Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  Arguably, for his history series he wrote I Henry VI first. A work of some expository stiffness, though it rises to masterly stagecraft in its 'Temple Garden'scene for example, it involved him in a ruthless selection from sources. The politically weak and morally good Henry VI had acceded in infancy and reigned for forty years. Later the first Tudor king tried to have Henry canonized, after his alleged miracles interested Pope Alexander VI. Wisely keeping the good king offstage at first, Shakespeare brings to the fore Lord Talbot, who has among his titles ' Lord Strange of Blackmere' (IV. vii. 65). Talbot's chivalry is considerably heightened in the play -- as in his relations with the Countess of Auvergne, the most charming of would-be assassins and the contrasting cowardice of one Sir John Fastolf, or Falstaff, who fled at the battle of Rouen, is also emphasized. One doubts that topical satire is aimed at Falstaff's living descendants, but in his heroic view of Talbot, Shakespeare, rather like Nashc in Pierce Penilesse, may go out of his way to flatter Lord Strange.

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  Most of the characters in I Henry VI are quite unheroic. The play shows quarrels at home and calamity abroad, from Henry V's funeral in 1422 to Lord Talbot's death and England's final loss of France in 1453. Brutal, acerbic confrontations occur, but mere sensation is avoided. Here the stage does not symbolize a fictive violence as in Titus, but rather, shocking events of a bitterly terrible past reality. France is no worse than England. Talbot's mortal enemy Joan la Pucelle at first seems recognizably Jeanne d'Arc. She is imaged as Deborah, as 'Astraea's daughter', even As ' France's saint' (1. viii. 29). Later she is as duplicitous as Spenser's Duessa in The Faerie Queene, but Shakespeare includes a fictive siege of Rouen, and he may have been obliged to show Joan in a patriotic light -- British troops under the Earl of Essex were in fact besieging Rouen from November 1591 to April 1592. Even so, Joan turns to devils and venery when the powers of light fail her, claims to be pregnant to avoid martyrdom, and is no worse at last than an amusing, pragmatic witch.

  Shakespeare's French hardly seem Catholic, except for an allusion to Joan's Mariolatry, and he does not refer to Catholic repression. His satire is that of a moderate Anglican, and at its root is a resigned, calm gravity as if death were history's chief fact. He ridicules a vain, meddling Bishop of Winchester for getting money from bordellos, yet not for doctrine. Implicitly he has pity for the fatally mistaken, and admiration for wasted splendours of feeling in his doomed barons. His battle scenes are little more than brief calamitous testimonies to man's ignorance and absurdity.

  In 2 Henry VI he gains an advantage in placing his weak, unworldly Henry, now subject to a vicious Queen Margaret, at the centre of the action, so that the paralysis of a state can be depicted ironically. 14 His Jack Cade episodes in their fresh, mordant humour comment indirectly on his own Tudor audiences. Aiming to overthrow the Crown by stirring up unrest, the Duke of York has enlisted a headstrong Kentishman, ' John Cade of Ashford', for the purpose. Cade's rabble soon conquer London on the rampage. Parodying inversions of Misrule, and of 'barring out' when pupils smashed school windows, Cade inverts civilized codes with cheerful blasphemy. He legalizes his lust: 'There shall not a maid be married, but she shall pay to me her

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  maidenhead' (IV. vii. 118-20). Heads of nobles are made to kiss on poles. A clerk is hanged with 'pen and inkhorn about his neck' (IV. ii. 108-9). Literacy is a crime -- all lawyers are to be killed in Cade's London, while the city's 'pissing-conduit' (IV. vi. 3) flows conveniently with claret wine. Cade's rabble in mindless enthusiasm are like sensationhunting play-goers, and as he is likened to a capering 'Morisco' himself, he is a type of the lewd jig-performer who dances at the end of dramas at Burbage's Theater. Still, Cade can be a spokesman of thematic truth as when he impugns the vain peers who 'consult about the giving up of some more towns in France' (IV. vii. 150-1).

  Cade's quick fall foreshadows that of the Duke of York. Early in 3 Henry VI, the author brings his nightmare story of feuding nobles to a pitch when the Duke of York, without his sons Edward, George, or Richard to save him, falls into the hands of a bloodthirsty Queen Margaret. That 'She-wolf of France', as York names her, with her 'tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide' provokes him with galling mockery:

  And where's that valiant crookback prodigy,

  Dickic, your boy, that with his grumbling voice

  Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies?

  Or with the rest where is your darling Rutland?

  Look, York, I stained this napkin with the blood

  That valiant Clifford with his rapier's point

  Made issue from the bosom of thy boy.

  And if thine eyes can water for his death,

  I give thee this to dry thy checks withal.

  (1. iv. 76-84)

  Hatred is evoked with an intensity new to the stage -- and Shakespeare's rival Greene was jealously to recall this scene. Margaret's hatred arises in a fine pattern in Henry VI, though there have been no villains; the author refuses to promote one political doctrine over another, and his events seem ritualized in history's fixed past. To some extent he makes the theatre a ritual for the public, and indeed his early history plays have a strong liturgical aspect -- which may be too overtly developed in Richard III.

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  But here in Richard III, brilliantly, he carries into a single individual's consciousness the allegorical method of many medieval morality plays. No doubt he could hardly have avoided the Tudor myth of Richard of Gloucester as a 'divine scourge', sent by heaven to punish and purge the realm. Rather more than a symbolic scourge, however, Richard is as idiosyncratic as Aaron of Titus Andronicus, whom he resembles. He has won his father's praise: 'Richard hath best deserved of all my sons', as the Duke of York says in 3 Henry VI. (1.i. 17). Unlike Hamlet to come, this son is not bent chiefly on avenging his father's death. Since peace has robbed Richard of his identity he will entirely refashion himself:

  I in this weak piping time of peace

  Have no delight to pass away the time,

  Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

  And descant on mine own deformity.

  And therefore since I cannot prove a lover

  To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

  I am determinèd to prove a villain.

  (1. i. 24-30)

  To achieve that end, he is endowed with several of the author's own attributes, such as a talent for artful language, a delight in dry wit, and a belief in the inexhaustible powers of acting and make-believe. He becomes a Machiavel with a lustrous veneer of grace, and at first a merry Vice, an actor on delightful terms with the audience. No more charming and fascinating killer had been seen on the Elizabethan stage.

  Opposed to carping politicians, stupid power-seekers and depleted moralists, he is even endearing up to Act IV. Like Jack Cade, Richard has the advantage of enduring for a while without the baggage of human conscience, which with its aspect of nemesis is transferred to Clarence, Lady Anne, or the railing spectre of Queen Margaret. With the intelligent gaiety of a poseur he is never more effective than when courting Lady Anne, whose husband and father-in-law he has murdered.

  Here the playwright squeezes historical events together so that

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  Henry VI's actual funeral rites in 1471, Richard's courtship of Anne in 1472, Clarence's murder in the Tower in 1478, and Edward IV's death in 1483 occur at the same time. With glee, Richard scurries from one challenge to the next. Meeting Henry's funeral cortège in the street, he confronts Lady Anne, who is played by a boy, and boy actors were trained in speed of repartee. He flatters his indignant lady by pleading for a 'slower pace', matches Anne's own word-rhythms, exchanges 'angel' for her 'devil', drops or increases beats in his blank verse, and in effect wins Anne through consummate verbal agility. His conquest is the more amusing because boy actors were more highly drilled than adult actors 15 -- and Anne's own articulateness itself is a part of her undoing.

  In Henry VI, the device of having actors speak aloft fro
m galleries seems artificially over-used, but here, for once, a stage gallery is exposed for the stage device it is. Prayer-book in hand between two bishops, Richard appears aloft in Act III to enchant London's aldermen with his virtue in order to appear reluctant to take a crown. (The playwright's father having been dismissed by his brother aldermen, the gallery drama obliges an audience to scorn aldermen as fools, just as Richard does.) By implication, Shakespeare interestingly suggests that the skilled actor, though possessed of great flexibility, may be nothing more than a hollow drum. Richard's excellence as a poseur rests on his miserable isolation and inadequacy -- and he succeeds, as a showman, partly because his inward life is feeble and uninhibiting. His creative destructiveness is brilliant, but it has a short run. His 'character' does not change -- but our intimacy with him lessens after he loses theatrical and political initiative. A chorus of wailing Queens precedes an innovative group of choric ghosts, and Richard is so distanced at last that his thoughts, not his feelings, are in focus. His opponent faces him at Bosworth, and after the tyrant is killed, a symbolic Earl of Richmond predicts the Tudor glory.

  With its clever design, Richard III creates the illusion that history writes itself on stage. That play gave young Burbage his first rich, complex Shakespearean role and remained popular throughout the author's lifetime and the reigns of James and Charles I. Audiences and censors had a chance to judge the Henry VI series first. Henslowe's

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  receipts for 'harey the vj', if we assume that this work was I Henry VI, suggest an unusual financial success. Performed at the Rose by Strange's men on 3 March 1592, 'harey', at any rate, made Henslowe richer by £3. 16s. 8d. -- the highest 'take' noted in his diary -- and the play ran fourteen times more until 19 June. 16

  Censorship of Henry VI was surprisingly moderate, so far as we know. The Master of the Revels was irritated by reckless, feuding nobles in their contempt for a monarch. Dialogue had to be cut. Jack Cade's brags at Blackheath, such as 'bid the King come to me . . . ile have his Crowne tell him, ere it be long' and 'for tomorrow I meane to sit in the Kings seate at Westminster' must have been excised, as they are missing in the play's Folio text. 17

  But in June 1592, as rioting suddenly put the theatres in jeopardy, the authorities had more in mind than a few insults in a company's playbooks. And the success of Henry VI hardly bettered its author's life. His professional calling was new, turbulent, and unprotected by any guild; and since no one had been a city playhouse writer before 1576, he had no way of really envisioning how his career might turn out. As it was, summer brought him bad news, as we shall see, even before he found himself under personal attack. On the road Pembroke's men constructed brief texts of his 2 and 3 Henry VI. These scripts, in due course, they were forced to sell as The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke. Shakespeare's own scripts with their large casts would have been difficult for any company to take on the road. But then he had not designed Henry VI for travel, and he could not have foreseen the coming of the plague.

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  9

  THE CITY IN SEPTEMBER

  Envie is seldome idle. (Greenes Groats-worth of Witte, 1592) [Your wife] prayeth unto the lord to seace his hand frome punyshenge us with his crosse that she mowght have you at home with her hopinge hopinge then that you should be eased of this heavey labowre & toylle ( Philip Henslowe in London, to the actor Edward Alleyn on tour with 'my lorde Stranges Players', 14 August 1593)

  Plague and prospects

  Viewed from the bankside south of the river, London would have seemed tranquil and beautiful in the late summer of 1592. Then as now, some days brought haze over the Thames. In low-lying southern liberties near the amphitheatres, the air could be hot and humid. Here, though the tenements were sealed off from the Thames by rising embankments, the working lives of people within the river's floodplain were influenced by the river's commerce and the city to the north. Above a line of public and private houses on the north bank, steeples and towers rose into the September air. Wherries and barges would have moved on the river deliberately as ever -- but watermen did not bring play-goers over to Paris Garden and the Clink.

  What were Shakespeare's relations with a city which was about to be struck by the worst plague since his birth? About 14 per cent of London's populace were to die. That calamity -- with the fear, disruption, suffering, and bitter loss it entailed -- is so overwhelming that his attitude to the theatre, or the effects of pamphleteering by University

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  Wits on his career, must have seemed comparatively minor matters. Yet the attack upon him in Chettle and Greene's Groats-worth of Witte belongs as much to our picture as do the effects of the plague. Before we turn to the epidemic and to the 'Wits', however, it will be well to consider a little further his relations with the London theatres.

  In the worst of the plague to come, deaths in theatre suburbs -- in Shoreditch and Southwark -- were to be proportionately much higher in number than those in London's heart. The central parishes were surrounded by a less than well-to-do riverside belt and by poor, tawdry districts north and east, and yet recent studies have shown that in each urban parish there was a wide range of wealth. It is true that those in the same trades might congregate in the same districts: there were for example shipwrights and sailors in St Dunstan's parish, weavers and cobblers in St Giles Cripplegate, and silk-weavers in Allhallows Honey Lane. But even the West End was not purely gentrified, since one might find goldsmiths in Holborn, the Strand, and Fleet Street, or cutlers and engravers, locksmiths and silversmiths elsewhere in the west. Each part of London was socially varied, and the various ranks were not segregated in daily life.

  Generally, the public theatre reflected the 'mix' of parishes. By 1592, this theatre was nearly a universal one -- it could be plebeian and courtly, ribald and refined in the same afternoon or play. All sorts, certainly, had come to see Titus, the Shrew, or Henry VI, and Shakespeare had deliberately appealed to varied audiences since he needed to bring in receipts. So far, one might add, he has not suggested London's real variety in any production. In Henry VI he writes as if he could hardly see below the heads of nobles; his social contexts are surprisingly weak, vague, or thin. He looks at the urban populace with reserve, an aloofness, and now and then, as in the Cade episodes, with mild disdain, as if he had an eye upon a fastidious patron. How fairly has he pictured a society in any epoch? His vulgar clown in Two Gentlemen seems an afterthought; and nostalgia and memory help to prompt Warwickshire earthiness in the Shrew. In behaviour or in rank his protagonists are aristocrats, and it may not be enough to say that he shared with many Londoners the notion that life in its 'fullness' could be realized only by the gentry and nobility.

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  In his concern for elegance -- despite schoolish excesses -- he had written as a poet who might find his fulfilment offstage, or without any very deep commitment to the theatre. His early plays are better than those of his contemporaries, with the exception of Marlowe at his best, but not astonishingly 'original'. They have more in common with other dramas of the 1590s than they show in differences. In Henry VI he strips drama of bombast or turgidity and makes it more intelligent, but this achievement suggests not so much his faith in the public as his dislike of mere sensation and crude sentiment.

  On the other hand, we cannot suppose that he was not extremely attentive to 'sharers'. He hardly let the actors down. 'Your Poets', says Gamaliel Ratsey to players in Ratsey's Ghost, a fictive Jacobean account of a real highwayman, 'take great paines to make your parts fit for your mouthes'. 1 And he had taken pains to make parts fit for mouths and memories -- his rhymes, striking images, and rhythmical styles made his early works fairly easy to memorize. (He would not be so kind to actors later on.) He cares little about historical causation in Henry VI -- one never quite knows why York quarrels with Somerset, or Gloucester with Winchester -- but tapsters and silversmiths at the Rose may not
have cared much either, and it is more important that he tried to suit London's amphitheatres. At these venues an actor confronted a high, abrupt cliff of spectators ahead, to the right, the left, and people in the yard below. Those watching the stage also watched and reacted to each other, and as a wave of excitement swept round, the emotive intensity of speeches in Henry VI would have had a strong effect, with the audience's reaction forming part of the drama.

  Shakespeare learned from that reciprocity and he and the public, in the months before the bubonic plague, were beginning to develop together. Lyly's, Peele's, Marlowe's, and his own works prepared the public for more subtle dramas, and chapels and churches, while denouncing the theatre, also aided it. Puritan vestries as in St Botolph Aldgate had 'concionators' -- special lecturers 2 -- who gave up to three talks a week: these frequent disquisitions trained the popular ear, and listeners might develop an appetite for livelier fare at the Rose, Curtain, or Theater. Bishops and grudging universities helped too,

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  at least by sending more Doctors of Divinity to town, and by the 1590s few non-graduates were being instituted to an urban cure of souls.