Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  With his capital sunk in Blackfriars, old Burbage died three months later. Cuthbert and Richard then had to hunt for a new venue, if the company were to survive. The Theater stood on land owned by one Giles Allen -- a man of broadly Puritan sympathies -- who refused to renew the lease. He played a nasty game, at last agreeing to a lease on inflated terms, and then refusing to sign because he would not accept Richard the actor as surety. While Cuthbert tried, with no success, to get a new lease, the troupe could have used Langley's Swan on Bankside before their Shoreditch lease expired on 13 April 1597, but they clung mainly to the less than wholesome Curtain while cash ran low and the Theater stood in 'darke silence, and vast solitude'. 28 Money did not flow in. Gatherers waited at theatre doors, without seeing much of it. Just why this happened is after all a little mysterious; but dwindling cash was a worry for any troupe, and the spectre of bored, listless ranks of the gentry defecting, or staying away for any reason, was a nightmare. Actors had to eat; hirelings had to be paid. The poet's fellows valued his scripts as prime assets, and they can only have felt it a hurtful, oppressive loss in 1597 and 1598 when they sold the playbooks of Richard III, Richard II, 1 Henry IV, and Love's Labour's Lost to Andrew Wise as a cash-raising device.

  These were popular works. Sold to Wise, they were printed in quarto, with the result that the first three became the only playbooks

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  by Shakespeare to sell as well as dramas such as Thomas Heywood If You Know Not Me, Part 1 ( 1605), Samuel Daniel Philotas ( 1605), the anonymous How a Man May Choose a Good Wife ( 1602), or Beaumont and Fletcher Philaster ( 1620), to judge from the number of times a drama was reprinted in the twenty-five years after it was published. But the release of four of Shakespeare's playscripts to Wise was an act of desperation, and one stresses the point not only because Shakespeare's biographers neglect it but because they have so little to say of his acting company and think of his success as an unbroken phenomenon.

  And what did his fame mean? Plays in print advertised his name, but could also signal his troupe's urgent need for cash, or their declining attractiveness. Rival companies left each other's repertories alone; but his fellows clearly believed one of their dramas was stolen, and cannot have been eager to release many of their holdings. 29 If his histories or romantic comedies were well liked on stage, colleagues might want more of the same and he risked repeating himself. On the other hand, if he relied on older forms which he handled well, he could jeopardize his troupe's effort to keep up with new fashions in performance to maintain their prestige. Nothing he had done guaranteed his troupe's solvency.

  A doubtfully legal trick saved them. Some of his colleagues lived near the Rose on Bankside, and here the Burbages took out a thirtyone-year lease on a vacant site in December 1598. The winter brought hard frosts, says Stow. The Thames froze at London Bridge before Christmas, and then there was a thaw, followed by icy, cheerless weather on St John's Day, the 27th, and a heavy snowfall on the 28th, when the river 'was againe nigh frozen'. 30 Taking advantage of the snowfall to work undetected, Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, Peter Streete the carpenter, and about a dozen workmen dismantled the old Theater at Shoreditch. Its heavy timbers were piled on wagons, which would have found ice on the streets hazardous. The timbers could not have been dragged over a 'nigh frozen' Thames, so they probably went over London Bridge, before being unloaded at a Southwark site that had been inherited by Nicholas Brend, whose father, Thomas, had bought the land in 1544. Just to the east of the Rose, this was

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  farther back from the river. Here Peter Streete, who pledged to finish in twenty-eight weeks, led his men in building a new theatre to be called the Globe.

  There were problems almost at once. Allen sued for trespass, claiming Streete had taken material worth £800 which was rightly Allen's because it stood on his land -- and litigation was to last nearly two years. Also, building costs ran high. On 21 February, the Burbages agreed to meet 50 per cent of the costs, and, without precedent, brought in five sharers, each to put up 10 per cent as co-owners or 'housekeepers' in the venture. The five new 'housekeepers' were Shakespeare, John Heminges, Will Kempe, Thomas Pope, and Augustine Phillips: and thus actors (in the path of old James Burbage) became proprietors. Collectively, they had one half-share in the Globe's ground-lease, but in due course Heminges arranged for William Leveson, a mercer, and Thomas Savage, a goldsmith down from Lancashire, to be trustees in a deed which allowed the five to alter their terms to 'tenancy in common'. That enabled an actor to dispose of his share, and so when Kempe quit the troupe at the year's end, his share was taken by the other four.

  Thanks to the Brends, on whose land the Globe was built, it is possible to consider for the first time in a biography six documents which, interestingly, mention Shakespeare's name. A modern scholar refers to 'Sir Thomas Brend', but he never had a title, nor was he of gentlemanly rank. In fact he had died in September 1597, and when an inquisition into Brend's heritable assets was at last completed on 16 May 1599, his estate's properties in St Saviour's parish included 'a House [that is, the Globe] newly built with a garden attached' ('una Domo de novo edificata cum gardino') which is then 'in the occupation of William Shakespeare and others' ('in occupatione Willielmi Shakespeare et aliorum'). Significantly, this implies that in May 1599 Shakespeare was thought to be the most prominent Globe tenant, and also that the Globe had a partial existence by that month. The second document comes two years later. When Nicholas Brend -- Thomas's son -- mortgaged his Southwark properties, including the Globe, to his stepbrother John Bodley, on 7 October 1601, he signed a deed of trust which lists eighteen tenants including ' Richard Burbage and

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  William Shackspeare, gent.' -- and here the troupe's leading actor and its regular dramatist are the Globe's chief tenants. In a third document, they also appear as such on 10 October 1601 -- when Bodley's control of the property was enhanced just two days before Nicholas Brend died.

  The Globe's effective owner for the last fifteen years of Shakespeare's life was John Bodley, but the story is a little involved. Technically, Bodley was a trustee for Nicholas's older son Matthew, and, for a few years, Bodley was obliged to share ownership with two partners. After Bodley's first partner died, the other partner, his uncle John Collet, sold his interest to Bodley in 1608, at which time a deed mentions the 'playhouse' and ' Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare, gentlemen'. Those two are thus linked again as the foremost tenants in a company known, by then, as the King's Servants. Even after his own death, ' William Shakespeare gent' is named as tenant of the playhouse in a decree of 21 February 1622 (since it was common for such descriptions to be repeated for years after a tenant was dead and buried). On 12 March 1624, the deceased friends Burbage and Shakespeare are both listed as tenants with the still-living Cuthbert Burbage and Heminges, and finally, nine years later, on 20 June 1633, the Globe is described as 'now or late in the possession or occupation of John Herminge, Cuthbert Burbage, Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare or any of them, their or any of their leagues or assignes, &c.' 31

  So much, anyway, for legal deeds. Shakespeare as a 'housekeeper' or part-holder of the Globe tenancy benefited from new income and new stimulus in 1599, as a beautiful theatre opened its doors. Yet competition from rivals did not vanish, nor did censorship, Puritan fury, or threats of long closure in plague. What exactly did the Globe look like? To speak of the first Globe which lasted until June 1613, the various drawings by Norden, Visschcr, Hondius, Delaram, and others show it as either circular, hexagonal, or octagonal, and minus stair turrets. We lack any sketch of its stage or tiring-house. Happily in modern times, or since October 1989, fascinating archaeological data has come from the Globe's site, now mostly under Southwark's Anchor Terrace and Southwark Bridge Road, but the whole site has yet to be exposed. We have more to learn about this theatre. Still, ingenuity can make use of

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  fragmentary clues, and a full-sized replica of Bankside's Globe, opened
in 1997, gives one a thrilling sense of what performances may well have been like at ' Shakespeare's factory'. 32

  Streete, at any rate, had set good foundations of chalk rubble around wooden stakes. Using the old Theater's high timber frame, he cut costs as much as he dared, and the Globe rose as a many-sided polygon, roughly a hundred feet in diameter, with sophisticated stair turrets giving access to tiers of galleries. 33 With false economy, the roof was not tiled but thatched, with the result that the whole structure was to burn to the ground in 1613.

  As with other theatres, there would be no lavatories, but buckets must have been available to those seeking relief in the galleries: bottled ale sold well. Streete's builders attended to one enemy of Londoners-the sun. It was felt that the sun gave city faces a tanned, peasant look, while fading costly garments. A high gallery roof kept the sun out of nearly everyone's eyes. Actors were sheltered by a colourful 'Heavens', a guttered stage-cover, which served partly as a sounding-board and had painted stars, planets, and other astrological emblems.

  Competition soon appeared. In 1600 Streete began to erect the Fortune theatre outside Cripplegate, as Henslowe's and Alleyn's response to the Globe. In worried confusion the Privy Council soon licensed Worcester's men to play at the Boar's Head, and tolerated children's companies as well as other adult troupes in the capital. The Globe must have opened not later than the end of May 1599.

  And its bright flag, visible across the river to those watching for it, as well as to watermen carrying over clientele, a trumpeter on the high roof, and clamour and bustle with apprentices and artisans in the crowded yard as the galleries filled up with the élite -- must all have seemed very promising to the Chamberlain's Servants. Their poet needed this yellow-topped magnet -- in which lavish display seemed natural. Even more vital for him, one suspects, was his troupe's experience over the past five years of hard times, mistakes, disagreements, and experimentalism. His fellow sharers did not see eye to eye, though some of them had lately shown a willingness to work together by pooling their money. Here in the Bankside among bordellos and

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  bear-pits and sharp entrepreneurs, the actors faced a challenge with a new sense of tension. Not since Hunsdon's plan in 1594 had they been free from a threat of bankruptcy, and enemies were near at hand. The vestry of St Saviour's, Southwark, first called for an end of playing and then tried to gain from it by taxing the local theatres. Shakespeare took lodgings in the area for a while, before moving back across the river nearer his friends Heminges and Condell, who were in the parish of St Mary, Aldermanbury.

  The sharers needed to go 'up-market' to hold the gentry, and that in itself may have caused friction. After leaving the troupe and undertaking a morris dance from London to Norwich, Will Kempe was to call his enemies 'Shakerags' -- perhaps a mild fling at Shakespeare or his hirelings. Vigorous and athletic, Kempe was famous for obscene jigs of a kind not to be repeated on Bankside. Just what led to his quitting a profit-making troupe is still unknown, but his exit may be the tip of an iceberg of after-hours' arguments, debate, and jockeying politics. Even long before Kempe left, the actors' troubles with Blackfriars, with Allen, or with different venues surely caused anxiety. As an artist, what did Shakespeare make of the company's politics? He may not have sketched their debates, but he was familiar with their political behaviour when he wrote Julius Caesar.

  Thomas Platter, a young doctor from Basle, saw a tragedy about Julius Caesar at a Bankside theatre in the autumn. Visiting England from 18 September to 20 October 1599, Platter reported to his Swiss relatives in a difficult dialect, a peculiar 'form of sixteenth century Alemannic' as Ernest Schanzer calls it, which today can be 'obscure even to German scholars'. But Platter describes London's theatres, and -unless he refers to a rival play -- he has seen Julius Caesar at the new Globe. 'On the 21st of September, after dinner, at about two o'clock, I went with my party across the water. In the straw-thatched house [streüwine Dachhaus]', as Platter writes,

  we saw the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar, very pleasingly performed, with approximately fifteen characters; at the end of the play they danced together admirably and exceedingly gracefully, according to their custom, two in each group dressed in men's and two in women's apparel.

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  One suspects that the Swiss doctor paid for excellent, cushioned seats. (He notes of the theatres, 'Yedoch sindt underscheidene gäng unndt ständt da man lustiger unndt basz sitzet' (literally: 'However, there are separate galleries and places, where one sits more pleasantly and better'). 34

  And Platter's memory of a cast of about 'fifteen characters' fits Julius Caesar pretty well (if one discounts a number of smaller parts), and the graceful dancing at the play's end is an interesting feature. Kempe then had not yet left, so he could have been among the dancers -- though Shakespeare's play lacks a good part for a clown. Julius Caesar is spare and grave in style, befitting the dignity of Rome and the awe aroused by Caesar's murder, or the chief secular event in the world's history. Often popular in modern classrooms, the tragedy took up a hero whose story was even taught to Elizabethan children. "Julius Caesar", one reads for example in The Education of children in learning ( 1588), 'the first and greatest Emperour that ever lived, with a most pure stile, set foorth the histories of his times and certayne bookes of Grammar'. 35 Subtle as the tragedy is, Shakespeare might have recited it without a qualm to his own daughters. He mainly avoids sexual puns and any display of petty vices -- even Antony's sensuality is kept at a distance -- and gives his Globe audiences dignified, heroic Romans who speak in a 'pure' language in keeping with high politics. Also he celebrates the stage's power. Re-enacting Julius Caesar's murder, the actors perpetuate him by making him as interesting as he may have been in life, and the play's effects hinge partly on a careful, tight structure built round the three soliloquies of Cassius, Brutus, and Antony, and the orations over Caesar's corpse by both Brutus and Antony.

  Shakespeare's ironies mock his audience. In one sense, Antony's refrain over Caesar's corpse flatters their wit:

  Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,

  And Brutus is an honourable man.

  (III. ii. 94-5)

  Yet this also suggests that all city crowds are gullible, though the word 'honourable' might prefigure Antony's lofty praise of the dead Brutus in Act V.

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  At all events, Julius Caesar was popular. Its manner can seem 'plain as a Doric portico', in Arthur Humphreys's phrase. 36 Somewhat less awed by Caesar than by Caesar's Tudor prestige, Shakespeare, in his respect for Roman clarity and Roman simplicity, imposes unusual restraints on his art. By closely following his main guide Plutarch, more closely here than he ever followed Holinshed, he begins to acquire a confidence with Roman topics which will increase with Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. Plutarch Lives (in North's version) is rather more concerned with political behaviour than with character, but every trait of Shakespeare's Brutus is really traceable to Plutarch's Brutus. Even as Plutarch reductively sketches his Romans, so in this play Cassius is -- basically -- an austere and sceptical Epicurean, Brutus is an idealizing Stoic, and Mark Antony is a sensual opportunist.

  One radical difference in characterization, though, appears in the poet's intuitive method, or in his inventing for each of his heroes a psychology allowing for subtle variations from a norm. For that he had no literary source, though he perhaps had theatrical politics or the internal affairs of his own troupe among other models. As a 'housekeeper' he had motives to attend closely to relationships in his company. Since he did not think in a literal way, one hardly expects to find Will Kempe in Cassius, but, then, this dramatist's mind did not function in an imaginative cocoon in which the 'miracle' of genius alone told him how men interact in crises. Leaning on Plutarch, it is true that he was in some respects all too faithful to his main source. This play lacks an objective commentator, but clearly gives Brutus a vital, plausible intellectual life, and in delicately suggesting the errors in Brutus's thought
and feeling Shakespeare most usefully responds to the stimulus of Jonson, especially his neo-classical ideas, and to poets associated with the Inns of Court. With this play, he also prepared himself to write something more intimate, more personally committed and confident, in his next tragedy -- for his best 'leap ahead', the largest single advance he made in his career as a dramatist.

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  14

  HAMLET'S QUESTIONS

  What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god-the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?

  Was't Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet.

  If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,

  And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,

  Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.

  Who does it then?

  ( Prince Hamlet)

  Poets' wars and 'little eyases'

  Bitter, icy weather and deluges of snow appear to have helped screen the workers who dismantled the Theater, but for actors intensely cold weather had drawbacks. Thick ice had begun to cover English rivers in December and January. Alpine glaciers soon crushed houses near Chamonix, marking the start of colder spells all over Europe, and winters, as a rule, were to be hard for the rest of Shakespeare's lifetime. 1 There is no sign that he regretted stark winters, but freezing weather brings no cheer and heralds bleak revelations in his new play: ''Tis bitter cold, | And I am sick at heart', says Francisco, in its first scene, and later Hamlet remarks: 'The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold.'