Shakespeare's Ear

by Tim Rayborn

  Thank goodness for good old English ale! Amazingly, no one else seems to have been hurt, and even though the building only had two doors, evacuation apparently went smoothly enough. In the absence of any kind of organized fire brigade, the whole structure went up in flames and was completely destroyed in less than two hours. In those flames were costumes, props, and possibly original manuscripts for plays. The players were undaunted, however, and the Globe was rebuilt the following year. It thrived until 1642, when it was closed by the Puritans, and in 1644 or 1645, it was torn down to make room for new housing. In 1997, the new reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe opened for business, sitting on the approximate location of the original and designed in the style of its predecessor. It has been wildly successful in bringing the feel and atmosphere of Tudor and Stuart theater back to life, though presumably the cannon is a lot safer this time around.

  Richard Burbage’s very brief epitaph (1567–1619)

  Brevity is the soul of wit

  Burbage is considered by many to be the first great English actor, one who brought genuine emotion to his roles, rather than just declaiming his lines. He was also a friend and partner of Shakespeare, a theater owner, and a skilled painter—some think that the Chandos portrait presumed to be of Shakespeare was painted by Burbage.

  He excelled at tragedies and played the main roles for most of his friend’s great characters—Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and Richard II, among others. He was popular and successful, but not nearly as shrewd a businessman as the bard, and so not as wealthy.

  He died somewhat unexpectedly in 1619, though unlike Shakespeare, he never retired from the stage and continued acting right up till the end. He was so popular that his death threatened to overshadow that of Queen Anne (James I’s wife), who had died only a few days before him on March 2, 1619; because of her death, the theaters were closed in official mourning.

  Tributes to the actor poured in, such as this one from an anonymous poet who wrote of him in a funeral elegy:

  He’s gone, and with him what a world are dead,

  Which he reviv’d, to be revived so

  No more: young Hamlet, old Hieronimo,

  Kind Lear, the grieved Moore, and more beside,

  That liv’d in him, have now forever died.

  Oft have I seen him leap into a grave,

  Suiting ye person, which he seem’d to have,

  Of a sad lover, with so true an eye

  That then I would have sworn he meant to die.

  Oft have I seen him play his part in jest

  So lively that spectators, and the rest

  Of his sad crew, whilst he but seem’d to bleed,

  Amazed, thought even then he died in deed.

  The poem goes on for quite some time, praising his skill, his many roles, and his speech.

  But perhaps the best epitaph was the one said to have been carved on his gravestone, a reminder of his long devotion to the stage, captured perfectly in only two words:

  “Exit Burbage.”

  5

  The Seventeenth Century

  The seventeenth century was a mixed bag for theater. In England, it began with a golden age of drama that produced some of the finest plays ever written in the English language. That flowering was gutted by the events of the English Civil War and the Puritan years of no fun that followed it in the middle of the century. Theaters were finally reopened when Charles II returned to claim his crown in 1660, but with some fundamental changes, most dramatically (pun intended), the introduction of women to the English stage. This was something that would have been unthinkable to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

  In France, women had always been allowed to act, but after 1600, the French preference came to be for comedies and farces, perhaps to stave off the horrors of the wars that the country seemed to find itself perpetually engaged in throughout the century. Molière was the greatest name in French drama, but he was not universally loved, certainly not by religious authorities, as we will see. His farces drew from a variety of sources, especially the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, which by the same time was flourishing as never before (see act II for a whole chapter devoted to this zany, anarchic, and fun genre). French theater thrived under the patronage of the extravagant and decadent Sun King, Louis XIV, while Spain entered into a golden age of literature and drama, though not without its own share of controversy and violence.

  As you might imagine, it’s a bit of a tricky thing giving a chapter a title like “The Seventeenth Century,” because some people featured here were born in the sixteenth and lived into the seventeenth, or were born in the seventeenth and made it successfully into the eighteenth. This problem also holds true for the rest of the chapters in act I, but obviously they have to be divided up some way. So how does one classify such individuals, who were so damned inconsiderate as to exist in more than one century? Mainly, it’s based on when they did their best or most famous work, or when the most interesting (and awful) things happened to them. With that in mind, let’s look at some of Europe’s more intriguing theatrical escapades in the decades after Shakespeare, both in England and beyond.

  Lope de Vega (1562–1635)

  Affairs, exile, and an armada

  Vega was a key figure in early seventeenth-century Spanish literature and drama. In addition to his other works—including about three thousand sonnets—he is credited with writing at least five hundred plays (some sources say over two thousand), an amazing output when you consider that Shakespeare wrote fewer than forty (that we know of). The quality of Vega’s output varies, which may have to do with how quickly some were produced. He noted that over a hundred of his plays were performed within a day of his conceiving and writing them down!

  He claimed to have written his first play at the age of twelve, and that he could already read and translate Latin by then. In his long career he helped to define Spanish theater by creating a new sense of realism in characters and establishing the Spanish comedy with a definitive three-act form. He is considered Spain’s greatest literary talent after Cervantes.

  After enrolling in the University of Alcalá, north of Madrid, he intended to study for the priesthood but fell for the charms of a young lady and realized that the whole celibacy thing was not going to be an option. In fact, it was so not going to work for him that he spent his life engaging in one scandalous affair after another. After a stint in the navy in the early 1580s, he returned to Madrid to begin a career as a playwright, and also started an affair with an actress, Elena Osorio, who was estranged from her husband. When that ended badly a few years later (she left him for someone else), he wrote rather viciously against her and her family, stating that her brother knew nothing of his profession (a doctor) and implying that her “services” were available for money. These accusations landed him in hot water for libel, which led to his being banished from Castile for two years. This punishment was made easier by the fact that he took his new lover, sixteen-year-old Isabel de Alderete y Urbina, with him. Obviously, her family was not thrilled, and they probably forced him to marry her, along with making him enlist in the navy again in 1588.

  Ah, 1588—that would be the year of the famous Spanish Armada, the one that sailed to England to try to depose Queen Elizabeth I. Yes, poor Lope took part in that ill-fated venture, where the Spaniards were thumped by the disagreeable English and the even more disagreeable English weather. Fortunately for him, he survived and sailed back, tail-between-legs, with his comrades. Once home, he and Isabel moved to Valencia and then Toledo, where he wrote plays for wealthy patrons. She died in childbirth in 1594, so he finally returned to Madrid and remarried, but continued to indulge in affairs.

  The first decades of the seventeenth century saw him reach his creative heights in the employment of the Duke of Sessa. After the death of his second wife, Vega finally decided to become a priest in 1614, but whatever his original intentions, he quickly determined that this little hiccup need not put an end to his affairs. Indeed, he also made the e
ffort to introduce fine young ladies to the duke, which may be one reason that his unpriestly indiscretions were overlooked. He wrote to the duke on one occasion: “I believe I would not have had myself ordained had I believed that I should have to cease serving your Excellency in anything, and especially in those matters in which you take so much pleasure.” Late in life, his son (also named Lope) died in a shipwreck and his daughter ran off with (or was abducted by) and was then abandoned by a nobleman, so unhappiness haunted him, regardless of his literary reputation. He seems to have felt he deserved it after a lifetime of scandals.

  William Davenant (1606–1668)

  Son of a b[ard]?

  Davenant was a rare example of an actor and playwright who had a successful career during the reign of King Charles I, navigated through the Cromwell years, and picked up again late in life to attain more success during the reign of Charles II. He wrote a number of comedies, tragedies, masques, and poems, as well as opera texts (somewhat unintentionally; see below). Along the way, several crazy and not-so-great things happened to him, including contracting syphilis, losing part of his nose, being accused of treason, and being sentenced to death, all of which he weathered and survived long enough to die at a relatively advanced age.

  Before we look at those things, we can start with a mystery concerning Davenant’s birth. Born in Oxford in 1606, he was (allegedly) the son of Jane Shepherd Davenant and John Davenant, who was the proprietor of the Crown Inn and the mayor of Oxford. It was said that William Shakespeare was his godfather, which made for a rather illustrious beginning. Shakespeare, you see, knew the Davenants because he would stop in Oxford on the way to Stratford from London and stay at their inn, at least according to writer and antiquarian John Aubrey (1626–1697). Aubrey recorded that the poet Samuel Butler (1613–1680) commented on the rumor of something more going on. So this account is quickly becoming a “friend of a friend said this” kind of thing, but the story is interesting enough to quote Butler at length:

  Mr. William Shakespeare was wont to go into Warwickshire once a year, and did commonly in his journey lie at this house [the Crown Inn] in Oxon, where he was exceedingly respected…. Now Sir William [Davenant] would sometimes, when he was pleasant over a glass of wine with his most intimate friends—e.g. Sam Butler, author of Hudibras, etc., say, that it seemed to him that he writ with the very spirit that did Shakespeare, and seemed contented enough to be thought his Son. He would tell them the story as above, in which way his mother had a very light report, whereby she was called a Whore.

  The insult to Mrs. Davenant notwithstanding, the story is intriguing. Will almost certainly had not been faithful to Anne Hathaway, and who knows what he might have gotten up to in his travels? If John were away, anything was possible. Perhaps Jane had a dalliance with Will on one of these stopovers and didn’t know for certain who her son’s father was.

  It seems that the rumor circulated in William Davenant’s lifetime and that he did little to discourage it, despite the damage it could have done to his mother’s (and his own) reputation. One story records that, after being knighted by Charles I in 1644, he boldly declared: “Know this, which does honor to my mother—I am the son of Shakespeare.” Some have suggested that he was merely saying that he was “a son of Shakespeare” in the sense of being an heir to the great man’s literary legacy, but this poetic association could have also been a way of concealing the truth. Of course, this story may just be an urban legend.

  Regardless of his uncertain origins, he went on to lead a colorful and rather unsettling life. Sometime in 1630, his adventurous spirit led him to contract syphilis, and either the treatment or the disease itself caused his nose to become disfigured, marring his appearance (a terrible fate for an actor) and leaving him open to ridicule by cruel rivals and critics. One such mockery drove Davenant into a rage. The tormentor, a tapster named Thomas Warren, angered Davenant so much with his insults, that Davenant drew his rapier and stabbed the man, mortally wounding him. Davenant fled to Holland, being accused of murder, but the king eventually pardoned him. In fact, his poetry impressed Charles so much that Davenant was made a poet laureate in 1638 after the death of Ben Jonson (though the title would not become official for a few decades), a tweak on the nose—er, a poke in the eye—to his enemies.

  Davenant was an ardent Royalist and supported the king during the Civil War of the 1640s. Before the war began, he was a part of the Army Plot of 1641, a plan by Royalists to use the army to crush dissent in Parliament and occupy London, as the two sides clashed and prepared for conflict. You may recall that Charles considered himself to be king by divine right, and as such, believed that no one, not even Parliament, could tell him what to do. This didn’t go over too well with a lot of people and directly caused the civil war that followed.

  Davenant was implicated as a conspirator in the plot by those in Parliament loyal to Cromwell. He was accused of treason and had to flee to France. He rather bravely returned during the war, was knighted, and as we saw, may have declared himself to be Shakespeare’s son—maybe it was a patriotic or provocative gesture, given the Puritan dislike for plays? After the king lost the war (and later his head), Davenant once again made a hasty retreat to France. During this stay, he converted to Catholicism; perhaps this was the ultimate act of defiance against the English Puritans now in control of the government?

  Regardless of his religious affiliation, he entered the service of the exiled king-in-waiting, Charles II, who made him lieutenant governor of the Maryland colony in 1651. However, Davenant was captured at sea by English forces, returned to England, and sentenced to death. He languished in the Tower of London, but apparently the poet John Milton (of Paradise Lost fame) spoke up for him, and the Puritans were content to release him in 1652. Among those in the upper classes who opposed Cromwell, there was still a demand for plays, and not one to stay out of trouble, Davenant converted a part of his home into a private theater (since all public playhouses were closed) where he and his colleagues could perform their works to private audiences who were willing to appreciate them.

  He also devised a clever means of producing some works in the 1650s by disguising them in music. Perhaps surprisingly, the Puritan government was more favorably inclined toward music (Cromwell was quite fond of dancing), so by collaborating with composers and basically turning plays into operas, Davenant was able to obtain official permission to show them. One such work, The Siege of Rhodes (recalling the Ottoman Turkish attack on the island in 1522), is generally regarded as England’s first true opera. Another musical play, provocatively titled The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, was actively supported and encouraged by Cromwell and the Puritans as anti-Spanish (and thus anti-Catholic) propaganda. The irony that it was written by a Catholic playwright—two things they detested—was apparently lost on them.

  He was pretty much able to stay out of trouble, but in 1659, he supported an uprising against the government after Oliver Cromwell’s death. He was imprisoned, but amazingly, yet again nothing happened to him and once free, he was able to go back to France; all in the days before the Channel Tunnel. He returned to England for good when Charles was restored to the throne in 1660. With the theaters reopened, Davenant could at last shine once more. He was even granted, along with Thomas Killigrew (more on him next), a monopoly on playhouses and public theater performances; in other words, they had control over what was produced. During his last years, he was noted for reviving, adapting, and producing many of Shakespeare’s plays, and he seemed to make no effort to discourage whatever rumors still circulated about his uncertain parentage. He died rather suddenly in 1668 and was buried in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, a fitting resting place for a man who may have been the son of England’s greatest playwright. Or not.

  Thomas Killigrew (1612–1683)

  Possessed nuns and insults to a king

  English playwright and theater manager Thomas Killigrew was the son of Sir Robert Killigrew, a courtier of King James I, so he had a privilege
d start in life, including becoming a page to King Charles I, but rather than pursuing higher education, he wanted to write plays; so much for respectability. He had a love of the theater from a young age and volunteered as an extra at the Red Bull Theatre in London to be able to view its plays for free. But later on, he took advantage of family money to travel to the continent, gaining life experiences and attempting to write his own plays, including The Prisoners, a tragicomedy about the adventures of a pirate.

  One of Killigrew’s most interesting early experiences was as a witness to the so-called possessed nuns of Loudun, in Poitou, France. This strange affair involved an entire convent of nuns who in 1632 accused a Catholic priest, one Urbain Grandier, of bewitching them, seducing them, and sending demons to them. Now, Grandier had a notorious reputation for womanizing and had even written against clerical celibacy. In doing so, he earned the enmity of the all-powerful Cardinal Richelieu, whom you may remember as a villain from The Three Musketeers.

  In all likelihood, the nuns were faking, having been persuaded to do so by the local bishop or some other clergy in an effort to denounce Grandier; some may have fallen under the influence of mass hysteria and genuinely believed they were being assaulted by diabolical forces. The afflicted did many of the usual things that those possessed by demons are said to do, such as fly into rages, writhe, speak in tongues, scream and shout, and other antisocial activities. Thousands of curious people came to see the allegedly possessed nuns and their exorcisms, and Killigrew left a lengthy account of his visit in 1635. He described one young woman being freed of her demon, and how a name appeared on her arm as it departed: