Moreover, ringing the city were sprawling suburbs that were virtually without regulation of any kind. Within living memory, these precincts were still quite open and uncrowded. Stow recalled that near Bishopsgate, when he was a young man, there were “pleasant fields, very commodious for citizens therein to walk, shoot, and otherwise to recreate and refresh their dull spirits in the sweet and wholesome air.” Now, he complained, this area, like others, had been turned into “a continual building throughout” of filthy cottages, small tenements, kitchen gardens, workshops, refuse heaps, and the like, “from Houndsditch in the west as far as Whitechapel and further towards the east.” Not only had the once-beautiful approaches to the city been sullied, but the traffic had become horrendous: “The coachman rides behind the horse tails, lasheth them, and looketh not behind him; the drayman sitteth and sleepeth on his dray, and letteth his horse lead him home.” And what made it worse, Stow wrote, was that young people seemed to have forgotten how to walk: “The world runs on wheels with many whose parents were glad to go on foot.”
There were other bustling cities in England, and, if he had traveled, the young Shakespeare could conceivably have seen one or two or them, but none was like London. With a population nearing two hundred thousand, it was some fifteen times larger than the next most populous cities in England and Wales; in all of Europe only Naples and Paris exceeded it in size. Its commercial vitality was intense: London, as one contemporary put it, was “the Fair that lasts all year.” This meant that it was fast escaping the seasonal rhythms by which the rest of the country lived; and it was escaping too the deep sense of the local that governed identity elsewhere. It was one of the only places in England where you were not surrounded by people who knew you, your family, and many of the most intimate details of your life, one of the only places in which your clothes and food and furniture were not produced by people you knew personally. It was in consequence the preeminent site not only of relative anonymity but also of fantasy: a place where you could dream of escaping your origins and turning into someone else.
That Shakespeare had this dream is virtually certain: it lies at the heart of what it means to be an actor, it is essential to the craft of the playwright, and it fuels the willingness of audiences to part with their pennies in order to see a play. He may also have had more private motives, a desire to escape whatever had led him into difficulties with Thomas Lucy, a desire to escape his wife and his three children, a desire to escape the glove and illegal wool trade of his improvident father. In his plays, he repeatedly staged scenes of characters separated from their familial bonds, stripped of their identities, stumbling into unfamiliar territory: Rosalind and Celia in the Forest of Arden; Viola on the seacoast of Illyria; Lear, Gloucester, and Edgar on the heath; Pericles in Tarsus; the infant Perdita in Sicily; Innogen (or Imogen) in the mountains of Wales; and all the humans on the spirit-haunted island in The Tempest.
Few of these scenes, however, depend upon the idea of the city. London may have been the principal staging ground for fantasies of metamorphosis, and it was certainly the site where Shakespeare remade himself, but it did not in an immediately obvious way shape his own theatrical imagination. In The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, his colleague Ben Jonson showed himself passionately interested in the city in which he grew up, the stepson of a master bricklayer living in Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross. Other contemporary London-born playwrights, such as Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, similarly interested themselves in the lives of ordinary citizens: shoemakers, whores, shopkeepers, and watermen. But what principally excited Shakespeare’s imagination about London were its more sinister or disturbing aspects.
In his very early history play 2 Henry VI, Shakespeare depicted a band of lower-class Kentish rebels, led by the clothworker Jack Cade, descending on London to overthrow the social order. Cade promises a kind of primitive economic reform: “There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny, the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer” (4.2.58–60). The rebels—“a ragged multitude / Of hinds and peasants, rude and merciless” (4.4.31–32)—want to burn the records of the realm, abolish literacy, break into prisons and free the prisoners, make the fountains run with wine, execute the gentry. “The first thing we do,” famously says one of Cade’s followers, “let’s kill all the lawyers” (4.2.68).
In a sequence of wild scenes, poised between grotesque comedy and nightmare, the young Shakespeare imagined—and invited his audience to imagine—what it would be like to have London controlled by a half-mad, belligerently illiterate rabble from the country. Something about the fantasy seems to have released a current of personal energy in the neophyte playwright, himself only recently arrived in the capital. While the upper-class characters in this early history play are for the most part stiff and unconvincing—the king in particular is almost completely a cipher—the lower-class rebels are startlingly vital. It is as if Shakespeare had grasped something crucial for the writing of plays: he could split apart elements of himself and his background, mold each of them into vivid form, and then at once laugh, shudder, and destroy them.
He emphasized the destruction, as if to insist that these illiterate, rebellious yokels, these loudmouthed butchers and weavers, had absolutely nothing to do with the playwright himself. “Die, damnèd wretch, the curse of her that bore thee!” exclaims the prosperous country squire who eventually kills Cade (5.1.74), and then, as if killing were not enough, thrusts his sword into the dead man’s body. What is being destroyed with such gleeful vehemence is not only an enemy of property but an enemy of the kind of person that Shakespeare understood himself to be. It is possible to detect a disguised self-portrait in Cade’s first victim. “Dost thou use to write thy name?” Cade asks an unfortunate clerk seized by the mob. “Or hast thou a mark to thyself like an honest plain-dealing man?”
CLERK: Sir, I thank God I have been so well brought up that I can write my name.
ALL CADE’S FOLLOWERS: He hath confessed—away with him! He’s a villain and a traitor.
CADE: Away with him, I say, hang him with his pen and inkhorn about his neck.
(4.2.89–97)
These are lines written by a playwright whose parents signed with a mark and who was probably the first in his family to learn to write his name.
At the same time it is possible to detect Shakespeare on the other side as well, in the rebels swarming toward London with their fantasies of wealth and their intimate knowledge of humble trades.
SECONT REBEL: I see them! I see them! There’s Best’s son, the tanner of Wingham—
FIRST REBEL: He shall have the skins of our enemies to make dog’s leather of.
(4.2.18–21)
Tanning was Shakespeare’s father’s trade—and, in all likelihood, his own too: “dog’s leather” was what they called inferior leather used in glove making. He was oddly close, then, to these grotesques, startlingly close even to their leader, Jack Cade, with his claim to be “of an honourable house” (4.2.43), his inveterate pretending, his dream of high station.
Shakespeare was dramatizing something from the chronicles—he characteristically mined these books, particularly Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York and Raphael Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, for the materials of his history plays. And he pushed Cade, the fifteenth-century rebel, still further back into the past by adding details drawn from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. But just as Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors is far more a portrait of Shakespeare’s contemporary London than of ancient Asia Minor, so too the medieval England in 2 Henry VI is suffused less with the otherness of the past than with the familiar coordinates of Shakespeare’s own present.
And it is the London crowd—the unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling through the narrow streets, crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and churches and theaters—that is the key to the whole spectacle.
The sight of all those people—along with their noise, the smell of their breath, their rowdiness and potential for violence—seems to have been Shakespeare’s first and most enduring impression of the great city. In Julius Caesar, he returned to the spectacle of the bloodthirsty mob, roaming the streets in search of the conspirators who have killed their hero Caesar:
THIRD PLEBEIAN: Your name, sir, truly.
CINNA: Truly, my name is Cinna.
FIRST PLEBEIAN: Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator.
CINNA: I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.
FOURTH PLEBEIAN: Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.
CINNA: I am not Cinna the conspirator.
FOURTH PLEBEIAN: It is no matter, his name’s Cinna. Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.
THIRD PLEBEIAN: Tear him, tear him!
(3.3.25–34)
This urban mob, rioting for bread and threatening to overturn the social order, figures as well in Coriolanus. And it is this same mob—“Mechanic slaves / With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers”—that Cleopatra imagines watching her being led captive through the streets of the great city. The very thought of smelling their “thick breaths,” as they cheer the triumph of Rome, is enough to confirm her in her determination to commit suicide (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.205–7).
Even when his scene is Rome, Ephesus, Vienna, or Venice, Shakespeare’s fixed point of urban reference was London. Ancient Romans may have worn togas and gone hatless, but when the rioting plebeians in Coriolanus get what they want, they throw their caps in the air, just as Elizabethan Londoners did. Only in his very early history play, however, did Shakespeare place this London crowd firmly in the city in which he lived and worked, without disguise. “Here sitting upon London Stone,” says the megalomaniac Cade, referring to a famous landmark on Cannon Street, “I charge and command that, of the city’s cost, the Pissing Conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of our reign” (4.6.1–4). “So, sirs, now go some and pull down the Savoy,” he tells his followers; “others to th’ Inns of Court—down with them all” (4.7.1–2). As in a poor man’s utopian dream, the law courts will be destroyed and the fountains will run with wine. Small wonder that the middle-class citizens flee in panic and the urban lower classes—“The rascal people” (4.4.50)—rise up in support of the rebels.
When the insurgents get their hands on one of their most hated enemies, Lord Saye, Cade lays out the charges against him:
Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and, whereas before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used and, contrary to the King his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear. (4.7.27–34)
The paper mill and the printing press are anachronisms—neither existed in England at the time of Cade’s rebellion—but that does not matter: Shakespeare was interested in the sources of his own consciousness, the grammar school that took him away from the world of the score and tally (the stick on which people reckoned their small debts) and into the world of the printed book.
Shakespeare was fascinated by the crazed ranting of those who hate modernity, despise learning, and celebrate the virtue of ignorance. And it is characteristic of him even here—when he was imagining those who would have attacked his own identity—that he heard not only the grotesque stupidity but also the grievance:
Thou hast appointed justices of peace to call poor men before them about matters they were not able to answer. Moreover, thou hast put them in prison, and, because they could not read, thou hast hanged them when indeed only for that cause they have been most worthy to live. (4.7.34–39)
It is mad to think that felons should be spared because they are illiterate, but Cade is lodging a protest against an actual feature of English law at the time that seems equally mad: if an accused felon could demonstrate that he was literate—usually by reading a verse from the Psalms—he could claim “benefit of clergy”; that is, he could, for legal purposes, be classified by virtue of literacy as a clergyman and therefore officially be subject to the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, which did not have the death penalty. The result in most cases was that the literate thief or murderer went scot-free, though only once: the perpetrator who successfully claimed benefit of clergy was branded with a T for thief or an M for Murderer, and a second offense was fatal. Hence Cade’s otherwise incomprehensible charge makes perfect sense: “thou hast put them in prison, and, because they could not read, thou hast hanged them.” And hence some of the otherwise incomprehensible rage against nouns and verbs and grammar schools: Cade commands that Lord Saye, along with his son-in-law, Sir James Cromer, be beheaded. “Let them kiss one another,” he orders, when their heads are returned to him on poles, “for they loved well when they were alive.” Pleased with the spectacle, he proposes parading through London: “with these borne before us instead of maces will we ride through the streets, and at every corner have them kiss.” The grisly sight is meant to excite further bloodshed. “Up Fish Street!” he shouts. “Down Saint Magnus’ Corner! Kill and knock down! Throw them into Thames!” (4.7.138–39, 142–44, 145–46).
Saint Magnus’ Corner was at the northern end of London Bridge, the place where Shakespeare himself may have first set foot in the city. He would, in all likelihood, have been traveling with the troupe of actors he had joined. Perhaps, as they approached the capital, they joked about the rebellious butchers and weavers who long ago had marched on London. The playing company, in any case, would have wanted to attract attention to themselves, to let the populace know that they were back in the city and that they were performing at a particular place and time. In their gaudiest clothes, beating drums and waving flags, they would have timed their arrival and sought the busiest route; if they were approaching from the south, they would have marched up Southwark High Street and across London Bridge.
This, then, might well have been Shakespeare’s initial glimpse of London: an architectural marvel, some eight hundred feet in length, that a French visitor, Etienne Perlin, called “the most beautiful bridge in the world.” The congested roadway, supported on twenty piers of stone sixty feet high and thirty broad, was lined with tall houses and shops extending out over the water on struts. Many of the shops sold luxury goods—fine silks, hosiery, velvet caps—and some of the buildings themselves commanded attention: you could buy groceries in a two-story thirteenth-century stone building that had formerly been a chantry dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket where Masses were once sung for the souls of the dead. From the breaks between the buildings there were splendid views up and down the great river, especially to the west; overhead there were scavenging birds, wheeling in the air; and in the river hundreds of swans, plucked once a year for the queen’s bedding and upholstery.
But one sight in particular would certainly have arrested Shakespeare’s attention; it was a major tourist attraction, always pointed out to new arrivals. Stuck on poles on the Great Stone Gate, two arches from the Southwark side, were severed heads, some completely reduced to skulls, others parboiled and tanned, still identifiable. These were not the remains of common thieves, rapists, and murderers. Ordinary criminals were strung up by the hundreds on gibbets located around the margins of the city. The heads on the bridge, visitors were duly informed, were those of gentlemen and nobles who suffered the fate of traitors. A foreign visitor to London in 1592 counted thirty-four of them; another in 1598 said he counted more than thirty. When he first walked across the bridge, or very soon after, Shakespeare must have realized that among the heads were those of John Somerville and the man who bore his own mother’s name and may have been his distant kinsman, Edward Arden.
A father and his son-in-law, their severed heads grinning on poles across from one another. “Let them kiss one ano
ther, for they loved well when they were alive.” The severed heads he saw on the bridge must have made an impact upon his imagination, and not only as demonstrated in the Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI. If he had spent some dangerous months in Lancashire, Shakespeare would already have imbibed powerful lessons about danger and the need for discretion, concealment, and fiction. These lessons would have been reinforced in Stratford, as tensions rose and rumors of conspiracy, assassination, and invasion spread. But the sight on the bridge was the most compelling instruction yet: keep control of yourself; do not fall into the hands of your enemies; be smart, tough, and realistic; master strategies of concealment and evasion; keep your head on your shoulders.
Hard lessons for a poet and an actor aspiring to be heard and seen by the world. But some such lessons may have caused Shakespeare to reach a decision that has since made it difficult to understand who he was. Where are his personal letters? Why have scholars, ferreting for centuries, failed to find the books he must have owned—or rather, why did he choose not to write his name in those books, the way that Jonson or Donne or many of his contemporaries did? Why, in the huge, glorious body of his writing, is there no direct access to his thoughts about politics or religion or art? Why is everything he wrote—even in the sonnets—couched in a way that enables him to hide his face and his innermost thoughts? Scholars have long thought that the answer must lie in indifference and accident: no contemporary thought that this playwright’s personal views were sufficiently important to record, no one bothered to save his casual letters, and the boxes of papers that may have been left to his daughter Susanna were eventually sold off and used to wrap fish or stiffen the spines of new books or were simply burned. Possibly. But the heads on the pikes may have spoken to him on the day he entered London—and he may well have heeded their warning.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Page 18