Shakespeare at forty was, by the expectancies of the day, a man advancing into middle age. ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure.’ He might feel himself slipping towards the fifth of Jaques’s ‘seven ages’ - the portly justice,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances . . .
(As You Like It, 2.7.155-6)
- and one might think this an appropriate mien for the Silver Street marriage-counsellor. There is a theatrical tradition that Shakespeare played old men - the ghost in Hamlet, Adam in As You Like It.25 He was perhaps already balding, as he is in all the known portraits, a condition humorously associated with tonsured friars and sufferers from syphilis - thus prostitutes, in Timon of Athens, ‘make curl’d-pate ruffians bald’ (4.3.162).
Of the portraits only three have any real claim to authenticity - the engraving by Martin Droeshout in the front of the First Folio; the ‘Chandos’ portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, attributed to John Taylor; and the funeral effigy at Holy Trinity, Stratford, attributed to Gheerart Janssen. The first and the last are true likenesses by virtue of their context - they are definitely of Shakespeare - but as portraits they are maddeningly bland and uncommunicative. The funeral bust has been famously described as looking like a ‘self-satisfied pork-butcher’, a judgment laden with Edwardian snobbery but unfortunately apposite. The ‘Chandos’ portrait is not certainly of Shakespeare, but it has a convincing provenance, and a degree of similarity to the other two portraits, and its compellingly saturnine portrayal answers needs which the others leave untouched. In terms of execution, the ‘Chandos’ is the earliest (c. 1610) - the other two are posthumous - but the Droeshout engraving is based on an earlier portrait, now lost, which for various reasons can be plausibly dated back to around 1604.26 Somewhere behind that iconic but incompetent little cartoon which adorns the First Folio is an image of Shakespeare in his early forties - Shakespeare the lodger on Silver Street.
One saw a respectable-looking man but something shadowed that respectability. His status was dubious, tinged with the ambiguous aura of the playhouse, a place associated with moral dangers and depravities as much as with poetry, music and laughter. He was nominally a gentleman - Mr Shakespeare - with a fancy coat of arms which he had purchased on behalf of his father, and which was now his own since his father’s death in 1601. (The motto, ‘Non sanz droict’, was parodied by Jonson as ‘Not without mustard’.) But there were unresolved problems with the Herald’s Office as to the exact nature of his gentility. The herald who had awarded the coat of arms, Sir William Dethick, was under investigation. A note written by one of his antagonists lists some questionable awards, among them ‘Shakespeare ye player’.27 The inference - that a mere player or actor could not really be a gentleman - is a commonplace attitude of the time, and one that rankled in Shakespeare deeply. He expresses bitterness at his ill-starred profession in Sonnet 111:
O for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.
A more genial expression of the matter is found in an epigram addressed to Shakespeare in 1611:
Some say (good Will), which I in sport do sing,
Hadst thou not plaid some kingly parts in sport,
Thou hadst bin a companion for a King.28
To paraphrase, he had ruined his prospects of social advancement by choosing the career of an actor.
If he was a man of substance, it was the substance of money and property. Shakespeare’s earnings were high - estimates vary wildly, but something around £250 a year is plausible. By 1602 he owned three houses in Stratford, and 107 acres of tenanted farmland north of the town; three years later he invested £440 acquiring a ‘moiety’ or half-share in the income of Stratford tithe-lands. 29 These are big sums, conjured out of the ‘insubstantial pageant’ of the playhouse and swiftly solidified into bricks, mortar and land. He did not neglect the small sums, either. In 1604, around the time he was betrothing Stephen and Mary on Silver Street, his lawyers were suing a Stratford neighbour for an outstanding debt of 35s 10d. He would not necessarily agree with Iago’s view that ‘who steals my purse steals trash’ (Othello, 3.3.161).
In an anonymous pamphlet of 1605, Ratsey’s Ghost, a provincial player is advised to go to London and ‘play Hamlet’ for a wager. ‘There thou shalt learn to be frugal . . . and to feed upon all men, to let none feed upon thee; to make thy hand a stranger to thy pocket, and when thou feelest thy purse well lined, buy thee some place or lordship in the country.’ Yes, says the player, ‘I have heard indeed of some that have gone to London very meanly, and have come in time to be exceeding wealthy.’ The author may have had the acquisitive player Mr Shakespeare in mind when he wrote this.30
Jonson jibed at Shakespeare’s pretensions to gentility (at least that is one interpretation of some lines in his 1599 satire Every Man out of his Humour) but when he came to praise Shakespeare in the preface to the First Folio, the first adjective he uses of him is ‘gentle’. This does not necessarily have the softness of its modern meaning - it refers to the perceived qualities of a ‘gentleman’: courtesy, loyalty, probity.
What else do we know of him as he takes up his tenancy on Silver Street? He was a married man, but his wife Anne n’e Hathwey or Hathaway was up in Stratford, rather too distant to impose husbandly virtues on him. He was a father scarred by the death of a child - his only son, Hamnet, had died at the age of eleven in 1596.31 His remaining children were daughters - Susanna, who was twenty in 1603, and Hamnet’s twin sister, Judith. Neither was yet married. The problem of the ‘succession’ which had dogged Queen Elizabeth’s last years had been resolved, but Shakespeare had his own uncertainties of succession.
That he was a man of charm and geniality is attested by many eyewitnesses. In 1592, our first personal notice of him, the author Henry Chettle reported: ‘Myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace of writing, which approves his art.’32 ‘Civil’ in his demeanour and ‘upright’ in his dealing - that was ten years ago, but there is no reason to think he was any less so now. However, one notes the circumstances of this testimonial: some gritting of the teeth may be discernible in Chettle’s compliments, for they are in the nature of a public apology. Shakespeare had complained to him about that notorious passage in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, which tilted furiously at ‘Shakescene’, the ‘upstart crow beautified with our feathers’ (in other words, a mere actor who was presuming to write plays). Ostensibly this was a pamphlet by Robert Greene, edited for publication by Chettle after Greene’s death, though some argue that Chettle cooked up most of it himself. Either way, it was he whom Shakespeare held responsible.33 Chettle also mentions some men ‘of worship’ who have come forward to vouch for Shakespeare - character witnesses, one might say. The description is precise - men ‘of worship’ were inferior to nobles or knights, who were men ‘of honour’: they were gentlemen, citizens, professionals, etc. One adds to Shakespeare’s civility and uprightness a certain steely quality - a young man ready to call on powerful backers, if needed, to assert his ‘honesty’.
Other contemporaries have left testimony, including two out of that mob of minor authors who are as much his literary milieu as the more famous names we remember today. Here is the calligrapher and poet John Davies, writing in praise of ‘W.S.’ and ‘R.B.’, undoubtedly Shakespeare and Burbage:
Players, I love yee and your qualitie,
As ye are men that pass time not abus’d . . .
Wit, courage, good shape, good partes, and all good,
As long as a
ll these goods are no worse us’d;
And though the stage doth staine pure gentle bloud,
Yet generous yee are in minde and moode.34
And in 1604 one ‘An. Sc.’, sometimes identified as Anthony Scoloker, refers to him - on what precise grounds we do not know - as ‘friendly Shakespeare’.35
John Aubrey said he was ‘a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit’. Aubrey could not have seen him - he was born in 1626, ten years after Shakespeare’s death - but he had spoken to those who had. Among his named sources were the Davenant brothers, who had known Shakespeare personally, as children, when he stayed at their father’s tavern, the Crown in Oxford. Sir William Davenant’s testimony is complicated by his claim to be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son (of this more later), but his elder brother, the Rev. Robert Davenant, born in 1603, gives us a childhood memory of uncomplicated warmth. Thus Aubrey: ‘I have heard Parson Robert D say that Mr W. Shakespeare here [at the Crown] gave him a hundred kisses.’36
These are contemporary testimonies of Shakespeare the man - ‘civil’ despite provocation, ‘gentle’ whether or not truly a gentleman, ‘friendly’ to a junior author, lavishly affectionate to a little boy, ‘generous in mind and mood’. They are the upbeat impressions and memories: that there was a darker side must be inferred from his writing. How else could he impersonate so acutely every shade of cruelty and falsehood, every nuance of betrayal, every murky twinge of sexuality? He is not Iago or Edmund or Thersites, but he has found them in himself.
He was, in Jorge Luis Borges’s famous conundrum, ‘many and no one’.37 But that is metaphor. Biography stands by the idea - more prosaic but ultimately more mysterious - that he was someone.
3
Sugar and gall
What was Shakespeare writing during his residency with the Mountjoys in c. 1603-5? There are five plays which belong in that broad time-span. They are, in probable order of composition: Othello, Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well, Timon of Athens and King Lear. A rate of two plays a year is about average for Shakespeare’s working life, and may even reflect an agreed productivity rate as the company’s ‘playmaker’. The cross-currents of composition, rehearsal and rewriting were complex. He was seldom working on less than two plays at once: ideas refract and reverberate between them.
Othello and Measure for Measure can be dated quite precisely. Both have references which suggest Shakespeare was at work on them in 1603, and both were performed at court towards the end of 1604 (their first recorded performances, though not necessarily their first performances).38 By contrast, All’s Well and Timon have no documentary dating. Neither was printed before its appearance in the First Folio of 1623, and no early performances are recorded. (The recording of King’s Men performances is anyway very sketchy: there exists no ledger for the Globe comparable to Philip Henslowe’s diary, which lists performances and box-office takings at the neighbouring Rose.) All’s Well is generally dated to c. 1604 because of its affinities with Measure, and Timon to c. 1605 because its verbal parallels with King Lear seem more likely to be anticipations than echoes.39 Lear itself, that mightiest of works, was first performed at the end of 1606, and its early gestation can also be placed, in a purely topographical sense, on Silver Street.
It is in many ways a curious list. Bookended by two of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies are these three rather odder, less popular works. One could call them ‘experimental’ but Shakespeare was constantly an experimenter, so perhaps one means they are experiments which do not wholly come off.
Measure for Measure and All’s Well are two of that group traditionally called the ‘problem plays’, or the ‘dark comedies’ - also in this group is the earlier Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), which falls outside my defined time-period but belongs with it in mood. The term ‘problem play’ is old fashioned but still more or less serviceable. It was coined by F. S. Boas in 1896, taking a tinge of the chief dramatists of the day, Ibsen and Shaw. Shaw tended showily to disparage Shakespeare, but liked these particular plays, where he found Shakespeare ‘ready and willing to start at the twentieth century if the seventeenth would only let him’40 - as perverse a statement of Shakespeare’s intentions as one could hope to find.
They are ‘problem’ plays because they are hard to categorize. Their tone is elusive, blurred, faintly unwholesome. ‘The air is cheerless,’ in Dover Wilson’s aphoristic summary, and ‘the wit mirthless’. The admirable characters are not entirely likeable, and the likeable characters not at all admirable. The humour is bitter; it has ‘a grating quality which excludes geniality and ensures disturbing after-thoughts’.41 They are also ‘problem plays’ in a more direct sense: plays which deliberately pose problems - ethical conundrums, tangled motives, characters ‘at war ’twixt will and will not’. They continue, in a different register, the mood ushered in by Hamlet at the beginning of the new century - nervy, questioning, ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’; and sickly also in the perception of malaise and corruption beneath the veneer of society: something ‘rotten in the state’. This is a particular theme of Measure for Measure, where the city’s ills lie less in the visible squalor of its prisons and brothels than in the concealed corruption of those in government:
Authority, though it err like others,
Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself
That skins the vice o’ th’ top . . . (2.2.135-7)
The overall quality of these plays is summed up by A. P. Rossiter - one of the most eloquent of the mid-twentieth-century analysts - as ‘shiftingness’:
All the firm points of view or points d’appui fail one, or are felt to be fallible . . . Like Donne’s love-poems, these plays throw opposed and contradictory views into the mind, only to leave the resulting equations without any settled or soothing solutions. They are all about ‘Xs’ that do not work out.
Or as it is sinuously expressed by the sceptical Lafeu in All’s Well: ‘Hence it is that we make trifles of our terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear’ (2.3.3-6).
In formal terms - indeed in terms of theatrical fashion and therefore partly market-driven - these plays are Shakespeare’s experiments in tragicomedy. The term originates with Plautus, the Roman comic dramatist much admired by Shakespeare, who called his play Amphitryon a ‘tragicomoedia’ because it improperly mingled gods and ordinary middle-class Romans. In Shakespeare’s day the new models were Italian writers like Giovanbattista Giraldi Cintio (known in England as Cinthio) and Giovanbattista Guarini, both products of the sophisticated court of Ferrara. The poet and diplomat Guarini, whose pastoral tragicomedy Il Pastor Fido (‘The Faithful Shepherd’) was translated into English in 1602, offers some interesting precepts. ‘True’ tragicomedy, he writes, avoids the ‘great themes’ of tragedy. It is realistic rather than fantastic, it blends ‘contrary qualities’, and it brings the characters through dangers and perplexities - through what he calls the ‘feigned knot’ (il nodo finto) of the story - to happiness.42 These elegant definitions, from an essay published with the English Pastor Fido in 1602, could well have been in Shakespeare’s mind when he was writing All’s Well that Ends Well a year or two later. The very title of the play is a somewhat ironic definition of tragicomedy, though at the end of it the best the King can muster is ‘All seems to be well.’
Hamlet has a humorous comment on these fashionable hybrids, as Polonius struggles to itemize the repertoire of the players newly arrived in Elsinore - they are, he assures us, ‘the best . . . either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical- pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral . . .’ (2.2.397-400).
The keynote of this new kind of tragicomedy is its mingling of disparate tones and emotions - what Guarini calls ‘contrary qualities’. Again Hamlet is a prototype, with its intrusions of sharp and sometimes seamy banter into the traditionally relentless format of Senecan revenge-
tragedy. This is precisely the quality praised in what is probably the earliest surviving critical comment on the play. In his preface to Daiphantus (1604), the mysterious ‘An. Sc.’ hopes his own poem will be popular with the ‘vulgar’ (he means ordinary people; the phrase is not here pejorative), like ‘Shakespeare’s tragedies, where the Comedian rides when the Tragedian stands on tip-toe: faith, it should please all, like Prince Hamlet’.43
In All’s Well, the mingling of tones is particularly elusive. Its central narrative is based on old folk-motifs (‘Healing the King’, ‘The Clever Wench’), and there is a jarring between this fairy-tale tendency and the more modern timbre of scepticism and paradox. We are lulled by the sweet autumnal melancholy of the verse, and then we are laughed at for giving in so easily. With their intrinsic ambiguities, and their testing of credibilities, the problem plays have been called ‘Mannerist’44 - in other words, they share something with the distorted figures and perplexing perspectives of mid-sixteenth-century Italian painters like Parmigianino and Bronzino.
The heyday of Jacobean tragicomedy comes later - Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case, Massinger - but already in 1603 John Marston had produced a very idiosyncratic, urban type of tragicomedy, The Malcontent, which showed how the form could be adapted to the concurrent taste for satire and topicality. This play has analogies with Measure and was probably another spur - a competitive one - to Shakespeare.45
A simple and beautiful synopsis of these plays’ appeal is found in a couplet from Othello -
The Lodger Shakespeare Page 4
