Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  In fact he wrote Richard II as the opening work in a series of four dramas about the Lancastrian kings who had reigned before the period of his first tetralogy -- or in the seventeen years between Bolingbroke's quarrel with Mowbray in 1398 and the aftermath of Agincourt in 1415.

  This was the riskiest of his projects, and the first drama in the series nearly ruined his company. For one thing, with Richard II, he doubtless irked the Queen. 'I am Richard II, know ye not that?' Elizabeth later told the antiquary William Lambarde at Greenwich Palace on 4. August 1601. Her political enemies had compared her with

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  Richard II, who had lacked a direct heir as she did and had been deposed. The Essex-and-Southampton faction pressed that analogy fatally, and she felt that the theatre was partly to blame. 'This tragedy', she told poor Lambarde (who died fifteen days after the interview), 'was played 40tie times in open streets and houses.' Lambarde tried to mollify her, but she returned to Richard II and 'demanded', as the old antiquary put it, ' "Whether I had seen any true picture, or lively representation of his countenance and person?" ' 'None but such as be in common hands', she was told. 18

  The scene in Richard II in which the king is forcibly deposed was censored or never printed while the Queen was alive, but, luckily, the rash acting of the play by the Chamberlain's men at the request of five or six of Essex's conspirators on 7 February 1601 (only a day before their abortive coup) did not bring down the company; they were cleared of conspiracy in the Essex revolt. On behalf of Shakespeare's men, Augustine Phillips at a trial on 18 February -- perhaps in one of the star performances of his life -- claimed that his actors had told Essex's men that the play was 'so old & so long out of use as that they should get no company at it'. Actors, like newborn babes or sheep in a meadow, knew nothing of politics; that was implicitly clear, but, as a respected sharer, Phillips stuck to the point. He recalled that his troupe had heartily wished to put on 'some other play' for the Essex conspirators, who, nevertheless, gave them 40s. above the ordinary fee to put on this one. 19

  One feels, anyway, that the actors had reason to be pleasant with the Queen's officials. The Revels Office had been tolerating a good deal of political comment. But in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had taken risks with Richard II. An unusually ceremonial play, it balances the story of King Richard's fall with that of Harry Bolingbroke's ominous and deadly rise. Richard talks, but Bolingbroke takes steps. Law and tradition have ensured Richard's right to the crown, and yet having had his uncle Gloucester killed by means of the Duke of Norfolk, he falters, and while picturing his guilt and self-pity, he foolishly relies on the crown's mystique to save him.

  Shakespeare had taken very special pains with the work, using details in Holinshed Chronicles but looking into more alternative sources than for any other history play. Also he lavished care on verbal texture,

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  to the extent that his text has an unusual verbal decorum. Few plays demand more of the 'ear', and its rhythms or quirky negative verbs ('unkiss', 'uncurse', 'undeaf ', 'unhappied') are intendedly medieval in a very Elizabethan way. Just as Marlowe's Edward II affects the portrayal of Richard, so Spenser's deliberately archaic manner in The Faerie Queene, for example, influences Shakespeare's language.

  The play's choric figures hardly seem medieval. As if he were one of Elizabeth's clergy, the Bishop of Carlisle implores a lax Richard to use strength to resist Bolingbroke -- and Aumerle rubs in the lesson:

  He means, my lord, that we are too remiss,

  Whilst Bolingbroke through our security,

  Grows strong and great in substance and in power.

  (111. ii. 29-31)

  Rather so did the Queen feel about British military laxity and Spain's threat in 1595 -- when a Spanish invasion was expected, her troops had withdrawn from the Continent, and Ireland stirred in revolt. In one respect, Shakespeare offers a sad object-lesson almost bound to please a militant anxious Queen and her Privy Council. He makes Richard even more passive than any historical source had shown him to be.

  But, then, Richard is potent in his fall. There is a metaphysical aspect in his tragedy, even as his faith in the crown is mocked by a nasty, emergent pragmatism. How patriotic was Shakespeare? The dying Gaunt very poignantly evokes an England which the young king wastes and neglects:

  This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

  This other Eden, demi-paradise,

  This fortress built by nature for herself

  Against infection and the hand of war,

  This happy breed of men, this little world,

  This precious stone set in the silver sea,

  Which serves it in the office of a wall,

  Or as a moat defensive to a house

  Against the envy of less happier lands,

  This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England . . .

  (11. i. 41-50)

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  But even Gaunt can be less impressive than the spectacle of the decline of medievalism in Richard's talk in Acts IV and V.

  Shakespeare designed his plays to be open to multiple interpretation, and all have inexhaustible problems. But with more intellectual confidence here than in earlier history plays, he uses patriotism as a theme to be balanced against deeply upsetting ideas. Richard II shows how easy it is to be rid of an anointed king. Not God's power, but presumptions about divinity are radically at issue: the play demystifies monarchy by undercutting its godly sanction, and implies that a divinely ordained ruler is no concern of heaven. The idea that God no longer 'guards the right' has a dramatic shock, and counters tenets of belief which have supported armies from Tudor times to ours. As a key work in its author's development, Richard II also opens a path for his tragedies. If even the anointed servant is not protected by divine favour, history may be nothing more than a product of human volition; and emphasis falls upon choice, responsibility, and resourcefulness as factors that may determine the fate of a Macbeth or a Lear.

  After this prelude, the author explores ambiguities of modern politics in 1 and 2 Henry IV in which the terse, practical Harry Bolingbroke -- now Henry IV -- contends with a single armed political rebellion and has a truant-rebel in his eldest son, Prince Henry or Hal ('my unthrifty son' and 'a plague' in Richard II). In an early part of The Civil Wars ( 1595), Samuel Daniel had made Hal and Hotspur of about the same age, and so foils and rivals. More boldly, Shakespeare puts Hal at the centre of an evolving familial, military, and political picture which involves most of British society.

  Looming in the foreground is the bulky, dissolute colossus of Falstaff, who might be the soul of the suburbs or an urban Lord of Misrule expert in Nashe's raillery, or Tarlton's repartee, except that he is more inclusive. He is more complex than any of his sources: 'it is hard to get one's mind all round him', William Empson once noted, though there is no reason why Falstaff should be consistent, as modern critics of stage performance (such as Samuel Crowl in his Shakespeare Observed) often imply. Falstaff was probably acted by Kempe, whose artificial girth on stage would have been telling. A Jacobean drawing shows a reduced and tidy Falstaff in doublet and breeches

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  with lace-topped boots, but the architect Inigo Jones (born in 1573) could have seen Kempe's clown, and Jones later specifies 'like a SrJohn fall staff' in describing a similar figure: 'a roabe of russet Girt low', he writes, 'with a great belley' and 'buskines to shew a great swolen lege' -- a figure with a 'great head and balde'. 20

  As in the Merchant or Much Ado, Shakespeare could hope to appeal to idlers and lawyers at the Inns of Court and of Chancery and well beyond. Falstaff, as the most intelligent of clowns, has been an Inn of Chancery law student of Clement's Inn, who began to crack skulls as a mere lad ( 2 Henry IV, III. ii). He appears with Hal in a very Tudor Eastcheap, which had in Gracechurch Street a street of haberdashers pronounced as ' Grass Street', as well as what Stow calls a 'flesh Market of Butchers' and the Boar's Head among other taverns. 21 Prince Hal's education includes bouts of
heady enjoyment and combats of wit with a glutton. Both are canny actors, and yet, though Falstaff lies, he counters the worst shams of wartime patriotism. The Prince has an authentic self only when with him. Like Doll Tearsheet, the clown even becomes a standard of social truth, as when, as a captain, he reports on his men at Shrewsbury: 'I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered; there's not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town's end, to beg during life' ( I Henry IV, v. iii. 35-8). That condemns the army system, not the fat clown. Similarly when Doll is scandalized by Pistol's captaincy, she really derides the Tudor practice of giving offices by court favour. 'You a captain?' she screams at Pistol,

  You slave! For what? For tearing a poor whore's ruff in a bawdy-house! He a captain! Hang him, rogue, he lives upon mouldy stewed prunes and dried cakes. A captain? God's light, these villains will make the word 'captain' odious; therefore captains had need look to't. ( 2 Henry IV, II. iv. 139-44)

  Yet it is Falstaff who best exposes a gap between Renaissance language and action, and to the extent that he pictures the excesses of humanist faith in the word, he might be a rebel in the advanced grammarschool era of the 1570s. He is the only being through whom the Poet of the Sonnets might speak the truth. Cat-like and alert, despite his bulk, he is in his odd, aggrandizing passivity, easy sociability, and

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  detachment so much like the author that a resemblance may have amused the actors. Both poet and clown are pretenders; both exploit royalty; both try to control reality through words; both appear to seek male affection and approval with the utmost urgency. Both are insouciant but not arrogant -- and perhaps only a writer of unusual receptivity and great personal modesty could have brought such a clown into being. Falstaff symbolizes nothing exactly because he engrosses so many meanings.

  Critics, more often than audiences, nonetheless find fault with Henry IV. If Falstaff's lying is not thought to be objectionable, the Prince's lying can seem slick and self-interested: it is impossible to know when, or if ever, he tells the truth, and commentators fault him in all three parts of the Henriad. 'Hal is an anti-Midas; everything he touches turns to dross', writes Stephen Greenblatt. 'Hal is the prince and principle of falsification-he is himself a counterfeit companion.' 22 Certainly Hal lies in order to manipulate appearances as he waits to amaze the world and to redeem himself by rejecting Falstaff, but he comes out of the chrysalis as a rather stiff butterfly.

  His interior life -- if it exists -- is not on display even in Henry V. Shakespeare concerns himself here with the theatre of politics and writes his most effectively playable history drama. It is likely that he added the apologetic Chorus at a late point, and just how vital that is to the play's success can become clear when the Chorus is missing, as in the brief quarto of 1600. Shakespeare never wrote with a narrower, more coercive purpose than he did for a Chorus which steadily praises King Harry and amplifies his settings:

  Now entertain conjecture of a time When creeping murmur and the poring dark Fills the wide vessel of the universe. (IV. O. 1-3)

  Yet the Chorus might have wandered in from another play. It describes wrong settings, contradicts the stage-action, or sends Harry off to Harfleur from two different ports. It refers to honour 'in the breast of every man' just before we see the Eastcheap rogues. On the eve of Agincourt, it speaks of a 'little touch of Harry in the night',

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  though Harry cheers up neither man nor devil in the night. What we read in a text of Henry Vis not what we usually hear and see on stage, or in the heroic films of Laurence Olivier ( 1944) or Kenneth Branagh ( 1989), though Branagh's Henry at least watches as Bardolph is hanged. A modern editor notices that the King lies to his troops about brotherhood, that he cannot be honest with anyone, and that after a doubtfully just war he claims the French princess in a kind of diplomatic rape. 23

  Written when the Chamberlain's men were short of funds and in other difficulty, Henry V reveals patchwork composing or, at least, uncertain revision. Shakespeare's trouble with Hal, in any case, appears in no fewer than three plays. However, Henry V might testify to the value of external and conceptual difficulties in his career, for he depicts the politician and military hero at last in an exciting drama of action, in which the ambiguities perhaps are not fully realizable on a stage. Harry may be nobly perfect and likeable, or a kind of sullen, political chunk of ice who is false with everyone, but he is certainly heroic; and just as Richard II is hard for actors to get right, so Henry V seems nearly impossible for them to get wrong. The gusto, humour, and sureness in Falstaff's portrayal are the more effective because ironically he is a test of truth in 1 and 2 Henry IV, but in Henry Vthere is no such standard, and the pragmatic Harry suggests the author's deep uneasiness with political heroism and with a nation's barbarity in war.

  As it turned out, Falstaff caused some unexpected trouble. At first in Henry IV Shakespeare had called him 'Sir John Oldcastle' after the Protestant hero and Lollard martyr. Descendants of Oldcastle's widow including Henry Brooke, the eighth Lord Cobham, must have protested, and the clown's name was changed to Falstaff. In 2 Henry IV the Epilogue cats humble pie to say that Falstaff might 'die of a sweat', but 'Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man'. With the clown's new name in place, 1 Henry IV was published in quarto in 1598 and reprinted more often, in the next twenty-five years, than any other Shakespeare play. Immensely popular, Falstaff thrived even in private theatricals. At Surrenden in Kent, Sir Edward Dering went so far as to abridge the two parts of Henry IV, link them with a few original verses,

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  and arrange for the revamped work's staging by his relatives, friends, and 'Jacke of the buttery' a year before the first Folio. 24

  Long before that, Falstaff had featured in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which the great clown purges a provincial town of folly at the price of losing his skill at evading blame. The comedy is a strong one with its roots in old, suggestive folk-myths of social purgation. The text was written in a mere two weeks at the Queen's command, according to a legend fostered in 1702 by John Dennis, who had a financial stake in The Comical Gallant, his revision of The Merry Wives. Seven years later Dennis's legend was embellished when Rowe added the detail that the Queen had asked Shakespeare to show Falstaff in love. Falstaff is not in love, just broke, and hopes with identical loveletters to seduce both Mistress Page and Mistress Ford and so live off both. Unfortunately, he lacks a photocopier. 'I warrant', says Mistress Page, 'he hath a thousand of these letters, writ with blank space for different names -- sure, more, and these are of the second edition. He will print them out of doubt -- for he cares not what he puts into the press when he would put us two' (11. i. 71-6). Not many Tudor country folk talked so readily of printing and the press. The comedy was written for an urban audience, and, no doubt, too, for a royal occasion. Posing as the Fairy Queen in Act V, Mistress Quickly alludes to ' Windsor Castle'and to the Order of the Garter. It has been argued that the play was staged at the royal Garter Feast at Whitehall Palace, Westminster, on St George's Day, 23 April 1597. For the first time in four years, knights were then elected to the Order of the Garter, and invested in St George's Chapel, Windsor, a few weeks later. Still, there is no proof that The Merry Wives was acted then, and it could have had a court debut as late as the winter of 1597-8. 25

  Does the author take revenge on Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham by letting jealous Ford assume the name ' Brooke' in negotiating with Falstaff? The name Brooke in the play was altered to Broome, in any case. Shakespeare glances at a real Frederick, Count Mömpelgard, later duke of Württemberg, whom the Queen had pledged to elect as a Garter Knight. From the German states Mömpelgard was sending letters about a missing Garter. Thus Bardolph, out beyond Eton, spies 'three German devils, three Doctor Faustuses', but it is left to the

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  French physician Dr Caius to demolish foreign pretensions. 'It is tella me', says Caius to the Garter Inn's host, 'dat you make grand preparation for a duke de Jamany. By
my trot, der is no duke that the court is know to come' ( Merry Wives, IV. v. 65, 80-2). 26

  Shakespeare did not always mock 'Jamany', and would send Hamlet to one of the German universities most favoured by the Danes. The heroine and her brother are called 'Anne' and 'William', as if the author had in mind two persons of the distant past. A sighing, wistful Slender, missing his book of Songs and Sonnets, describes the pretty heroine as well as he can. 'She has brown hair and speaks small like a woman', he says of Anne Page; we don't know whether that is a clue to the colour of Anne Shakespeare's hair. Slender manages to lose Anne for good in this very funny comedy, the only one the author ever set in an Elizabethan town.

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  12

  NEW PLACE AND THE COUNTRY

  She has a housewife's hand -- but that's no matter. (Rosalind, As You Like It)

  Gains and losses

  In these years, the poet who supplied repertory with works as effective as Romeo and Juliet, the Dream, and Henry IV did not hang up his hat after morning rehearsals. He appeared on the stage himself, and with his writing, rehearsing, acting, planning with his fellows, and vetting of scripts he was very unlikely to leave London often. His income was substantial by 1596. As a matter of record ' William Shackspere' was one of the seventy-three rateable residents at St Helen's parish that October, but since he forgot or neglected by the next February to pay his tax -- just 5s. on goods valued at £5 -- the Petty Collectors of Bishopsgate ward sent his name to the Exchequer. No doubt the low assessment of £5 was simply nominal. Sharers in the Admiral's Servants were earning about £1 a week (perhaps the equivalent of £500 or more in London at the end of the twentieth century). This was four times the fixed wage of a skilled city worker, and his income would have been between £100 and £160 a year from all sources by the end of the reign. Few of his schoolmates ever earned so much.