Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

  CHAPTER 6

  Life in the Suburbs

  HE HAD GROWN up in a world where the fields began just at the end of the street, or at most within a few minutes’ walk. Now all around him, extending for miles beyond London’s crumbling city walls, were tenements, warehouses, small vegetable gardens, workshops, gun foundries, brick kilns, and windmills, along with stinking ditches and refuse heaps. Shakespeare made his acquaintance for the first time with the suburbs. He discovered what it was to pine for open country.

  Londoners too liked to walk out into the fields to take some fresh air—the familiar joy of the countryside was intensified by a widespread belief that the plague was airborne, carried by foul smells. City dwellers passed through the crowded, reeking streets sniffing nosegays or stuffing their nostrils with cloves. In their rooms they burned scented candles and fuming pots to keep the city’s pestilential stench at bay. The sweet country air was regarded as literally lifesaving—hence the rush out of the city, during times of plague, by those who could afford to leave and hence too the ordinary craving for a stroll in the fields.

  Setting out from the center of the city, an energetic walker could still fairly quickly reach hedged pastures where cows peacefully grazed or ground where laundresses pegged their washing and dyers stretched cloth tautly on what were known as tenter frames or tenterhooks (from whence our phrase “to be on tenterhooks”). And though in Shakespeare’s time the open spaces to which Londoners had once had easy access had already begun to disappear, other attractions drew people through the gates or across the river to the suburbs. Many taverns and inns, some of them quite venerable—the famous Tabard Inn, where Chaucer’s pilgrims started their journey to Canterbury, was located in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames—offered food and drink and private rooms in a world that had almost no privacy. In Finsbury Field, to the north of the city, archers could stroll about shooting at painted stakes and trying to avoid passersby. (In 1557 a pregnant woman out for a walk with her husband was struck in the neck by a stray arrow and killed.) Other places of amusement included firing ranges (for practicing pistol shooting), cockfighting pits, wrestling rings, bowling alleys, places for music and dancing, platforms upon which criminals were mutilated or hanged, and an impressive array of “houses of resort,” that is, whorehouses. Moralists denounced the latter with particular fierceness, of course, and demanded that they be closed, but the moves against them by city authorities always fell short. In Measure for Measure, a play set in a Vienna that looks and sounds like London, the ruler, embarking on a campaign of moral reform, gives an order to pull down the “houses of resort in the suburbs” (1.2.82–83). The order is not carried out.

  The congested city, then, was effectively surrounded by an all-purpose entertainment zone, the place where Shakespeare spent much of his professional life. His imagination took it all in, even things that at this distance seem quite negligible. He was forcefully struck, for example, by the game of bowls, particularly by the way the ball with the off-center weight swerved, so that you hit your target only by seeming to aim elsewhere. The image came to him repeatedly as a way of figuring the surprising twists of his cunningly devised plots. So too with archery, wrestling, tilting at posts called quintains, and the whole range of Elizabethan sports and contests: when he did not actually depict them (like in the wrestling scene in As You Like It), he used them again and again as images.

  Shakespeare’s imagination was excited as well by the less innocuous amusements of the suburbs. Henry VIII bequeathed to his royal children a love of seeing bulls and bears “baited,” that is, penned up in a ring or chained to a stake and set upon by fierce dogs. The bulls—on occasion “wearied to death” for sport—seem to have been more or less anonymous, but the bears acquired names and personalities: Sackerson, Ned Whiting, George Stone, and Harry Hunks (the latter blinded to increase the fun). The game was something of an English specialty—in their travel journals foreign tourists frequently noted that they took in the sight, and Queen Elizabeth treated visiting ambassadors to it. The cost of keeping the animals was defrayed by making it an entertainment available to the public: large crowds paid admission to the great circular wooden arenas to see the spectacle. In a popular variation, an ape was tied to the back of a pony, which was then attacked by the dogs: “To see the animal kicking amongst the dogs, with the screams of the ape,” wrote one observer, “beholding the curs hanging from the ears and neck of the pony, is very laughable.”

  “Be there bears i’th’ town?” asks the asinine Slender, in The Merry Wives of Windsor; “I love the sport well” (1.1.241, 243). Shakespeare clearly visited the bear garden in person—he had professional reasons to be interested in what crowds were excited by—but evidently he was less wholeheartedly enamored. The sport, he saw wryly, served to make the Slenders of the world feel more like real men. “I have seen Sackerson loose twenty times, and have taken him by the chain,” Slender boasts. “But I warrant you, the women have so cried and shrieked at it that it passed. But women, indeed, cannot abide’em. They are very ill-favoured, rough things” (1.1.247–51).

  Elizabethans perceived bears as supremely ugly, embodiments of everything coarse and violent, and Shakespeare repeatedly echoed this view, but he also grasped something else: “They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly,” says Macbeth, his enemies closing in around him, “But bear-like I must fight the course” (5.7.1–2). This was hardly a sentimental account of either bearbaiting or murder—Macbeth is a traitor who deserves what he gets in the end—but it suspended the coarse laughter of the arena and got at something almost unendurable about the spectacle.

  Why did Elizabethan and Jacobean people, including, notably, the Tudor and Stuart monarchs who were its special patrons, enjoy something so brutal and nasty? (Though there was an attempt to revive the “royal sport” at the end of the seventeenth century, it never really recovered from the blow it suffered when seven bears were shot to death in 1655 by Puritan soldiers.) The answer is as difficult to determine as it is to explain why we love our own cruel spectacles. But one key is found in a remark by Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Dekker: “At length a blind bear was tied to the stake, and instead of baiting him with dogs, a company of creatures that had the shapes of men and faces of Christians (being either colliers, carters, or watermen) took the office of beadles upon them, and whipped Monsieur Hunks till the blood ran down his old shoulders.” What the crowds saw in this instance, at least, was a grotesque—and therefore amusing—version of the disciplinary whippings that were routinely inflicted throughout society: parents frequently whipped children, teachers whipped students, masters whipped servants, beadles whipped whores, sheriffs whipped vagrants and “sturdy beggars.” The spectacle in the arena had an odd double effect that Shakespeare would immeasurably intensify. It confirmed the order of things—this is what we do—and at the same time it called that order into question—what we do is grotesque.

  London was a nonstop theater of punishments. Shakespeare had certainly witnessed corporal discipline before he came to London—Stratford had whipping posts, pillories, and stocks—but the frequency and ferocity of sentences meted out on public scaffolds at Tower Hill, Tyburn, and Smithfield; at Bridewell and the Marshalsea prisons; and at many other sites both within and outside the city walls would have been new. Almost daily he could have watched the state brand, cut, and kill those it deemed offenders. London’s many established punishment grounds did not exhaust the locations of these spectacles: in some cases of murder the offender’s right hand was cut off at or near the place where the crime was committed and the bleeding malefactor was then paraded through the streets to the execution site. Such spectacles were virtually inescapable for anyone who lived in the great city.

  What was it like to walk through these streets? To see such sights every few days? To live in a city where popular entertainments mirrored these constant torments in the whipping of blind bears or, for that matter, in the performance of tragedies? Whether or not
Shakespeare went out of his way to witness the gory rituals of law and order (there were other playwrights who were more interested in competing with the public torturer and hangman), they figure repeatedly in his plays. Lavinia’s ghastly fate in Titus Andronicus—her hands lopped off, her tongue cut out—would have been easy for Elizabethan actors to represent in graphic, realistic detail, for they had seen such things performed in the flesh on scaffolds in the suburbs, near the playhouse. And when Shakespeare’s characters displayed the bloody heads of Richard III or Macbeth, members of the audience could easily have compared the simulation with the real thing.

  Shakespeare was not simply giving the vulgar crowd what they craved; he himself was manifestly fascinated by the penal spectacles all around him. His fascination was not the same as endorsement; indeed it included a strong current of revulsion. The most terrible scene of torture in his works—the blinding of the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear—is, the playwright makes clear, unequivocally the act of moral monsters. But the horror with which this particular wicked act is depicted is not the same as a blanket repudiation of his society’s savage judicial punishments. When at the end of Othello the wicked Iago refuses to explain why he has woven his vicious plot—“Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word”—the agents of the Venetian state are confident that they will get some answer from him: “Torments will ope your lips” (5.2.309–10, 312). And even if they do not succeed—Iago remains silent for the remainder of the play, and nothing encourages us to believe that torments will lead him to alter his resolution—the Venetians are determined to exact some vengeance on the villain for what he has done. Indeed they will, as the official of the state explains, use all of their ingenuity in order to intensify and prolong his agony:

  If there be any cunning cruelty

  That can torment him much and hold him long,

  It shall be his.

  (5.2.342–44)

  Though torturing Iago cannot revive Desdemona or restore Othello’s ruined life, Othello encourages the audience to accept the legitimacy of this proposed course of action: it is a gesture, however inadequate, toward repairing the damaged moral order. State torture is part of the world as Shakespeare and his audience experienced and thus imagined it, and not only from the special perspective of tragedy. In the glow at the end of one of Shakespeare’s happiest comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, when all the dark suspicions have been vanquished and the bitter misunderstandings have been resolved, there is still time to think ahead to the rack and the thumbscrew. The schemes of Don John the Bastard—a kind of inept Iago—have been exposed, and the villain has fled. Claudio and Hero have been reconciled and are about to join that most delicious couple, Beatrice and Benedick, in marrying. The merry Benedick calls for music—“let’s have a dance ere we are married”—when word is brought that Don John has been captured. “Think not on him till tomorrow,” Benedick says, speaking the play’s closing words, “I’ll devise thee brave punishments for him. Strike up, pipers” (5.4.112–13, 121–22).

  This then is the answer, or at least part of the answer, to the question of what it was like to live in such a city as London, amidst the endless, grim spectacles of penal justice. The spectacles were part of the structure of life and were accepted as such; the trick was to know when to look and when to look away, when to punish and when to dance.

  In close proximity to the sites of pain and death were sites of pleasure—the punishment scaffolds of the Bankside were close to the brothels—and these too seized Shakespeare’s imagination. Whorehouses (“stews”) figure frequently in his plays—Doll Tearsheet, Mistress Overdone, and their fellow workers in the sex industry are quickly but indelibly sketched, along with assorted panders, doorkeepers, tapsters, and servants. He depicted brothels as places of disease, vice, and disorder, but also as places that satisfy ineradicable human needs, bringing together men and women, gentlemen and common people, old and young, the educated and the illiterate, in a camaraderie rarely found elsewhere in the highly stratified society. Above all, he depicted them as small businesses that struggle against high odds—stiff competition, rowdy or indifferent clients, hostile civic authorities—to make a modest profit.

  These qualities closely linked whorehouses in Shakespeare’s imagination, and probably in that of most of his contemporaries, with another suburban institution, one that had only recently come into its own and that was the center of his professional life. The theater, which did not exist as a freestanding structure anywhere in England when Shakespeare was born, at once conjoined and played with almost everything that the “entertainment zone” had to offer: dancing, music, games of skill, blood sports, punishment, sex. Indeed, the boundaries between theatrical imitation and reality, between one form of amusement and another, were often blurred. Whores worked the playhouse crowd and, at least in the fantasies of the theater’s enemies, conducted their trade in small rooms on-site.

  A foreign visitor to London in 1584 described the elaborate spectacle he had witnessed in Southwark one August afternoon:

  There is a round building three stories high, in which are kept about a hundred large English dogs, with separate wooden kennels for each of them. These dogs were made to fight singly with three bears, the second bear being larger than the first and the third larger than the second. After this a horse was brought in and chased by the dogs, and at last a bull, who defended himself bravely. The next was that a number of men and women came forward from a separate compartment, dancing, conversing and fighting with each other: also a man who threw some white bread among the crowd, that scrambled for it. Right over the middle of the place a rose was fixed, this rose being set on fire by a rocket: suddenly lots of apples and pears fell out of it down upon the people standing below. Whilst the people were scrambling for the apples, some rockets were made to fall down upon them out of the rose, which caused a great fright but amused the spectators. After this, rockets and other fireworks came flying out of all corners, and that was the end of the play.

  “That was the end of the play”: few today would classify this gory, gaudy spectacle as theater, but in Elizabethan London the baiting of animals and the performing of plays were curiously intertwined. They both aroused the ire of the city authorities, fretting about traffic congestion, idleness, disorder, and public health—hence the location of performances in places like Southwark, outside the jurisdiction of the aldermen and mayor. They were attacked in similar terms by moralists and preachers, threatening divine vengeance upon all who took pleasure in filthy, godless shows. They attracted crowds of common people and at the same time were patronized and protected by aristocrats. They even took place in strikingly similar buildings. Indeed, one of these buildings—the Hope playhouse—served for both bearbaiting and playacting: in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, performed there in 1614, one of the characters refers to the stench that still lingered from the previous day’s sport. The Hope was owned by the pawnbroker, moneylender, and theatrical impressario Philip Henslowe, who also owned whorehouses. London entertainments—and the money they generated—all, in some sense, flowed into one another.

  At the same time, the theater, which had (with the exception of the Hope) genuinely differentiated itself from all other types of arenas, was a remarkably important innovation. Playacting in purpose-built playhouses (as opposed to candlelit private halls, innyards, and the backs of wagons) had only recently come to London, significantly later than blood sports. A map of Southwark from 1542 already shows a bullring on High Street, but it was not until 1567 that a prosperous London grocer, John Brayne, put up the city’s first freestanding public playhouse, the Red Lion, in Stepney. The enterprise was a bold one—nothing of the kind had been built in England since the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Very little is known about the Red Lion—it may have been pulled down or transformed to other uses very quickly—but to the intrepid Brayne it must have seemed a promising speculation, for nine years later he was at it again, in a fa
r more important venture. This time he took a business partner, his brother-in-law James Burbage, a joiner by trade who had turned actor under the patronage of the Earl of Leicester. Burbage’s carpentry skills were probably at least as important as his playacting, for he played a major role in constructing the complex polygonal timber building that the entrepreneurs called simply the Theater.

  The name befits the notion of the Renaissance, in the literal sense of a rebirth of classical antiquity: in 1576 the relatively unfamiliar word “theater” self-consciously conjured up ancient amphitheaters. Not surprisingly, then, the Theater was almost immediately attacked from the pulpit for being made “after the manner of the old heathenish Theatre at Rome.” Burbage and Brayne were wise to build it on land they had leased in the liberty of Holywell in the suburb of Shoreditch, outside the Bishopsgate entrance to the city. Here, on the site of what had been a priory of Benedictine nuns, the enterprise was subject to the queen’s Privy Council rather than the city. The preachers could fulminate and the city fathers could threaten, but the show would go on.