A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  Since at least the eighteenth century, critics have struggled to make sense of Shakespeare’s change of heart about Falstaff. Why would he abandon one of his great creations—especially after promising that we’d see Falstaff again? Justifying this on artistic grounds wasn’t easy, though Samuel Johnson did his best to exonerate Shakespeare: perhaps he “could contrive no train of adventures suitable to his character, or could match him with no companions likely to quicken his humour, or could open no new vein of pleasantry.” The excuse—that Shakespeare lacked invention—is desperate, and you get the sense that Johnson himself doesn’t believe it. What Johnson found especially unforgivable was that Shakespeare went back on his word: “Let meaner authors learn from this example, that it is dangerous to sell the bear which is not yet hunted, to promise to the public what they have not written.” Johnson apparently hadn’t considered reasons for Shakespeare’s decision that had nothing to do with character or plot but rather with Kemp and clowning. The parting of ways between Shakespeare and Kemp—ironically if unintentionally mirrored in Hal’s icy repudiation of Fastaff—was a rejection not only of a certain kind of comedy but also a declaration that from here on in, it was going to be a playwright’s and not an actor’s theater, no matter how popular the actor.

  Kemp and Shakespeare made an odd pair. Older by a decade or so, Kemp was also the tougher and more physically imposing of the two. He was a powerfully built man, possessed of extraordinary stamina, yet exceptionally graceful. (To play the fat Falstaff he had to wear specially made “giant hose.”) A woodcut executed in 1600—the only contemporary portrait we have of Kemp—depicts from the neck up a man well into middle age, with a grizzled beard and longish hair. But the rest of his body is that of a much younger man—of average height but muscular, sturdy, erect, light on his feet, dressed in the traditional garb of the Morris dancer. Kemp would respond to the breakup with the Chamberlain’s Men by dancing his way “out of the world” (punningly, out of the Globe), out of London, toward Norwich in early 1600, in a Morris dance lasting a few weeks, reconnecting with his roots in a solo performance. His demeanor underscored another fundamental difference with Shakespeare, having to do with class. He usually played lower-class country fellows like Bottom, Costard, Peter, and Launcelot. Even in the role of the aristocratic Falstaff, Kemp played a man of the people and wore a workingman’s cap. For Kemp, this was more than a role, it was a conviction, one that only increased his popular appeal. He loathed social climbers and went out of his way to praise those who didn’t stand upon rank. No doubt Shakespeare’s pursuit of gentility rubbed Kemp the wrong way.

  Kemp was a veteran performer, his career going back at least to the mid-1580s, when he had been a member of the leading company of the time, Leicester’s Men. They were an itinerant company, playing at court, in the English countryside, and on the Continent, including Denmark (Kemp could have regaled Shakespeare with stories of playing before the Danish court at Elsinore). Shakespeare and Kemp may have first crossed paths in 1587, when Leicester’s Men passed through Stratford-upon-Avon. If Shakespeare, then in his early twenties, was contemplating a life in the theater, watching Leicester’s Men perform in his hometown might have been a deciding factor. Though they may have both belonged to Strange’s Men by 1594, the first time their names are officially linked is a year later, 1595, when the two, along with Richard Burbage, are recorded as receiving payments for court performances by the newly formed Chamberlain’s Men. The up-and-coming Burbage was by now a promising actor, and Shakespeare was emerging as an important playwright and poet. But at that time their reputations were easily overshadowed by Kemp’s. There could have been no doubt in Kemp’s mind in 1594 when he and Shakespeare became fellow sharers, or even in 1599 when his fame was at its height, who would be remembered as the greatest name in Elizabethan theater.

  As gentle as Shakespeare was reputed to be, he was not pliant, especially if that meant subordinating his artistic vision and will to the desires of the extraordinary actors for whom he wrote. It’s tempting to read one of the very few contemporary anecdotes about Shakespeare as a gloss on this aspect of his relationship with his charismatic fellow players. This time, however, it’s Richard Burbage whom Shakespeare displaces in another act of substitution, a curious reversal of the bed trick that figures so largely in his comedies. The story appears in the journal of John Manningham, a law student who jotted it down in March 1602 (though the apocryphal story may have already been in circulation for a few years):

  Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III, there was a citizen grown so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard III. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard III.

  In the age-old struggle for primacy between writer and actor, this round goes to the dramatist who rewrites the scene, leaving his leading man out in the cold while enjoying his fan’s embrace. The protean Shakespeare also gets in the last word.

  The parting of ways between Kemp and Shakespeare was less than friendly (a year later, having left the company, Kemp was still muttering about “Shakerags”). Even if personal differences could be overcome, philosophical ones over the role of the clown and the nature of comedy could not. Performers like Kemp were more than jokesters, and at stake was more than simply entertaining audiences. Clowns—closer to what we would call comedians—traced their lineage to older, popular forms of festive entertainment, to the Lord of Misrule, to the Vice figure of morality drama, to traditions of minstrelsy, rusticity, song and dance. Their origins also encouraged leading clowns to think of themselves as the true stars of their companies. It was their job to banter with members of the audience, especially at the end of scenes, and to stray from the script when occasion presented itself. They weren’t intended to be believable characters, that is to say, like real people, not even when playing fully fleshed-out roles like Falstaff. This was because leading clowns were also always playing themselves, or rather, the stage identity they so carefully crafted.

  Playgoers were not the only ones who never forgot that Kemp was Kemp. Even Shakespeare occasionally forgot to distinguish actor and role. When he imagined the clown Peter’s entrance in Romeo and Juliet, he writes “Enter Will Kemp.” The same holds true in act 4 of Much Ado About Nothing, where instead of the character “Dogberry” he writes “Kemp.” What’s so striking is that he rarely does this for other actors in the company. The speech prefixes to the quarto of The Second Part of Henry the Fourth similarly reveal traces of what Shakespeare was imagining as he wrote. There’s an otherwise inexplicable stage entrance for someone named “Will” in act 2, scene 4, which makes no sense other than as an early entry for Will Kemp as Falstaff. Editors who don’t accept this are forced to invent a new character, “Will” or “William,” who is never named onstage, is then given lines assigned to others, and for whom a speedy exit is invented as well. Far more likely is that Shakespeare, as elsewhere in these drafts, couldn’t help but think of Will Kemp as Will Kemp, whatever his role. As Shakespeare found himself moving steadily at this time toward a more naturalistic drama in which characters like Rosalind and Hamlet feel real, the traditional clown had become an obstacle.

  No less gnawing a problem for Shakespeare was the clown’s after-piece, the jig. It may be hard for us to conceive of the conclusion of Romeo and Juliet—with the image of the dead lovers fresh in our minds—immediately followed by a bawdy song and dance, but Elizabethan audiences demanded it. Jigs were basically semi-improvisational one-act plays, running to a few hundred lines, usually performed by four actors. They were rich in clowning, repartee, and high-spirited dancing and song, and written in traditional ballad form. Though nominally independent of the plays that preceded them, they were an extension of the clown’s part. If comedies were about
love, jigs were about what happened after marriage—adultery, deception, and irrepressible sexual desire. Jigs—anarchic and libidinal—were wildly popular because they tapped into parts of everyday experience usually left untouched in the world of the play. As such, they provided a counterpoint to the fragile closure of romantic comedy and to the high seriousness and finality of tragedy.

  Frustratingly little evidence survives about the Elizabethan jig. There must have been some tacit agreement between the authorities and the publishers not to print them. After several jigs—including a few making much of Kemp’s role—appeared in print in the early 1590s, not another was published for thirty years. But even these scripts fail to capture the extraordinary vitality of these performances—the explosive energy, the star clown’s sidesplitting gestures, the high-spirited singing, the spectacular leaping, the titillating groping. The undisputed master of the jig was, unsurprisingly, Will Kemp—who looked back on his career as one “spent… in mad jigs and merry jests.” His stage presence, his comic timing, and more than anything else his dancing skill and stamina made his jigs famous. Dick Tarlton may have been a greater all-around entertainer, but Kemp figured out how to suit his comic gifts to the public stage. By 1598, the popularity of Kemp’s jigs was so great that everywhere you turned in London you could hear “whores, beadles, bawds, and sergeants filthily chant Kemp’s jig.” There were spectators so enthralled with jigs that they would arrive at the theater only after the play was over, pushing their way in to see the jig for free.

  Dramatists understandably grumbled about the jigs (which were written not by playwrights but by hack ballad makers). It could not have been easy surrendering to the clown the last word. Christopher Marlowe had hated jigs, and said so in the prologue to Tamburlaine the Great, where he announces that his play rejects “jigging veins of riming mother wits / And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay.” Even as popular a dramatist as Thomas Dekker had sharp words for what he calls the “nasty bawdy jig.” Given this friction, it’s easy to see how disagreements over the purpose of playing between the Chamberlain’s Men’s leading clown and its star playwright had reached the breaking point. After Kemp’s departure, when a revival of a Falstaff play was called for, fellow sharer Thomas Pope, adept in comic roles, could step in. But Kemp’s jigs were a thing of the past; Shakespeare now got in the last word at the Globe.

  Shakespeare’s victory over Kemp (even if Kemp had left by choice) was so complete that it’s hard in retrospect to see what all the fuss was about. In 1638, the dramatist Richard Brome included a scene in The Antipodes in which a clown is taken to task for improvising and for bantering with the audience. When the clown defends himself by appealing to the precedent established by the great comedians of the past, he is told that the days of Tarlton and Kemp are over, it’s a playwrights’ theater now, and the stage “purged from barbarism, / And brought to the perfection it now shines.” The battle won, English drama would never be the same.

  Kemp bounced around for a while. He drifted back to the Curtain, where he could count on old fans, performed a bit with a company called Worcester’s Men, and tried to get a touring company going on the Continent, but nothing really took hold, and he had to borrow money. Within a few years he died penniless, his burial entry reading simply “Kemp, a man.” If not for Shakespeare, Kemp’s legacy and verbal style would be long forgotten. After Kemp left the company we no longer find Shakespeare carelessly alluding to particular actors in his drafts, only to characters. It’s as if he began to believe more fully in the reality of his own creations. As Shakespeare’s characters became more real and as Shakespeare’s name figured more and more prominently on printed editions of his plays, his fellow players, with the exception of Burbage, became increasingly anonymous. Shakespeare had won the battle of Wills, though he would spend much of the following year trying to exorcise Kemp’s ghost.

  – 2 –

  A Great Blow in Ireland

  Long before returning to Whitehall in late December, Shakespeare knew not to expect much holiday cheer at court. The domestic and international challenges England now faced reverberated through the play he was trying to finish, Henry the Fifth, as they would through all the plays he worked on in 1599. Since summer, the news both at home and abroad had been unrelentingly grim. The mood had turned dark in August, with word of the death of the most powerful man in England, Lord Treasurer Burghley, followed by reports of a catastrophic military defeat in Ireland. As Burghley lay dying, Elizabeth visited him and in an extraordinary gesture, hoping to spur his recovery, spoon-fed the minister who had served her faithfully for forty years. On August 29, 1598, Londoners lined the streets between Burghley’s residence in the Strand and Westminster Abbey to witness the extraordinary state funeral “performed… with all the rites that belong to so great a personage.” Watching the five hundred official mourners accompanying the hearse, many of whom were already vying for the spoils of Burghley’s lucrative offices, Londoners who remembered the other famous courtiers who had grown old with Elizabeth—Leicester, Walsingham, Warwick, and Hatton—may well have sensed that they were witnessing the end of an era.

  The aging queen knew it and feared it. She had recently confided to a foreign ambassador that she had now “lost twenty or two and twenty of her councillors,” and put little faith in the current crop of aspirants, who “were young and had no experience in affairs of state.” Burghley’s tireless service, his skill at managing conflict, and his occasional ruthlessness had proven indispensable to the queen. He had helped avert the corrosive effects of the factionalism she herself had encouraged as part of a time-tested strategy of playing her powerful and ambitious courtiers against one another. The most conspicuous mourner that day was Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who had been Burghley’s ward and who had looked up to him as a father figure. Tall and handsome, with his distinctive square-cut beard and charismatic air, he stood in striking contrast to the man who should have been the center of attention, Burghley’s son, Secretary of State Sir Robert Cecil, a canny, hunchback bureaucrat whom Elizabeth affectionately called her “pygmy.” With Burghley’s death, the court irrevocably fractured into factions aligned with these two men—the “Militia” and the “Togati,” court observer Sir Robert Naunton called them, the swordsmen and the bureaucrats.

  In the spring of 1598, English policy makers heatedly debated whether to make peace with Spain. Burghley was the chief advocate of peace, and his death was a blow to the hopes of those seeking to reorient English foreign policy. The English had learned in April that their warweary French allies were ready to make a separate peace. Elizabeth dispatched Robert Cecil to the French court to discover Henri IV’s intentions and if possible break off the proposed treaty with Spain. But the French king had already made up his mind. Henri IV’s decision left England virtually alone in confronting the Spanish—on the Continent, in Ireland, on the seas, and potentially on its own shores as well. As lord treasurer, Burghley knew that the cost of fighting on all these fronts had become nearly intolerable. Even as Burghley lay dying he oversaw a revised agreement with the Low Countries that ensured their covering the expense of auxiliary English troops. If war was unavoidable, Burghley wanted others to pay for it. Only after his death did his fellow countrymen discover how expensive it was to maintain a war footing, one reporting that the lord treasurer “had left the Queen’s coffers so bare that there is but £20,000 to be found.”

  The arguments favoring peace were compelling. The end of hostilities would go far toward repairing England’s international reputation. The English, noted the contemporary historian William Camden, were increasingly seen as “disturbers of the whole world, as if they were happy in other men’s miseries.” A lasting peace with Spain would also, it was hoped, end Spanish support for Irish rebels and enrich the nation by providing English merchants with access to ports now closed to them. And peace, Camden adds, would let England “take breath and gather wealth against future events.”

  The acknowledged n
eed for England to catch its breath gives some sense of how spent the nation had become in its unending skirmishes with Spain. England’s dispatch of troops to the Low Countries and a fleet to the West Indies in 1585 had helped provoke the Great Armada of 1588. This, in turn, led to English naval expeditions against Spain and Portugal and the conscription of thousands of English soldiers to fight against the Spanish and their surrogates. Spain, for its part, retaliated with successive (and again unlucky) armadas in 1596 and 1597, plots against Elizabeth’s life, and support for Irish resistance to English rule. There was little that England could do to forestall future armadas other than sending out fleets to loot Spanish shipping, ports, and colonial outposts. Like exhausted heavyweights slugging it out, England and Spain exchanged blows but neither had the luck or strength to land a knockout punch.