Shakespeare

by Shakespeare

  There are many other specific references, rushing headlong over one another in Nashe’s cryptic and densely allusive prose. “To be or not to be” is ascribed to Cicero’s “id am esse am non esse.” The author is accused of copying Kyd and of trying to “outbrave” Greene and Marlowe with his own brand “of a bragging blank verse.” Can we see also in a reference to “kilcowconceipt” a nod to Shakespeare’s alleged origins in a butcher’s shop? The conclusion must be that these allusions are all pointing in the same direction, to the unnamed author who by 1589 had written early versions of Turn Andronicus, The Taming of a Shrew, King John and Hamlet. Who else might it have been? It was a relatively small world with a limited number of occupants, and there are very few other candidates as the targets for the combined scorn of Greene and of Nashe.

  In 1590 Robert Greene returned to the attack. In Never Too Late he abuses an actor whom he names Roscius, after the famous Roman player. “Why Roscius, art thou proud with Esops crow, being pranct with the glorie of others feathers? Of thyself thou canst say nothing …”4 He repeats this attack two years later, when he refers to his opponent as “Shake-scene.” But common sense would suggest that this was a long-running campaign inaugurated by a “university wit” who believed himself to be unfairly criticised or neglected in favour of an “unlearned” and imitative “countrey-Author”-who, it seems, never once responded to the attacks upon him.

  If the intended target is indeed Shakespeare, then we have evidence that he had a distinctive presence in the London theatrical world by the late 1580s.This means that he had begun writing for the stage very soon after his first arrival in London. The fact that he is also named as “Roscius” suggests that he had already won some acclaim for his skills as an actor. Scholars and critics disagree about any and every piece of evidence; but there is an old saying that, when doctors disagree, the patient must walk away. The figure walking away from us may be the young Shakespeare.

  CHAPTER 29

  Why Should I Not Now

  Have the Like Successes?

  So we can create a plausible chronology of this earliest period. In 1587, when part of the Queen’s Men, Shakespeare wrote an early version of Hamlet. This juvenile Hamlet has disappeared – except that from Nashe’s account of 1589 we know it contained the words “to be or not to be,” as well as a ghost crying out “Revenge!” There is a long tradition of anecdotal evidence that Shakespeare played that ghost, which would also make sense of Nashe’s otherwise incomprehensible aside on the unnamed writer-“if you entreat him faire in a frostie morning.”

  Was King Leir, also written in 1587, an earlier version of Shakespeare’s tragedy? It begins with the famous division of the kingdom, but then diverges from the later version; there are more elements of conventional romance, derived from the popular stories of the period. In particular King Leir has a happy ending in which Leir and his good daughter are reunited. King Leir was performed by the Queen’s Men at a time when it is conjectured that Shakespeare was part of that company, and it is in many respects an accomplished and inventive piece of work. But it is so utterly unlike anything written even by the young Shakespeare that his authorship must be seriously in question. Another possible form of transmission suggests itself. If Shakespeare did indeed act in it, the plot and characters of the original may have lodged in his imagination. In the other early dramas related to Shakespeare, there is a notable consonance between lines and scenes. There is no such resemblance between Leir and Lear, except for the basic premise of the plot. So it seems likely that, on this occasion, Shakespeare was reviving an old story without much reference to the original play. King Leir is utterly unlike King Lear.

  There is a third play that can be dated to 1587, if only because of a reference to it in Tarlton’s Jests. “At the Bull in Bishops-gate was a play of Henry the fift, where in the judge was to take a box on the eare; and because he was absent that should take the blow, Tarlton himselfe, ever forward to please, took upon him to play the same judge, beside his owne part of the clowne.” The Bull here is the Red Bull; the clown, Tarlton, died in 1588 and so this version of King Henry V must predate that time. Tarlton was also a member of the Queen’s Men, so the associations are clear enough. The Famous Victories of Henry V, “as it was plaide by the Queenes Maiesties Players,” has survived in an edition published in 1593. It is not a particularly graceful or elegant piece of work, but it does contain scenes and characters that were later taken up by Shakespeare in the two parts of Henry IV and in Henry V. In particular the “low” acquaintances of Prince Harry, Falstaff and Bardolph and the others, are anticipated in the crude but effective humour of Ned and Tom, Dericke and John Cobler, in The Famous Victories. Other incidents in Shakespeare’s plays are also based upon scenes in this earlier drama. Again, as in the case of King Leir, it seems likely that he acted as a member of the Queen’s Men in The Famous Victories and then at a later date employed the elements of the plot that most appealed to him.

  There are other intriguing productions that, from internal and external evidence, we may ascribe approximately to 1588. One of the most significant is The Taming of a Shrew, which without doubt is the model or forerunner of The Taming of the Shrew. There are of course differences between A Shrew and The Shrew. A Shrew is set in Greece rather than Italy, employs different names for most of the characters and is little more than half the length of the more famous play. But there are also strong resemblances, not least in the storyline, and a large number of verbal parallels – including exact repetitions of such recondite phrases as “beat me to death with a bottom of a brown thread.” The conclusions are clear enough. Either Shakespeare took over lines and scenes from the work of an unnamed and unknown dramatist, or he was improving upon his own original. On the principle that the simplest explanation is the most likely, we can suggest that Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew was a revision and revival of one of his first successes. The later version is immeasurably deeper and richer than the original; the poetry is more accomplished, and the characterisation more assured. Since they were published some twenty-nine years apart, the author certainly had time and opportunity to re-create or reinvent the text. We may use a simile drawn from another art. A Shrew is a drawing, while The Shrew is an oil-painting. But the difference in execution and composition, the difference between a sketch and a masterpiece, cannot conceal the underlying resemblance. This was obvious enough to the publishers and printers involved in producing editions of both plays; they were both licensed under the same copyright. The publisher of A Shrew went on to print editions of The Rape of Lucrece and the first part of Henry IV, so he retained his Shakespearian connections.

  The most intriguing factor, however, in this early play of Shakespeare is the habit of purloining Marlowe’s lines; most of the interpolations were removed at a later date, when they were no longer considered timely, but to a large extent they characterise A Shrew. The two parts of Tamburlaine had been performed in 1587, and when A Shrew’s Fernando (aka Petruchio) feeds Kate from the point of his dagger, he is satirising a similar scene in Marlowe. The young Shakespeare also continually parodies the language of Doctor Faustus, which strongly suggests that it was the successor of Tamburlaine on the stage in 1588. There is the old proverb about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, and from the evidence of A Shrew Shakespeare was mightily impressed by Marlowe’s rhetorical verse. But it is clear that he already had a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, and realised that the bravura of Marlovian poetry might seem inept in a less rarefied context. At a later date he would contrast the high rhetoric of the heroic protagonists with the low demotic of the ordinary crowd. The young Shakespeare had, in other words, an instinctive comic gift.

  In both versions of the drama he also reveals a highly theatrical sensibility. The play is set within a play; the themes of disguise, of changing costume, are central to his genius; his characters are very good fantasists who change identity with great ease. They are all, in a word, performers. The whole ess
ence of the wooing between Kate and Petruchio is performance. There is here a plethora of words. The young Shakespeare loved word-play of every kind, as if he could not curb his exuberance. He loved quoting bits of Italian, introducing Latin tags, making classical allusions. For all these reasons the play celebrates itself. It celebrates its being in the world, far beyond any possible “meanings” that have been attached to it over the centuries.

  The Taming of a Shrew was in turn satirised by Nashe and Greene in Menaphon, published in 1589, and in a play entitled A Knack to Know a Knave, reputed to be the fruit of their collaboration. We must imagine an atmosphere of rivalry and slanging which, depending on local circumstances, was variously good-humoured or bitter. Each young dramatist quoted from the others’ works, and generally added to the highly coloured and even frenetic atmosphere of London’s early drama. Only Shakespeare, however, seems to have quoted so extensively from his rival Marlowe; the evidence of A Shrew in fact suggests that there was some reason for his being accused, by Greene, of decking himself in borrowed plumes. It is all very high-spirited stuff, and A Shrew is nothing if not swift and vivacious, but the egregious theft of Marlowe’s lines suggests that he did not intend the play to be taken very seriously. It was simply an entertainment of the hour. Yet, like many English farces, it proved to be a popular success.

  If he could already triumph in comedy, there was no reason why he should not have tried his hand at history. Two of the other plays emerging in 1588, plausibly attributed to the young dramatist, are Edmund Ironside and The Troublesome Raigne of King John. Edmund Ironside has been the subject of much scholarly dispute,1 the controversy further inflamed by the fact that a manuscript version of the play can be located in the Manuscript Division of the British Library. It is written in a neat legal hand, on partly lined paper also used for legal documents, and displays several of Shakespeare’s characteristic quirks of spelling and orthography. The eager student may call up the document, and gaze with wild surmise on the ink possibly drawn from Shakespeare’s quill. Like the mask of Agamemnon and the Shroud of Turin, however, the relics of the great dead are the cause only of bitter rivalries and contradictory opinions. Palaeography is not necessarily an exact science.

  The play itself concerns Edmund II, best known for his spirited defence of England against Canute in the early eleventh century. Canute and Edmund are seen in conflict, military and rhetorical, but their high intentions are often thwarted by the machinations of the evil Edricus. When the play ends in concord Edricus, in uncanny anticipation of Malvolio, stalks off the stage with the words “By heaven I’ll be revenged on both of you.” The part of Edmund may have been meant for Edward Alleyn, fresh from his success as Tamburlaine and Faustus. The drama is in any case fluent and powerful, with a steady attention both to rhetorical effect and to ingenuity of plotting. It still seems fresh upon the page which, by any standard, must be a criterion for its authorship. It was not immediately licensed for performance, however, because the spirited dispute between two archbishops in the play was considered indecorous in a period when the clergy were lampooning each other in the religious squabble known as the “Martin Marprelate Controversy.” It was not in fact performed until the 1630s.

  It is in essence a revenge tragedy, on the model of The Spanish Tragedy, complete with the amputation of hands and the mutilation of noses. It also marks, in Edricus, the first appearance of the theatrical Shakespearian villain:

  They cannot so dissemble as I can

  Cloak, cozen, cog and flatter with the king

  Crouch and seem courteous, promise and protest…

  The genuine Shakespearian note once more emerges, the words an obvious preliminary to those of Richard III. Edmund Ironside has been described as the first English history play, but in fact that honour can be claimed by the unknown play on the exploits of Henry V staged at the Red Bull. But Edmund Ironside is the first history play derived from an imaginative reading of historical sources; the story is in part based upon Holinshed’s Chronicles, the source from which King Leir also springs. It uses Ovid. It uses Plutarch. It uses Spenser. It is permeated by legal and biblical phraseology in a manner to which successive generations of Shakespearian scholars have become accustomed. It incorporates “low” comedy in prose beside high rhetoric in verse, placing both in an intriguing perspective. It shares the same misunderstandings of classical mythology as does the work of the young Shakespeare. It uses the imagery of “butchery” for the first time in English drama, imagery which became something of a Shakespearian speciality. It has the phrase “all hail,” and the immediate reference to Judas, which is a hallmark of Shakespeare’s plays.2 There is also an odd interpolation on the subject of the parting of a newly wedded couple:

  as sadly as the late espoused man

  Grieves to depart from his new-married wife.

  How many sighs I fetched at my depart

  How many times I turned to come again …

  All the characteristics conspire to make one pertinent question. Who else but the young Shakespeare could possibly have written it in 1588? Marlowe, Kyd, or Greene? None seems so appropriate or so convincing as Shakespeare himself.

  Edmund Ironside can be adduced, then, as evidence of the young Shakespeare’s talent for re-creating historical narrative on stage. Other dramatists copied him, Marlowe’s Edward II being the most famous example, but none had his instinctive ability to create memorable action out of the sometimes laboured descriptions of the chroniclers. He was able to depict character in expressive speech, to summarise the manifold causes of action with significant detail, and to invent memorable plots. His greatest and earliest gift, however, was perhaps the introduction of comedy as a respite from tragical or violent action. He had a perfect “ear” for variation and change.

  These early plays are not admitted into the official Shakespeare “canon.” Many scholars believe there is no evidence, external or internal, to indicate who wrote them. Could it be simply that they are not considered sufficiently “Shakespearian”? But Shakespeare himself was not immediately “Shakespearian.” Early Wilde was not “Wildean,” and the young Browning was not in the pattern of the mature Browning. Shakespeare’s plays were published long after they were written and performed; many were not printed until after his death. He had time, in other words, to revise and embellish.

  His earliest plays are written in the approved “new” style of his contemporaries; they are fluent, even if on occasions they show facility rather than inventiveness. They use end-stopped declamatory verse with Ovidian and Senecan flourishes; they include Latin tags and general classical allusiveness. They are also written with great spirit and bravura, as if the words and cadences emerged effortlessly from some source of overflowing energy and confidence. But he was also learning his craft all the time, and the astonishing fact of his early development is the speed of his progress. He learnt from the reactions of the audience, and the responses of the players; the range of his language was immeasurably enlarged and deepened as he experimented with the various forms of drama. He was highly attuned to the language all around him – the poems, the plays, the pamphlets, the orations, the speech of the street – and he absorbed everything. There was perhaps no greater assimilator in the history of English drama.

  It has also been plausibly conjectured that in 1588 Shakespeare wrote another play, based upon the chronicles, which was later published as The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England. Shakespeare’s King John is certainly closely modelled upon it, to the extent that it can best be seen as a revision or adaptation of the older play. There is not one scene in King John which is not based upon an original scene in The Troublesome Raigne. One nineteenth-century critic remarked that “Shakespeare has no doubt kept so closely to the lines of the older play because it was a favourite with the audience.”3 It is much more likely, however, that he kept closely to the earlier scenes because he had written them. Otherwise once more we are presented with the strange anomaly of Shakespeare extensively pur
loining the work of an unknown and unnamed writer and passing it off under his own name. He even copied the historical errors of the original.

  The later publishers of The Troublesome Raigne, in 1611 and in 1622, were in no doubt about the matter; they accredited it as the work of “W Sh” and “W. SHAKESPEARE” without ever being corrected. It is sometimes suggested that sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century publishers were in some way incompetent or negligent, and that they regularly put false names on their title pages. This is in fact not the case. They were stringently regulated by their guild, the Stationers’ Company, and could incur large fines for any breach of standards. There were of course occasional rogue printers who would try to pass off inferior work as that of “W.S” or some other suggestive name, but the printer of the 1611 edition of The Troublesome Raigne, Valentine Simms, was well known to Shakespeare and was responsible for the first editions of four of his plays. He would not have put “W Sh” on a book without some warrant for doing so.