Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  The University Wits were excelling themselves, borrowing from each other with jealous eyes, lifting the drama to new heights, and pleasing the companies, when a grammar-school trained man -- a mere actor -- began to rival them. Shakespeare, it seems, had decided to write for his fellow players.

  Crab the dog

  He may not have done so without encouragement. Certainly he appears to have been a busy, obliging hireling; Greene would accuse

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  him later of being a ' Johannes fac totum', a jack of all trades in the theatre, or a would-be universal genius. To be sure, Greene does not use ' factotum' in its modern sense to signify a man who simply does odd jobs, 'a man of all work', but, rather, to suggest the high conceit of a man who both acts in and writes plays. Shakespeare's repertory acting itself called for dexterity and boldness; he can hardly have concealed from the players his wit or sense of rhetoric, and he seems to have impressed one actor -- Beeston -- as a person well trained enough to have taught at school. If his fellows did ask Shakespeare to write a play, they must have felt they had little to lose.

  A knack for dashing off a script was highly valued, but not well rewarded in practice: companies paid about £6 or a play, which had a normal run of eight to twelve performances over about five months. (By the eighth performance, as Roslyn Knutson calculates, the company might expect to recover its production costs and make a profit. 35 ) Popular works were often revived, as Kyd's and Marlowe's plays were over the years -- but there were costly failures. To speed up their writing, most playwrights preferred to collaborate. For example among eighty-nine scripts that Henslowe of the Rose tells us about in detail, fifty-five are jointly written, and only thirty-four are single-author plays. 36 In a small collaborative team, a writer might specialize in working up a few kinds of action, scene, or situation.

  An actor who could write a good play by himself was a rarity, but in Elizabeth's time he would not have seemed 'literary' or set apart. It is clear enough that Shakespeare coveted the normalcy of being a group member, just as his father for years, and at cost to himself, had served with his aldermanic brethren at Stratford. The group offered consoling protections. A measure of anonymity, a guise of ordinariness, in time suited Shakespeare well -- and he and his fellows would have thought of a play as a collective event. A script existed, above all, for performance, when it became a play-in-being. Indeed, their acceptance of the notion of a play as a group activity -- not as words on a page -- was one of the actors' most valuable legacies from the medieval theatre.

  A play's performance was its virtual publication, although the dramatist Beaumont later praised what he called a 'second publication' 37 when a work appeared in print. Shakespeare may have author-

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  ized the publication of several of his plays after they had come out in inaccurate quartos. A play issued in 'quarto' was a thin, unbound object advertised by its title-page, whereas a 'folio' was a large, expensive volume -- not used for collections of plays until Jonson Works in 1616. Dramas were only an insignificant part of the book trade, and bookshops such as those in St Paul's churchyard, which were not mere 'stalls', but structures two and four storeys high, hardly bothered with them. Peter Blayney reckons that on average only five or six new plays a year were printed in Shakespeare's time. The notion that a printed drama was often stolen by a rival company is quite mistaken. The troupes, as a rule, did not poach from each other's repertories, and more co-operation existed between acting companies than is usually recognized. But the book trade could be flooded with even a few playbooks. Shakespeare's three most popular plays in quarto, I Henry IV, Richard III, and Richard II, possibly advertised his company, but sales in the shops would have brought him no direct return. 38 About half of his plays were printed in quarto before the large Folio with thirty-six of his works was published in 1623, seven years after he died. Throughout his life, he had little to gain from seeing his name in a London bookshop.

  Yet this is not to say that he cared little for play-texts. Far from being a spontaneous genius, pouring out work with no heed for it, he evidently took pains with scripts; he was a reviser, with a poet's concern for verbal style. He usually read omnivorously to make a play; he relied on his memory of sources, if not also on working notes in a 'table book', selected materials to transform, and produced an acting text about which he often had second thoughts. He undertook some very substantial revisions. Initially, a text might require only minor changes for production. In giving a script to his fellows, he might, however, leave a few major decisions unresolved to benefit from advice during staging. 39 Although he left minor discrepancies in his works, he must have improved his early plays as his experience increased, and, no doubt, repertory playing aided him more than it harmed him. As an actor-playwright, he gained an insider's awareness of stage effects, a feeling for tactics that would make a character's psychology at once distinctive and plausible, and, above all, a splendid sense of overall design and economy of effect.

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  We may lack his earliest piece. But if Lyly began with a drama as fine as Campaspe, Shakespeare may have begun with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which has the simplest design of his seventeen comedies. The composition dates of his early plays still provide a misty battleground for scholars, and the text of this play may have been changed over four or five years. One version of Two Gentlemen could have been written around 1588-91, when its elegant Lylyan theme of 'love versus friendship'was being mocked in romances and plays alike. For example, after two genteel friends in Peele Old Wives Tale agree to share gains, Jack thinks nothing of asking Eumenides for half of a lady. Happily, Delia is ready to be cut in two, since she honours the cult of male friendship:

  EUMENIDES. Before I will falsify my faith unto my friend, I will divide her. Jack, thou shalt have half . . . Therefore prepare thyself, Delia, for thou must die.

  DELLA. Then farewell, world! Adieu, Eumenides! 40

  But Peele's joke destroys a pretended reality. His scene is funny but it becomes slapstick; an audience will not believe Delia might be sliced. In contrast, Shakespeare mocks and believes in his story at once; in Two Gentlemen, he distances an action while arousing our 812concern for his characters, and shows that he can write farce and comedy simultaneously. He fails the more egregiously, now and then perhaps, when his effects, which are new, go awry. His story, in outline, is so simple I will risk telling it briefly. Proteus and Valentine, the two young gentlemen, lose their gentility, but recover it at last to wed Julia and Silvia. Leaving Julia, Proteus runs after his friend Valentine to Milan, falls in love with the friend's amour Silvia, and then treacherously gets Silvia's father the Duke to banish Valentine. Missing her Proteus, Julia disguises herself as a page to journey to Milan, where she enters Proteus's service. With new falseness, Proteus pretends to win Silvia for Sir Thurio, while trying to make love to her. Valentine -chosen by outlaws as their king, because he is handsome and a linguist -- eventually confronts Proteus, who is about to rape Silvia. Moved by his friend's total repentance, Valentine renounces his own loving claim to Silvia -- or, as he tells Proteus, in lines that can still mortify the play's critics:

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  By penitence th' Eternal's wrath's appeased. And that my love may appear plain and free, All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.

  (V. iv. 81-3)

  That ludicrous gesture, at least, signals to us that the friends are at last resuming the habits of gentility they left behind in Act I. After the 'page' swoons and reveals herself to be Julia, Proteus recalls his love for her. Valentine, with the Duke's consent, prepares to marry Silvia, and two happy couples will return to Milan for a double wedding and bliss ever after.

  Technically -- as Stanley Wells has ably shown -- the young playwright's handling of this story has drawbacks. Unwilling or unable to orchestrate group scenes, Shakespeare relies on soliloquies, duologues, and asides throughout; in one bad mishmash, two soliloquies come together. 41 Some of the poetry (as in the lovely song 'Wh
o is Silvia?') has an April-like freshness, but some of it is shallow, humdrum padding, and a few speeches might be spoken by disembodied voices. The outlaws, even as parodies, are feeble; they might be children trying to imagine what adults would say. Thurio and the Duke are pasteboard; Valentine is almost brainless, though affecting. Speed the page seems like a pert, saucy Lylyan page, and the play echoes sententious remarks on women and love in Lyly Sapho and Phao.

  But if it is close in temper to Lyly's world, Two Gentlemen is not quite Lylyan, and grammar-school training in imitatio has served the young playwright well. Borrowing and assimilating widely, as if he could hardly trust what he knows of life, Shakespeare is an accomplished parasite. He lifts part of the story from a Queen's players' drama known as 'felix & philiomena', of 1585, or from Nicolas Collin's French translation of Jorge de Montemayor's Portuguese story Diana Enamorada, upon which 'felix' is probably based. He apparently looks into Puttenham English Poesie treatise, works up an incident from Ovid, and takes numerous details from Arthur Brooke's romantic poem Romeus and Juliet ( 1562).

  But, extensive as it is, his deft borrowing is already more nearly a habit of mind -- or habit of being -- than an artistic necessity.

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  Shakespeare did not always depend on literary models or existing sources, and much of Two Gentlemen springs from invention. Images, devices, or plots he takes up he usually changes. He had learned to 'vary' from literary sources at school when he was hearing simple sentimental exhortations to bold action: 'Lyfte up thy heart', says Palingenius in the English translation of a school text, 'and walke the depth apace.' To make good use of a source was to 'walke the depth', or boldly to further one's new, appropriate enterprise. Borrowing from literary models helped one to escape from the vices of singularity and useless invention. Furthermore, despite the ambiguous evidence of the Sonnets, Shakespeare seems to have flourished with a certain annihilation of the sense of himself and a profoundly sympathetic absorption in other, imagined viewpoints. His conception of his fellow actors' preferences and abilities on stage -- and his awareness of viewpoints implicit in his sources -- must often have helped him to write more freely.

  If he wrote Two Gentlemen before 1592, the play was modish. Its clown Lance -- and Lance's dog Crab -- would have been theatrically advanced at any time in the 1590s; for though there had been clowns before, the actor playing Lance -- and the real dog on stage, who 'acts' what he is -- keep up a fictive illusion but also break it, with new, uneasy, yet intense comic effects. Into an elegant, artificial world, Lance brings his earthy peasant realism, as when he takes the blame for what Crab did under the Duke's table in a 'pissing-while.' (IV. iv. 19). He barely advances the plot, but by berating his dog as unfeeling he highlights Proteus's stony behaviour with Julia -- and offsets the alltoo-genteel silliness of Valentine.

  Julia is so affecting that she nearly destroys an artful, fragile balance. The author invests her with religious imagery before causing her to suffer. He gives to both Julia and Silvia an inner strength denied his men, as if he were recalling the two pious women in his father's home at Henley Street. It is most unlikely that Julia is, in any sense, a portrait of Anne Shakespeare; but the playwright has learned from his women. He so expertly evokes Julia's feelings that she becomes more moving than is necessary for his play. Most of all, he reveals himself as an unemphatic and astute writer producing a script stronger than the

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  sum of its gaucheries; he has a natural bent for romantic comedy -already he is out-distancing Greene -- and a genial tolerance of absurdity, which may be one reason why actors liked him.

  We know nothing of the Two Gentlemen's Tudor performances. But in 1598 Francis Meres cites it first in a list of Shakespeare's comedies, so it had had a vogue. The play was mainly conventional, but witty enough to flatter refined London tastes. Its movement is brisk and light, its courtly symmetry pleasing. Its greatest character may be Crab, who speaks no line at all. Julia's role suggests the author's talent for tragedy, and at about the time when the Two Gentlemen was new, two writers of tragedy had begun to transform the London stage.

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  8

  ATTITUDES

  UP Fish Street! Down Saint Magnus' Corner! Kill and knock down! Throw them into Thames!

  ( Jack Cade, 2 Henry VI)

  Marlowe, Kyd, and Shoreditch

  Shakespeare's likely evolving duties in a troupe, as well as his attitudes to Marlowe and Kyd, his own plays, and even what is known of his London milieu, give us a chance to examine him rather closely. What is unique in his inward development? After some experience as an actor and theatre-poet, how did he make the most use of his talents?

  Even in comparison with John Lyly, he bursts into flower as a poet with astonishing suddenness. Lyly had had the two elegant prose romances of Euphues and Euphues and his England behind him when he wrote his first play. Soon after school, Shakespeare must have penned something other than epistles and orations; his amateurish 'hate away' sonnet, no. 145, is not beyond the skill of a bright grammarschool boy, and it is likely that he wrote more ambitious works during his courtship; a few years later in London he may have revised or added to works by other writers. 1 Yet in a work such as Two Gentlemen he proved his real value to a troupe. His exotic, rather Petrarchan and Italianate manner suited a fashion, as though he had been able to capitalize on a vogue and please Inns of Court men, city gentry and their wives, and foreign visitors. As Thomas Nashe put it in 1592, the afternoon was 'the idlest time of the day', and London had many idlers waiting to be charmed, such as 'Gentlemen of the Court, the Innes of Courte, and the number of Captaines and Souldiers about'. 2

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  Meanwhile as a receptive, impressionable actor Shakespeare was picking up hints on stage to guide his pen. His early work is saved from gross dramaturgical faults because it is a reciprocal affair; as a player himself for five or six days a week, he appears to suit players whom he meets. Tudor actors were quick to suggest and to adapt in order to survive. Work in a group abetted his stage sense, as if he had so many extra pairs of ears and eyes, and this was one of his advantages over Greene, Peele, Watson, and other 'Wits'.

  Yet he was in danger of letting his facility outrun his experience of life, and of being too rushed to develop his talents well. As an actor he had to charm nut-cracking groundlings, and put up with clownish acts and lewd jigs, to which he seems to allude acidly in the Cade episodes of 2 Henry VI (for example, in III. i. 356-65 and IV. vii. 118-22). As a poet he had to please a tightly knit group, find time in a busy schedule to concentrate, and avoid the luxury of writing to suit himself. His first extant plays (in revised texts) are clear in structure, alive in imagery, and often felicitous in blank verse -- but they can show stiff, wooden, academic writing, poor exposition, and some of the worst vices of school rhetoric. A few of his devices are extremely feeble, as when a barbarian 'army of Goths' comes on stage in Act V of Titus Andronicus to restore civil manners to Rome. He is more bookish than observant, despite what actors tell him. His grasp of psychology is latent but undeveloped in Richard III, and several voices in Henry VI speak in the same well-oiled, undifferentiated manner; this was a fairly general fault in plays of the 1580s and early 1590s, and can be illustrated even from some of the plays of Marlowe and Lyly. At the outset he brings less deft felicity to exposition, or even to scenic structure, than may appear until we compare him with others; and, so far as we know, he did not supply scripts regularly until he was past 25. Few good contemporary playwrights found their stride so late.

  At first, he would have had to live near other actors, and the facts are interesting. The Exchequer's Subsidy Rolls show that by October 1596 he was lodging at St Helen's parish in Bishopsgate ward, about a mile from the northern theatres. This was a well-to-do neighbourhood near rows of small, narrow shops at St Ethclburga's and All Hallows on the Wall; it was divided by a teeming, bustling Bishopsgate

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  Street, which led down into Fis
h Street (of 2 Henry VI) and the area of Falstaff's Eastcheap taverns and on to London Bridge. To the north the concourse led outside the walls to the liberty of Norton Folgate, muddy Hog Lane, and the theatre suburb of Shoreditch.

  He came to know Shoreditch (which Stow also calls 'Soresditch' and 'Sewersditch') very well, and so did his fellow actor Christopher Beeston, whose sons Augustine, Christopher, and Robert were baptized at St Leonard's, Shoreditch, and buried there between 1604 and 1615. Beeston's younger son William -- John Aubrey's acquaintance -lived near the theatre suburb as late as the early 1680s. Shakespeare must have seen its high street on many a dark morning, for when at St Helen's he had to follow a northern route to reach Burbage's Theater or the Curtain, and this took him among rickety, propped-up tenements and smelly alleys. 3

  Known for 'wenches and soldiers' Shoreditch also harboured unlicensed barber-surgeons, procurers, beggars, and others of no legal trade. The Privy Council noted in such an area 'dissolute, loose, and insolent' persons among dicing-houses, bowling-alleys, brothels, taverns, and alehouses, 4 but Burbage's men found the suburb convenient. Its cheap entertainments made it popular with young actors. Later the inquisitive Aubrey -- it seems after hearing what William Beeston told him of the playwright's habits -- jotted this undated note over Shakespeare's name: