In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  So the ‘lost years’ have involved a long search with many blind alleys – but none, I think, are fruitless. All are revealing about his times. For now, what we can say is this. At some point around the age of twenty, William decided he was going to be a poet. Whether he joined the Queen’s Men, or whether he went straight to London and worked in menial jobs at Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch (and he could of course have done both), at some point at the end of the 1580s he began to make his name in London as a writer. In the late eighties, around the time of the Armada, the old-fashioned and politically motivated Queen’s Men would cease to be the cutting edge in the theatre. The focal point for ambitious artists became London itself, where a new kind of drama was emerging, whose writers and stars were bringing huge audiences into great wooden theatres that could hold up to 3000 people for a show. It was now open to a poet from the provinces to write the kind of dramas and the kind of verse he wanted. Everything we know suggests that around 1588–9 Shakespeare based himself in London. And there his talent immediately made its mark and he rapidly rose to fame.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LONDON: FAME

  ON 17 NOVEMBER 1588 the church bells rang out as usual across the land for Queen Elizabeth’s accession day, but this year’s commemoration took on a new meaning with lavish public celebrations of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This was the defining event that brought the religious conflicts of the previous thirty years of her reign into sharp focus. That summer the country had been under arms: beacons at the ready, watchers set up along the coasts. Even in towns far from the sea, such as Stratford, men were called up to fight. Along with their fellow countrymen, Stratford’s recruits marched to the port of Tilbury, but they were not needed: the Armada had already lost the gun battles waged along the south coast from Plymouth to Kent. Then came the grim night when fireships were sent in to wreak havoc among the Spanish ships anchored off Gravelines, after which there was nothing left for the demoralized remnants but to attempt to return home the long way round the north of Britain, only to be battered to destruction on the rocks of Galway and Donegal. To loyal English Catholics, just as much as to the Protestant majority, the defeat of the Spanish invasion force was a deliverance, and it inaugurated a brief surge of optimism throughout the land.

  So in London that morning the queen and all her councillors made their way down Cheapside to St Paul’s for a particularly heartfelt service of thanks-giving. The day was bright, the rain held off, and the peals of the bells floating over the city were audible miles away. Arriving from the north of England or the Midlands at that time, heading for one of the northern gates, Aldersgate or Bishopsgate, the traveller would have seen London in all its splendour: a capital now fast on the way to becoming a world city.

  The best view was from the windmills across Finsbury Fields. From here the eye could take in the entire three-mile stretch of the city from Westminster to St Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch. And from this viewpoint an almost photographic panorama was drawn by an artist some time in the first few years of Shakespeare’s theatrical career. If, as is thought, he arrived here from Stratford at this time, this is the London he would have seen.

  CAMERA OBSCURA: A VIEW OF THE CITY

  Far away to the right, across the loop of the Thames at Lambeth, are the Surrey hills, and in the foreground the huge roof of Westminster Hall and the Abbey, finials and weathervanes glinting. In front of the Abbey lies the smart suburb of Westminster, with its royal buildings, grace and favour apartments, tennis courts and tilt yards. The wooden palings of the garden of Gray’s Inn help to date the image: they were rebuilt in brick in the late 1590s. Closer still, travellers are moving out of Gray’s Inn Road, and the covered wagons of long-distance carriers from Smithfield are setting out for the Midlands. A cluster of men are practising at archery butts; on Moorfields the stainers are laying out their dyeing frames, and laundry women are emptying their ‘flaskets’ and laying out their washing to dry on fields where cows graze.

  Beyond them in the distance the eye is taken to the towers of the archbishop’s palace over the river, and then to the great halls of the lawyers in the foreground. Gilded lanterns, sundials and stained glass catch the early light at Gray’s Inn (where Shakespeare would play his Comedy of Errors), Arundel House and the Middle Temple (future venue for a memorable Twelfth Night). Now the red roofs of the western end of the city come into view, the great private mansions around Holborn and the Strand, and the undulating expanse of tiled rooftops sloping down the Fleet valley and up to St Martin’s Ludgate. To see such a magnificent sight in the twenty-first century, one would have to go to Assisi, Toledo or Cuzco.

  From the forest of brick chimneys smudges of smoke rise from fires of wood and seacoal. As the gaze shifts eastwards, the suburb of Clerkenwell comes into view, and behind it the huge bulk of St Paul’s with its great Gothic gable and tower, still 300 feet high, even though the spire, which took it well over 500 feet, has been gone for nearly thirty years now. Further on lies the mass of the late medieval city: the towers and spires of twenty-five churches, many going back to Anglo-Saxon times; and the huge mansions of the rich, sunlight occasionally catching their vermilioned crests and painted campaniles. Over the jumble of rooftops around the Guildhall and the Royal Exchange we can make out the weather-stained turrets of the Tower of London. Looking east again, Greenwich and the hills of Kent come into view, clear and blue. And everywhere, rising with the smoke into the still air, is what we can never hear now with all the traffic noise: the human roar of a great pre-modern city.

  To visitors from home and abroad, Elizabethan London was a phenomenon. Its population was nearly 200,000 and rising fast. The great livery companies, the goldsmiths, merchants, mercers and clothiers, had grown in power and ostentation: their civic rituals and processions were grand public occasions on which fountains ran with wine, and cherubim with gilded wings and trumpets saluted the genius of the city. And in the last twenty years the suburbs had spread in every direction, filling up with tenements for the new urban poor.

  With such wild extremes, the city itself would soon become the focus of a whole new genre of city comedies. In one memorable contemporary image London was likened to a ‘perspective picture’ which, depending on the viewpoint, yielded beauty and ugliness, peace and war, charity and aggression: prodigiously overflowing with wealth, yet sucking the life blood of the countryside as thousands of immigrants poured in to sustain its conspicuous consumption. Yet it was a place of tremendous opportunity, especially to an aspiring playwright in the autumn of 1588.

  Back at the windmills in Finsbury Fields, the sounds of the city are still rising. Close by, wheels are rumbling and creaking up the rutted track towards Holloway as covered wagons head north with armed guards to fight off the robbers who haunt the wooded hills around Highgate. Looking east, there are two more windmills in open fields by the road leading down to Aldersgate, their sails turning as they grind flour for London’s bread. Beyond them are yet further windmills, half hidden among the suburban sprawl of Shoreditch. Here was London’s first theatre district.

  Shoreditch had expanded hugely in the last fifty years, the result of an uncontrolled growth of unlicensed infills by landlords who used every available space to capitalize on the huge influx of unemployed people from the impoverished countryside. And the theatres were in the middle of it. Just over Moorfield ditch the Curtain peeps over the rooftops in our panorama, and 200 yards to the north is a great wooden octagon topped with a huge flag. This is the Theatre, the first custom-built professional playhouse in the modern world. Here in the autumn of 1588 the audience would have been able to see some of the most popular shows of the early Elizabethan drama. From our vantage point in Finsbury Fields, carried on the wind, you can imagine the distant roar of the crowd.

  THE ENGLISH DRAMA

  When this eternal substance of my soul

  Did live imprison’d in my wanton flesh.

  Each in their function serving other’s need,
<
br />   I was a courtier in the Spanish court

  My name was Don Andrea …

  So begins the first great verse tragedy of the Elizabethan new wave. With its dark mix of courtly grandeur and corruption, its vistas of eternal torment and its hints of bloody revenge to come, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy caught the anxious mood of the time. It was probably written the year before the Armada, as was Marlowe’s explosive first play, Tamburlaine. What an exciting time for a young man with ambitions to be a writer.

  Drama had always been an important element of English vernacular culture, and it is no coincidence that the end of the medieval mystery plays was followed by the swift rise of the professional theatre. London was at the heart of this new venture, which started with the Red Lion in 1567, followed by Newington Butts in 1575, then Burbage’s Theatre in 1576 and the Curtain the next year. These were the famous theatres of Shakespeare’s early career. The grander Rose, Swan and Globe on the south bank would follow later, as would the Fortune in the north of the city. There were also many inn yard theatres, some specially adapted as permanent stages, such as the Bull in Bishopsgate, the Bell and the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street and the huge Bel Savage outside Ludgate. All these were public venues for audiences of both sexes and the widest social background. For a higher-class clientele there would soon be indoor auditoria, such as the Blackfriars and the Cockpit. Many private institutions also regularly staged plays in magnificent settings, such as the great lawyers’ halls of the Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn. And of course Shakespeare’s company would regularly provide entertainment at grand festivities in royal palaces, such as Hampton Court, Whitehall, Richmond and Greenwich.

  The English drama came out of the medieval tradition. But the professional theatre – with its mass audience, its specialized urban venues, its new and often demanding scripts and its fast turnover – was a new phenomenon. The first professional, custom-built acting arena, Burbage’s Theatre, was the model for the big wooden amphitheatres that followed, the largest of which could accommodate up to 3000 people. Foreign visitors, such as Thomas Platter from Switzerland, give us an idea of what they were like:

  These places are built in such a fashion that the players perform on a raised stage so that every one can see what happens. Nevertheless there are different gangways and places where one sits more comfortably, but then you have to pay more. If you stand below you pay one English penny, but if a seat is required you have to go in through another door and pay an extra penny. If you wish to sit on cushions in the most comfortable seat, so that you can not only see everything but can be seen yourself, you enter by yet another door and pay a further penny.

  In just a few years the theatre had become the major public art, the single most effective platform for entertainment, ideas and debate. It was the subject of tremendous interest at home and abroad, and the constant object of attention from the authorities, secular and religious; and, for that reason, strictly subject to the censor. In late 1580s’ England history was at stake, and theatre was political in the widest sense.

  BURBAGE’S THEATRE: SHAKESPEARE’S WORKPLACE

  The Curtain and the Theatre, where Shakespeare first worked, lay a mile north of the city wall, outside city jurisdiction. This was an important consideration in a time when Puritans were making moves against any kind of stage performance, which they regarded as an encouragement to immorality and a threat to the most basic principles of the Protestant religion. The road to Shoreditch from the city at the end of the 1580s was, as the antiquarian John Stow’s guidebook notes, lined with houses, ‘many of them recently built with alleys backward, and too much pestered with people (a great cause of infection) up to the bars’. There were many lodging places here, including houses owned by the actor Edward Alleyn and his brother. Further north, closer to the theatres, lived the Bassanos, a family of Venetian musicians who had arrived in the days of Henry VIII: they owned three houses by St Mary’s Spital, just before the bars crossing the road, which marked the end of city jurisdiction.

  Burbage’s Theatre was built inside the precinct of a medieval nunnery at an ancient ‘holy well’. Sold off by Henry VIII back in the 1540s, the abbey church and buildings had been quarried for building stone, and the granary and brewhouses were now occupied by smallholders. The old stone perimeter wall still stood, enclosing gardens and the former convent orchard, which was now the private garden of Burbage’s landlord, Giles Allen. The Theatre itself was a half-timbered, three-storey lath and plaster building with a tiled roof and two external staircases. Nearly 100 feet across, it was squashed in between an allotment garden on the north, the Great Horse Pond to the east, and the Great Barn, part cattle pen and part slaughterhouse, on the south. On the west side, towards Finsbury Fields, along the common sewer ran a brick perimeter wall in which a hole had been broken to give spectators access. To this unprepossessing place audiences rode out from the city up Bishopsgate, leaving their mounts tethered at the Great Horse Pond. Until it was demolished in December 1598, when its timbers were removed to build the new Globe on Bankside, this was Shakespeare’s main London workplace.

  Shoreditch was a rough area. Like all his class, Shakespeare wore a sword and not just for show: some of his fellow playwrights and actors – Knell, Spencer and Porter – were killed in duels, and several – Towne, Day, Marlowe and Ben Jonson – killed other people. The records of the Middlesex Sessions include constant reports of riot, affray and murder associated with the playhouses, whose ‘lewde jigges songs and daunces’ were felt to be dangerously attractive to ‘cut-purses and other lewde and ill disposed persons’. Already by February 1580 the authorities had become alarmed by

  unlawful assemblies of the people to hear and see certain interludes called plays exercised by the said James Burbage and divers other persons unknown at a certain place called the Theatre in Holywell in the aforesaid county. By reason of which unlawful assembling of the people great affrays assaults tumults and quasi-insurrections and divers other misdeeds and enormities have been then and there done by very many ill-disposed persons to the great disturbance of the peace…

  Fuelled by drink, prostitution and crime, then, the stage crackled with low life and buzzed with the language and edginess of the street. To be sure, it often churned out mindless drivel, sentimental pap or blatant government propaganda, seamed with bigotry, jingoism and racism. But at its best it could be elevated, explosive and oppositional, and it would leave its mark on the culture of England – and the world – from that day to this.

  THEATRE AS PROPAGANDA, THEATRE AS INVESTMENT

  The government cottoned on early to the potential importance of the theatre for the dissemination of ideas. In her first year as queen Elizabeth had issued a decree controlling the performance of plays; all scripts were subject to censorship, and patronage of the main companies usually depended on leading noblemen with strong government links. It had been Elizabeth’s spymaster Walsingham, for example, who had set up the Queen’s Men, taking the best talent from everywhere: not because he loved the theatre – there is no evidence he ever went to a play – but because he wanted to put the most influential medium of the day to his own use.

  Little is known of Shakespeare’s first patrons, his early contacts and friendships – the obvious things that lead a person to a particular place or employment; but it is certain that at some point in the late 1580s he came to work in London. In the previous twenty-five years there had been a revolution in dramatic style. The plays of his schooldays had been either the traditional mysteries and moralities, or academic tragedies and comedies; in the mid-1580s the rhyming verse of the Queen’s Men had become all the rage. But the rise of a new kind of blank verse during that decade would soon turn the drama into an effective mass medium with appeal across the board. And when Shakespeare hit London the trendsetters were Thomas Kyd and above all Christopher Marlowe.

  MARLOWE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LANGUAGE

  Marlowe was the same age as Shakespeare, and from the same class.
But, unlike Shakespeare, he had been to university. His presumed Cambridge portrait gives you the man: the gold buttons, the expensive slashed doublet with firelicks of red silk, the folded arms and the faintly superior look. Most eye-catching of all is the motto: ‘What nourishes me destroys me.’ A boast, and a forecast. Recruited as a secret agent at Cambridge, Marlowe was a young firebrand with an indiscreet tongue. There are hints, too, of a dangerous and unstable character; described by those who knew him as a man ‘liable to sudden and privy injuries’, he had been implicated in the killing of a man in the streets of Shoreditch. But he was a dazzling talent. A classical translator and poet with a fabulous, effortless lyric sense, a dark irony and black humour, Marlowe was sadistic, iconoclastic, hip. And though Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy launched the new wave, it was Marlowe who ran with it. In 1587 the twenty-three-year-old Marlowe captivated London audiences with Tamburlaine, the story of an oriental Napoleon. He wrote in the new form of blank verse rather than the ‘jigging’ rhymes of the Queen’s Men, at which he sneered in contempt. The new style was a ten-syllable line so flexible and interesting that foreign visitors – even the French! – would compare it favourably to their own: ‘Their plays are in a kind of blank verse which suits an ordinary language better than our metre, and makes some melody. They think it irksome to have the ear continually tickled with the same cadence, and say that listening to heroic verses spoken for two or three hours is not so natural or so pleasing.’