In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  The investigators interviewed the actors, among them the labourer William Harrison, who said that in their stagings of Shakespeare they had ‘acted from printed books and nothing was added’. So these were what the censor called the ‘allowed texts’, the printed Quartos of the plays published over 1608–9. The playing of Pericles before Catholic audiences is especially interesting because it also appears soon afterwards in a booklist at the English Jesuit College at St Omer in France, where such plays were performed by the students in full costume with scenery. It would appear, then, that Pericles was seen as some kind of mystery play or saints’ play in which Shakespeare explored the themes of patience and redemption. How far people saw Christian allegory in it is another matter, but, coupled with the overt themes of purity and corruption, the epiphany of the virgin goddess Diana of Ephesus is particularly striking. The German Protestant Martin Luther had condemned ‘those who would turn Diana into the Virgin Mary’, whereas Christian humanists had argued that Jupiter, Apollo, Diana, Christ and Mary were but names for the many powers of the ‘one god and one goddess’. ‘Sacred things must needs be wrapped in fable and enigma,’ wrote one sixteenth-century humanist. ‘But for you, since Jupiter, the best and greatest god, is propitious to you, when I say Jupiter, understand me to mean Christ and the true God.’

  In this light the apparition of Jupiter in Cymbeline and of Diana in Pericles, or the thunder of Apollo’s oracle in The Winter’s Tale, take on a tantalizing ambiguity, the meanings of which we can no longer pin down. Shakespeare’s last plays are a radical remix of ideas in which almost anything goes: tragedy and comedy, high life and low life, rhetoric and street language, the sacred and the profane, ritual and riot. And in this new world of words, he is trying to work in ideas about religion in the broadest sense. Or perhaps we should say the concepts behind religion – love, redemption, the soul. By now we are a long way from the mystery plays: but at times in the dramaturgy, the symbolism and even the language of his late plays, we feel as if we have come full circle. God could no longer be named on stage, so use the gods. And again, these do not look like the habits of mind of a Protestant.

  Coincidence or not, it was now that the historian John Speed revived his attack on Shakespeare for the Oldcastle slanders, linking him with the Jesuit Robert Persons as ‘the papist and his poet … ever feigning’. Although this comment was made specifically in reference to that controversy, it may carry a wider implication. Were there still people who felt that Shakespeare had not abandoned the spirit world of his ancestors, the old English world of pre-Reformation Christianity? Indeed, as late at the Civil War, a generation on, radical pamphleteers would lump his plays in with the sort of ‘prelatical trash’ read by seminarians and royalist crypto-Catholics. Apollo or no Apollo, they knew a hawk from a handsaw.

  WRITING FOR BLACKFRIARS: THE MOVE TO AN INDOOR THEATRE

  When the theatres finally reopened the King’s Men found themselves with not only the Globe but a new indoor theatre too, which offered Shakespeare major new artistic challenges. The Burbages, it will be remembered, had first obtained the lease on the Blackfriars in 1596, hoping to pioneer a comfortable, warm, indoor theatre with artificial lighting, only to fail to get planning permission and be forced to sublet. Bad winters (and most of them were) hit takings at the draughty Globe very badly; as Jonson said in Poetaster, ‘this winter has made us all poorer than so many starved snakes; nobody comes at us’. Then after several frustrating years, in August 1608 they had recovered the Blackfriars. The winter of 1609–10, with the plague at last at bay, was therefore their first opportunity to use the venue, and they formed a new group of shareholders, who included Shakespeare, Hemmings, Condell and Sly.

  The theatre stood in a fashionable district on the opposite side of the Thames a couple of hundred yards from St Paul’s, and since the streets round about were stone-laid, it was accessible to playgoers even in the worst weather. The neighbours were a cut above those in Southwark. The Royal Wardrobe was next door, the Master of the Revels near by. The Cobhams and the Hunsdons, court officials and the royal treasurer, were among the important figures who had houses and gardens in or near the old monastic buildings.

  The Blackfriars monastery, which had been dissolved by Henry VIII, occupied a plot 125 yards square with a large garden, all now divided up and leased out by property developers. On the west wall the Apothecaries’ hall butted on to Water Lane; to the east, on St Andrew’s Hill, was the Royal Wardrobe; to the north lay Shoemakers’ Row and Carter Lane, the latter with its famous coaching inns, the Mermaid and the Bell, where the poet’s Stratford friends stayed. To the south a series of lanes led down a hundred yards to the river and the water taxis at Blackfriars stairs.

  The theatre had been constructed in the old frater of the monastic buildings. It was quite a small space, only 46 feet wide by 66 long; but the very high ceiling accommodated two galleries for spectators, and it was lit by big candelabra hanging over the stage. The setting was intimate in size and acoustics, and beautiful lighting effects were possible. A contemporary poem remarks on the frisson of the ‘torchy Friars’ – heady entertainment for Temple lawyers before a meal of caviar, oysters and artichokes, and then a boat over to the more visceral entertainments of Bankside.

  The intention was to use the Blackfriars as the company’s winter home and the Globe in the summer. The new theatre would prove a great investment: although it had fewer seats, it attracted a posh audience and was twice as profitable to shareholders as the Globe. A city financier claimed in 1612 that the King’s Men ‘got, and yet doth, more in one winter in the said great hall by a thousand pounds than they were used to get on the Bankside’.

  This was probably true, and was certainly resented. Constantly over the next twenty or thirty years ‘persons of honor and quality’ among the neighbours petitioned to close it on the grounds of rowdiness, fire risk and obstruction. At showtime, they complained, the streets around Ludgate were so clogged with theatregoers and ‘heckney-coaches’ that ‘inhabitants cannot come to their houses, nor bring in their necessary provisions of beer, wood, coal or hay, nor the tradesmen or shopkeepers utter their wares, nor the passenger go to the common water stairs without danger of their lives and limbs’. These inconveniences were said to last ‘every day in the winter time from one or two of the clock till six at night’. But Shakespeare and friends now had ‘persons of honor and quality’ to support them, too, and the Blackfriars stayed open. It would see the last great phase of the poet’s career, when his final masterpieces were written with the indoor theatre in mind, with the magical effects in music, lighting and staging that it offered.

  SECOND THOUGHTS: REWRITING LEAR

  The Blackfriars demanded a different approach to dramaturgy, staging and scripting. A fresh look at the whole repertoire was called for: plays that had long been shown in the huge and rowdy open-air theatres needed editing, cutting and restaging. All this reminds us that Shakespeare’s texts were not fixed but developed over time, and probably had done so since the start. Love’s Labour’s Lost, for example, had been published ‘newly corrected and augmented’ back in the 1590s. No fewer than sixteen of his plays are known only through the Folio text published after his death, so their textual history is a blank. The rest all show signs of revision. Some are very short and may have been cut, like Macbeth. Others reveal careful reworking, which may have been done with the Blackfriars in mind.

  It would appear that King Lear was rewritten for the indoor stage in the winter of 1609–10, although there is still some argument about this. A minority think the revision took place after Shakespeare’s death; others have suggested that some changes were made to appease the censor. Censorship certainly played its part, but some of the differences between the 1608 and 1623 versions are hard to account for in any other way than as authorial. For example, Shakespeare cut the mock trial of Regan and Goneril: a good scene, but one that he perhaps felt held up the action. He also cut the magical awakening of Lear by music: be
autiful, but verging too close to romance, maybe, in such a stark play. He reshaped some of the roles, especially Edgar and Albany – obviously he had watched the show with an audience many times and knew which bits worked best, just as a modern director and author will do today. But most interesting of all is his revision of the last scene.

  This is what was published in the 1608 Quarto. The passage begins with Lear holding the body of his daughter Cordelia. It is not quite clear whether the first line refers to her, and it is open to interpretation in performance:

  LEAR: And my poor fool is hanged. No, no life.

  Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

  And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more.

  Never, never, never. Pray you, undo

  This button. Thank you, sir. O, O, O, O!

  EDGAR: He faints. My lord, my lord.

  LEAR: Break, heart, I prithee break. [Dies]

  In the later Folio text, Shakespeare has rewritten the passage in this way:

  LEAR: And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life.

  Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

  And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more.

  Never, never, never, never, never.

  Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.

  Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,

  Look there, look there. [He dies]

  EDGAR: He faints. My lord, my lord.

  KENT: Break, heart, I prithee break.

  Here’s a fascinating opportunity to watch Shakespeare putting a red pen through his own work after experiencing how it affects the audience. There are several things to note about his changes, not least the rejigging to give the extraordinary single-line iambic pentameter with ‘never’ repeated five times. The ‘break my heart’ line of Lear is now given to Kent. But especially significant is the difference in the way he treats Lear’s death. The Quarto simply gives us Lear’s desperate desire to cease to be since Cordelia is dead. The Folio substitutes an ambiguity: it is impossible to determine from the text whether Lear dies from a broken heart through grief, or from a flood of joy at thinking his child is still alive. In performance the actor and director can go either way, or leave the audience unsure. Shakespeare pinpoints the focus of the action by shifting the stage direction to make him die on ‘look there’.

  The simplest addition comes a few lines later, in the final speech. In the first, Quarto version the speech is given to the Earl of Albany; now it is given to Edgar, the young son of old Gloucester. Albany is the senior character now that Lear is dead; he is left in power. But Edgar is the one who has gone through the sufferings of the play; the Christian knight, as it were, who has been hunted down and reduced to a ‘naked unaccommodated man’, he has seen the horrors and survived. The audience’s emotional identification is with him.

  EDGAR: The weight of this sad time we must obey:

  Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

  The oldest hath borne most: we that are young

  Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

  Edgar’s words might stand for the experience of all those who had gone through the fires of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but also, on a bigger plane, of all those who have suffered at any time at the hands of tyranny and cruelty. This is why the play – deemed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries unperformable unless adulterated – has spoken perhaps most powerfully to the generations who have lived through the horrors of the twentieth century.

  MUSICAL COLLABORATION: ROBERT JOHNSON

  The Blackfriars made Shakespeare rethink his art in other ways, too. Particularly interesting is the changed role of music in his last plays. There are hints of this in the first version of King Lear, and in Antony and Cleopatra in the heavenly music heard by Antony. But now the tastes of the Blackfriars audience would be more fully catered to. These tastes had long been established by the children’s companies, whose shows included an hour’s music before the play, during which boys ‘sang so delightfully cum voce tremula to the accompaniment of a bass-viol, so lovely that it could not be equalled’. This kind of thing had been one of the big draws at the Blackfriars in the recent past, before the King’s Men took it over. Shakespeare was quick to take the idea and run with it, in particular using music offstage as an accompaniment to the action. In late 1609 he teamed up with a twenty-six-year-old court lutenist called Robert Johnson, related, as virtually all court and theatre musicians were, to the great Italian musical families the Ferraboscos and Bassanos. His kinswoman Margaret Johnson, who had married one of the Bassano brothers, was the mother of Emilia Lanier. Johnson belongs to a group of English composers that emerged around 1609 and developed a more declamatory style of song for the stage, a style essentially dramatic and strikingly different from the ‘ayres’ of John Dowland and his contemporaries. Working for the special conditions of court masques and public plays, especially in the indoor theatre at the Blackfriars, they emphasized speech rhythms and inflections, chordal harmonies and psychology: with Johnson the song takes on the atmosphere of its dramatic context. He is reported to have said that it was his intention to ‘marry the words and Notes wel together’. To achieve this aim he evidently worked alongside his authors, and the result is a series of theatre songs closely tied to the action. Some, such as the haunting ‘Full fathom five’ from The Tempest and the sinister ‘Howl, howl’ from Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, have beautiful settings. Johnson’s music has now been identified in The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Cymbeline; among other commissions he composed the music for Shakespeare’s collaborations with John Fletcher in Cardenio, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

  BEN JONSON RETURNS

  It was during this excitingly creative time that Ben Jonson came back to the company. Some of his best shows, among them Volpone and The Alchemist, were written for the King’s Men at the Blackfriars; and the company’s Christmas repertoires at court over the next few years usually included Jonson’s plays. Jonson was a big fish now that he and Inigo Jones had cornered the masque market, and, having acquired the status and credit he desired, he would make a long career of it.

  So Shakespeare had the pleasure of working with his old rival again, even if he no longer trod the boards speaking Jonson’s lines. Their relationship had clearly lost none of its edge – with Jonson nothing was ever forgotten. In his printed prefaces he rehearses his old grouses; he perhaps lampoons Shakespeare as Lovewhit in Volpone; and he still lets it be known that he thinks Shakespeare’s recent work (Pericles in particular) is not what a serious dramatist should be up to. Shakespeare in turn would drop in-jokes into his plays for Jonson’s benefit, and would later plot The Tempest in exact conformity with the classical unities of time and place (the action takes place in a single location over a mere three hours), as if just to show his old friend that he too could follow the rule book if he really had to. Their relationship, however, was characterized by affection as well as rivalry, as is evident from Jonson’s posthumous tribute in the Folio, in which he spoke what he knew in his heart. ‘I loved him this side idolatry,’ he says; but admits that Shakespeare had surpassed even the ancients, Sophocles and Euripides:

  Soul of the age!

  The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage …

  … And all the muses still were in their prime

  When like Apollo he came forth to warm

  Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!

  ‘GREAT CREATING NATURE’

  The poet’s late output points up the contrast between court and country. This comes out most strongly in The Winter’s Tale, which he probably wrote in the winter and spring of 1609–10 to be performed at the Globe in the summer season starting in May. Writers of the time equated ‘winter’s tales’ with old wives’ tales – scarcely believable romantic fables. In a wonderfully karmic twist, for this show Shakespeare adapted a pulp novel, Pandosto, by his old rival Robert Greene, who had sneered at him as a ‘Shake-scene’ and a
‘tiger’s heart’ nearly twenty years before. The play marks an imaginative return to rural roots with clowns, sheep fairs, pickpockets and old shepherds; and it takes some sarcastic swipes at courtly affectations, ‘courtly smell, and … courtly contempt’. The country scenes feel as if they were inspired in part by Stratford, right down to the specialist vocabulary from the wool trade.

  The Winter’s Tale mixes incredible resourcefulness of language with the simplest of structures. The plot represents everything Ben Jonson was denigrating in his jibe about Shakespeare’s ‘Tales, Tempests and other such Drolleries’. In a precipitously tragic first two Acts, King Leontes destroys his family through jealousy; his only son dies, his baby daughter is cast into the wilds, and he believes his wife has died of grief. Sixteen years later redemption comes when, as Apollo’s oracle required, ‘that which is lost [is] found’. The subject is time’s destructive and redeeming powers, a theme also central to the sonnets.

  There is a fascinating stylistic split in The Winter’s Tale. The first two Acts are full of the most angry, aggressive language expressing sexual jealousy, with repellent imagery of the stews (Leontes’ wife, he says, has been ‘sluic’d’). Great writers at the end of their lives often play freely with language, and Shakespeare’s is now at its most demanding and rewarding. Here Leontes believes his wife is pregnant by his best friend: