Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Chapter Four. In London

IN 1596, WHILE ATTENDING a performance at the new Swan Theatre in London, a Dutch tourist named Johannes de Witt did a very useful thing that no one, it seems, had ever done before. He made a sketch-rather rough and with a not wholly convincing grasp of perspective-depicting the Swan’s interior as viewed from a central seat in the upper galleries. The sketch shows a large projecting stage, partly roofed, with a tower behind containing a space known as the tiring (short for “attiring”) house-a term whose earliest recorded use is by William Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream-where the actors changed costumes and grabbed props. Above the tiring area were galleries for musicians and audience, as well as spaces that could be incorporated into performances, for balcony scenes and the like. The whole bears a striking resemblance to the interior of the replica Globe Theatre we find on London ’s Bankside today.

De Witt’s little effort was subsequently lost, but luckily a friend of his had made a faithful copy in a notebook, and this eventually found its way into the archives of the library of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. There it sat unregarded for almost three hundred years. But in 1888 a German named Karl Gaedertz found the notebook and its rough sketch, and luckily-all but miraculously-recognized its significance, for the sketch represents the only known visual depiction of the interior of an Elizabethan playhouse in London. Without it we would know essentially nothing about the working layout of theaters of the time. Its uniqueness explains the similarity of the interior design of the new, replica Globe. It was all there was to go on.

Two decades after de Witt’s visit, another Dutchman, an artist named Claes Jan Visscher, produced a famous engraved panorama of London, showing in the foreground the theaters of Bankside, the Globe among them. Roughly circular and with a thatched roof, this was very much Shakespeare’s “wooden O” and has remained the default image of the theater ever since. However, in 1948, a scholar named I. A. Shapiro showed pretty well conclusively that Visscher had based his drawing on an earlier engraving, from 1572, before any of the theaters he depicted had actually been built. In fact, it appeared that Visscher had never actually been to London and so was hardly the most reliable of witnesses.

This left just one illustration from the era known to have been drawn from life and that was a view made by a Bohemian artist named Wenceslas Hollar sometime in the late 1630s or early 1640s. Called the Long View, it is a lovely drawing-“perhaps the most beautiful and harmonious of all London panoramas,” in Peter Ackroyd’s estimation-but a slightly strange one in that it depicts a view from a position slightly above and behind the tower of Southwark Cathedral (then known as the Church of Saint Saviour and Saint Mary Overie), as if Hollar had been looking down on the cathedral from another building-a building that did not in fact exist.

So it is a view-entirely accurate as far as can be made out-that no human had ever seen. More to the point, it showed the second Globe, not the first, which had burned down in 1613, three years before Shakespeare died. The second Globe was a fine theater, and we are lucky to have Hollar’s drawing of it, for it was pulled down soon afterward, but it was patently not the place where Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and a dozen or so other Shakespeare plays were (probably to almost certainly) first performed. In any case the Globe was only a very small part of the whole composition and was depicted as seen from a distance of nine hundred feet, so it offers very little detail.

And there you have the complete visual record we possess of theaters in Shakespeare’s day and somewhat beyond: one rough sketch of the interior of a playhouse Shakespeare had no connection with, one doubtful panorama by someone who may never have seen London, and one depiction done years after Shakespeare left the scene showing a theater he never wrote for. The best that can be said of any of them is that they may bear some resemblance to the playhouses Shakespeare knew, but possibly not.

The written record for the period is not a great deal more enlightening. Most of what little we know about what it was like to attend the theater in Shakespeare’s time comes from the letters and diaries of tourists, for whom the London sights were novel enough to be worth recording. Sometimes, however, it is a little hard to know quite what to make of these. In 1587 a visitor from the country wrote excitedly to his father about an unexpected event he had seen at a performance by the Admiral’s Men: One actor had raised a musket to fire at another, but the musket ball “missed the fellow he aimed at and killed a child, and a woman great with child forthwith, and hit another man in the head very sore.” It is astounding to suppose that actors were firing live muskets-which in the sixteenth century were really little more than exploding sticks-in the confined space of a theater, but, if so, one wonders where they were hoping the musket ball would lodge. The Admiral’s Men failed to secure an invitation to take part in the Christmas revels at court the following month-something that would normally have been more or less automatic-so it would appear that they were in some sort of temporary disgrace.

We would know even less about the business and structure of Elizabethan theatrical life were it not for the diary and related papers of Philip Henslowe, proprietor of the Rose and Fortune theaters. Henslowe was a man of many parts, not all of them entirely commendable. He was an impresario, moneylender, property investor, timber merchant, dyer, starch manufacturer, and, in a very big way, brothel keeper, among much else. He was famous among writers for advancing them small sums, then keeping them in a kind of measured penury, the better to coax plays from them. But for all his shortcomings, Henslowe redeemed himself to history by keeping meticulous records, of which those from the years 1592 to 1603 survive. His “diary,” as it is usually called, wasn’t really a diary so much as a catchall of preoccupations; it included a recipe for curing deafness, notes on casting spells, even advice on how best to pasture a horse. But it also incorporated invaluable details of the day-to-day running of a playhouse, including the names of plays his company performed and the actors employed, along with exhaustive lists of stage props and wardrobes (including a delightfully mysterious “robe for to go invisible”).

Henslowe’s papers also included a detailed contract for the building of the Fortune Theatre, at an agreed-on cost of £ 440, in 1600. Although the Fortune was not much like the Globe-it was somewhat larger, and square rather than round-and although the contract included no drawings, it provided specifications on the heights and depths of the galleries, the thickness of wood to be used in the floors, the composition of plaster in the walls, and other details that proved immeasurably beneficial in building the replica Globe on Bankside in 1997.

Theaters as dedicated spaces of entertainment were a new phenomenon in England in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Previously players had performed in innyards or the halls of great homes or other spaces normally used for other purposes. London ’s first true playhouse appears to have been the Red Lion, built in 1567 in Whitechapel by an entrepreneur named John Brayne. Almost nothing is known about the Red Lion, including how much success it enjoyed, but its life appears to have been short. Still, it must have shown some promise, for nine years after its construction Brayne was at it again, this time working in league with his brother-in-law, James Burbage, who was a carpenter by trade but an actor and impresario by nature. Their new theater-called the Theatre-opened in 1576 a few hundred yards to the north of the City walls near Finsbury Fields in Shoreditch. Soon afterward Burbage’s longtime rival Henslowe opened the Curtain Theatre just up the road, and London was a truly theatrical place.

William Shakespeare could not have chosen a more propitious moment to come of age. By the time he arrived in London in (presumably) the late 1580s, theaters dotted the outskirts and would continue to rise throughout his career. All were compelled to reside in “liberties,” areas mostly outside London ’s walls where City laws and regulations did not apply. It was a banishment they shared with brothels, prisons, gunpowder stores, unconsecrated graveyards, lunatic asylums (the notorious Bedlam stood close by the Theatre), and noisome enterprises like soapmaking, dyeing, and tanning-and these could be noisome indeed. Glue makers and soapmakers rendered copious volumes of bones and animal fat, filling the air with a cloying smell that could be all but worn, while tanners steeped their products in vats of dog feces to make them supple. No one reached a playhouse without encountering a good deal of odor.

The new theaters did not prosper equally. Within three years of its opening, the Curtain was being used for fencing bouts, and all other London playhouses, with the single eventual exception of the Globe, relied on other entertainments, particularly animal baiting, to fortify their earnings. The pastime was not unique to England, but it was regarded as an English specialty. Queen Elizabeth often had visitors from abroad entertained with bearbaiting at Whitehall. In its classic form, a bear was put in a ring, sometimes tethered to a stake, and set upon by mastiffs, but bears were expensive investments, so other animals (such as bulls and horses) were commonly substituted. One variation was to put a chimpanzee on the back of a horse and let the dogs go for both together. The sight of a screeching ape clinging for dear life to a bucking horse while dogs leaped at it from below was considered about as rich an amusement as public life could offer. That an audience that could be moved to tears one day by a performance of Doctor Faustus could return the next to the same space and be just as entertained by the frantic deaths of helpless animals may say as much about the age as any single statement could.

It was also an age that gave rise to the Puritans, a people so averse to sensual pleasure that they would rather live in a distant wilderness in the New World than embrace tolerance. Puritans detested the theater and tended to blame every natural calamity, including a rare but startling earthquake in 1580, on the playhouses. They considered theaters, with their lascivious puns and unnatural cross-dressing, a natural haunt for prostitutes and shady characters, a breeding ground of infectious diseases, a distraction from worship, and a source of unhealthy sexual excitement. All the female parts were of course played by boys-a convention that would last until the Restoration in the 1660s. In consequence the Puritans believed that the theaters were hotbeds of sodomy-still a capital offense in Shakespeare’s lifetime*-and wanton liaisons of all sorts.

There may actually have been a little something to this, as popular tales of the day suggest. In one story a young wife pleads with her husband to be allowed to attend a popular play. Reluctantly the husband consents, but with the strict proviso that she be vigilant for thieves and keep her purse buried deep within her petticoats. Upon her return home, the wife bursts into tears and confesses that the purse has been stolen. The husband is naturally astounded. Did his wife not feel a hand probing beneath her dress? Oh, yes, she responds candidly, she had felt a neighbor’s hand there-“but I did not think he had come for that.”

Fortunately for Shakespeare and for posterity, the queen brushed away all attempts to limit public amusements, including on Sundays. For one thing she liked them herself, but equally pertinent, her government enjoyed hearty revenues from licensing bowling alleys, theatrical productions, gaming houses (even though gambling was actually illegal in London), and the sale and manufacture of much that went on in them.

But though plays were tolerated, they were strictly regulated. The Master of the Revels licensed all dramatic works (at a cost of 7 shillings per license) and made sure that companies performed in a manner that he considered respectful and orderly. Those who displeased him could in theory be jailed at his indefinite pleasure, and punishments were not unknown. In 1605, soon after the accession of James I, Ben Jonson and his collaborators on Eastward Ho! made some excellent but unwisely intemperate jokes about the sudden influx of rough and underwashed Scots to the royal court and were arrested and threatened with having their ears and noses lopped off. It was because of these dangers (and the Vagrancy Act of 1572, which specifically authorized the whipping of unlicensed vagabonds) that acting troupes attached themselves to aristocratic patrons. The patron afforded the actors some measure of protection, and they in turn carried his name across the land, lending him publicity and prestige. For a time patrons collected troupes of actors rather in the way rich people of a later age collected racehorses or yachts.

Plays were performed at about two o’clock in the afternoon. Handbills were distributed through the streets advertising what was on offer, and citizens were reminded that a play was soon to start by the appearance of a banner waving from the highest part of the structure in which a performance was to take place and a fanfare of trumpets that could be heard across much of the city. General admission for groundlings-those who stood in the open around the stage-was a penny. Those who wished to sit paid a penny more, and those who desired a cushion paid another penny on top of that-all this at a time when a day’s wage was 1 shilling (12 pence) or less a day. The money was dropped into a box, which was taken to a special room for safekeeping-the box office.

For those who could afford an additional treat, apples and pears (both apt to be used as missiles during moments of disappointment) and nuts, gingerbread, and bottles of ale were on offer, as was the newly fashionable commodity tobacco. A small pipeful cost 3 pence-considerably more than the price of admission. There were no toilets-or at least no official ones. Despite their large capacity, theaters were reasonably intimate. No one in the audience was more than fifty feet or so from the edge of the stage.

Theaters had little scenery and no curtains (even at the Curtain), no way to distinguish day from night, fog from sunshine, battlefield from boudoir, other than through words. So scenes had to be set with a few verbal strokes and the help of a compliant audience’s imagination. As Wells and Taylor note, “Oberon and Prospero have only to declare themselves invisible to become so.”

No one set scenes more brilliantly and economically than Shakespeare. Consider the opening lines of Hamlet:

Barnardo: Who’s there?

Francisco: Nay, answer me. Stand, and unfold yourself.

Barnardo: Long live the King!

Francisco: Barnardo?

Barnardo: He.

In five terse lines Shakespeare establishes that it is nighttime and cold (“unfold yourself” means “draw back your cloak”), that the speakers are soldiers on guard, and that there is tension in the air. With just fifteen words-eleven of them monosyllables-he has the audience’s full, rapt attention.

Costumes were elaborate and much valued but not always greatly assembled with historical veracity, it would seem. We know this because a man named Henry Peacham (or so it is assumed; his name is scribbled in the margin) made a sketch of a scene in Titus Andronicus during one of its performances. Where and when precisely this happened is not known, but the sketch shows a critical moment in the play when Tamora begs Titus to spare her sons and portrays with some care the postures and surprisingly motley costumes (some suitably ancient, others carelessly Tudor) of the performers. For audience and players alike, it appears, a hint of antiquity was sufficient. Realism came rather in the form of gore. Sheep’s or pig’s organs and a little sleight of hand made possible the lifting of hearts from bodies in murder scenes, and sheep’s blood was splashed about for a literal touch of color on swords and flesh wounds. Artificial limbs were sometimes strewn over imagined fields of battle-“as bloody as may be,” as one set of stage directions encouraged. Plays, even the solemn ones, traditionally ended with a jig as a kind of bonus entertainment.

It was a time of rapid evolution for theatrical techniques. As Stanley Wells has written: “Plays became longer, more ambitious, more spectacular, more complex in construction, wider in emotional range, and better designed to show off the talents of their performers.” Acting styles became less bombastic. A greater naturalism emerged in the course of Shakespeare’s lifetime-much of which he helped to foster. Shakespeare and his contemporaries also enjoyed a good deal of latitude in subject and setting. Italian playwrights, following the classical Roman tradition, were required to set their plays around a town square. Shakespeare could place his action wherever he wished: on or in hillsides, forts, castles, battlefields, lonesome islands, enchanted dells, anywhere an imaginative audience could be persuaded to go.

Plays, at least as written, were of strikingly variable lengths. Even going at a fair clip and without intermissions, Hamlet would run for nearly four and a half hours. Richard III, Coriolanus, and Troilus and Cressida were only slightly shorter. Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair would have taken no less than five hours to perform, unless judiciously cut, as it almost certainly was. (Shakespeare and Jonson were notoriously copious. Of the twenty-nine plays of three thousand lines or more that still exist from the period 1590-1616, twenty-two are by Jonson or Shakespeare.)

A particular challenge for audience and performers alike must surely have been the practice of putting male players in female parts. When we consider how many powerful and expressive female roles Shakespeare created-Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona-the actors must have been gifted dissemblers indeed. Rosalind in As You Like It has about a quarter of all the lines in the play; Shakespeare clearly had enormous confidence in some young actor. Yet, while we often know a good deal about performers in male roles from Shakespeare’s day, we know almost nothing about the conduct of the female parts. Judith Cook, in Women in Shakespeare, says she could not find a single record of any role of a woman played by a specific boy actor. We don’t even know much about boy actors in general terms, including how old they were. For many of a conservative nature, stage transvestism was a source of real anxiety. The fear was that spectators would be attracted to both the female character and the boy beneath, thus becoming doubly corrupted.

This disdain for female actors was a Northern European tradition. In Spain, France, and Italy, women were played by women-a fact that astonished British travelers, who seem often to have been genuinely surprised to find that women could play women as competently onstage as in life. Shakespeare got maximum effect from the gender confusion by constantly having his female characters-Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth Night- disguise themselves as boys, creating the satisfyingly dizzying situation of a boy playing a woman playing a boy.

The golden age of theater lasted only about the length of a good human lifetime, but what a wondrously prolific and successful period it was. Between the opening of the Red Lion in 1567 and the closing of all the theaters by the Puritans seventy-five years later, London ’s playhouses are thought to have attracted fifty million paying customers, something like ten times the entire country’s population in Shakespeare’s day.

To prosper, a theater in London needed to draw as many as two thousand spectators a day-about 1 percent of the city’s population-two hundred or so times a year, and to do so repeatedly against stiff competition. To keep customers coming back, it was necessary to change the plays continually. Most companies performed at least five different plays in a week, sometimes six, and used such spare time as they could muster to learn and rehearse new ones.

A new play might be performed three times in its first month, then rested for a few months or abandoned altogether. Few plays managed as many as ten performances in a year. So quite quickly there arose an urgent demand for material. What is truly remarkable is how much quality the age produced in the circumstances. Few writers made much of a living at it, however. A good play might fetch £10, but as such plays were often collaborations involving as many as half a dozen authors, an individual share was modest (and with no royalties or other further payments). Thomas Dekker cranked out, singly or in collaboration, no fewer than thirty-two plays in three years, but never pocketed more than 12 shillings a week and spent much of his career imprisoned for debt. Even Ben Jonson, who passed most of his career in triumph and esteem, died in poverty.

Plays belonged, incidentally, to the company, not the playwright. A finished play was stamped with a license from the Master of the Revels giving permission for its staging, so it needed to be retained by the company. It is sometimes considered odd that no play manuscripts or prompt books were found among Shakespeare’s personal effects at his death. In fact it would have been odd if they had been.

For authors and actors alike, the theatrical world was an insanely busy place, and for someone like William Shakespeare, who was playwright, actor, part owner, and probably de facto director as well (there were no formal directors in his day), it must have been nearly hysterical at times. Companies might have as many as thirty plays in their active repertoire, so a leading actor could be required to memorize perhaps fifteen thousand lines in a season-about the same as memorizing every word in this book-as well as remember every dance and sword thrust and costume change. Even the most successful companies were unlikely to employ more than a dozen or so actors, so a great deal of doubling up was necessary. Julius Caesar, for instance, has forty named characters, as well as parts for unspecified numbers of “servants,” “other plebeians,” and “senators, soldiers, and attendants.” Although many of these had few demanding lines, or none at all, it was still necessary in every case to be fully acquainted with the relevant props, cues, positions, entrances, and exits, and to appear on time correctly attired. That in itself must have been a challenge, for nearly all clothing then involved either complicated fastenings-two dozen or more obstinate fabric clasps on a standard doublet-or yards of lacing.

In such a hothouse, reliability was paramount. Henslowe’s papers show that actors were subjected to rigorous contractual obligations, with graduated penalties for missing rehearsals, being drunk or tardy, failing to be “ready apparelled” at the right moment, or-strikingly-for wearing any stage costumes outside the playhouse. Costumes were extremely valuable, so the fine was a decidedly whopping (and thus probably never imposed) £40. But even the most minor infractions, like tardiness, could cost an actor two days’ pay.

Shakespeare appears to have remained an actor throughout his professional life (unlike Ben Jonson, who quit as soon as he could afford to), for he was listed as an actor on documents in 1592, 1598, 1603, and 1608-which is to say at every phase of his career. It can’t have been easy to have been an actor as well as a playwright, but it would doubtless have allowed him (assuming he wished it) much greater control than had he simply surrendered a script to others, as most playwrights did. According to tradition, Shakespeare specialized in good but fairly undemanding roles in his own plays. The Ghost in Hamlet is the part to which he is most often linked. In fact, we don’t know what parts he played, but that they were nontaxing roles seems a reasonable assumption given the demands on him not only as writer of the plays but also in all likelihood as the person most closely involved with their staging. But it may well be that he truly enjoyed acting and craved large parts when not distracted by scripting considerations. He was listed as a principal performer in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour in 1598 and in Sejanus His Fall in 1603.

It is tempting, even logical, to guess that Shakespeare when he arrived in London gravitated to Shoreditch, just north of the City walls. This was the home of the Theatre and the Curtain both, and was where many playwrights and actors lived, drank, caroused, occasionally fought, and no less occasionally died. It was in Shoreditch, very near the Theatre, in September 1589 that the rising, and ever hotheaded, young star Christopher Marlowe, fresh from the triumphs of Tamburlaine the Great, fell into a heated altercation with an innkeeper named William Bradley. Swords were drawn. Marlowe’s friend Thomas Watson, a playwright himself, stepped into the fray and, in inevitably confused circumstances, stabbed Bradley in the chest. The blow was fatal. Both writers spent time in prison-Marlowe very briefly, Watson for five months-but were cleared on the grounds that Bradley had provoked his own demise and that they had acted in self-defense. We may reasonably suppose that the murder of Bradley was the talk of the district that evening, but whether Shakespeare was around to hear it or not we don’t know. If not yet, he soon would be, for at some point shortly after this he became, in a big and fairly sudden way, a presence in the London theater.

We are not quite sure, however, when that point was. We are not even sure when we have our first glimpse of him at work. The ever-meticulous Henslowe has a note in his diary recording a performance of “harey VI” at the Rose in the first week of March 1592. Many take this to be Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1, which would be gratifying for Shakespeare fans because “harey VI” was a great triumph. It attracted box office receipts of £3 16 shillings and 8 pence on its debut-a very considerable sum-and was performed thirteen times more in the next four months, which is to say more than almost any other play of its day. But the success of the play, particularly upon its debut, does rather raise a question: Would people really have turned out in droves to see the premiere of a play by a little-known author or was it perhaps a play, now lost, on the same subject by someone better established? One troubling point is that Shakespeare had no recorded connection with Henslowe’s company as actor or playwright.

The first certain mention of Shakespeare as playwright comes, unexpectedly enough, in an unkind note in a thin and idiosyncratic pamphlet, when he was already the author of several plays-probably five, possibly more-though there is much uncertainty about which exactly these were.

The pamphlet’s full, generously descriptive title is Greene’s Groat’s-Worth * of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance. Describing the folly of youth, the falsehood of make-shift flatterers, the misery of the negligent, and mischiefs of deceiving Courtesans. Written before his death and published at his dying request, by Robert Greene, who did indeed fulfill the title’s promise by dying while it was being prepared for publication. (Amazingly he managed in the same month to produce a second volume of deathbed thoughts called, rather irresistibly, Greene’s Vision, Written at the instant of his death.)

Greene was a pamphleteer and poet and a leading light in a group of playwrights known to posterity as the University Wits. Mostly, however, he was a wastrel and cad. He married well but ran through his wife’s money and abandoned her and their child, and took up with a mistress of tarnished repute by whom he produced another child, grandly named Fortunatus, and with whom he lived in a tenement in Dowgate, near London Bridge. Here, after overindulging one evening on Rhenish wine and pickled herring (or so all histories report), Greene fell ill and began to die slowly and unattractively, ridden with lice and sipping whatever intoxicants his dwindling resources could muster. Somehow during this month of decline, he managed (almost certainly with a good deal of help) to produce his two collections of thoughts, based loosely on his own life and peppered with tart observations about other writers, before rasping out his last breath, on September 3, 1592. He was thirty-one or possibly thirty-two-a reasonable age for a dying Londoner.

Only two copies of Greene’s Groat’s-Worth survive, and there would not be much call for either were it not for a single arresting sentence tucked into one of its many discursive passages: “Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”

If the not-so-subtle reference to “Shake-scene” didn’t identify the target at once, the reference to a “Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide” almost certainly did, for it is a parody of a line in Henry VI, Part 3. It is clear from the context that Shakespeare had distinguished himself enough to awaken envy in a dying man but was still sufficiently fresh to be considered an upstart.

No one knows quite what Shakespeare did to antagonize the dying Greene. It may have been very personal, for all we know, but more probably it was just a case of professional jealousy. Greene evidently felt that Shakespeare’s position as a player qualified him to speak lines but not to create them. Writing was clearly best left to university graduates, however dissolute. (Greene was the worst kind of snob-a university graduate from a humble background: His father was a saddler.) At any rate Shakespeare or someone speaking for him must have protested, for soon afterward Greene’s editor and amanuensis, Henry Chettle, offered an apology of radiant humility and abjection, praising Shakespeare’s honesty and good character, “his facetious grace in writing,” and much else.

Chettle was much more grudging in apologizing to Christopher Marlowe, who was far worse maligned (though, as was usual in these tracts, not explicitly named), as Greene’s slender volume accused him of atheism-a very grave charge for the time. Why Chettle was so much more respectful (or fearful) of Shakespeare than of the comparatively well-connected and always dangerous Marlowe is an interesting but unresolvable puzzle. At all events no one would ever attack Shakespeare in such a way again.

Just at the moment that Shakespeare enters the theatrical record, the record itself is suspended owing to a particularly severe outbreak of plague. Four days after the death of Robert Greene, London ’s theaters were officially ordered shut, and they would remain so for just under two years, with only the briefest remissions. It was a period of great suffering. In London at least ten thousand people died in a single year. For theatrical companies it meant banishment from the capital and a dispiritingly itinerant existence on tour.

What Shakespeare did with himself at this time is not known. Ever elusive, he now disappears from recorded sight for two years more. As always there are many theories as to where he passed the plague years of 1592 and 1593. One is that he spent the time traveling in Italy, which would account for a rush of Italian plays upon his return-The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet-though at least one of these was probably written already and none requires a trip to Italy to explain its existence. All that is certain is that in April 1593, just before his twenty-ninth birthday and little more than half a year after the theaters had shut, William Shakespeare produced a narrative poem called Venus and Adonis with a dedication so florid and unctuous that it can raise a sympathetic cringe even after four hundred years. The dedication says:

Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden. Only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather…

The person at whom this gush was directed was not an aged worthy, but a wan, slender, exceedingly effeminate youth of nineteen, Henry Wriothesley (pronounced “rizzly”), third Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield. Southampton grew up at the heart of the court. His father died when he was just seven, and he was placed under the wardship of Lord Burghley, the queen’s lord treasurer-effectively her prime minister. Burghley saw to his education and, when Southampton was just seventeen, sought to have him marry his granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth de Vere, who was in turn daughter of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and longtime favorite among those who think Shakespeare was not Shakespeare. Southampton declined to proceed with the marriage, for which he had to pay a colossal forfeit of £5,000 (something like £2.5 million in today’s money). He really didn’t want to marry Burghley’s granddaughter.

Southampton, it appears, enjoyed the intimate company of men and women both. He had a mistress at court, one Elizabeth Vernon, but equally while serving in Ireland as Lord-General of Horse under his close friend the Earl of Essex, he shared quarters with a fellow officer whom he would “hug in his arms and play wantonly with,” in the words of one scandalized observer. He must have made an interesting soldier, for his most striking quality was his exceeding effeminacy. We know precisely how he looked-or at least wished to be remembered-because Nicholas Hilliard, the celebrated portraitist, produced a miniature of him showing him with flowing auburn locks draped over his left shoulder, at a time when men did not normally wear their hair so long or arrange it with such smoldering allure.

Matters took a further interesting lurch in the spring of 2002 when another portrait of Southampton was identified at a stately home, Hatchlands Park in Surrey, showing him dressed as a woman (or an exceedingly camp man), a pose strikingly reminiscent of the beautiful youth with “a woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted” described with such tender admiration in Sonnet 20. The date attributed to the painting, 1590-1593, was just the time that Shakespeare was beseeching Southampton ’s patronage.

We’ve no idea how much or how little Southampton admired the poem dedicated to him, but the wider world loved it. It was the greatest publishing success of Shakespeare’s career-far more successful in print than any of his plays-and was reprinted at least ten times in his lifetime (though only one first-edition copy survives, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford). Written in narrative form and sprawling over 1,194 lines, Venus and Adonis was rich and decidedly racy for its day, though actually quite tame compared with the work on which it was based, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which contains eighteen rapes and a great deal of pillage, among much else. Shakespeare threw out most of the violence but played on themes-love, lust, death, the transient frailty of beauty-that spoke to Elizabethan tastes and ensured the poem’s popularity.

Some of it is a little rich for modern tastes-for instance:

And now she beats her heart, whereat it groans…

“Ay me!” she cries, and twenty times, “Woe, woe!”

But such lines struck a chord with Elizabethan readers and made the work an instant hit. The publisher was Richard Field, with whom Shakespeare had grown up in Stratford, but it did so well that a more successful publisher, John Harrison, bought out Field’s interest. The following year Harrison published a follow-up poem by Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, based on Ovid’s Fasti. This poem, considerably longer at 1,855 lines and written in a seven-line stanza form known as rhyme royal, was primarily a paean to chastity and, like chastity itself, was not so popular.

Again there was an elaborate dedication to the foppish earl:

To the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesely, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield.

The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would sow greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your Lordship, to whom I wish long life still lengthened with all happiness.

Your Lordship’s in all duty,

William Shakespeare

As these dedications are the only two occasions when Shakespeare speaks directly to the world in his own voice, scholars have naturally picked over them to see what might reasonably be deduced from them. What many believe is that the second dedication shows a greater confidence and familiarity-and possibly affection-than the first. A. L. Rowse, for one, could think of “no Elizabethan dedication that gives one more the sense of intimacy” and that conclusion is echoed with more or less equal vigor in many other assessments.

In fact we know nothing at all about the relationship, if any, that existed between Shakespeare and Southampton. But as Wells and Taylor put it in their edition of the complete works, “the affection with which Shakespeare speaks of him in the dedication to Lucrece suggests a strong personal connection.” The suspicion is that Southampton was the beautiful youth with whom Shakespeare may have had a relationship, as described in the sonnets-which may have been written about the same time, though the sonnets would not be published for fifteen years. But according to Martin Wiggins of the University of Birmingham, addressing work to a nobleman “was commonly only a speculative bid for patronage.” And Shakespeare was just one of several poets-Thomas Nashe, Gervase Markham, John Clapham, and Barnabe Barnes were others-vying for Southampton’s benediction during the same period (his rivals’ obsequious dedications, not incidentally, make Shakespeare’s entreaties look restrained, honest, and frankly dignified).

Southampton was not, in any case, in a position to bestow largesse in volume. Although he enjoyed an income of £ 3,000 a year (something like £1.5 million in today’s money) upon reaching his majority, he also inherited vast expenses and was dissolute into the bargain. Moreover, under the terms of his inheritance, he had to pass a third of any earnings to his mother. Within a few years he was, to quote Wiggins again, “virtually bankrupt.” All of which makes it unlikely that Southampton gave-or was ever in a position to give-Shakespeare £1,000, a story first related by Shakespeare’s biographer Nicholas Rowe in the early 1700s and endorsed surprisingly often ever since: for instance, by the Shakespeare scholar Sidney Lee in the Dictionary of National Biography.

So by 1594 William Shakespeare was clearly on the way to success. He was the author of two exceedingly accomplished poems and he had the patronage of a leading aristocrat. But rather than capitalize on this promising beginning, he left the field of poetry and returned all but exclusively to the theater, a move that must have seemed at least mildly eccentric, if not actively willful, for playwriting was not an esteemed profession, and its practice, however accomplished, gained one little critical respect.

Yet this was precisely the world that Shakespeare now wholeheartedly embraced. He never dedicated anything else to Southampton or any other aristocrat, or sought anyone’s patronage again. He wrote for publication only once more that we know of-with the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, published in 1601. Nothing else bearing his name was published with his obvious consent in his lifetime, including the plays that he now turned to almost exclusively.

The theatrical scene that Shakespeare found was much altered from two years before. For one thing, it was without his greatest competitor, Christopher Marlowe, who had died the previous year. Marlowe was just two months older than Shakespeare. Though from a modest background himself-he was the son of a shoemaker from Canterbury-he had gone to Cambridge (on a scholarship), and so enjoyed an elevated status.

Goodness knows what he might have achieved, but in 1593 he fell into trouble in a very big way. In the spring of that year inflammatory anti-immigrant notices began to appear all over London bearing lines of verse inspired by popular dramas, including in one instance a vicious parody of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. The government by this time was so obsessed with internal security that it spent £ 12,000 a year-a fabulous sum-spying on its own citizens. This was an era when one really didn’t wish to attract the critical attention of the authorities. Among those interrogated was Thomas Kyd, Marlowe’s friend and former roommate and author of the immensely popular Spanish Tragedy. Under torture (or possibly just the threat of it) at Bridewell Prison, Kyd accused Marlowe of being “irreligious, intemperate, and of cruel heart,” but above all of being a blasphemer and atheist. These were serious charges indeed.

Marlowe was brought before the Privy Council, questioned, and released on a bond that required him to stay within twelve miles of the royal court wherever it happened to be so that his case could be dealt with quickly when it pleased his accusers to turn to it. He faced, at the very least, having his ears cut off-that was if things went well-so it must have been a deeply uneasy time for him. As Marlowe’s biographer David Riggs has written, “There were no acquittals in Tudor state courts.”

It was against this background that Marlowe went drinking with three men of doubtful character at the house of a widow, Eleanor Bull, in Deptford in East London. There, according to a subsequent coroner’s report, a dispute arose over the bill, and Marlowe-who truly was never far from violence-seized a dagger and tried to stab one Ingram Frizer with it. Frizer, in self-defense, turned the weapon back on Marlowe and stabbed him in the forehead above the right eye-a difficult place to strike a killing blow, one would have thought, but killing him outright. That is the official version, anyway. Some historians believe Marlowe was assassinated at the behest of the crown or its senior agents. Whatever the motivation, he was dead at twenty-nine.

At that age Shakespeare was writing comparative trifles-Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Comedy of Errors are all probably among his works of this period. Marlowe by contrast had written ambitious and appreciable dramas: The Jew of Malta, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, and Tamburlaine the Great. “If Shakespeare too had died in that year,” Stanley Wells has written, “we should now regard Marlowe as the greater writer.”

No doubt. But what if both had lived? Could either have sustained the competition? Shakespeare, it seems fair to say, had more promise for the long term. Marlowe possessed little gift for comedy and none at all, that we can see, for creating strong female roles-areas where Shakespeare shone. Above all it is impossible to imagine a person as quick to violence and as erratic in temperament as Christopher Marlowe reaching a wise and productive middle age. Shakespeare had a disposition built for the long haul.

Kyd died the next year, aged just thirty-six, never having recovered from his ordeal at Bridewell. Greene was dead already, of course, and Watson followed him soon after. Shakespeare would have no serious rivals until the emergence of Ben Jonson in 1598.

For theatrical troupes the plague years were an equally terminal moment. The endless trudge in search of provincial engagements proved too much for many companies, and one by one they disbanded-Hertford’s, Sussex ’s, Derby ’s, and Pembroke’s all fading away more or less at once. By 1594 only two troupes of note remained: the Admiral’s Men under Edward Alleyn, and a new group, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (named for the head of the queen’s household), led by Richard Burbage and comprising several talents absorbed from recently extinguished companies. Among these talents were John Heminges, who would become Shakespeare’s close friend and (some thirty years in the future) coeditor of the First Folio, and the celebrated comic Will Kemp, for whom Shakespeare would (it is reasonably presumed) write many of his most famous comedic roles, such as Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing.

Shakespeare would spend the rest of his working life with this company. As Wells and Taylor note, “He is the only prominent playwright of his time to have had so stable a relationship with a single company.” It was clearly a happy and well-run outfit, and its members were commendably-or at the very least comparatively-sober, diligent, and clean living.

Shakespeare seems to have been unusual among the troupe in not being a conspicuously devoted family man. Burbage was a loving husband and father of seven in Shoreditch. Heminges and Condell were likewise steady fellows, living as neighbors in the prosperous parish of Saint Mary Aldermanbury, where they were pillars of their church and prodigious procreators, producing no fewer than twenty-three children between them.

In short they led innocuous lives. They did not draw daggers or brawl in pubs. They behaved like businessmen. And six times a week they gathered together, dressed up in costumes and makeup, and gave the world some of the most sublime and unimprovable hours of pleasure it has ever known.