The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works

by William Shakespeare

  Some measure of Shakespeare’s personal success during this period may be gained from the ascription to him of works not now believed to be his; Locrine and Thomas Lord Cromwell were published in 1595 and 1602 respectively as by ‘W.S.’; in 1599 a collection of poems, The Passionate Pilgrim, containing some poems certainly by other writers, appeared under his name; so, in 1606 and 1608, did The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy. Since Shakespeare’s time, too, many plays of the period, some published, some surviving only in manuscript, have been attributed to him. In modern times, the most plausible case has been made for parts, or all, of Edward III, which was entered in the registers of the Stationers’ Company (a normal, but not invariable, way of setting in motion the publication process) in 1595 and published in 1596. It was first ascribed to Shakespeare in 1656. When this edition of the Complete Works first appeared, we said that if any play deserved to be added to the canon, this was it. Since then the scholarly case for Shakespeare having written part, or even all, of the play has grown, and we reprint it here according to its conjectural date of composition.

  4. King James I (1566-1625): a portrait 1621) by Daniel Mytens

  In August 1608 the King’s Men took up the lease of the smaller, ‘private’ indoor theatre, the Blackfriars; again, Shakespeare was one of the syndicate of owners. The company took possession in 1609. The Blackfriars served as a winter home; in better weather, performances continued to be given at the Globe. By now, Shakespeare was at a late stage in his career. Perhaps he realized it; he seems to have been willing to share his responsibilities as the company’s resident dramatist with younger writers. Timon of Athens, tentatively dated to early 1606, seems on internal evidence to be partly the work of Thomas Middleton (1580-1627). Another collaborative play, very successful in its time, was Pericles (c. 1607-8), in which Shakespeare probably worked with George Wilkins, an unscrupulous character who gave up his brief career as a writer in favour of a longer one as a tavern (or brothel) keeper. But Shakespeare’s most fruitful collaboration was with John Fletcher, his junior by fifteen years. Fletcher was collaborating with Francis Beaumont on plays for the King’s Men by about 1608. Beaumont stopped writing plays when he married, in about 1613, and it is at this time that Fletcher began to collaborate with Shakespeare. A lost play, Cardenio, acted by the King’s Men some time before 20May 1613, was plausibly ascribed to Shakespeare and Fletcher in a document of 1653; All is True (Henry VIII), first acted about June 1613, is generally agreed on stylistic evidence to be another fruit of the same partnership; and The Two Noble Kinsmen, also dated 1613, which seems to be the last play in which Shakespeare had a hand, was ascribed to the pair on its publication in 1634. One of Shakespeare’s last professional tasks was the minor one of devising an impress—which has not survived—for the Earl of Rutland to bear at a tournament held on 24 March 1613 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the King’s accession. An impresa was a paper or pasteboard shield painted with an emblematic device and motto which would be carried and interpreted for a knight by his squire; such a ceremony is portrayed in Pericles (Sc. 6). Shakespeare received forty-four shillings for his share in the work; Richard Burbage was paid the same sum ‘for painting and making it’.

  The Drama and Theatre of Shakespeare’s Time

  Shakespeare came upon the theatrical scene at an auspicious time. English drama and theatre had developed only slowly during the earlier part of the sixteenth century; during Shakespeare’s youth they exploded into vigorous life. It was a period of secularization; previously, drama had been largely religious in subject matter and overtly didactic in treatment; as a boy of fifteen, Shakespeare could have seen one of the last performances of a great cycle of plays on religious themes at Coventry, not far from his home town. 1567 saw the building in London of the short-lived Red Lion, and in 1576 the Theatre went up, to be rapidly followed by the Curtain: England’s first important, custom-built playhouses. There was a sudden spurt in the development of all aspects of theatrical art: acting, production, playwriting, company organization, and administration. Within a few years the twin arts of drama and theatre entered upon a period of achievement whose brilliance remains unequalled.

  The new drama was literary and rhetorical rather than scenic and spectacular: but its mainstream was theatrical too. Its writers were poets. Prose was only beginning to be used in plays during Shakespeare’s youth; a playwright was often known as a ‘poet’, and most of the best playwrights of the period wrote with distinction in other forms. Shakespeare’s most important predecessors and early contemporaries, from whom he learned much, were John Lyly (c.1554-1606), pre-eminent for courtly comedy and elegant prose, Robert Greene (1558-92), who helped particularly to develop the scope and language of romantic comedy, the tragedian Thomas Kyd (1558-94),and Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), whose ‘mighty line’ put heroism excitingly on the stage and who shares with Shakespeare credit for establishing the English history play as a dramatic mode. As Shakespeare’s career progressed, other dramatists displayed their talents and, doubtless, influenced and stimulated him. George Chapman (c.1560-1634) emerged as a dramatist in the mid-1590s and succeeded in both comedy and tragedy. He was deeply interested in classical themes, as was Ben Jonson (1572-1637), who became Shakespeare’s chief rival. Jonson was a dominating personality, vocal about his accomplishments (and about Shakespeare, who, he said, ‘wanted art’), and biting as a comic satirist. Thomas Dekker (c.1572-1632) wrote comedies that are more akin to Shakespeare’s than to Jonson’s in their romantic warmth; the satirical plays of John Marston (c.1575-1634) are more sensational and cynical than Jonson’s. Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) brought a sharp wit to the portrayal of contemporary London life, and developed into a great tragic dramatist. Towards the end of Shakespeare’s career, Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625) came upon the scene; the affinity between Shakespeare’s late tragicomedies and some of Fletcher’s romances is reflected in their collaboration.

  The companies for which these dramatists wrote were organized mainly from within. They were led by the sharers: eight in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at first, twelve by the end of Shakespeare’s career. Collectively they owned the joint stock of play scripts, costumes, and properties; they shared both expenses and profits. All were working members of the company. Exceptionally, the sharers of Shakespeare’s company owned the Globe theatre itself; more commonly, actors rented theatres from financial speculators such as Philip Henslowe, financier of the Admiral’s Men. Subordinate to the sharers were the ‘hired men’—lesser actors along with prompters (‘bookholders’), stagekeepers, wardrobe keepers (‘tiremen’), musicians, and money-collectors (‘gatherers’). Even those not employed principally as actors might swell a scene at need. The hired men were paid by the week. Companies would need scribes to copy out actors’ parts and to make fair copies from the playwrights’ foul papers (working manuscripts), but they seem mainly to have been employed part-time. The other important group of company members were the apprentices. These were boys or youths each serving a formal term of apprenticeship to one of the sharers. They played female and juvenile roles.

  The success of plays in the Elizabethan theatres depended almost entirely on the actors. They had to be talented, hard-working, and versatile. Above all they had to have extraordinary memories. Plays were given in a repertory system on almost every afternoon of the week except during Lent. Only about two weeks could be allowed for rehearsal of a new play, and during that time the company would be regularly performing a variety of other plays. Lacking printed copies, the actors worked from ‘parts’ written out on scrolls giving only the cue lines from other characters’ speeches. The bookholder, or prompter, had to make sure that actors entered at the right moment, properly equipped. Many of them would take several parts in the same play: doubling and more was a necessary practice. The strain on the memory was great, demanding a high degree of professionalism. Conditions of employment were carefully regulated: a contract of 1614 provides that an actor
and sharer, Robert Dawes (not in Shakespeare’s company), be fined one shilling for failure to turn up at the beginning of a rehearsal, two shillings for missing a rehearsal altogether, three shillings if he was not ‘ready apparelled’ for a performance, ten shillings if four other members of the company considered him to be ‘overcome with drink’ at the time he should be acting, and one pound if he simply failed to turn up for a performance without ‘licence or just excuse of sickness’.

  There can be no doubt that the best actors of Shakespeare’s time would have been greatly admired in any age. English actors became famous abroad; some of the best surviving accounts are in letters written by visitors to England: the actors were literally ‘something to write home about’, and some of them performed (in English) on the Continent. Edward Alleyn, the leading tragedian of the Admiral’s Men, renowned especially for his performances of Marlowe’s heroes, made a fortune and founded Dulwich College. All too little is known about the actors of Shakespeare’s company and the roles they played, but many testimonies survive to Richard Burbage’s excellence in tragic roles. According to an elegy written after he died, in 1619,No more young Hamlet, old Hieronimo;

  Kind Lear, the grieved Moor, and more beside

  That lived in him have now for ever died.

  There is no reason to suppose that the boy actors lacked talent and skill; they were highly trained as apprentices to leading actors. Most plays of the period, including Shakespeare’s, have far fewer female than male roles, but some women’s parts—such as Rosalind (in As You Like It) and Cleopatra—are long and important; Shakespeare must have had confidence in the boys who played them. Some of them later became sharers themselves.

  The playwriting techniques of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were intimately bound up with the theatrical conditions to which they catered. Theatre buildings were virtually confined to London. Plays continued to be given in improvised circumstances when the companies toured the provinces and when they acted at court (that is, wherever the sovereign and his or her entourage happened to be—in London, usually Whitehall or Greenwich). In 1602, Twelfth Night was given in the still-surviving hall of one of London’s Inns of Court, the Middle Temple. Acting companies could use guildhalls, the halls of great houses, the yards of inns, or even churches. (In 1608, Richard II and Hamlet were performed by ships’ crews at sea off the coast of Sierra Leone.) Many plays of the period require no more than an open space and the costumes and properties that the actors carried with them on their travels. Others made more use of the expanding facilities of the professional stage. No doubt texts were adapted as circumstances required.

  5. Richard Burbage: reputedly a self-portrait

  6. The hall of the Middle Temple, London

  Permanent theatres were of two kinds, known now as public and private. Most important to Shakespeare were public theatres such as the Theatre, the Curtain, and the Globe. Unfortunately, the only surviving drawing (reproduced opposite) portraying the interior of a public theatre in any detail is of the Swan, not used by Shakespeare’s company. Though theatres were not uniform in design, they had important features in common. They were large wooden buildings, usually round or polygonal; the Globe, which was about 100 feet in diameter and 36 feet in height, could hold over three thousand spectators. Between the outer and inner walls—a space of about 12 feet—were three levels of tiered benches extending round most of the auditorium and roofed on top; after the Globe burnt down, in 1613, the roof, formerly thatched, was tiled. The surround of benches was broken on the lowest level by the stage, broad and deep, which jutted forth at a height of about 5 feet into the central yard, where spectators (‘groundlings’) could stand. Actors entered mainly, perhaps entirely, from openings in the wall at the back of the stage. At least two doors, one on each side, could be used; stage directions frequently call for characters to enter simultaneously from different doors, when the dramatic situation requires them to be meeting, and to leave ‘severally’ (separately) when they are parting. The depth of the stage meant that characters could enter through the stage doors some moments before other characters standing at the front of the stage might be expected to notice them.

  Also in the wall at the rear of the stage there appears to have been some kind of central aperture which could be used for the disclosing and putting forth of Desdemona’s bed (Othello, 5.2) or the concealment of the spying Polonius (Hamlet, 3.4) or of the sleeping Lear (The History of King Lear, Sc. 20). Behind the stage wall was the tiring-house—the actors’ dressing area.

  On the second level the seating facilities for spectators seem to have extended even to the back of the stage, forming a balcony which at the Globe was probably divided into five bays. Here perhaps was the ‘lords’ room’, which could be taken over by the actors for plays in which action took place ‘above’ (or ‘aloft’), as in Romeo’s wooing of Juliet or the death of Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra. It seems to have been possible for actors to move from the main stage to the upper level during the time taken to speak a few lines of verse, as we may see in The Merchant of Venice (2.6.51-8) or Julius Caesar (5.3.33-5). Somewhere above the lords’ room was a window or platform known as ‘the top’; Joan la Pucelle appears there briefly in I Henry VI (3.3), and in The Tempest, Prospero is seen ‘on the top, invisible’ (3.3).

  Above the stage, at a level higher than the second gallery, was a canopy, probably supported by two pillars (which could themselves be used for concealment) rising from the stage. One function of the canopy was to shelter the stage from the weather; it also formed the floor of one or more huts housing the machinery for special effects and its operators. Here cannon-balls could be rolled around a trough to imitate the sound of thunder, and fire crackers could be set off to simulate lightning. And from this area actors could descend in a chair operated by a winch. Shakespeare uses this facility mainly in his late plays: in Cymbeline for the descent of Jupiter (5.5), and, probably, in Pericles for the descent of Diana (Sc. 21) and in The Tempest for Juno’s appearance in the masque (4.1). On the stage itself was a trap which could be opened to serve as Ophelia’s grave (Hamlet, 5.1) or as Malvolio’s dungeon (Twelfth Night, 4.2).

  7. The Swan Theatre: a copy, by Aernout van Buchel, of a drawing made about 1596 by Johannes de Witt, a Dutch visitor to London

  Somewhere in the backstage area, perhaps in or close to the gallery, must have been a space for the musicians who played a prominent part in many performances. No doubt then, as now, a single musician was capable of playing several instruments. Stringed instruments, plucked (such as the lute) and bowed (such as viols), were needed. Woodwind instruments included recorders (called for in Hamlet, 3.2) and the stronger, shriller hautboys (ancestors of the modern oboe); trumpets and cornetts were needed for the many flourishes and sennets (more elaborate fanfares) played especially for the comings and goings of royal characters. Sometimes musicians would play on stage: entrances for trumpeters and drummers are common in battle scenes. More often they would be heard but not seen; from behind the stage (as, perhaps, at the opening of Twelfth Night or in the concluding dance of Much Ado About Nothing), or even occasionally under it (Antony and Cleopatra, 4.3). Some actors were themselves musicians: the performers of Feste (in Twelfth Night) and Ariel (in The Tempest) must sing and, probably, accompany themselves on lute and tabor (a small drum slung around the neck). Though traditional music has survived for some of the songs in Shakespeare’s plays (such as Ophelia’s mad songs, in Hamlet), we have little music which was certainly composed for them in his own time. The principal exception is two songs for The Tempest by Robert Johnson, a fine composer who was attached to the King’s Men.

  Shakespeare’s plays require few substantial properties. A ‘state’, or throne on a dais, is sometimes called for, as are tables and chairs and, occasionally, a bed, a pair of stocks (King Lear, Sc. 7/2.2), a cauldron (Macbeth, 4.1), a rose brier (I Henry VI, 2.4), and a bush (Two Noble Kinsmen, 5.3). No doubt these and other such objects were pushed on and off the stage
by attendants in full view of the audience. We know that Elizabethan companies spent lavishly on costumes, and some plays require special clothes; at the beginning of 2 Henry IV, Rumour enters ‘painted full of tongues’; regal personages, and supernatural figures such as Hymen in As You Like It (5.4) and the goddesses in The Tempest (4.1), must have been distinctively costumed; presumably a bear-skin was needed for The Winter’s Tale (3.3). Probably no serious attempt was made at historical realism. The only surviving contemporary drawing of a scene from a Shakespeare play, illustrating Titus Andronicus (reproduced on the following page), shows the characters dressed in a mixture of Elizabethan and classical costumes, and this accords with the often anachronistic references to clothing in plays with a historical setting. The same drawing also illustrates the use of head-dresses, of varied weapons as properties—the guard to the left appears to be wearing a scimitar—of facial and bodily make-up for Aaron, the Moor, and of eloquent gestures. Extended passages of wordless action are not uncommon in Shakespeare. Dumb shows feature prominently in earlier Elizabethan plays, and in Shakespeare the direction ‘alarum’ or ‘alarums and excursions’ may stand for lengthy and exciting passages of arms. Even in one of Shakespeare’s latest plays, Cymbeline, important episodes are conducted in wordless mime (see, for example, 5.2-4).