Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  Yet he was capable of plagiaristic excess. At a troubled time not long before he died, he replied to the fussy, scholarly Gabriel Harvey of Cambridge in a fine pamphlet, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, most of which, though in easy prose, is closely copied from Francis Thynne verses in The Debate Betweene Pride and Lowlines which was in print by the 1570s. Rather more cynical was Greene's irresponsibility in exploiting national prejudices. In his play James IV he humbles Scotland and then depicts a reconciliation between that country and

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  England on the understanding that the Scots are an inferior, bemused people. In the play, the English teach a sharp lesson, killing 7,000 Scottish lairds in battle -- far exceeding the facts of Flodden Field-after which the Scottish king is sentimentally forgiven for trifling with the English: 'Youth has misled -- tut, but a little fault. 'Tis kingly to amend what is amiss' (lines 2509-10)

  Yet Greene was obsessed by his own moral lapses, and in 'repentance'pamphlets he took up his sins. He has given himself to drink and women. ('In one year hee pist as much against the walls', Nashe told Gabriel Harvey, 'as thou and thy two brothers spent in three'.) Taking a prostitute as his mistress, he left this anecdote about women in The Royal Exchange ( 1590) without comment, though he claimed he was translating from an Italian source: ' Tymon of Athens who was called Mysanthropos, seeing a tree whereon divers women had hanged themselves, wished that everie tree might yeelde such fruite.' 14 Repeatedly he told the sad tale of his decline into writing plays, and used a favourite image from Aesop for the players, as when he has Cicero rebuke the Roman actor Roscius in Francesco's Fortunes: 'Why, Roscius, art thou proud with Esops Crow, being pranct with the glorie of others feathers?' The 'feathers' were words supplied by artful, hard-working playwrights, and so an actor had no reason to 'waxe proud'. 15

  But his complaints ran a little deeper than this. He found in playwriting, which he respected, no way to come round -- or to discover a satisfactory picture of himself or the stability he needed. He looked into the same situation that underlay Shakespeare's career, and saw that the making of scripts for a mercenary theatre subject to vulgar taste reduced the maker, the poet, to gross servitude. Shakespeare pursued his artistic life in public as a kind of popular entertainment and so far had found that circumstances 'did not better for my life provide' than 'the public means'. But whereas Greene saw himself as a puppet of the actors, Shakespeare had regarded them so far as protectors, intimate associates, and allies.

  And yet even in 1592 Greene's plays were popular on the London stage. Friar Bacon had been bringing in an average of 23s. a day for Henslowe, and seemed so attractive that it demanded a sequel, the

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  play we call John of Bordeaux, which has a few lines in Henry Chettle's hand in an extant script. Greene Orlando Furioso, his A LookingGlass for London and England (written with Thomas Lodge), as well as Friar Bacon, ensured that he had something produced every month from February to June that year.

  But he was accused in April of selling Orlando Furioso to both the Queen's and the Strange-Admiral's players. Then, when theatres were under a double interdiction in the summer, Greene became ill. Nashe did not deny that a 'banquet' of Rhenish wine and pickled herring with this friend was the cause. Abandoned it seems even by his mistress, Greene fended for himself, wrote a confessional pamphlet and some acerbic notes about the players and Shakespeare, and apparently collapsed in the street one day near Dowgate wharf. He was taken in by a shoemaker, one Isam, and near Dowgate's water-carriers he feebly lingered on. Lacking clothes, he borrowed a shirt when his own was being washed -- a fact that led Harvey later to sneer over his poverty. Early in September 'he walked to his chaire and back againe', and wrote to his wife after nine o'clock that night, but the next day Robert Greene died. The shoemaker saw to his burial after wrapping a wreath about the scholar's waist.

  The first to descend on Greene's papers, it seems, was Henry Chettle, formerly a partner of the printer John Danter (who brought out a quarto of Titus Andronicus). Chettle, at the time, would have lacked a first-hand knowledge of the theatre, but he was inclined towards the stage and would write for it, in penury, after his daughter Mary died (in 1595). At the moment he had in hand some fascinating material. On 20 September 1592 he licensed a work to be called Greenes Groatsworth of witte, bought with a million of Repentance. Describing the follie of youth, the falshood of make-shifte flatterers, the miscrie of the negligent, and mischiefes of deceiving Courtezans. Written before his death and published at his dyeing request.

  The 'waspish little worme' and 'upstart Crow'

  Greenes Groats-worth, printed from a text in Chettle's handwriting, was virtually a rape of Shakespeare, or an insinuating attack on not only his

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  plays but his person, and it had the force of seeming to be a candid statement by a dying man. Greene uses a popular formula in which a parable is told, embellished with damaging details to fit an individual. Complex and witty, Groats-worth begins with a 'prodigal son' story about a bookish Roberto -- who is meant to resemble Robert Greene. Having accused his greedy father of usury, Roberto is left one coin to buy a 'groats-worth of witte', and after luring his rich brother to ensnarement by a prostitute 'in the suburbes', he is cast out to starve.

  Cursing his fate, he now meets a stage player, who has been a 'countrey Author' and has an odd voice. 'Truly', Roberto remarks with distaste, it is strange 'you should so prosper in that vayne practise [of acting] for that it seemes to me your voice is nothing gratious.'

  Who is the country poet and actor with vile tones? Is Greene thinking of another enemy, or does he imply that Shakespeare's pitch, timbre, or Midlands vowels were unpleasant? At any rate, Roberto becomes a playwright himself. His purse swells like the sea until, demoralized by servitude, he cheats actors, takes up with lewd friends, and ends with just one groat. At this point, Greene intervenes to admit that his life has been like Roberto's and to advise Peele, Nashe, and Marlowe apparently about the actors. 'Base minded men all three of you, if by my miserie you be not warned', he says, 'for unto none of you (like race) sought those burres to cleave.' The 'burres' may be the Burbages, and the next lines are the bitterest and nearly the most famous lines ever written of Shakespeare. 'Yes trust them not', writes Greene,

  for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannesfac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. O that I might intreat your rare wits to be imploied in more profitable courses: & let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions. I know the best husband of you will never prove an Usurer . . . 16

  Does the 'upstart Crow' resemble proud, vain crows in Macrobius, Martial, and Aesop, or is he like the thieving crow in Horace's third Epistle, and so a plagiarist? Only vaguely is Shakespeare linked with dishonesty, but he is vicious (with a 'Tygers hart'), presumptuous, and

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  common, if not ungrateful ('upstart' and 'beautified' by the achievements of others), and smug and conceited ('the onely Shake-scene'). In coining 'Johannes fac totum' from dominus or magister factotum Greene makes him as reckless as Jack Cade, who was known as ' Jack Mend-All', and links him also with the author's pettily cruel Queen Margaret. The Duke of York's phrase in 3 Henry VI (O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide!, 1. iv. 138) is aptly misquoted, and that allusion echoes Margaret's earlier attack on Gloucester in 2 Henry VI ('His feathers are but borrowed, | For he's disposed as the hateful raven', 111. i. 75-6).

  Greene had listened very well to his rival's works, since none of Henry VI was in print, and he conveys a final hint that Shakespeare had viciously refused to lend money. A poor, starving Grasshopper approaches a busy Ant for aid. Like the cruel, maleficent Shake-scene with his tiger's heart, the Ant has the inner being of a 'waspish little worme'. And so when th
e Grasshopper calls for food, the Ant waspishly replies:

  now thou feelst the storme, And starvst for food while I am fed with cates. Use no intreats, I will relentlesse rest, For toyling labour hates an idle guest. 17

  The pamphlet was not written by a deranged observer. Its charges against a Stratford man, whose voice cannot be mistaken for a Cambridge graduate's, are not very precise; but they add up to a glimpse of an actor-poet -- seen through a thick glass of hatred -- who holds himself aloof from other poets, blends with a group such as Burbage's players, serves a troupe diversely, and writes scripts to rival those of his social betters. In brief, its assertions are not fantastic. Shakespeare perhaps avoided Wits and others at Shoreditch, but whether or not he ever refused to aid Greene is unknown.

  Printed in an edition of about 500 copies, Groats-worth did not sell very briskly -- it was not reissued until 1596 -- but its rechcrché theatreallusions would have had some effect. The proof of Greene's straits was that he was dead, whereas Henry VI's success might well imply a 'Shake-scene'. Warfare between Nashe and Harvey in the autumn called attention to Greene's strange demise: 'what a coyle there is with

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  pamphleting on him after his death' wrote Nashe, adding that he had had no hand in a 'scald trivial lying pamphlet' called Greenes groatsworth which is 'given out to be of my doing'. 18 Others took Chettle as the work's real author, a matter that still fuels speculation.

  With his integrity under attack, Shakespeare must at first have felt sharply cut, and his stoicism cannot have left him immune to embarrassment and pain. Some 'friends' who read his manuscripts presumably heard of a scandal touching him, and he may allude to it. In Sonnets 110-12, the Poet refers to his dire troubles, the stage's iniquity, and defects in his own behaviour. He has gone 'here and there' in miserable, compromising journeys,

  made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new. Most true it is that I have looked on truth Askance and strangely.

  The public stage even now colours him like a dye: 'my name receives a brand', he declares,

  And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. Pity me then.

  One scandal burns, whether or not he refers to the name ' Greene' in 'o'er-green' -- a word used only this once by Shakespeare and printed in 1609 as 'ore-greene'. 'Your love and pity doth th'impression fill', the Poet begins in Sonnet 112,

  Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow; For what care I who calls me good or ill, So you o'er-green my bad, my good allow? You are my all the world, and I must strive. To know my shames and praises from your tongue

  Events in his life may not be pictured exactly in the lyrics, but if he refers here to his mood after the attack, his 'brow' clears. Yet he did not forget easily. His exposure to 'ill' and 'shames' would continue if he stayed in the theatre, and the pamphlet made his choice of a stage

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  career riskier. However little Greene's words continued to nettle him, he appears to mock his own sensitivity to them, as when in Hamlet he refers to Greene's 'beautified' in Polonius's saying, of the Prince's letter to 'the most beautified Ophelia': 'that's an ill phrase, a vile phrase, "beautified" is a vile phrase' ( II. ii. 110-12). Later on in the same scene, an actor in Polonius's role apparently ad-libbed with the surprising remark 'beautified lady', since Edward Pudsey jotted oddly in a commonplace book around 1601: 'The sunne breedes mag Beautifyed Ladye gotes in a dead dog beeing good kissing carrion etc.' 19 But by then it appears, Shakespeare was amused by the 'vile phrase'.

  At some point he, or another hand, did remove from 2 Henry VI a line about 'Abradas the great Masadonian Pyrate'which he had picked up from Greene Menaphon or Penelope's Web; this line is used in the quarto of 2 Henry VI, but not in the Folio version, where it is replaced by 'Bargulus the strong Illyrian pirate'. 20 And late in 1592 he was well in control of his feelings when, it seems, he saw Henry Chettle. In Kind-Harts Dreame, licensed on 8 December, Chettle apologizes for Groats-worth and states that he had had no previous knowledge of Marlowe (whom he has no wish to know) or of Shakespeare either. His phrase 'the qualitie' refers to acting, and of late he has discovered Shakespeare to be a splendid actor -- a stunning feat since the public theatres were shut that autumn -- and, furthermore, has found him to be a perfectly civil or polite man: 'my selfe have seene his demeanor no lesse civill than he excellent in the qualitie he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writting, that aprooves his Art.' 21 Chettle's arm has been twisted, it seems. Persons of higher than ordinary standing, or 'divers of worship', had spoken to him about the playwright. Just who they were is unclear, but Shakespeare had been attracting very smart young bloods and men of rank.

  Shagbag, The Comedy of Errors, and Love's Labour's Lost

  Groats-worth itself was a symptom of a lasting feud between the troupes and the poets who wrote for them, and in time the playwright Thomas Dekker was to carry it on. 'O you that are the Poets of these

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  sinfull times, over whom the Players have now got the upper hand', 22 Dekker would lament, and, in the wake of Greene's comments, Shakespeare in his straddling work as an actor-poet had reason to be on guard. But he had begun to amuse some of the keenest theatre enthusiasts, or law students and others at London's great law Inns, the Inns of Court and Chancery. Less than thirty months after Greene's allusion to ' Johannes fac totum', law students at Gray's Inn's Christmas revels were warned, facetiously, of a 'Johannes Shagbag'. This vile man is potent since he waylays literally 'all' in his part of London.

  Whether or not 'Shagbag' was meant to be Shakespeare, the 'termers', who were au courant with theatre news, had seen The Comedy of Errors a few days earlier in Gray's hall where invited actors had staged it after some uproar. When too many invited guests turned up and in the crush some stalked out, 'it was thought good not to offer any thing of account, saving Dancing and Revelling with Gentlewomen', reports the Gesta Grayorum, 'and after such Sports, a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the Players. So that Night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon, it was ever afterwards called, The Night of Errors'. 23 Shakespeare's comedy was well suited for Gray's Inn and for Innocents Night on 28 December 1594 -- though it may have had a Bankside debut, if it is Henslowe's 'the gelyous comodey' (or Jealous Comedy), staged at the Rose during a break in the plague in January 1593. 24

  Many students and gentlemanly sojourners near Holborn had time to frequent public theatres, to seek out actors, and hear gossip of the stage, and around 1594 Shakespeare would have been known particularly at Gray's Inn. As the largest and most fashionable law Inn, Gray's recruited members from wealthy families north and south, and here men from great northern Catholic families were in evidence. One Gray's Reader (later knighted) was Thomas Hesketh, an executor of the wills of Alexander de Hoghton, and of his own namesake Sir Thomas Hesketh of Rufford in Lancashire, who had known Lord Strange and kept players. Gray's, indeed, had more Lancashire members than any other Inn; and whether or not Shakespeare had known Hoghton and Hesketh, Stratford had its Lancashire-born schoolmasters.

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  Among Gray's members from the south, none was a keener patron of the arts than a delicately handsome Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. Historically, the Inns had sponsored drama almost as a loyal duty to the monarch, and they had poets and future dramatists in residence; also they were hives of sonneteering in the 1590. Michael Drayton of Warwickshire refers to the Inns, and to judge from his sonnets he knew unpublished lyrics by his Stratford countryman.

  In brief, The Comedy of Errors was staged in a milieu not uncongenial to its author. As Shakespeare's funniest play it advertises his considerable technical powers. It outdoes its main source, or Plautus's funny, unsentimental Menaechmi about identical twins, by having two sets of twi
ns for confusion, even as it deftly mixes poignant comedy and farce. Shakespeare's Antipholus of Syracuse is a foreigner -- as Johannes Shagbag is said to be -- who fails to cope with a dauntingly quick-paced, haunted society of Ephesus, which takes him for his twin. He is like a confused actor who has lost track of his own identity, as if he has had too many bizarre roles to play, and though he falls in love with an urbane, pretty Luciana, the sister of his brother's wife Adriana, he never quite imposes himself on a foreign society.

  Mistaking him for her husband and shocked by his coldness, Adriana beseeches him as one terrified by loss of love. Her pathos in its tragic aspect is urgent and unanswered, as if she were replying to the Poet of the so-called Dark Lady sonnets. 'Ay, ay, Antipholus, look strange and frown', she cries imploringly,