In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  In September 1588 the Queen’s Men lose both their star, Tarlton, and a key patron, Robert Dudley. That autumn, or early the next year, Shakespeare joins the company of Ferdinando, the new Lord Strange, a member of the great Lancashire family of the Stanleys. They probably play summers in Shoreditch and winters at city inns like the Cross Keys, where they are in November 1589. He spends nearly two years with Strange’s Men, and writes Titus Andronicus for them at this time. For Strange he also writes the two plays that begin his great series on English history: The Contention of the Houses of York and Lancaster and Richard Duke of York (which we know as Henry VI Parts 2 and 3). They are his first great successes. Then, in May 1591, Strange’s company splits up. The original core group go to Henslowe’s new Rose theatre south of the river, while the young Richard Burbage, loyal to his father, remains at the Theatre in Shoreditch. Shakespeare stays with him with his scripts, which now include the Henry VI plays, Titus and The Taming of the Shrew. In late 1591 (probably at speed with a collaborator) he writes Henry VI Part 1 – the ‘prequel’ to The Contention, which is acted at the Rose by a company of players from both Strange’s Men and the Admiral’s Men, for whom Edward Alleyn, Marlowe’s star actor, performed the main roles. At this time Shakespeare would have got to know Alleyn and Marlowe personally.

  Then, in 1592, Pembroke’s Men, very likely the missing link in Shakespeare’s still mysterious early career, come into the picture. Shakespeare and Burbage probably act for a while with this company. The Pembroke family are the greatest patrons of poetry at this time – the earl’s young wife Mary had a special interest in drama – and this is the beginning of the relationship with the family, which will last for the rest of Shakespeare’s life.

  A young writer fired by his early success, Shakespeare already has in mind a sequel to the three Henry VI plays, and Richard III may have started life for Strange (in it the poet flatters his patron by inflating the historical role of his ancestors, the Stanleys, at the battle of Bosworth). He perhaps finishes the play in mid- or late 1592 for Pembroke’s Men (the play has a little puff for one of Pembroke’s ancestors too). But the following spring a devastating outbreak of plague, in which more than 10,000 people died, hits London. The theatres are immediately closed for fear of contagion; in the summer Pembroke’s Men find themselves out of work and the company folds. Just turned twenty-nine, Shakespeare is forced to seek a new patron and another source of income. In the winter of 1593–4, he and Burbage work for Sussex’s Men. Finally in May 1594 they both join the newly formed Chamberlain’s Men with old friends and colleagues from Strange’s Men, and return to The Theatre in Shoreditch. From now on we are on firm ground. From confusion and speculation we can move to a clearer narrative of Shakespeare’s career as a professional writer.

  INSECURITY AND LOYALTY

  The hypothetical picture above gives a rough idea of the wheeler-dealing by which Shakespeare built up a career, finally committing himself at the age of thirty to the Chamberlain’s Men with a group of actors and entrepreneurs whom he had known for a long time. In those early years there were a number of theatre owners, several noble patrons and lots of companies – as many as thirty are recorded from that time. But the circle of actors and writers in London can never have comprised more than a couple of hundred people. In this little world of shifting groupings Shakespeare worked for more than one entrepreneur and his plays passed through the hands of more than one company. He swapped patrons and theatres, sometimes with rival companies playing the same building. Living at times hand to mouth, it was a precarious profession: companies folded, the plague struck, the city authorities clamped down, theatres were closed. A steady income was never guaranteed. You lived on your wits.

  Shakespeare’s early professional career, then, was like that of any writer in theatre or film today, working for a number of masters. But loyalty to the group was very important. And for some reason, perhaps simply because they liked and trusted each other, the Burbages were his preferred people, although no one yet knows how the relationship started.

  THE EARLY PLAYS: RIVERS OF BLOOD AND SHAGGY DOG STORIES

  The order in which the young Shakespeare wrote his first hits is largely speculation. As we have seen, the earliest tragedy was Titus Andronicus. The latest linguistic analysis suggests that this was a collaboration with another writer, George Peele, who wrote for the Queen’s Men. It’s a young man’s play full of rhetoric and violence, the Elizabethan equivalent of a Quentin Tarantino movie. No doubt those in the cheaper seats loved all the blood and guts – but then they saw it in the streets outside every day. Heads are cut off and eyes gouged out in other Elizabethan plays, of course, but there is something peculiar about Shakespearean violence and aggression. Gentle Will he may have been to his friends, but a key part of his psychology is aggression and violence, as when Marcus discovers his mutilated daughter:

  Why dost thou not speak to me?

  Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,

  Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind,

  Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips

  Titus is so grotesque and horrible that earlier generations than our own found it hard to believe that it was really Shakespeare who wrote it. But this was the rhetoric of the time: a shadowing of speeches made on the scaffold before even more terrible violations of the human body were done for real as punishment and edification – another kind of public theatre. When Olivier played Titus in Poland in the late 1950s the play was seen as true to life by packed audiences, for whom nothing in it seemed improbable in the light of the unexampled cruelties of the midtwentieth century. If anything, the ornate control of the verse keeps the lid on the horrors, as it does in the sonorous Latin of his model, the Roman Seneca.

  Shakespeare also wrote lyrical romantic pieces at this period. Maybe The Two Gentlemen of Verona (or at least an earlier version of it) is another youthful play – perhaps even his first solo effort. The accomplished elegance of the verse shows he had developed his writing skills and suggests considerable experience as a jobbing man of the theatre. But the play is dramatically unambitious and he has not yet learned how to use his actors. It does contain beautiful poetry, however, including the famous speech that capitivated Viola de Lesseps, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character in the film Shakespeare in Love:

  What light is light if Silvia be not seen?

  What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by –

  Unless it be to think that she is by,

  And feed upon the shadow of perfection.

  Except I be with Silvia in the night

  There is no music in the nightingale

  The prose of the comic Launce, on the other hand, sounds like something straight out of a Stratford guildhall show, written in the Elizabethan equivalent of a Birmingham accent: ‘I think Crab, my dog, be the sourest-natured dog that lives. My mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel hearted cur shed one tear. He is a stone, a very pebble-stone, and has no more pity in him than a dog ….’ There follow twenty lines piling misconstruings on top of each other as Launce plays out for the audience what is literally a shaggy dog story: ‘This hat is Nan our maid. I am the dog. No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog. O, the dog is me, and I am myself ….’

  And so on, for as long as the performer could milk the audience. A speech like this is simply the fossilized record of a fluid text done ‘extempore’, as he would have said. The success of the scene depended on the improvising skills of the clown and his ability to play the crowd. The clowns were the stars of the first main phase of the professional theatre, before the great tragedians like Alleyn took over. The best of them was the Queen’s Men’s Tarlton, who died in September 1588, and was so funny that on one memorable occasion the queen had to ask him to leave the stage because she was laughing so much. Many of his gags became staples for the next generation; and one of them, as it happens, concerned a dog. Cra
b’s scene-stealing non-speaking role was never repeated by Shakespeare: it is his only part for a dog. So was Two Gentlemen a version of a show originally written for the Queen’s Men and Tarlton – or did Shakespeare simply take the gag from an old Tarlton show, recycling it for his own company after the clown’s death? This seems more likely. Perhaps Shakespeare was harking back to a great comic act, rather as a modern West End show might bring, say, Morecambe and Wise back to life. But, wisely, it was not a trick he would play twice. Legends are best left alone.

  A MASTER OF BOTH COMEDY AND HISTORY

  Although his early hits were history, not comedy, Shakespeare’s essential bent is comic – he can’t resist it, even in tragedy. His contemporaries thought him ‘best for comedy’. Unsurprisingly, not all his jokes have stood the test of time. Some are topical, some are in-jokes, some depend on the sort of word play beloved of Elizabethans but that can strike us as rather laboured today, especially when he is sucking up to the literary pretensions of an aristocratic or legal audience. But what is so wonderful is that in our modern world so much of Shakespeare is still such great fun, even when he is in tragic mode. Indeed, it is perhaps his sense of comedy that makes his tragedies work so well on stage. These days we may not understand all his words, nor did they get everything at the Theatre or the Globe, of course; but in the twenty-first century Shakespeare at his best is still the most fun we can have in a theatre.

  Nevertheless it would be with histories, not with tragedies or comedies, that Shakespeare would overtake Marlowe and soon have his rival chasing him, imitating him. Eventually his brand of history would run the Queen’s Men out of town and out of business. Especially in the aftermath of the Armada, there was a big nationwide audience, built up by the Queen’s Men’s ceaseless tours, for plays dramatizing the national story. This was where Shakespeare’s interests lay.

  His Henry VI plays began a brilliant sequence for which he quarried the Tudor chroniclers of the Wars of the Roses, Hall and Holinshed. Yet Shakespeare’s obsession with history was surely driven not only by the box office but by his own psychology. He had been brought up with stories of old England and its kings, the medieval Catholic past, the splendour and cruelties of English history, and he loved them. But even when he was only in his mid-twenties, his plays could be distinguished from the Queen’s Men’s propaganda. He had an instinctive feel for the complexities of history, where right and wrong exist on both sides and where a multiple perspective can suggest the chaotic reality, the ‘pressure of the time’.

  His fascination with history would lead him to write, by 1593, the most ambitious theatrical entertainment written by a single artist since the ancient Greeks. The only parallel in English was the Mystery Cycle, whose conventions were now plundered by him for secular passion plays – plays in which Richard of York, scourged with a paper crown and chastising Queen Margaret as a ‘tiger’s heart in a woman’s hide’, would become a new Man of Sorrows. Shakespeare was in the process of a journey from Mystery through History to Tragedy.

  MAKING IT

  But still there is no certain mention of him by name. In late 1590 there is an intriguing reference in print by Edmund Spenser, author of the The Faerie Queene. That December Spenser’s Teares of the Muses appeared, with an address to Lady Alice Strange, a renowned literary patron and wife of Shakespeare’s Ferdinando. In it Spenser praises ‘our pleasant Willy’ as a brilliant writer who, mysteriously, ‘dead of late … chooses to sit in an idle cell than so himself to mockery sell’. As Shakespeare was quite possibly in Strange’s service at this moment, does this refer to him? And if so, what does ‘dead of late’ mean and what ‘mockery’ had he suffered? Given that Shakespeare was soon to receive a critical mauling at the hands of one of London’s most famous pamphleteers, Robert Greene, it may be that in 1590 he had already excited the jealousy of his rivals.

  The previous summer, the preface to Greene’s Menaphon addressed ‘to the gentlemen of both universities’ by his journalist friend Thomas Nashe had sneered at the ‘very mechanical mates … [who] in servile imitation of vainglorious tragedians … leave the trade of noverint [lawyer’s clerk] whereto they were born and busy themselves with endeavours of art’. He talks of those who ‘could scarcely latinise their neck verse’ yet try to write ‘English Seneca … afford you whole Hamlets … imitate the Kidde [in] home born mediocrity …’. While ostensibly aimed at Kyd, the attack is in the plural – on more than one playwright who is imitating ‘vainglorious tragedians’. And none was more up and coming than the man who, that year perhaps, had done that exercise in English Seneca, Titus Andronicus.

  The next year, 1591, Spenser may mention Shakespeare again in a discussion of contemporary poets, this time wrapping him in a classical metaphor: ‘last but not least Aetion … a gentler shepherd may no where be found, whose Muse full of high thoughts invention doth like himself heroically sound’. That word ‘gentle’ stuck with him all the way through. And if this description is indeed of Shakespeare, Spenser’s remarks are very important because they show he was no longer just a theatrical jobber but was recognized as a man with a gift. Everywhere now English poetry was felt to be on the rise, and for the movers and shakers, patrons like the Stranges and the Herberts and practitioners like Spenser, new and extraordinary talent was something they wanted to foster. Shakespeare was now a fully fledged poet.

  On stage Shakespeare was soon outdoing Marlowe: even his early plays exhibited deeper moral concerns than Marlowe’s. Their styles, of course, are very distinctive: Shakespeare had a more natural feel for ordinary people and their speech – an enviable common touch. And Shakespeare also had a feel for what his audiences liked. He knew a good story when he saw it; whereas Marlowe’s choice of material, though always interesting, was not always entirely successful. When, for example, Marlowe tried to outdo Shakespeare with a history play, Edward II, he chose a reign oddly lacking in significance and a plot that cannot have endeared him to some in high places. Shakespeare, on the other hand, was always careful in his choice of plots: very few don’t work. In fact the only one that doesn’t, Timon of Athens, he sets aside unfinished. He was a derivative writer in the best sense, usually borrowing and adapting an existing plot and always going after the inherited, ‘right’ way of working it, with a great feel for the basics of storytelling. Also, although some of his contemporaries denied it, he paid close attention to structure. He must have known the debate in Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie on how to construct a dramatic plot, with, for example, its dissection of Euripides’s Hecuba, which Shakespeare may have studied at school.

  Probably already picked out by Spenser, ‘our Willy’ was shaping up as a talented young artist with a winning manner. In contrast to Marlowe’s arrogance, class envy and atheism, Shakespeare was ‘smooth’, ‘honey tongued’ and ‘sweet’. From the start he knew what his patrons liked, and, as he said later through the mouthpiece of his Prospero, the aim of his project was above all ‘to please’.

  FOREIGN WAR

  He was not a man to court controversy. The early 1590s were edgy times to be an artist: the theatre was increasingly viewed with suspicion by the city authorities; there were fanatics on all sides, and Elizabeth was as worried about Puritan extremists as she was about the Catholic underground. There were strange prophecies and unsettling news stories. On 19 July 1591, a crazed Puritan fanatic, William Hacket, who had proclaimed himself the Messiah from a cart in Cheapside, was hanged, drawn and quartered.

  That year English armies were fighting in France and Ireland, and alongside the Protestants who were struggling to gain independence from their Spanish overlords in the Netherlands. Here and in Normandy the Spanish were close to establishing bases from which they could mount a far more effective invasion of England than they had in 1588. Rumours abounded of another Armada. At home, out of work war veterans, many maimed or crippled, were to be seen everywhere on the roads, even between Stratford and Warwick. Huge numbers of people were on poor relief. All this added to a g
rowing public mood of disillusionment with the regime.

  Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s government was still prosecuting the war against internal and external enemies. That winter further English contingents were raised and sent to help their Dutch allies in the Low Countries. Elizabeth’s state archive in the Public Record Office contains lists of payments to secret agents, along with the keys to their ciphers. Robin Poley, one of the most dangerous of them, turns up in Brussels, Antwerp and Flushing ‘on her majesty’s secret business’. Marlowe, too, was swimming in these dangerous waters at this time. For while his plays were packing in audiences at the Rose in London, in December, in his other role as a secret agent, he went to Flushing.

  Looking out over the wide, sandy estuary of the Schelde, the fortified town of Flushing was a solid point amid miles of marshy shores and a hinterland plagued by malaria, which had killed far more English troops than had enemy action (among them the poet Philip Sidney, whose brother was now English governor in Flushing). It was the entry point for the English forces: munitions, supplies, profiteers and double agents all came through here. And that winter, already charged and acquitted in one murder case, Marlowe was arrested on more dangerous charges: an informer with whom he had shared a room had reported that he had talked about going over to the Catholic side, and that he had been experimenting with counterfeiting money. The charges may seem unbelievable, and possibly were trumped up. But then Marlowe was a man who sailed close to the wind in more than just his penchant for tobacco and boys. Evidently someone thought the wind he was catching was the Counter Reformation blowing from Rome. After an interview with the governor he was sent back by sea to England, to face his spymaster Walsingham.