by Park Honan
The last of the new sharers, John Lowin, was recruited from Worcester's troupe -- but probably at first as a hireling who looked forward to early promotion. As a mainstay of the King's men until the outbreak of the Civil War, he resided at St Saviour's parish in South-
wark, often 'near the playhouse', and carried memories of Shakespeare down to the closing of the theatres in 1642. From about 1604
or 1605 on, the troupe were usually to have twelve or thirteen shareholders. 9
King James was crowned before a limited assembly at Westminster Abbey on his saint's day, 25 July, but his grand public entry into the city had to wait for nearly a year because of plague. To avoid what was a severe epidemic the court went on a progress in Surrey to Pyrford, where the poet John Donne -- in disgrace over an impolitic marriage -- was then languishing; and continued into Hampshire, Berkshire, and Oxfordshire with death nearly at their heels. Close to
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Oxford at Woodstock, they received word that Oxford's colleges were closing. Plague was 'daily acquiring greater strength'. 10 But after a voyage to the Isle of Wight, James at last reached Wiltshire for a prolonged stay at Wilton House with the young Earl of Pembroke.
Shakespeare's troupe, not in obvious despair, had already taken to the road, though touring was disliked -- and between 1597 and 1603 there was really less of it for actors than at any other time in his life. After about 1605 as a rule, younger men were delegated for touring. In this plague-ridden year wagons of the King's actors rolled north to Coventry and west to Shrewsbury. They also reached Bath, but 3,000 people died in this year at nearby Bristol, and the plague touched towns such as Norwich, Northampton, and Chester. By October the actors had prudently retreated to a small western suburb of London.
This was Mortlake -- just beyond Fulham and near Fichmond Castle. Augustine Phillips had bought a house at Mortlake near the river, at some point before 1604, and here the troupe appear to have waited for the sickness to lift. Nevertheless late in the autumn they received an order to go from Mortlake to Wilton to meet with their royal patron, and John Heminges later received £30 'for the paynes and expences of himself and the rest of the company in comming from Mortelake in the countie of Surrie unto the courte aforesaid and there p'senting before his majestie one playe'. 11 Wilton House was the country seat of the Earls of Pembroke. James had just elevated young Pembroke as a Knight of the Garter. The earl's mother was Sir Philip Sidney's sister, and the house often attracted poets and inspired legends. As late as mid-Victorian times, in August 1865, William Cory, an Eton College master staying over as Greek tutor, jotted an odd report he had just heard from the then Lady Herbert. 'The house is full of interest', Lady Herbert had told Cory, and added, to his surprise: 'above us is Wolsey 's room; we have a letter, never printed, from Lady Pembroke to her son, telling him to bring James I from Salisbury to seeAs You Like It; "we have the man Shakespeare with us". She wanted to cajole the King in Raleigh's behalf -- he came.' 12
An attractive story. Cardinal Wolsey died in 1530, so he could not have stayed in a house built after 1544, when the first Earl of Pembroke was granted the abbey and estate of Wilton. Lady Herbert, it may be,
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called a chamber ' Wolsey 's room' because it had a picture of the Cardinal on the wall, but she suffered incurably from ' Shakespeare fantasies'; and a letter about Shakespeare being 'with us' has never been found. In 1996 though, Peter Davison discovered something valid enough in that the Wilton burgesses paid out the sum of £65s. od.,in 'giftes and fees unto the kinges servantes', in 1603 13 (a fair if not a munificent sum for royal actors). If that refers to the King's men, they possibly acted for the local burgesses, but their chief duty was to the King. At Wilton House they put on at least one play, not necessarily As You Like It. Also, they learned that they would be needed for the holidays at Hampton Court, and that they might have to offer help, this winter or later, with the amateur court masques beloved by Queen Anna.
After performing for James, Shakespeare's men had no more status at court than low-paid lackeys. Though one acted a king, when a play ended one became subservient or invisible. So it had been in the 1590s, and this amusing metamorphosis, from consequence to nothingness, he had, in effect, pictured in Sly of the Shrew, or in Bottom of the Dream. But since they were welcome for their skills, his actors were invited back to court for an unprecedented eight shows in this winter, and for eleven in the next; Queen Elizabeth had been less solicitous. In the ten years up to 1613, they were to give at least 138 royal performances. These had more than a tangible monetary value for a Stratford poet who, with his fellows, studied the royal court. And their prestige as the King's Servants did them no harm at the Globe, which offered a source of income that only the terror of plague, or fire, flood, censors, the Stuart King, or diabolic luck were likely to stop.
Pageantry, Measure for Measure, and All's Well That Ends Well
The relief of Londoners in having crowned a new monarch without bloodshed and a sense of the artful ingenuity that he and Anna might inspire were evident in 1604. With a ruler priding himself on good sense, the changeover was hopeful -- at least until faults emerged, in his extravagance, absenteeism, and his somewhat impatient ways. Yet
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in the first ten years of his reign, works of high art, intelligence, and spiritual strength came into being, and in the Queen's court a fresh atmosphere, a promise, a large-mindedness indirectly affected the theatres -- and Shakespeare's own audacity.
For the 'royal entry' into London the playwright and eight of his fellows were each given four and a half yards of cheap red cloth for gowns, since the troupe was a royal organization; from the Crown that was a routine gift. Troupes did not parade in the streets on 15 March, so, it seems, Shakespeare did not march, but, whether or not he wore a scarlet gown of low-grade fabric, he would have been keen to see how royalty was perceived. He was obliged to study his rivals and the public's taste. In this period, there were several kinds of pageantry -- including outdoor shows for the sovereign on tours or progresses, the annual Lord Mayor's Show at that officer's inauguration on 29 October, and scenes enacted en route during a sovereign's entry into the City. 14 Londoners had not witnessed a great royal entry, with enacted scenes, since Elizabeth's coronation in 1559.
For James's grandiose event, Stephen Harrison had designed tall forms of wood and plaster, the largest of which was ninety feet high and fifty feet wide. With pillars, domes, obelisks, and pyramids, the triumphal arches were overlaid with symbolic ornaments, and had painted cartouches, grotesque caryatids, and flat perches aloft for living actors, as though the city were a public playhouse.
Having slept overnight at the Tower, the King, who disliked crowds, set out in the packed, clamorous ways on 15 March. First along the route was Fenchurch's arch, in the charge of Ben Jonson. At James's approach, a curtain drew back, and a figure clothed as the Genius of the City began a dialogue with the God of the Thames, who poured live fishes out of a pot. Other figures, coming to life, twitched overhead. Supported by Sage Counsel and Warlike Force, the Genius appeared with his daughters -- Gladness, Veneration, Promptitude, Vigilance, Affection, and Unanimity. Holding a squirrel and a censer, to suggest nimbleness and the 'perfume of prompt action', Promptitude, for example, 'was attired in a short tuck't garment of flamecolour, wings at her back, her hair bright, and bound up with ribands; her breast open, virago-like'. 15 While the King fidgeted, the Genius
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told of the nation's ancient Trojans, and brought the story down to their true inheritors, the Stuarts.
The King next moved on to the modest arches of the city's Italian and Dutch communities, then to Thomas Dekker's spectacular 'Nova Arabia Felix' arch at Cheapside. Here King James found himself imaged as a beaming, well-feathered Phoenix, who had given to 'a new Arabia, a new spring'. Music sounded, and two choristers from St Paul's sang in 'ravishing voices'. But, it seems, after a ninety-foothigh New World Arch with a giant globe, royal patience h
ad worn thin. Beyond an arch at Temple Bar, he was stopped by a tailpiece, thrown up at the last moment, in which a rainbow, the sun, moon, and the Pleiades soared between two seventy-foot obelisks, and a human comet, Electra, hailed him as the new Augustus of the British Isles.
Despite inaudible actors and the King's glassy-eyed disgust, the day was hardly a failure. The royal 'entry' into London advertised the skills of writers, actors, and iconographers, and if the courtly pageantry was recondite, it was also profuse, non-literal, and imaginative in trying to picture the truths that lie behind kingship and the ordering of society.
And that boded fairly well for new masques and stage plays. Anna, who was impressed, took on John Florio the translator, and Samuel Daniel the poet, as Grooms of her Privy Chamber, besides employing Jonson and Inigo Jones. Bizarre as it was, the iconography had set a high standard in public entertainment, challenging and appealing to the mind, offering erudition, beauty, and elaborate detail. The gentry, in effect, were being prepared for intelligent, richly allusive dramas, even for the range and grandeur of King Lear or Antony and Cleopatra. Anna's court became a hothouse of talent, as it drew in men and women from varied social ranks and backgrounds. Her entourage abetted follies, but art and intelligence are not unknown to thrive on gaiety of spirit and some tolerance. The royal consort was Catholic and her husband a Protestant, but James called the Roman Church 'our mother church', and claimed to revere works by St Bernardof Clairvaux and St Augustine. At least at first, he encouraged a climate which favoured poets and Anglican divines in casting a light on the whole spiritual history of Britain. He was to respond harshly to Catholics. He treated his Church's Puritan wing rudely, but he set in
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motion this year at his Hampton conference the translators who were to produce the King James Version of the Bible. Now and then, he laughed at an entertainment. Perhaps he really approved The Merchant of Venice, staged one Shrove Sunday and again, for Prince Henry, on Shrove Tuesday, "by the 'K.'s Command'. 16 Anna's appetite was hardly sated by that: 'Burbage is come and says there is no new play the Queen has not seen, but they have revived an old one called Love's Labour Lost, which for wit and mirth he says will please her exceedingly', Sir Walter Cope told Lord Cecil. 'And this is to be played tomorrow night at my Lord of Southampton's, unless you send a writ to remove. . . . Burbage is my messenger ready attending your pleasure.' 17 That must have been Cuthbert Burbage, Richard's brother, who had been in Sir Walter's service, and the letter suggests Anna sees more plays than her husband.
Among new works the King's players acted at court were Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well. Both were generally ill accord with James's views in showing potent, natural urges of sexual love, waywardness in men, and illusions of redemption. Both evoke spiritual grace. Measure for Measure by one 'Shaxberd' was acted in Whitehall's banqueting hall oil St Stephen's night, 26 December 1604. 18
Its composition date is unknown, but this play alludes to events of 1603. Written in -- or close to -- its author's fortieth year, it may well be an early product of his troupe's reorganization and expansion when Tooley and Cooke were promoted to the sharers' group, if Shakespeare renegotiated his own arrangements. Either under a contract or by an 'understanding' he had written about two new plays a year, but in the Jacobean era that rate was to be halved: on average he offered one new play a year for the rest of his working life. Stage closures during outbreaks of plague, his actors' needs, or his own convenience would have influenced his rate; also, it cannot be shown that in one year he worked on only one play. He could have begun a complex project such as King Lear,put that aside for Macbeth, and finished both playbooks at nearly the same time; but to speak of a tendency, he was soon writing less. His handwriting had deteriorated (to compare the writing in Thomas More's early 'Hand D' with Othello's textual
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problems) and though that need not be a sign of physical debility he was unlikely to have the duties of a 'Johannesfac totum' any longer. 19 His working life had been hard; profits had accumulated, and, having inherited his father's properties and made new investments, he did not lack money. He was comfortably off. In London, as will be seen, he was in touch with a fascinating network of immigrants and with a few of their descendants, among other people outside the theatre; and he was living in the north of the city, not quite so close to fellow sharers as is generally supposed. If he did not as yet mean to quit London, he evidently welcomed a relief from rehearsals. After acting in Jonson Sejanus ( 1603), it is likely that he appeared on stage less often, rather than not at all, and that he hoped to compose without tight restraints of time. In the main he had deflected envy, avoided trouble with rivals, and relied on a close, hierarchical fraternity which he tried to abet; it may be that we see his implicit criticism of the fraternity of actors even better in Othello than in Hamlet. But in any case, his loyalty to his troupe can hardly be questioned. An expansion in personnel is no sign that his own obligation increased; and an elegant script from him each year would have kept up their prestige.
Since the accession, romantic comedies had fallen out of fashion: satires, tragedies and tragicomedies were in vogue. He seldom left a genre quite behind, and Measure for Measure, which is more comic than tragic, advances beyond any rival play in its psychological depth. He turns to an Italian novella by Geraldi Cinthio which had been used in George Whetstone's crowded, two-part Elizabethan play Promos and Cassandra. Taking details from Cinthio and adapting from Whetstone's comic sub-plot, he imagines modern London in ' Vienna', so that one might be about 200 yards from Bankside's Globe in scene ii. His plays were staged near alleys of enterprise, though the alleys' profits were never sure. 'What with the war', cries poor Mistress Overdone of the bordello trade, 'what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk' (1. ii. 80-2). From what would be a Londoner's viewpoint, she refers to the overseas war, to 'sweat' or the plague, to treason trials at Winchester, and to a shrinking of custom in the almost deserted capital around the autumn of 1603. Shakespeare, in most respects, is less
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exotic -- here and elsewhere -- than Middleton, Marston, or Webster tend to be.
In the first act he sketches figures who quickly lead to an impasse-young Claudio, terrified and condemned to death for getting his betrothed lover with child; a correct Angelo, Deputy of Vienna, who succumbs to lust; and a jejune and fiery Isabella, novitiate of the order of St Clare, who craves moral rectitude and rather than sleep with Angelo would let her brother Claudio die. Manœuvring among them all is Vienna's godlike Duke, who absents himself only to return in disguise as a friar, while reminding one sometimes of the monarch of precepts in King James's book Basilikon Doron (a source for the play).
Rather like England's Stuart king, the Duke rules by divine right, admits to prior leniency as a governor, and distrusts crowds -- 'I love the people', he claims,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes.
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and aves vehement.
(1. i. 67-70)
So James might have felt on 15 March. But Duke Vincentio of Vienna is oddly vulnerable. He is embarrassed and inconvenienced; he is upset by Lucio's slanders, or again by the murderer Barnardine's unwillingness to be put to death in prison because he has a hangover, with the result that his severed head cannot be sent to Angelo in place of Claudio's head. Such details suggest a playwright dissatisfied with his earlier comic dramaturgy and seeking a better analysis of social malaise. Shakespeare is set apart from other dramatists by his ability to give the utmost eloquence to each person in turn, but also, and just as much, by his special kind of social realism. His characters are marshalled not to satirize human society but to unveil it, and here he ranges over abstract issues of government which appear to involve his attitudes to British towns as well as to London. Angelo's corrupt righteousness might have infected Stratford, where a narrow Puritan clique influenced the counci
l and where, as in other towns, sermons were replacing dramas and other 'obscene' entertainments. 20
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Measure for Measure makes much of the intellectual comedy of repressed feeling, and a spectacular tension is evident in its breathless, twisting plot, in which sexual desire bursts the seams of order. The ending is high-handedly dictated by the Duke himself, who takes Isabella as his bride whether she likes it or not. Is the Duke any better at last than a sexually obsessed Angelo -- and is Angelo redeemed? As in the Sonnets, the author represents sexual desire as a force unmanageable, immense, furtive, threatening, if not chiefly degrading, which not even the wise can withstand.
Sexual desire and repulsion mix with a marital theme in All's Well That Ends Well. Here the action is based on a story in Boccaccio Decameron, which the playwright found loosely translated in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, first printed in 1566. In Painter's very good rendition of it, one Giletta of Narbonne, a physician's wealthy daughter, heals the ailing French king of a fistula, a long, morbid pipelike ulcer in his body with a narrow orifice. As Giletta's reward for her timely cure, the king agrees that she be given in marriage to a reluctant Beltramo, who stamps off to Florence, where he takes a lover. But Giletta, by a ruse, sleeps with him in place of the new lady, and, after bearing him two healthy sons and otherwise proving herself, she is received back gladly by Beltramo.