In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  This fascinating document suggests that the actors wanted a temporary winter move from Shoreditch to a converted inner yard or sizeable ‘great chamber’. From that time, except for provincial tours in 1596 and 1597, the Chamberlain’s Men would be based in London. On 15 March 1595 Richard Burbage appeared as joint payee with Will Kemp and William Shakespeare, ‘servants to the Lord Chamberlain’, for ‘plays performed before Her Majesty’ at court on 26 and 28 December. This is the first document that specifically associates Shakespeare with an acting company, and the first mention of his name with respect to a theatrical performance. It proves he was now a leading member of Hunsdon’s company; he would stay with them, and the King’s Men, which they later became, until he retired from the stage altogether.

  ‘MOST EXCELLENT FOR TRAGEDY’: THE FIRST MASTERPIECES

  A stable and experienced company, assured political backing (for now at least) and a permanent theatre: it is all that any dramatist would desire today. It is no surprise that from this time Shakespeare spread his wings and his art widened and deepened. In London he staged shows at the Theatre, in the royal palaces and the lawyers’ halls, and sometimes gave private performances at noble houses; he also played at town halls and guildhalls up and down the land. He was probably contracted to deliver two plays a year, giving the company formal consent that he could not publish them without the express consent of his ‘fellows’.

  Just turned thirty, Shakespeare was on a creative high. Over the next three years he wrote a string of brilliant plays, moving from being a straight entertainer to an explorer of deeper themes. He was now a thinking artist enriched by life, age, experience, politics and broader reading. In this second phase of his career we begin to see his seriousness, and his interest in the drama of personality which would culminate in Hamlet. Alongside these concerns he was continuing his project on English history, which he now took beyond the level of any of his contemporaries in three great history plays: Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV.

  Richard II, with Burbage as the king, added a new dimension to his writing. Expressing himself in wonderful lyric poetry, Shakespeare was now presenting politics as a kind of morality play and the theatre as a source of moral power. Here we can see the beginnings of a cunning and conscious public artist exploring the contradictions between the ‘king’s two bodies’ – the office and the person – with a ‘conceit’ that made the likes of the Earl of Essex ‘wondrous merry’. The deposition of Richard, a weak king, was a dangerous topic and had to be handled with very great tact: the first three printings of this, one of his most carefully written plays, do not include the deposition scene. It was a tale easily capable of being understood as political allegory, and it attracted great interest: Robert Cecil, Burghley’s powerful younger son, was invited to a private show at a London house in December 1595. Around the same time Shakespearealso remade an old Queen’s Men show on King John, a very anti-Catholic play whose rhetoric he removed in a systematic and perhaps revealing way in order to open up his characteristic dual viewpoints and present on stage the clash of opposites.

  But not all his tragedies were about history. Romeo and Juliet is a young man’s play about love and death, adolescent angst and suicide. Shakespeare may have staged it in some form by late 1594 or early the following year; it was in print by 1597 and then revised by the author in collaboration with his performers at least until the publication of a second quarto in 1599. It was, and still is, a scintillating show full of energy and movement: masques, torch-bearers running on and off, and the ever-popular stage fights. The plot is driven by the fateful series of misunderstandings and coincidences that propel the drama to its tragic climax. The dominant feelings experienced by the audience are the oppressive heat of a Verona summer, the emotions being ratcheted up, the whizz-bang exhilaration of speed and clash, and, of course, the intensity of the lovers’ passion. This sexually charged enactment of adolescence, which explains its emotional appeal to modern teenagers, was brilliantly conveyed in the recent film by Baz Luhrman. Has anyone other than Shakespeare ever dramatized so comprehensively the experience of adolescence?

  Romeo and Juliet was a tremendous success, which had an instant effect on the imagination of audiences and the theatre world. Among the many literary references to it from the late 1590s, the critic Francis Meres declared that ‘Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent … for Tragedy’.

  FAIRIES AND MECHANICALS

  Shakespeare was also, of course, a great comic writer. Around the same time, in 1595 or 1596, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was played, perhaps before the queen at court in Greenwich, for a wedding in the Stanley family. It was a new play with several sources, including the recent Guy of Warwick play in which Oberon, king of the fairies, wakens Guy with fairy music. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a characteristic and deceptively clever mix of light and almost dark, with typical reflections on the irrational power of Eros, Blind Cupid: a theme Shakespeare followed right to the end of his career. The play contains some wonderful courtly poetry mixed with hilarious low-life scenes involving a bunch of ‘mechanicals’: Shakespeare is always unerring in his observation of lower-class people, though the fun he pokes at them is never devoid of affection. But the comedy has a bitter-sweet edge, and the profundity is put in the hands not of the nobles, but of the weaver ‘bully Bottom’, the amoral fairies with their disdain for humans (‘what fools these mortals be’) and especially that creature of the old Warwickshire countryside, Puck, Robin Goodfellow.

  If we shadows have offended,

  Think but this – and all is mended –

  That you have but slumber’d here

  While these visions did appear.

  And this weak and idle theme,

  No more yielding but a dream …

  This is the first of the author’s many reflections about theatre as a metaphor for existence: the world as a stage. It is also the first of his questionings of the insufficiency of art itself. ‘The best in this kind,’ says Theseus of the acting profession, ‘are but shadows.’ And, in a curiously precise echo of Southwell,

  The lunatic, the lover and the poet

  Are of imagination all compact …

  Shakespeare had struck gold. Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are about as exhilarating and magical as theatre can get. The two plays had an extraordinary effect on the theatre culture of the day, influencing each other, Shakespeare’s later plays and the whole contemporary network of written language and speech. They showed the world what he could do. And, more important, they showed Shakespeare himself what he could do.

  FOOLS OF TIME: THE PASSION OF ROBERT SOUTHWELL

  Just as A Midsummer Night’s Dream was being staged in the New Year of 1595, the final act of another drama was being played out – a drama of which Shakespeare could not have failed to be aware. In February, after two and a half years in jail, Southwell was tried before Lord Chief Justice Coke. The Jesuit was the epitome of reason, while the psychopathic state inquisitor Topcliffe raged. The verbatim record shadows Shakespeare’s later explorations of power, conscience and cruelty:

  SOUTHWELL: I am decayed in memory with long and close imprisonment, and I have been tortured ten times. I had rather have endured ten executions. I speak not this for myself, but for others; that they may not be handled so inhumanly, to drive men to desperation, if it were possible.

  TOPCLIFFE: If he were racked, let me die for it.

  SOUTHWELL: No; but it was as evil a torture, of late device.

  TOPCLIFFE: I did but set him against a wall.

  SOUTHWELL: Thou art a bad man.

  TOPCLIFFE: I would blow you all to dust if I could.

  SOUTHWELL: What, all?

  TOPCLIFFE: Ay, all.

  SOUTHWELL: What, soul and body too?

  Inevitably, though he continued to protest his loyalty to the queen, Southwell was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Another kind of theatre in Elizabethan England, public executions were
highly ritualized events intended to terrify and intimidate. After the dragging on a hurdle through the streets, the last-minute remonstrations, the calls for recantation and the declarations of faith and loyalty, came the dreadful sequence of torture and butchery, which began with the victim only partly hanged and therefore still alive. This is the kind of thing Shakespeare wrote about in Julius Caesar:

  To cut the head off and then hack the limbs

  Like wrath in death and envy afterwards …

  Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;

  Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,

  Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds:

  Aggression was at the heart of Shakespeare’s work, and at the heart of his time. Despite months of torture, armed with the techniques of meditation taught by his order, Southwell went through his terrifying ordeal with steely will: one of the ‘fools of time’ who ‘die for goodness, who have liv’d for crime’ as Shakespeare put it later in one of his sonnets.

  The resonance of Southwell’s tale reached to the very top. Mysteriously, his high-ranking Catholic friends – or sympathizers, such as Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy – had an audience with Elizabeth the night before his death, to convey to her Southwell’s solemn oath that he intended no treason against her. After his execution they saw her again, to show her, of all things, ‘a book Southwell wrote about the duty of poets’ – the text of Southwell’s plea to his cousin WS on the true role of poets. She was interested in poetry and books, wrote sonnets herself, and had translated Boethius and possibly even Seneca; she respected literary people. When she read it she is reported to have shown ‘signs of grief’.

  A TRAITOR TO THE CAUSE?

  Did Shakespeare listen to Southwell? Shakespeare read everyone of course; as we have seen he was a magpie, and his borrowings usually tell us about his writer’s craft, rather than his personal belief. There is a tendency these days to overstate his interest in, and use of, Catholic texts, and we should perhaps not overplay this, interesting as it is. However, such public ordeals of conscience were bound to affect writers, just as they would do today. As Shakespeare implies in Sonnet 124, Southwell and the other Jesuit martyrs were ‘fools of time which die for goodness, who have lived for crime’, and in his plays and poems there are numerous echoes of Southwell’s poetry, especially in shows written or revised in the mid-1590s, such as Titus and King John. It is particularly interesting that Shakespeare had access to some texts available only in manuscript (had he perhaps obtained them from his Billesley kinsman John Trussell, who claimed to be Southwell’s literary executor?). Some individual usages are notable. For instance, Shakespeare’s borrowing of the very unusual verb ‘candies’, the congealing of ice on water. In the Sonnets, too, Shakespeare perhaps remembered Southwell’s graphic poems on lust as a ‘swallowed bayt’ that destroys the soul. And ten years on, with a long memory and great powers of recall, Shakespeare may have been thinking of the reflection on birds in a cage and the mystery of things found in Southwell’s Epistle of Comfort when he wrote the tremendous speech at the climax of King Lear. Above all, it seems certain that in Macbeth, Shakespeare was echoing the surreal imagery of Southwell’s poem ‘The Burning Babe’ (‘but newly born … a pretty babe all burning bright did in the air appear … such floods of tears did shed’) when he wrote:

  And pity like a naked new born babe

  Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim horsed

  Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

  Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye

  That tears shall drown the wind.

  Shakespeare’s babe is not the Christ child, but Pity. But the image is the same: the naked baby, the storm, the tears. Great poets often have a peculiar and sustained interest in a particular lesser poet (Samuel Daniel is another obvious example with Shakespeare). In Southwell’s case the irony is that the lesser poet may have deliberately set out to play such a role. But unlike Southwell, Shakespeare had an open mind. He also read the work of the great Protestant preacher Henry Smith, published in 1593 by his friend Richard Field. Southwell and Smith make a fascinating pair of complementary literary influences: from opposing sides doctrinally, both write about power and conscience and both are literary models of great power. Southwell was influenced by English and Italian religious poetry; Smith by the Bible and Ovid. What Southwell showed was that the debate about the nature of the poet in the 1590s involved everyone, from all walks of life and across the whole spectrum of religious belief.

  However, Southwell’s plea to fellow poets to write religious poetry seems to have been rejected by Shakespeare. Later in his career he was criticized by Catholic underground writers in terms that suggest he was betraying the cause. One tract off a Catholic secret press a few years later gives a list of Shakespeare plays and poems, and rejects his agenda with a specifically religious theory of tragedy:

  Of Troylus faith, and Cressid’s falsitie,

  Of Rychard’s strategems for the englishe crowne,

  Of Tarquins lust, and lucrece chastitie,

  Of these, of none of these my muse nowe treates

  Living his double life between London and Stratford, he went his own way as a playwright for the public theatres, secular and humanistic. Of course, there were good pragmatic reasons to do so. But could he no longer believe in the religious universe espoused by men such as Southwell and his own father? John Donne, another former Catholic, would speak of a time when all coherence was gone. In the greatest phase of his art, Shakespeare would explore what that incoherence meant.

  THE QUEEN AND THE TORTURER

  The tale of Robert Southwell introduces us to another person in the gallery of figures from Shakespeare’s London whose real lives shadow the imaginary worlds of his drama: Elizabeth’s inquisitor, Richard Topcliffe. A torturer, seducer and blackmailer, Topcliffe was so well known that his name went into the language as a verb for the sadistic breaking and humiliating of a prisoner. Topcliffe appears in the letters and lives – and fantasies – of playwrights such as Jonson and Munday, students like the Middle Temple lawyer John Manningham, and even the poet John Donne (‘a Topcliffe would have ravish’d him away/For Saying of our Ladies Psalter’). He is a figure who takes us into another reality of Gloriana’s body politic, one which co-existed with the splendours of the English Renaissance, a time when torture reached the statute book and became an important part of Elizabethan policy; when it is estimated that 35,000 people died in prison or on the scaffold.

  Sixty-three years old in 1595, but still possessed of an animal magnetism, Topcliffe was descended from a well-to-do family in Lincolnshire. Born a Catholic, he became a rabid hunter of papists, and one with direct access to the queen. When he captured Southwell (his biggest catch) and took him to his own house in the Bridewell, he wrote to Elizabeth in pathological gibberish to enlighten her about the forms of torture he intended to use, for her benefit describing his victim stretched with spiked wrist bands and writhing as if in a country dance, a ‘trick at Trenchmore’:

  ‘I have him here within my strong chamber in Westminster …. Upon this present taking of him, it is good forthwith to enforce him to answer truly and directly … if your highness’ pleasure be to know anything in his heart, to stand against the wall, his feet standing upon the ground, and his hands but as high as he can reach against the wall, (like a trick at Trenchmore) will enforce him to tell all … It may please your majesty to consider, I never did take so weighty a man …’

  Topcliffe is usually portrayed as an outsider – an aberration. In fact, for thirty years he was close to the Crown; a royal servant with special access, licensed by Elizabeth herself, to whom he wrote fawning letters (‘… to my Goddess on earth …’). He was a loyal servant. He may have gone too far at times, and was eventually pensioned off, but until then he was one of them. Topcliffe was also involved in scandal over a play called The Isle of Dogs, which resulted in playwrights including Ben Jonson being arrested and theatres closed. By a stra
nge coincidence, he traced his descent back to the historical Hubert de Burgh, the sinister torturer in Shakespeare’s King John, which was written around the time of Southwell’s execution. Did Shakespeare know that, one wonders?

  Some of Topcliffe’s deeds of extortion through blackmail became proverbial. His destruction of the FitzHerbert family, by colluding with their stepson to have his stepfather killed and the estate confiscated, was one of the worst of the time, and strangely resembles the tale of Edmund in King Lear. After double-crossing the stepson, Topcliffe helped himself to several thousand acres of prime land in Derbyshire. And it is in the tale of Topcliffe’s ruin of the FitzHerbert family that we get the first appearance of a story that found its way onto the stage. The daughters of the house prepared milk for him one morning and he found a spider in the cup. Seeing the spider, the man who could watch the dissection of a living human being with frenzied elation, dissolved into paranoid hysteria.

  … a foul spider was found by Mr Topcliffe in his milk prepared for his breakfast by 2 or 3 women in the house whose husbands fathers and friends had been lately committed to prison for their treasons … Bassett would needs persuade Topcliffe that it was not a spider but a humble bee. But Topcliffe told Bassett that if he did find the leggs and if Bassett would find the wings then he would believe that it was a humble bee …

  Shakespeare memorably used the image in The Winter’s Tale, when the paranoid tyrant Leontes is about to have his wife and child killed:

  There may be in the cup/A spider steep’d …

  I have drunk and seen the spider.

  Though the saying may already have been a proverb, perhaps this is another echo of the real-life stories we can still glimpse behind Shakespeare’s texts?