In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  And at this time the atmosphere in south Warwickshire now began to change subtly. The mid-decade was a kind of watershed in the culture of the time; the old world was becoming more distant and new forces were beginning to take control, as they would do across much of the region by the 1590s. The old fabric of society was disintegrating. In the surrounding countyside, more and more common land was being enclosed for sheep farming by the new rich, driving out landless peasants. In Coventry, where the population had slumped by a half, street singers told of hard times in the ‘Ballad of Nowadays’, and the Puritans, new in power, were rooting out ungodliness and suppressing the old rituals that had once bound the community together. In a single parish, the Warwick clerk John Fisher counted nearly 250 adults and children in the almshouses and on parish aid; many of them were jobless itinerants who had often come from far afield. On the roads around Coventry, Warwick and Stratford that winter such people represented a cross-section of Elizabeth’s England. Thomas Wilson, a thirty-year-old Yorkshireman, lived in Warwick with no wife and four children; his jobless teenagers, Tom and Peter, were reduced to begging. William Orchard, eighty, had no support and was unable to work. Anne Iseham, with only one leg, had to provide alone for her small child because her husband, Henry, had disappeared as ‘a fugitive’. John Harbet and his wife, aged seventy, and their eighteen-year-old ‘idiot’ child were whipped and told to find a master. Roger Asplyn of Stratford was fifty and had no wife but four children: Robert, aged sixteen, Cycely (who was blind), fourteen, Ursula, twelve and Isabell, eleven; ‘all the children do beg’, said Fisher. All had been born in Stratford but had been driven out by the corporation. Roger was whipped, and with his four children sent back down the road to Stratford.

  These were the kind of people and the kind of stories that Shakespeare would draw on in his works. They offer a snapshot of the dramatic changes that came over the English commonwealth at this time – the decline of the old order, social and psychological. The Reformation touched everything because it affected the core beliefs that made society tick, the glue that bonded society and maintained it. Even the massive medieval industry of organized civic charity was on the point of collapse. As Roger Asplyn and his four children trudged back towards Stratford in the rains of November 1586, a new age was dawning.

  And for William? He was twenty-two now, and the family’s main breadwinner. He had a wife and three children to support, in addition to his five siblings and his now ageing parents. If he had not already gone, it was time to do so.

  THE MOMENT OF DEPARTURE

  But when did Shakespeare leave Stratford? How did he join the theatre, and when and how did he get to London? Unfortunately there is no hard evidence; unless and until more documents come to light, we are likely to remain in the dark. These years were the key time in his development, but we have no idea where he was. It is assumed that Anne remained in Henley Street – but it is not even certain that she conceived the twins in Stratford. In reality William could have left his home town at any time after his marriage in 1582, and could have done a variety of jobs before he established himself in London, presumably at the end of the 1580s. It is only from 1592 that the chronology of his life starts to feel a little more secure.

  But a few reasonable conjectures can be made. Shakespeare was twenty when the twins were born and baptized in Stratford. Four years or so later he was surely working in a professional theatre company, and very likely, though not certainly, in London. At some point, then, he had decided he wanted to be a poet. He had already learned to write verse; the marriage sonnet was a halting beginning, with its nod to the new fashions in poetry, but he must have written other verse, and maybe even plays. A late seventeenth-century visitor to Stratford heard a tale that he had gone to London for the first time ‘as a serviture, in a very mean rank’ in the theatre – a runner, a prompt boy, or an ostler holding horses for wealthier members of the audience. Although this is generally viewed as part of the myth, it is plausible. And he would have had plenty of opportunity to meet theatre companies in Stratford: Berkeley’s Men and Leicester’s Men performed there around this time; whilst Strange’s Men, for whom he worked in his late twenties, did shows in nearby Coventry.

  Those are possibilities, none of them mutually exclusive. But one theory stands out above the rest, and has recently become something more than mere hypothesis. It suggests that, aged around twenty-two, Shakespeare joined the leading company of the day, the Queen’s Men.

  A MURDER IN THAME

  In mid-June 1587, in fine summer weather, the Queen’s Men were on tour in Oxfordshire, rolling their wagon of props and costumes into the wool town of Thame on the old road to London. In Elizabeth’s day, at the time of the sheep clip in June the place was full of wool buyers and others; it was a good time to play, and it was visited by many travelling companies. The main street still has a long marketplace lined with big timber-framed houses. There were inns for travellers at the east end where the London road points towards the low green ridge of the Chilterns. Here the Queen’s Men played on 13 June, in the late afternoon or early evening, in the yard of an inn called the White Hound.

  The Queen’s Men were the biggest draw of the time. There were riots in some towns when the crowds became too great for everyone to get in; local records note payments for broken benches and cracked windows in town halls across the Midlands when the Queen’s Men came through. William Knell played their juvenile leads, such as Prince Henry in The Famous Victories of Henry V, the patriotic tale of the battle of Agincourt and the precursor of Shakespeare’s play. Knell was remembered even thirty years later as a star of the generation of actors just before Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn. He was young, physical and fiery – and he was certainly fiery that night in Thame. Perhaps he had been drinking after the show. Between nine and ten in the evening, so the Thame coroner’s jury were told, Knell chased a fellow actor into the close behind the inn, raging in his fury and brandishing a sword. The tale is told in the deathless prose of the Elizabethan coroner:

  John Towne late of Shoreditch, yeoman, was in a close called White Hound in Thame when William Knell came and had in his right hand a sword and jumped upon John Towne intending to kill him. Towne in fear and despairing of his life and of the mutilation of his limbs by the aforesaid Knell, drew back to a certain mound of earth which he could neither cross nor ascend without peril of his life. William Knell continuing his attack as before, so maliciously and furiously, and Towne on the hillock, to save his life drew his sword of iron (price five shillings) and held it in his right hand and thrust it into the neck of William Knell and made a mortal wound three inches deep and one inch wide.

  Within half an hour, as the midsummer sun set over Oxford and the last light faded from the sky, Knell’s life ebbed away And the next day, as the company headed on towards Abingdon and Stratford, where the town accounts show they played that year, they found themselves a man short.

  It has long been noticed that Shakespeare had interesting connections with the Queen’s Men. Some of them had previously been the Earl of Leicester’s Men, based in Warwick; and among them was James Burbage, the key link in Shakespeare’s professional career (James’s son Richard would take the lead roles in his greatest plays). And after this 1587 tour one of the company, John Hemmings, married Knell’s widow, Rebecca. Hemmings would be another lifelong friend of Shakespeares. A Droitwich man, chubby and stuttering, it would be Hemmings, along with Henry Condell, who would publish Shakespeare’s plays after his death. So when the tale of Knell’s murder was unearthed some years ago, the suggestion was made that Shakespeare was recruited at that time to replace him. It is a nice thought that the nucleus of the greatest acting company in the history of the theatre might have come about as a result of that night in Thame. But to work for such a prestigious company a young man must have had some kind of apprenticeship as an actor: they would hardly have hired an unknown. Shakespeare’s connection with the Queen’s Men, however, doesn’t just rest on the shaky
foundation of Knell’s murder in Thame.

  SHAKESPEARE AND THE QUEEN’S MEN

  The greatest performing art of its day, theatre was also the most political. The Queen’s Men had been founded in 1583 as a deliberate act of policy, amalgamating the best players from other leading companies by none other than Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster – not for entertainment but for a political purpose. They were intended to spread Protestantism and royalist propaganda through a divided realm. Their repertory was to be based on English themes. The English history play, already present in the drama of the sixties and seventies, now came to prominence. Plays such as The Famous Victories of Henry V, The True Tragedy of Richard III and The Troublesome Reign of King John were Tudor royalist propaganda, strongly Protestant in tone, often virulently so. King John, for example, is built up as a national hero because he fought against the control of Rome. These kinds of story were put on stage because they could be presented as tragedies that were ‘true’ rather than ‘poetical’. They were perceived as popular entertainment that people across the land would enjoy while being constantly reminded of the ideology of God, queen, Protestant Church and nation on which the government depended – an ideology that was being strongly pushed in schools and in church sermons in the tense years overshadowed by the threat of Spanish invasion, which culminated in 1588 in the Armada.

  The core of the Queen’s Men had worked with James Burbage in Leicester’s Men. Some were famous. Shakespeare’s friend Thomas Heywood, for instance, remembered the best actors of the previous generation: John Bentley, William Knell, Tobias Mills, John Singer, Robert Wilson and, of course, the great clown Richard Tarlton, who became a legend with his comic routines, improvisations, dancing and fencing. As the stage keeper recalls in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. ‘I kept the stage in Master Tarlton’s time, I thanke my starres. Ho!, you should ha seene him ha’ come in, and ha’ beene coozened I’ the Cloath-quarter, so finely And Adams, the Rogue, ha’ leap’d and caper’d upon him …’.

  So the Queen’s Men formed an important part of Shakespeare’s dramatic upbringing; theirs were the hits of his early adulthood. And their shows had a big influence on him as a professional writer. Six or seven of his plays are closely related to the plots of the Queen’s Men. His King John follows their Troublesome Reign almost scene for scene (although he took pains to defuse much of its anti-Catholic rhetoric); his King Lear and Richard III cover the same stories as their old Leir and their True Tragedy of Richard III. Shakespeare’s sequence of plays on Henry IV and Henry V elaborates material used in their Famous Victories. His Two Gentlemen of Verona was perhaps also modelled on a lost Queen’s Men play.

  Of course, he could simply have got hold of their scripts through theatre contacts. But some people in the contemporary publishing industry were under the impression that he actually had a hand in writing them. Take the case of The Troublesome Reign of King John. The second edition of the play, published in 1611, put Shakespeare’s initials on the title page, and the third, in 1622, gave his name in full. This might just have been an unscrupulous sales pitch, but no fewer than four separate publishers of Queen’s Men material thought they were dealing with plays by Shakespeare. Maybe they knew something we don’t. Perhaps Shakespeare really did have a hand in the Queen’s Men’s plays.

  His connection with the Queen’s Men’s scripts, then, seems close and deep – and early. So how did Shakespeare come to know them if not by acting in them? Or even by being involved as one of their group of scriptwriters? Not only did Shakespeare have an unusual and sustained knowledge of their plays, but there are no echoes of Shakespeare’s mature style in their plays. Theirs came first. So did Shakespeare begin his career with them? These tantalizing hints for his first steps as a theatre professional are now beginning to add up to something more than a tale of murder in a small Oxfordshire town.

  So his professional career might have begun as a jobbing actor and general dogsbody. Some years later Robert Greene (a Queen’s Men scriptwriter) would attack Shakespeare as a ‘jack of all trades’ who had had the audacity to write blank verse of his own and, what is more, ‘borrowing our plumes’. Maybe this is what happened. Throughout his career Shakespeare was a magpie who borrowed or stole as much as he could decently get away with. Perhaps he began as an actor, who then moved on to writing as a collaborator in a team, contributing here and there to the joint project, in the way most plays were written at that time. He was not yet a principal writer, like Wilson or Greene: that would only come when he had the confidence and experience to strike out on his own at the end of the 1580s.

  Working for the Queen’s Men, he would have had to write to their house style, a literal but forceful verse with jigging rhymes. Shakespeare at this stage would have subordinated his talents to their principal writers and actors, to the showmanship of Tarlton or the booming leads of Wilson. And, of course, as far as their anti-Catholic propaganda went, he would have had to keep his own feelings to himself.

  THE ‘LOST YEARS’ FOUND?

  On this reading, then, Shakespeare could have been with the Queen’s Men through the late eighties – perhaps even before they came to Stratford in 1587. They were above all a touring company, going as far as Scotland and Dublin. Through provincial town accounts their tour itineraries in those years can be traced. Some venues still survive: Leicester guildhall, the common halls in York and Norwich, Church House in Sherborne. They liked the prosperous towns of East Anglia and the south coast. In eight out of their first eleven seasons they toured the north, playing at the residences of big Lancashire families such as the Stanleys at Knowsley and New Park, and Lord Strange at Lathom – important stops on politically motivated tours. Even a theatre company could help Walsingham keep an eye on families whose loyalty was suspect. (And could that be how Shakespeare first made the Lancashire connection that would be important later in his career?)

  The Queen’s Men played Coventry and Stratford in the winter of 1587. After Christmas they entertained the queen at her palace in Greenwich, then went into Kent towards Easter and, as rumours grew of the impending Spanish invasion, they moved along the south coast town by town – Dover, Hythe, Romney, Lydd, Rye – entertaining packed houses with their patriotic ‘true’ histories. By early June they were in Lyme Regis, and in mid-June had reached Plymouth where they would have seen the watchers on the coast, the beacons readied and Drake’s galleons patrolling off the Sound. The Armada was approaching. If Shakespeare was there that day, it must have been an exciting time to be with the main propaganda company. Some of their politics may have stuck in his throat; but for a young writer with ambition, what an apprenticeship.

  BACK TO THE MYTH

  The Queen’s Men connection is intriguing and, if true, a revelation for our understanding of Shakespeare’s early career. But of course this is a tale held together by a chain of conjectures: plausible, suggestive, but no more. Shakespeare’s deep knowledge of their plays is clear, but as yet we cannot prove he was with the company. As so often with Shakespeare, we are left with ambiguity. The ‘lost years’ are, for the moment, still lost. But here again, the much derided Shakespeare traditions may be able to help us: his father’s illicit wool dealing, the enmity with Lucy, even the poaching, have something in them. So before we follow him to London, with or without the Queen’s Men, let’s remember what the tradition says: that Shakespeare left Stratford as a young man and got a menial job in the London theatre, where he worked up from the bottom, starting off holding horses, or working as the prompt boy holding ‘the book’. This story is not often taken seriously. But it is how things happen in real life.

  Such breaks usually come about through personal contacts. And Shakespeare’s primary relationships in the theatre through his entire professional life were with the Burbage family: James, the entrepreneur responsible for the first custom-built public theatre in the modern world in 1576; his sons Cuthbert, later the manager of the Globe, and Richard, the great actor. So how and where did th
ey meet? Their earlier connection has never been discovered, but it could go back to Warwickshire. James Burbage is first found with Robert Dudley’s players in Warwick, and, curiously enough, there were Burbages in Stratford: one of them was mayor in 1555. At Michaelmas 1588 the Court of Common Pleas in London heard a case between William Burbage of Stratford and John Shakespeare, the poet’s father; it dragged on for four years until it was arbitrated by John’s old friends Nick Barnhurst and William Badger. Some time in or before 1582 John had leased to Burbage a house in Stratford, possibly in Greenhill Street, and subsequently they had fallen into disagreement about monies owed by John. It is at the least an interesting coincidence that a Burbage should have been a tenant of John Shakespeare at the very time when the myth says William went to London where he teamed up with James Burbage and his sons.

  There is another strange twist to the story. Many years later, in December 1598, James Burbage and his men dismantled their Theatre in north London and removed its timbers from the property of their landlord. Present that night in the snow with Burbage and his workmen as they tore down the building was a friend ‘of some fourteen years’ called William Smith, a gentleman of Waltham Cross. By a strange coincidence an exact contemporary of Shakespeare’s at Stratford was William Smith, who went to the University of Oxford, became a schoolmaster in Essex and is known to have lived in Waltham Cross in the 1580s. Smith’s father William, haberdasher and alderman of Henley Street, was a friend of John Shakespeare, and perhaps the poet’s godfather. Coincidences sometimes invite us to pay attention, and this is one of those instances. Is it too fanciful to imagine that young William Shakespeare’s professional career might have begun in Stratford in 1584 with a deal over a table at Burbage’s tavern in Bridge Street, with his godfather and James Burbage?