BRIGHT STARS
Two early Renaissance writers dazzled their contemporaries shortly before Shakespeare came onto the scene: John Lyly (c.1554–1606) and Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593). Both men had a profound effect on him. Lyly’s major works, which include both prose fiction and comedies, were published from the late 1570s and remained popular. His work taught Shakespeare how to write dramatic prose so that words became the focus of dramatic action, the plot yielding to conversation and argument, especially as in Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV Parts One and Two and As You Like It. Lyly’s influence can be found in any Shakespearian character who likes to talk for the sake of it: the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, or What You Will, and Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale – to name but a few.
Christopher Marlowe, like Shakespeare, was the son of a tradesman, a shoemaker, and he imbibed his Latin literature at a new grammar school in Canterbury. Unlike Shakespeare, Marlowe then went on to university. His plays burst onto an astonished stage from the late 1580s and became popular. ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’ (as Ben Jonson called it) has a memorable and ingratiating poetic sound all of its own and worked its magic upon Shakespeare’s imagination. There are close affinities between Marlowe’s erotic poem Hero and Leander (published posthumously in 1598) and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (published in 1593, which suggests he knew Marlowe’s poem in manuscript); between Marlowe’s play about a weak king, Edward II, and Shakespeare’s Richard II; and between Marlowe’s satire The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
The effect of Marlowe’s many mighty moments deeply influenced Shakespeare, for example when the scholar-magician Dr Faustus glimpses Helen of Troy just moments before his eternal damnation:
FAUSTUS
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
[They kiss.]
Her lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
[They kiss again.]
Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
(Dr Faustus, scene 13, 90–7).14
This episode haunted Shakespeare throughout his career. When Romeo and Juliet first meet at the Capulet ball, we hear and see:
ROMEO
Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.
(Romeo and Juliet, 1.5.108–9)
The kiss is sweet and seals the inevitability of Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy. Shakespeare is thinking of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus when the dethroned Richard II stares at his own reflection in a looking glass:
Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That like the sun did make beholders wink?
Is this the face which faced so many follies,
That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face,
As brittle as the glory is the face,
He shatters the glass
For there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers.
(Richard II, 4.1.273–79)
Years later, in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare brings the legendary Helen onto stage as well (3.1.), but satirises her as little more than a self-absorbed fool, hopelessly devoted to Prince Paris. Marlowe was a colourful and dangerous character, only two months older than Shakespeare: who knows what he might have produced had he not been killed during an argument over a tavern bill in Deptford on 30 May 1593, aged just 29? The excitement that Shakespeare found in Marlowe ignited and inspired his talent for playwriting. Although the two are distinctive dramatists stylistically, without Marlowe Shakespeare would have been very different.
SHAKESPEARE THE ALCHEMIST
Shakespeare always complicates his source material at the same time as adapting and reshaping it. In Othello, for example, he introduces questions of motive which are absent from the story as he found it in Cinthio’s original. Has Othello slept with Iago’s wife Emilia (Othello, 1.3.378–80, 2.1.294–99)? Is Iago in love with Desdemona (2.1.290–93), and is that why Iago plots to destroy Othello as cruelly as he does? The only character to be named in the source is ‘Disdemona’. All the other names are invented by Shakespeare, including Iago (curiously, the Spanish version of James and the name of the king who commanded a royal performance of the play by the King’s Men on All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1604). At the end of Cinthio’s crudely moralistic story one of the lessons to be learned is that parents should take great care in naming their children: ‘Disdemona’ means ‘the unfortunate one’ and Cinthio’s moral warning conveys a ‘and-look-what-happened-to-her’ message.
What does happen to her in the source narrative? The Ensign (Iago) hides in the bedroom wardrobe and makes a noise. The Moor (Othello) tells Disdemona to investigate. The Ensign appears and beats her on the back of the head with a sand-filled stocking. He and the Moor then break her skull, causing the bedroom ceiling to collapse in an attempt to make it look like an accidental death. In contrast Shakespeare has Desdemona fight for her life – ‘Kill me tomorrow; let me live tonight’ (Othello, 5.2.87) – and has Othello alone smothering her to death in a quasi-erotic suffocation. Shakespeare, in contrast to his source story, does not allow a single drop of her blood to be shed, his Othello taking great care that her unbroken skin remains icon-like ‘and smooth as monumental alabaster’ (Othello, 5.2.5). Chillingly, Shakespeare’s Othello already sees Desdemona as an effigy on a tomb by the time he arrives to murder her.
Sometimes it is possible to imagine Shakespeare with his source book open in front of him, transforming the words to convey a much richer experience of thought and feeling. Here is Holinshed’s account of Henry V’s speech as he rallies the hopelessly outnumbered English troops into battle against the French at Agincourt:
I would not wish a man more than I have; we are indeed in comparison to the enemies but a few, but if God of his clemency do favour us and our just cause, as I trust he will, we shall speed well enough. But let no man ascribe victory to our own strength and might but only to God’s assistance, to whom I have no doubt we shall worthily have cause to give thanks therefore. And if so be that for our offences’ sakes we shall be delivered into the hands of our enemies, the less number we be, the less damage shall the realm of England sustain.
Shakespeare adds the emotional and rhetorical emphases of the battle being fought on St Crispin’s Day (25 October) and has his King Henry encouraging his troops to imagine the anniversary of the day in years to come and to think of themselves memorably as ‘we few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ (Henry V, 4.3.40–67, line 60). Interesting, too, is how Holinshed places greater stress on the king and his men calling directly on God’s assistance. In contrast, Shakespeare’s Henry V evokes the medieval, Roman Catholic sensibility and calls for the support of Saint Crispin (the patron saint of shoemakers, as it happens).
His treatment of Cleopatra also provides valuable insights into how he worked. Here is Plutarch’s description of Cleopatra in her barge from North’s translation:
To take her barge to the edge of the river Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, citherns, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of herself: she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus commonly drawn in picture; and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth the god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. Her ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the nymphs Nereides (which are the mermaids of the waters) an
d like the Graces, some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge, out of which there came a wonderful passing sweet savour of perfumes, that perfumed the wharf’s side, pestered with innumerable multitudes of people. Some of them followed the barge all alongst the river’s side; others also ran out of the city to see her coming in; so that in the end there ran such multitudes of people one after another to see her that Antonius was left post-alone in the market place in his imperial seat to give audience. And there went a rumour in the people’s mouths that the goddess Venus was come to play with the god Bacchus, for the general good of all Asia.
Plutarch is keen to describe the colours, clothing, scent and music as well as the other people who are on the barge with Cleopatra – her pageboys, like little love-gods, and her waiting gentlewomen – and those running along the riverbank. The moment is already intricately and richly described before Shakespeare turns his mind to it. But he brings about a poetic metamorphosis. He follows the source closely but heightens Cleopatra’s exceptional magnetism by transforming Plutarch’s rich prose into golden verse:
ENOBARBUS
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that
The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description. She did lie
In her pavilion – cloth of gold, of tissue –
O’er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.
AGRIPPA O, rare for Antony!
ENOBARBUS
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her i’th’eyes,
And made their bends adornings. At the helm
A seeming mermaid steers. The silken tackle
Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands
That yarely frame the office. From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her, and Antony,
Enthroned i’th’market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to th’air, which but for vacancy
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.
(Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.198–224)
Shakespeare re-casts Plutarch entirely as lyrical poetry and enhances it with the emphatic musical sounds of ‘burnished’ and ‘burned’, and the breathless plosive and alliterative excitement of ‘poop’ (the stern of the barge), ‘purple’ and ‘perfumèd’. Shakespeare is captivated by the effect that Cleopatra and her barge have on the natural elements – the wind itself is ‘love-sick’ – and he takes us erotically close to the ‘glow’ of her ‘delicate cheeks’, presenting the moment as enigmatic and sexually charged. The ship’s ‘silken tackle’ swells in the quick (‘yarely’) hands of Cleopatra’s women. The fans used to cool Egypt’s famous queen have the contradictory effect of keeping her warm. He does not refer to the classical gods Venus (goddess of love) and Bacchus (god of wine) and emphasises the natural world instead. The air itself has created ‘a gap in nature’, a sort of vacuum, and has gone to see Cleopatra too, while Shakespeare’s Antony is left whistling in the marketplace. Plutarch’s account is a careful and colourful commentary on a live event; Shakespeare produces a burnished oil painting: lyrical, erotic, enigmatic.
AMONG THE ACTORS
As well as books, Shakespeare needed actors. They illuminated his words and kept the audience wanting more. Throughout much of his career, Shakespeare produced plays for a stable company of actors who became old friends. He knew how they would deliver his lines, speak the poetry and crack the jokes. The company formed in 1594, stayed together, and the characters in the plays aged with them. Richard Burbage (1568–1619) tended to take the leading roles and audiences were able to watch him grow from Richard III and Hamlet through to Othello and King Lear, while Shakespeare was writing these major roles for someone who was roughly the same age as himself.
There are moments in some of the printed plays in which names of actors are accidentally used instead of the speech-prefixes of the characters. So, for example, in the edition of Much Ado About Nothing published in 1600, the names of the much-loved comedians Will Kemp and Richard Cowley appear instead of their roles Dogberry and Verges, indicating that Shakespeare was writing as much with the actors in mind as the characters they were playing. This slippage between actor and role also suggests that the printed version of Much Ado About Nothing was based on Shakespeare’s own (now lost) manuscript.
Actors were not given a full script but only their actual speeches with the cue-lines. They knew the line just before their own and had to listen out carefully for it, a practice which gave an immediate, almost improvisatory quality to the style of acting. Shakespeare jokes about this in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when the workmen of Athens are rehearsing their play, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’: ‘You speak all your part at once, cues and all’ says their long-suffering director figure, Peter Quince, to Francis Flute, the bellows-mender (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.2.93–4).
Writing for a company of actors whose abilities he knew intimately and with whom he rehearsed explains why there are only sparse stage directions in the early printed texts. Quite often these are only implied in the dialogue: ‘See, it stalks away’ says Barnardo of Hamlet’s father’s ghost (Hamlet, 1.1.48); ‘You must not kneel’ says Cordelia to her aged father, King Lear (The Tragedy of King Lear, 4.6.52), implying that he tries to do so on the line before; ‘he cares not for your weeping’ says Volumnia to Coriolanus’s wife, Virgilia (Coriolanus, 5.3.157). In Henry IV Part One there are the directions, ‘the lady speaks in Welsh’, for example (3.1.193), and a little later ‘here the lady sings a Welsh song’ (3.1.240.1). Shakespeare did not have to (and probably could not) provide the Welsh dialogue or song, but the fact that the moment is there suggests there was an actor in the company who could be relied on to write, speak and sing it.
Physical descriptions help determine casting. Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, should be short of stature (Lysander calls her a ‘dwarf’, a ‘bead’, an ‘acorn’ 3.2.329 and 331) whereas her counterpart Helena is tall. Hermia taunts Helena by calling her a ‘painted maypole’ (3.2.290–97). You need to be extremely thin to play Dr Pinch in The Comedy of Errors, ‘a hungry lean-faced villain’ (5.1.238) and, as his name implies, Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, or What You Will, so it is likely that the same actor played both roles. It helps if the actor playing Falstaff is naturally fat (padding can help, but often does not ring true in performance). But on the whole, Shakespeare’s scripts are blessedly free from over-determined instructions. You do not have to be old in order to play King Lear (Burbage was only around forty) because he describes himself as ‘four score and upward’ (The Tragedy of King Lear, 4.6.54); you just have to convince the audience. Shakespeare knew the actors’ talents, wrote according to their abilities, and entrusted his words to their interpretative action. This is why directors over the centuries have rejoiced in the friendliness, understanding, and freedom that they find in Shakespeare’s work, a text for actors.
The Shakespearian stage was bare but included a few vital components: three entrances and exits including the middle, curtained ‘discovery space’ (essential for eavesdroppers, and the place, for example, where Polonius in Hamlet is murdered, ‘behind the arras’, 3.4.22.1). Entrances and exits on either side of it allow for a character or a group of charact
ers to leave just as others enter from the opposite side. It might be a twin who just misses seeing his or her brother or sister (in The Comedy of Errors or Twelfth Night, or What You Will), or an opposing character, or even an army. The stage was never cluttered with scenery and did not require elaborate set changes. The emphasis was on fluidity and pace, one scene melting quickly into another with an energetic sense of continuous action. There was a trapdoor (from which ghosts might appear and where graves could be dug), and an upper playing space (from which gods might descend and where lovers could enjoy a privileged focal point).
From 1608, when the King’s Men took over the running of the indoor Blackfriars Theatre, Shakespeare could rely on a more intimate playing space than at The Globe. The audience were all seated and there was scope for lighting effects with candles. The Tempest seems to have been written especially for this indoor venue because it requires more special effects than any of the other plays (for example the spirit Ariel in flight, the sudden appearance of a magical banquet, and the descent of three goddesses). Its long, subtle scenes suggest that Shakespeare was writing it with an intimate playing space in mind. Being primarily written for the Blackfriars Theatre would not have precluded performances at ‘the great [G]lobe itself’ (The Tempest, 4.1.153), though probably with modified action. The arraignment of Queen Katherine of Aragon during the divorce proceedings of Henry VIII had actually taken place in the Blackfriars. When Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play All is True (Henry VIII) was performed there, that particular scene (2.4.) would have taken on a special resonance in its site-specific venue. The script, too, was closely based on the words spoken at the royal hearing. But we know that the play was performed at the Globe as well (rather like a play in our own time which opens in a small, niche, studio space and then transfers to a much bigger venue). Henry VIII infamously dissolved the monasteries and great religious houses; the play about him literally set the Globe on fire and burned it to the ground.
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