by Park Honan
Shakespeare counted on skilled tragedians, too, and much talent had come to Shoreditch. Famous in the new amalgamation was Edward Alleyn himself, a golden voiced 'fustian king' of about 26, and a glittering figure as he turned on a platform in a long, brocaded coat or the crimson velvet breeches he had worn in Marlowe Tamburlaine. Such a man wore large, false mirroring jewellery with metal lace to catch the afternoon light. Burbage's son Richard was on hand -- not yet rivalling Alleyn -- and so was a thin, spindly John Sincler, soon to act in The Taming of the Shrew. Other actors had been abroad: George Bryan, Thomas Pope, and Will Kempe had entertamed the Danes at Elsinore, and Pope and Bryan had gone on to the Elector at Dresden before coming to Shoreditch. Kempe, the clown, was back in London by 1590, and if he did not join Strange's group at once, he soon played in their comic A Knack to Know a Knave.
Shakespeare faced a troupe hungry for success, aware of their excellence. He was, in effect, their servant. His personality and even his play are related to his lack of status in these years: even as a sharer he was not to be so important to a troupe as its most famous actors, and amenity, modesty, agreeableness, and a certain jocular, detached attitude to his script would have served him well. At this point, he wrote parts that might be instantly familiar to those who would act them. Titus, in some respects, is cautiously imitative; its black, Moorish villain Aaron, laughing at atrocities, is like a Marlowe villain, just as its aggrieved, half-crazed hero Titus resembles Kyd's Hieronomo.
Notoriously Shakespeare fills his action with bizarre, numbing atrocities: dripping pig's blood is called for. The worst happens offstage, but three hands in this tragedy are chopped off, and a tongue is
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torn out. Titus kills one of his offspring in fury, another in shame. Most of the characters are emblematic puppets, but the play ably exploits visual properties in a well-painted, sensuously pleasing theatre and posits a malignant, nightmarish 'wilderness of tigers', a Rome featuring sizzling entrails, rape, dismemberment, slit throats, vivid torture, cooked heads in a pie, a cannibal feast. Titus's and Aaron's roles have life, and it may be valid that the playwright's first wholly successful portrait is that of a black man. (Though not the first Elizabethan to praise black skin-colour, Shakespeare is without much competition the most eloquent: Aaron's 'black-is-beautiful' speeches in Act IV are compelling.) But Aaron is only a speechless supernumerary in Act I. Titus's own faults are hardly emphasized as he enters Rome with his dead and living sons, a captive Queen Tamora of the Goths, and her paramour Aaron, and in cold piety orders a son of Tamora to be butchered. His political mistakes expose him and the Andronici to exquisite torture, and at first there is no consolation whatever. When Lavinia totters on stage in Act II, raped, tongueless, without hands, she is greeted by her uncle Marcus with a picturesque speech imitated from Ovid.
The play, however, can be much better to see than to read, and stylistic defects which we imagine in the text can magically disappear in a good stage production. More than a young poet's insecurity is evident. Meeting the demands for a Kyd-like revenge script, he manages to absorb what others were discovering about tragedy. He is in some ways less tactful than Ovid in Metamorphoses or Seneca in Thyestes in handling myth, but he brings a well-considered attitude to events. He represents carefully a Tudor view of ancient Rome, a city which in its republican phase seemed to have benefited from austere family virtues, before sinking into impiety and hedonism under the later empire. His materials help him to think of cities old and new, of Rome and London. He finds an emblem in Philomela's change into a nightingale after her particularly cruel rape by Tereus, and in woods where Lavinia is raped, a change for all Rome is signalled in Marcus's allusions to Ovid's myth.
The classical myth of transformation in the play is somewhat febrile and overstrained, though it is anxiously pointed up, as when a copy of
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Ovid Metamorphoses is literally brought on stage in Act IV. Still it is by means of his intellect, even his academic excess, that Shakespeare in this case preserves his integrity; his use of Ovid helps him to organize a story, impose a meaning on events, and also consolidate his outlook, so that the play relates even to the comic Two Gentlemen, the Shrew, and his other early works in which metamorphoses in being, attitude, or awareness occur.
And Titus is a work of immense promise for his constructive abilities. His lovely, varying, and ominous uses of nature help him to highlight the bestiality he depicts. To some extent he brings into the work just such a view of London as a sensitive countryman might bring from the fields and forests of the Midlands. He had seen a workable, civilized order (by and large) within London's walls, beyond which were the vulnerable and chaotic suburbs. What preserves an urban society? What threatens it? His Tamora is an emblem of corruption, a woman no longer nurturing but bestialized, rather like the women who were reduced to selling their bodies for male pleasure at Bankside or Shoreditch brothels. Much that he had known at Stratford was replicated in the capital, but not the lawless sordidness, the dens, procurers, and syphilitic women whom the actors talked about. From a mean, often debased, life of the theatre areas he at first drew little, but implicit in Titus is the corrupt, desperate face of a London that would have impressed him most as new in his experience.
He has relied in the play not only on the precedents of Kyd, Marlowe, and Peele, but on Ovid, Seneca, and the Roman historians. No other urban playwright had drawn on so many diverse sources to produce such a coherent, well-planned work, though a few of the élite saw little beyond its dazzling show.
At some point most likely between 1604 and 1615, Henry Peacham was to draw a 'composite' scene from ' Titus in which the chief actors are seen in Roman dress, the others in Elizabethan. Whether or not he had seen the play, he gives a visual idea of it: his pen-sketch displays Aaron the Moor wielding a sword, while a tall Tamora on her knees pleads for her two rapist sons. Earlier, on 1 January 1596, Jacques Petit, a Gascon servant of Anthony Bacon, had been struck chiefly by the work's visual effects. This play had more value in the show ('la monstre')
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than in the subject, as he wrote of a country-house production by London players that he had seen at Burley-on-the-Hill in Rutland. 10 (That was about a hundred miles from London, and Shakespeare may have been among the actors if the Chamberlain's Servants came that far north.) Also, a cartoon which circulated with a broadside ballad, perhaps in the 1590s, shows Lavinia, blonde hair down to her knees, prettily holding a pan with her stumps to catch blood squirting from the neck of a Goth who has raped her. 11
The play's spectacular nature and its Kyd-like qualities dated it, and in later years Ben Jonson mocked the mode of 'Andronicus'. Yet Shakespeare was altering the traditions of the English tragic hero, especially in his depiction of Titus's pain and suffering. From this portrait there were lessons he would use later in representing Othello, Timon, or King Lear. Titus's verse is revealing in and through the stunning force of its beauty, as when in bitter isolation and despair he declares,
If there were reason for these miseries,
Then into limits could I bind my woes.
When heaven cloth weep, cloth not the earth o'erflow?
If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,
Threat'ning the welkin with his big-swoll'n face?
And wilt thou have a reason for this coil?
I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow.
(111. i. 218-24)
Writing to suit a troupe's strength, Shakespeare experimented with more complex plots and romantic stories. It seems The Taming of the Shrew was also staged at an early point, in all probability before June 1592, by Strange's men.
Based on old, brutal folk-myths of the young wife 'tamed' by a husband who beats and terrifies her, this play ostensibly focuses on an economic issue. A self-reliant suitor, on his travels, only need marry a wealthy gentleman's daughter to prosper. But the daughter is a 'shrew', and her wealth means less in the suitor's eyes than the game of shrew-
taming. Granted that one Katherine Minola, of Padua, will not be dictated to by a man, how is a well-born Petruccio of Verona
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to make her yield her independence? Intensely erotic, the story takes on issues of subservience and power, a male dread of dominant females, and a Renaissance fear of women in domestic rebellion.
All of which tasks Shakespeare's structural talent. He weaves in three plot-strands -- Kate in relation to Petruccio, her sister Bianca with suitors, and an Induction (or framing device) involving the drunken Midlands tinker Christopher Sly -- and does so with a skill that may seem to leave Titus and The Two Gentlemen behind. He also opens a Pandora's box, and his view of his materials is ambiguous and unresolved. He has not quite made up his mind about shrew -- let alone about a society which can isolate a woman and quickly rob her of everything but her courage. Petruccio's and Kate's talk is colloquial, earthy, often bawdy, sharp as a slap in the face, enriched by snippets from country folk-tales and legends. The playwright looks into the mirror and over its edge into remembrances of his past, so that the Shrew in effect greatly expands his supply for play-making.
He considerably opens up Warwickshire at any rate and his allusions in the Induction are fascinating. Christopher Sly's name relates to that of Stratford's own Stephen Sly, who later resisted enclosure at Welcombe. Duped by a bored, prankish nobleman into thinking himself a wedded aristocrat, Sly has a 'wife' in the young page Bartholomew, whose name is that of the poet's brother-in-law, lately returned to Shottery and the sibling closest to Anne Shakespeare in age. Sly is from 'Burton-heath', which suggests the hamlet of Barton-on-theHeath of the poet's uncle and aunt Edmund and Joan Lambert, whose son and heir was sued by John and Mary Shakespeare -- with one 'Willielmo Shackespere filio suo' -- in vain in 1588. 12 (Since Shakespeare is named in that legal action he must have heard of it, and his Barton relatives remained a thorn in his father's flesh.) A servant mentions ' Cicely Hacket', and Sly refers to ' Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot'. Here we are about four miles from Stratford -- a Hacket family lived at Wincot's very small hamlet at the time of the play. On 21 November 1591, Robert Hacket's daughter Sara was baptized in Wincot's parish church at Quinton. The Induction also evokes a local playing troupe such as that of Frances Hathaway's husband, Davy Jones.
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For the playwright such allusions are memory-devices, echoes of use, comic connections with a recent past. But the Induction also has an odd, hallucinatory sheen of memory, and Sly lives in a waking dream between falsehood and reality as he sits down to watch a play, 'a kind of history', as his 'wife' Bartholomew calls it, and The Taming of the Shrew unfolds before their amazed eyes. Or has Sly dreamed up all the action that follows?
Sly, in fact, is important enough to be in both scenes of the Induction, and he may well have been brought back to comment on the action after Act V (thus with Warwickshire scenes surrounding those of Padua). However, he reappears only at the end of a very similar play called The Taming of a Shrew. Did actors on the road reconstruct the weaker A Shrew, from memories of performing in Shakespeare's The Shrew? Scholars debate this point; we do not know. Clearly though, there was a disruption in Strange's company: for example Titus Andronicus went out of their hands to be acted by Pembroke's men, and later, it seems, successfully at the Rose, by Sussex's players.
The most serious convulsion we know about in the amalgamated Strange-Admiral troupe split it apart. In May 1591, Alleyn had cornered the crusty impresario James Burbage in the Theater's tiringhouse, at the back of the stage, to ask what had become of money due the players. As usual, his friend knew nothing of money. Alleyn heated up. On behalf of others, he told Burbage sarcastically that 'belike he meant to deale with them, as he did with the poor wydowe', the survivor of Burbage's partner in the Theater -- Margaret Brayne. If things came to that, he, Alleyn, would complain to the Lord Admiral! With an oath, Burbage shouted that he cared nothing for the three 'best lordes of them all'.
The result was that Alleyn withdrew from Shoreditch. He took leading actors, such as Bryan, Pope, Augustine Phillips, and possibly John Heminges, down with him to Henslowe's Rose on Bankside, married Henslowe's stepdaughter within a year for good measure, and led the Strange-Admiral troupe in evil times of touring during plague. Shakespeare may possibly have stayed behind at the Theater with men such as Richard Burbage, Sincler, Condell, Tooley, and Beeston. 13 Some of these actors, at any rate, soon turned up in Pem-
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broke's company, which had several Shakespeare plays in its repertory and came to such grief on the road its members had to pawn their own playing apparel.
Annihilation of some of the troupes and the closing of all theatrical venues in and near London was at hand. Like others, Shakespeare had very little security as a theatre man, but before the plague he had attempted something new; in taking English history as his subject he had begun to make one of the most sustained efforts of his life.
The white rose of York
In a sense, he had begun to do so just in time. His dramatization of Henry VI's reign drew comments in a plague year -- 1592 -- during the latter half of which no London theatre was open. But all three parts of Henery VI must have been penned before the plague, and he may already have begun to write Richard III or completed that fourth work in a historical sequence or tetralogy about the Wars of the Roses.
His subject -- the fifteenth-century Lancastrian wars -- sent him to the English chronicles, and here he found many problems. To justify his own claim to the throne Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had hired an Italian humanist named Polydore Vergil to write a proper history of England. Whitewashing the Tudors, Vergil had portrayed Richard III as a blood-mad fiend whose death at Bosworth in 1485 had brought Henry's own glorious line to power. In an ironic biography Sir Thomas More had further established an image of Richard III as a lipgnawing, crook-backed killer whom people loved to hate.
But chroniclers wrote more and more about reigns before the Tudors, and early in the 1590s antiquarian works of many kinds came from London's presses and beyond. By 1576 Cambridge had its own press after appointing John Kingston as their printer, and eight years later Oxford's Convocation had loaned £100 to the bookseller Joseph Barnes to set up a press of its own. New data about the British past increased national pride and self-consciousness, but also whetted interest in royal power and abetted a certain popular cynicism. People were sceptical about authority, disenchanted by economic hardship. Royal pageantry and civic ritual abounded in London as if to show the
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smooth, superficial face of authority, whereas the chroniclers, now and then, offered intimate glimpses of power.
Strange's men had featured Henry VI as a vague morality-play hero in Seven Deadly Sins. But to look for a king in history or to attempt to see him realistically was to plunge into a welter of annalistic detail-for instance in Robert Fabyan New Chronicles ( 1516), Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York ( 1548), which lifts in extenso from Polydore Vergil, or Richard Grafton's Chronicles ( 1562-72), John Stow Chronicles and Annales (dating from 1565), or the immense composite Chronicles of England, Scotland's and Ireland ( 1577 and 1587) which we call Repheal Holinshed's, though they incorporate work done by other Tudor historians for over seventy years.
In the expanded edition of 1587, Holinshed Chronicles -- three folio volumes with seven title-pages, and 3 1/2 million words -- was to be an oceanic source for at least thirteen of Shakespeare's plays. This work is not limited to any single ideology or historical thesis, and although it divides its chronicle, starting with William the Conqueror, into reigns, it opens up history on the basis of a giant random inclusiveness. It does not overrule the viewpoints of its many component sources. For Shakespeare this great text was a spacious library and supplier of detail; its jumbled vastness, multiple viewpoints, and fertile inconsistencies allowed space for his imagination to play. He reacted to Holinshed -- somewhat as he did to Golding's v
ersion of Ovid -- as to a very literal, unfanciful version of what was in the true 'thing' itself, in this case the documents of British historical experience, with judgement about the 'thing' left open. Beset by problems of form, he seems to have found that Hall Two Noble and Illustre Families at least gave a shape to the fifteenth century in depicting a curve of events over eight reigns from Richard II ( 1377-99) -- from the time of the Mowbray-Bolingbroke quarrel -- to Richard III's death in 1485 and the union of the red and white roses of Lancaster and York under the first Tudor king. Hall moralizes, without really showing the hand of God shaping events. Before Richard III, Shakespeare eschews any emphasis on a 'providential plan' in history, but gains coherence in his use of abrasive conflict, ritual, and sharp ironies in all three parts of Henry VI.
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He had set himself the most challenging of tasks, in that he now had to respond imaginatively to history's chaos. Nothing in Hall or Holinshed has anything like the appealing dramatic order of an Italian or French novella; yet he had to bring the liveliest order to Henry VI. The stage asked for clarity, intensity, and expert design as he re-embodied the English dead. The chronicles allowed him to expand upon details, but he was working within terribly restricting boundaries, and thus forcing his imagination and analytical intelligence to act to produce a cogent structure while always being aware of facts he had to exclude. The notion that his talent was 'miraculous' undercuts the many small, conscious efforts he had to make in his choices and deft borrowings. In Henry VI, he was relying on more than the chronicles, fusing with them elements of popular culture: he took something from the sportive, festive and impudent antics of Lords of Misrule, something from political cabaret, from Robert Wilson's popular patriotic dramas, and from Peele's and Greene's sentimental history scenes. He was helped by Sidncy's Arcadia ( 1590), which, under the guise of pastoral convention, explores the idiosyncratic faults of aristocratic regimes, and he learned from Spenser's delicate finesse and insights into human power and temptation in the first three books of The Faerie Queene ( 1590).
