Shakespeare had been writing plays for five or six years before one of them, Titus Andronicus, was finally published in 1594. Its title page advertised the names of the playing companies who had performed it, not who wrote it. This was typical. Even the most celebrated plays by the most popular Elizabethan dramatists appeared anonymously. We have no documentary evidence that Christopher Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine, and if not for a casual allusion by Thomas Heywood in the early seventeenth century, Thomas Kyd’s name would not be linked to his masterpiece from the late 1580s, The Spanish Tragedy. We still don’t know who wrote some of the finest plays of the period – including Mucedorus, Arden of Faversham and Edward the Third. Still, we are lucky that they have survived at all, for only six hundred or so of the estimated three thousand plays staged between the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1558 and the closing of the theatres in 1642 were ever printed. A large percentage of those that found their way into print nonetheless remained anonymous and none of these, so far as anyone knows, was published under an assumed name. It would have been pointless to do so. For a playwright anxious about being identified on the title page of a play – fearing punishment for seditious words or imagining that publishing carried a social stigma – the simplest and obvious course of action was to do nothing: allow the play, like so many others, to reach London’s bookstalls without a name attached to it. Nobody would notice and nobody would care.
If an Elizabethan writer insisted on having a pseudonym appear on a title page of a published quarto, and could somehow persuade a publisher to put it there, the worst possible moment to do so was 1598. In that year the Privy Council briefly shut down the public playhouses in the wake of The Isle of Dogs, a scandalous play that landed both Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe, who collaborated on it, in serious trouble. And if you were going to put someone else’s name on a play, nothing could be more foolish than to use a real person’s name, especially that of someone highly visible, such as an actor who could easily be hauled in and questioned. The memory of Thomas Kyd’s brutal interrogation by the authorities five years earlier would have weighed heavily on anyone who might contemplate serving as a front for another writer. Kyd, who unluckily had shared writing quarters with Marlowe, was put on the rack and tortured, and died within a year or so, but not before telling interrogators hunting down the source of anti-alien propaganda all that they wanted to know about Marlowe and his beliefs.
Yet 1598 turned out to be the very year that two publishers independently decided that Shakespeare’s popularity had reached the point where it was profitable to put his name on the title page of his plays. That year, Cuthbert Burby brought out a ‘newly corrected and augmented’ edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost by ‘W. Shakespere’, while Valentine Simmes published second editions of Richard the Third and Richard the Second (both by ‘William Shake-speare’). If anyone wanted to signal through a wink and nod that a name was pseudonymous, confirmed by that hyphen, it would have helped to be consistent. Yet Burby and Simmes didn’t spell Shakespeare’s name the same way, and it wasn’t because only one of them had been tipped off about inserting that hyphen. If there really was a conspiracy and ‘Shake-speare’ a pseudonym, a score of publishers who at various times over a quarter-century owned and published Shakespeare’s works, and then their various printers and compositors, and then those to whom they sold their rights, would each in turn have had to be let in on the secret – and carried it to the grave. Pseudonymous publication requires both consistency and a degree of control over the printed word; the uneven publication of Shakespeare’s plays didn’t allow for either. Some plays, like Richard the Third and The Merry Wives of Windsor, bore Shakespeare’s name from the outset. Others, like Richard the Second, first lacked it, then added it. Still others, including Romeo and Juliet and Henry the Fifth, were never published under Shakespeare’s name during his lifetime.
Where his name does appear on the title pages of these early editions, it was variously spelled ‘Shakspere’, ‘Shake-speare’ and ‘Shakespeare’. There’s no pattern. Spelling simply wasn’t uniform at the time. Shakespeare himself didn’t even spell his own name the same way. On his will alone (which bears his signature on each page) he spelled it ‘Shakspere’ on the first two pages and ‘Shakspeare’ on the last one. As Marlovians and Oxfordians well know, the names of their candidates were also spelled variously at the time. Alan Nelson has pointed out that Oxford spelled a word like ‘halfpenny’ eleven different ways, but this doesn’t suggest that de Vere was barely literate, any more than claims about Shakespeare’s spelling habits should. The author’s name on the first quarto of Hamlet is spelled ‘William Shake-speare’; the second quarto, published a year later, reads ‘William Shakespeare’. Others heard and spelled his name differently, including whoever recorded the Revels Account for performances at Whitehall Palace during the Christmas season of 1604. Listed there alongside the ten plays performed by the King’s Men are the names of the ‘poets which made the plays’: ‘Shaxberd’ is written alongside Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors and The Merchant of Venice – yet another inventive spelling and at the same time powerful evidence ascribing to him the authorship of these plays.
Early editions of Shakespeare’s plays contain additional clues about the identity of their author. Playing companies turned over to printers different sorts of manuscripts. Scholars have spent lifetimes poring over the resulting printed texts, reconstructing from the smallest details the lost originals – whether one play or an other was printed from ‘foul papers’ (an early modern term for an author’s rough draft), ‘fair copy’ (an author’s or more likely a scribe’s neater transcription of that earlier draft) or ‘prompt copy’ (either foul or fair copy that would have been marked up and used in the playhouse). Plays set from ‘foul papers’ often reveal a great deal about an author’s writing habits.
An Elizabethan playwright had to devote a good deal of his attention to mundane concerns: which actors in the playing company were available, how many roles had to be doubled (for there were far more roles than performers in each of his plays), and how to get them onstage and offstage, or from a balcony to the main stage, or through costume changes, on time. All this is vastly more complicated than it seems, and as someone who for much of his career acted in the plays he wrote alongside those for whom he wrote the other parts, Shakespeare had a decided advantage over freelance dramatists.
For most of his professional life, Shakespeare wrote for an unusually stable and prosperous company, named the Chamberlain’s Men from their formation in 1594, and after King James came to the throne in 1603, rechristened the King’s Men. Shakespeare knew that every play he wrote had to include significant roles for the half-dozen or so shareholders in the company, actors all, including himself. Other roles would go to hired men, some of whom worked with the company for years, others sporadically. And then, of course, there were the two or three boys who played female roles, since women were not allowed to perform on the Elizabethan stage. These boys were only around until maturity, when their voices and bodies changed; so there was quite a bit of turnover, making life especially difficult for a playwright who had to depend on the capabilities of those working for the company at any given moment. You couldn’t write Rosalind’s part in As You Like It unless you had absolute confidence that the boy who spoke her seven hundred lines, a quarter of the play, could manage it. You couldn’t write a part requiring the boy playing Lady Percy in The First Part of Henry the Fourth to sing in Welsh unless you knew that the company had a young actor who could handle a tune and was a native of Wales. Whoever wrote these plays had an intimate, first-hand knowledge of everyone in the company, and must have been a shrewd judge of each actor’s talents.
There were times when Shakespeare was thinking so intently about the part he was writing for a particular actor that in jotting down the speech headings he mistakenly wrote the actor’s name rather than his character’s. We know this because compositors passed on some of these slips when typesetting h
is foul papers. Take, for example, the stage direction in the First Folio edition of that early history play, The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, which reads: ‘Enter Sinklo and Humfrey’. John Sinklo was a regular hired-man for whom Shakespeare wrote lots of skinny-man parts. Shakespeare would slip again and start thinking of Sinklo rather than the character he was playing in the draft that was used to produce the quarto edition of The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, where his stage direction reads: ‘Enter Sincklo and three or four officers’. It’s clear that the scene was originally written as a star turn for Sinklo, and wouldn’t be half as funny or make as much sense without him, for he is brought onstage mostly to be teased about his waistline. The others take turns calling him names: ‘nuthook’, ‘starved bloodhound’, and, in case we miss the point, ‘thin thing’.
The author of Shakespeare’s plays could not have written the great roles of Richard III, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello and Lear unless he knew how far he could stretch his leading tragedian, Richard Burbage. Writing parts for the company’s star comedian was even tougher. How could anyone but a shareholder in the company know to stop writing comic parts for Will Kemp the moment he quit the company in 1599 – and start writing parts in advance of the arrival of his replacement, Robert Armin, whose comic gifts couldn’t have been more different? Kemp was another one of those actors Shakespeare kept confusing with his characters – easy enough to do, since Kemp always partly played himself no matter what role Shakespeare had written for him. The 1599 quarto of Romeo and Juliet identifies the Nurse’s comic sidekick Peter first as ‘The Clown’ and then in an ensuing stage direction as ‘Will Kemp’. The same sort of slip occurs in the quarto of Much Ado about Nothing, where we learn that the comic roles of Dogberry and Verges had been written for Kemp and Richard Cowley.
Rehearsing with a small group of fellow actors every morning, performing that same play with them that afternoon, and meeting regularly after that with shareholders for business decisions and to hear and purchase new plays could not have been stress-free. There are even recorded instances in which Elizabethan actors and playwrights came to blows – but not, so far as we know, members of Shakespeare’s company. One reason, perhaps, is that the sharers were all enriched by their enterprise. It wasn’t just Shakespeare who became successful enough to seek the status of gentleman, or invested in real estate. By focusing unforgivingly and relentlessly on Shakespeare’s accumulation of wealth, Victorian biographers overlooked the extent to which his interest in financial matters was typical of his fellow sharers. And the successful sharers of the Chamberlain’s Men, in turn, could only look on in envy at the far vaster fortune accumulated by their rival from the Admiral’s Men, Edward Alleyn.
The evidence is of a piece: the surviving texts confirm that whoever wrote the plays had to have been a long-term partner in an all-absorbing theatrical venture. The plays could not have been written by a Christopher Marlowe squirrelled away to the Continent or an aristocrat who secretly delivered the plays to the actors. And they certainly could not have been written by somebody who, like Edward de Vere, was not alive in March 1613, when, a month or two after the Globe Theatre caught fire during a performance of a ‘new’ play, Henry the Eighth, ‘Mr Shakespeare’ and ‘Richard Burbage’ were each paid forty-four shillings by Thomas Screvin, steward to Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland (the younger brother of the fifth Earl of Rutland, the one believed by some to have written the plays of Shakespeare), for collaborating on an impresa for the earl to use at the court celebrations honouring King James’s Accession Day on 24 March. An impresa was a painted and ceremonial pasteboard shield on which an enigmatic saying, usually in Latin, was written. There was considerable pressure on courtiers to come up with something unusually witty, since gossip about one’s impresa was sure to follow. Who better than Shakespeare to come up with something imaginative and apt – and the several examples of this courtly art form in Pericles were good advertising, confirming that he had a talent for this sort of thing, and that his Latin was strong enough. Burbage, a talented artist, was paid for ‘painting and making it’. Imprese were ephemeral, so we don’t know what Shakespeare wrote for Rutland. But Rutland was sufficiently pleased by their work to rehire Burbage three years later, when he was paid £4 18s on 25 March 1616 ‘for my lord’s shield and for the emblance’. This time, Shakespeare wasn’t available; he lay dying in Stratford, that very day affixing his signature to the successive pages of his will.
Even if we lacked all other textual evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship, there is one incident that ought to persuade even the most hardened sceptic: the special epilogue written for a court performance of The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, where Shakespeare speaks for himself as the author of the play. Before it was performed at court, The Second Part of Henry the Fourth had been staged for popular audiences at the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. There, the play had ended with an epilogue spoken by Will Kemp. Moments before that Falstaff, played by Kemp, is hauled off to the Fleet prison and it looks for once like Falstaff, that great escape artist, will not be able to wriggle out of trouble. But Kemp suddenly dashes back onstage and a few moments pass before playgoers realise that the play really is over and that Kemp is delivering an epilogue not as Falstaff but more or less as himself:
One word more, I beseech you. If you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katherine of France, where (for anything I know) Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already a’ be killed with your hard opinions. For Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man. My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you good night.
(Epilogue, 24–32)
Kemp’s repeated mention of his legs and dancing signals that a jig – an often raunchy Elizabethan song-and-dance act that followed both comedies and tragedies – was about to commence. Kemp also announces that Shakespeare, ‘our humble author’, promises to ‘continue the story’, so that his admirers can rest assured they’ll be seeing Kemp again soon.
But this epilogue wouldn’t do at court, where plays didn’t end with salacious jigs. So Shakespeare had to write an alternative one appropriate for the command performance at Whitehall Palace, where the Queen herself was in attendance. Taking centre stage himself, Shakespeare replaced Kemp and delivers his own lines (‘what I have to say is of my own making’). It’s the closest we ever get in his plays to hearing Shakespeare speak for and as himself. It’s a brassy and confident speech, one that may even have caught his fellow players off guard:
First, my fear; then, my curtsy; last my speech. My fear is your displeasure. My curtsy, my duty. And my speech, to beg your pardons. If you look for a good speech now, you undo me. For what I have to say is of my own making. And what indeed (I should say) will (I doubt) prove my own marring. But to the purpose and so to the venture. Be it known to you, as it is very well, I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play, to pray your patience for it, and to promise a better. I meant indeed to pay you with this, which if (like an ill venture) it come unluckily home, I break, and you, my gentle creditors, lose. Here I promised you I would be, and here I commit my body to your mercies. Bate me some, and I will pay you some, and (as most debtors do) promise you infinitely. And so I kneel down before you; but indeed, to pray for the Queen.
(Epilogue, 1–15)
This time around there’s no mention of what the next play will be about and no promise that Kemp will return as Falstaff. The apology for Oldcastle in The First Part of Henry the Fourth (if that’s the ‘displeasing’ if enormously popular play he never quite gets around to naming) is nicely finessed, as Shakespeare offers in compensation the Falstaff play they have just applauded as a way of making amends. Beyond this point, the epilogue’s initial acceptance of social deference – all that begging and curtsying, appropriate to someone of Shakespeare’s lower social station – gives way to the novel suggestion that playwright and spectators are bound in a partnership, sharers in
a venture. If Shakespeare offers himself as merchant adventurer, his plays as treasure and his audience as investors, then it must needs follow that an ‘ill venture’ which breaks or bankrupts him will prove as costly to his creditors. When Shakespeare describes his courtly audience as ‘gentle creditors’ he means not only that they provide the credit or licence to let him write what he wants, but also that they credit or believe in him. Pursuing the implications of this metaphor, he redefines the basis of their understanding: accept his terms, then, and they’ll be repaid with plays for a long time to come.
The episode is less well known than it should be, because for the past four centuries it has been effectively buried by generations of editors. In 1600 the Chamberlain’s Men handed over a manuscript of The Second Part of Henry the Fourth to Andrew Wise and William Aspley to publish. They in turn asked Valentine Simmes to print it – and the title page of this quarto, like the entry in the Stationers’ Register that assigned copyright to the publishers, confirms that the play was written ‘by William Shakespeare’. But when passing along the playscript, the company must have inadvertently handed over a copy containing both the Curtain and Whitehall epilogues. The compositor working for Simmes printed them both, one right after the other, resulting in the speaker first kneeling in prayer, then leaping up and resuming his speech. The Folio editors, trying to repair this, made a further hash of it in 1623, moving the kneeling bit to the end, which is how it has been printed ever since, running together two speeches with wildly different purposes. Untangled, they tell a very different story.
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