This strange practice originated under Elizabeth, who required every knight participating in the celebratory royal birthday and Accession Day tilts to present her with a pasteboard shield. The pressure to produce just the right impresa was a burden for the knights, some of whom sought out the help of poets and artists. Unlike an emblem, which also combined word and image, the impresa was highly personal, its message, like that of a sonnet, bound up in the inscrutable relationship of speaker and object of veneration. In this case, the venerated object was Elizabeth herself, and the message of the impresa a courtier’s attempt to flatter or cajole the queen. The shield gallery might be said to contain the political history of Elizabeth’s reign, the cumulative ups and downs of political aspirants. In its reliance on the enigmatic combination of word and image, and on wonder and interpretive skill, it embodied more than any other room at Whitehall the extent to which the physical world of the court resembled the imaginative world of the stage.
No doubt when Shakespeare entered the shield gallery his eye was drawn to his own anonymous contributions. He was obviously skilled in the genre and would later advertise his talents in Pericles, which contains a wonderful scene in which six knights display their imprese; Pericles’s own shield depicts “a withered branch, that’s only green at top; / The motto, In hac spe vivo”—“In this hope I live” (2.2.43–44). For obvious reasons, few records survive of who ghostwrote imprese, though there’s a bookkeeper’s entry which records that Shakespeare was paid forty-four shillings for providing the impresa that the Earl of Rutland displayed at King James’s Accession Day tournament in March 1613. That was a lot of money for so few words. And Shakespeare was responsible for just the motto; his fellow actor Richard Burbage, an accomplished artist, was paid handsomely “for painting and making it.” It’s highly unlikely that this commission at the very end of his career was Shakespeare’s first freelance job. Who better, after all, to give voice to a courtier’s unrequited desires?
Shakespeare’s destination at Whitehall was the great chamber, also known as the guard or watching chamber, where the Chamberlain’s Men were to perform this evening. It had fallen to them, as the preeminent company in the land, to play the first night of the Christmas holidays, as they had now done for five years running. But they couldn’t afford to rest on their laurels: they had played three out of five times the previous Christmas season, yet had been responsible for all four court performances the Christmas before that. This season they were sharing the stage with the Admiral’s Men, with two performances each. It was not a reassuring trend.
The great chamber was the most intimate playing space at Whitehall. Sixty feet long by thirty feet wide, with a twenty-foot ceiling, it had a wooden floor, a fireplace, and was decorated with woven tapestries. The acoustics were probably much better than those at the next most attractive playing space, the great hall, just beyond it and facing the chapel, which was considerably larger and had a high ceiling and a stone floor. A year earlier, a French ambassador recorded in his diary that at the Whitehall Christmas celebrations, “they began to dance in the presence of the Queen and to act comedies, which was done in the great chamber, and the Queen’s throne was set up there and attended by a hundred gentlemen, very well ordered, the ladies also, and the whole court.” The French ambassador does not mention it, but there were probably a few children there, too. Lady Anne Clifford, who was a girl of nine or so at this time, recalled in later years how during Elizabeth’s reign at “Christmas I used to go much to the court and sometimes did I lie at my Aunt Warwick’s chamber on a pallet.” It’s probable that her aunt Warwick maintained a company of players earlier in the decade, and it would be fitting if she secured a place for her young niece at performances by the leading players of the day.
If the great chamber was to be readied for dancing after the play—including energetic galliards that would have required a good deal of space—the audience, excepting Elizabeth on her throne, would have been seated on easily cleared upholstered benches or stools (or alternatively, as on other occasions, arranged in a shallow bank of temporary seating built against the wall). Many hands pitched in to make the performance a success. The Office of the Revels supervised the lighting and scenery, while the sergeant painter and his staff took care of any painting or decoration the performance required. The chamberlain’s staff of ushers, porters, and grooms oversaw cleaning and heating the chamber, as well as seating and decorating. It would have been a tight squeeze to accommodate all those gathered to see the play in the great chamber. John Chamberlain writes at Christmastime 1601 that there “has been such a small court this Christmas that the guard were not troubled to keep doors at the plays and pastimes.” If this Christmas were more typical, the queen’s guards would have had their hands full.
There was a pecking order about who sat where during performances in the great chamber. This was not the public playhouse, where money could secure a better seat. An excruciating example of how social hierarchy was maintained survives in a letter from a secretary to the Earl of Essex named Edward Jones. Jones, who had married a woman of higher social station, was spotted at Christmas 1596 by the lord chamberlain, Cobham, alongside his pregnant wife, in a place reserved for those of higher rank. Shakespeare, whose company was the only one to perform at court that Christmas, may have witnessed the humiliation that followed: Cobham pointed his white staff of office at Jones, publicly berated him, and told him to get back to where he belonged. Jones wrote to Cobham a few days later, complaining “that which grieveth me most is the public disgrace which your Lordship gave at the play on Sunday night, not only before many of my friends that thought your Lordship did me wrong, but in the hearing of my wife, who being with child did take it so ill as she wept.” Jones protested that he was just checking on his pregnant wife, not presuming to sit where he didn’t belong, and didn’t deserve to be called “saucy fellow” and “other words of disgrace.”
If, as is likely, the Chamberlain’s Men presented their resident playwright’s most recent work at court during the Christmas season of 1598, they would be staging The Second Part of Henry the Fourth and Much Ado About Nothing. Against this possible lineup the Admiral’s Men were offering relatively lighter fare: two Robin Hood plays coauthored by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle (Chettle was paid in late November 1598 “for mending of Robin Hood for the court”—probably inserting changes in the text requested by the master of the revels, Edmund Tilney). Tilney, whose responsibilities also included “calling together of sundry players and perusing, fitting and reforming their matters otherwise not convenient to be shown before her Majesty,” would have carefully reviewed every play to be performed at Christmas no later than November, this time not simply vetting the script but scrutinizing a dress performance at the Revels office to ensure that nothing visual or verbal would give offense.
If the Chamberlain’s Men performed The Second Part of Henry the Fourth this Christmas, their timing couldn’t have been better. Its opening prologue is spoken by a character named Rumor, a familiar presence at court—“Open your ears, for which of you will stop / The vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks”:
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
I speak of peace while covert enmity,
Under the smile of safety, wounds the world.
(1.1.1–10)
Rumor continues with an image that Shakespeare liked well enough to rework and improve in Hamlet’s rebuke to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “Will you play upon this pipe?… You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops” (3.2.350–65):
Rumor is a pipe,
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wav’ring multitude,
Can play upon it.
(1.1.15–20)
These words would have struck home at Whitehall that late December day, as rumors of great import swirled around the anxious court: Would there be peace or war with Spain? And would the wavering Earl of Essex finally agree to lead an English army to suppress an Irish rebellion?
WHEN THE CHAMBERLAIN’S MEN HAD STAGED THE SECOND PART OF Henry the Fourth at the Curtain, the play had ended with an epilogue spoken by Will Kemp. Characters who deliver Shakespeare’s epilogues tend to straddle fictional and real worlds, and this play’s ending is no exception. As the fifth act comes to a close, Sir John Falstaff—played by Kemp—is hauled off to the Fleet prison, and it looks for once as if Falstaff, that great escape artist, will not be able to wriggle out of trouble. But Kemp suddenly dashes back onstage. A moment or two passes before playgoers realize that the play really is over and that Kemp is delivering an epilogue not as Falstaff but more or less as himself (a slippery distinction, since Kemp always played Kemp whatever role he was assigned):
If my tongue cannot entreat you to acquit me, will you command me to use my legs? And yet that were but light payment, to dance out of your debt. But a good conscience will make any possible satisfaction, and so would I. All the gentle-women here have forgiven me. If the gentlemen will not, then the gentlemen do not agree with the gentlewomen, which was never seen before in such an assembly.
One word more, I beseech you. If you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France. Where, for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already ’a be killed with your hard opinions; for Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man. My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you good night.
(Epilogue, 16–32)
The witty epilogue manages to do several things at once. Kemp’s repeated mention of his legs and dancing signals that a jig—a bawdy skit with dancing that concluded every publicly staged play, and at which Kemp excelled—is about to begin. Kemp also conveys the news that Shakespeare, “our humble author,” promises to “continue the story,” so his admirers can rest assured they’ll be seeing him again soon. This is the only time Shakespeare ever shared with his audience what he planned to write next—a play that will feature Sir John Falstaff as well as Henry’s bride-to-be, Katharine of France. The work in progress is clearly Henry the Fifth, capstone to the historical sequence that had begun four years earlier with Richard the Second and continued in the two parts of Henry the Fourth. Tagged onto the end of the epilogue is a forced apology for using Oldcastle’s name in The First Part of Henry the Fourth (hence the disclaimer that “Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man”).
This epilogue wouldn’t do at court, where plays did not end with ribald jigs. So, like Hamlet scribbling “some dozen or sixteen lines” to be inserted into The Mousetrap, Shakespeare appended roughly the same number of lines to the special Whitehall performance. Once past the opening apology, Shakespeare breaks new ground in this revised epilogue. The speech is brassy and confident and may even have caught his fellow players off guard. Taking center stage, Shakespeare delivers his own lines (“what I have to say is of my own making”). It’s the only time in his plays we hear him speak for and as himself:
First, my fear; then, my curtsy; last my speech. My fear is your displeasure; my curtsy, my duty; and my speech, to beg your pardons. If you look for a good speech now, you undo me, for what I have to say is of my own making, and what indeed I should say will, I doubt, prove my own marring. But to the purpose, and so to the venture. Be it known to you, as it is very well, I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play, to pray your patience for it, and to promise a better. I meant indeed to pay you with this, which if like an ill venture it come unluckily home, I break, and you, my gentle creditors, lose. Here I promised you I would be, and here I commit my body to your mercies. Bate me some and I will pay you some and, as most debtors do, promise you infinitely. And so I kneel down before you; but indeed, to pray for the Queen.
(Epilogue 1–15)
It’s a deft piece of work. This time around there’s no mention of what the next play will be about and no promise that Kemp will return as Falstaff. The apology for Oldcastle in The First Part of Henry the Fourth (perhaps that or Merry Wives was “the displeasing play” he never quite gets around to naming) is nicely finessed, as Shakespeare offers in compensation the Falstaff play they have just applauded as a way of making amends. Beyond this point, the epilogue’s initial acceptance of social deference—all that begging and curtsying—gives way to Shakespeare’s novel suggestion that playwright and playgoers are bound in a partnership, sharers in a venture. Those in the audience alert to the echoes of Shakespeare’s recent drama may have picked up on key words here—venture and credit, bating and paying, promising and breaking—central to his play about the new world of venture capital, The Merchant of Venice. If Shakespeare offers himself as merchant-adventurer, his plays as treasure, and his audience as investors, then it follows that an “ill venture” that breaks or bankrupts him will prove as costly to his creditors.
The analogy between a theatrical joint-stock company like the Chamberlain’s Men and joint-stock mercantile companies is not farfetched. Both kinds of joint-stock operations were great levelers, the wealth that they produced transforming long-standing social boundaries. Shakespeare, who had recently translated his theatrical earnings into a coat of arms and joined the ranks of the “gentle creditors,” understood that money helped secure not just property but gentility, too. For Shakespeare and the Chamberlain’s Men, the rewards of venturing were as palpable as the perils of breaking. Veteran courtiers knew how many talented theatrical companies had come and gone: in the past decade the Queen’s Men, Sussex’s Men, Pembroke’s Men, and Strange’s Men had all been applauded at court and had all subsequently broken up. The threat of financial ruin through the loss of a permanent playing space in the city was an actor-sharer’s worst nightmare.
When Shakespeare describes his audience as “gentle creditors” he means not only that they provide the credit or license to let him write what he wants, but also that they credit or believe in him. Pursuing the implications of this metaphor, he redefines the terms of their understanding: if they bate him some, that is, if they cut him some slack, he will make it up to them in installments. And, playing upon how debtors promise infinitely (that is, promise the world), Shakespeare says he will do the same. Like most debtors, when he says “infinitely” he also means it in the sense of “indefinitely.” Accept his terms, then, and they’ll be repaid with immortal plays for a long time to come. The version of the epilogue spoken by Kemp described “our humble author” sticking to a successful if by now familiar formula for success; the substitute one that Shakespeare himself delivered on the eve of 1599 couldn’t be more different. It’s the closest we get in his work to Shakespeare revealing his determination to move in a new direction, one in which he will demand more of his audience, his fellow players, and himself.
What had begun with Shakespeare modestly curtsying to his audience ends with what looks like a second act of deference as the epilogue comes to a close. Kneeling in prayer to conclude a play (itself an outworn Elizabethan convention) would seem to restore the world of deference and hierarchy rather than collaboration and mutuality. But Shakespeare—player and gentleman—catches himself and explains to his audience that while it may look like he’s kneeling “before them,” he’s not; he’s kneeling in prayer for Elizabeth, in deference to whom, now, one expects, every other subject in the room scrambles to follow suit. Relative to the monarch, debtors and creditors, servants and lords, players and patrons—who are all falling to their knees to join in this prayer for the queen—are on the same level after all.
This unusual epilogue survives by accident—or rather, due to carelessness. The Second Part of Henry the Fourth was published less than two years after this. When the manuscript was passed along to the printing house, both versions of th
e epilogue were bundled with it. The compositor setting type, unsure of what to do, printed both but left an extra bit of space between the Whitehall and Curtain versions. Had he thought about it more, he might have realized that it made no sense for the speaker to kneel to the queen midway through the epilogue and then spring up again. When the compositor of the 1623 Folio came upon this crux he, too, decided not to choose between the two but also melded them into a single epilogue, though he at least tried to mend things by moving the prayer to the queen to the end of the epilogue. Bizarrely, modern-day editors, who ought to know better, have followed suit, leaving the confusion intact and obscuring why and how Shakespeare redirects his art at this time.
The rupture with Will Kemp hinted at in the revised epilogue became total by the early months of 1599, when Kemp walked (or was shoved) away from his partnership in the Globe and almost surely in the company as well, enabling Shakespeare and the other principles to enrich themselves by carving up his share. The full story of why Kemp changed his mind about the Globe and the Chamberlain’s Men will never be known. Given the money he was sacrificing by leaving the partnership, the gulf between how he and others saw his role in the playing company and at the Globe must have been unbridgeable. That Shakespeare chose to cut his comic star out of Henry the Fifth defied expectations, for audiences familiar with stage versions of this story took for granted they’d be seeing a clown. Whether it precipitated Kemp’s decision or was made in response to it is hard to tell, though I suspect the former. Kemp’s great predecessor Dick Tarlton had starred as the lead clown, Derick (and perhaps as Oldcastle, too) in Shakespeare’s main dramatic source, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. It would have been a milestone in Kemp’s career, at the height of his popularity, to have surpassed Tarlton with his own comic turn in Henry the Fifth.
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 5
