by Park Honan
Yet opponents of the theatre were stronger than ever -- and some of its fiercest detractors, in effect, were among its enthusiasts. No one on record complained of snow, rain, hail, or frozen feet at an amphitheatre. Londoners accepted the stage as a sport, an open-air, allweather game. With jostling, shouting, hurled missiles, and a noisy stage, a playhouse could be a wild, alarming chaos. Stephen Gosson complains of actors in a 'heate' with 'their foaming, their fretting, their stampinge', and though he was no friend to actors he could expect to be believed. 3
City authorities eyed the theatre as a sink of disease, lethal in epidemics and unhealthy at other times -- though some playhouse customs, oddly, may have warded off death. We know that the rat-flea carrying the bacillus of bubonic plague is repelled by some odours-including the smell of nuts. If the loud cracking of hazel nuts in the middle of Romeo's love-scenes at the Curtain upset actors, the practice seems nonetheless to have been a healthy one. The flea that carried Yersina pestis -- that tiny destroyer of Renaissance London-was hardy. Infected in October, it could awake to transmit plague in March after nestling in white fabrics, bedclothes, or neutral-coloured garments; since the rat-flea favoured these colours, the bright clothes of the public and the actors were fortuitous. Alert to a disease that was mysterious, savage, and evasive, aldermen and their advisers forbade acting when the weekly plague-toll rose sharply. When it stayed below a certain number -- such as twenty or thirty deaths -- play-acting might be allowed, though officials took varying views as to what constituted a crisis, and the city or Privy Council could impose a 'precautionary restraint' for nearly as long as they wished. 4
Crowds disturbed the authorities for other reasons, too. Political unrest, destruction of property, disorder and rowdiness, or the disaffection of apprentices and the falling off of work might, among other ills, be blamed on the theatres. One drama such as Jonson and Nashe Isle of Dogs (in the restraint of 28 July to 11 October 1597) might cause a suspension of all play-acting in the capital. Official views of the stage were constant mainly in their arbitrariness.
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In common with other actors, Shakespeare viewed the plague as a fact of life -- and stoicism befitted his calling. As for other kinds of interference with the stage he exercised his wit on a large variety of grievances. 'Tired with all these, for restful death I cry', as he writes in Sonnet 66 with its allusions to
strength by limping sway disablèd, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill, And simple truth miscalled simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill.
No doubt he feels the weight of these things -- or of some of them -though the complaints are commonplace and his delight in his poem's wit and smart concinnity is apparent. On the other hand, his stoicism in the Sonnets is convincing partly because its contexts are relatively fresh. For example, he is nearly immune to the external environment in Sonnet 124 -- inasmuch as his supposed sturdy passion, his 'love'
suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls Under the blow of thrallèd discontent Whereto th'inviting time our fashion calls. It fears not policy, that heretic Which works on leases of short-numbered hours, But all alone stands hugely politic.
Such an elegant declaration seems written by an imaginative man pleased with himself and well removed from Henley Street's flock bolsters, truckle bedsteads, 'the Roome over ye celler', or simple wooden stools, coffers, and chests in his father's house. 5 Yet the elegant lines take us closer to the theatre man, and the attitude of being 'hugely politic' or boldly and supremely prudent was a concomitant of Shakespeare's stoicism.
At 28, he had become prudent and enduring enough. His most basic professional strength was his constructive power or his ability to supply practicable scripts, and this was the power that would bring him rewards. To exercise it and survive as an actor-playwright, he had to be rough and ready, thick-skinned despite his sensitivity, humorous or lightly ironic. Good actors needed to find setbacks amusing
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in order to keep their equanimity in a profession known for its violence, and he could not have worked six months in the theatre without normal pluck and simple, shoulder-shrugging endurance. It is certain that, for as long as he felt he could be in the theatre, he meant to keep on 'making things' to get money. His acting, so far as we can tell, aided his constructive facility by acquainting him with a troupe's needs, and so far his talents may have seemed to him adequate to the purpose.
But his situation would have become more doubtful than this after Henry VI. As he gained notoriety and became an object of envy, his relations with other actors could change: and such a man benefited from harmony in a troupe. His modesty, agreeableness, and unpretentious 'open' manner were natural and yet self-protective -- and he might have seemed, in 1592, as free and easy as Ben Jonson would find him. Amusingly, in both the so-called Chandos Portrait (in the National Portrait Gallery, London) and in his effigy in Stratford's church he is unbraced and relaxed. In the portrait, which may date from the Jacobean era though its authenticity has been debated, the sitter has unbuttoned the collar of his shirt and untied the dangling strings of a neck-band. In the effigy Shakespeare's fine gown, laced with silk, hangs easily open in front. The conventional poses prove nothing, but they might have seemed appropriate to Jonson, who implies that Shakespeare was normally frank, unaffectedly candid, not at all secretive.
And if he lost himself in his imaginative constructions or identified with his Titus, his Katherine, or even his Richard, and found fulfilment in humiliating himself, he was also hard-headed: concerned with the whole structural order of a script, at least as practical and down-toearth as other suppliers of dramas, and evidently did not seem to be a protean wonder in daily life. He found it wise to be 'open' and simple: so much depended on his normal relations with his fellows that his amenity had a value. He brought rewards to players, and he was responding to much in the theatre such as its richness of colour and costume, its endless possibilities in the challenge of staging. But he was not likely to forget the low status of his calling or that his livelihood depended on chance, luck, and official whim.
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Late in June 1592, Shakespeare found London's playhouses forbidden to him. Authorities shut the theatres after a public riot near the Rose, and their restraint was supposed to last until Michaelmas, or 29 September. Then in midsummer, official notice was taken of plague in the city, and, except for two short winter sessions, the theatres were shut (in principle) for twenty months.
Apart from Lent, Shakespeare normally knew no let-up in repertoryplaying which might have allowed him to visit Stratford, though he may have contrived to see his family each year (as Aubrey believed). Actors needed to work the year round. When London was closed, most companies were forced to break up or to go on tour, and though touring was a normal duty (not an act of desperation), Lord Strange's large group went on the road with difficulty: 'oure Companie is greate, and thearbie our chardge intollerable in travellinge the Countrie', these actors petitioned Whitehall, 'and the Contynuaunce thereof will be a meane to bring us to division and separacion, whearbie we shall not onelie be undone, but alsoe unreadie to serve her majestie when it shall please her highenes to commaund us'. 6 It was 'hugely politic' to refer to the Queen since her Privy Council acceded to the notion that she needed plays for her 'solace'. And the Queen lost little by throwing crumbs to actors. Strange's men were paid in arrears at a standard £10 for a court performance -- a sum of 10 marks (£6.13s. 4d.) as the official fee plus another 5 marks (£3. 6s. 8d.) as her gratuity -- and the Queen paid for no plays at all during eight or nine months of a year (her fee barely equalled the total weekly profit of a troupe's chief actors). Her Council did agree, perhaps this season, that the Rose might stay open if free of 'the infection of sicknes', but in September there was no abatement of plague.
Lord Strange's company had been touring since 13 July; now they were forced to remain out of London for many more weeks. Whether or not Shakespeare travelled w
ith them, he would have been aware of new setbacks. The sickness worsened slowly. Then, after a brief abatement in winter, plague returned to the city with a virulence which might have made the hardships of actors on the road seem trivial by
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contrast. Civic disruption in a major epidemic was enormous. Masters often discharged servants and apprentices; trade dwindled, marts shut down, grain might become scarce. What Shakespeare observed of wishful males and sensible females is submitted to a high-courtly comic order in Love's Labour-s Lost, and ideas for that play were confirmed by what he heard or saw in plague-time.
Lord Strange's men, for example, were at Bristol, devoted to makebelieve and applause. In London were some of their womenfolk, contending with hunger, terror, or death. An actor such as Alleyn felt that devoutness and a few nostrums would protect his wife Joan back in plague-ridden Bankside. 'My good sweet mouse', he writes, 'kepe your house fayr and clean which I knowe you will and every evening throwe water before your dore and in your backside and have in your windowes good store of rwe [rue] and herbe of grace.' 7 Alleyn was then anxious to have Joan darken the colours of his fine woollen, orange-tawny stockings before he came home. Philip Henslowe, Joan's stepfather, wrote that Joan as a good wife was imploring the Deity to cease punishing with a Cross. Over 700 men, women, and children were dying in the plague at Shoreditch, it appeared; over a thousand people had died in London in one week. On the Bankside over against the Clink, the plague had been in one house after another, as Henslowe writes to Alleyn in a hasty passage that deserves a translation:
Rownd a bowte vs yt hathe bene all moste in every howsse abowt vs & wholle howsholdes deyed & yt my frend the baylle doth scape but he smealles monstrusly for feare & dares staye no wheare for ther hathe deyed this laste weacke in generall 1603 . . . & as for other newes of this & that I cane tealle youe none but that Robart brownes wife in shordech & all her chelldren & howshowld be dead & heare dorcs sheat vpe 8
[Round about us it [the epidemic] has been almost in every house about us and whole households have died, and [I can tell you] that my friend the bailiff does escape but he smells monstrously for fear and dares stay nowhere, for there have died this last week, in general, 1,603 . . . and as for other news of this and that I can tell you none but that Robert Browne's wife in Shoreditch and all her children and household be dead and her doors shut up.]
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Robert Browne, an actor who was then in Germany with Worcester's men, evidently lost his wife, all of his children, and every household servant. In the country, troupes were often thought to be carrying the plague and so could be barred from towns and villages. Actors and their boys had begun to die of hunger or exhaustion, and at least one troupe was never heard from again. As for Strange's players, they had been afoot with baggage for almost the entire second half of 1592. However, when the worst suffering in the lanes, alleys, and subdivided tenements of London's suburbs lay ahead -- and players had been on the road for less than three months -- both Shakespeare and Alleyn, as the chief actor of Strange's troupe, received some encouragement. Early that September, Thomas Nashe in the city published his racy, nervy social satire Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell.
Taking the form of a witty address to the devil, this pamphlet was popular in plague-time. It was twice reissued in 1592. Before citing Alleyn's talents, Nashe praises a 'Tragedian' who has been playing in 1 Henry VI with enormous success. 'How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the Terror of the French)', writes the pamphleteer,
to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall] times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding. 9
The indirect praise of Shakespeare is strong -- this is the first printed allusion to his plays -- but it came from an odd quarter. Nashe was partial to scholars who saw play-writing as their own preserve. At 24 he was the sharpest, most original satirist among the Wits, making the pamphlet a vehicle for scorching but brisk polemic, humanist critiques, and stylistic verve. He seemed a wonderful boy. Thin and slight with a haystack of hair and a merry gaggle-toothed look as his teeth poked out at angles, he had come down from St John's College at Cambridge with a BA in 1588. He sympathized with the plight of men who worked for the theatres, and his early writings are influenced by fellow graduates. Asked in 1589 to write a preface to Greene's story Menaphon, he surveyed the tight little world of the theatre-poets. Nashe now adopts Greene's views. Opposed to university-educated
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poets, he argues, are parasitic actors and fluent 'Art-masters', or 'Alcumists of eloquence' who 'thinke to out-brave better pennes with the swelling bumbast of bragging blanke verse'.
But just whose are the unlearned pens?
Fond of punning on proper names -- as when in Anatomy of Absurdity he evokes the puritanical Phillip Stubbes as one who will 'stubbe up sin by the rootes' -- Nashe paints a picture-frame into which an enemy might fit Shakespeare's face. He seems to have in mind a follower of Thomas Kyd. Such a man 'will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of Tragicall speeches' to exhaust bloody Seneca, writes Nashe, 'which makes his famished followers to imitate the Kid in Æsop'. 10
Perhaps neither Kyd nor Shakespeare meant to hang himself after reading this. Nashe was then just down from Cambridge -- a university as hostile to the players as Oxford. Officials at Cambridge were about to petition to renew an edict of 1575 banning 'any open show' there or for five miles round. At Oxford of course travelling players were banned by the university but oddly not by the town, which forbade them only the use of municipal buildings. In fact Oxford's town chamberlains record a payment of 6s. 8d. 'geven to the lord Stranges players', and if Shakespeare was with the troupe he may have acted near Oxford's High Street on 6 October 1592. 11 But the Vice Chancellor was reduced to the humiliating policy of giving good money now and then to the troupes of actors of various noblemen (diversorum nobilium histriones) simply to leave Oxford quietly. Nashe regrets that any graduate must compete with ignoramuses, but he hopes graduates will save English poetry and sounds a clarion call for the Wits. With a flourish he mentions as possible revivers of the Muse Matthew Roydon, Thomas Acheley, and George Peele. ( Marlowe's name may be missing from the short list because he had of late offended Greene.)
At any rate, Nashe takes one close to the dilemma of the University Wits. As author of a fine 'Elegie', Matthew Roydon enjoyed prestige, and George Chapman dedicated two works to him. With an Oxford MA, Roydon had come down to study law at Thavies Inn in Holborn, where Acheley may have joined him. Both young men would have found the law more profitable in the city than poetry, of which there was a glut; few of their works survive.
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Peele was of very different mettle, but after depleting his first wife's inheritance he found he could barely support himself. At Christ Church, Oxford where he took his MA in 1579 he had been the fellow student of such men as Richard Hakluyt, author of the Voyages, Sir Philip Sidney, and the dramatists Richard Edes, Leonard Hutton, and William Gager; the three last became clergymen, but Gager had praised his verse, and Peele wrote pageants as well as his pastoral The Arraignment of Paris, which a children's company played at court. However, his courtly chances were few, and he earned less from pageants than Shakespeare's fellow dramatist Anthony Munday would earn from producing Lord Mayor's shows. He did not forget to honour a player-patron when he could, as in his lines for the Accession Day tilts in 1590:
The Earle of Darbies valiant sonne and heire, Brave Ferdinande Lord Straunge, straunglie embarkt, Under Joves kinglie byrd, the golden Eagle. 12
Few hopeful poets failed to nod at Lord Strange. However, Peele's play-writing was neither flexible nor abundant, and he sank into poverty and stasis. He might have illustrated Nashe's point that graduates are ill-used by players, and rivalled by too many other pens. The trouble
was that, after leaving supportive medieval halls at the colleges, young men who were set on being poets found only a splintered community of fellow graduates in London; the Wits were proud, abrasive, quarrelsome, more or less in competition with one another, and they lacked institutional power.
But among Nashe's friends, Robert Greene, at least, had learned to thrive, although he saw actors as his enemies. Boldly prolific and talented, he had plunged into the sleazy, liberating life of Bohemian neighbourhoods with delight and a certain proud, dignified reserve as a gentleman of academic mark. Baptized near Norwich on 11 July 1558, and of a family that may have had prosperous connections with Yorkshire gentry, Greene had taken his BA at St John's College, and MA at Clare Hall in Cambridge five years later. Married, but having left his wife and child, he seemed 'a good fellow' in the suburbs among women and cronies, an artist in greasy silk stockings and what Nashe
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calls a 'very faire Cloake' with sleeves of 'goose turd greene'. He was 'of face amiable, of body well proportioned', says Henry Chettle, 'his attire after the habite of a schollerlike Gentleman, onely his haire was somewhat long'. The hair was a concession to his poetic life, but there was something immaculate, precise, and showily trim in Greene's look, even apparent in a printed cartoon which shows him at work though attired in a winding-sheet. Over his green cloak was his pendant 'jolly red' beard, long and pointed 'like the spire of a steeple'. 13 Thriving on books, adapting the Greek romances, and keen on Ovid, he was much concerned to show off his brilliance.
Though his workmanship often lacked polish, Greene discovered so much as an artist that Shakespeare studied his work with profit. In opening up many sources in his prose tales and bringing a Greek zest to them he was to have an influence on Pericles and Cymbeline as well as The Winter's Tale. In 1592 he had in his rogue pamphlets about pickpockets, cut-purses, and other con men of the city extended literary diction and subject-matter fascinatingly downwards. Greene did not interview pick-pockets and purse-cutters, 'foisters' and 'nippers', but the dens and brothels gave him authority to use written sources freshly. Troubled, and unable to impose a moral system on his facts, he avoided moralistic comment by depicting the trickster as hero. His career had run parallel to and a little ahead of Shakespeare's. Fascinated by Ovid, he had written about wonder, about love and the mind's 'inward metamorphosis', and far from merely imitating John Lyly he had expressly reformulated Lyly Euphues in his own Mamillia to comment on lust. Again, he took up Castiglione Il Cortegiano, not to comment on the perfect courtier, but to explore love and eloquence in his story Morando.