In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  Falstaff’s appeal is not difficult to see. There was an atmosphere of stasis and disillusionment at the end of the old queen’s reign, and here was a show that hit the spot psychologically: corrupt politicians, bloodless princes and puritanical judges were contrasted with the full-blooded life of a true-hearted Englishman. It was an image of themselves that the audiences loved, whether high-born or low-born. There was much nostalgic harking back in Shakespeare’s day, and in a time of anxiety and change the show magically conjured up old England. But it had a very hard edge of reality too, for it was anchored in real events of great contemporary relevance: civil war, rebellions on the Celtic fringe, and the suppression of a northern revolt, which would have recalled to many minds the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536 and the Northern Rebellion of 1569. In the Henry IV plays the Percy family in particular are in the forefront, as they had been in 1569; and the northern rebels are lied to and betrayed by Machiavellian politicians, just as they had been by Henry VIII. Everyone in the audience knew this to be the reality of politics and ‘honour’, that ‘mere scutcheon’, as Falstaff calls it.

  So what the government’s ‘readers’ called ‘application to the times’ was more obvious to a contemporary audience than to us now. But the Henry IV plays work on many levels; they are also a haunting psychological story of fathers and sons, in Hollywood terms a maturation tale. Prince Hal’s surrogate father, Falstaff, is the prince of misrule, a fat knight joking, drinking and whoring. Hal’s real father, King Henry IV (whom Shakespeare himself perhaps played), is saturnine, weighed down by guilt about his usurpation of the throne and also by his sense of duty to God and his people. His son eventually grows up and rejects the underworld life inhabited by Falstaff and his friends, as is foretold in one of the greatest scenes in drama:

  FALSTAFF: … banish not him thy Harry’s company: – banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.

  PRINCE HENRY: I do; I will.

  But although Falstaff may be a braggart and a liar, he is life incarnate – as we see, for example, in the scene when, called to military service, he leaves the Boar’s Head tavern in Eastcheap, always ready to blow his trumpet, even to his old companions:

  FALSTAFF: Pay the musicians, sirrah. Farewell, hostess; farewell Doll. You see, my good wenches, how men of merit are sought after: the undeserver may sleep, when the man of action is called on. Farewell, good wenches: if I be not sent away post, I will see you again ere I go.

  DOLL: I cannot speak; if my heart be not ready to burst – Well sweet Jack, have a care of yourself.

  FALSTAFF: Farewell, farewell. [Falstaff exits]

  HOSTESS: Well fare thee well. I have known thee these twenty-nine years, come peascod-time, but an honester and truer hearted man – Well, fare thee well.

  BARDOLPH [at the door]: Mistress Tearsheet!

  HOSTESS: What’s the matter?

  BARDOLPH: Bid Mistress Tearsheet come to my master.

  HOSTESS: O, run Doll, run; run good Doll, come. She comes blubberedfn1. Yea, and will you come, Doll?

  fn1 ‘blubbered’ means a tear-stained face

  This is great writing of real people’s speech: for example, the precision with which Mistress Quickly dates a decades-old meeting to the time when peas are podding (when the itinerant pea-pickers come to town, as Shakespeare would have remembered). We know Falstaff is a rogue, but Quickly’s judgement is affectionate – ‘an honester or truer hearted man’ is the author’s guide to how to see him – and it explains Hal’s fascination with him. Falstaff is a great stuffed piece of life.

  Shakespeare wrote greater plays and finer verse and prose, but he never surpassed the comedy of Falstaff’s scenes in Cheapside and Gloucestershire. The passages involving Falstaff at the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, for instance, with Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, are marvellously observed counterpoints to the scenes of the great deeds of history, the actions of kings and armies. Then there is Falstaff’s old friend Justice Shallow, a country JP who, Falstaff tells us, spent a lecherous youth in the brothels of Turnmill Street in Clerkenwell: a man who when ‘he was naked looked for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife. A was so forlorn, that his dimensions to any thick sight were invisible, a was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey and the whores called him mandrake Shakespeare’s knowledge of the brothels of Southwark and Clerkenwell is, to say the least, accurate in its local colour. It is amazing to think that the time when he was scripting Part 1 may have been the months immediately after his son’s death, and that Part 2 was written during the following year.

  THE AUTHOR’S MESSAGE TO HIS AUDIENCE

  The published text of Henry IV Part 2 also lets us eavesdrop on the brouhaha, which was evidently very considerable, over Shakespeare’s traducing of the Cobham family’s ancestor Sir John Oldcastle. In response, Shakespeare’s enemies commissioned a play by Anthony Munday. Presented in autumn 1599 at the Rose, The True and Honourable History of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle, the Good Lord Cobham was designed to set the record straight. The preface showed that it was specifically intended to counter Shakespeare’s portrayal:

  It is no pampered glutton we present,

  Nor aged counsellor to youthful sins;

  But one whose virtues shone above the rest,

  A valiant martyr and a virtuous peer.

  The preface ended with a straight attack on Shakespeare’s fraudulent portrayal of Oldcastle:

  Let fair truth be graced,

  Since forged invention former time defaced

  This is remarkable evidence, not only of the author’s propagandist aims but of the imaginative hold that Shakespeare’s character had already exerted over contemporary audiences by 1599.

  Shakespeare, however, had clearly felt the need to backpedal. At the end of the printed text of Henry IV Part 2 is a page of additions, which suggests the way that he and his company attempted to defuse the controversy. In the first epilogue the author speaks straight to the audience, apparently commenting directly on the controversy:

  First my fear, then my curtsy, last my speech.

  My fear, is your displeasure; my curtsy, my duty; and my speech, to beg your pardons. If you look for a good speech now, you undo me, for what I have to say is of mine own making and what indeed I should say will, I doubt [fear], prove mine own marring. But to the purpose, and so to the venture. Be it known to you, as it is very well, I was lately here at the end of a displeasing play to pray your patience for it and promise you a better. I meant indeed to pay you with this; which if like an ill venture it come unluckily home, I break, and you, my gentle creditors, lose. Here I promised you I would be, and here I commit my body to your mercies. Bate me some [let me off], and I will pay you some, and as most debtors do, promise you infinitely: and so I kneel down before you, but indeed, to pray for the Queen.

  Shakespeare does the same sort of thing at the end of The Tempest when the ‘author’ stands on the stage and speaks directly to the audience about their relationship. The audience, remember, knew him as both actor and author. He provided their entertainment, and the metaphor he used here for their relationship was commercial – an ‘ill venture’ was an unsuccessful trading enterprise. So the audience were the creditors of the playwright, and he was the debtor who always promised more, and kept in credit by delivering it.

  But hidden in the clever showman’s patter there was still an apology. Shakespeare said he had recently produced something ‘displeasing’ (in some eyes) that had lost him credit, and he begged forgiveness. Perhaps these lines were actually delivered on stage by Shakespeare himself, who had played the part of Henry IV.

  The second epilogue, spoken by a dancer, was even more to the point. It suggests that the saga rumbled on for months after Cobham’s death and the removal of Oldcastle’s name from the play (note also the showbiz promise of a sequel – Henry V is clearly already in the planning):

  One word more, I beseech you. If you be not too cloyed with fat
meat, our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France; where, for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already a be killed with your hard opinions; for Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man. My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you good night.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental!

  REBUILDING THE FAMILY: SHAKESPEARE BUYS A HOUSE

  In the months after his son’s death, although he still continued to work in London, Shakespeare clearly felt the need for some practical and emotional input in Stratford. Early in 1597 he made the first move in his gradual accumulation of property and land in the town and surrounding area. Like the coat of arms, it may have been something he had contemplated for a while, but perhaps Hamnet’s death had focused his mind. Anne and the girls (Susanna was thirteen and Judith, the surviving twin, twelve) were perhaps still living in Henley Street with William’s parents and two of his brothers, Richard, twenty-three, and Edmund, who had just turned seventeen. (William’s sister Joan, now twenty-eight, was probably already married to the hatter William Hart; his brother Gilbert, now thirty, appears this year as a haberdasher in St Bride’s in London.) It would have been a crowded household. On 4 May 1597, perhaps soon after the first sonnets were written to the ‘lovely boy’, William signed the papers to purchase his own house.

  In Church Lane, on the corner opposite the old guild chapel, stood New Place, one of the biggest houses in Stratford. It could hardly have been closer to his old haunts: the schoolroom where he had spent so much of his young life was across the lane out of the side door. New Place had been built by Hugh Clopton, the medieval benefactor of the town, who was also responsible for the ‘great and sumptuose bridge’ over the river, and the guild chapel with its lavish cycle of paintings; a shining example of the old-style civic-minded Christian countryman. The present vendors were the Underhills, who had fallen on hard times. An important Catholic family recently hammered by the recusancy laws, they had been caught up with the Ardens in the Somerville Plot back in 1583. So the house had had more than one significant previous owner. And now, despite their fall in fortunes in the late 1570s, it was the Shakespeares’ turn.

  What William got was a late fifteenth-century half-timbered town house with five bays and a frontage of 60 feet. A front gate led into a courtyard, then a rear block and a barn. As an Elizabethan estate agent might have put it, the property benefited from a well and ten fireplaces, and, most important, a garden 180 feet long with other land beyond available by separate negotiation. So like a successful showbusiness writer today, he bought a large house with a private garden. The place had not been lived in for a while and was semi-derelict. It needed major renovation and the record of the corporation’s purchase of surplus stone from him in 1597–8 suggests that this work took a year or so and that he may not have moved the family in for quite some time. In fact, his cousin Thomas Greene was still living in it as late as 1609, so Shakespeare may have rented part of it out to his relations. The deed of purchase says it cost £60, but the true purchase price was evidently concealed in the sale documents. In fact the house had gone for £140 in 1563 when Clopton’s descendants sold it, and £110 in 1567 when the Underhills bought it. It is very likely, then, that the face price was only half what was actually paid.

  Whatever the price, he could afford it. He was probably on a contract to write two plays a year for at least £20 and maybe earned twice that with other script chores. He also made money as an actor, as a shareholder and from private commissions. So he probably took home at least £60 a year, maybe more with work on the side and money lending. These are not huge sums: he is often portrayed as money-grabbing, but this is overstated. His property and land amounted to nothing like the holdings of some of his fellow actors; men such as Henslowe and Alleyn spent money like water; Condell owned inns and tenements in the Strand. But after ten years in showbiz he had made some money and had financial security.

  There were still loose ends, though. His mother and father were still trying to recover their property, Asbies, at Wilmcote from his mother’s brother-in-law, Edmund Lambert. The land amounted to about eighty acres and may have been intended as William’s inheritance from his mother. Mortgaged to Lambert in the black days of John Shakespeare’s business collapse twenty years earlier, in the early 1590s William’s parents had tried to get it back by associating their name with their eldest son. In November 1597, no doubt backed by William’s money, but without naming their famous son this time, John and Mary made a formal complaint against Lambert, in which they claimed the property was still theirs by right, and that …

  the said John Lambert is of great wealth and ability, and well friended and allied amongst gentlemen and freeholders of the county … and your said plaintiffs [John and Mary] are of small wealth and very few friends and alliances in the said county

  Was this true? After all, only a year before the Shakespeares had claimed to the Garter Herald that John was a man of substance and property. Both the Herald and the Lambert cases were special pleading of course, but there may have been an element of truth in their plea that they were of only ‘small wealth’. John and Mary were still living in Henley Street, probably with Anne and the children, who had not yet moved into New Place, and possibly with William’s younger brothers. But despite the loss of Asbies, William had retrieved the family’s position by the money earned from his theatre success. In his eyes, perhaps this was the most important thing: after all his father’s disasters he had rebuilt the family’s fortune.

  ELIZABETHAN BEST-SELLERS: THE 1590S’ TOP TEN

  In London that winter the success of Falstaff saw Shakespeare creep into the lower reaches of the literary best-sellers. Plays at that time were not regarded as literature and no publisher expected to make much money on a play quarto. For Shakespeare, it was writing plays, acting and doing writing jobs on the side, together perhaps with money-lending, that made his money – not publishing. But in 1598 he had a modest breakthrough, in print as well as on stage. His recent hits Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Falstaff plays had cemented his status as the leading dramatist of Elizabethan London, and his name now began to appear on play quartos in order to sell them. In 1598 Love’s Labour’s Lost was published, ‘corrected’ by the author; it was the first play to be published with his name on the cover. The quarto of Romeo and Juliet says the show was ‘often (with great applause) played publicly’, and a second quarto soon afterwards would breathlessly advertise a better text, ‘newly corrected augmented and amended’. At this point other dramatists began to echo his plays (especially Romeo and Juliet) and contemporary writers paid tribute more frequently to his stage work rather than to his printed poems.

  The numbers of play quartos sold were not great. Henry IV Part 1 (seven printings) was his best, followed by Richard III and Richard II at five each. These were outstripped by Mucedorus, of all plays (a comedy of 1598 once attributed to Shakespeare; nine printings), and, less unexpectedly, by Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. A print run of a couple of thousand would be good going.

  So not much money was to be made from play quartos: Venus and Adonis outsold Shakespeare’s best-selling play by four editions. A top ten best-seller list for the period shows us that the favourite reading of most Elizabethans seemed to be a mixture of scripture and self-help spiritual manuals. The date in each case is the first surviving edition:

  The Psalms in English Meter 1583 (124 editions in 25 years)

  The Book of Common Prayer 1583 (66 editions)

  The Bible (Bishops and Geneva versions) 1583 (63 editions)

  The New Testament 1583 (34 editions)

  Bayly, The Practice of Piety 1612 (36 editions)

  Parsons, Book of Christian Exercise 1584 (27 editions)

  Dent, A Sermon of Repentance 1582 (20 editions)

  Henry Smith, The Trumpet of the Soul 1591 (17 editions)

&nb
sp; Dering, A Short Catechism for Householders 1580 (17 editions)

  Dent, The Plain Man’s Pathway 1601 (16 editions)

  The Elizabethan book-buying public was God-fearing and Protestant. And some of these books enjoyed big sales, even by today’s standards. A single print run of the Psalms or the Book of Common Prayer might be 2000 or 3000; the former went through 124 editions in twenty-five years. The theatre audience was a different matter, with a dozen venues and four main theatres; London tickets sold in one venue could top 10,000 a week. For a playwright, quartos of plays meant only a few pounds on the side. Shakespeare was working in a different marketplace with a different audience.

  HARD TIMES IN STRATFORD

  Back home in 1598, a severe food crisis had developed. Stratford had been devastated in the mid-1590s by two fires, which Puritan preachers connected with the slow pace of change to God’s true law in this still ungodly town. The town’s economic problems had been aggravated by bad harvests, much rain and unseasonal temperatures with late snow. The burial register shows that the death rate was up; many people succumbed to diseases associated with malnutrition. There were complaints about those who hoarded ‘like wolves’, looking after themselves while the town’s 700 paupers waited for the corporation dole. A ‘note of corne and malte’ that February listed the holdings of the better off who were storing more malt than was necessary for personal need. William Shakespeare, still of Henley Street, was named among them, but it was a common tale at that time. That autumn the disasters in Stratford led the town to petition the Privy Council for relief from the latest subsidy voted by Parliament, and an old family friend of the Shakespeares, Richard Quiney, came to London.