Shakespeare

by Shakespeare

  Shakespeare no doubt decided to remain with Burbage and his men because he would then be the principal writer of the company. It was gratifying to have a company at hand to give expression to his vision of the world. As resident playwright he seems also to have brought some of his plays with him, as if he exercised a proprietorial right over them. This was unusual, since the plays generally belonged to the companies or to the managers of the playhouses, but it suggests that even at this early stage he was not lacking a certain business acumen or professional expertise. That is how Burbage’s players were able to perform Titus Andronicus and The Taming of a Shrew.

  They also performed two other plays, The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, which anticipate the second and third parts of Henry VI. They may in fact have been written before the separation between Alleyn and Burbage. Another form of contention now surrounds these two early dramas, predictably between those who believe that they were written and subsequently revised by the young Shakespeare, those who argue that they were composed by one or two unknown and unnamed dramatists, and those who insist that they are later reconstructions. The first supposition seems the most likely. Both plays were published by reputable stationers, and a later combined edition of 1619 is declared to be “Written by William Shakespeare, Gent.” The First Part of the Contention anticipates the second part of Henry VI in almost every respect, from whole scenes to individual lines and the smallest phrases. The True Tragedy bears an equally strong resemblance to the third part of the historical trilogy. The order of the scenes is the same; the long speeches are the same; the dialogue is the same. There can scarcely be any doubt that they are the originals of, and models for, the later and more accomplished plays.

  There are certain scholars, however, who suggest that The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy actually came later and were in effect “memorial reconstructions” of Shakespeare’s own plays. By “memorial reconstruction” is meant the theory that a group of actors, who had played in both parts of Henry VI, came together and tried to recall the words and scenes of the plays so that they might act or publish them for their own purposes. They remembered what they could, and invented the rest. The texts themselves do not bear out this interesting hypothesis. Many of the longer speeches are remembered word for word while other shorter scenes and passages are not remembered at all. It is odd that, despite their lapses of memory, they were able to produce coherent plays that manifest integrity of plot, language and imagery. Which inspired actor, for example, produced the line “Et tu Brute, wilt thou stab Caesar too?” He could not have been “reconstructing” Julius Caesar because it had not yet been written.

  The simple response, to textual evidence such as this, is to agree that the young Shakespeare wrote these early plays and then over the course of time revised them for performance. The overwhelming similarity between The Contention and The True Tragedy and the second and third parts of Henry VI rests on the fact that they were all written by the same person with the same skills and preoccupations. There is no evidence for any theatrical conspiracy, and it is hard to imagine an occasion when it would be deemed necessary. Who were these actors who patched up plays already known to be composed by Shakespeare? To what company did they belong? And why was no action taken to prevent their publishing their speculative and illicit ventures? It is scarcely likely that, in 1619, Shakespeare’s name would be attached to the re-publication of their fraudulent endeavours. The theory defies common logic.

  It is significant, too, that these plays represent further ventures into the genre of the history play that he had already fashioned in The Troublesome Raigne of King John and Edmund Ironside. He returned to the chronicles for much of his information, and again produced an historical spectacle complete with processions and battles. He knew that he excelled in this kind of work, and he knew also that it was extraordinarily popular.

  All of the formidable qualities of the second and third parts of Henry VI are to be found in The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy. There is in all of them a truly epic breadth of scale with wars and rebellions, battles on the field and confrontations in the presence chamber; there is the poetry of power and of pathos, as well as the more martial clangour of duel and dispute; there are fights at sea and on land; there are murders and a plentiful supply of severed heads; there are death-beds and scenes of black magic; there is comedy and melodrama, farce and tragedy. Shakespeare invents passages of history when it suits his dramatic purpose. He revises, excises and enlarges historical episodes in the same spirit. It is clear that the young dramatist was revelling in his ability to invent paradigmatic action and to orchestrate great scenes of battle or procession. From the beginning he had a fluent and fertile dramatic imagination, charged with ritual and spectacle. The public stage was not then fixed; it was fast and fluid, capable of accommodating a wide range of effects. There was no dramatic theory about historical drama; playwrights learned from each other, and plays copied other plays. Shakespeare was still imitating Marlowe and Greene at this early date in his career, to such an extent that one or two scholars have ascribed these plays to them. This is most unlikely. The best analogy at this later date is with the historical films of Sergei Eisenstein, in particular the two parts of Ivan the Terrible where grave ritual and grotesque farce are held together in a context of overwhelming majesty. We may imagine the Shakespearian actors to have been as stylised, in action and in delivery, as the performers of the early Russian cinema. The plays represented a ritualised and emblematic society where matters of heraldry and genealogy were of immense importance. They themselves are a form of ritual, like a religious ceremony assisted by chanting and incantation.

  Shakespeare was an apologist for royal power. He makes the Catholic distinction between the priest and his office – the weak priest or king must still be obeyed because of the sacredness of his role. His sympathies may be found also in the fact that he describes the followers of Jack Cade as a “rabblement,” quite different from the presentation of them in the chronicles. Cade was the leader of the disaffected multitude who in 1450 constituted the “Kentish Rebellion” against the government of Henry VI. It was an unsuccessful uprising, yet Cade himself is vilified by Shakespeare in a manner wholly at odds with his immediate sources. Shakespeare seems to have been averse to any kind of popular movement. In particular he ridicules the illiteracy of the London artisanal class, as if to be literate (as he was) was a singular mark of distinction and separation from the mass. He felt himself to be apart.

  But there is a curious paradox here, one which he and his audience may have observed. The sixteenth-century theatre is a democratising force. Common players assume the roles of monarchs. On the space of the stage itself nobles and commoners are sometimes engaged within a shared action. There is no dramatic difference between the varying ranks of society. In the history plays Shakespeare creates ironic associations and parallels between the chivalric action of the nobles and the comic action of the commoners, as if he were testing the true potential of the theatre. It is a complicated point, perhaps, but one that suggests the subversive or revolutionary potential of the stage. It was in essence a populist medium.

  In revising at a later date The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, he changed the sentence structure of certain scenes, added or excised stray lines and even words, removed local London detail and furnished more set speeches. He did not touch the actual structures of the plays but merely embellished and elaborated upon them. He also widened and deepened the characterisation. In the process of revising The True Tragedy, for example, he significantly added to the part of the Duke of York. It is most likely that when Shakespeare effected these revisions he already had in mind, or had written, The Tragedy of King Richard III. In The True Tragedy Richard compares himself to “the aspiring Catalin,” Catiline being a noble conspirato
r against the Roman Republic, but in the revised version Richard compares himself more villainously to “the murtherous Macheuill.”

  Shakespeare also changed the parts in order to complement the actors. He altered the characterisation of Jack Cade, for example, to incorporate the talents of Will Kempe, who had become the principal comic of his company; he added the detail that Cade is a wild morris-dancer, at which dance Kempe was known for his skills. In the revised version of the play, too, the stage-directions refer to “Sinklo,” “Sink.” and “Sin.”; this was not a character in the play but, rather, the name of the actor John Sinklo or Sincler, who was well known for his extreme slenderness. This suggests that Shakespeare was rewriting the part with Sincler fully in mind and eye.

  These revisions and alterations were no doubt part of his practice with all of his drama. It is only through chance or fortune that copies of The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy, Edmund Ironside and The Taming of a Shrew, have survived. Shakespeare was also learning and changing his craft in another sense. His later historical dramas, in particular the two parts of Henry IV, display much more subtlety and inwardness both in their characterisation and in their action. The demonstrative and oratorical mode of the earliest plays is subdued in favour of Falstaff’s wit and the old king’s melancholy. It has even been suggested that Shakespeare’s histories led him directly towards his experiments with tragedy and that one form cannot really be separated from the other. Certainly Shakespeare himself does not seem to have distinguished between them. The cry of “Et tu, Brute” in the drama appropriately entitled The True Tragedy points in that direction; the English history plays lead to Julius Caesar, which in turn proceeds towards Hamlet.

  Part IV. The Earl of Pembroke’s Men

  Robert Greene’s autobiographical pamphlet, Groats-Worth of Witte, calls Shakespeare “an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Among the Buzzing

  pleased Multitude

  Shakespeare followed public taste but he also helped to create it. He wrote ten plays devoted to the subject of English history, far more than any of his contemporaries, and we can infer that it was for him an agreeable and accommodating subject. But, as is often the case with literary genius, the imagination of the age helped to inspire him. This in a sense was the first period of secular history in England. The plays of an earlier date presented sacred history from Creation to Doom, but from the mid-sixteenth century onwards the twin forces of the Reformation and Renaissance learning persuaded scholars and writers to look beyond the eschatology of the Church. If human will rather than divine providence was the source of significant event, then drama had found a new subject. It could be said that Shakespeare was present at the invention of human motive and human purpose in English history.

  Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York had been published in 1548, and the first edition of Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland followed in 1577. These were the books that Shakespeare devoured, although he seemed to favour Holinshed’s more popular account of the past. If we wish to see Shakespeare as a characteristically or even quintessentially English writer, this appetite for historical re-creation affords some evidence for that identification. Schelling described the history play as a distinctively English genre. It did not last for ever, of course, but faded after approximately twenty years of successful performance; coincidentally or not, history plays really only lasted while Shakespeare continued to write them.

  The extent of his popularity, by 1591, can be measured in the praise bestowed upon him by Edmund Spenser. It is perfectly possible that the poet had already met the young dramatist on the occasion of Spenser’s infrequent visits to London and the court. All forms of social intercourse were within a small and interconnected community. Spenser was acquainted with Lady Strange (it was once asserted that she was his “cousin”) and he could have been introduced to Shakespeare in the context of the Stanley and Derby families. In 1591 Spenser dedicated The Teares of the Muses to Lady Strange, in which dedication he spoke of her “private bands of affinity, which it hath pleased your ladyship to acknowledge.” In The Teares of the Muses he refers to the learned comedies that are staged in “the painted theatres” and that delight “the listeners.” He could have seen one or two of Shakespeare’s plays at court when he came to Westminster during the Christmas season of 1590; he may in fact have seen The Contention and The True Tragedy. This will help to explain the lines in his poem Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, when he possibly refers to Shakespeare in the guise of Aetion – from the Greek meaning “like an eagle”:

  A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found:

  Whose Muse, full of high thought’s invention,

  Doth like himself heroically sound.

  What name, other than “shake-spear,” does “heroically sound”? It is also highly appropriate for one who had written The Troublesome Raigne of King John as well as The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy. In truth it fits no other writer of the period. Colin Clout, written in draft form by the end of 1591, also includes Lady Strange as Amaryllis and Lord Strange as Amyntas. So the young Shakespeare is implicitly placed in noble company and therefore perhaps in noble society. It has been objected that at this date the young Shakespeare had written little or nothing of any consequence. This narrative has suggested that, on the contrary, he had already written a great deal that was popular and successful. What could be more natural than that he should be honoured by a poet who was part of the same culture and whose own epic of national identity and salvation, The Faerie Queene, was even then being published? In 1591, also, was published Spenser’s poem The Teares of the Muses, that alludes to “our pleasant Willy.” This poet is possessed by a “gentle spirit” and from his pen “large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow.” This would later become the standard description of Shakespeare’s sugared verses.

  By 1591 he was already so successful that he must have been conveying funds to his wife and family; whether he appeared in person is another matter. He may have entrusted his moneys to the carrier. But the matters of his home town still concerned him. His father’s affairs in particular continued to exercise him. He was thoroughly informed, for example, of his father’s decision to file a bill of complaint in the Queen’s Bench at Westminster, in the late summer of 1588, to regain possession of the house in Wilmcote from their recalcitrant relative Edmund Lambert. The case was meant to be heard in 1590 but was then dropped or settled out of court, only to be revived eight years later. It has even been suggested that Shakespeare himself may have had to appear at Westminster to further his father’s case; the court document twice refers to John and Mary Shakespeare “simulcum Willielmo Shackespere filio suo,” together with William Shakespeare their son.

  The fact that John Shakespeare pressed his case at Westminster suggests that he was not without funds. He also stood surety of £10 on behalf of a neighbour, and forfeited what was in fact a considerable sum. He was engaged in other acts of litigation. He was sued for £10 by another Stratford neighbour, arrested, released and then rearrested; then with the aid of a local lawyer, William Court, he took the case to the Queen’s Bench. We cannot assume, then, that Shakespeare left his family in any condition of penury.

  John Shakespeare’s affairs were not confined to Westminster. He had been engaged in a dispute with one of his tenants, William Burbage, over a sum of £7. There were also further problems associated with John Shakespeare’s faith. In the spring of 1592 he was prominent on a list of Stratford townspeople who refused to attend church or, in the words of the investigation, “all such as refused obstinately to resort to the church.”1 The religious commissioners were used to various excuses for non-attendance and remarked that “it is said that these come not to church for fear of process of debt”-the church b
eing a public and visible place where a debtor might be located – but this hardly applies to Shakespeare’s father. In the same year he was present on two local juries, in the full light of day. It is significant, then, that in his drama Shakespeare adopts a very lenient attitude towards oath-taking and oath-breaking, as if neither was of very much account. This was part of his recusant family’s experience, obliged to affirm or to utter what they did not necessarily believe. Or, as Hamlet says, “words, words, words.” Among the nine recusants who appeared on the list beside “Mr. John Shackspeare” were three men with the names of Fluellen, Bardolph and Court; these names reappear in Henry V. Shakespeare paid some attention to his father’s tribulations. Like Blake and Chaucer, he used real names in unreal situations. It was a private joke.

  So Shakespeare stayed with Burbage’s men at the Theatre, while the rest of Lord Strange’s Men decamped with Alleyn to the Rose. But in 1592 the future of the London theatre was not all clear or secure for any theatrical company. At the beginning of June there was a riot among apprentices, who had gathered in Southwark to see a play; the affray spread to the other side of the river, and as a consequence the Privy Council issued an order to ban all drama and to close the theatres for three months. When in July Lord Strange’s Men begged the Privy Council to consider reopening the Rose, they threw an interesting light on the condition of all the players at this time. They were obliged to tour in the country, as a result of the closing of the London theatres, but “thearbie our chardge [is] intolerable, in travellinge the Countrie” so that they were close “to division and seperacion” whereby they would be “undone.” They also argued for the opening of the Rose as “a greate relief to the poore watermen theare” who had lost their custom.2 By the first week in August the lords of the Privy Council were pleased to grant their request on the condition that London was “free from infection of sickness.” But even as they issued their consent the plague was emerging once more in the city, and by 13 August it was “daily increasing in London.”3 Bartholomew Fair was banned. And there would be no more stage plays for the duration of the epidemic.