Shakespeare

by Shakespeare

There were a small number of Jews in sixteenth-century London, as well as ostensible converts from Judaism known as Marranos, generally living and working under assumed names. In 1594, only two years before the first production of The Merchant of Venice, the Earl of Essex had been instrumental in the apprehension, torture and death of Roderigo Lopez, a Jewish doctor accused of attempting to poison the queen. There is an allusion to that affair in the play itself. But the stage image of Jews essentially came from the mystery plays, where they were pilloried as the tormentors of Jesus. In the dramatic cycle Herod was played in a red wig, for example; it represents the origin of the clown in pantomime. It was the costume of Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. It is, in effect, the image with which Shakespeare was obliged to work. Yet out of the character he created something infinitely more interesting and sympathetic than the stock type. As a result Shylock has entered the imagination of the world.

  CHAPTER 50

  What Are You? A Gentleman

  Less than three months after Hamnet’s death, John Shakespeare was awarded a coat of arms by the Garter King of Arms. He became a gentleman, and of course his son would share that appellation by inheritance. It is more than likely, in fact, that Shakespeare himself was responsible for the renewal of an application that his father had made – and then dropped – twenty-eight years before. The cost of obtaining the coat of arms had then seemed prohibitive but, in the milder climate of Shakespeare’s new-found affluence, that impediment had gone. It is difficult to be sure of the time needed to procure such a suit, but Shakespeare must have entered his father’s submission before Hamnet’s death. It would have been fitting and appropriate for Shakespeare to wish to pass on his new status to his only son, a natural succession that Hamnet’s death frustrated.

  The coat of arms was a rebus, or pun on the name of Shakespeare. On the grant of arms an heraldic drawing was sketched at the top of the page; it showed a falcon, holding a spear, perched above a shield and crest. The falcon is displaying its wings, in the action known as “shaking.”1 The motto included here, “Non sainz droict,” means “Not without right.” The shaken spear was of gold tipped with silver, as if it were some courtly or ceremonial staff, and the falcon itself was considered to be a noble bird. The livery of the Earl of Southampton contained four falcons, and it is possible that Shakespeare was claiming some kind of relationship with him. The whole device is somewhat assertive, and no doubt reflected the conviction of the Shakespeare males (or at least of one of them) that they were indeed gentlemen.

  The Garter King of Arms had granted these arms to John Shakespeare “being solicited and by credible report informed” that his “parentes amp; late Grandfather for his faithfull amp; valeant service were advaunced amp; rewarded by the most Prudent Prince King Henry the seventh of famous memorie.”2 This seems to have been sheer invention on the Shakespeares’ part; there is no record of any Shakespeare being honoured by Henry VII. But it may have been one of those “family stories” that are believed without necessarily being investigated.

  Shakespeare seems to have been preoccupied with heraldry. In Richard II he displays considerable technical knowledge of the subject, while Katherine says in The Taming of the Shrew (1028-30):

  If you strike me, you are no Gentleman,

  And if no Gentleman, why then no armes.

  To which Petruchio replies:

  A Herald Kate? Oh put me in thy bookes.

  There is in the same play an episode clearly taken from a volume of heraldry, Gerard Legh’s Accedens of Armory 3 suggesting that Shakespeare was reading such books as early as the 1580s. He wished to demonstrate, and to publicise to the world, his “gentle” state. It was a way of setting himself apart from the still ambiguous reputation enjoyed by most players. It was also an indirect way of associating himself with the Ardens of his mother’s line. In a more immediate sense he was restoring his family’s reputation after the sudden and perplexing withdrawal of John Shakespeare from public business.

  At this late date it may seem a mere contrivance, an honorific without meaning, but in the late sixteenth century it was a sign and emblem of true identity. It afforded the bearer proper individuality as well as a secure place within the general hierarchy of the community. By combining emblem and reality, spectacle and decoration, heraldry truly became a Tudor obsession. There were no fewer than seven standard texts on the subject. In this, at least, Shakespeare was very much a man of his age. The world of his drama is that of the great house or of the court; none of his central protagonists is “low born,” to use the phrase of the time, but is a gentleman, a lord or a monarch. The only exceptions are the protagonists of The Merry Wives of Windsor, citizens all. The common people are, in the mass, described by him as “the rabble.”

  But John Shakespeare’s right to bear arms was not without critics. From the late 1590s onwards the York Herald, Sir Ralph Brooke, had challenged the decisions of the Garter King of Arms, Sir William Dethick, in granting arms to apparently unworthy recipients. There were accusations of malfeasance, if not explicitly of fraud and bribery. In Brooke’s list of twenty-three “mean persons” who had been granted arms wrongly, the name of Shakespeare came fifth. The qualities of the recipient were called into question, to which William Dethick replied that “the man was a magistrate of Stratford-upon-Avon: a Justice of the Peace. He married the daughter and heir of Arden, of a good substance and ability.” There is at least one false note in this defence. Mary Arden was the daughter and heir of a very obscure branch of the Arden family, and it is likely that the Shakespeares exaggerated her ancestry. As in their former claim of a forefather rewarded by Henry VII, the ambition outran the reality.

  The fact that the dispute had become public knowledge must have been an irritant, to put it mildly, to Shakespeare, whose assertive emblem and motto had now been cast into doubt. This did not prevent him, however, from applying three years later for the Shakespeare arms to be impaled with the arms of the Arden family. He may have done this “to please his Mother, and to be partly proud” (35-6), as the citizen says of Coriolanus, but it suggests the persistence and quality of his interest in such matters.

  He also received some barbed criticism from a dramatic colleague. In Every Man out of His Humour Ben Jonson introduces a vainglorious rustic, Sogliardo, who acquires a coat of arms. “I can write myself a gentleman now,” he says; “here’s my patent, it cost me thirty pounds, by this breath.” The arms include a boar’s head to which an appropriate motto is suggested, “Not without mustard.” This has generally been taken, not without reason, as an allusion to Shakespeare’s “Not without right.” The mustard may also refer to the bright gold of the Shakespearian coat. So his newly found eminence did not go without some malicious comment.

  Yet, characteristically enough, Shakespeare was also able to satirise his own pretensions. In Twelfth Night, performed in the period when Brooke was challenging Dethick’s bestowal of arms upon the Shakespeares, the steward Malvolio has pretensions to gentility. He is persuaded to wear yellow stockings “cross-gartered”-with a garter crossing on each leg – and his lower body would therefore have been seen as a grotesque parody of Shakespeare’s coat of arms.4 These arms were also yellow, with a black diagonal band. Malvolio is by far the most deluded and ridiculous character in the entire play, and in the cross-gartering episode he ambles and simpers upon the stage in a caricature of gentility. “Some are borne great … Some atcheeue greatnesse,” he declares. “And some haue greatnesse thrust vpon them” (1516-20). If Shakespeare played the part of Malvolio, as seems to be likely, the joke could not have been more explicit. It would have come naturally to Shakespeare – to parody his pretensions to gentility at the same time as he pursued them with the utmost seriousness, to mock that which was most important to him. It was a part of his instinctive ambivalence in all the affairs of the world.

  CHAPTER 51

  His Companies Vnletter’d Rude, and Shallow

  James Burbage’s plan to convert part of Blackfria
rs into a private I theatre, and thus circumvent the authority of the City fathers, was not advancing. In the early winter of 1596 it was criticised by thirty-one residents in the immediate vicinity. Their petition objected to the erection of “a common playhouse … which will grow to be a very great annoyance and trouble, not only to all the noblemen and gentlemen thereabout inhabiting, but also a general inconvenience to all the inhabitants of the said precinct, by reason of the gathering together of all manner of lewd and vagrant persons.” There were allusions to “the great pestering and filling-up of the same precinct,”1 and to the loud sound of drums and trumpets coming from the stage.

  Another piece of playhouse business was responsible for Shakespeare’s next entry in the public records. He had played some part in aborted negotiations for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to use Francis Langley’s theatre, the Swan, on Bankside. It was a readily available alternative to the Curtain and the disputed Theatre. The Swan had been erected by Langley two years before in the neighbourhood of Paris Garden. It was the latest, and grandest, of the public theatres. There is a famous drawing of it by Johannes de Witt, and such was the ubiquity of this print that for many years it was taken as the model of all the sixteenth-century playhouses. Since each playhouse differed from every other, it was an unwarrantable assumption. In his notes de Witt explains that the Swan is “the largest and most magnificent” of the London playhouses, capable of holding three thousand spectators; it was constructed of “a mass of flint stones (of which there is a prodigious supply in Britain), and supported by wooden columns painted in such excellent imitation of marble that it is able to deceive even the most cunning.” He also disclosed that “its form resembles that of a Roman work.” 2 Langley’s intent was that of somewhat cheap magnificence. Despite its exterior lustre, however, the Swan never achieved any great theatrical eminence. If the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had moved there, in the winter of 1596, its theatrical history would have been very different.

  The connection between Shakespeare and Langley is to be found in a petition of a certain William Wayte who, in the autumn of 1596, named them both – together with Dorothy Soer and Anne Lee – in a writ ob metum mortis. Wayte was alleging that he stood in danger of death or grave physical harm from Shakespeare and others. This was a legal device for the completion of a writ, however, and did not necessarily mean that Shakespeare had threatened to kill him. It transpired that Francis Langley himself had previously taken out a writ against Wayte and his stepfather, William Gardiner; Gardiner, Justice of the Peace with special jurisdiction in Paris Garden, had a reputation in the district for corruption and general chicanery, and had apparently sought to close down the Swan Theatre. Wayte may have encountered some kind of resistance from Shakespeare and his co-defendants while in fact attempting to do so. But that is supposition. We only know for certain that Shakespeare was somehow involved with the imbroglio. It has in fact been suggested by some theatrical scholars that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played at the Swan for a short season, but there is no evidence of this except for a stray reference in Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix- “My name’s Hamlet revenge: thou hast been at Paris Garden, hast not?”

  It is perhaps worth noting that Langley himself enjoyed a somewhat dubious reputation as a money-broker and minor civic official who had managed to accumulate a large fortune; he had been charged by the Attorney General, in no less a tribunal than the Star Chamber, of violence and of extortion. Sharp practice has always been a London speciality. He had purchased the manor of Paris Garden in order to build and let out tenements, and of course there were also brothels in that particular neighbourhood. One of those named in the petition, Dorothy Soer, owned property in Paris Garden Lane and gave her name to cheap lodgings known as “Soer’s Rents” or “Sore’s Rents.” It is more than likely that some of the tenements in that lane were of low repute.

  Shakespeare may even have lived among them. The eighteenth-century scholar, Edmond Malone, has left a note stating that “from a paper now before me, which formerly belonged to Edward Alleyn, the player, our poet appears to have lived in Southwark, near the Bear garden, in 1596.”3 That paper has never been recovered. But whatever the date of Shakespeare’s removal to the south bank of the Thames, Wayte’s petition reveals one salient fact. Shakespeare was associated with people not altogether dissimilar to the comic pimps and bawds of his plays. He was thoroughly acquainted with the “low life” of London. It was an inevitable and inalienable part of his profession as a player. The fact is often forgotten in accounts of “gentle” Shakespeare but it is undoubtedly true that he knew at first hand the depths, as well as the heights, of urban life.

  And then, for the winter season, he was once more in front of the queen. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men gave six performances at court, among them of The Merchant of Venice and King John. It is also possible that Falstaff made his appearance before the sovereign, in the first part of Henry IV. There is a long-enduring story that Elizabeth was so taken with the comic rogue that she requested a play be written in which Falstaff falls in love; the requests of Elizabeth were never lightly refused, and so appeared The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is a charming, if unconfirmed, story.

  The nature of The Hystorie of Henry the Fourth, otherwise known as the first part of Henry IV, has also been the subject of debate. It is not clear whether Shakespeare wrote it with Part Two in mind, or whether the narrative grew under his hand. The first part did in any case provoke controversy of another kind. The Lord Chamberlain, Sir William Brooke, Lord Cobham, had been alerted to the fact that the play’s principal comic character was named Sir John Oldcastle. He may well have first seen the play in the presence of the queen at court. He was related to the original Oldcastle, and was not pleased with the farce surrounding the theatrical namesake. The real Oldcastle had been a supporter of the Lollards who had led an abortive insurrection against Henry V; subsequently he had been executed for treason. But he was considered by many to have been a proto-Protestant, and thus an early martyr to the cause of Reformation. His descendant did not approve of his presentation as a thief, braggart, coward and drunkard.

  So Cobham wrote to the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, who in turn passed on the complaint to Shakespeare’s company; Shakespeare was then obliged in the second part of the play to change the name of his comic hero, from Oldcastle to Falstaff, and publicly to disavow his original creation. It is not clear why in the beginning Shakespeare chose the name of Oldcastle. It has been suggested that Shakespeare’s “secret” Catholic sympathies led him to lampoon this Lollard and anti-Catholic. In his Church History Thomas Fuller writes of Shakespeare’s original use of Oldcastle, “but it matters as little what petulant Poets as what malicious Papists have written against him.” But it seems unlikely that any overt Catholic bias entered the play. The name of Oldcastle had already appeared in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, and Shakespeare may simply have borrowed it without considering the connection with Cobham.

  It was in any case changed, and not without a certain humiliation on Shakespeare’s part. In an epilogue to the second part of Henry IV he himself came upon the stage and announced that “for any thing I knowe Falstaffe shall die of a sweat, vnlesse already a be killd with your harde opinions; for Oldecastle died a Martyre, and this is not the man …” (3224-7). Then he danced, and afterwards knelt for the applause.

  The connection was not wholly erased, however. In a letter to Robert Cecil the Earl of Essex gave out the news that a certain lady was “maryed to Sir Jo. Falstaff” -this was the Court nickname now given to Lord Cobham. The name of Oldcastle was also still associated with Henry IV, and in fact the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played for the Burgundian ambassador a play entitled Sir John Old Castell. Shakespeare’s inventions have a habit of lingering in the air.

  Oldcastle, or Falstaff, is at the centre of the play. He is the presiding deity of the London taverns who takes the young Prince Hal, heir to the throne, within his paternal and capacious embrace; he is discomfited
only when Hal, on becoming sovereign, repudiates him in bitter terms. Hal has been compared to Shakespeare in that respect, disowning such supposed drinking companions as Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe. It may be significant that Greene had a wife known as “Doll” and that Falstaff’s weakness is for a prostitute known as Doll Tere-Sheete, but this may be coincidental. In any case Falstaff is too large, too monumental, to be identified with anyone in life. He is as mythical as the Green Man.

  He has become perhaps the most recognisable of all Shakespearian characters; he now appears in a thousand different contexts, from novel to grand opera. He became famous almost as soon as he appeared upon the stage. One poem notes “but let Falstaff come” and “you scarce shall have a roome” in the theatre, and another celebrates how long “Falstaff from cracking nuts hath kept the throng”:4 when Falstaff came on stage the audience were silent with anticipation. It was indeed the presence of Falstaff that rendered these plays so popular; the first part of Henry IV was reprinted more frequently than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. The first quarto edition was read so often and so widely that it survives only in fragments; there were three reprintings in the first year of publication.

  The boisterous, extravagant, rhapsodical figure was at once recognised as a national type; he seemed to be as English as beef-pudding and beer, a great deflator of authority and pomposity, a drinker to excess, a rogue who concealed his crimes with wit and bravado. He is an enemy of seriousness in all of its forms, and thus represents one salient aspect of the English imagination. He is filled with good humour and good nature, even when he is leading conscripted soldiers to their certain death, and in that sense he is above mere censure; he is like one of the Homeric gods whose divinity is in no way impeded by their wilful behaviour. He is free from malice, free from self-consciousness; he is in fact free from everything. He is the thorn to the rose, the jester to the king, the shadow to the flame. His instinct for bawdry and subversion are part of his language that parodies the rhetoric of others and follows its own anarchic chain of associations; we have already seen how he translates “gravitie” into “gravie.” Whatever can be thought of, Falstaff says. Shakespeare took comedy as far as it can possibly go.