Printing the texts of plays was a way of giving the theater and the new profession of playwright an aura of respectability. In 1616, when Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s rival, published a folio of his Workes it was the first time the collected plays of an English author had been published. The First Folio of Shakespeare in 1623 was only the second. Jonson was ridiculed for dignifying his plays as if they were serious literary “Workes.” Plays printed before 1616 appeared in the unbound form common for almanacs and joke books. To print plays in a large handsomely bound folio as was done with collections of sermons or ancient classics claimed a new longevity for the playwright’s work.
Shakespeare’s contemporary public were not readers but listeners. While our age of omnipresent print, and of photographic and electronic images, relies on the eye, Elizabethans were experienced and long-suffering listeners. Once in 1584, when Laurence Chaderton, Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the town’s preacher for a half century, had preached for only two hours the disappointed congregation cried out, “For God’s sake, sir, go on! we beg you, go on!” He and others urged that listening was more profitable than reading. The spoken word brought “the zeale of the speaker, the attention of the hearer, the promise of God to the ordinary preaching of His Word … and many other things which are not to be hoped for by reading the written sermons.” Those who lived by the spoken word made every sermon a performance. Reading the classic sermons of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Donne (1573–1631), we miss the histrionic talent that kept his audiences on edge for hours.
Shakespeare could prosper only by pleasing these audiences. As Dr. Samuel Johnson would note on the opening of the Drury Lane Theater in 1747, “we that live to please must please to live.” Shakespeare’s posthumous fame proved a surprising coincidence of the vulgar taste of his time with the sophisticated taste of following centuries. For Shakespeare the claims of immortality were not pressing. It was more urgent to please contemporary London playgoers. Beginning in London as the actor who annoyed Robert Greene in 1592, he appeared as a “principal comedian” in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour in 1598, and a “principal tragedian” in Jonson’s Sejanus in 1603, and he continued to act until he retired to Stratford in 1611.
His acting talent also gave him an advantage in selling his plays. An Elizabethan playwright usually wrote a play to the order of a playing company, then read it to the actors for their approval. If his work was approved he was paid six pounds and his role was over. Some playwrights, like George Chapman, did not even go to see their plays performed. But Shakespeare, we are told, paid close attention to the production. By 1594 he was an acting member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, which had its problems. In 1597 a seditious comedy, The Isle of Dogs, by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson led the Privy Council to shut all playhouses. Jonson and two of the actors were sent to prison. In 1598, when the theaters reopened, Shakespeare enjoyed a great success with Henry IV, Part One, introducing Falstaff. The company also did well with Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, in which Shakespeare acted.
When the company lost their lease at the Theatre they pooled the actors’ resources to build a new theater across the Thames south of London. With timbers from Burbage’s dismantled historic Theatre they erected the new Globe Playhouse in July 1599. Taking the motto Totus mundus agit histrionem (A whole world of players), the Lord Chamberlain’s Company flourished with its rich repertory by Shakespeare, Jonson, and others, despite increasing competition from new theaters and the boys’ companies. Shakespeare himself held an investor’s share and as an actor was entitled to another portion of the company’s receipts, adding up to about 10 percent. His share fluctuated over the years. For the first time these actors had financed the building of their own theater. And the greatest English dramatist acquired a substantial stake in the popularity of his work in his own day. The public was becoming a patron.
On his accession, King James designated the former Lord Chamberlain’s Company as the King’s Company. Letters patent (May 19, 1603) expressly authorized nine of its members (including William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage) “freely to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, Interludes, Morals, Pastorals, stage plays … as well for the recreation of our loving subjects as for our solace and pleasure.” The company acted before the court six times during the next Christmas holidays.
Shakespeare continued to write and act for the King’s Company at the Globe and in the Blackfriars, their “private” playhouse during winter. The Age of Shakespeare at the Globe had a dramatic end on June 19, 1613. During a gala performance there of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII “with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty,” the cannon discharged from the thatched roof to announce the entry of the king set fire to the thatch. “Where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within an hour the whole house to the very ground. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric; wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.” By the following spring the prosperous members of the King’s Company, including Shakespeare, had paid for having the Globe “new builded in a far fairer manner than before.” But Shakespeare, who now owned a fourteenth share in the enterprise, had retired to Stratford. Within his twenty-year London career he had produced the poems and plays that made him the idol of English literature. The English-speaking community in all future centuries would be united by familiarity with “the Bible and Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare had arrived at a crucial moment for a creator’s collaboration with the city audience. The city theater, as we have seen, had just now provided new incentives and opportunities to reach out to a listening public hungry for entertainment. The reborn spectator offered the literary man a new chance for feedback, which meant a new stimulus and a new resource for creators. In the soliloquy itself, a newly developed literary convention, the actor shared his private thoughts with the audience. We hear the hesitating Hamlet blame himself:
O! that this too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew;
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.
Fie on it! O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.…
(I, ii)
The sense of nationhood, inspired by a vigorous virgin queen and by a generation of world explorers, challenged by a formidable Spanish rival, was enriched by a national vernacular recently conscious of itself. As John of Gaunt boasts in Richard II:
This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.…
(II, i)
By reaching recklessly out to imaginary creations of other times and places the Elizabethan stage violated the traditional canons of Aristotle’s Poetics, which still insisted on the duty of all artists to imitate nature. “Art imitates nature as well as it can,” observed Dante, “as a pupil follows his master, thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.” These Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action would make the unreality of the stage less disturbing. And a play
read, it was said, “hath not half the pleasure of a Play Acted: for … it wants the pleasure of Graceful Action.”
Sir Philip Sidney expressed the liberated Elizabethan spirit in his Apologie for Poetrie (1580; published, 1595):
Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature.… Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done.… Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.
And he translated the plain biblical theology into literature: man the creator fulfilling the image of his Creator. “Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s with the efficacy of nature; but rather give right honor to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to his own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which is nothing he showeth so much as in poetry.”
The dramatist, no longer to be blamed for “deceiving” his audience by misrepresenting nature, should be applauded, for “that which they do, is not done to Circumvent, but to Represent, not to Deceive others, but to make others Conceive.” In the next century John Dryden would actually defend the dramatist’s mission as a welcome kind of “deception.” Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie had been a prophetic defense of the poet’s power to reach in, to carry the listener into the playground of his personal imagination. For the poet mere imitation (mimesis) was not enough. Writing before any of Shakespeare’s plays had appeared, while still defending the Aristotelian unities, he deplored the poor products on the London stage.
We do not know that Shakespeare ever read Sidney. But Sidney’s declaration of independence from the imprisoning archetype of nature spoke for Shakespeare, too, and opened a world for the adventuring word. This new stage, this new scene of collaborative conception and deception, Shakespeare peopled beyond even Sidney’s imagining. The poet and his audience would journey inward to bizarre new worlds where creation somehow preceded conception. The spectator was no longer a mere victim but a full collaborator, without whom the poets’ work was unfulfilled. The vast new world within, a new “nature” of the poets’ own creation, stretched infinitely in all directions.
With prodigious energy Shakespeare used all the conventions of his age in this joint exploring-creating expedition. He started with light comedy, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. He explored the recent history of the Wars of the Roses in the three parts of Henry VI. He depicted the tragedies of earlier English history in Richard II and Richard III, in the adventures of Henry IV and Henry V. He mined the grandeur, romance, and tragedy of ancient Rome in Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. He elaborated comedies from the Italian—The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado about Nothing—and invented the fantasy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He reshaped fragments of history and folklore into triumphant tragedies—Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.
The limits imposed by Elizabethan society Shakespeare somehow made into his opportunity. For the dramatist still dared not comment explicitly on the politics or mores of his own age. Not until the theater would be freed from the whims of the Master of the Revels and the Privy Council could there be serious dramas of contemporary life on the London stage. Ironically, Hamlet and Lear and Macbeth would remain alive for alien centuries, precisely because Shakespeare’s inhibitions saved him from recounting topical problems in familiar settings. He would reach out to us, and take us inward with him to enjoy the Human Comedy in exotic costumes and on remote scenes, equally enticing to the Elizabethan theatergoer and to us.
While we can never solve the mystery of Shakespeare, we do know enough about him and his work to dispose of some easy generalizations. For example, the temptation bred on the Left Banks of the world to identify the creator’s genius with instability, or even with madness. Shakespeare’s life makes us pause at Proust’s self-serving declaration that “everything great comes from neurotics. They alone have … composed our masterpieces.” Shakespeare’s contemporaries seemed agreed on his good-natured equanimity. It is hard to believe he was bland. But Charles Lamb and others have found it “impossible to conceive a mad Shakespeare.” Did he have “the sanity of true genius”? Among quarrelsome competing playwrights, he avoided the acrimony that drew his rival Ben Jonson into a murderous duel with a fellow actor and sent him to prison for a seditious play. Called the amiable “English Terence,” he was widely praised for “no railing but a reigning wit.” Still, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, Ben Jonson exceeded him in reputation and it was Jonson, not Shakespeare, whom the king appointed poet laureate with a substantial pension in 1616.
Had Shakespeare not enjoyed the affection of his fellow actors his plays might not have survived. About three fourths of the prolific output of playwrights in his lifetime has disappeared. But Shakespeare’s fellow actors, as a token of friendship to him, did us the great service of preserving the texts of his plays when they arranged publication of the First Folio in 1623. What other playwright of that age was so well served by his fellows? The First Folio Shakespeare, the compilers explained, was published not for profit but “only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.” In his Ode addressed “to the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare,” Jonson’s praise for the “Sweet Swan of Avon,” expressed a general view. Shakespeare’s professional life, in a turbulent age, was conspicuously placid. Except for the “dark lady of the sonnets,” we know of no unrequited loves, no Beatrice or Fiammetta!
Still, amiable legends circulated which had the ring of truth and the appeal of Shakespearean wit, and which idolatrous biographers would have trouble explaining away. One was a stage-door anecdote noted for March 13, 1601, in the diary of a London student:
Upon a time when [Richard] Burbidge played Richard III there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him that, before she went from the play, she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbidge came. Then, message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.
Shakespeare’s proverbial fluency was praised by his fellow actors in their preface to the Folio. “His mind and hand went together, and what he thought, he uttered with the easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” But Jonson, a laborious writer who left only a fraction of Shakespeare’s output, years later still nursed resentment that the players should have “mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing … he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand!’ ”
Unlike other great creators of the human comedy, Shakespeare never left his home country. Even in England he traveled little, and had no public life outside his profession. He had a meager formal education, “small Latin and less Greek,” and showed no learned idiosyncrasy in his reading habits. His best resource was probably in the classic curriculum of the Elizabethan grammar school he attended, reinforced by the reading habits of any literate Elizabethan. Like Boccaccio and Chaucer before them, the writers of Shakespeare’s age did not aim at “originality.” They were accustomed to borrow, embellish, elaborate, and revise Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Virgil, Plutarch, among others, and the abundant classical myths and legends. None of Shakespeare’s plays told a thoroughly original story. As an actor, Shakespeare made his living and stocked his memory with works of other playwrights. He seems to have been well read too in contemporary English authors. The narrow scope and traditions of his elementary education focused his imagination. He felt no uneasiness at drawing on these others and on his own earlier works, or simply translating into blank verse Holinshed’s Chronicles or North’s Plutarch.
His Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra showed a faithfulness to their Plutarchean source that might worry later pursuers of originality. When Ben Jonson ridiculed Shakespeare’s lack of classical learning, one of Shakespeare’s champions retorted “That if Mr. Shakespeare had not read the Ancients, he had likewise not stollen any thing from ’em; (A Fault the other made no Conscience of).”
The better-documented Ben Jonson provided a perfect foil for our Shakespeare. The robust and irritable Jonson, insecure stepson of a bricklayer, was proud of his learning, and of the sponsorship of the pedantic William Camden. In his plays he took up and developed the popular psychology of “humours.” With explicit theories he professed to do his best to follow the classical rules and apologized, as in Sejanus, when he violated them. His most durable play, Volpone, applied the simplistic theory that each character should express a dominant humour. While Shakespeare, too, briefly experimented with this theory (in Timon of Athens), his achievement was to liberate the theater from such conventions and formulas. Jonson explained in the Prologue to Every Man in His Humour,
Though need make many poets, and some such
As art and nature have not bettered much;
Yet ours, for want, hath not so loved the stage,
As he dare serve th’ ill customs of the age.…
One such, today, as others plays should be;
Where neither chorus wafts you o’er the seas,
Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please …
But deeds and language such as men do use,
And persons such as Comedy would choose,
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.…
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 44