Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  the more to be admired q [quia: because] he was not a company keeper lived in Shoreditch, wouldnt be debauched, & if invited to writ [that] he was in paine. 5

  Shakespeare is tactful by habit, if this is a valid memory in a family of theatre people. When actors invite him to carouse, he writes that he is 'in paine' (with toothache or worse) to avoid being debauched in a famous red-light area. How often did he use the same excuse? But Aubrey crossed out this report (for what reason we do not know) and of course failed to say when Shakespeare may have 'lived in Shoreditch'. Plague deaths were numerous there in 1592-4, and he perhaps moved a mile south when he could afford a more salubrious room.

  In any case, he saw the suburb when he came up from St Helen's.

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  Passing the so-called Artillery Fields and Bethlehem or 'Bedlam' hospital for the insane, he would have come to Norton Folgate -- where the poets Watson and Marlowe lived in 1589. To the north was Hog Lane; beyond were the bordellos that so troubled the Queen's Council, a four-aisled church, and a yard where actors were buried. To the west in trampled fields stood Burbage's Theater and the Curtain. By night the suburb must have been as lurid as Eastcheap -- where Doll Tearsheet, Poins, and Pistol of Henry IV would disport themselves. But in the early 1590s as a poet bringing his aspirations and rhetorical training to his work, Shakespeare was slow to draw on the capital's common life; he had much more to do with players, book-sources, and scripts. Playwrights were concerned with company loyalty, parody, and imitation, and above all with fashion and 'box-office receipts'. They studied the successes of rivals, and so he came under the influence of a poet who was his senior by two months -- Christopher Marlowe.

  Marlowe's provocative artistry affected Shakespeare more deeply than did works by other modern writers, and this poet's background was not entirely unlike his own.

  Marlowe, too, was raised in a craftsman's house and schooled in the 1570s when the humanist curriculum was settled. Like Shakespeare, he received some of the best training ever available for English boys who would become poets. Most accounts of both his and the Stratford poet's schooling overlook the change that had come over intellectual life from the 1530s and 1540s, when new Latin texts poured from presses and the life of the mind was keen at Cambridge (spurred on by Cheke, Ascham, Haddon, Carr, and Christopherson among others) and, a little later, at Oxford. Masters carried over that stir into grammar classrooms, and Marlowe benefited from an excessive emphasis on poetics and rhetoric.

  At Canterbury's fine King's School, he heard ritual in chapel, discovered Ovid, listened to an able master. Then as the son of a debtridden shoemaker who was to prove untrustworthy as warden treasurer of a local guild, he matriculated at Corpus Christi College,

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  Cambridge, and took on clandestine work for the Crown's secret service at some point before taking his MA degree.

  His showy, blasphemous wit concealed a sensitive nature. Some of his reported statements might be no more than parodies of his gambits, and his wit, at least, is more evident in his verse than in what he is supposed to have said, such as that 'all protestantes are Hypocritical asses', or the homoerotic 'all they that love not Tobacco and Boies were fooles'. The wittiest of his supposed remarks as reported by the dubious, fairly stupid, Richard Baines compares Moses with a juggler: 'He [ Marlowe] affirmeth that Moyses was but a Jugler & that one Heriots being Sir W Raleighs man Can do more than he.' 6 At any rate, down in London Marlowe was known among cronies for atheism, papist leanings, and buggery, the charge often depending on the literalness of those who listened to him. His escapades, even before his final one, could be lethal. In September 1589 he was set upon in Hog Lane by the innkeeper's son William Bradley. Intervening, his fellow poet Thomas Watson fatally drove a blade into Bradley's chest. Both poets went to prison, but Shakespeare (whether or not he 'wouldnt be debauched') may well have frequented theatre alehouses and seen Marlowe between 1590 and 1592, after the latter's release. In a comic image in Venus and Adonis ( 1593) for example, he seems to remember

  shrill-tongued tapsters answering every call, Soothing the hurnour of fantastic wits.

  (lines 849-50)

  The lines may be a Norton Folgate joke, with Marlowe among 'wits' in need of soothing, but we leave it to romantic biographers to take us inside smoky, suffocating alehouses. His Cambridge degree made Marlowe a gentleman, dividing him socially from a mainly unknown player, but the player seems to have acted in the Cambridge poet's The Jew of Malta -- a work Shakespeare recalled closely in his own plays and which was not in print.

  However, Marlowe helped him in other ways in a climate of feeling marked by the reign's most renowned event: the defeat of Spain's Armada of 1588. War with Spain continued through the decade of

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  Shakespeare's history plays, and the enemy was nearly supreme on the Continent in armed might and cultural vigour. (Sailing with the Armada had been a young unknown Lope de Vega, who with Tirso de Molina and Calderón became one of Madrid's prime playwrights.) The events of 1588 were memorable enough. At Tilbury before the sea-battle, the Queen had appeared at camp dressed. in her armour 'like an Amazonian Queene', and other reports of her are possibly echoed in Shakespeare's portrait of Joan la Pucelle in 1 Henry VI. Channel winds and four-wheeled gun-carriages had broken a giant, crescent-shaped flotilla, whose captured ensigns were later flown in London over Traitors' Gate or displayed at Paul's Cross.

  In reaction, playwrights cannily wrote of earlier victories at Agincourt, Crécy, and Flodden Field. Not that the sea-victory quite preceded the making of history plays in London: we know that the actors Knell and Tarlton took parts in the popular The Famous Victories of Henry V at some point before the Armada's date. (Both actors died in or before 1588, and Knell's widow married John Heminges in March of that year.) But the Spanish war did set a mood for history scripts with strong political implications, and around 1587 and 1588 Marlowe appealed to that mood with his two-part Tamburlaine.

  His hero -- starting as a Scythian shepherd -- rises as 'the amazement of the world' to defeat witless, effete, or blustering monarchs, and so suggests that most regimes are corrupt at the top. Mocking royalty, Tamburlaine famously shouts at his captive kings who trudge with bits in the mouth --

  Holla, ye pamper'd jades of Asia!

  What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day . . . ?

  (Pt. 2, IV. iii. 1-2)

  Other daring plays followed from Marlowe, with intellectual features that affected Shakespeare's attitude to form and meaning. Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta mix tragedy with farce, and in dramatizing belief they suggest a defiance of the tyranny and prejudices of all ideologies. The Massacre at Paris, despite its Francophobia, probes into roots of state violence in Machiavellian speeches of its Duke of Guise that seem to have affected Shakespeare's own style --

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  Give me a look, that, when I bend the brows,

  Pale death may walk in furrows of my face.

  A hand, that with a grasp may gripe the world;

  An ear to hear what my detractors say;

  A royal seat, a sceptre, and a crown.

  (I. ii. 100-4)

  After Marlowe was murdered in 1593, Shakespeare was to pay a certain elegiac tribute, not to the craftsman or maker of plays, but to the poet of Hero and Leander. Marlowe had achieved a level of writing in Hero that Shakespeare probably felt he himself could not reach, and in fact his quoting a line of Marlowe's poem in As You Like It ('Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?') was an unusual gesture, though some professional esteem had been mutually signalled between the two poets. As Tamburlaine affected the form of Richard III, so the Stratford writer's early chronicle plays evidently helped Marlowe to write his spare, almost apolitical Edward II. And Shakespeare learned from a poet who had located drama in new psychological techniques. By isolating a Guise, Faustus, or Barabas, and letting him 'speak past' interlocutors, Marlowe showed other poets how to dramatize a fascinating, aberrant psyche, d
isplay its suffering, and get a mind to lend its tone to a drama. Shakespeare seems to borrow from these methods for his Titus, Henry VI, and Richard of Gloucester, and to develop them later with egocentrics such as Hamlet, Coriolanus, and Timon.

  'Kind Kit Marlowe' -- as he was recalled -- forgave 'Wits' for attacking him in print. Shakespeare, too, could be amenable and forgiving; at least, after being attacked in a work published by Henry Chettle, he was 'civil' with Chettle. But he was never likely to imitate Marlowe's personal braggadocio, sensation-hunting, or relish of confrontation. As a man obliged to work in a troupe, Shakespeare practised a certain husbandry with such experience as he had. If he played many parts in a season, he was not eccentric, picturesque, or attention-seeking after rehearsals; he was taken by most of his fellows for the clever and reliable colleague he seemed to be. He was an agreeable, cautious person, whose offstage experience, so far, had been intense rather than very wide, as his early plays and sonnets suggest.

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  Yet, if slower than Marlowe to do so, he was now showing a remarkable power of development, and this marked him out in the 1590s. That power depended, in part, on an excellent memory which must have served him in boyhood among 'grammar gods', as later it surely did on stage.

  As we have seen, other Tudor actors, of course, retained many lines, and what is quite unusual is not the tenacity of Shakespeare's memory but its evocative power. In recalling the countryside he invokes the tones, feelings, and ambience of a Midlands past, and his recollecting complicates and renews his life of the sensations and intellect. He draws on a deep, fresh well of impressions of provincial life; he connects easily in Titus Andronicus with the Roman culture of his schooldays, and elsewhere with known, curricular lessons pointing back to history's grandeur. In effect he repossesses his grammar-school learning to elaborate on it, and Shakespeare's plays exhibit school techniques, as in controversiae and imitatio, which become ever more refined and sophisticated. He appears to benefit from early complications at Shottery, and what he knows of courtship culture is recalled with exactitude in London. It is not in writing tragedy or chronicle plays that he is at case at first (or lucky enough to avoid expository blunders), but in writing romantic comedy. His past continually instructs him, and with a conservative impulse he carried a good deal of Stratford to London.

  Moreover, one source of tension helping him to develop is illuminated by recent, close investigations of his Midlands town and of aspects of sixteenth-century London. He knew contrasting social orders: from the almost medieval, well-regulated parish of his youth he had come into the anarchic, splintered world of the suburbs, where success in the theatre depended on chance, luck, agility, and quick rational effort. Stratford had its mercantile competitiveness, too, but it was also a place of older, communal and religious values, with traditions in behaviour and feeling opposed to those of the pragmatic, opportunistic stage. Formed largely by the pieties and temper of his home he was likely to exert himself without feeling quite satisfied with anything he did, and he had some reason in the tatty suburbs to regret the theatre.

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  In his Sonnets, he smartens feelings that he knows well. One problem he alludes to more than once is the vulgarity of acting, or the stain imparted to the actor and the actor's reputation, and so he implies in Sonnet 111 that a 'guilty goddess' -- such as Fate or Ill Luck -- has placed him in an unseemly, raw, exposed calling which offers no better way of getting a living, 'Than public means which public manners breeds.'

  He appears to apologize stylishly for a calling of low to middling repute, no doubt with a wish to please friends or patrons who read his sonnets. But his behaviour suggests that he could not forget the related matter of his own family's need for respectability in a Midlands town. Some facts of the matter are clear in official borough Minutes and Accounts. As we know, his father had absconded from the brethren's council, and the brethren, of course, had lost patience: in 1586 they had deprived John Shakespeare of an alderman's gown. A series of harvest failures lay ahead, but early in the 1590s Stratford's economic plight was already acute; the crafts and trades could not employ all the talented, able young. Gossip was sharp in a market town, and unlikely to diminish in bitter times. William Shakespeare had three brothers who needed work, two daughters who might require husbands, and a boy in Hamnet who might finish school at Church Street. His own choices had not enhanced his social status; he needed money to help his family, but the public mercenary actor had never emerged from a certain shade. It is not unpaid actors, but those who go on the stage for reward ('propter praemium in scenam prodeunt') who are blameworthy, as the Roman jurist Ulpian had declared. Modern Oxford took up that theme. Who vulgarizes our theatre? as William Gager asked in a scene he added to Seneca's Hippolytus at Oxford in February 1592. And he answers in his own Latin:

  Qui sui spectaculum

  Mercedis ergo praebet, infamis siet.

  Non ergo quenquam Scena, sed quacstus, notat. 7

  [Whoever puts on a show for gain, let him be infamous. Not acting on a stage, but doing so for reward, disgraces a man.]

  And yet, though he cannot have been insensitive to notions of

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  respectability, Shakespeare was sanguine enough to hope to improve his lot, and to move into some position of safety and profitability. He could hardly return with equanimity to the circumstances at Stratford. And the theatre offered him anonymity, at least; only a few actors' names had resonance with the public. The city's cognoscenti might know who wrote the best scripts, but attention fixed on stars, lively dramas, or scandal, not on the scriptwriters. Marlowe's name meant so little that the two Tamburlaine dramas were printed without it in 1590 -- and only a chance remark, by Heywood, tells us that Kyd wrote the most influential English play of the sixteenth century, The Spanish Tragedy.

  Shakespeare was quick enough to admire profitable works. Thomas Kyd had not been to university -- a defect unlikely to be forgiven by some 'Wits' -- but his father, a city scrivener, had sent him to Merchant Taylors' School under the gifted Richard Mulcaster. With a rare gift for play structure, Kyd around 1587 may have written Hamlet, the missing revenge tragedy now famous as 'ur-Hamlet' since it must have been a source for Shakespeare's later tragedy. Revived at Newington Butts on 9 June 1594, when even a Marlowe play did poorly, Hamlet earned a paltry 8s. for Henslowe. 8 But if (as we think) it played at the Theater and Paris Garden it held the stage fitfully for perhaps thirteen years before Shakespeare turned to the subject.

  In The Spanish Tragedy, his masterpiece, of uncertain date but perhaps of the late 1580s, Kyd uses a patterned manner to evoke extremes of impassioned feeling. The effect upon Shakespeare might have been as if Mulcastcr's rhetoric lessons at Merchant Taylors' had been superimposed abruptly on those of Jenkins' at Stratford. Kyd's hero -- Hieronimo -- is a decent Spanish magistrate driven to wild grief and then to a crazed, clever, bloody revenge in a play-within-the-play after his son is murdered. Alleyn or young Ben Jonson, as old Hieronimo, may have shattered the groundlings' hearts--

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  O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;

  O life, no life, but lively form of death;

  O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,

  Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!

  (III. ii. 1-4)

  That was easily parodied -- as were Marlowe's lines on the harnessed kings. But Londoners responded to Kyd's aural symmetries, and Shakespeare was to appeal to the same gusto of delight in orchestrated language. Also, Kyd's play has rich seams of interest. He uses a revenge theme cleverly to bring in a variety of other appeals and concerns, such as justice, sexual passion, politics, duplicity, even playacting, as in Shakespeare Hamlet. His Spanish court is believable, and he shows how the concerns of a well-meaning king thwart or impel those caught up in a diabolic tangle of court policy.

  South of the river at the Rose, Kyd and Marlowe in fact made high tragedy profitable. They emboldened Shakespeare, who
needed to enhance his usefulness as times became harder. Miseries of war and inflation threatened all the players -- even before death came massively to the city, as we shall see. And Whitehall was capricious. Lately the Puritans had made a bold case for church reform in a series of illegal, vituperative 'Martin Marprelate' tracts. At first the government employed theatre-poets to reply to the outrageous 'Martin', and then turned viciously against their own helpers.

  In fact, the Privy Council warned sharply of 'matters of Divinytie and of state' unfit to be suffered on a stage. 9 But actors feared penury as much as prison, and around 1590 Shakespeare had begun to take his chances.

  'I am the sea': Titus Andronicus and the Shrew

  After some of them had been in prison, an exceptional group of men and boys had met west of Shoreditch's taverns in 1590. Comprising former members of Strange's and the Lord Admiral's troupes, this was an amalgamated company which lasted for four years under Lord Strange's (or the Earl of Derby's) patronage as the most successful

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  body of actors in England. To their book-keeper, Shakespeare appears to have given his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus.

  Just when he wrote this play is uncertain, and it could have had a debut at Henslowe's Rose rather than at Shoreditch. But he planned the work on a grand scale: its first act requires at least twenty-six players if we allow for 'doubling' in roles. Stagehands and 'gatherers' might take parts at a pinch, but Titus was meant for a large company such as Lord Strange's, which is the first troupe listed on the title-page of John Danter's quarto edition of the play in 1594.