by Park Honan
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themselves in new city quarters. It would have helped to have Shakespeares Sonnets in print to testify to their poet's courtly refinement, and Thorpe's edition was thus no calamity in 1609.
The actors were a centre of Shakespeare's observations, though a work such as The Tempest suggests that he went well beyond actors' circles for his living sources. Over the years, he can only have heard a good deal about the advantages of a 'winter' hall in the city's west near the Thames. Back in 1596 old Burbage had hatched a plan for a roofed theatre and had purchased the Blackfriars room, but the plan had failed: up to the end of that decade the Upper Frater was empty as a cavern. Then the great hall was leased to the Chapel Children, and when the boy actors got into hot water with satire and political gibes, their leader, impresario, and leaseholder Henry Evans bargained to sell their lease. Finally, when the boy actors had been closed down, Evans made a new, acceptable offer to the troupe, so the Upper Frater came back into the hands of Shakespeare's men in the summer of 1608.
At that juncture, when plague had closed every venue, the Burbages settled on a new 'housekeeper' scheme, and extended this to seven men on 9 August 1608. Pope had died, Phillips lay buried at Mortlake; and their Globe shares meanwhile had gone to William Sly and Henry Condell. Holding back two shares for themselves, Richard and Cuthbert Burbage now brought in Sly and Condell, as well as Heminges and Shakespeare (as survivors of the company's earlier housekeepers), to be equal sharers in the Blackfriars. A seventh share went to an outside financier, Thomas Evans. Sly died when the deal was in progress, and so, when the plague relented, the new housekeepers were six, four of whom were King's players. 13
Flaunting their supremacy, the actors decided to keep two theatres, although the Globe could easily have been rented or sold. No company had ever been foolish enough to try to maintain two playhouses, each empty as a tomb for half of the year. But from 1609 onwards, the Globe would be used from May to September, then stand empty for the seven colder months, when, with courtiers and lawyers back in town, the company acted in London's affluent west near the river. Indoor hours would be about the same as at the Globe to appeal to idlers or 'afternoon's men' (often the main clientele for a hall theatre),
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and six shows might be given weekly. A winter stage could be lit partly by daylight, with the help of candles and torches, but whereas the Globe's prices began at a penny, a roofed theatre could charge more. At Blackfriars the cost would be 6d. for entry to a gallery, a further 1s. for a bench in the pit. A box cost half a crown. As many as ten showy, tobacco-smoking gallants, often in feathered hats, could go through the tiring-house, hire a stool, and sit on the stage itself for a total outlay of 2s.
Blackfriars proved ideal for offstage music. The 'little eyases' had capitalized on that, and Shakespeare made increasing use of music and song in works up to The Tempest. The Globe's stage balcony, in fact, was rapidly altered so that a consortium of musicians could play there, too, and higher charges were not expected to lead to 'a difference in the plays staged at either place'. 14 Shakespeare had used instrumental effects at times, perhaps, as an artistic crutch to make up for a play's vagueness, confusion, or feeble effects (his poorest work may be lost to us, or expunged from revised texts that exist). Music is sparingly used in the early comedies, but two crucial songs at the end of Love's Labour's Lost and a music of enchantment in the Dream anticipate a sudden, marvellous development in As You Like It, in which instrumental music and song reinforce theme after theme, such as time's passing, the humour of 'holiday', the Forest of Arden's delights, or man's ingratitude. Even so, the late romances are musically his most excitingly innovative works. New facilities at Blackfriars, and then at the Globe, must have led him to experiment, and music in Cymbeline or The Tempest becomes, in an Elizabethan way, 'an act of faith', reinforcing present but elusive meanings in the work's action.
Even before he had an indoor stage, he had begun the series which includes Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. These plays are naïvely presentational, conciliatory in mood, less gestured and less emphatically structured than anything he had done before. They recall Tudor dramatic romances of his youth, as well as the miracle works of late medieval times. Why does he seem to reach back? In avoiding the limits of modern realism, logic, and literalness he might use his art to exploit rich areas of popular romance. But there is something more personal in his aims, if one judges from his insistent
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return to variations upon only a few themes. From the time of King Lear, he appears to have drawn on an effort he was making to set himself right with people he cared for, and perhaps to overcome some aspects of estrangement in his absences from home. Yet if that is so, he also transcends such a need, both intellectually and artistically, and none of his dramatic work correlates exactly with any known outward event in his life. The origin of none of it can be reduced to psychological causes, neuroses, worries, or anything of the kind. Though they differ in form and tone, his late plays are alike in a power of open spiritual enquiry, as also in an expanded focus. With the heightening effects of romance, they seem less concerned with an individual than with what happens to a family over a span of time. A motive such as bitter jealousy splits the family, and causes grievous estrangement, odd outcomes, possible death, and 'painful adventures'.
Again and again, he turned over in his mind the needs of reconciliation, mercy, and forgiveness. These themes permeate even Henry VIII, played in 1613, and he looks into the conditions of their existence, such as growth and decay, chance and time's passage, the development of self-awareness, and the effects of one generation upon the other. In Pericles and The Winter's Tale, a wide gap of years separates two royal generations. Infants grow up; separations have unforeseen results in distant lands. The young aid the regeneration of the old, and heroines have effects which do not depend on the struggle known, say, to a Cordelia or Helena, but rather on their being. Alarmed that his son Florizel loves the supposed shepherd-girl Perdita in The Winter's Tale, the King of Bohemia threatens to disfigure her face with briars, but nothing can harm Perdita, nor will the men who lust for Marina in Pericles' brothel experience anything but her grace. Evil is sudden, implacable, and ferocious but every evildoer in this series is pardoned, except for the incestuous Antiochus in Pericles. Disruption and violence are offset by ceremonial, elaborate endings, and by the recovery of persons supposed lost or dead.
Clearly, though, Shakespeare still catered for upper sections of the play-going market which his troupe needed to hold, and his romances have affinities with Sidney Arcadia, a favourite book for university men and young gallants. The public's taste was turning to courtly fare.
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Also he could hope to please London's apprentices and servants, many of whom were female. Psychologically the plays are rooted in the realities of exile and in his view of society's corruption. They show a fascination with strangeness and imaginative disturbance, and what Michael Billington (speaking of Lear) calls his awareness 'of the precarious absurdity of human existence'. 15
It might be appropriate if George Wilkins, a hater of women, did suggest the topic of Pericles. Consorting with leading men of the theatre, Wilkins, unbelievably, was at that time staying out of trouble, neither thumping his whores nor stealing anybody's clothes; most of his crimes were ahead of him. We know that Wilkins had collaborated with John Day and William Rowley on a play about recent and real adventures in the East, The Travels of the Three English Brothers, performed in 1607. This work has been compared with Pericles, which Wilkins could have begun that year. In some ways Pericles' first two acts suggest his style, and Shakespeare may have completed or revised the drama, which was followed in 1608 by Wilkins's prose tale The Painfull Adventures of Pericles. This hypothetical view of its authorship, though, is a little weakened by the fact that Pericles exists only in an irregular, flawed quarto issued by Henry Gosson in 1609. Most of its passages, however, make perfectly
good sense, and we surely have more to learn from Gosson's text. A minor city publisher, Gosson served as a legal guarantor for Wilkins when he nearly killed a woman in 1611. At any rate, the play's first two acts are more banal than anything Shakespeare is known to have written, but with stolid efficiency they fit an unusual scheme.
Strikingly, Pericles brings on stage a reincarnation of the fourteenthcentury poet John Gower, who in his Confessio Amantis had put aside moral concerns to relate over 400 tales about love in a simple, direct style. Gower had included a version of the story of Apollonius of Tyre, upon which Pericles is based; and yet Shakespeare also takes details from Lawrence Twine's romance version, The Patterne of Painefull Adventures, first issued in 1576. As old Gower, Chaucer's friend, introduces each act of Pericles in a crabbed, antique style, the stage action becomes pageant-like, with widely dispersed episodes. Having found the secret of Antiochus's incest with his daughter in Greece, Pericles
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is melancholy, passive, and victimized despite his goodness, and yet his adventures as a jousting knight or a shipwrecked prince bring him no self-understanding. In the first four acts, he is barely more than an enduring folk-tale hero. In his wanderings and sufferings, in his apparent loss of Thaisa his wife, and then of his daughter Marina, he seems in flight from himself and also from a recognition of the possibility of incest. In Shakespeare's view, the human mind constructs such walls of self-justification that only trials worse than Job's may possibly let in light. When implicitly the hero faces Antiochus's secret at last, he is able to save Marina and then recover his lost wife. In its strong images of female virtue as distinct from female sexuality, the play's view of womanhood is less contradictory, than Shakespeare's view could have been, but the work is a powerfully affecting if dreamlike study of guilt and fate.
Much lighter, and yet more complex, Cymbeline highlights among other topics British history, a dispersed royal family, and supernatural intervention. The play has a long, threading, inclusive plot which unfolds with a deceptive casualness, even as Shakespeare lightly derides some of his own past works. It is a surprisingly difficult play, and we may stilt be 'far from having got Cymbeline in focus', as Emrys Jones once observed. A critic of modern stage performance notes that the text is fearfully elusive, 'constantly shifting its mood and its ground' and 'apt at any moment to mock itself, to send itself up'. 16
Not that Cymbeline's themes are wholly parodic or comic. For the nation's chroniclers, as for Spenser in The Faerie Queene, the time of the British monarch Cymbeline had been almost uneventful: peace was its mysterious purpose, for near the end of Cymbeline's thirtyfive-year reign, which began in 33 BC, Christ was born. The calm of the pax Romana had a spiritual meaning; but Spenser adds that, because the island king had refused to pay tribute to Rome, it was in his reign that the struggle for British freedom, culminating with King Arthur, really began. Alert to these sources, Shakespeare contrived a lively story for the public, for wits and lawyers at Blackfriars, and also for the court, in writing Cymbeline around 1610.
And it has references which might fit 4. June, when the royal Henry was created Prince of Wales and when James Hay, King James's
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oldest Scottish friend, was made a Knight of the Bath. Shakespeare turns to Holinshed's History of Scotland to bring in the exploits of an earlier Scottish Hay. Sixteen times Cymbeline refers to the Welsh port of 'Milford' or ' Milford Haven', which absurdly becomes the nearest embarkation-point for the Continent from London. It is perhaps not enough for critics to tell us that Milford in Wales was a thriving port (which it was), since Kentish ports were also active: the dramatist, who gives Bohemia a sea coast in The Winter's Tale, could read a map. Shakespeare's geography is symbolic, and much in his day was being made of the fact that James's great-grandfather Henry VII had landed at Milford Haven in 1485 to conquer a tyrant and win the crown. 'Milford' suggests James's royal line from Henry VII, and a native resistance to tyranny. But if Britain's first resistance hero was Cymbeline, this figure in the play begins as a duped fool wed to a malevolent Queen. When she dies, Cymbeline emerges from mental stupor, and Britons resist the Romans only to make lasting peace.
Such resistance has a parallel in the spiritual freeing of mankind which Christ brings -- not that this is made explicit. Disguising his seriousness, the author mocks his own plays and a few of his hoary devices, and, though he has sent up his art in A Midsummer Night's Dream and elsewhere, here self-mockery is ubiquitous, permeating the play's situations and texture. Brian Gibbons notes 'the extraordinary frequency with which Shakespeare makes apparent allusions to his own earlier work' in Cymbeline, which has references to Romeo, Henry V, All's Well, Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and even Lucrece. 17 Here, for a final time, the device of turning a 'girl' into a 'boy' is used -- as if in ironic apology for a parade of sexual changes feigned by Julia, Jessica, Portia, Nerissa, Rosalind, and Viola. The heroine Imogen (or as some would have her name, Innogen) becomes the boy Fidele, only to wake up in a grave beside her headless, oafish suitor Cloten. 18 Also Shakespeare again takes up just that distrust of female sexuality which appears in his Sonnets, Measure for Measure, and several tragedies. Unhistorically, he gives Cymbeline a daughter as well as two sons (thus matching King James's family), but the sons Arviragus and Guiderius are living in a rustic, prehistoric Britain with old Belarius, who has fled the court. At home is the king's
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daughter Imogen, who is divided from her husband, Posthumus, because he is not of royal blood.
Though far off in Rome, Posthumus is still threatened by Imogen's sexuality: he is unable to respond to love that is sensual as well as spiritual. The author reaches through Othello to transfer the problem from the tragic to the ridiculous. Thus the hero takes a wager on Imogen's chastity, virtually wills himself to be a cuckold, and, after believing Iachimo has slept with her, plans to kill Imogen. Hardly a dutiful Desdemona, Imogen shows her mettle, as when the servant Pisanio laments tha he has been told to kill her:
PISANIO. Since I received command to do this business I have not slept one wink. IMOGEN. Do't, and to bed, then.
(III. iv. 99-100)
The plot takes her safely into Wales where she finds her royal brothers. Ever more troubled, Posthumous has thought of her as male property. He would tear her limbs and destroy 'the woman's part in me'; he fears betrayal by all women including his mother, and his phobia leads to disaster before his ultimate regeneration. At the play's centre is a colossal misogyny, too dark and idiosyncratic to suggest any deliberate self-burlesque. Yet there is enough self-mockery in Cymbeline to suggest its author's need to be rid of a burden of attitudes he has previously dramatized, and, with the help of folklore elements and a magical view of events, the play is impressionistic and exuberantly fresh in its exploration of history, myth, and male conceit.
Less sprawling and somewhat less topically allusive, The Winter's Tale clearly appealed to the wits at Blackfriars and to the Globe's public alike. Its sheep-shearing festival in Act IV and several other scenes so closely evoke Warwickshire that it might well have been penned at New Place. There is an influence from the dance of satyrs in Ben Jonson's Masque of Oberon, staged at court, on 1 January 1611, but there are signs that Shakespeare added his own dance of satyrs (in IV. iv) after writing the main text. Simon Forman the astrologer saw The Winter's Tale at the Globe on 15 May 1611, and after it was acted at court, in November, it remained in the King's men's repertoire for twenty-nine years.
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One has only to read Greene's Pandosto, a very popular Tudor romance and the drama's main source, to see how much Shakespeare owes to his former maligner's pattern of contrasts. Not so savage as Pandosto, and not so happy at first in marriage, Leontes flies into a jealous rage at his wife Hermione for her supposed affair with his childhood friend Polixenes. It has been said that Leontes suffers from delusional madness, or from memories of a homoerotic boyhood, but the text carries one quickly on to consequences:
he orders his wife's newborn infant, Perdita, to be burned alive, as if Queen Mary's martyr-fires were still alight, but the baby is left on Bohemia's sea coast to be found by a shepherd. Believing that Hermione and the child are dead, Leontes spends the next sixteen years in prayer and repentance, even as Stratford's college of priests had prayed round the year. The burning of a child (which is only threatened) need not evoke martyrs, but the suffering in Greene's Pandosto is spiritualized. To be sure, Leontes still doubts Perdita's 'worth' after his ordeal.
A terse, funny link between the wintry opening and the earthy scenes of Bohemia is in the famous stage-direction, 'Exit, pursued by a bear'. Perdita's deliverer Antigonus is eaten by an animal which suggests the Candlemas Bear, the sluggish creature which, in legend, emerged on 2 February, Candlemas Day, to say how long winter still had to run.
But in the subtext, as it were, of this play, Shakespeare emphasizes cruelty, egotism, and blindness. Earlier, when persecuted by her husband, Hermione remarks, 'The Emperor of Russia was my father'. Jacobeans perhaps would have remembered Ivan IV or 'the Terrible' ( 1530-84) who saw treachery everywhere, killed his son in a fit of rage, and at Moscow released untamed bears on victims. 19 Shakespeare implies that the cruel bear is not far from our lives, and his Bohemian scenes, for all their jollity, suggest his underlying disbelief in redemption. Perdita, though superficially observant, is timid and unresolved until fortune happens to favour her; her lover Florizel boasts of an inheritance he will get at his father's death; and the comic Autolycus (whose namesake in Greek myth is descended from Hermes, god of crooks) knows the stupidity of countryfolk. As a petty thief and conman who pretends to be a mugger's victim, Autolycus takes the
