by Andrea Mays
Elizabethan London was mad for the theater, and its popularity was well entrenched prior to Shakespeare’s arrival. In 1576, James Burbage had built the city’s first public playhouse, which he called simply the Theatre. He located it in Shoreditch, outside the City of London’s walls, primarily to avoid regulation by the fussy and capricious Puritan London civil authorities, the Corporation of London. It was a turning point in the history of the English stage. Before Burbage, plays were performed on improvised stages at Inn-Yards, the rectangular, open courtyards of inns ringed by two or three covered balconies, or in small, exclusive private theaters. But the Inn-Yards layout was unfortunate from both an actor’s and a businessman’s perspective. There was no tiring room where actors could switch costumes between characters or scenes. For most patrons there was little protection from the elements, and none at all for those standing in the “pit” in the yard, closest to the actors. These venues could not accommodate large crowds. In contrast, the Theatre could hold three thousand people, thus making playgoing more accessible to the masses.
Burbage modeled the Theatre on the Roman circus and the bear- and bull-baiting arenas in London. It was octagonal, with benches and seating constructed like bleachers, but with plenty of empty space in front of the stage where the groundlings could pay a penny and stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, to watch the play from directly in front of the stage. Although the people standing in the pit were still exposed to the elements, anyone willing to pay two pennies enjoyed a seat and some shelter from the weather. Tiers of galleries formed the circumference of the theater. There was no proscenium separating the stage from the audience, no movable scenery, and scarcely any props. Language created the geography and the atmosphere. Burbage earned extra cash by selling food and drink to his captive audience.
By 1587 Philip Henslowe, entrepreneur, diarist, and proprietor of the Rose theater, another prominent London playhouse, was running, besides his brothel, a thriving theater business on the south bank of the Thames River. Henslowe’s stepson-in-law, Edward Alleyn, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, was the foremost actor of his time—equaled perhaps only by Richard Burbage, James’s son.
Plays were so popular that theatergoing distracted people from work and other entertainments. Shop owners complained that their apprentices abandoned their jobs during the day to attend performances. Proprietors of bull- and bear-baiting establishments—in which blinded and chained bears were tormented and attacked by savage, hungry dogs for the amusement of the public—complained to the Crown that the theater had become too popular and that no one was attending their establishments. They lobbied against their competitors and demanded a law to close the theaters on Thursdays, to protect the interests of the animal combat industry.
Later, other theaters opened in London, including the one more closely associated with Shakespeare’s name than any other—the Globe. On performance days, its grounds were transformed into a temporary bazaar, with merchants peddling food, wine, and ale occupying the streets and plazas surrounding the theater. Like the Theatre, the Globe could hold about three thousand patrons, many of whom milled around in the vicinity before the show began. A trumpet sounded to announce the imminent start of the performance, and as patrons entered, they dropped a penny in the box held by a “gatherer.” That penny entitled them to unsheltered standing room on the ground in front of the stage and earned them the moniker “penny public.” If they desired a seat and could afford one, they could pay an additional penny, dropping it in another box as they climbed a small set of stairs. A seat in the second gallery cost them yet another penny, dropped in the box of the gatherer standing at the base of the second flight of stairs. After the patrons had taken their seats, and actors had taken their places, the boxes of pennies were taken to a room backstage—the original “box office”—for counting. The proceeds of the performance were split among the “householders,” those men, including actors, who had made the transition from hired man to profit participant.
In the last decade of the sixteenth century, Shakespeare’s arrival in London coincided with a historical phenomenon that contributed to his success; the audience for theatrical performances was larger than it had ever been in England’s history. That audience had an almost insatiable appetite for new plays, and access to large theaters where they could see them performed.
The undistinguished and unknown young Shakespeare landed in London without prospects. He did not carry in his satchel a stack of manuscripts of finished plays ready for the stage. Given the average life span of a man at the time, half of Shakespeare’s life was over before he even began his theatrical career. But Shakespeare immersed himself in an intoxicating milieu of actors and poets. How exactly an outsider without proper university credentials or an established literary reputation was able to penetrate the tight-knit circle of wits, poets, and actors who orbited the London theaters remains unknown. But somehow he did. He began by performing in plays written by others. He must have displayed a natural talent for it, for he became a regular figure on the stage. But he was not content to remain an actor. Not long after he arrived in London, Shakespeare picked up a quill and wrote his first play. It was Titus Andronicus, a bloody revenge story set in ancient Rome. It was not his best work, but it was an astonishing debut.
By 1592, Shakespeare had become prominent enough to provoke a jealous literary attack from a fellow author. It was the first mention of Shakespeare’s name in print. Robert Greene, a talented but dissipated poet embittered by his failed youthful promise, reached out from his deathbed to condemn Shakespeare. In a biting little pamphlet called Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, he warned three other playwrights, including Christopher Marlowe, that there was a preening “upstart crow” in their midst.
This interloper, warned Greene, reminded him of the crow from Aesop’s fables who struts around in borrowed feathers. This particular crow was an actor, one of “those puppets . . . that spake from our mouths” and who, onstage, “perform those antics garnished in our colors.” Greene complained about one such actor who did not know his place. “Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum [jack of all trades], is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.” In a clever turn, Greene twisted the words from one of Shakespeare’s own plays to mock the upstart. In Henry VI Part 3, the Duke of York is crowned with an imitation paper crown before his enemies kill him. Before his death, York rails against Queen Margaret of France, “O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!” Greene rewrote the line to suggest that Shakespeare was an actor masquerading as a poet.
Greene did not live long enough to enjoy seeing his insults in print. In August 1592, while dining with fellow author Thomas Nashe and others, he gorged himself on Rhenish wine and pickled herring. Taken ill, he died on September 3, 1592. Before the month was out, the publisher Henry Chettle posthumously printed Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance. Describing the follie of youth, the falshoode of makshifte flatterers, the miserie of the negligent, and mischiefes of deceiuing Courtezans. It must have created discordant ripples in the theater world, for it provoked strong statements from Chettle and Nashe. Chettle apologized to Shakespeare, regretting that he had published the pamphlet in the first place: “With neither of them that take offense was I acquainted, and with one of them [Marlowe] I care not if I ever be. The other [Shakespeare], whom at that time I did not so much spare, as since I wish I had . . . I am as sorry, as if the original fault had been my fault, because myself have seen his demeanor no less civil than he [is] excellent in the quality he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues for his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art.”
But Chettle was just the publisher. Playwright Thomas Nashe found himself in a more uncomfortable
position—accused of ghostwriting Greene’s Groatsworth. A bit of tantalizing evidence supported the charge. A few years earlier, in 1589, Nashe had written the introduction to another work by Greene. In it Nashe complained about inferior authors “who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse.” It is only three words—“bombast,” “blank,” and “verse”—but the parallel is there. Alternatively, Greene might simply have appropriated the words from Nashe. In any event, Nashe issued a vehement denial that he was the secret author of Greene’s mockery of Shakespeare. “Other news I am advertised of, that a scald, trivial, lying pamphlet, called Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, is given out as being my doing. God never have any care of my soul, but utterly renounce me, if the least word or syllable in it proceeded from my pen, or if I were in any way privy to the writing or printing of it.”
This long-forgotten incident is more than a tempest in a teapot over bruised egos and sullied reputations. The Groatsworth controversy offers fundamental revelations about who William Shakespeare was at a particular moment in time, and captures him during his metamorphosis from player to playwright. Greene froze the moment in time when Shakespeare’s reputation as a playwright eclipsed his celebrity as an actor.
The episode also suggests that by 1592, William Shakespeare was already a man to be reckoned with. What else but his rising status can account for the fulsome retraction from printer Henry Chettle or the fervid denial from poet Thomas Nashe?
Greene was right about one thing. At the beginning of Shakespeare’s literary career, he was not a singular talent or the only remarkable writer working. It was a golden age in the history of the English language.
It had been Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), not Shakespeare, who had changed theater forever, adapting blank verse used in poetry for dialogue. Blank verse is poetry that has meter—a particular rhythm—but no rhyme. Lines of Elizabethan verse customarily used groups of five iambs: each iamb a pair of syllables, in delivery the first unstressed, the second stressed. Rather than delivering speeches in a declamatory and unnatural style, actors could deliver blank verse in a more natural speaking cadence.4
In London, Shakespeare joined a coterie of established star writers. His singular position in English literary history was ensured by his effective use of blank verse. Not content to excel at a single type of poetic form, he also took Petrarch’s Italian sonnet (introduced to England by Sir Philip Sidney) and perfected it, too. A sonnet, Italian for “little song,” is a fourteen-line lyric poem with a very rigid set of rules for meter and rhyme, written in iambic pentameter. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”
He excelled at both sonnets and long poems. In the theater, he mastered histories, tragedies, and comedies. His competitors might each excel in one or two of these arts, but no one else mastered them all.
But as Shakespeare’s early acting and playwriting careers gained momentum, they were interrupted by disease. When the plague of 1592 to 1594 struck London, Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels—the royal official who approved all plays for public performance—shut down the theaters and other public places, save church, for health reasons.5
The actors fled to the country and reorganized themselves into temporary, ad hoc touring companies performing plays in the towns and provinces. During this time, Shakespeare wrote two long poems. The first, Venus and Adonis, was an elaborate, ornate, and extremely erotic narrative work of six-line stanzas almost 1,200 lines long; “backward she push’d him, as she would be thrust” gives a fair idea of the steamy content. On April 18, 1593, the poem was registered with the Stationers’ Company, which kept a list of works to be published by its members. When Venus and Adonis was printed later that year, Shakespeare included his name on the title page. It was a sign of pride of authorship. Poems were considered more highbrow than plays. Authors boasted of their poetical works and never published their plays. The following year, on May 9, 1594, Shakespeare’s second long poem, The Rape of Lucrece, almost two thousand lines long, was registered. Seeking to attract a sponsor, Shakespeare dedicated it to Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, with the obsequious language of a poet hoping to engage a patron: “The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end . . .”
While Shakespeare was writing and publishing poems, friends and fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell were performing in his plays in London. Heminges and Condell, living in the same neighborhood and worshippers in the parish of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, were members of the Earl of Derby’s Men, in which company they had performed in Titus Andronicus.6 When their patron Derby died in April 1594 they joined with Shakespeare and fellow actor Richard Burbage as investors and performers in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, one of two rival theater companies in London. Shakespeare, aside from sharing in the receipts, was also the company’s writer-in-residence. He and his colleagues built it into the most accomplished theatrical company in the English-speaking world.
In 1594, for the first time, one of Shakespeare’s plays appeared in print. It was his first play, The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, published in quarto format, the equivalent of a cheap, modern paperback selling for five pence. It was printed by pirates without permission or attribution—Shakespeare’s name does not even appear on the title page. Quarto is a printing term referring to the format in which a book appears. In a quarto, each sheet was folded twice, at right angles, producing four leaves, or eight pages. The pages were stitched together, and the book was sold unbound. This would not be the last time that an unauthorized, pirated edition of a Shakespeare play would appear in print.
By late 1594 or early 1595, Shakespeare had written a formidable portfolio of plays, but it is difficult to determine exactly when he wrote them, or in what order. Often it is impossible to even date a play to a certain year. His credits by this time seem to have included the comedies Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Comedy of Errors; the histories in the Henry VI series; and, of course, Titus Andronicus. Some scholars also believe that by the end of 1594 he may have also written King John, The Taming of the Shrew, and also three of his finest plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III.
Had Shakespeare died in 1595, he had already made a sufficient mark to qualify as one of the major literary voices of the Elizabethan era. An early death in his thirties would not have been unusual—several of his peers had died young. If twenty-nine-year-old Marlowe had not been murdered at the dawn of a brilliant career, and if he had enjoyed another decade or two of productivity, we might remember him, and not the poet of Stratford, as the star playwright of his age. If Shakespeare had written only A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III, and then had vanished from the stage, we would still remember him as long as those three texts survived. But what he accomplished over the next fifteen years, between 1595 and 1610, immortalized him.
By late 1594, Shakespeare had, in little more than five years in London, transformed himself from an undistinguished man from the hinterlands into a talented and celebrated actor and writer in the greatest city in the English-speaking world. In the next stage of his career, he leveraged his considerable talent and achievements into greater success. Already a prominent figure in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare connected his name with another illustrious institution when he became a shareholder in the now-renowned Globe Theatre. The Globe was run as a joint-stock company, with Shakespeare, Heminges, Condell, and Burbage as some of the principal stockholders. Shakespeare continued to serve as in-house playwright, taking a percentage of the gate as a householder, and a percentage of the profits as a shareholder. In other words, he was an author, actor, producer, co-owner of the acting company, and co-owner of the theater that sold the tickets. Thus Shakespeare prefigured the economic vertical integration that characterizes much of the modern entertainment industry.
Two
events signaled his rising social status and financial prosperity. In 1596 the Shakespeare family was granted a coat of arms in William’s father’s name, enabling the playwright to sign his name, “William Shakespeare, Gentleman.” And in 1597 Shakespeare glanced homeward to Stratford, where he purchased New Place, one of the two best properties in town. It was a source of pride to a glover’s son.
The plays kept coming: Othello, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Henry V, and more. Neither Shakespeare’s burgeoning fame as a playwright nor his financial success as a theatrical entrepreneur diminished his love of acting. We find him on the stage in 1598, appearing on the list of “principal comedians” who acted in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour.7 He performed a number of times before the most important theatergoer in England, Queen Elizabeth I. Although she enjoyed watching plays, she did not, contrary to modern cinematic portrayals in films such as Shakespeare in Love, attend public theaters. Instead, she summoned the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to come to her and perform at Richmond, Greenwich, or Whitehall, wherever she happened to be in residence—particularly around Christmas and Twelfth Night.8