In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  In the first half of 1599, while the Globe was under construction, they were still using the Curtain in Shoreditch. Henry V was first played here – this, then, was Shakespeare’s ‘wooden O’. At this time the company lost an important member, their clown Kemp. A stand-up comic, a virtuoso song and dance man and an unpredictable and uproarious ad libber, Kemp had been the darling of the groundlings. But Shakespeare and the rest of the company were moving towards higher-class shows with a more refined and fixed text, and it may be that ‘artistic disagreements’ were the cause of Kemp’s departure. All we know is that he left before the Globe opened, with words of bitterness and recrimination.

  By the end of the year, down on his luck, he decided to raise money by dancing his famous jig all the way to Norwich. Kemp had been a draw in towns right across England, and his sacking made news. He later complained of ‘lyes’ told of him by ‘an impudent generation of ballad makers and their coherents’, among whom may have been perhaps some of his erstwhile colleagues, if the epilogue to the tale of his jig is anything to go by: ‘My notable Shakerags … for that I know you to be a sort of witles beetle-heads, that can understand nothing, but what is knockt in to your scalpes … I knowe the best of ye by the lyes ye writ of me.’ Was it Shakespeare who had sacked him? Whatever happened, such a crowd-puller was not easily replaced. Shakespeare’s two new plays for the season of 1599 had no part for a clown. The show must go on.

  A KILLING IN SOUTHWARK

  The first night at the Globe seems to have been set for a date in June, and that month Henslowe’s takings next door at the Rose dipped alarmingly. As the weather got hotter, there was tension in the streets. On 6 June, while the painters were putting the finishing touches to the Globe, a vicious fight took place between two of Henslowe’s playwrights, John Day and Henry Porter. A collaborator of Chettle’s, Day was a ‘rogue and base fellow’ in some eyes. Porter had been a leading writer for the Admiral’s Men for the previous two years or so; an early collaborator with Jonson on Hot Anger Soon Cold and author of vigorous English social dramas, such as The Angry Woman of Abingdon. He had real promise: the previous year the critic Francis Meres had placed him alongside Shakespeare in a group of the best contemporary comedy writers.

  That day, according to the coroner’s jury, ‘moved by the instigation of the Devil, and of malice aforethought’, the raging Day stabbed Porter in the left side ‘with a certain sword, in English, a rapier’. Porter died the next morning – another talent of the age gone. Day got off with manslaughter and capitalized on it over the next few months with topical shows such as The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green in which the duellist Captain Westford, who had been in Spain, was said to be ‘well practised in the desperate fight of a single rapier’. Perhaps Day had been more skilled in such fighting than the unfortunate Porter. But clearly in Southwark all human life was there, and it was swiftly turned into art.

  NEW THEATRE, OLD RIVALRIES

  Recent evidence suggests that the Globe theatre opened on 12 June with Julius Caesar, after careful calculations by an astrologer to hit on the most auspicious opening day and hour. On the old calendar that day was the summer solstice, the shortest night, and it coincided with a new moon (which the almanacs judged ‘best to open a new house’). A more practical consideration was that a high tide would spare the posh people in the audience from getting their clothes dirty on a long walk across smelly mudflats.

  Grander and more elaborately decorated than the Theatre, the Globe was soon a magnet for Londoners and foreign visitors. Julius Caesar, for example, was seen on 21 September ‘very ably acted by a company of about fifteen’ by a Swiss traveller, Thomas Platter of Basle. It was Shakespeare’s twenty-first play and marked ten years at the top. A grim political piece, it touched on major talking points of the day: how to tell a tyrant from a just ruler? How and when to justify assassination? Somewhat unremitting in its lack of comic relief, it was lit up by brilliant scenes between Brutus and Cassius that used, but surpassed, Euripides’s parallel scenes in his Iphigenia. Gallingly for the self-proclaimed classicist Jonson, it was everything he aspired to write.

  The Globe’s opening refuelled old showbusiness rivalries. The Chamberlain’s Men led with their strongest shows; six months later, faced with a declining share of box-office receipts, Henslowe and Alleyn cut their losses, left the Rose and moved north to the new Fortune, near Cripplegate where they would rebuild their audience and mount a new challenge. But with more theatres and bigger audiences, a younger generation of playwrights was now vying for prominence, and the pace of artistic ambition began to quicken in London’s theatre world.

  Throughout this time Ben Jonson had been working for Shakespeare’s company, but he had his own ideas about what poetry should do. Comedy, he thought, should be ‘neere the times’, and in the autumn he made his bid for leadership of the avant-garde in London’s theatre world. At the same time a young Middle Temple lawyer, John Marston, writing for a boys’ company, the Children of St Paul’s, came out with a darkly comic satire called The Malcontent. Chapman, the translator of Homer, was competing too, and soon the rules of the game were shifting away from Shakespeare’s history- and comedy-dominated drama of personality to social satire and rhetorically florid, classically influenced tragedy of state. No doubt this was to do partly with artists’ responses to their own society and partly with changing tastes and fashions, but this working out of rivalries within the new wave gives a terrific insight into Shakespeare as a writer responding to trends. For under commercial pressure, with a big investment at stake, his company were soon wheeler-dealing, head-hunting and even pirating other companies’ scripts. In this atmosphere, late in 1599, the War of the Poets began.

  THE BOYS’ COMPANIES AND THE WAR OF THE POETS

  At the turn of the new century the craze for boys’ companies in indoor theatres caused even Shakespeare and his colleagues to glance nervously over their shoulders. With Jonson and Chapman as their poets, a remarkable troupe of boy players acted with a charm and grace that seems to have made them more attractive than their adult rivals. They also offered vocal and instrumental music, for which they were specially trained. And sex appeal too: the playwright Thomas Middleton advised the London gallant ‘to call in at the Blackfriars, where he should see a nest of boys able to ravish a man’. Puritan sermonizers, needless to say, were shocked. But there was good acting to be seen, too: Ben Jonson himself praised the power of little Salathiel Pavy, only thirteen when he died, who for three years had been ‘the stage’s jewel’. A foreign visitor from Germany in 1602 spoke of a preshow of music from an organ, lute, mandolins, flutes and violins, and of a boy who sang so delightfully that the nuns in Milan could not excel him: ‘we have not heard his equal in all our travels’.

  ‘What, are they children?’ Hamlet asks with a twinkle. In reply Shakespeare made Rosencrantz drily dismiss the ‘eyrie of children, little eyases [an obscene pun – ‘eye-arses’], that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for’t’. But he was worried: ‘These are now the fashion, and so berattle the common stages – so they call them.’ (The ‘common stages’, of course, meant Shakespeare and his company.) At the centre of it all was the furrow-browed Jonson. The butt of much barbed satire, he never forgot the violence of the quarrel in which he and John Marston came to blows.

  The matter dated back to September 1599, when the twenty-three-year-old Marston, then still a lawyer at the Middle Temple, was making his name as a combative satirist and pamphleteer. It began with a mocking representation of Jonson on stage. But Jonson too liked a fight – after all, he had killed a colleague in one. His new play Every Man Out of His Humour opened at the Globe at about the same time; in it he attacked the kind of romantic comedy at which Shakespeare excelled, and announced his own theory of art and satire.

  What Shakespeare felt about this is not known, but young Marston, who greatly admired him, went after Jonson, mocking his slowness and his pretensions to learning with a clever lawye
r’s wit. Over that autumn and winter Marston’s Histriomastix (‘The Actor-chewer’) was performed by Children of St Paul’s at the Cathedral theatre. In it, Marston dismissed Jonson as a ‘heavy translatting-scholler’ who looked down on the common sort, sucked up to the judiciary and charged a hefty £10 a play. Some writers might have thought that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But Jonson had a thin skin and he wrote a bitter retort: it was all ‘black vomit’, ‘excrement’, ‘base filth motivated by malice’, and the actors who performed the plays of his whippers were a bunch of ‘servile apes’.

  So this was the new climate: metropolitan wit, with lashings of exuberant, over-wordy satire. It was not Shakespeare’s preferred arena, but he felt he should respond to this shift in taste and may have begun his own foray into satire, Troilus and Cressida, around this time. But first, between January and late March 1600, he put on As You Like It at the Globe, probably a revised text of a show first staged the previous year. It was taken from a French romance set in the Forest of Ardennes, which becomes the magical Arden of his childhood, complete with the old resident hermit of legend: the leafy place of exile where they lived ‘like the old Robin Hood of England … in the golden world’. The company had a new clown now, the singer Armin, a goldsmith’s apprentice who played a Jonsonian Touchstone. As a nod to the new wave, Shakespeare inserted the melancholic satirist Jacques (which literally means ‘privy’), but Jacques’s gripes are left behind by brighter, lighter spirits – especially, as so often in his comedies, by the women, who have all the best lines.

  According to a later acting tradition, Shakespeare played the aged Adam, but he perhaps doubled as the Warwickshire yokel William. He was by now well known to his audiences as both author and actor, so everyone would have appreciated the joke.

  TOUCHSTONE: How old are you friend?

  WILLIAM: Five and twenty, sir.

  TOUCHSTONE: A ripe age. Is thy name William?

  WILLIAM: William, sir.

  TOUCHSTONE: A fair name. Was’t born i’the forest here?

  WILLIAM: Ay, Sir, I thank God.

  TOUCHSTONE: Thank God – a good answer. Art rich?

  WILLIAM: Faith sir, so-so.

  TOUCHSTONE: Art thou wise?

  WILLIAM: Ay Sir I have a pretty wit.

  TOUCHSTONE: Art thou learned?

  WILLIAM: No sir

  Touchstone then shows off William’s lack of learning with a quick flash of Latin pedantry: ‘… ipse is he. Now you are not ipse, for I am he Therefore tremble, and depart.’ Shakespeare was no longer afraid of being mocked for his ‘small Latin’.

  And the ‘war’ went on. Marston was next, with Jack Drum’s Entertainment in the spring of 1601. Jonson had now left Shakespeare’s company to put on Cynthia’s Revels with the Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars. Shakespeare’s next show, Twelfth Night or What You Will, with Armin as the clown Feste, was played at the Globe in early 1601. It was Shakespeare’s Ovidian riposte to Jonson’s criticism of romantic comedy in Every Man Out of His Humour. This was romantic comedy combined with social satire and touched by a bitter-sweet melancholy: a tale of lost twins, mistaken identity, gender bending and cross-dressing (an area that Shakespeare always found a very satisfying and intriguing source of comedy) with the battle of the sexes thrown in for good measure.

  As its first audiences recognized, the model was the Latin comedy of Plautus; but Shakespeare’s play was in a different league of sophistication. It also contains a series of great songs. Twelfth Night represents the peak of Shakespeare’s festive comedy but with an edge, especially in the merciless (and, to us, unsettlingly cruel) deconstruction of Olivia’s Puritan steward, Malvolio. This is part of a minor but persistent theme in the play, with its jibes at extreme Puritans and Brownists, an early sect of radical nonconformists. Puritans and curates were clearly not his – or his audiences’ – favourite people.

  The aftermath of the War of the Poets would rumble on for the next two or three years. It was during this time, when the vogue for satirical drama was at its height, that the Chamberlain’s Men became alarmed enough to purloin one of their rivals’ scripts. The company were short of this sort of stuff – it did not, after all, play to Shakespeare’s strengths, and Jonson had gone to a rival outfit – so they resorted to bare-faced literary piracy. The Children’s company had cheekily performed the Chamberlain’s Men play The First Part of Jeronimo; so they retaliated by procuring Marston’s Malcontent, a very topical show in its tilts at court immorality and intrigue, the prevailing atmosphere of the end of Elizabeth’s reign. The Chamberlain’s Men answered the charge of theft by claiming that the book of the play had been mysteriously lost and then found. Intellectual property rights were hard to assert in Shakespeare’s theatre world. As we would say, that’s showbiz.

  IRELAND: A REAL WAR

  But back in 1600, hanging over the quarrels on stage was an altogether bigger dissension. The critical political situation was worsened by several tensions in the body politic, primarily the continuing uncertainty about the succession and the colonial war in Ireland. In the charismatic figure of the Earl of Essex – the English Achilles, as the poet Samuel Daniel had called him – both these strands came together. And they came at the end of a decade of discourse about Ireland from writers as varied as Edmund Spenser (author of The Faerie Queene, who lived there and wrote a tract called ‘The Present State of Ireland’) and John Donne (who in his Elegy no. 20 wrote of ‘Sick Ireland, with a strange war possessed’). Playwrights, too, were now using history to touch on the Irish question: for instance, George Peele in his Edward I, and a lost play about Henry I performed by the Admiral’s Men in 1598, both looked at the beginnings of English empire in Ireland. In his history cycle, especially Henry IV Part 1, Shakespeare also tackled past English wars with Celtic neighbours. Elizabethan audiences were attuned to such nuances and could make the topical connection.

  In August 1598, at the battle of the Yellow Ford, the Irish nationalist Earl of Tyrone had defeated the English forces and captured their key fort in Ulster. In autumn the rebellion had spread to the province of Munster, with talk of ‘shaking off all English government’, Ireland’s ‘Norman yoke’. In response, Elizabeth had appointed a new military commander and dispatched him with reinforcements, and in January 1599 had filled the vacant post of vice-regent with her favourite, Essex. It was in Essex’s vice-regency that Shakespeare’s play on a foreign war, Henry V, had been staged at the Curtain and the Globe. In it the chorus likened the 1415 campaign in France to that of ‘the General of our gracious Empress’, Essex, in Ireland. Something in this didn’t please, for the next year the play was published with all of the choruses cut. In his critique of militarism in Henry V, put into the mouths of the common soldiers, some have seen Shakespeare’s misgivings about Essex, his awareness of growing public alarm at the war in Ireland, and a disillusioned ambivalence about the reasons behind, and the consequences of, English empire building. ‘What if the war be unjust?’ ask the famine-stricken soldiers before Agincourt. The soldiers in 1415 had been treated as badly as Elizabeth’s Irish army conscripts had been for the last twenty years, and now maimed Irish veterans were to be seen everywhere on the roads of England.

  Essex failed: the unauthorized pact he made with Tyrone caused fury in London, where Elizabeth saw such mediation as an insult to her honour and authority. At the end of September 1599, Essex returned from Ireland. At ten in the morning he burst unannounced, ‘full of dirt and mire’, into the queen’s room at Nonesuch Palace, where he found her ‘newly up’ in a state of undress, ‘hare about her Face’. His political judgement and his personal conduct now combined to damn him. Placed under house arrest and denied access to the queen, he was tried by his peers and stripped of his titles and office, although cleared of treason. But his dramatic and irretrievable loss of favour pushed the increasingly desperate Essex to make a rash bid for the crown, hoping to exploit the worries over the succession. And in February 1601 the poets found themselves
living out in real life Jonson’s maxim that theatre should be ‘neere, and familiarly allied to the time’.

  THE ESSEX REBELLION AND THE DEPOSITION PLAY

  Essex’s rebellion of February 1601 was preceded by an amazing incident that, if nothing else, reveals the power that was believed to reside in the theatre. On the 5th the conspirators had a meeting with members of Shakespeare’s company and persuaded them to put on Richard II, which featured the deposition of the monarch, the following Saturday afternoon. These were very dangerous waters: the play was sufficiently sensitive to have had the deposition scene cut in no fewer than three printed quartos. The theme had been particularly controversial since the publication in 1599 of a book by Sir John Hayward that told the same story. It had been dedicated to Essex with a very pointed phrase: ‘great thou are in hope, greater in expectation of a future time’.

  Hayward seems to have intended no treason, but he nearly died for it. Just how seriously such things might be interpreted is shown by an abstract in the state papers from the government’s investigation of the book. Like a CIA ‘reader’ in the Cold War, the examiner concludes that Hayward had:

  selected a story 200 years old and published it, intending the application of it to this time, the plot being that of a king who is taxed for misgovernment, and his council for corrupt and covetous dealings for private ends; the King is censured for conferring benefits on hated favourites, the nobles become discontented, and the commons groan under continual taxation, whereupon the Kings is deposed, and in the end murdered.