Shakespeare's Ear

by Tim Rayborn

  The Spanish Tragedie is a rather complex story, beginning straight off with the death of Andrea, a Spanish officer, who returns as a ghost to seek revenge on his killer, the Portuguese Prince Balthazar. Of course, Balthazar falls in love with the daughter of the Duke of Castile, Bel-Imperia, who had been Andrea’s love—awkward—and through a series of unfortunate events, the king of Portugal becomes convinced that marrying these two will bring about peace between his country and Spain. Meanwhile, Bel-Imperia hooks up with Horatio, Andrea’s friend—again, awkward—and when Balthazar and his cronies find out about this, they hang him and imprison her. Horatio’s father, Hieronimo, finds his son’s body and goes mad, but conveniently recovers to begin plotting revenge.

  Through all of this, Lorenzo, the king’s nephew, has been trying to help Balthazar by permanently silencing anyone who could spill the beans about Horatio’s murder. Hieronimo and Bel-Imperia concoct a plan to take revenge on all of them, performing a play for the guests of a royal entertainment, inviting Lorenzo and Balthazar to act with them. In the course of the show, Hieronimo stabs Lorenzo to death and Bel-Imperia kills both Balthazar and herself. Hieronimo explains to the audience that these deaths were not faked and reveals the whole sordid story. He then bites off his own tongue so as not to implicate Bel-Imperia as his co-conspirator (and so tarnish her name) and successfully kills the Duke of Castile and himself. The ghost of Andrea, seeing that vengeance has been served, is satisfied and departs, reflecting on the carnage:

  Ay, now my hopes have end in their effects,

  When blood and sorrow finish my desires:

  Horatio murder’d in his father’s bower;

  Vild Serberine by Pedringano slain;

  False Pedringano hang’d by quaint device;

  Fair Isabella by herself misdone;

  Prince Balthazar by Bellimperia stabb’d;

  The Duke of Castile and his wicked son

  Both done to death by old Hieronimo;

  My Bellimperia fall’n, as Dido fell,

  And good Hieronimo slain by himself:

  Ay, these were spectacles to please my soul!

  Wow.

  This kind of crazy drama of blood and revenge would become all the rage in London over the next twenty years. The play-within-a-play device and the ghost of the wrongly murdered man would both feature in Hamlet, for example. In 1602, additions were made to The Spanish Tragedie, with some 320 new lines being penned for it. Some scholars have put forth pretty convincing evidence (based on textual similarities) that Shakespeare himself may have been the author of these new lines. Updates of older works were common at the time.

  In any case, Kyd’s life would see its own share of bloody drama, and he was destined for a tragic and violent end. Between 1587 and 1593, Kyd was in the service of a nobleman who has never been identified, and at this time, he also crossed paths with the notorious Christopher Marlowe (more on him below), who may have also been in the service of said unknown lord. Marlowe, as we will see, was very possibly up to his ears in spying and intrigue, but it was his personal life that got him, and by association Kyd, into trouble. Marlowe, allegedly being both a homosexual and an atheist, was guilty of two serious crimes that could carry the death penalty.

  Though Kyd did not seem to share Marlowe’s views or his orientation, he may have had some of Marlowe’s writings on both topics in his possession. It seems that an informer turned him in, and he was arrested in May 1593. The papers in question denied the divinity of Christ. Thereafter, Kyd was tortured and insisted that the works belonged to Marlowe, who, he said, also believed that Christ himself was homosexual. Marlowe was summoned to answer these charges but met a violent end on May 30, 1593, before a decision could be rendered, as we will see.

  Kyd was released eventually, but he never recovered from his injuries, and he was no longer welcome in his lord’s service. The cloud of suspicion hung heavy over his head, and many probably thought that he was a nonbeliever, as well.

  This may all seem strange to the modern reader, when we are accustomed (at least in theory) to a live-and-let-live philosophy, but in those days, having an “improper” set of religious beliefs could be a matter of life and death. England had gone through a great deal of social upheaval since Henry VIII had broken with the Catholic Church in 1534. His son Edward VI strengthened the Protestant position as England’s official religion after gaining the throne in 1547, while Henry’s daughter, Mary Tudor (the infamous “Bloody Mary”), reinstated Roman Catholicism immediately after Edward’s untimely death in 1553. Finally, Elizabeth I put Protestantism back in place with her accession in 1558, and the Anglican Church replaced the Catholic Church permanently. This topsy-turvy change of official beliefs meant that adhering to the “correct” faith was more than a matter of personal preferences; it concerned political survival, national security, and keeping order. Those who continued to adhere to Catholicism in Protestant England were, at least initially, tolerated, but they came to be viewed increasingly with suspicion and prejudice. Those who held no beliefs at all were effectively enemies of the state, which held that it obtained its authority from God.

  Kyd was an example of how a deep thinker could get swept up into things beyond his control and could suffer the consequences of daring to entertain dangerous ideas, even if not adhering to them. He seems to have died in the summer of 1594, at only thirty-five years old. In December of that year, his parents renounced administration of his estate, probably because he had debts. As a final indignity, even though The Spanish Tragedie was immensely popular in his day and the decades immediately afterward, he was forgotten as an author for a remarkably long time. It was only in the later eighteenth century that his name was rediscovered in association with the play and he was able to again achieve recognition as the author of one of the most influential English plays of the age.

  Robert Greene (1558–1592)

  A Groats-Worth of Wit

  Greene was a highly educated writer of pamphlets, prose, and plays, having received degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. He was acutely aware of his fine education and had no problem lording it over those with fewer advantages than he, in particular, William Shakespeare; more on that momentarily. However, Greene’s credentials didn’t mean that he wanted a scholar’s life or, even worse, one attached to the Anglican Church; far from it. He reveled in debauchery and lived a bohemian lifestyle. He was so fond of making up stories about his exploits and adventures that it’s difficult to know what actually happened and what was just his invention. He claimed to have traveled to Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, and France, a remarkable achievement, but no definitive evidence for these journeys has been found. He further said that he married a gentleman’s daughter but, “forasmuch as she would perswade me from my wilful wickednes, after I had a child by her, I cast her off, having spent up the marriage-money which I obtained by her.” He proceeded to seek new fortunes in London. Again, evidence for this account is inconclusive.

  His version of what happened on his way to London also may or may not be true. He alleges that he met a player who told him that there was great potential for scholars to become playwrights, and so he joined this actor, took residence in a brothel, and began making money writing plays. He took a mistress (sister to a famous leader of a gang of thieves, later hanged) and together they had an illegitimate child. Thereafter, he drifted from inn to inn and tavern to tavern, always finding a way to cheat and lie his way out of things, and somehow avoid paying his debts, bragging that “nothing rested in him almost but craftiness.”

  In the Repentance of Robert Greene (published after his death in October 1592), a work thought to be autobiographical, Greene claims:

  Now I do remember (though too late) that I have read in the scriptures how neither adulterers, swearers, thieves nor murderers shall inherit the kingdom of heaven. What hope then can I have of any grace when (given over from all grace) I exceeded all other in these kind of sins?

  Young yet in years, though old in wickednes
s, I began to resolve that there was nothing bad that was profitable, whereupon I grew so rooted in all mischief that I had as great a delight in wickedness as sundry hath in godliness, and as much felicity I took in villainy as others had in honesty.

  From whoredom I grew to drunkenness, from drunkenness to swearing and blaspheming the name of God; hereof grew quarrels, frays, and continual controversies which are now as worms in my conscience gnawing me incessantly.

  I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people, who being my continual companions came still to my lodging, and there would continue quaffing, carousing and surfeiting with me all the day long.

  There probably is truth in these stories, though how much he embellished to make himself look even more rakish is unclear. His enemies denounced him as a liar, cheat, thief, and scoundrel, and decried his wasted degrees and his leaving a good wife behind. More than once, Greene claimed that he felt called to repentance and wanted to make a new start, but he always slid back into his grifting ways.

  Despite his failings, he was the central figure in a group of London writers (including Christopher Marlowe and others) who were penning works for the stage as well as poetry and pamphlets. It was this group that Shakespeare eventually attached himself to when he arrived in the big city. Not having their university degrees, he was an odd man out, despite his talent, and some resented him for it; for many of them, Shakespeare was merely a player, not a true writer. For Will’s part, it seems that while he was content to share their company, he was not the debauched sort of man they had hoped for and he did not engage in their criminal or other unsavory activities, though their lifestyles undoubtedly gave him ideas for future characters.

  In August 1592, after a meal of too much Rhenish wine and pickled herring, Greene became ill (as would just about anyone!). Having no lodgings, he was taken in and looked after by a shoemaker and his wife, of all people. One of Greene’s enemies records that he had pawned even his clothing for money, and knowing that he had little time, he asked the wife to place a wreath of bay leaves on his head, so that he could die resembling a poet laureate (i.e., one of the esteemed poets of ancient Greece, Rome, or Renaissance Italy crowned with a laurel wreath on the head in honor of their literary work). This episode seems pretty silly, and may be another invention, but Greene’s ego makes it possible that the story is true.

  His most notorious work appeared after his death. Titled Greene’s Groats-Worth of Wit, it included scathing commentaries about several of his fellow writers, including this famous passage:

  For there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

  Scholars have generally agreed that this was an attack on Shakespeare for daring to presume that, as an actor, he could claim to be the equal of those university-educated slackers and ne’er-do-wells, when in fact all he was doing was shamelessly imitating them. Some at the time and now believe that the pamphlet was actually authored by another dramatist, Henry Chettle (ca. 1564–ca. 1606), using Greene’s name as a way of hiding his own attacks. Debate about this has gone back and forth; the work may actually have been a kind of collaboration between the two, with Chettle filling in and embellishing Greene’s words. Chettle actually denied having anything to do with writing the scurrilous attacks on his fellow playwrights, as did Thomas Nashe (1567–ca. 1601), a writer and satirist who, so rumor claimed, ghostwrote part of the work. Nashe in particular liked a good scrap, so why he was so vehement in his public denial of any connection (calling it a “lying pamphlet”) is mysterious. One possibility is that he was paid a visit by a representative of the Earl of Southampton (soon-to-be patron of Shakespeare and dedicatee of the sonnets), who was not at all amused at such slanderous words.

  Regardless of Greene’s attack (assuming he wrote the work), his plays probably had some influence on the bard; Shakespeare seems to have modeled Falstaff in part on Greene, for example, and two of Greene’s own plays, The Scottish History of James the Fourth and Pandosto, may have influenced the content of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Winter’s Tale respectively. Greene probably wouldn’t have appreciated the tribute.

  Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)

  A poke in the eye

  Marlowe was an undoubted genius, the greatest of the playwrights of that circle of college-educated writers that lived in London in the late 1580s. Noted for such dramas as Tamburlaine, Edward II, and Doctor Faustus, Marlowe possessed remarkable skill and his works were triumphs of craft and words. He no doubt had a significant influence on another playwright who was almost his exact contemporary, William Shakespeare. It’s entirely possible that he would have eclipsed Shakespeare as the age’s greatest dramatist, if not for the inconvenient fact that he died violently when he was not yet thirty years old. The circumstances of that death and the controversial life that led up to it make him one of the most fascinating figures in the history of the theater.

  Marlowe was born in Canterbury in February 1564—the exact date is not certain, we only have a baptism date of February 26. He was the son of a shoemaker who saw to it that his son received a good education. So the young Christopher was able to gain a scholarship to attend Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, where he took his bachelor of arts degree in 1584. He continued to study for a master of arts degree, but already controversy surrounded him. In fact, Cambridge University was reluctant to grant Marlowe this degree in 1587 because there were rumors that he had converted to Catholicism, not exactly the best career choice a few decades after Queen Mary burned Protestants alive and tried to roll back England to being a Catholic nation. One rumor said that Marlowe intended to leave England and go to the college at Rheims in France and take ordination as a priest.

  Then the Privy Council (the queen’s government) intervened and insisted that the degree be granted, because of Marlowe’s service to said government. Why would this important body care about an otherwise unknown student? This question has led to a lot of speculation, but it may well be that Marlowe was already being employed in the business of espionage for Sir Francis Walsingham (Elizabeth’s spymaster) or others. Writers, artists, musicians, and their kind made very good spies because they could travel, their art allowed them to cross borders, and they were often in close company with nobility and government officials. Was Marlowe going undercover to Rheims, posing as a convert but actually there to gather information? He was known to take long absences from the college and to spend more money than he could have had as a humble student with poor parents. So, was he on some spymaster’s payroll? It’s certainly possible, and he may have been pretending to be a priest-in-training to learn what he could about conspiracies against Elizabeth’s government.

  In 1592, he was arrested in the Netherlands for being involved in coin counterfeiting, a serious infraction, but when he was returned to England to face investigation and possible trial, no charges were brought. He may have been taking part in some botched spy mission during which he got caught and the English government preferred to hush the whole thing up.

  In any case, Marlowe was also a major figure of the London theater scene, writing his masterpieces and allegedly living a bohemian lifestyle. It has long been supposed that he might have been homosexual or at least preferred dalliances with other young men, an offense in Elizabethan England that could have serious consequences, even if many tended to simply look the other way when confronted with the possibility.

  He and Shakespeare seemed to enjoy the friendly competition of writing plays, using each other’s works as inspiration for their own. They may have even tried to one-up each other with each new work they wrote in response to the other’s. Certainly, Marlowe’s plays influenced certain plots and ideas of Shakespeare, even years later: The Jew of Malta influenced The Merchant of Venice, Edward II influenced Richard II, and Faustus influenced Ma
cbeth. Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays probably prompted Marlowe to write Edward II to begin with.

  Today, Marlowe is best remembered for his Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, the story of a man who summoned demons and sold his soul to the demon Mephistopheles for earthly rewards. Since Puritans were already railing against plays as being satanic, you can imagine how this plot feature must have gone over, particularly when the actor playing Faustus performed faux black magic rituals in front of the astonished audience, summoning a “demon” who would arrive in a puff of smoke through the trap door in the stage. At a time when most people fervently believed such magical feats were possible in real life, this must have been almost too much. Some claimed that they saw more than one devil onstage during performances of the play, and that the second one looked decidedly real. The scene wherein Faustus commands Mephistopheles to take the offer of his soul to Lucifer is quite striking:

  Go bear these tidings to great Lucifer:

  Seeing Faustus hath incurr’d eternal death

  By desperate thoughts against Jove’s deity,

  Say, he surrenders up to him his soul,

  So he will spare him four and twenty years,

  Letting him live in all voluptuousness;

  Having thee ever to attend on me,

  To give me whatsoever I shall ask,

  To tell me whatsoever I demand,

  To slay mine enemies, and to aid my friends,

  And always be obedient to my will.