by Shakespeare
The transaction concerning the tithes was witnessed by two friends who would at a later date be named in his will, Anthony Nash of Welcombe and the lawyer Francis Collins. It is a mark of the invisibility of Shakespeare’s Stratford life that little is known of these gentlemen, who played an intimate and familiar part in the dramatist’s commercial affairs. They were part of a world very different from that of the players and playgoers, but he was equally at home in their company.
His prosperity did not go unremarked and in a fictional “biography” published this year of a notorious highwayman, Gamaliel Ratsey, there are references to actors who “are grown so wealthy that they have expected to be knighted, or at least to be cojunct in authority and to sit with men of great worship.” There is also a clear allusion to Shakespeare in the remark that “thou shalt learne to be frugall … to make thy hand a stranger to thy pocket… and when thou feelest thy purse well-lined, buy thee some Place or lordship in the country, that growing weary of playing thy mony may there bring thee to dignitie and reputation.”2 The anonymous writer goes on to say that “I haue heard indeede, of some that haue gone to London very meanly, and haue come in time to be exceeding wealthy.” This fits Shakespeare’s case exactly. The little volume seems to have been written by someone who knew of Shakespeare’s affairs, and it is interesting that he should emphasise the dramatist’s obvious thrift as well as his success.
The wealthy player is described as “weary of playing,” too, which confirms the evidence that Shakespeare had retired from the stage by 1603 or 1604. The purchase of tithes, as we have seen, ensured that he had an annual and independent income larger than that of a player. It is doubly unlikely, then, that he was on tour with the King’s Men in autumn and winter of this year. They were travelling again out of necessity, since a new onset of the plague meant that the theatres were closed from the middle of October to the middle of December. Among the plays they took with them were Othello and Measure for Measure as well as Ben Jonson’s Volpone. They seem to have travelled as far west as Barnstaple, taking in Oxford and Saffron Walden enroute, and may indeed have stayed in the provinces until the Globe was reopened on 15 December. Just eleven days later, they performed before the king.
They were playing in uncertain times, and to a king who was reported to be in a state of alarm and anxiety. In early November the conspiracy popularly known as the “Gunpowder Plot” was revealed to the world, with its ambitious and unprecedented attempt to blow up king and Parliament. It led to renewed suspicion and persecution of Roman Catholics, of course, nowhere more fiercely than in Stratford and Warwickshire. The leading conspirator, Robert Catesby, was a Warwickshire man. The conspirators met in that county, and one of them had even rented Clopton House just outside Stratford to be close to his colleagues. In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of 5 November the bailiff of Stratford seized a cloak-bag “full of copes, vestments, crosses, crucifixes, chalices and other massing relics.” It was supposed “to be delivered to one George Badger there.”3 George Badger was the woollen-draper who lived next door to the Shakespeares in Henley Street. Shakespeare knew him very well indeed, and would have quickly been informed by his family of the calamity that had fallen upon him.
New legislation was passed by the Parliament against Catholic recusants, and the king himself, according to the Venetian ambassador, declared: “I shall most certainly be obliged to stain my hands with their blood, though sorely against my will …”4 For the Shakespeare family in Stratford, it was an uncertain time. In the spring of the following year, Susannah Shakespeare was cited for her failure to receive holy communion that Easter. She is listed with some well-known Catholic recusants in the town, among them Shakespeare’s old friend Hamnet Sadler – the godfather of his dead son. The danger of her position must have been emphasised to her by someone close to her, since the word “dismissa” was later placed against her entry. She must have outwardly conformed by taking communion. Three years later, however, Richard Shakespeare, the dramatist’s brother, was taken before the bawdry court at Stratford for some unspecified offence; he was fined 12 pence, for the use of the Stratford poor, which suggests that he was found guilty of breaking the Sabbath.
The response of Shakespeare to the turbulent events of 1605 was to write a play of apparently conservative and orthodox intent. Macbeth was concerned with the terrible consequences of murdering a divinely appointed sovereign, and within the drama itself there are even references to the trials of the conspirators in the spring of 1606. There are allusions to “equivocation,” a concept which appeared at the trial of the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet, who was subsequently hanged. When Lady Macduff remarks, on the subject of treason, “every one that do’s so, is a Traitor, and must be hang’d”(1512) there may have been applause and cheers among the audience of the Globe. In Macbeth, too, there is an invocation of the Stuart dynasty, with reference to the kings who will rule England as well as Scotland. Since the play is also steeped in King James’s favourite subject, witchcraft, there can be no doubt that it was purposefully designed to appeal to the new monarch. The witches of Macbeth can be said to plot against the lawful king, with their intimations of Macbeth’s greatness, and just fifteen years previously some Scottish witches had been tried for conspiring against James himself. The parallel is clear. In the previous year, too, King James had been greeted by three sibyls at the gates of an Oxford college and hailed as the true descendant of Banquo. That is no doubt why Shakespeare, in direct contrast with the source, refuses to connect Banquo with the Macbeths’ plot against Duncan. Shakespeare was adapting James’s own suppositions and beliefs into memorable theatre. He was in a sense sanctifying them and turning them into myth.
Yet Shakespeare wrote with only one eye upon the king. Macbeth was also designed to entertain everyone else. It ushers on to the stage ghosts as well as bloodshed and magic. What could be more appealing to an early seventeenth-century audience than royalty and mystery combined? The scene at the banquet, in which Banquo’s ghost appears to Macbeth, mightily impressed itself upon Shakespeare’s contemporaries. It is a play that acquired an almost Celtic sense of doom and the supernatural. That is why actors refuse to name it Macbeth, but to this day continue to call it “the Scottish play.” It is as if Shakespeare, deep in his Scottish sources, was possessed by a new form of imagination; it is a tribute to his extraordinary sensitivity and to his unconscious powers of assimilation.
Macbeth is one of the shortest plays that Shakespeare ever wrote – in fact only The Comedy of Errors is shorter – and has a playing time of approximately two hours. It is also remarkably free of oaths and profanities, as a result of a measure passed by Parliament in March 1603; a parliamentary act to “restrain the abuses of players” forbade irreverence or blasphemy on the public stage. It has been suggested that the relative brevity of the play is an indication of the king’s span of attention, but this is unlikely. It may have been the result of cuts by the Master of the Revels. More likely, however, is that the play itself demanded this length. The intensity and concentration of the fatal action require a series of drumbeats. Although the slight ambiguity in the respective roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth suggests that Shakespeare may have begun the play without knowing which of them would kill the king, there is a consistency of effect. The verse is shaped and pared down so that it becomes echoic; it is almost relentless in its pace, and there are images throughout of rushing action. “Time” is mentioned on forty-four occasions. There are no puns, and only one “comic” scene in which the Porter responds to the knocking at the gate; it is hardly comic, however, since the Porter is modelled upon the keeper of Hell’s gates and the elaborate references in the Porter’s monologue to the details of the recent conspiracy are pervaded by a chilling gallows’ humour.
The Porter is indeed an image of the Hell Porter in the mystery plays, and it has been well observed that the banqueting scene in the play is related to the scene of feasting in that part of the mystery cycle entitled “The Death
of Herod.” The death and doom of the ancient plays survive in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, as another layer of darkness and supernatural fear. Shakespeare is much more concerned with the ancient forces of the earth than with the omens of the sky. Macbeth is a poem of the night. Yet, in any discussion of Macbeth himself, the concept of darkness is not required. He is the most vital and energetic character within the play, a natural force, surpassing any conventional notion of good and evil. He partakes of the sublime. Like many of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, he seems actively to seek out his fate.
Since the play is mentioned in a production by the Children of St. Paul’s in early July 1606, it must have been performed at the Globe before that date. So Macbeth was played during the season that ran from Easter on 21 April until the middle of July, when once more the playhouses were closed as a result of the plague. The King’s Men remained in the neighbourhood of London for a short period, however, in order to entertain King Christian of Denmark, who was the brother-in-law of James; he remained in England from 15 July to 11 August, and Heminges was paid for “three playes before his Majestie and the kinge of Denmarke at Greenwich and Hampton Court.” It has plausibly been asserted that one of these plays was Macbeth, performed before the royal parties in the early days of August.
It is not at all clear, however, that King Christian and his hosts attended to the great drama. The Danish king was a heavy drinker, who on one evening was carried out of the entertainments in a state of insensibility. Everyone seemed to follow his example, according to Sir John Harington, and the English nobles “wallow in beastly delights” while their ladies “roll in intoxication.” He added that “I ne’er did see such lack of good order, discretion and sobriety. The Gunpowder fright is got out of all our heads …”5 The men fell down and the women were sick, an apt token of the change that had taken place since the days of Elizabeth. If it was a new society, it was not necessarily a more decorous one.
After their royal performances the King’s Men began a season of touring in Kent, where they played at Dover, Maidstone and Faversham. They also journeyed to Saffron Walden, Leicester, Oxford, and Marlborough. It is tempting to believe that Shakespeare was with them when they visited Dover, at the beginning of October, if only because of the important presence of that town in his next play. But such explicit connections are dangerous. There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare travelled with them, and every reason to believe that he was engaged elsewhere. In the course of this year, after all, he completed the writing of King Lear.
CHAPTER 79. Oh You Go farre
There is ample evidence for the first performance of King Lear at the court on 26 December 1606. On the title page of the first quarto publication, it is announced that “yt was played before the Kinges Maiestie at Whitehall vppon St. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes.” The title page is also singular for the name of “Mr. William Shakspeare” blazoned across the top in type larger than the rest. It is a clear sign of his eminence and what a later age would call “name recognition.” It was also a way of distinguishing this play from the old King Leir published in 1605.
There were clear associations with Macbeth, the play composed immediately before it. Both dramas were concerned with what might be called the mythological history of Britain, but both have some contemporary import. The folly of Lear’s division of his kingdom had been amply demonstrated, in a period when King James was intent upon unifying the separate kingdoms of Scotland and England into the one realm of Great Britain. In the third act the word “English” had been substituted by “Brittish.” King James had warned his son, in Basilikon Doron, that “by deuiding your kingdoms, yee shall leaue the seed of diuision and discord among your posteritie.”King Lear might be described as a meditation upon that theme. A political decision is once more lent a theatrical and even mythological dimension. In Lear, as in Macbeth, there are invocations of the medieval mystery cycle. Lear becomes the sacred figure who is mocked and buffeted. The use of British mythology once more prompted Shakespeare into calling up the powers of ancient drama. He was aiming for a total theatrical effect. If the regality of Lear was emphasised upon the stage, perhaps by the wearing of a crown, then his innate authority would have been sustained by James’s own assertion of divine right. It renders Lear’s decline and fall all the more fearful for a contemporaneous audience. The spectator must be thoroughly possessed by the idea of sacred kingship fully to appreciate the play.
The casting can in part be reconstructed. Richard Burbage excelled as Lear, and indeed it was reported that the old king “lived in him.” Robert Armin played the Fool, and perhaps Cordelia. It seems to be a strange “doubling” but it would explain the fact that the Fool mysteriously disappears at the end of the third act, at which point Cordelia emerges. The idea of Cordelia played by a comic actor, however, does not suit modern taste. It is easier to imagine a boy in the part. We may also envisage Burbage and Armin upon the stage, contesting against the storm – or, rather, fighting to be heard against the noise of kettle-drums, squibs, and cannon balls being rolled in metal trays.
The young Shakespeare may have acted in an early production of the old play of King Leir. It has been suggested that the first King Leir was part of his own juvenile work, but it is more probable that he recalled his youthful involvement in it and then completely rewrote it for the King’s Men. In preparation he read Holinshed and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. He must also have been reading Florio’s translation of Montaigne, since one hundred new words in that volume re-emerge in King Lear. He was immensely susceptible to the sound and rhythm of words, to the extent that after first encountering them he could effortlessly reduplicate them.
He also read an account of some spiritual malpractice by Jesuit priests in Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures. It was an account that had some resonance after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, but for Shakespeare it had a specific interest. Among the Jesuit priests, who were accused of feigning ceremonies of exorcism on some impressionable chambermaids, were Thomas Cottam and Robert Debdale. Cottam was the brother of the Stratford schoolmaster, John Cottam, to whom, many years before, Shakespeare probably owed his introduction to the Lancastrian recusant families of Hoghton Tower and Rufford Hall. Robert Debdale had been a neighbour of the Hathaways at Shottery and, being of an age with Shakespeare, may well have attended the Stratford school with him. So it is likely that Shakespeare turned to Harsnett’s account for news of his contemporaries, and only by accident or indirection discovered material that would be of use in King Lear.
We may picture his mind and imagination as a vast assimilator, picking up trifles that were later polished until they glowed. He incorporates so many disparate elements, and conflates so many inconsistent sources, that it is impossible to gauge what attitude he takes towards the unfolding drama of King Lear. He is so absorbed by the matter to hand that there is neither opportunity nor occasion to dispense judgement except of the most blatant theatrical kind. The drama has no ultimate “meaning.” In a play filled with rage and death, this may be the hardest lesson of all. Yet it may contain redemption. To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning to life and that there are limits to human understanding. So we lay down a heavy burden and are made humble. That is what Shakespearian tragedy accomplishes for us.
We glimpse here the insistent and instinctive patterns of his imagination that have nothing to do with homilies or sermons. He moved forward quickly with chiming words and themes, parallel phrases and situations, contrasting characters and events, working out their destinies. He improvised; he was surprised by his characters. He picked material from anywhere and everywhere. The feigning of madness by “poor Tom,” for example, is amplified by allusions to Samuel Harsnett’s account of apparent diabolic possession; in front of large crowds the Jesuit priests summoned forth various unclean spirits from the bodies of the women. Shakespeare uses the names of the devils that were invoked on this occasion. He a
lso borrows the language of possession. It was a way of intimating that Tom’s madness is feigned, just as the Jesuit priests are engaged in what Harsnett describes as “the feat of juggling and deluding the people by counterfeit miracles.” But is there not some deeper connection between the theatre and these rites of exorcism, in front of an awed and astonished crowd? It is as if the “mimic superstition” of the papists was somehow replicated or complemented by the illusions of the playhouse. The invocation of Roman Catholic superstition, far from lancing Tom’s folly, somehow increases the sacredness of Lear’s terror. It may also have led Shakespeare to contemplate the nature of illusion itself. Even when the powers of the Jesuit priests are feigned, they seem to be effective.
That is why many scholars have deemed King Lear to be a mystery play in all but name, an echo of Catholic ritual satisfying the liturgical and iconographic hunger of those who professed the old religion. The desire for ceremony mony outlives the faith that first employed it. In fact there may be grace and redemption in the ceremony itself. It is certainly true that in 1609 and 1610 a group of Catholic actors performed King Lear in various sympathetic houses in Yorkshire. It would be absurd to suggest that this was a deliberate strategy on Shakespeare’s part. It is more likely that the forces of his nature comprehended sacred, as well as secular, realities and that this reversion to old imagery was wholly instinctive.
