Shakespeare: The World as Stage

by Bill Bryson

  We’ve no idea how much or how little Southampton admired the poem dedicated to him, but the wider world loved it. It was the greatest publishing success of Shakespeare’s career-far more successful in print than any of his plays-and was reprinted at least ten times in his lifetime (though only one first-edition copy survives, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford). Written in narrative form and sprawling over 1,194 lines, Venus and Adonis was rich and decidedly racy for its day, though actually quite tame compared with the work on which it was based, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which contains eighteen rapes and a great deal of pillage, among much else. Shakespeare threw out most of the violence but played on themes-love, lust, death, the transient frailty of beauty-that spoke to Elizabethan tastes and ensured the poem’s popularity.

  Some of it is a little rich for modern tastes-for instance:

  And now she beats her heart, whereat it groans…

  “Ay me!” she cries, and twenty times, “Woe, woe!”

  But such lines struck a chord with Elizabethan readers and made the work an instant hit. The publisher was Richard Field, with whom Shakespeare had grown up in Stratford, but it did so well that a more successful publisher, John Harrison, bought out Field’s interest. The following year Harrison published a follow-up poem by Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, based on Ovid’s Fasti. This poem, considerably longer at 1,855 lines and written in a seven-line stanza form known as rhyme royal, was primarily a paean to chastity and, like chastity itself, was not so popular.

  Again there was an elaborate dedication to the foppish earl:

  To the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesely, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield.

  The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would sow greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your Lordship, to whom I wish long life still lengthened with all happiness.

  Your Lordship’s in all duty,

  William Shakespeare

  As these dedications are the only two occasions when Shakespeare speaks directly to the world in his own voice, scholars have naturally picked over them to see what might reasonably be deduced from them. What many believe is that the second dedication shows a greater confidence and familiarity-and possibly affection-than the first. A. L. Rowse, for one, could think of “no Elizabethan dedication that gives one more the sense of intimacy” and that conclusion is echoed with more or less equal vigor in many other assessments.

  In fact we know nothing at all about the relationship, if any, that existed between Shakespeare and Southampton. But as Wells and Taylor put it in their edition of the complete works, “the affection with which Shakespeare speaks of him in the dedication to Lucrece suggests a strong personal connection.” The suspicion is that Southampton was the beautiful youth with whom Shakespeare may have had a relationship, as described in the sonnets-which may have been written about the same time, though the sonnets would not be published for fifteen years. But according to Martin Wiggins of the University of Birmingham, addressing work to a nobleman “was commonly only a speculative bid for patronage.” And Shakespeare was just one of several poets-Thomas Nashe, Gervase Markham, John Clapham, and Barnabe Barnes were others-vying for Southampton’s benediction during the same period (his rivals’ obsequious dedications, not incidentally, make Shakespeare’s entreaties look restrained, honest, and frankly dignified).

  Southampton was not, in any case, in a position to bestow largesse in volume. Although he enjoyed an income of £ 3,000 a year (something like £1.5 million in today’s money) upon reaching his majority, he also inherited vast expenses and was dissolute into the bargain. Moreover, under the terms of his inheritance, he had to pass a third of any earnings to his mother. Within a few years he was, to quote Wiggins again, “virtually bankrupt.” All of which makes it unlikely that Southampton gave-or was ever in a position to give-Shakespeare £1,000, a story first related by Shakespeare’s biographer Nicholas Rowe in the early 1700s and endorsed surprisingly often ever since: for instance, by the Shakespeare scholar Sidney Lee in the Dictionary of National Biography.

  So by 1594 William Shakespeare was clearly on the way to success. He was the author of two exceedingly accomplished poems and he had the patronage of a leading aristocrat. But rather than capitalize on this promising beginning, he left the field of poetry and returned all but exclusively to the theater, a move that must have seemed at least mildly eccentric, if not actively willful, for playwriting was not an esteemed profession, and its practice, however accomplished, gained one little critical respect.

  Yet this was precisely the world that Shakespeare now wholeheartedly embraced. He never dedicated anything else to Southampton or any other aristocrat, or sought anyone’s patronage again. He wrote for publication only once more that we know of-with the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, published in 1601. Nothing else bearing his name was published with his obvious consent in his lifetime, including the plays that he now turned to almost exclusively.

  The theatrical scene that Shakespeare found was much altered from two years before. For one thing, it was without his greatest competitor, Christopher Marlowe, who had died the previous year. Marlowe was just two months older than Shakespeare. Though from a modest background himself-he was the son of a shoemaker from Canterbury-he had gone to Cambridge (on a scholarship), and so enjoyed an elevated status.

  Goodness knows what he might have achieved, but in 1593 he fell into trouble in a very big way. In the spring of that year inflammatory anti-immigrant notices began to appear all over London bearing lines of verse inspired by popular dramas, including in one instance a vicious parody of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. The government by this time was so obsessed with internal security that it spent £ 12,000 a year-a fabulous sum-spying on its own citizens. This was an era when one really didn’t wish to attract the critical attention of the authorities. Among those interrogated was Thomas Kyd, Marlowe’s friend and former roommate and author of the immensely popular Spanish Tragedy. Under torture (or possibly just the threat of it) at Bridewell Prison, Kyd accused Marlowe of being “irreligious, intemperate, and of cruel heart,” but above all of being a blasphemer and atheist. These were serious charges indeed.

  Marlowe was brought before the Privy Council, questioned, and released on a bond that required him to stay within twelve miles of the royal court wherever it happened to be so that his case could be dealt with quickly when it pleased his accusers to turn to it. He faced, at the very least, having his ears cut off-that was if things went well-so it must have been a deeply uneasy time for him. As Marlowe’s biographer David Riggs has written, “There were no acquittals in Tudor state courts.”

  It was against this background that Marlowe went drinking with three men of doubtful character at the house of a widow, Eleanor Bull, in Deptford in East London. There, according to a subsequent coroner’s report, a dispute arose over the bill, and Marlowe-who truly was never far from violence-seized a dagger and tried to stab one Ingram Frizer with it. Frizer, in self-defense, turned the weapon back on Marlowe and stabbed him in the forehead above the right eye-a difficult place to strike a killing blow, one would have thought, but killing him outright. That is the official version, anyway. Some historians believe Marlowe was assassinated at the behest of the crown or its senior agents. Whatever the motivation, he was dead at twenty-nine.

  At that age Shakespeare was writing comparative trifles-Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Comedy of Errors are all probably among his works of this period. Marlowe by contrast had written ambitious and appreciable dramas: The Jew of Malta, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, and Tamburlaine the Great. “If Shakespeare too had died in that year,” Stanley Wells has written, “we should now regard Marlowe
as the greater writer.”

  No doubt. But what if both had lived? Could either have sustained the competition? Shakespeare, it seems fair to say, had more promise for the long term. Marlowe possessed little gift for comedy and none at all, that we can see, for creating strong female roles-areas where Shakespeare shone. Above all it is impossible to imagine a person as quick to violence and as erratic in temperament as Christopher Marlowe reaching a wise and productive middle age. Shakespeare had a disposition built for the long haul.

  Kyd died the next year, aged just thirty-six, never having recovered from his ordeal at Bridewell. Greene was dead already, of course, and Watson followed him soon after. Shakespeare would have no serious rivals until the emergence of Ben Jonson in 1598.

  For theatrical troupes the plague years were an equally terminal moment. The endless trudge in search of provincial engagements proved too much for many companies, and one by one they disbanded-Hertford’s, Sussex ’s, Derby ’s, and Pembroke’s all fading away more or less at once. By 1594 only two troupes of note remained: the Admiral’s Men under Edward Alleyn, and a new group, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (named for the head of the queen’s household), led by Richard Burbage and comprising several talents absorbed from recently extinguished companies. Among these talents were John Heminges, who would become Shakespeare’s close friend and (some thirty years in the future) coeditor of the First Folio, and the celebrated comic Will Kemp, for whom Shakespeare would (it is reasonably presumed) write many of his most famous comedic roles, such as Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing.

  Shakespeare would spend the rest of his working life with this company. As Wells and Taylor note, “He is the only prominent playwright of his time to have had so stable a relationship with a single company.” It was clearly a happy and well-run outfit, and its members were commendably-or at the very least comparatively-sober, diligent, and clean living.

  Shakespeare seems to have been unusual among the troupe in not being a conspicuously devoted family man. Burbage was a loving husband and father of seven in Shoreditch. Heminges and Condell were likewise steady fellows, living as neighbors in the prosperous parish of Saint Mary Aldermanbury, where they were pillars of their church and prodigious procreators, producing no fewer than twenty-three children between them.

  In short they led innocuous lives. They did not draw daggers or brawl in pubs. They behaved like businessmen. And six times a week they gathered together, dressed up in costumes and makeup, and gave the world some of the most sublime and unimprovable hours of pleasure it has ever known.

  Chapter Five. The Plays

  NEARLY EVERYONE AGREES THAT William Shakespeare’s career as a playwright began in about 1590, but there is much less agreement on which plays began it. Depending on whose authority you favor, Shakespeare’s debut written offering might be any of at least eight works: The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentleman of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, King John, or the three parts of Henry VI.

  The American authority Sylvan Barnet lists The Comedy of Errors as Shakespeare’s first play with Love’s Labour’s Lost second, but more recently Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, in the Oxford Complete Works, credit him with ten other plays-more than a quarter of his output-before either of those two comes along. Wells and Taylor place The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the head of their list-not on any documentary evidence, as they freely concede, but simply because it is notably unpolished (or has “an uncertainty of technique suggestive of inexperience,” as they rather more elegantly put it). The Arden Shakespeare, meanwhile, puts The Taming of the Shrew first, while the Riverside Shakespeare places the first part of Henry VI first. Hardly any two lists are the same.

  For many plays all we can confidently adduce is a terminus ad quem-a date beyond which they could not have been written. Sometimes evidence of timing is seen in allusions to external events, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which seemingly pointed references are made to unseasonable weather and bad harvests (and England had very bad harvests in 1594 and 1595), or in Romeo and Juliet when Nurse speaks of an earthquake of eleven years before (London had a brief but startling one in 1580), but such hints are rare and often doubtful anyway. Many other judgments are made on little more than style. Thus The Comedy of Errors and Titus Andronicus “convey an aroma of youth,” in the words of Samuel Schoenbaum, while Barnet can, without blushing, suggest that Romeo and Juliet came before Othello simply because “one feels Othello is later.”

  Arguments would run far deeper were it not for the existence of a small, plump book by one Francis Meres called Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury. Published in 1598, it is a 700-page compendium of platitudes and philosophical musings, little of it original and even less of it of interest to history except for one immeasurably helpful passage first noticed by scholars some two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death: “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. For comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labour’s Lost, his Love Labour’s Won, his Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard the Second, Richard the Third, Henry the Fourth, King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.”

  This was rich stuff indeed. It provided the first published mention of four of Shakespeare’s plays-The Merchant of Venice, King John, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream-and additionally, in a separate passage, established that he had written at least some sonnets by this time, though they wouldn’t be published as a collected work for a further eleven years.

  Rather more puzzling is the mention of Love’s Labour’s Won, about which nothing else is known. For a long time it was assumed that this was an alternative name for some play that we already possess-in all likelihood The Taming of the Shrew, which is notably absent from Meres’s list. Shakespeare’s plays were occasionally known by other names: Twelfth Night was sometimes called Malvolio, and Much Ado About Nothing was sometimes Benedick and Beatrice, so the possibility of a second title was plausible.

  In 1953 the mystery deepened when an antiquarian book dealer in London, while moving stock, chanced upon a fragment of a bookseller’s inventory from 1603, which listed Love’s Labour’s Won and The Taming of the Shrew together-clearly suggesting that they weren’t the same play after all, and giving further evidence that Love’s Labour Won really was a separate play. If, as the inventory equally suggests, it existed in published form, there may once have been as many as 1,500 copies in circulation, so there is every chance that the play may one day turn up somewhere (a prospect thought most unlikely for Shakespeare’s other lost play, Cardenio, which appears to have existed only in manuscript). It is all a little puzzling. If Love’s Labour’s Won is a real and separate play, and was published, a natural question is why Heminges and Condell didn’t include it in the First Folio. No one can say.

  In whatever order the plays came, thanks to Meres we know that by 1598, when he had been at it for probably much less than a decade, Shakespeare had already proved himself a dab hand at comedy, history, and tragedy, and had done enough-much more than enough, in fact-to achieve a lasting reputation. His success was not, it must be said, without its shortcuts. Shakespeare didn’t scruple to steal plots, dialogue, names, and titles-whatever suited his purpose. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare was a wonderful teller of stories so long as someone else had told them first.

  But then this was a charge that could be laid against nearly all writers of the day. To Elizabethan playwrights plots and characters were common property. Marlowe took his Doctor Faustus from a German Historia von D. Johann Fausten (by way of an English translation) and Dido Queen of Carthage directly from the Virgil’s Aeneid. Shakespeare’s Hamlet was preceded by an earlier Hamlet play, unfortunately now lost and its author unknown (though some believe it was the hazy genius Thomas Kyd), leaving us to guess how much his version owed to the original. Hi
s King Lear was similarly inspired by an earlier KingLeir. His Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (to give it its formal original title) was freely based on the poem The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet by a promising young talent named Arthur Brooke, who wrote it in 1562 and then unfortunately drowned. Brooke in turn had taken the story from an Italian named Matteo Bandello. As You Like It was borrowed quite transparently from a work called Rosalynde, by Thomas Lodge, and The Winter’s Tale is likewise a reworking of Pandosto, a forgotten novel by Shakespeare’s bitter critic Robert Greene. Only a few of Shakespeare’s works-in particular the comedies A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Tempest- appear to have borrowed from no one.

  What Shakespeare did, of course, was take pedestrian pieces of work and endow them with distinction and, very often, greatness. Before he reworked it Othello was insipid melodrama. In Lear’s earlier manifestation, the king was not mad and the story had a happy ending. Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing were inconsequential tales in a collection of popular Italian fiction. Shakespeare’s particular genius was to take an engaging notion and make it better yet. In The Comedy of Errors, he borrows a simple but effective plot device from Plautus-having twin brothers who have never met appear in the same town at the same time-but increases the comic potential exponentially by giving the brothers twin servants who are similarly underinformed.

  Slightly more jarring to modern sensibilities was Shakespeare’s habit of lifting passages of text almost verbatim from other sources and dropping them into his plays. Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra both contain considerable passages taken with only scant alteration from Sir Thomas North’s magisterial translation of Plutarch, and The Tempest pays a similar uncredited tribute to a popular translation of Ovid. Marlowe’s “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?” from Hero and Leander reappears unchanged in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and a couplet from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine-