure” poetry rising unbidden and entire from the depths of Shakespeare’s being, a pearl of great price fashioned instinctively by experience and suffering. In its riddling complexity it bears more than a passing resemblance to the contemporaneous poetry of John Donne. Although Shakespeare sometimes seems more inclined to poetical miscellanies and ancient English ballads, there is no reason why he should not have heard or read Donne’s poetry in manuscript. Donne was known to the Countess of Pembroke. He had been a member of Lincoln’s Inn and had also served with the Earl of Essex; he can be said to have moved in the same London circles as Shakespeare himself. This was also the milieu in which Donne’s poems were circulating in manuscript, and there seem to be echoes of his work both in King Lear and in Two Noble Kinsmen. There are connections between the personages of Shakespeare’s world that are now lost to view.

CHAPTER 72. I Am (Quoth He) Expected of My friends

After the death of his father Shakespeare’s visits to Stratford, in order to see his widowed mother as well as his wife and family, are likely to have become more frequent. It was a slow process of readjustment, or reorientation, that would finally result in his living for long periods of time in his home town. It represents the return of the native, one of the most characteristic passages of human experience. In his later plays, too, Shakespeare celebrates the reunification of families and the reconciliation of old differences. There is one other additional fact to add to this homecoming, which is to be found in Oxford.

The association with Shakespeare and Oxford is not well understood— there are somewhat implausible suggestions that he used the Bodleian Library that was established in 1602—but it is clear enough that he habitually stopped at Oxford on his journeys between London and Stratford. We know this from three separate sources. One was a diary kept by an Oxford antiquary, Thomas Hearne, in which he states that Shakespeare “always spent some time at the Crown tavern in Oxford kept by one Davenant.” Thirty years later Alexander Pope, who could not have known of Hearne’s diary, has the same story to the effect that

Shakespeare often baited at the Crown Inn or Tavern in Oxford, in his journey to and from London. The landlady was a woman of great beauty and sprightly wit; and her husband, Mr. John Davenant, (afterwards mayor of that city) a grave melancholy man, who as well as his wife used much to delight in Shakespeare’s pleasant company.¹

Aubrey completes the story with the note that “Shakespeare did comonly in his journey lye at this house in Oxon: where he was exceedingly respected.”²

John and Jennet Davenant were a London couple — Davenant was a wine-importer living in Maiden Lane — who had somehow become acquainted with Shakespeare. One contemporary stated that Davenant was “an admirer and lover of plays and play-makers, especially Shakespeare.” ³ In 1601, after six of their children had died at birth or in early infancy, they decided to move to the healthier atmosphere of Oxford. Here they managed a tavern, then known simply as the Tavern, a four-storeyed building on the east side of Cornmarket. It was not an inn, which could take in travellers, but a place for convivial drinking. If Shakespeare did indeed stay with the Davenants, as seems very likely, he would have done so as a guest rather than a customer. The air seems to have been beneficial, and the Davenants acquired a family of seven healthy children. Their first-born son, Robert, recalls Shakespeare covering him with “a hundred kisses.” ⁴ Their second son William, apparently named after Shakespeare and the dramatist’s godson, has left a more equivocal story.

Hearne and Pope both confirm that William Davenant claimed to be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son as well as his godson. As Hearne notes in a bracket, “In all probability he [Shakespeare] got him.” They both retold the story of how the boy was once asked by an elderly townsman why he was running home; he replied “to see my godfather Shakespeare.” To which the old gentleman replied, “That’s a good boy, but have a care that you don’t take God’s name in vain.”⁵

The story was no doubt apocryphal, and had in fact been applied to others beside Shakespeare, but at the time it reinforced the general belief that the dramatist was something of a philanderer. William Davenant, in later life, did nothing to dispel the rumour that he was Shakespeare’s illegitimate son: he continued to advertise the fact with pride. As Aubrey noted, “that notion of Sir William’s being more than a poetical child only of Shakespeare was common in town.” ⁶ Since William Davenant was himself a poet and playwright, he may have had some slight excuse for defaming his mother and claiming such distinguished parentage. He did indeed serve Shakespeare well. He himself revised Macbeth and The Tempest, with the assistance of John Dryden, and helped to maintain the continuity of Shakespearian drama; he was also instrumental in the revival of nine plays after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

Murals from the sixteenth century have been uncovered at the Crown, one of them with the monogram of “IHS” which is the characteristic Catholic sign of Christ. William Davenant himself was in later life a Catholic and a Royalist. So Shakespeare stayed in congenial company. Davenant was also said to have a semblance of Shakespeare’s “open Countenance” but the resemblance could not have been exact; he had lost his nose as a result of mercury treatment for syphilis. As a contemporary noted, “the want of a Nose gives an odd Cast to the Face.”⁷ Certainly he inherited nothing of Shakespeare’s genius.

It is interesting to speculate, however, about the physical appearance of Shakespeare then in his mid-forties. The slimness, if not the sprightliness, of youth had long gone. He had been a handsome and well-shaped man, according to Aubrey’s report, but by now he must have become a little portly. It is not inconceivable that he actually became rather fat. His auburn or chestnut hair had withered on the vine, and it is likely that his cranium was already as bare as it appears in the Droeshout engraving which decorates the frontispiece of the Folio. From that engraving, too, we gain some acquaintance with his full lips, his straight and sensitive nose, his watchful eyes. The beard he sported in his earlier life has gone, leaving behind a small moustache. A professional phrenologist has concluded, from the shape of the head, that the dramatist was possessed of “ideality, wonder, wit, imitation, benevolence, and veneration” with “small destructiveness and acquisitiveness.” His cranium also evinces “great susceptibility, activity, quickness and love of action.”⁸

There is no doubt that he would have dressed well; his neatness and general cleanliness are well attested from his work. The standard dress of an Elizabethan gentleman included a bejewelled and quilted silk doublet, with a ruff for formal occasions; the doublet was covered with a jerkin, manufactured perhaps of fine leather or costly cloth. He wore breeches, an Elizabethan form of short trousers, that were fastened at the doublet and tied at the knees. The codpiece, plumped up by stiff packing, was out of favour by the end of the century. The shirt beneath his doublet was of cambric or of lawn. It could be tied or worn open at the front; in some apocryphal portraits of Shakespeare the wide collars of the shirt are draped over the doublet. The tail of the shirt was used as a form of underwear. He sported silk stockings and variously coloured leather “pumps” or shoes, with heels and soles of cork. He owned a cloak, reaching anywhere from the waist to the ankles and characteristically worn over one shoulder. And he carried a sword, as the mark of a gentleman. He had a tall hat; the higher the hat, the higher the social status. Dress was an essential aspect of late Tudor society. As one instructor on the art of being a gentleman put it, “The sum of a hundred pounde is not to be accompted much in these dayes to be bestowed of apparell for one gentleman.”⁹ There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare was strident or ostentatious in his dress — far from it — but he would have been as elegant as the best of his contemporaries.

The Droeshout image, approved by Shakespeare’s colleagues after the playwright’s death as a fitting accompaniment to the collected edition of the plays, is perhaps the closest to a true resemblance. Martin Droeshout could not have been working from life, since he was only fifteen at the time of Shakespeare’s death. But he was part of a dynasty of Flemish artists living in London. His father, Michael Droeshout, had been an engraver and his uncle, Martin Droeshout, was a painter. It is possible, then, that the younger Martin Droeshout based his engraving upon an earlier likeness now lost. It is also relatively close to the image adorning the monument above Shakespeare’s tomb in the church at Stratford. That bust shows Shakespeare with a beard, which suggests that he grew it or shaved it according to mood.

The sculpture has been described by one Shakespearian as resembling that of “a self-satisfied pork butcher.”¹⁰ That it is a good likeness is not in doubt, however, because an early chronicler of Shakespeare’s Stratford believed that “the head was evidently taken from a death-mask.”¹¹ It must have been acceptable to Shakespeare’s immediate family, who commissioned it. It was executed by Gerard Johnson, a Dutch artist who lived near the Globe in Southwark. He had ample opportunity, therefore, to study his subject. There is no reason why a great writer should not resemble a pork butcher, satisfied or otherwise, and it is at least ironic that later accounts did make him a butcher’s apprentice. He may have possessed that corpulent and ruddy glow that seems to be peculiar to English butchers. And why should he not look satisfied?

There are other portraits which claim some attention from posterity, if only because the quest for Shakespeare’s face is an unending one. They all provide varying degrees of resemblance. One painting, now known as the “Chandos portrait” (c. 1610), depicts a man in his early forties wearing a black silk doublet; he is of muddy or swarthy complexion, and his black curls lend him a gypsy or continental appearance. He is also wearing a gold earring. It was once suggested, half in earnest, that it was a portrait of Shakespeare dressed to play Shylock. The painting itself has a long and complicated history, which is as much as to say that its provenance is uncertain.

A more refined and noble image presents itself in the painting known as the “Janssen portrait” (c.1620), in which a sensitive face surmounts an exquisite doublet. The “Felton portrait” (c. eighteenth century) is executed on a small wood panel, and displays a man in his thirties with an enormous forehead but no other distinguished or distinguishing characteristics. The “Flower portrait” is close to the Droeshout engraving, and has led some scholars to believe that it is in fact the lost original for the Folio engraving; it is dated 1609, and has been painted on top of a Madonna of the fifteenth century. But there have been arguments over the authenticity of the dating. And so the matter rests. All of these paintings have a family resemblance, but all of them may be derived from Droeshout.

The one notable exception would seem to be the Grafton portrait (c. 1588), which has already been described in the context of Shakespeare’s own life. It shows a young and fashionably dressed man in his early twenties, and was previously dismissed on the grounds that the young Shakespeare could not have been so affluent at such an early stage of his career. That is no longer a reasonable supposition, as we have seen, and so the merits of the painting can be taken on their own. If it is placed next to the Droeshout engraving, a consonance of youth and middle age begins to emerge. All of these representations, hovering in the realm of uncertainty and conjecture, resemble Shakespeare in more than a pictographic sense; they are a token of his elusiveness in the world. They also suggest that the appearance of the man may have been quite different from any mental or cultural image of Shakespeare that currently exists. He may have been swarthy. He may have worn an earring. He may in later life even have been fat.

CHAPTER 73. My Lord This Is But the Play,Theyre But in Jest

We can see him in another sense. On 2 February 1602, he walked from the landing-stage by the Thames a few yards northwards to the hall of the Middle Temple. It was here that a new play, Twelfth Night, was to be performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in front of the members of that Inn. There is an account of it by one of them, John Manningham, in his diary. “At our feast wee had a play called ‘Twelue Night, or what you will’ much like the commedy of errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni.” ¹ He then goes on to describe the gulling of Malvolio. It is a brief but interesting entry, revealing the game of source-hunting to be an old one. It might even lead to the speculation that Shakespeare expected the sources of his plays to be known to the more knowledgeable among the audience, and that his departure from such sources was part of the drama’s effect.

The work to which Manningham refers is Gl’Inganni by Curzio Gonzaga, an Italian play that had not been translated into English. It is likely, then, that Shakespeare had some knowledge of Italian. He had a professional attitude towards reading, and probably never opened a book without hoping to extract something from it. In any case Shakespeare always departed from his sources when he deemed it necessary to do so, elaborating them and pushing them further into romance and fantastic improbability.

The fact that Manningham compared Twelfth Night to The Comedy of Errors suggests that there were playgoers who were familiar with a number of Shakespeare’s plays; this, in itself, is a serious measure of his reputation. But they may not have been in the majority. The audience in the hall of the Middle Temple was presumably rowdy and quite possibly drunken. If they wished for bawdy humour and broad farce, then Twelfth Night would have satisfied them. It took its name from the “Twelfth Day” festivals that were well known for their riotousness, and it had an effervescent mood of continual gaiety that did not dip once. The story of Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, of Malvolio and Feste, was awash with innuendo and suggestion. The fact that Viola dressed as a boy, while being acted by a boy, added an element of sexual frisson that would not have been lost upon the members of the Inn. It may be that the convention of boys playing female roles was in fact the context for obscenity and suggestion that do not appear in the written texts. The language of the wooing scenes was in any case erotically charged, and might well have been complemented by “wanton” gestures. The layers of strange multisexual loving delighted Shakespeare.

There are also numerous legal puns and quibbles in Twelfth Night that would have found responsive hearers. A literal interpretation of the title, of course, would imply that it had first been performed on the afternoon of 6 January 1602. So it is unlikely that the performance in the Middle Temple was the first. It would have suited the Globe, and there are remarkably few stage-properties to be accommodated.

It can be assumed that Armin played Feste, and as a result Feste is given four songs, three of which have entered the national repertoire—“O Mistris mine where are you roming?” “Come away, come away death,” and “When that I was and a little tine boy.” Twelfth Night is suffused with music. It begins and ends in music. Shakespeare has used the advent of Armin, and perhaps the acoustic resources of the Globe, to explore a new range of theatrical effect. It is more than possible that the dramatist himself played Malvolio; as has already been suggested, Malvolio’s crossed yellow garters may have been a farcical version of Shakespeare’s own coat of arms.² There are many topical allusions in Twelfth Night, but one of the most prominent must surely concern the scenes between Feste and Malvolio. Feste represents the spirit of festival and entertainment, for example, whereas the rancorous Malvolio is described as a Puritan. Their conflict represents one of the oldest and most divisive controversies of the period, with the Puritan faction ranged against plays and playhouses as agents of the devil.

The Puritans opposed the playhouses on a number of levels. Playhouses competed with the pulpits in the matter of public instruction or, as one moralist put it, “the Playe houses are pestered when the churches are naked.” ³ The dramas were considered to be the entertainment of idle people, gapers and lookers-on who ought to be more profitably employed in the afternoons. The actors were deemed to encourage ready emotionalism; they relied upon sexuality and sexual innuendo, especially with the pretty boys dressed as girls who excited lascivious passions; they were subversive of hierarchies, dressed as princes in one scene and as commoners in the next. They were in any case acting, counterfeiting God’s image; it was a form of primitive idolatry, that only papists could enjoy.

It is also possible to go from the general to the particular. It has been suggested that Malvolio was based upon a “real” original, one Sir William Knollys, the Comptroller of the Royal Household, but all such allusions have long since been lost. Yet there can be no doubt that Shakespeare often had certain contemporaries in mind, when inventing characters, and that the actors deliberately impersonated them in their parts. He never knowingly neglected a source of amusement for the London crowd.

That popular success meant that he had become a relatively affluent man. It may be that his purse had been enlarged by his father’s recent death but, whatever the source of his funds, he paid the large amount of £320 for more Stratford land. On 1 May 1602, he purchased from John and William Combe 107 acres of arable land and 20 acres of pasture in the hamlets of Bishopstone and Welcombe. He knew the Combes very well, and he knew the land in question very well. He was now, in the words of his Hamlet, “spacious in the possession of durt” (3356-7). It is doubtful whether he took so ironical an attitude towards his own property. Three years later he purchased even more land. Earlier in Hamlet he betrays his interest in the subject, when the prince of Denmark holds up a skull, and remarks that “this fellowe might be in’s time a great buyer of Land, with his Statuts, his recognisances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoucers” (3072-4). The buying of land in the late sixteenth century was indeed a tiresome and complex business; it was natural for Shakespeare to express his frustration, even through the mouth of the melancholy Dane. In the autumn of 1602 he also bought a plot of half an acre of land, with a cottage and cottage garden, in Chapel Lane just behind his grand house of New Place. The cottage may have been intended for a servant and family, or even for a gardener. Or could it possibly have been a place in which he might seclude himself?

He was clearly aiming for local respectability as well as prosperity. The corporation of Stratford, however, were not necessarily sympathetic to the sources of his wealth. At the end of this year they formally forbade the performance of plays or interludes in the guildhall. It was a manifestation of the regional Puritanism that affected other districts of the country. The fact that he began to spend more time, and money, in Stratford suggests that he was not much concerned about such matters. His life as dramatist, and his life as townsman, were separate and not to be confused.