Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  whose will is large and spacious,

  Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

  (Sonnet 135)

  Still, the author avoids moralizing even in his fine sonnet on lust. Here he echoes a pun on waist/waste which Barnabe Barnes had developed in the same volume (of 1593) in which he praised the Earl of Southampton. For Shakespeare, a 'waste of shame' implies a 'shameful waist'. In modern editions of the Sonnets, grammatical punctua-

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  tion may abet the clarity of this great discourse on lust, but Shakespeare's intimacy of tone is perhaps More apparent in the text of 1609:

  Th'expence of Spirit in a waste of shame

  Is lust in action, and till action, lust

  Is perjurd, murdrous, blouddy full of blame,

  Savage, extreame, rude, cruell, not to trust,

  Injoyd no sooner but dispised straight,

  Past reason hunted, and no sooner had

  Past reason hated as a swollowed bayt,

  On purpose layd to make the taker mad.

  Made In pursut and in possession so,

  Had, having, and in quest, to have extreame,

  A blisse in proofe and provd and very wo,

  Before a joy proposd behind a dreame,

  All this the world well knowes yet none knowes well,

  To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

  (Sonnet 129)

  If the Sonnets were set from his manuscript, he may have written' In pursut and in possession so', and then inserted 'Made' (for 'Mad') in line 9 without changing the capital letter of the next word. 28 Quick and flowing as this poem is, its vision of lust is nightmarish. Developing his art typically by pressing situations to extremes, he etches the bleakest side of passion. He pictures a sexual reality that other sonneteers of the 1590s fail to show, and ends his series with two wry, ironic sonnets on venereal disease.

  Politics and King Jobn

  By the time Lucrece was printed in 1594, the theatre offered some illusion of hope for a few actors as plague abated. Among playwrights active just before the epidemic, few survived it for long. John Lyly lived on unproductively and sat as MP for one 'pocket borough' after another. Greene was gone; Peele and Nashe had only a few years left. Lodge was about to renounce the theatre. Kyd dragged out his last months in squalor, and on 30 May 1593 at Deptford -- along the river

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  south-east of the capital -- Marlowe had been killed in a knife-fight with three of the scum of the government's intelligence network ( Ingram Friser, Robert Poley, and Nicholas Skeres).

  Shakespeare's soft-voiced, glittering patron now faced paying a fine to Burghley, and another vast fee to get his estates out of wardship. In November 1594, the young earl was leasing out part of Southampton House, and a few years later selling off five of his manors, including Portsea and Bighton -- the last to relatives of the poet George Wither. He did little else tangibly for poets, and in fact the young earl was not well placed to offer great sums of money, a semi-permanent household office, a sinecure, or other large benefits of patronage. The myth that he once gave Shakespeare £1, 000 for a 'Purchase' was invented by Sir William Davenant, and strained even the credulity of Rowe (who noted it in 1709).

  But having used the earl's fashionable name, Shakespeare in Venus and Lucrece had offset the slurs of Greene and advertised his worth as a poet who pleased beyond the public stage. He might yet attract political patronage, and early in the spring of 1594 he could not have been certain of his way ahead.

  Throwing in his own political lot with the brash, vigorous Earl of Essex, Southampton began to offer a lively spectacle. Railing at the Burghley-Cecil faction in government and quietly scheming for James VI's succession, the Earl of Essex was drawing Puritan and Catholic followers alike. In 1599 he set sail to crush the Earl of Tyrone's or 'the O'Neill's' rebellion in Ireland and took along as his cavalry general Southampton -- who, just lately, had offended the Queen by seducing and marrying one of her doll-like Maids of Honour. In the most cautious patriotic way Shakespeare spoke out. In his only clear, specific allusion to a contemporary (and extra-dramatic) event, he has the Chorus in Act V of Henry Vcomment on the Earl of Essex's possible return from the Irish bogs.

  Had not Londoners cheered King Harry after a rain of arrows at Agincourt? (Not that the famous use of arrows and stakes against the French cavalry is explicit in the play.) 'As, by a lower but high-loving likelihood', says the Chorus, with imperfect faith in the Earl of Essex's military luck,

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  Were now the General of our gracious Empress -

  As in good time he may -- from Ireland coming,

  Bringing rebellion broaché on his sword,

  How many would the peaceful city quit

  To welcome him! Much More, and much More cause,

  Did they this Harry.

  (V.O. 29-35)

  This is no propaganda for Essex and Southampton -- and Shakespeare's doubt about their expedition was prophetic. After the débâcle of the army overseas, Southampton, Rutland and his brother, and a few other rash romantics joined the Earl of Essex in a rebellion against the Queen in 1601. But Londoners failed to rise against her, and Essex was executed. Southampton luckily was merely imprisoned in the Tower -- with his cat for company.

  Finally, when nearly retired from the stage, Shakespeare gave a very slight sign of his feeling for the Essex conspirators -- and indirectly for his former patron -- by devising an impresa for Southampton's friend the sixth Earl of Rutland. Such imprese were insignia, with mottoes and allegorical designs, usually painted on banners or paper shields. Shakespeare was paid 44s. for devising the work, his friend Burbage the same amount for painting it, and Rutland carried the insignia at a tourney, on 24. March, to mark King James's Accession Day in 1613.

  These late, almost nostalgic, gestures are indicative at least of Shakespeare's regard for the fate of the Essex faction. No doubt his caution was prudent, but it was also a sign of his wish to keep his poise, his freedom of enquiry into political motives. And that much is evident in his King John, a play which may date from around 1593-4 or a little later. King John has a relation to the Sonnets and to Lucrece's style, but the date or dates of its composition are in dispute and it could be a revised play, originally written before its author had read the anonymous, crude, anti-Catholic drama The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England which was printed in two parts in 1591.

  Shakespeare, in his play, in effect looks at modern political motives by taking up a thirteenth-century subject. King John, in defying the

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  pope, seemed a hero to Elizabethan Protestants. In the play he is weak and wavering, living in a world of deceit and compromise in which religion itself is political. Significantly the play offended Catholics, and William Sankey SJ, on the authority of the Holy Office, was to censor much of it in the 1640s for students at an English college in Spain. Shakespeare's papal legate Cardinal Pandolf has a grand subtle intellect and is by no means corrupt, but he is worldly, cynical, and capable of political blackmail on behalf of the pope.

  The play's boldly sardonic, developing hero -- the Bastard Falconbridge -- begins as a self-interested adventurer equipped in his rough and ready way for survival. He might be an ideal play-actor, ready to serve, detached from events, observant, and not inhibited. As the play's moral agent he is sensitive to politics as an arena of deceit, chance, treachery, self-delusion, and cowardice, and he interestingly rails against the refinement of court circles in a manner that might imply effeteness and ineptitude in Shakespeare's own patron.

  The yearning at the root of King John -- and conveyed by the Bastard -- is for a blameless, wise ruler in a just commonwealth; this is set against the realities of viciousness, weakness, and guile in the political world. The play's portraits are at once subtle and given in highly rhetorical and somewhat overwrought verse. King John might have suited a weary, if well disciplined, troupe on the road, since it nearly 'acts' itself and demands unusual r
estraint. Its portrait of Constance, the mother of King John's victim, young Arthur, reminds one of the technical experiment of Lucrece. And its Bastard's patriotism is thoughtful and questioning, at least partly because the author has tested his own paradoxes of attitude as a sonneteer.

  Though distanced from pieties of his upbringing, Shakespeare had not lost his Christian faith, or his belief in the worth of his nation under its Queen. He sympathized with Catholics, but he shows King John cowed by the pope's legate. Cardinal Pandolf tells the king with reference to the French threat to England:

  It was my breath that blew this tempest up,

  Upon your stubborn usage of the Pope,

  And since you are a gentle convertite,

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  My tongue shall hush again this storm of war

  And make fair weather in your blust'ring land.

  (v. i. 17-21)

  The Bastard, however, has another counsel for a confused, enfeebled king. 'But wherefore do you droop? Why look you sad?' Falconbridge tells John,

  Away, and glisten like the god of war

  When he intendeth to become the field.

  Show boldness and aspiring confidence.

  (v. i. 44, 54-6) 29

  Such an antidote to discouragement seems meant for a weary company, as well as a king. King John's overall form is poorer than in its best scenes, and the play is not a strong one. But its Bastard speaks with hard-won authority, and suggests an author who knows the pain of plague-time and the struggle of actors to endure.

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  11

  A SERVANT OF THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN

  I am as vigilant as a cat to steal cream.

  ( Falstaff, 1 Henry IV)

  Sharing with the Burbages

  In the bleak, cold spring of 1594, plague abated in southern England and players returned under grey skies to London. Few people could remember such an odd, dismal spring. The past two years had punished the acting troupes; none had thrived on the road and plague had brought total chaos to the entertainment world. Pembroke's men had broken up and had sold their playbooks, which thus came into print like debris from a sinking ship. Keen to advertise themselves, it seems, and stay afloat, other troupes released plays for publication. Hertford's small troupe faltered, and after losing their own patron, Sussex's men disbanded. Then, on 16 April, Ferdinando Lord Strange (lately fifth Earl of Derby) died in such bizarre circumstances that it was rumoured he had been poisoned, as likely he was, and his death, a few months after that of the Earl of Sussex, meant the theatre had lost two of its keenest patrons. Ferdinando's troupe performed in the name of his widow, the Dowager Countess Alice -- who will concern us -- but his death was like a bad omen. Cold skies, moreover, foretold a poor grain harvest (the first of four utterly disastrous annual failures) with rising prices and new hardships.

  So far, Shakespeare had kept his options open: in the letter accompanying Lucrece he looks ahead to writing poems, not more dramas, while implying he will accept patronage. In May the government interfered -- as if a giant were regrouping the children in a vast urban

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  sandlot -- and set up a kind of theatrical monopoly in London. That would give him a new chance; but biographers have underestimated his real situation, just as they neglect the difficulties faced by his new troupe in the mid-1590s. In some ways, his troubles only deepened as his career became more settled. Once committed to the theatre, he was unlikely to write another Venus or or Lucrece; and it was unlikely that any stage drama could have the status of such works. He cut himself off from the hope that is implicit in his two letters to Southampton, and a curious, cold sense of loss and disappointment runs in his Sonnets. Whatever he did, he might be less than respectable in a Midlands town; but the low status of actors was an old ache, a grievance felt by colleagues such as Phillips and Pope, and not the worst of his problems. Some dissatisfaction with himself saved him from complacency, while quickening his intellectual life; he adjusted with some cunning to a milieu he felt he had to accept to earn his livelihood. But the financial outlook of his new company was uncertain; he had nothing else to fall back upon, and might return home with nothing. If he had followed the path of his Titus playbook and gone with Burbage from Lord Strange's company, after May 1591, into Pembroke's, and then Sussex's, he had been obliged to do so to survive; in later years his fidelity to one troupe would be unique among poets. Yet that loyalty is no sign of his contentment, and there are underlying complications in his ambiguous writing to suggest that he opposed his vocation as much as he accepted it. He subverted many norms of the theatre and defied his medium as he made use of a compromised way of life in 1595 and 1596; he mocked popular assumptions even in his first great mythic plays Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, before creating a radical, ebullient mocker in Falstaff and virtually turning English history on its head. How did his new situation come about, and how did his new duties really affect him?

  Certainly in the plague, old James Burbage, as proprietor of the empty Shoreditch Theater, had not been quite idle. In good times, as recent evidence shows, Burbage broke city trade-laws in his manner of selling fruit, nuts, and drink to playgoers. He was fined, indicted, and banned from catering. Yet even when the Theater was shut he sold food illegally at Holywell Street, despite summonses from the

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  Middlesex justices (each year from 1591 to 1594). He felt the freer to do so, it seems, because of a connection in high places. He claimed to be 'Hunsdons man', while wearing the livery of old Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon of the Privy Council.

  This lord had a rather downright manner, a 'custom of swearing and obscenity', and the outlook of a politic old hedonist. 1 When his mistress Aemilia Lanyer, who was the daughter of a court musician, bore him a son called Henry in 1593, Lord Hunsdon was not very badly inconvenienced; the child, after all, had a notional father in her husband, the spendthrift musician Alfonso Lanier. 2 Hunsdon hardly concealed his follies, and in the obdurate old James Burbage, defying the law with his nuts and drink, he had a loyal and rugged admirer. More than once, Hunsdon's intervention saved the Theater from hostile voices on the Privy Council, and Burbage played Falstaff to a rather wheezy, ageing Prince Hal. Hunsdon was the Queen's first cousin (he was the son of Anne Boleyn's sister) and in view of Henry VIII's appetites he was said to be Elizabeth's half-brother, too. If not always on perfect terms with the Queen, he was one of her more trusted advisers. Moreover not long after his son-in-law Charles Howard, Lord Howard of Effingham, became the Lord High Admiral, Hunsdon was appointed the Queen's Chamberlain with control of funds and play-censorship in the Revels Office.

  In that office, economy was vital. Hunsdon knew for instance that it cost his office three times as much to stage a masque for the Queen as to pay for a play, and so, in league with Charles Howard, he usually protected actors from the worst demands of Guildhall, while quietly favouring the Queen's troupe, which was set up in 1583. But the Queen's group split in two twice, and in the spring of 1594 its remnants were in decline. Other acting companies were nearly bankrupted, melting away, and two of the best player-patrons -- Sussex and Derby -- were gone. Hunsdon and Howard had to move boldly to keep a stable, durable troupe in the capital.

  If the lords took advice, two women would have heard of plans affecting the fate of Shakespeare and other actors. It is unlikely that Hunsdon took five major actors from the troupe of his own relative, Alice, Countess of Derby -- Ferdinando's widow -- without consult-

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  ing her. Derby's men performed in her name in May. Litigious, abrasive, and later dissatisfied in a second marriage, the Dowager Countess Alice oddly took a generous interest in poets and actors. Hunsdon's daughter and Howard's wife, Catherine Carey, who was closer to the Queen than either of them, would probably also have given advice. What emerged, at any rate, was a sensitive theatrical plan of considerable help to Shakespeare. Though nominally sponsored by two Privy Council lords, it was not strictly a measure of the Queen's go
vernment, and that made the plan somewhat fragile. But it ensured the continuance of London playing, and, in the long run, the greatest cultural success a modern nation had ever known.

  Hunsdon and Howard's plan had a double-insurance feature in that two troupes were set up with a 'family' at each centre for stability; the two groups would straddle London, one north of the walls, one just south of the river. Hunsdon would sponsor men and boys under the Chamberlain's name at Shoreditch and thus oblige the profithungry old Burbage and his two sons. ( Cuthbert Burbage, lately a servant, had been baptized on 15 June 1565: he was now almost 29; young Richard, the actor, baptized on 7 July 1568, was 25, with his main success still ahead of him.) In turn, Howard would lend the Lord Admiral's name to a troupe on Bankside with Edward Alleyn, his wife Joan, and father-in-law Philip Henslowe at the centre. 3