Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  The Rose's yard and galleries were extended in 1592, and later this theatre served other uses and then decayed -- but it may have been standing when Edward Alleyn ( Henslowe's son-in-law, who inherited his interest in the Rose) paid a tithe due 'for ye rose' in 1622. 21

  One reached a slightly older theatre at Newington Butts, a mile to the south of London Bridge, along the road continuing from Southwark High Street. Playing at Newington is first mentioned on 13 May 1580. Twelve years later the Privy Council admitted Newington was remote, but Londoners knew its playhouse well enough to call a bad pun a'Newington conceit'. 22

  These, in brief, were the main theatrical venues Shakespeare would soon have heard about. By around 1588, Burbage's and Henslowe's

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  major playhouses were enhancing London's life -- though a Londoner such as Stow, the chronicler, was aware of civic loss, and little compensated for what had been lost in the lasting changes of the English Reformation. Many older, religious, festivals which had once deepened the people's lives had ceased, and church attendance in urban parishes was low. The Catholic menace within the country seemed to fade after Mary Queen of Scots' trial and execution in 1587, and war with Spain aroused fervid patriotism; but Londoners were not relieved by a heady, nationalistic sentiment. Though not on the verge of rebellion, London was riotous and less stable than it had been.

  No one, at any rate, better knew its mood than the Queen, who usually began her royal year in mid-November when she returned to London by way of Chelsea. She rode in by night, for a torchlight welcome. Ambassadors, the Lord Mayor, and citizens in chains and robes of office assembled for her. As she passed on dark streets, the people greeted their Virgin Queen with a depth of feeling that also responded to the tenuous beginnings of the greatest drama the world has known.

  Hirelings, repertory, and poets

  But in the late 1580s the quick rise and fall of playing companies, with financial troubles and changing members, made theatrical life chaotic. The troupes split, reorganized, and to save themselves often left the costly city to perform in the provinces. Trudging in mud, rain, or sleet behind a players' wagon and hoping for a few more pennies at a distant town, actors yearned for London. Shakespeare may hardly have reached the capital before he was out on the road; if he did travel, he returned when he could. But for a few years he is not traceable in our records, and the likeliest reason for this is that he began as a 'hireling' of other actors. Until he became a 'sharer', he would not be listed among a troupe's principal men.

  He could not have begun at any time without soon learning about a company's organization, about patrons, repertoires, and 'poets' (not yet called playwrights) and their valuable but lifeless scripts or playbooks. He may have known the ache of a traveller's bones over-

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  seas, and peered 'in maps for ports and piers and roads', in Denmark, the Lowlands, or Italy -- but we lack evidence of this. 23 Under foggy, raw British skies, he took his training.

  He knew that an acting company was a hard-working unit with eight to twelve chief actors, or sharers, who had invested in it; they paid relevant debts, and took on hired men who received between 5s. and 10s. in weekly wages. Financially the troupes often existed precariously, at the edge of ruin, and even late in the 1590s the Chamberlain's men had low receipts and were in dire trouble. The income of an actor varied greatly, as appears for example from G. E. Bentley's exact figures for a later period. In the year 1634-5, William Bankes, a sharer in what was then Prince Charles's troupe, earned £40, and each of three actors in the King's Servants earned £180. In earlier years, profits were lower, and in the mid-1590s when plague or riot had not shut the theatres, an actor, in a sharers' group such as the Admiral's, might earn on average about 18s. or £1 a week.

  The playing company's relations with the community were always problematic, and the troupes had many more enemies than just London's city fathers. Pamphlets and sermons attacked the actor for being ungodly in idleness -- a dishonest usurer, improvident, diseased, obscene, or sexually 'variable'. Religious authorities feared that the actor would capture Sunday audiences, and some merchants resented his competition for Londoners' cash. Dazzling and charismatic on stage, the actor offstage fascinated people, but also repelled them; he might attract women from any of the social ranks, yet he was also seen as a filthy pederast who kept boys as his 'ingles' or catamites. His ability to arouse strong feelings and fantasies was instinctively feared by many. It was felt that the actor could fatally induce divine wrath, or that his alleged self-love or self-satisfaction could infect honest people who went to work at regular hours. Moreover, from 1579 until the closing of the theatres before the Civil War, the actor was invoked as a person of no more status or real worth than a common beggar. 24

  Yet despite its paradoxical reputation -- and even because of it -- the acting profession drew into its ranks hopeful, intelligent, versatile boys and men, most of whom would have felt lucky to have anything to do with a troupe. A young man entering the theatre found that his

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  fellows had their own special customs and hierarchy. They dined together and went to the same, fairly inexpensive, taverns -- a young actor was not likely to have much spare cash. As a hireling, Shakespeare would have earned little more than a skilled mason or carpenter. About a quarter of the hirelings worked as minor actors; the others were stagehands, craftsmen, the 'book-keeper' or prompter -and his assistant 'stage-keepers' -- as well as tiremen in charge of costumes (one might pay three or four times more for a rich costume than for a new play), and gatherers to collect admission fees at theatre doors. Boy actors, for female roles, usually began as apprentices and received little but their keep.

  A player-patron had no direct legal responsibility for men who wore his badge and colours, but he gained prestige from his actorsespecially if they played at court -- and might influence them. Ferdinando, Lord Strange had become a stellar patron. Related on both sides to the royal family, he soon exposed a madcap Jesuit plot to get him to lay claim to the throne himself; he lured and betrayed one implicated Lancashire Catholic, Richard Hesketh, who was hanged. Ferdinando had hardly forgotten his family's alleged leniency with papists. And yet proud, sensitive, and alert to talent as he was, he borrowed funds to support the arts and earned the thanks and praise of a long list of poets, including Peele, Greene, Spenser, and Chapman. It is possible that he sent a few of his protégés to his troupe; but this is speculation. He did watch his troupe evolve. Once mainly acrobats, Strange's men appear as players in the 1580s at Bristol, Plymouth, Canterbury, Gloucester, and London; 25 in contempt of a prohibition by the Lord Mayor they played at the Cross Keys inn on 5 November 1589, for which some went to prison. A restructured troupe emerged to act six times at court in a single season, before some of them formed, along with Shakespeare, the successful Chamberlain's company.

  Still, we have only a few hints (at best) that Ferdinando, Lord Strange tried to help a young Stratford man. Shakespeare later departed from his sources to portray Strange's ancestor Lord Stanley (the Earl of Derby) in a better light in Richard III; and he may recall Ferdinando in the amusing grandeur of the King of Navarre (who has the unusual name Ferdinand) in Love's Labour's Lost-- but the portrait

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  is not flattering. Titus Andronicus's title-page suggests this play was first performed by Strange's men, who also acted 'harey the vj'.

  All of which, of course, does not prove Shakespeare began as a hireling of Strange's troupe. Speculation thrives; there were other patrons, of whom none was more important than the Queen. Her Master of the Revels (officially a dramatic censor and an impresario for shows at court) had been ordered to 'choose out a companie of players' on 10 March 1583. 26 The Master banded leading actors from existing troupes into the Queen's men, who wore red jackets and excelled in this decade. One of their two prime comedians was Richard Tarlton. Drumming on a tabor, fingering a pipe, then singing, curveting, skipping, and shuffling round and round in
a jig, Tarlton acted out his 'court', 'city', or 'country' Jests. He moulded audiences by acting not so much for them as with them; by bantering, calling for replies, and using impromptu wit, Tarlton became a part of the community of spectators. And no doubt his fame is important. He exploited something basic -- an audience's 'double awareness' of the player's dramatic role and of the player who is only pretending. The Elizabethan actor, as in soliloquies and asides, expresses his sense of being in fact a performer; the boy in female clothes remains for the audience a boy actor and an impersonated female. 27 Tarlton, among others, prepared the way for a great non-illusionist drama, in which Faustus or Hamlet speaks with a more affecting intimacy because audiences do not forget he is also a stage actor, frail as themselves.

  The troupes divided and reformed; personnel moved about. If Shakespeare attached himself to the Queen's men, he could have gone with the actor John Heminges from there straight into Strange's troupe. For twenty years, Shakespeare was to be Heminges' close friend and colleague. At any rate, after Tarlton's death in 1588, the Queen's men split into two groups -- one of them acting jointly with Sussex's men, the other probably helping to form Pembroke's company. Unlike the Queen's, Strange's men favoured dramas that were politically bold, or controversial in topic and fresh in dramaturgy to draw the crowds.

  Still almost all London troupes were alike in one way. They were subject to a tight repertory system. Shakespeare knew its demands

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  well, and they seem hard to imagine. A company in good, or ideal, times acted on every afternoon except Sundays and during Lent; they put on a different play each working day of the week, though some plays would be repeated in the weeks ahead. For example, the Admiral's men typically put on fifteen different titles in the course of twenty-seven playing days. An actor usually had to keep at least thirty parts in his memory, many more if he doubled in minor roles. It would have been normal for Shakespeare (if he worked as a typical hireling) to take a hundred small parts in a season. A leading actor such as Edward Alleyn or Richard Burbage, in any case, memorized about 800 lines for a part, and kept in mind up to 4,800 lines in a week. 28

  Each morning, a hireling actor had to rehearse a new play while getting up his lines for the afternoon's play, or rehearsing that one as well, and seeing that his costumes were ready. The 'book-holder' or 'bookkeeper' along with several assistants or 'stage-keepers' saw that the actors were ready on cue, and that properties were at hand. But a hireling got along without a director's help, and probably without ever reading the whole playscript. His own written-out 'parts', for memorizing, included only single phrase-cues or line-cues from other actors' speeches. On stage he was guided -- chiefly -- by his previous experience of acting with the same fellows.

  Shakespeare did not learn about 'character' simply by watching men and women; he had to become many an idiosyncratic person himself, if he had anything like the experiences of a typical Elizabethan actor. As a rule, players became skilled in a broad range of personactor. Young Burbage had to play the old, hoary Gorboduc and the lustful Tereus in the same play, Part Two of Seven Deadly Sins, performed by Strange's men around 1590. In that drama, one of the female roles was played by an actor named 'Will' -- presumably not Shakespeare, who would have been too old for the part, although women were sometimes acted by boys in their late teens. 29 And to make life easier there was type-casting. Now and then, an actor was lucky enough to take on character-types he was familiar with. When Shakespeare accepted roles in his own works, he seems to have played old Adam in As You Like It, or the Ghost in Hamlet -- elegiac, affecting voices; small parts -- and, says Aubrey in the seventeenth century,

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  he 'did act exceedingly well'. 30 Aubrey could have heard that from the son of Christopher Beeston of the Chamberlain's Servants; but it may mean little more than that Shakespeare on stage did not usually upset his colleagues.

  At 23 or 24 he submerged himself in a troupe. His survival depended on quick, instinctive co-operation; as a young player he must have seemed adaptable, enduring, useful. Our slim evidence suggests he avoided quarrels, then and later, and took pride in ordinary competence. Whatever wish he had to be exceptional in a group, he did not fulfil, and as a repertory man he became a professional.

  But it is by no means clear that he enjoyed this hard work at first, and there are signs he was nearly broken by it. His success as a playwright and poet was delayed; he admired poetry, but found the theatre a quick-paced, disenchanting funfair, with jigs, dancing, dumb-shows and clowns' acts interlaced with drama. As an actor, he learned facile tricks to get by, or hurried effects to win applause; and so as a playwright he would repeat stratagems, or rely at times on the makeshift. He might disguise yet one more heroine as a boy, or trust in actors to bring static roles to life, or assume an audience would not notice minor contradictions or improbabilities in a piece.

  The playbooks were mostly written by those who were gentlemen by virtue of their Oxford or Cambridge degrees. Their work was in demand and Shakespeare studied it, possibly without realizing that a common player such as himself could offend university men by writing at all. Clearly, the companies hungered for scripts. To make their plays, writers were ransacking a wide range of sources, as Stephen Gosson, a playwright turned pamphleteer, noticed in 1582: 'the Palace of Pleasure, the Golden Asse, the (Ethiopian historie, Amadis of Fraunce, the Rounde Table, bawdie Comedies in Latine, French, Italian, and Spanish'. 31 A company needed fifteen or twenty new plays a year. This imposed an enormous demand on the writers, and on the whole fund of available stories and plots in history and literature. Fresh, exciting plays helped to fill galleries -- to the despair of the stage's opponents. A letter-writer observes in 1587 how 'two hundred proude players jett in their silkes, wheare five hundred pore people sterve in the streets'. 32

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  Much in demand were competent writers, such as the 'University Wits', who included men such as Nashe, Greene, Peele, Lodge, and Thomas Watson. A cut above them all, socially and artistically, was young John Lyly, who since writing Euphues had supplied the boys of Paul's School with the finest English comedies Londoners had so far seen. A holder, like Greene, of two MA degrees, fashionably married and, in 1589, about to become an MP, Lyly, it seems, hoped in vain to be Master of the Revels. As an enterprising, short-statured man living in the parish of St Martin's, Ludgate, he was the major dramatist of the decade.

  Shakespeare -- who knew Euphues -- could have read Lyly's comedies Campaspe and Sapho and Phao in their 1584 quartos, or seen Lyly's Endimion or Midas acted a few years later. He may well have learned from Lyly Mother Bombie, The Woman in the Moon, or Love's Metamorphosis after starting to write himself. In the most routine of Lyly's work -- and nobody has argued that Midas is one of his stronger plays -- there is elegant wit, specificity, and exuberance, as when in Midas the servants Licio and Petulus discuss Licio's mistress (and thereby explain to London's gentry why their wives are costing them so much in London's fashionable shops):

  LICIO. Well, she hath the tongue of a parrot.

  PETULUS. That's a leaden dagger in a velvet sheath, to have a black tongue in a fair mouth. . . . But now you can say no more of the head, begin with the purtenances, for that was your promise.

  LICIO. The purtenances! It is impossible to reckon them up, much less tell the nature of them. Hoods, frontlets, wires, cauls, curling-irons, periwigs, bodkins, fillets, hairlaces, ribbons, rolls, knot-strings, glasses, combs, caps, hats, coifs, kerchers, cloths, earrings, borders, crepines, shadows, spots, and so many other trifles as both I want the words of art to name them, time to utter them, and wit to remember them. These be but a few notes.

  PETULUS. Notes, quoth you! I note one thing.

  LICIO. What is that?

  PETULUS. That if every part require so much as the head, it will make the richest husband in the world ache at the heart. 33

  Lyly's juvenile pages can be obscene. His women are refined, winning, and natural skirmishers, in a
tradition followed by many of Shakespeare's heroines. His dramatic style has been called dainty or deli-

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  cate -- so it is -- but he brought to comedy a sense of form and a clarity new in England. He had his characters discuss the state of being in love for the first time on a London stage; and by combining various genres and modes -- such as farce, bawdry, mythology, romance, political allegory -- he gave drama a presiding, supple intelligence, a sense of its unlimited possibilities. Drawing on Ovid and Plutarch and emphasizing a beauty of style, his works suggested more dramatic possibilities to Shakespeare than those of any other comic playwright.

  Still others improved on Lyly by combining new elements, and by writing parts for characters rather than classical types. Robert Greene, down from Cambridge, red-haired, self-indulgent, with a mistress, had discipline as a writer. His prose romances are often excellent; his style tends to be supple, copious, and incisive. His comedy The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (printed in 1594 and perhaps acted in 1587) duplicates a romantic triangle in Lyly Campaspe and foreshadows one in Shakespeare Two Gentlemen: wonderfully yielding to love's force, a lover relinquishes his lady to one who loves her more. Greene interlaces magic, kingship, pastoral effects, and love-rivalry with pathos, humour, and a quick pace. His women, here and elsewhere, are Patient Griseldas, though they seem lifelike in their narrow roles. George Peele, meanwhile, with a background in writing festive pageantry, was carrying out structural experiments. No Elizabethan play of comparable length has a more complex plot, for example, than his Old Wives Tale with its folklore elements and 'framing' devices 34 -- in which some of its characters watch and comment on the unfolding stage-action.