In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  Blank verse had come out of native poetry, but was influenced by the Latin line in rhythm and syntax, and loaded with classicisms with which university types like Marlowe couldn’t resist larding their lines:

  As when the seaman sees the Hyades

  Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds

  Only the nobs in the boxes would have known that the Hyades were the seven stars that presaged rain, and that Cimmerian simply meant black (the classical Cimmerii lived in perpetual darkness). But it sounded great.

  So a revolution was taking place not only in the acting companies and the professional playhouses, but in the verse itself. The English language at this time went through a sudden expansion, borrowing from everywhere. And with that came a vision appropriate to such an expansionist time, when ships sailed back to Tilbury and Deptford loaded with bounty looted from Spanish carracks: Yucatan gold and Potosi silver. The stage now could embody the whole globe ‘from the farthest equinoctial line … into the Eastern India’; writers piled on exotic names willy-nilly, plundering their Ovid, and their new maps, for ‘Cubar, where the negroes dwell’ and ‘the wide, the vast Euxine sea’.

  As befitted a violent age, the theatre was full of casual cruelty. But there was empathy in it, too. Although a classic Shakespearean quality, it was possessed by all the great writers of the period and came from their education. Marlowe, for example, allows the penny punters to get inside the head of the Scythian tyrant Tamburlaine with his implacable love and cruelty, and even to feel for his religion:

  By sacred Mahomet, the friend of God,

  Whose holy Alcoran remains with us,

  Whose glorious body, when he left the world,

  Clos’d in a coffin mounted up the air

  And hung on stately Mecca’s temple roof ….

  Above all this, though, are the great set-pieces of the world conqueror. This is what Ben Jonson called Marlowe’s ‘mighty sounding rhyme’:

  Now clear the triple region of the air,

  And let the majesty of heaven behold

  Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.

  Smile, stars that reign’d at my nativity,

  And dim the brightness of their neighbour lamps;

  Disdain to borrow light of Cynthia

  For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth,

  First rising in the east with mild aspect,

  But fixed now in the meridian line,

  Will send up fire to your turning spheres

  And cause the sun to borrow light of you.

  It was the sound that everyone wanted, and that all other artists sought to imitate: the standard by which any aspiring young playwright in London in the late 1580s had to measure himself.

  A YOUNG MAN’S GAME

  The late Elizabethan theatre was an industry with high pressure and a quick turnover. There was a different show every afternoon, and a play might only get three performances before a company pulled it off. Only big hits might get a decent run and perhaps even a revival. So there was a tremendous demand for scripts. It is interesting that during a modern run of 150 shows at the Royal Shakespeare Company only four plays are presented. The theatre impresario Philip Henslowe’s diary reveals the same number of performances in an Elizabethan season but with twenty-eight different plays, half of them new. His players could do as many as fifteen different shows in one month. Obviously, this was only possible in a memorizing culture – so all that learning by rote at school in Stratford would have come in useful.

  So it was a young man’s game with a demanding routine. Rehearsals for the next show took place in the morning, followed by a quick lunch (but no drink – actors’ contracts show that turning up on stage drunk was a sacking offence). The current show would then start at two and ended around five, earlier in winter; with make-up, wigs and costumes off, actors made their way back into town to eat at six or seven in the evening in their lodgings or in an ‘ordinary’, a simple eating and drinking place where they could relax. Along the road back to Bishopsgate there were several ordinaries, of which the Three Tuns at number 39 was typical: long and narrow, with a stable yard stretching back from the road, a small kitchen, a snug in front with a fire and a big shared garden.

  BISHOPSGATE AND THE THEATRE INNS

  Shakespeare’s first known address was close by, just inside the city walls in the parish of St Helen’s Bishopsgate. Here he probably lived through the early to mid-nineties, and perhaps for some time before. It was a tiny parish, a mere 300 yards long with only seventy-three rateable households, conveniently placed for work in Shoreditch. Most of his London is irretrievably gone now, of course, but this area was not destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, and many of the buildings Shakespeare knew survived into the 1850s. Victorian photographs still show sixteenth-century city-scapes, and from this rich archive, together with Tudor and seventeenth-century maps and the detailed guide to the city published by John Stow in 1598, it is possible to bring to life the area of London in which Shakespeare first lodged.

  Walking back in the evening from Shoreditch, just outside the old city on the right you passed the Bedlam hospital for lunatics (the site is now under Liverpool Street Station). Next door was the church of St Botolph (the patron of travellers) with ‘a fair churchyard adjoining the town ditch’, says Stow, ‘upon the very bank but enclosed by a comely wall of brick’. Next to the church gate was ‘a fair inn’, the White Hart, built in 1480 with three storeys overhanging the street. Over the road, on the corner of Houndsditch was the famous Dolphin inn, the London base for carriers from Suffolk and Norfolk and typical of those inns described by William Harrison in 1587, that could ‘lodge and with ease feed two or three hundred people and their horses at short warning, in a manner which would seem incredible’.

  Against the outside wall of the Dolphin second-hand clothing stalls were set up on the stone-paved street of Houndsditch, along with a metal foundry and ‘many shops for brokers, joiners, braziers and such as deal in old linen clothes and upholstery’. A recent influx of ‘baptised Jews’ traded as clothiers and pawnbrokers. They attracted some hostility and were denigrated in one contemporary account as ‘a base kind of vermin’. But the area remained a Jewish quarter, and London’s oldest synagogue still stands nearby. The year after he left Bishopsgate, Shakespeare would write a play about Jews.

  Here outside the gate the sharp growth in population had led to new building encroaching on the ditch: next to St Botolph’s churchyard a causeway led alongside the brick wall to what had recently become known as Petty France. Here lived a community of French Huguenot refugees, crowded into tenements from where (so their neighbours accused them) they polluted the ditch ‘with sewage of the houses and with other filthiness cast into the ditch water which was now forced into a narrow channel and almost filled up with unsavoury things, to the danger of impoisoning the whole city’. So with the billowing smoke from the braziers, the joiners’ dust and clamour, and the smell of sewage, it was perhaps best to cover your nose as you walked through the gate into the city.

  Inside the gate, Bishopsgate Street was filled with a tide of wagons, pack animals and jostling crowds. Lined with three-, four-, and five-storey jettied houses, no street in London was so well furnished with inns, eating places and houses of entertainment. Facing you, says Stow, were ‘divers fair innes, large for receipt of travellers’, the biggest of which were the Wrestlers and the Angel. These were favoured especially by landowners and traders from East Anglia (the richest agricultural lands in England) who lodged here in Bishopsgate right up to the coming of the railways in Victoria’s day A few yards on, there was the Vine, the Four Swans, the Green Dragon, and next door the Black Bull, the famous theatre inn from which carriers rode to Cambridge and wheeled wagons trundled into northern Essex, to Saffron Walden and over the shire border to Hadham and Hertford.

  All these places were typical Elizabethan city inns. You entered through a long gate passage into a big yard surrounded with stables on the ground floor and chambers a
bove. Many were of three storeys, sometimes with an attic floor too. ‘Every man may use his inn as his own house in England,’ it was said in Shakespeare’s childhood. ‘Nowhere in the world are there such inns for cheap good entertainment after the guests’ own pleasure.’

  This was the pre-modern system in every town and large village: your horse would be taken from you, unsaddled, walked, rubbed down, fed and watered; you were given your own room key by the chamberlain, who unloaded your bags and in winter kindled your fire.

  Your room was ‘well furnished with bedding and tapestry’ and you slept in ‘clean sheets wherein no man hath been lodged since they came from the laundress’. For food, you were free to inspect the kitchens and could eat with the host, at common table, or in your private chamber. London inns also had a wide choice of foreign wines, complemented by local beers with weird and wonderful names: ‘huffecap’ (a ‘heady ale’), ‘angels’ food’, ‘dragon’s milk’, ‘mad dog’ (clearly to be avoided) and, most mysteriously, ‘left leg’.

  It was best to choose a place you knew, or one that had been recommended by a reliable source, however, for London inns had a bad reputation for ‘cozening’ or cheating. Country visitors were warned to be on their guard against conmen and cheats, and hosts or room boys who might be in league with robbers. This low-life culture Shakespeare would later bring to life in the tavern scenes in Cheapside in his Henry IV plays: Falstaff’s robbery of travellers at Gadshill is planned from his inn. In a great city, of course, criminality always thrives around places of rest and entertainment. And in just such an inn the country boy from Stratford may have first lodged, paying a penny a night for food and bed without stabling.

  The Bishopsgate inns were also centres of theatrical shows. Most famous was the Black Bull, which Shakespeare would have known and where he may have acted. Early in Elizabeth’s reign it was converted into a theatre inn with a permanent stage, which was still to be seen a century later. Although shows could be staged indoors in the hall or ‘great chamber’, a seventeenth-century plan suggests that here the players used an inner yard. Shows started at around four o’clock, and were announced by the actors with drums and trumpets in the main street, literally drumming up business. The Black Bull had become such a well-known venue when Shakespeare was a boy that John Florio mentions it in his English-Italian phrase book of 1578 (‘Where shal we goe? To a playe at the Bull’). In 1583 it was licensed as a regular London venue for the Queen’s Men and they played here ‘oftentimes’. So if Shakespeare was indeed with the Queen’s Men in the late 1580s, this is where he would have played in London. A little way down Bishopsgate in Gracechurch Street, opposite the main fish, meat and herb markets, were two other famous actors’ inns well known to Shakespeare. The Bell, like the Black Bull, was licensed as a venue for the Queen’s Men from 1583, and the shows of Tarlton and ‘his fellowes’ were long remembered there too. Next door was the Cross Keys, Shakespeare’s most important London venue inside the city, where he may have played with Lord Strange’s Men in 1589, and certainly did with the Chamberlain’s company in 1594.

  So, though almost forgotten now, the Bishopsgate area is entitled to be seen as another of Shakespeare’s theatre neighbourhoods. It was very different in character from the better-known ones of Shoreditch and Southwark. The streets and properties here were clean, well built and well ordered, with good facilities. There was fresh water from a conduit flowing in from the hills above Clerkenwell. Tucked away in the warren of lanes east of the main street were (and still are) the Leathersellers’ hall and the company almshouses. These abutted St Helen’s, Shakespeare’s local church and a former nunnery. Around its courtyard were great merchant houses, of which the grandest was Crosby Place, built in the 1460s. Richard III once lived here, as did Sir Thomas More when writing both his Utopia and his book on that king. Shakespeare, working on his Richard III late in 1592 and using poetic licence rather than historical fact, treats Crosby Place as Richard’s London base, the centre of his plots and secret machinations. He sets two scenes in the house: the death of Henry VI in 1471 and Richard’s marriage to Lady Anne in 1473. Neither event actually took place here: it is just one of those instances where the locality in which Shakespeare lived gave him an idea for scenes in a play.

  Although audiences were smaller here, there were many advantages over Shoreditch: not least that theatregoers were spared the mile walk or ride out of the city on cold winter afternoons when it was dark by the time the show was over. In bad weather the unheated Theatre, situated as it was between the common sewer and the Great Horse Pond, was perhaps a little bleak. Also the resident population of Shoreditch included many poor; here in Bishopsgate were audiences with disposable income. And, not least, the inns could offer better facilities for spectators, including of course access from private rooms in the galleries within easy reach of food, drink, music and the other and varied pleasures of the Elizabethan world.

  How different it must all have seemed from Stratford. A country town could be busy, to be sure, especially on market days and when the big seasonal fairs were held, but this was a great city. Every day from early in the morning the place was full of noise, smell, colour and life as carters delivered their loads of coal, wood, beer, milk and hay, shopkeepers and street vendors drummed up custom, and carriages and the regular pack trains created a Tudor traffic jam as they blocked the streets. This was the cityscape that we can imagine the young Shakespeare encountering when he dropped his bags and settled into his room close by the Bull in Bishopsgate, with the hum of city life rising outside. The start of his London career was propelled not only by the excitement of a new art form, but by the sheer exhilaration of the city itself.

  A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN?

  Years later, in his sonnets, Shakespeare appears to look back in very revealing words on the days when, a diffident provincial from the yeoman class, he first came to London to make his name:

  How careful was I, when I took my way,

  Each trifle under truest bars to thrust,

  That to my use it might unused stay

  From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust

  Shakespeare was a guarded person, who protected himself and those he knew. And here he tells us that he did so from the very start of his career. His character, as we have seen, was shaped by his background, although this is perhaps characteristic of artists for whom outward life is often distanced, subordinated to the intensity of artistic endeavour and expression. But this sonnet also offers a picture of a provincial wary of the sophisticated society in which he now has to move and work, and other examples of this guardedness will emerge later in this story.

  It is even possible that an image of the young Shakespeare has survived. In the John Rylands Library in Manchester is a painting found in a house in Darlington in 1906. It is the portrait of a man done in Armada year, 1588, at the age of twenty-four – the same age as Shakespeare. The young man is not a noble: his doublet is plain pink-red with slashing and there are no fine buttons or ruff: he is plainly of the Tudor middle class. Nothing can be safely said about the personality of the anonymous sitter beyond a suggestion of diffidence and the fact that the face bears a very close resemblance in looks and proportions to the only certain portrait of Shakespeare, the Folio frontispiece. What makes this more than mere conjecture is that the painting came originally from the village of Grafton in Northamptonshire, close to Abington where Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth died. Elizabeth had inherited the poet’s possessions through her mother, Susanna, and the last inventory mentions not only books but ‘goods and lumber’ from Stratford. It is enough of a hint to make it possible that this is indeed the twenty-four-year old William Shakespeare at the start of his career.

  Having a portrait painted was the sort of thing you might do when you got the livery of a lord or were awarded a degree. For Shakespeare, entering the service of his first patron, Lord Strange, might have been such a moment. If the Grafton picture is indeed of him, it d
oes no harm to suppose that, like any successful young Elizabethan man, he bought himself a nice doublet and had his picture painted to send back to the family: proof to proud parents, and to his wife and children, that he was doing well. And whilst all this is pure speculation, the portrait does help us to imagine him at this point in his life and to get rid of the received image of Shakespeare as a balding middle-aged man in a ruff – an establishment figure. Here is a young Elizabethan who could be the artist who would soon write the greatest cycle of plays since the medieval mysteries and the ancient Greek dramas – his early histories, all of which were written in his twenties. Shakespeare looked like this: a young blade, diffident, sensitive, intelligent, witty, ambitious; a provincial poet making his way in the world, a face glimpsed in the seething crowds around the yards and carriage gates of Bishopsgate and Shoreditch.

  THE MYSTERY OF SHAKESPEARE’S EARLY CAREER

  So let us suppose that some time in the winter of 1588–9, Shakespeare joins a company based in London. Three or four years later he emerges as a playwright with several hits to his name; by the end of 1592 he has written his first great character, the villainous Richard III, and his fame is assured. But here’s the mystery: what did he do in between, and with whom did he work?

  It is assumed that his earliest solo plays were written around 1588–90, but nothing is certain. Precious clues come from the title page of what may be his earliest play, the Roman tragedy Titus Andronicus. When this was published in 1594 its title page named three companies, including that of Lord Strange (who had become Earl of Derby the previous year), which had successively put on the play: ‘The Earl of Derby, Earl of Pembroke, and Earl of Sussex their Servants’. If this order is right, it is possible to sketch a very tentative picture of his early career that goes something like this: