In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  No more than now should we take a government’s pronouncements on such matters at face value. But it is an interesting question how they thought this might be done, for by now many black people, baptized Christians, were living as citizens in London, Bristol and other cities. For example, in the records of the small parish of St Botolph’s outside Aldgate, among French and Dutch immigrants and one East Indian (from today’s Bengal) we find twenty-five black people living in Shakespeare’s lifetime. They were mainly servants, but one man lodged at the White Bell next to the Bell Foundry in Whitechapel Road and perhaps worked there (was he a West African skilled in bronze casting?). Some are given high-status Christian funerals by their employers, with bearers and black cloth. Among the names are these:

  Christopher Capperbert [Cape Verde], a blackemoore

  Suzanna Pearis a blackamoore tenant to John Despinois

  Symon Valencia a blackamoore

  Cassangoe A blacke A moore tenant to Mrs Barbor

  Easfanyyo a neagar servant to Mr Thomas Barbor a merchaunt

  Robert a negar

  A Negar whose name was suposed to be Frauncis. He was servant to Mr Peter Miller a beare brewer dwelling at the sign of the hartes horne in the libertie of Eastsmithfield

  Among later names we find ‘Anne Bause a Black-more wife to Anthonie bause trompetter’; ‘John Come Quicke, a Blacke-Moore, servant to Thomas Love a captaine’; and, saddest in this list, ‘a blackamoore woman that died in the street, named Marie’.

  Forgotten lives and forgotten histories. Sometimes these stories cross over with other sources: a woman, for example, who was concerned about the health of her black servant’s little daughter took her to Simon Forman. In his notebook Forman diagnosed the little girl as ‘cold of heart’: evidently she was suffering from profound depression. Human stories, as always, tell a different tale from official papers. But this too was the reality of Shakespeare’s London, and it can hardly have escaped him.

  So black people may well have been part of his daily life around St Helen’s Bishopsgate or Silver Street, and his knowledge of them could have deepened over the twelve years or so since he had written the part of the conventional stage villain Aaron the Moor in his early play Titus Andronicus. But had he come to know any black people intimately? It is possible, as we have seen, that he had had a black mistress. But that he could have met at least one noble high-ranking Moor is well documented.

  In 1600 an embassy from Morocco came to London and stayed half a year. The Moors’ temporary neighbours were fascinated by their daily routine of prayers and, then as now, foreign cooking and eating customs occasioned much comment, not all of it particularly open-minded. The publisher of Leo the African’s History dedicated the book to the ambassador, who during his stay sat for an Elizabethan portrait painter. The work, which still survives, is inscribed: ‘Abdul Guahid the ambassador of Barbary, 1600, aged 42’ and presents a powerful image of a noble Moor. As it happens, the Chamberlain’s Men played for the ambassador during Christmas 1600, so Shakespeare would have seen Abdul Guahid, and may even have met him.

  The noble Moor, and indeed the child with a frozen heart, could both have been part of his experience. Such hints, brief as they are, suggest a surprisingly rich hidden narrative for black people in Elizabethan England and help us see in a different light those government calls for repatriation. Clearly Shakespeare knew more about black people and racism than modern critics have cared to admit, and than we give him credit for. And attracted by the tale in Cinthio’s Hundred Stories, he decided to write a play on the subject.

  A LYNCHING OFFENCE

  Shakespeare’s commitment to Othello is shown by its wonderful quality, and by the care with which he subsequently revised it after the promulgation of the Act to reform the abuses of players in 1606. Its enduring power is shown by its effect wherever it has been performed since. In his day it was played at court, and on tour in the provinces: John Rice’s Desdemona in Oxford in 1609 moved the audience to tears. Later audiences, however, didn’t always like what they saw. A seventeenth-century English critic sneeringly saw the moral of the play as ‘a caution to Maidens of quality without their parents consent to run away with Blackamoors’. In the early nineteenth century US President John Quincy Adams famously felt that ‘the fondling of Desdemona with Othello onstage is disgusting’ and took the great moral lesson of the play to be ‘that black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the laws of Nature’. Audiences in the pre-Civil War South also found the play ‘Unfit to be permitted in any southern state, revolting, an outrage, the duty of every white man to resent; if Shakespeare the writer of the play were caught in any southern state, he ought to be lynched for having written it.’ Even in 1950s’ Britain, audiences were shocked that Paul Robeson should kiss Peggy Ashcroft on stage. In the liberal first decade of the twenty-first century the issues it raises are still everywhere, as was shown by a powerful recent TV film transposing Othello’s role to that of London’s first black commissioner of police. In 1602 Shakespeare was holding up a mirror to human nature. And in it, once again, he shows us ‘the stranger’s case’.

  ‘THIS MOST BALMY TIME’: THE DEATH OF ELIZABETH AND THE ACCESSION OF JAMES

  By 1602 journalists, pamphleteers, gossip columnists and astrologers were all hanging on Elizabeth’s failing health. It was still forbidden to speculate in public about the succession. But everyone knew it would soon be the end of an age, and the older generation hoped for a change for the better. Astrologers and horoscope-makers were increasingly tempted to make prophecies: there were fears, hopes and, in some quarters, dire forebodings. The mood was captured in many poems of the day. There was much talk of James VI of Scotland becoming king: indeed, over the border they had been waiting for this moment. From Scotland came all the right noises. But still Elizabeth refused to commit herself.

  Shakespeare’s company’s last performance for the queen was at Richmond Palace on 2 February 1603. On the 19th the theatres were closed in anticipation of her death, which occurred at the palace on the 24th. There was no tribute to her from Shakespeare. Is this significant? At least two fellow writers noted his silence: one, indeed, bluntly begged him to put pen to paper, but he did not. Shakespeare does appear, however, to comment on the event in a sonnet to his friend, the young man. Theirs was still, apparently, a close friendship – a long loving friendship now – which had endured separation for a time. For several years it had been intense, passionate – a tearful homoerotic intimacy. But things were calmer now, and the poem he now wrote linked the personal and the political – the inner and the outer worlds. Elizabeth, often identified with the chaste goddess of the moon, Diana or Cynthia, had finally endured her eclipse, but the aftermath had confounded all the prophets of doom. Internal references suggest that this may be Shakespeare’s response to Elizabeth’s death:

  Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

  Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,

  Can yet the lease of my true love control,

  Suppos’d as forfeit to a confin’d doom.

  The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur’d,

  And the sad augurs mock their own presage:

  Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d,

  And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

  Now with the drops of this most balmy time

  My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,

  Since spite of him I’ll live in this poor rhyme,

  While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes.

  And thou in this shalt find thy monument,

  When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.

  After forty-five years of religious and political conflicts and economic troubles, Elizabeth’s death carried with it a weight that is hard for us to imagine now. Hopes of peace in ‘this most balmy time’ reflect the first months of 1603, when the surprisingly smooth transition to James’s rule took place. What might take the mode
rn reader aback is the pointed reference to ‘tyrants’ at the end of a sonnet which may be about the death of the old queen.

  THE KING’S MEN

  Meanwhile, the wheels of patronage were turning fast. The Chamberlain’s Men were the premier acting company, with influential friends – the Pembrokes in particular seem to have been anxious to take the lead in driving James’s early cultural agendas. Almost immediately, on 19 May, Shakespeare, Burbage, Philips and the rest were given letters of patent to be the king’s acting company, in the kind of language of which Polonius would have heartily approved:

  freely to use and exercise the Art and faculty of playing Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, interludes, Morals, pastorals, Stage plays and such others like they have already studied … for the recreation of our loving Subjects as for our Solace and pleasure when we shall think good to see them … as well within their usual house called the Globe, as also within any town halls or moot halls or other convenient places within the liberties and freedom of any other City, university town, or borough whatsoever ….

  So they were now royal servants, the King’s Men, their future assured – a balmy time indeed. In those early days of James’s reign, many believed or hoped that religious change and renewal were imminent. The new king was a Protestant, but he had Catholic forebears and a Catholic wife. A true philosopher king, he hated religious extremism on both sides, and there were rumours that he would return England to Catholicism, or at least grant freedom of worship. On the other side, a group of Puritan clergy presented James with a petition on his way to London, hoping he would oversee further reform of the Church. Within the Church itself the climate encouraged many sermonizers not to rock the boat but to maintain the status quo. In court this cracking open of a closed shell saw those outcast or ignored by Elizabeth – people like Southampton, Shakespeare’s first patron – rise again, looking for new opportunities.

  In this mood many English poets saluted James with congratulatory poems, but again, not Shakespeare. After Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, he, unlike his peers, had not composed eulogies or funeral elegies for the great and good, and he did not break that habit now. But many poets felt that the event marked the beginning of a new cultural climate, one in which religious verse would be highly praised. A number even switched from secular to sacred or philosophical poetry, and there was a veritable outpouring of religious verse in the period 1603–5. James himself had a track record as a patron of poetry. At his accession he republished his book Basilikon doron, which had first appeared in 1599, with instructions to his young son Prince Henry on poetry, specifically the poetry of virtue. Such moves announced James to the London literati as a man of high philosophical and poetic ambition.

  PLAGUE IN SILVER STREET

  The king made his leisurely way down from Scotland during April and May 1603, staying at noble houses en route. But as he reached London, news came of a terrible outbreak of plague, the severest for ten years. That spring the theatres were closed. Across the city the parish books filled with page after page of burials as the death toll mounted to 1000 a week. In Shakespeare’s tiny parish the first deaths came in June, rising to a climax in the hot weather of August. The royal musician Henry Sandon was buried on the 1st, along with his daughter Susan, the painter William Linby and his wife Margaret, the goldsmith Thomas Ellis and a dozen servants who lodged and worked in this corner of the city. Many children died, too. There were eighty-five deaths in August and September alone, in a parish of only 100 or so taxable houses. It was the devastation of Shakespeare’s community. The minute books of the Barber Surgeons describe the cancellation of feasts, the money given ‘for reliefe of the most miserable poor and needie persons that it shall please almighty god to visit’.

  In such a climate it is dangerous and pointless to stay in town if you have the money and a place to go. Shakespeare and the company moved out to stay by the river at Mortlake, where Philips had recently bought a house. This was to be their base for the next few months. James had been forced to delay his ceremonial reception in London while plague still raged. That autumn he made a stately progress through Hampshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, ending up in October with the Pembrokes at Wilton, where he remained until early December. There the King’s Men, too, seem to have stayed for some time, earning a large fee of £30 for entertainments which included a play that was probably As You Like It, enacted before James on 2 December. Among the guests was Nicolo Molin, the Venetian ambassador.

  So, as might be guessed from those sonnets written in 1603, Shakespeare still had close contacts with the Pembroke family. Wilton was in effect the alternative court during the plague months, and a glittering circle was there that winter. Mary Herbert herself was still going strong: the famous patroness of poets, editor of her brother’s Arcadia and author of a play that Shakespeare would in due course use in manuscript for his own Antony and Cleopatra. The King’s Men’s prolonged stay at Wilton included a show to the town (a recent discovery in Trowbridge Record Office reveals that the burgesses paid £6,5s to the company). This detail does much to cement the picture of a continuing relationship between Shakespeare and Pembroke. The earl and his brother were great theatregoers and masquers, and loved to dress up and participate in courtly tilts and shows. The King’s Men would fit in a masque for the marriage of Pembroke’s brother the following year, between performances of Measure for Measure and The Comedy of Errors.

  In London, plague deaths declined with the onset of colder weather. At the almshouses in Muggle Street the inmates sat round their wood fires and charcoal stoves and tried to stay warm. The city was silenced by a blanket of snow. On Christmas Day ambassador Molin made his way back from Wilton and wrote home: ‘I got to London on Friday evening. No one ever mentions the plague, no more than if it had never been. The city is so full of people that it is hard to believe that about sixty thousand deaths have taken place.’

  But with the Globe still closed, the company stayed out of town and relied for the time being on the patronage of the court. James’s first winter in England was spent at Hampton Court, where the provision of entertainment was shared by the King’s Men and two other leading companies. Upwards of thirty plays were made ready for the royal choice, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and other staples, such as The Fair Maid of Bristol. Although chief writer for the company, and perhaps also what we would call a director, Shakespeare was still acting, too: solid, middle-of-the-road parts, such as John of Gaunt, Henry IV and the Ghost in Hamlet. This winter he also played in Sejanus, by his rival Ben Jonson. It was a flop, and there is a certain pleasure in realizing that Shakespeare must have known what it was like to be in one!

  ‘WHAT WE SEE DO LIE’: HOW SHAKESPEARE FELT?

  Around this time Shakespeare wrote a small cluster of sonnets that, though framed with his customary reserve, seem to offer fascinating circumstantial details of his life, and even hints about his personal feelings. Following the sonnet about Elizabeth’s death, these refer pointedly to politics – reinforcing the idea that in his private poems he was not writing mere artistic exercises, Petrarchan or otherwise, but putting down what he really felt. In the 154 sonnets there are in fact very few mere exercises (even the last two, versions of the epigram from the Greek Anthology, are chosen for their relevance to the tale). Most, on the contrary, are serious in a way that suggests he was mainly writing for himself, to get things off his chest, and, though some of them circulated among his friends, it is by no means certain that he showed every one to other people. In these sonnets from the momentous year of 1603–4 he surely says exactly what he wants to say.

  Two in particular focus on the ceremonies for James’s entry into London, and it is very interesting to see why this should be. Now a King’s Man, Shakespeare was not merely an actor but a royal courtier, a Gentleman Groom of the Most Honourable Privy Chamber. And for the royal entry Shakespeare, Burbage and their colleagues were issued with a length of scarlet woollen cloth, listed in the account book of the r
oyal wardrobe. In this classconscious society the sumptuary laws were very strict about which cloth could be used by which social rank, and wool was definitely for commoners. Along with stablemen, gunners, cooks and even royal bakers, three acting companies are listed: Alleyn’s Admiral’s Men, Beeston’s Queen’s Men, and the King’s Men with Shakespeare at the top of the list. To each went ‘scarlet red cloth: 4 and half yards’. This has always been understood simply as a gift, but the yardage was the amount needed for a gentleman groom’s livery jacket and breeches in the king’s livery. One might speculate that the famous Folio portrait of Shakespeare – which, along with his funeral bust, is the only certain image of the poet – shows him in that scarlet livery jacket with its lozenge pattern of gold braid on the sleeves, its gilt buttons and its stiffened collar.

  So did Shakespeare actually walk in the procession with the other royal servants? As we know that the actors played roles in the procession (Edward Alleyn, for example, made a speech to the king as the Genius of London), it is likely that Shakespeare and his colleagues also had a ceremonial function in their fine scarlet, perhaps with a speech to declaim at one of the great ornamental gates erected on the procession route.

  Thomas Dekker, who scripted the pageant that accompanied James’s grand entrance, described the crowds: ‘a sea of people so the street could not be seen: women and children crowding every casement’. The Venetian ambassador, Nicolo Molin, recorded his impressions in a letter home: