In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  He stayed at the Bell near St Paul’s, from where he wrote a letter to his ‘Loving good friend and countryman Mr. Wm Shackespere’, asking for help with a loan of £30 – not for the corporation’s expenses, but for his own debts: ‘You shall friend me much in helping me out of all the debts I owe in London, I thank God, and much quiet my mind, which would not be indebted.’ Quiney’s letter, good evidence for the language used between friends from the same town, appears to be about a private loan on which Quiney offered sureties and interest. Shakespeare agreed to help, for on 4 November, Quiney wrote to a Stratford friend, ‘that our countryman Mr. Wm. Shak. Would procure us money’, even though the conditions of the loan had not been agreed. Shakespeare was obviously seen as one of the wealthier townsmen of Stratford, and, like his father, was happy to lend money as part of his business.

  The sequel to Quiney’s visit was happy. The queen agreed to relieve ‘this town twice afflicted and almost wasted by fire’ and the government reimbursed Quiney for his expenses on his London trip. The Quineys and the Shakespeares stayed close: Richard’s son Thomas would marry William’s daughter Judith – although the union was not, as it turned out, a fortunate one.

  Such visits remind us that through friends, or by the local carriers, the Greenaways, William would have sent letters home – instructions for the builders at New Place, for example, on the purchase of stone, or to his lawyer regarding court cases. He would have received letters, too, from his daughter Susanna, for instance, who was literate, and from his wife, Anne, if she could write – she would have perhaps dictated to Susanna if not. Country gifts, too, were customary: Warwickshire cheeses, a new linen shirt, new gloves, useful things for the city. And, along with the news of the troubles of the town, there would have come more intimate pieces of gossip. Their next-door neighbour and friend, the draper George Badger, was fined £5 after many warnings ‘for his wilful refusing to come to the hall’. Badger was a staunch Catholic who paid his fines and went to prison for recusancy, and was eventually deprived of his alderman’s gown as John Shakespeare had been. There had been a great fuss in town that September when Badger had been elected bailiff, ‘thought by the greatest number of aldermen to be the meetest man’; his refusal to attend cost him another £100.

  And there was no doubt smaller gossip too: Anne’s concern for the affairs of her father’s old shepherd Thomas Whittington, who was now retired and living with the Paces in Shottery; John Smith’s fine for sowing woad (for dyeing) in the chapel orchard; players’ companies still coming through. The stuff of small-town life. Who’s in, who’s out. As well as writing and playing, this too was still Shakespeare’s life, the strong pull of his ‘countrymen’, his background, which would eventually draw him back home.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AMBITION: THE GLOBE

  IN 1599 SHAKESPEARE was at the mid-point of his career. Already recognized by his peers as the best at both comedy and tragedy, now, in his mid-thirties, he entered an incredibly fertile, creative phase. This was no doubt partly due to changes in his personal life about which we cannot know: age, experience, new influences and, as we have seen, loss, which has been a catalyst in the lives of many great poets. But these changes also came about because of professional pressures – in particular Shakespeare’s response to a new wave of mostly younger dramatists who challenged his supremacy just at the point when he had achieved mastery of his drama of personality. But whilst getting bums on seats was still a prime motivation, another challenge now seemed to be assuming greater importance: an artistic and psychological ambition. He was now on the artist’s journey into the interior.

  The first fruit was a quartet of great plays. Henry If As You Like It, Julius Caesar and Hamlet were all being written or drafted that year. Shakespeare would prove himself a master of all forms – history, comedy, satire and tragedy – and it was in this next year or two that he turned to tragedy. Between 1598 and 1601 his art took a leap forward as his verse became much more accomplished; there was a toughening of the language, a new freedom of metaphor and allusion, and a freer handling of the rhythm of the verse line. In this change he was pushed by his rivals, just as Marlowe had earlier driven him. A string of new faces – Marston, Jonson, Chapman and later Middleton – were all experimenting with genres and styles.

  Important too at this time were changes in the companies and playhouses. From this time, and for much of the next decade, his rivals were not only the companies he had always competed with but the new boys’ companies that used indoor theatres, artificial light and elaborate stage effects. To sophisticated audiences the newly reopened theatre of the Paul’s Boys by the Cathedral, and the indoor Blackfriars, were more appealing than the rowdy popular theatre – the ‘common stages’, as the shows of Shakespeare and his colleagues were called – up in the suburbs in Shoreditch.

  In all this creative ferment, one particular relationship deserves to be singled out. It made its mark in many ways, on and off stage, but in one area of influence it was particularly fascinating. Did Shakespeare come into direct contact with the greatest drama of the ancient world, Greek tragedy, both through Latin versions and through stage productions in London? If so, the catalyst was a cantankerous, turbulent black dog of a man called Ben Jonson.

  THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD: ENTER BEN JONSON

  In the autumn of 1598 the bricklayer, classicist and playwright Ben Jonson killed an actor called Gabriel Spencer with a rapier in a duel in Shoreditch Fields. (They were both irascible sorts: only a few months previously Spencer himself had killed a man in his lodging house in Holywell Street.) At his trial Jonson was found guilty of ‘felonious and wilful killing’; he saved his skin only by reciting what were known as ‘neck verses’ (Psalm 51) in Latin and pleading benefit of clergy, which by long tradition enabled a convicted criminal to pass as a clergyman and so obtain a discharge from the civil courts. Latin was Ben’s thing: it saved him, and it made him.

  Now branded with the ‘Tyburn T’ on his thumb, Jonson touted round for work. Down on his luck, and never an easy man to work with (he notoriously bit the hand that fed him), he sent a script to the Chamberlain’s Men. Shakespeare, according to a late but plausible story, saw his talent and gave him a chance. So during the winter of 1598–9 Jonson worked for Shakespeare’s company and got to know him. His first play, Every Man in His Humour, was staged that autumn at the Curtain in Shoreditch. Shakespeare may even have had a hand in retouching the script for the stage.

  It was said later that, although Shakespeare had been generous to him, Jonson ‘had not returned the same gentleness’. Jonson was passionate to a fault about the moral and didactic role of theatre, and about the craft required to write for it. Fiercely sure of his literary judgements, although he owed his break to Shakespeare, he thought his colleague’s shows broke all the classical rules of action, place and time: they were not made with appropriate craftsmanship. Still a paid-up member of the bricklayers’ guild, he saw poetry in the same light: after building it up from the sound foundation of a prose draft, he then worked it into verse carefully loaded with Latinisms. In print he even supplied his plays with footnotes to make sure the reader got all his clever references. So when Jonson said later of Shakespeare that he never blotted a line, he meant it to be taken as admiration, but also as criticism.

  Jonson’s influence was not only theatrical. As with all creative relationships in the arts, he seems to have spurred on Shakespeare’s ideas and his reading. After 1598 Shakespeare’s use of classical sources changed and broadened; he had a very strong ego and almost always took up artistic challenges. Their relationship would last until Shakespeare’s death, but it was notoriously prickly. Jonson wrote later that he had loved him ‘this side idolatry’ and generously compared him with the ancients. But even in his first play he made snide remarks at Shakespeare’s pretensions to gentility, mocking his newly acquired coat of arms. In a later preface to Every Man in His Humour, he derided those authors who

  with three rusty swo
rds,

  And help of some few foot-and-half foot words,

  Fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars.

  and offered instead, with a swipe at Shakespeare’s Henry V, a new kind of play

  Where neither Chorus wafts you o’er the seas;

  Nor creaking throne comes down, the boys to please;

  Although from the same social class as Shakespeare, Jonson saw himself as a scholar, a Latinist. He had a remarkable library of Greek and Latin classics, and was consulted by scholars of the day. That was his province and he saw the magpie Shakespeare, with his grammar school Greek and Latin, as a lesser light. Shakespeare could take offence at slights on his character, but seems to have taken Jonson’s rumblings in good part. A famous joke at his own expense bears a ring of truth. At the baptism of Jonson’s son, Shakespeare stood godfather. Asked what he would give the boy as a present, he suggested some silver alloy (latten) christening spoons: ‘I’ll get him some latten spoons. Then Ben can translate them for me.’

  Jonson commonly lent books to his friends and surely did so to Shakespeare. For Julius Caesar, written in early 1599, Shakespeare almost certainly used Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis; and while he may have known Erasmus’s Latin translation at school, the fact that he was writing the play when working with Jonson suggests that he might have borrowed a copy from him. Equally exciting is the possibility that at this time he read Aeschylus, the most ‘mighty line’ of the ancients and the nearest to the Elizabethans in poetic style. This could have been through a Latin printed version owned by Jonson, but it is also possible that in 1599 Shakespeare could have seen an adaptation of Aeschlyus’s greatest tragedy on the London stage. This was the moment when he started to write the first of his great tragedies, Hamlet.

  That year at the Rose on Bankside the Admiral’s Men put on two plays telling the tale of the murder of Agamemnon on his return from Troy, and the revenge and madness of his son Orestes. The texts were probably by Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle, working on a script left to the company by Jonson and tinkered with by George Chapman, who had recently published the first part of his famous translation of Homer’s Iliad. In the close-knit world of literary London the Greek classics were in the air, the ‘must-reads’ on everyone’s list. Dekker, for one, excitedly boasted of his knowledge of ‘the real thing’. The Rose plays were called Agamemnon and Orestes’ Furies – titles that match those in the most accessible Latin version of Aeschylus’s Oresteia.

  Shakespeare’s Euripidean parallels have long been noticed. Dryden was the first to see his debt to Iphigenia in Julius Caesar. For two centuries now scholars have also noticed close parallels between Hamlet and the Oresteia. These were once attributed to ‘archetypal patterns’; but Shakespeare was a conscious artist who rifled many sources for his inspiration and plots, and it is much more likely that he simply borrowed from one of the greatest of all works of literature. In Hamlet the graveyard scene and the closet scene, neither of which has a parallel in the source texts, seem directly inspired by the Orestes story It is hard not to think that Shakespeare had actually seen it on stage, or read the parallel scenes in Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers (Henri Estienne’s edition had a very user-friendly crib whose Latin was well within Shakespeare’s compass).

  Equally suggestive is the role of Hamlet’s faithful friend Horatio, crucial in building the audience’s sympathy for Hamlet but again absent in the play’s sources. Horatio effectively plays the role of Pylades, the faithful friend who supports the wavering revenger Orestes in both Aeschylus and Euripides (the latter Jonson we know had in his library). Dekker and Chettle’s plays have not survived, but even a rough literal translation of the 1550 Latin version of Euripides’s Orestes gives an inkling of what the audience heard at the Rose in 1599:

  Oh good Pylades

  Nothing is better than a loyal friend

  Not gold, nor kingdoms sure can weigh against

  A noble heart, a true and generous friend.

  Through every danger you have been my guide

  And now again do spur my fit revenge

  And still are by my side. But yet give pause;

  To speak your virtues more would be offence

  And I will cease before I praise too much.

  This surely reveals the source of one section of the play that Shakespeare was writing in 1599–1600: this is Hamlet speaking to Horatio. The same goes for the scene in the bedchamber with his mother Gertrude, over which hangs the shadow of sex and death; but despite Gertrude’s remarks, it is modelled not, as Freudians have said, on the tale of Oedipus, but on that of Orestes.

  In short, Shakespeare, like a top scriptwriter today, was a professional through and through. He had perhaps read Latin versions from Jonson’s library, and more than likely sat in the audience at the Rose and saw Dekker and Chettle’s shows. The impact, even in Chettle’s journeyman versifying, is likely to have been as powerful as it always is when the greatest works of literature are encountered. In the Greek drama, fate and human destiny allow no room for Christian providence and the audience is left with the remorseless power of the gods. Our failure to understand the true nature of the gods – all too human as it is – is no excuse, any more than it will be in King Lear. As the unforgiving Dionysus tells humankind in the Bacchae, ‘You understood too late’.

  This is an area of Shakespeare’s creative process of which next to nothing is known, but it is perhaps no accident that his friends praised him as fit to stand beside the ancient tragedians. These recent discoveries perhaps help to explain how Shakespeare came to write full-blown tragedy in the Greek spirit. For this was precisely the territory into which his ambition would now lead him.

  YESTERDAY SHOREDITCH, TOMORROW THE GLOBE

  He would make that journey with, for the first time in three years, stability in his professional career: as a shareholder in a new playhouse owned by the company. In the winter of 1598–9 Shakespeare and his colleagues decided to make a permanent move south of the river. By Christmas, the long-running feud over the company’s lease in Shoreditch had reached an acrimonious impasse. Their landlord, Giles Allen, was now demanding not only his plot of land but the fabric of the theatre that stood on it. John Hemmings’ friend and neighbour, the merchant Nicholas Brend, had just inherited a plot of land 100 yards from the Rose in Maiden Lane on Bankside. They secured an option on a lease, and decided to take advantage of the Christmas holiday. On the night of 28 December, with snow falling and the Thames freezing over, the Burbages, together with the most experienced theatrical carpenter in London, the contractor for the Rose, Peter Street, plus a dozen workmen and a few armed heavies, marched up to Shoreditch and set about dismantling the Theatre. (This, in fact, was as per their lease, which had permitted old James Burbage to ‘take down the buildings he might erect’.) Over the next few days they carted the pieces through the city and across the frozen river to the new site where, over the next six months, the Theatre would be rebuilt as the Globe.

  Early in 1599 the Warwickshire mafia organized a business plan for the new theatre. The rebuilding would be an expensive undertaking and they were still leasing the Curtain for their daily shows, so backers were needed. They approached two Aldermanbury contacts, the merchant William Leveson and Thomas Savage, a goldsmith neighbour of Hemmings and Condell (in one of whose houses Hemmings lived). The Savage connection may have dated back all the way to Strange’s company, for Savage was a Lancashire man from Rufford, the Heskeths’ home village, and his wife was a Hesketh. Then a share issue was made, half to the Burbages, the other half going as one-tenth each to Shakespeare, Hemmings, Condell, Sly and Philips. On 21 February a thirty-one-year lease was signed and construction began.

  The site consisted of seven gardens abutting the Bishop of Winchester’s park, bounded by the old park ditch which was now used for sewerage and drainage. On it stood a house and a row of decaying tenements with fifteen residents. The site was liable to flood at the time of the spring tides because the Thames had no emban
kment, so the theatre had to be constructed on a 130-foot-long wharf of timber piles partly driven into the sewer ditch, which was bridged for audience access. No wonder Jonson called the Globe ‘flanked with a ditch and forced out of a marsh’.

  The site was recently located at the junction of today’s Park Street under Southwark Bridge Road. A small excavation was able to determine the exact shape and size of the theatre, which was polygonal (possibly with twenty-four sides), 100 feet across, with a stage almost 50 feet wide, a pit and three galleries. Capacity was an amazing 3300 people – virtually double that of its modern successor on Bankside. Over the stage was a gabled lantern and the motto Totus mundus agit histrionem, which, loosely translated, means ‘All the world’s a stage’. A house was constructed next door; a recently discovered post-mortem document of Brend senior, dated 17 July that year, refers to the ‘newly built house with a garden in the occupation of William Shakespeare and others’.

  It had many advantages over Shoreditch: the site was also out of the jurisdiction of the city, but it could be reached in a few minutes by river taxi from Blackfriars and the inns of court; it was close to the bear pit and the bull baiting; the brothels and inns of Southwark were also nearby, crowded around St Saviour’s at the end of London Bridge. Recently, archaeologists have added grim immediacy to our picture of the area and its varied entertainment industries: the latest excavations around Bear Garden Lane have unearthed the skulls of mastiffs smashed by the chained bears; the bones of old blind bears torn to bits by the dogs; and a thick layer of hazelnuts, the equivalent of popcorn for an Elizabethan matinee crowd.