More than a third of London’s adult population saw a play every month. These people were theatre junkies. Hundreds if not thousands of plays were produced to feed their habit, and of the pitiful few we have left about a quarter were by one man. By common consent there was one individual who supremely vindicated the hardship of that Elizabethan crowd. With words that were sometimes strange and new but almost always captivating, William Shakespeare made their discomfort bearable.
He sweetened and transformed the atmosphere of the Globe. He opened windows for the audience into lives and worlds they had never dreamed of. He turned those blank boards into the campfire before Agincourt, the Nile-side death scene of Cleopatra, a spooky Scottish castle, the dark and misty battlements of Elsinore and the backlit balcony in Verona where a beautiful young girl (played, ahem, by a boy) appeared to her forbidden lover.
His dramas went global with astonishing speed, disseminated across the high seas by an increasingly adventurous and confident English merchant fleet. In 1607, when the author still had nine years to live, Hamlet and Richard II were performed on board a ship off Sierra Leone. In 1608 the melancholy Dane was introduced to an audience in what is now Yemen. By 1609 the ghost of Hamlet’s father first turned up on makeshift battlements somewhere in Indonesia, and by 1626 the people of Dresden were hearing the Prince trying to make his mind up about suicide—in German.
The performance was delivered by a group of Germans who called themselves “the English comedians,” in deference to the acknowledged origins of the art form. The point is that England—or more specifically, London—was responsible for the export of the commercial theatre, and no other city was.
In the seventy years from the 1576 opening of James Burbage’s first theatre to the abominable closure of the theatres by the Puritans, there was a boom unlike anything that has been seen before or since. That concept of the commercial, competitive theatre—you make them laugh, you make them cry, and mainly you make them pay—is after all the direct progenitor of the movies, the greatest popular art form of our times, and it started in London.
Yes, Spain had great theatre, but the Siglo de Oro came after the Elizabethan epoch, and the plays were more limited in their palette, concerned mainly with the strains of an agrarian and feudal society. Certainly, there were theatres in Venice, but again, they came a little later and they were on nothing like the scale of the London industry. France was to produce the gigantic figures of Corneille, Molière, Racine, but they did their stuff a generation if not a century later.
It was Shakespeare who was the presiding divinity of a specifically London genre. His cult is global in a way that no other writer can match. There are seven thousand works devoted to him in the Library of Congress, and there are regular Shakespeare festivals in Germany, Greece, Spain, Belgium, Turkey, Poland, Korea, Brazil and Mexico. He has been translated into ninety languages. Chinese professors consecrate their lives to his work. An online game based on Romeo and Juliet currently attracts 22 million players. There is a tribe in northeast India, called the Mizo, who regularly stage Hamlet and claim the Danish prince as one of their own.
I will never forget going to Brezhnev’s Moscow, in 1980, and watching hundreds of wrapped-up Russians stream into some dim and grimy theatre to hear an English actor recite a string of Shakespeare speeches including, of course, Hamlet’s meditation on whether or not to top himself or rise up against his predicament.
After the performance the put-upon comrades went out silently into the night, except for one gaunt fellow in a flat cap, who spotted the knot of English schoolboys and glared: “To be or not to be—that is the question!” He tapped his copy of the Complete Works and fired my Cold War adolescent imagination. Was he sympathising with the Prince, locked in the claustrophobic hypocrisy of Elsinore? Was he trying to get us a message, that there was something rotten in the state of Russia? Was he a Shakespeare-toting Sakharov?
Or was he (of course he was) just pleased to be able to quote a smattering of Shakespeare? Whatever he meant, my sixteen-year-old soul was proud that he was quoting our guy.
Shakespeare is the greatest hero and ambassador the English language has ever known. He is our single biggest cultural contribution to the world, our riposte to Beethoven and Michelangelo—and a pretty effective response he is, too. He is our greatest quarry of words and characters and predicaments. He is the one author we can truly call universal. He is our Homer.
We know more about Shakespeare than we know about any other Elizabethan dramatist—and yet we know next to nothing. Every fact or factoid is a frail peg from which is suspended a vast duffel coat sodden with conjecture, pockets stuffed with surmise.
We know that he was born on or around St. George’s Day 1564, and that his father, John Shakespeare, was a local worthy who made his money as a glover or whittawer—a worker of white leather. Shakespeare is supposed to have attended the abattoir in his youth, and some authorities detect in his work a special understanding of slaughtering, butchery and gore. Shakespeare senior was a Rotarian sort of fellow, rising from the rank of ale-taster to sheriff of Stratford-upon-Avon—effectively the mayor of the town.
John Shakespeare wasn’t perhaps an entirely spotless character—he was fined in 1522 for keeping an unauthorised dung heap, and in later years he was convicted of usury, a very serious offence. But he had enough money to give William an excellent education (or so we think) at the local grammar school, where the young man probably left knowing at least as much Latin as a modern university graduate in classics (which isn’t saying much). We know that in 1582 William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway at the very young age of eighteen.
Since she was twenty-six, and since they had a daughter, Susanna, six months later, we can probably conclude that it was the usual thing. We know that two years later they had twins, Judith and a boy, Hamnet, who died in infancy. We know that he pitched up in London sometime between 1585 and 1592, when he is first identified as a published playwright, but on all the key questions we haven’t a clue. We don’t know why this son of a glover become an actor and playwright. We don’t know why he went to London. We have nothing to go on but rumour. He may have been prosecuted for poaching deer at Charlecote in Oxfordshire; he may have been a secret recusant who sought employment with a Catholic family in Lancashire; he may have been a mercenary in Flanders or a traveller in Italy, or he may have sailed the Spanish Main with Drake. We have no real evidence for any of these more or less improbable hypotheses.
For one reason or another—perhaps because he simply needed to provide for his family, and it was the best and most enjoyable way he could make money—he arrived in London. In some ways it was still recognisably the same place that had been discovered by Dick Whittington. The old St. Paul’s was still standing, though its spire had been hit by lightning and had been removed. The Guildhall and the Royal Exchange were reportedly looking splendid, and there were now 120 churches. The potato was beginning to be eaten, with a few reservations from those who thought it was a fad and unlikely to catch on.
Anyone who has been to see a city in the modern Middle East or India will understand what was happening to Elizabethan London. It was starting to surge with unplanned development, unsanitary prefabricated tenements shoved up any old way and in defiance of the authorities. The population of London doubled between 1560 and 1600, and this once peripheral Roman colony was now far bigger than the mother city on the Tiber. There were more people in London than there were in any other European city except possibly Paris and Naples, and the place was growing all the time. It was the greatest trading centre in Europe, and not just because of the sheepback and broadcloth that had been exported since the Middle Ages. London was now the entrepôt, the place where merchants from Spain and Italy came to find furs from the Baltic and salted fish from Newfoundland, and with the growth of trade there grew the first solid middle class in Europe.
It was estimated that 10 percent
of the population was eligible for poor relief, and 25 percent was rich enough to contribute to the royal subsidies (or taxes), but as one observer put it, “the greatest part are neither too rich nor too poor, but do live in the mediocritie.” What did they want, those people who lived in the mediocritie? They wanted what we members of the mediocritie have always wanted.
They wanted booze. Between 1563 and 1620 wine imports from France and Spain rose five times.
They wanted sex. About 40 percent of the men who lived in the Clink area of Southwark were watermen who made a living from ferrying punters across to the prostitutes.
And they wanted fun. After the bleaching solemnity of the Reformation, the smashing of stained-glass windows, they wanted colour and spectacle and the collective release of emotion. Of course there were shows, barbaric scenes in which bears were attacked by dogs, or sometimes an impresario would tickle the fancy of the crowd by tying a chimpanzee to the back of a horse and setting the dogs on both of them. But bears were expensive, and it is natural for human beings to wish to see themselves, to hold a mirror up to their own lives. And so for some time there had been skits and scenes played by touring companies in the balconied courtyards of inns. Eventually it dawned on the impresarios that there could be serious money in such shows, and in 1576 a player named James Burbage made the breakthrough.
Why not create a permanent dedicated space—as they had in ancient Athens—but run on purely commercial lines? Soon theatres were springing up around the perimeter of the city, English theatres that looked more like the yard of a pub than Epidaurus; and to understand the emergence of William Shakespeare at the end of the sixteenth century, it is vital to grasp that these were rival commercial ventures staffed by rival companies.
A man like Philip Henslowe, who owned the Rose and Fortune theatres, would pay his authors between £3 and £5 for a play, and he would make it back in one night—if he had the right play. So suddenly there was a financial incentive not just to write but to compete to be the best; and if you were a man like Henslowe or Burbage you wanted those bums on the seats in your theatre, and you were prepared to pay the talent for the right stuff.
Shakespeare was just one of a coterie of at least fifteen middle-class males who were all toiling at the same craft, each vying to be more esteemed, more praised, and therefore more recompensed, than the rest. There were George Chapman, Henry Chettle, John Day, Thomas Dekker, Michael Drayton, Richard Hathaway, William Haughton, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, Anthony Munday, Henry Porter, Robert Wilson and William Shakespeare. They stole ideas from each other, they inspired each other, they pushed each other to new heights of exertion. It is that sense of rivalry among a defined group of talented people—that is the way to produce genius. Think of Los Alamos. Think of Bletchley, where a gaggle of oddball geniuses competed to crack the Nazi Enigma codes. There was jealousy of all kinds.
Richard Burbage famously fixed an assignation with a female fan at the stage door and went to change from his clothes, only to find that Shakespeare himself had got there first—with the quip that “William the Conqueror came before Richard.” Sometimes there was physical violence. Marlowe killed a man, and was killed himself in a mysterious pub brawl in Deptford. Ben Jonson killed a rising star named Gabriel Spencer in a duel, and escaped the gallows only by reading the “neck verse,” a medieval loophole whereby the literate were allowed to cheat execution by reading the Bible in Latin. He had a T for “Tyburn” branded on his thumb, meaning that he would be hanged there for his next offence.
In an atmosphere of such extreme competition it was natural that actors and playwrights would devise a system for pooling risk and sharing responsibility, so they created companies directly analogous to the commercial companies that were being formed to spread the risk of sending boats round the world. After the 1555 Muscovy company came the Turkey company in 1581, the Venice Company in 1583, the East India Company in 1600 and the Virginia company in 1609. Like the commercial companies, the companies of players engaged in takeovers, head-hunting, poaching and the eternal battle for market share.
Think how often Shakespeare describes an event in commercial terms or as a maritime venture. As Iago says to Cassio, when it becomes clear that Othello has had his way with Desdemona, “Faith, he tonight hath boarded a land carrack [a kind of boat]. If it prove lawful prize, he’s made forever.” Or as Brutus says to Cassius in Julius Caesar, when he wants him to come in on the assassination, “And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”
The Shakespearean theatre was the product of the entrepreneurial maritime culture of the age, and it has been estimated that a “sharer” or partner in the King’s Men—as Shakespeare was—would take a dividend of between £100 and £150 a year, which was not to be sneezed at. London was the high seas, the wooden frames of the theatres were the boats and the booty was the theatre-going public. And how did each company hope to hoist the maximum number of punters aboard? By studying their tastes and giving them what they wanted.
The audience wanted romance and sexual excitement, and “honey-tongued” Shakespeare was famously good at that. Young men were said to plunder Romeo and Juliet for chat-up lines. They liked a good laugh, which is why Shakespeare is so stuffed with puns and comic interludes, some of which have aged better than others. They wanted to be wrung out with emotion. They wanted to gasp.
They wanted to be shocked at the implications of an idea and its relevance to the politics of the time. Shakespearean theatre drew strength from both of the power centres of London: the money of the City and the politics of Westminster. It was the City merchants who generated the cash to pay for the leisure hours that Londoners spent at the shows, and it was the merchants who provided the model for the entrepreneurial joint-stock theatre company.
It was the politics of the Metropolis, and the intrigues of the court, that gave the plays that extra topicality, the gasp-factor that requires us to understand the background. Queen Elizabeth had seen off the Armada in 1588; she had executed Mary Queen of Scots and many others. Her secret service was ruthless and her spies were everywhere. But she was a childless woman of late middle years, and the question of succession was agonising.
The Spanish could always try again. There were constant rumours that they had already landed at the Isle of Wight. People wondered how this poor weak woman could survive in the face of the bullying charisma of the noblemen who surrounded her, and in particular her “favourite,” the ambitious, unruly, good-looking, square-bearded, sonnet-writing Earl of Essex.
As James Shapiro has shown in his wonderful 1599, Shakespeare’s plays are not deracinated masterpieces bequeathed to the human race by some garret-bound egghead with a bad haircut. For an Elizabethan audience, they must have derived their energy and their resonance from the events of the time. Shakespeare’s dramas are tapping the underlying pool of unspoken—and often unspeakable—anxiety about the stability of the state. So many of his plays are about succession, and kingship, and the perils of subverting the natural order of things—Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Henry II, Henry IV, King Lear and so on. Probably a quarter of his plays develop this theme, one way or another.
So when an Elizabethan audience saw the conspirators draw their daggers on Caesar, they would have known of the chilling events that had taken place at court. As Shapiro relates: one day Elizabeth was having a row with Essex, and as usual Essex was pushing his luck, reckoning that the old girl still fancied him. He turned his back on her, an unforgivable insult to the monarch, and Elizabeth slapped him. At which point Essex moved to draw his sword on her! Unthinkable. You could not report it or talk about it, but you could show an event from history that was almost like it.
Julius Caesar, the text, was effectively banned; you could not buy a physical copy of the play for twenty-four years after Shakespeare’s death. You had to watch the play, and when you watched the story of the tyran
nicide you watched with eyes peeled for references to the anxieties of the day.
Think of the moment when Brutus describes the effeminacy of the dictator. Caesar pathetically fails to swim the Tiber, and when he succumbs to fever he cries, “Give me some drink, Titinius, as a sick girl. Ye gods, it doth amaze me. A man of such a feeble temper should, Get the start of the majestic world, And bear the palm alone.” That is just the kind of criticism that one can imagine falling from the lips of some sexist and discontented earl; and the mutterers had support from some of the lower orders.
One Mary Bunton of Hucking was overheard to say, “I care not a turd for the Queen or her precepts.” She was put in the stocks with a paper on her head, detailing her offence, and whipped. How many other Mary Buntons were there, and would they back Essex when he mounted his inevitable rebellion?
Elizabeth took a risk in sending Essex at the head of an army to Ireland to suppress a revolt, and there was great nervousness about what he would do on his return. The troubles in Ireland reminded everyone of another monarch who (a) had been childless, (b) had been disliked by the merchants for overtaxing them, (c) had bogged up Ireland—and then (d) was deposed by a charismatic earl.
It was the Queen herself who gloomily made the comparison: “Know you not that I am Richard II?”
When Essex did return from Ireland, at the head of his unsuccessful army, he again behaved contumaciously. He rushed into the Queen’s very bedchamber and caught the ageing woman without her makeup and her hair all over the place. As the ladies of the bedchamber scattered in panic, he advanced on the Queen of England.
He kissed her hands, he kissed her neck, and generally made nice in the most gushing way, and there was not a lot that Elizabeth could do about it at the time—though afterwards she simply froze him out. Shortly thereafter Essex decided there was nothing for it. On the eve of the revolt he asked the Chamberlain’s Men—who then included William Shakespeare—to perform a play.
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