by Michael Wood
But in the sixteenth century ‘our proper measure’ was hard to separate from the religious view of the world. And the religious view of the world was at the centre of the cultural crisis of the age. For that reason, in Shakespeare’s early years in London there raged a great debate on the duty of poets.
As we have seen, Southampton’s circle was tainted with the Old Religion. Southampton himself had been a prize in the struggle between the regime, the missionaries and the Catholic moderates. At this time Burghley had commanded him to marry his own granddaughter: Southampton had pleaded for time, conferred with a priest and eventually refused. It brought him a huge fine of £5000. Years later it was discovered by Elizabeth’s inquisitor, Richard Topcliffe, that Southampton’s confessor and spiritual adviser had been his cousin, the charismatic Jesuit priest Robert Southwell, who had at one time sheltered in the earl’s mother’s Holborn house. This discovery points to an intriguing connection at this formative moment in Shakespeare’s career, for Southwell was distantly related to Shakespeare through the Ardens. But he was also a poet, and it was Southwell who produced the most urgent manifesto for poetry in the early 1590s.
SHADOW LIVES: ROBERT SOUTHWELL
By the time Venus and Adonis was published Southwell was in prison awaiting his trial and execution. But his poems, pamphlets and political tracts were widely circulated among the intelligentsia in manuscript and even in printed form. They were read by everyone from the queen to Burghley, Bacon and their torturer Topcliffe.
Southwell had been in England since 1586, living underground, moving from place to place and trying to ‘bring succour to the faithful’. Hot on his heels, Topcliffe had nearly got him in October 1591 when Southwell and eleven leading Jesuits had met at their safe house close to Stratford at Baddesley Clinton. The next year, staying in London at Southampton House, Elizabeth’s Public Enemy Number One had walked the streets in broad daylight in a black velvet cloak, a saintly Scarlet Pimpernel. Southwell had Hampshire family connections, too, and his track as a hunted man naturally led to the Southamptons at Titchfield.
He was also a central figure in the political debate among Catholics over the question of their allegiance to the queen. It was Southwell who drafted an extraordinary response to the government’s anti-Catholic measures of autumn 1591: An Humble Supplication to Her Majesty, addressed to the queen herself, insisted that it was possible to be both patriotic and a Catholic. Printed in early 1592 at a secret press, it was much read and often admired, although Queen Elizabeth is said to have replied that to do what Southwell asked, to allow Catholics freedom of worship, would be ‘to lay my body at their feet’. It had been easy for those living in safety on the Continent, implacable enemies such as William Allen, to dismiss Elizabeth as an illegitimate heretic; those like Southwell, who were on the ground in England with their lives on the line, were more sensitive to the temper of the English, the perception of foreign threat and the widespread love of the queen. But by then the damage had been done for the English Catholic community.
At the same time Southwell entered into the debate about poetry. Even if he had not been able to change the views of the political establishment, as a poet and writer he was able to influence its literary counterpart. He was also covetous of literary fame, fascinated by the role of poetry in changing hearts and minds. He saw a need for a spiritual poesy in an age of violent, bawdy entertainment in the world of the public theatres, the bear- and bull-baiting arenas and the stews (brothels), and of Renaissance game-playing in the world of the sonneteers.
Southwell wrote many poems, not all of them successful, but some startling in their fantastic and original imagery. Most famous was ‘The Burning Babe’, which Ben Jonson particularly admired, and which Shakespeare used in Macbeth. Printed in 1595, his poems went through thirteen editions in a generation and were counted among the most successful of the age – alongside Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Together they represent the twin poles of Elizabethan devotional poetry, the one to God, the other to Love.
‘MY LOVING COUSIN’: THE MYSTERY OF WS
Southwell was concerned about the role of the poet in what he saw as an Age of Tyrants, a time of persecution like that of the Christian martyrs in the later Roman Empire. His ideas were put down in a remarkable letter that became an influential tract for the times and that has hitherto unexplored bearings on Shakespeare’s biography. For Southwell seems to have urged the rising young talent of the day to write religious poetry. Insisting on their obligation to write spiritual work he wrote:
Worthy cousin, Poets, by abusing their talent, and making the follies, and feignings of love the customary subject of their base endeavours, have so discredited this faculty, that a Poet, a Lover, and a Liar, are by many reckoned but three words of one signification …’
Composed perhaps just before his capture in July 1592, and circulated as a preface to a manuscript collection of his poems, the letter was addressed to his ‘loving cousin’ who, he said, had encouraged him to publish his poetry. His cousin, he asserted, was a far superior poet, but Southwell took him to task over the role of poets in such an age, insisting on their obligation to write spiritual work. In a dedicatory poem to the reader Southwell spelt out precisely what he had in mind: ‘Still the finest wits are (di)stilling Venus’ rose … playing with pagan toys …’ He clearly admired his cousin’s talent, though not his erotic themes. In the end, he concluded, ‘it rests in your will …’.
Is this mere convention? Venus, after all, is at the heart of all love poetry. Or had Southwell read Venus and Adonis in Southampton’s house? Several poets in the early 1590s were affected by Southwell’s plea, most famously the Protestant Edmund Spenser. Thomas Lodge was another: it changed his life’s direction. In the final lines of the letter Southwell smiles about his own ‘ditties’ compared with the much finer verse of his loving cousin:
Blame me not (good Cosin) though I send you a blame-worthy present; in which the most that can commend it is the good will of the writer; neither arte nor invention giving it any credite. If in me this be a fault, you cannot be faultlesse that did importune me to commit it … In the meane time, with many good wishes, I send you these few ditties; adde you the tunes, and let the Meane, I pray you, be still a part in all your musicke.
Although in early editions the addressee is called ‘my loving cousin’, in the one brought out in 1616 (coincidentally or not, just after Shakespeare’s death) his initials are given. They are WS.
SPIES AND INFORMERS
Venus and Adonis hit the bookstalls in the summer of 1593. That spring had been grim, with terrible weather, plague and growing unemployment all contributing to a general disillusionment with the government. Amid rumours of a new Spanish invasion, the prosecution of recusants had intensified. There were disquieting signs of xenophobia, especially against the supposed cosseting of ‘Flemings and Strangers’ resident in London; racism was always bubbling below the surface of Elizabeth’s England. In May a nasty libel was nailed to the door of the Dutch church in London, lumping French and Dutch immigrants together with the Jews (‘Like the Jews you eat us up as bread’) and threatening them with death unless they ‘fly, fly and never return’. Beefed up with allusions to Marlowe’s plays, the libel was signed, a little too transparently, ‘Tamburlaine’. But the power of the state would soon come crashing down on two of Shakespeare’s main theatrical acquaintances and rivals.
Recently lawyers acting for the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, had published Conspiracy for a Pretended Reformation, arguing that religious radicals were conspiring to overthrow Church and State. Orthodoxy was more and more the cry. In 1593 there was a spate of polemical books against Presbyterians and Puritans, and an official drive to root out dissent. Parliament passed a bill to deal with the ‘wicked practices of seditious sectaries and disloyal persons’. As always, literature, publishing and the theatre were among the main targets.
The Dutch libel pointed the finger at Marlowe. In its wake the playwri
ght Thomas Kyd’s rooms were ransacked by the authorities. Their report states that ‘vile hereticall Conceiptes denyinge the deity of Jhesus Christe our Saviour [were] fownd emongst the papers of thos Kydd prisoner’. After which another hand has scribbled in a different ink ‘which he affirmethe that he had from Marlowe’.
Kyd denied any knowledge of the papers, which may have been planted, and attributed their presence to the fact that he and Marlowe had once shared rooms. He was interrogated, tortured, and died from his injuries the following year.
A few days after the ‘discovery’ of these papers Marlowe himself was arrested and examined by the Privy Council. A secret agent in government pay, he had already been arrested once that winter, on the Dutch island of Flushing, on the basis of an informer’s report that he had been forging coins and had expressed an intention to go over to the Catholic side. True or not, there was also the question of his plays. Of his recent shows, Edward II was a portrait of a corrupt court, time-serving courtiers and a weak ruler; The Massacre at Paris was about one of the most controversial events in contemporary history, the pogroms conducted against the Protestant Huguenots. Allegory was a complicated matter taken very seriously by the government. A writer could be faced with the rack, and even execution, for a historical work perceived to have ‘application to the times’. Marlowe was released, but only on a kind of bail: he had to present himself to the authorities daily.
MARLOWE’S MURDER
On 30 May Marlowe went to a meeting at Deptford. Here, within sight of the centre of Elizabethan power, the palace at Greenwich, was an area dominated by government and naval establishments, and many of the grand houses along the river frontage were connected with them. Disembarking at the Watergate – still there today, overgrown and sprouting weeds, washed by the greasy green swell – Marlowe would have walked down a narrow lane to a row of houses along the waterfront. Here a Mrs Bull kept her lodging place: not a tavern, as legend has it, but a government safe house run by a widow who had family connections with the queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.
With Marlowe that day were three men, all government agents who operated on the dark side of Gloriana’s body politic. Nicholas Skeres was a street thug and Ingram Frizer a blackmailer and petty shark, but the third man, Robin Poley, was a major player in the world of espionage, the secret theatre of the Elizabethan age. A former Catholic, he had been the agent provocateur in the most savage of all the Elizabethan government’s stings, the Babington Plot. There were dark stories of male victims falling in love with him, anguished whispers of sodomy, of sex used in entrapment: ‘My beloved Robin (as I hope you are),’ wrote his biggest and saddest catch, Antony Babington himself, in a farewell letter: ‘otherwise of all two footed beings the most wicked’. Marlowe’s sort of man perhaps?
Why the meeting was held is not known, nor whether it was official. Maybe Marlowe meant to flee the country by ship from Deptford. Maybe he wanted Poley to intercede with the Privy Council to take the heat off him. Whatever the reason, the four men ate, walked in the garden and smoked, before tempers flared in the early evening and Marlowe was stabbed between the eyes by Frizer.
It sounds like a professional job: modern assassins are trained to go for the throat or to stab the eyes. But, not surprisingly, the coroner in a naval town decided it was misadventure – an argument ‘over the reckoning’ (the bill) as they claimed at the inquest. The killer was pardoned swiftly and quietly, just as Poley himself had been freed after the Babington Plot. A scribal copy of the intelligence note on Marlowe’s ‘heretical Conceiptes’ was carefully altered by a government official after the event, to tidy the case up. Bureaucracies in a police state are the same everywhere.
Some years later, in As You Like It, Shakespeare put a rather enigmatic comment on the killing into the mouth of the clown Touchstone, who compares himself to the ‘most capricious poet, honest Ovid’ who was exiled for his verses by the emperor Augustus: ‘When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.’
The grim pun on a famous Marlowe line, ‘infinite riches in a little room’, suggests who Shakespeare was thinking about. And with it a pointed hint at the real charge: was it also Marlowe’s plays that had got him into trouble?
Marlowe had been Shakespeare’s first great inspiration. They had come from the same social background and were the same age, but Marlowe went up the fast track via university. Success for him had been so swift, so easy and so big that he may have thought he could get away with anything. A man ‘liable to sudden privy injuries’, perhaps Marlowe had just got caught up in the paranoia of the time. For an artist on the public stage that was easy to do – unless, like Shakespeare, you kept things close to your chest.
POETRY IN A GRAVER VEIN
While the theatres remained closed, Shakespeare may have written The Comedy of Errors, a brilliant reworking of a piece by the Roman comic playwright Plautus, which Shakespeare had probably read in Latin at school. By now he was becoming an expert at his craft and the play is very cleverly plotted; it retained its popularity well into James Is reign. And where some of his early shows, such as Love’s Labour’s Lost, seem over-wordy to a modern audience, The Comedy of Errors still works a treat with its helter-skelter action based on the mistaken identity of two sets of twins (the father of twins himself, Shakespeare made twins the central characters in two of his plays, and pulled it off). Some of the key plot ideas are particularly interesting: shipwrecks, storms, personal loss, parents and children, the reuniting of a family; the potential of tragedy in comedy. These were themes to which he would return compulsively all his life.
He was also working on more non-dramatic poetry. In summer 1593 he had promised Southampton a ‘graver work’ than Venus and Adonis, and on 9 May the following year he duly registered for publication The Rape of Lucrece. The poem was a typical Renaissance humanist reinvention of a classical theme, with perhaps a strand of Christian allegory that we can no longer decipher. Certainly ‘graver’, then – though surely not answering the criticisms levelled at secular poetry by Southwell. The letter of dedication to Southampton was still self-deprecating and classconscious, but its phrasing was now more assured. It also stressed duty, suggesting that he was now in Southampton’s service and receiving money.
Money clearly meant a lot to Shakespeare. His father had been broken financially and driven from office; the son would work hard to restore the family’s fortunes. He might be paid no more than £10 by his patron for a poem; but, long-term, such a relationship might raise very much more. There is a later story that Southampton gave him £1000 for the purchase of a property: unlikely, perhaps, but still, a hint of the rewards that might lie ahead.
THE MAGNIFICENT ELEVEN: THE COMPANY IS FORMED
In the same month that The Rape of Lucrece was registered, Shakespeare, with Burbage, joined a new company formed by the Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon, the company with which he would work for the rest of his career. Along with Edward Alleyn’s Admiral’s Men, they would come to bestride the London theatre world like colossi. The Admiral’s Men did Marlowe plays with Alleyn as the star at the Rose on Bankside; the Chamberlain’s Men had Richard Burbage playing the leads in Shakespeare’s shows at the Theatre in Shoreditch.
The roots of the company went back a long way. Some of the group had been with him in Pembroke’s Men in 1592, some (Burbage, Kemp, Sly, Philips) with Strange’s company in 1590; it is possible that Shakespeare had known John Hemmings in the Queen’s Men back in 1587. Many of them had Warwickshire and Worcestershire connections. As we have seen, after the split of Strange’s company in 1591, Shakespeare had most likely stayed with the Burbages (father James and son Richard, respectively leaseholder and leading actor) in Shoreditch. This was the crucial connection with what would become first the Chamberlain’s Men and then the King’s Men: the greatest acting company in the history of the theatre, which would buil
d the Globe and perform the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and Shirley until the closing of the theatres in 1642 at the start of the Civil War.
In June the theatres reopened and the new company (‘my Lord Chamberlain’s Men’) played alongside the Admiral’s Men for Henslowe at Newington Butts, a mile from London Bridge. The theatre was not a favourite of the actors, not just because of the long walk involved but on account of its insalubrious setting over a sewer opposite the Fishmongers’ company almshouses.
In Henslowe’s account book a line is drawn after 13 June; it marks a watershed in English drama. From that date all his performances were by the Admiral’s Men, probably at the Rose, and relations with the Chamberlain’s Men ceased. Shakespeare, Richard Burbage and the rest of the company went on tour to hone their act after the long lay-off. They played Marlborough that autumn, then came back to London, where in early October their new patron, the bluff-spoken Lord Hunsdon, wrote to the Lord Mayor asking for a licence for his players to continue their occupation of the Cross Keys during the winter. Hunsdon’s letter reveals the cajoling, threats and bribes required:
Where my now company of players have been accustomed for the better exercise of their quality, and for the service of her Majesty if need so require, to play this winter time within the City at the Cross Keys in Gracious [Gracechurch] Street. These are to require and pray your Lordship to permit and suffer them so to do … they have undertaken to me that, where heretofore they began not their plays till towards four o’clock, they will now begin at two, and have done between four and five, and will not use any Drums or trumpets at all for the calling of the people together, and shall be contributaries to the poor of the parish where they play according to their abilities.