Shakespeare: The World as Stage

by Bill Bryson

  Costumes were elaborate and much valued but not always greatly assembled with historical veracity, it would seem. We know this because a man named Henry Peacham (or so it is assumed; his name is scribbled in the margin) made a sketch of a scene in Titus Andronicus during one of its performances. Where and when precisely this happened is not known, but the sketch shows a critical moment in the play when Tamora begs Titus to spare her sons and portrays with some care the postures and surprisingly motley costumes (some suitably ancient, others carelessly Tudor) of the performers. For audience and players alike, it appears, a hint of antiquity was sufficient. Realism came rather in the form of gore. Sheep’s or pig’s organs and a little sleight of hand made possible the lifting of hearts from bodies in murder scenes, and sheep’s blood was splashed about for a literal touch of color on swords and flesh wounds. Artificial limbs were sometimes strewn over imagined fields of battle-“as bloody as may be,” as one set of stage directions encouraged. Plays, even the solemn ones, traditionally ended with a jig as a kind of bonus entertainment.

  It was a time of rapid evolution for theatrical techniques. As Stanley Wells has written: “Plays became longer, more ambitious, more spectacular, more complex in construction, wider in emotional range, and better designed to show off the talents of their performers.” Acting styles became less bombastic. A greater naturalism emerged in the course of Shakespeare’s lifetime-much of which he helped to foster. Shakespeare and his contemporaries also enjoyed a good deal of latitude in subject and setting. Italian playwrights, following the classical Roman tradition, were required to set their plays around a town square. Shakespeare could place his action wherever he wished: on or in hillsides, forts, castles, battlefields, lonesome islands, enchanted dells, anywhere an imaginative audience could be persuaded to go.

  Plays, at least as written, were of strikingly variable lengths. Even going at a fair clip and without intermissions, Hamlet would run for nearly four and a half hours. Richard III, Coriolanus, and Troilus and Cressida were only slightly shorter. Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair would have taken no less than five hours to perform, unless judiciously cut, as it almost certainly was. (Shakespeare and Jonson were notoriously copious. Of the twenty-nine plays of three thousand lines or more that still exist from the period 1590-1616, twenty-two are by Jonson or Shakespeare.)

  A particular challenge for audience and performers alike must surely have been the practice of putting male players in female parts. When we consider how many powerful and expressive female roles Shakespeare created-Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona-the actors must have been gifted dissemblers indeed. Rosalind in As You Like It has about a quarter of all the lines in the play; Shakespeare clearly had enormous confidence in some young actor. Yet, while we often know a good deal about performers in male roles from Shakespeare’s day, we know almost nothing about the conduct of the female parts. Judith Cook, in Women in Shakespeare, says she could not find a single record of any role of a woman played by a specific boy actor. We don’t even know much about boy actors in general terms, including how old they were. For many of a conservative nature, stage transvestism was a source of real anxiety. The fear was that spectators would be attracted to both the female character and the boy beneath, thus becoming doubly corrupted.

  This disdain for female actors was a Northern European tradition. In Spain, France, and Italy, women were played by women-a fact that astonished British travelers, who seem often to have been genuinely surprised to find that women could play women as competently onstage as in life. Shakespeare got maximum effect from the gender confusion by constantly having his female characters-Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth Night- disguise themselves as boys, creating the satisfyingly dizzying situation of a boy playing a woman playing a boy.

  The golden age of theater lasted only about the length of a good human lifetime, but what a wondrously prolific and successful period it was. Between the opening of the Red Lion in 1567 and the closing of all the theaters by the Puritans seventy-five years later, London ’s playhouses are thought to have attracted fifty million paying customers, something like ten times the entire country’s population in Shakespeare’s day.

  To prosper, a theater in London needed to draw as many as two thousand spectators a day-about 1 percent of the city’s population-two hundred or so times a year, and to do so repeatedly against stiff competition. To keep customers coming back, it was necessary to change the plays continually. Most companies performed at least five different plays in a week, sometimes six, and used such spare time as they could muster to learn and rehearse new ones.

  A new play might be performed three times in its first month, then rested for a few months or abandoned altogether. Few plays managed as many as ten performances in a year. So quite quickly there arose an urgent demand for material. What is truly remarkable is how much quality the age produced in the circumstances. Few writers made much of a living at it, however. A good play might fetch £10, but as such plays were often collaborations involving as many as half a dozen authors, an individual share was modest (and with no royalties or other further payments). Thomas Dekker cranked out, singly or in collaboration, no fewer than thirty-two plays in three years, but never pocketed more than 12 shillings a week and spent much of his career imprisoned for debt. Even Ben Jonson, who passed most of his career in triumph and esteem, died in poverty.

  Plays belonged, incidentally, to the company, not the playwright. A finished play was stamped with a license from the Master of the Revels giving permission for its staging, so it needed to be retained by the company. It is sometimes considered odd that no play manuscripts or prompt books were found among Shakespeare’s personal effects at his death. In fact it would have been odd if they had been.

  For authors and actors alike, the theatrical world was an insanely busy place, and for someone like William Shakespeare, who was playwright, actor, part owner, and probably de facto director as well (there were no formal directors in his day), it must have been nearly hysterical at times. Companies might have as many as thirty plays in their active repertoire, so a leading actor could be required to memorize perhaps fifteen thousand lines in a season-about the same as memorizing every word in this book-as well as remember every dance and sword thrust and costume change. Even the most successful companies were unlikely to employ more than a dozen or so actors, so a great deal of doubling up was necessary. Julius Caesar, for instance, has forty named characters, as well as parts for unspecified numbers of “servants,” “other plebeians,” and “senators, soldiers, and attendants.” Although many of these had few demanding lines, or none at all, it was still necessary in every case to be fully acquainted with the relevant props, cues, positions, entrances, and exits, and to appear on time correctly attired. That in itself must have been a challenge, for nearly all clothing then involved either complicated fastenings-two dozen or more obstinate fabric clasps on a standard doublet-or yards of lacing.

  In such a hothouse, reliability was paramount. Henslowe’s papers show that actors were subjected to rigorous contractual obligations, with graduated penalties for missing rehearsals, being drunk or tardy, failing to be “ready apparelled” at the right moment, or-strikingly-for wearing any stage costumes outside the playhouse. Costumes were extremely valuable, so the fine was a decidedly whopping (and thus probably never imposed) £40. But even the most minor infractions, like tardiness, could cost an actor two days’ pay.

  Shakespeare appears to have remained an actor throughout his professional life (unlike Ben Jonson, who quit as soon as he could afford to), for he was listed as an actor on documents in 1592, 1598, 1603, and 1608-which is to say at every phase of his career. It can’t have been easy to have been an actor as well as a playwright, but it would doubtless have allowed him (assuming he wished it) much greater control than had he simply surrendered a script to others, as most playwrights did. According to tradition, Shakespeare specialized in good but fairly undemanding roles in his own plays. The Ghost i
n Hamlet is the part to which he is most often linked. In fact, we don’t know what parts he played, but that they were nontaxing roles seems a reasonable assumption given the demands on him not only as writer of the plays but also in all likelihood as the person most closely involved with their staging. But it may well be that he truly enjoyed acting and craved large parts when not distracted by scripting considerations. He was listed as a principal performer in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour in 1598 and in Sejanus His Fall in 1603.

  It is tempting, even logical, to guess that Shakespeare when he arrived in London gravitated to Shoreditch, just north of the City walls. This was the home of the Theatre and the Curtain both, and was where many playwrights and actors lived, drank, caroused, occasionally fought, and no less occasionally died. It was in Shoreditch, very near the Theatre, in September 1589 that the rising, and ever hotheaded, young star Christopher Marlowe, fresh from the triumphs of Tamburlaine the Great, fell into a heated altercation with an innkeeper named William Bradley. Swords were drawn. Marlowe’s friend Thomas Watson, a playwright himself, stepped into the fray and, in inevitably confused circumstances, stabbed Bradley in the chest. The blow was fatal. Both writers spent time in prison-Marlowe very briefly, Watson for five months-but were cleared on the grounds that Bradley had provoked his own demise and that they had acted in self-defense. We may reasonably suppose that the murder of Bradley was the talk of the district that evening, but whether Shakespeare was around to hear it or not we don’t know. If not yet, he soon would be, for at some point shortly after this he became, in a big and fairly sudden way, a presence in the London theater.

  We are not quite sure, however, when that point was. We are not even sure when we have our first glimpse of him at work. The ever-meticulous Henslowe has a note in his diary recording a performance of “harey VI” at the Rose in the first week of March 1592. Many take this to be Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1, which would be gratifying for Shakespeare fans because “harey VI” was a great triumph. It attracted box office receipts of £3 16 shillings and 8 pence on its debut-a very considerable sum-and was performed thirteen times more in the next four months, which is to say more than almost any other play of its day. But the success of the play, particularly upon its debut, does rather raise a question: Would people really have turned out in droves to see the premiere of a play by a little-known author or was it perhaps a play, now lost, on the same subject by someone better established? One troubling point is that Shakespeare had no recorded connection with Henslowe’s company as actor or playwright.

  The first certain mention of Shakespeare as playwright comes, unexpectedly enough, in an unkind note in a thin and idiosyncratic pamphlet, when he was already the author of several plays-probably five, possibly more-though there is much uncertainty about which exactly these were.

  The pamphlet’s full, generously descriptive title is Greene’s Groat’s-Worth * of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance. Describing the folly of youth, the falsehood of make-shift flatterers, the misery of the negligent, and mischiefs of deceiving Courtesans. Written before his death and published at his dying request, by Robert Greene, who did indeed fulfill the title’s promise by dying while it was being prepared for publication. (Amazingly he managed in the same month to produce a second volume of deathbed thoughts called, rather irresistibly, Greene’s Vision, Written at the instant of his death.)

  Greene was a pamphleteer and poet and a leading light in a group of playwrights known to posterity as the University Wits. Mostly, however, he was a wastrel and cad. He married well but ran through his wife’s money and abandoned her and their child, and took up with a mistress of tarnished repute by whom he produced another child, grandly named Fortunatus, and with whom he lived in a tenement in Dowgate, near London Bridge. Here, after overindulging one evening on Rhenish wine and pickled herring (or so all histories report), Greene fell ill and began to die slowly and unattractively, ridden with lice and sipping whatever intoxicants his dwindling resources could muster. Somehow during this month of decline, he managed (almost certainly with a good deal of help) to produce his two collections of thoughts, based loosely on his own life and peppered with tart observations about other writers, before rasping out his last breath, on September 3, 1592. He was thirty-one or possibly thirty-two-a reasonable age for a dying Londoner.

  Only two copies of Greene’s Groat’s-Worth survive, and there would not be much call for either were it not for a single arresting sentence tucked into one of its many discursive passages: “Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”

  If the not-so-subtle reference to “Shake-scene” didn’t identify the target at once, the reference to a “Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide” almost certainly did, for it is a parody of a line in Henry VI, Part 3. It is clear from the context that Shakespeare had distinguished himself enough to awaken envy in a dying man but was still sufficiently fresh to be considered an upstart.

  No one knows quite what Shakespeare did to antagonize the dying Greene. It may have been very personal, for all we know, but more probably it was just a case of professional jealousy. Greene evidently felt that Shakespeare’s position as a player qualified him to speak lines but not to create them. Writing was clearly best left to university graduates, however dissolute. (Greene was the worst kind of snob-a university graduate from a humble background: His father was a saddler.) At any rate Shakespeare or someone speaking for him must have protested, for soon afterward Greene’s editor and amanuensis, Henry Chettle, offered an apology of radiant humility and abjection, praising Shakespeare’s honesty and good character, “his facetious grace in writing,” and much else.

  Chettle was much more grudging in apologizing to Christopher Marlowe, who was far worse maligned (though, as was usual in these tracts, not explicitly named), as Greene’s slender volume accused him of atheism-a very grave charge for the time. Why Chettle was so much more respectful (or fearful) of Shakespeare than of the comparatively well-connected and always dangerous Marlowe is an interesting but unresolvable puzzle. At all events no one would ever attack Shakespeare in such a way again.

  Just at the moment that Shakespeare enters the theatrical record, the record itself is suspended owing to a particularly severe outbreak of plague. Four days after the death of Robert Greene, London ’s theaters were officially ordered shut, and they would remain so for just under two years, with only the briefest remissions. It was a period of great suffering. In London at least ten thousand people died in a single year. For theatrical companies it meant banishment from the capital and a dispiritingly itinerant existence on tour.

  What Shakespeare did with himself at this time is not known. Ever elusive, he now disappears from recorded sight for two years more. As always there are many theories as to where he passed the plague years of 1592 and 1593. One is that he spent the time traveling in Italy, which would account for a rush of Italian plays upon his return-The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet-though at least one of these was probably written already and none requires a trip to Italy to explain its existence. All that is certain is that in April 1593, just before his twenty-ninth birthday and little more than half a year after the theaters had shut, William Shakespeare produced a narrative poem called Venus and Adonis with a dedication so florid and unctuous that it can raise a sympathetic cringe even after four hundred years. The dedication says:

  Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden. Only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured you with some graver labour.
But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather…

  The person at whom this gush was directed was not an aged worthy, but a wan, slender, exceedingly effeminate youth of nineteen, Henry Wriothesley (pronounced “rizzly”), third Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield. Southampton grew up at the heart of the court. His father died when he was just seven, and he was placed under the wardship of Lord Burghley, the queen’s lord treasurer-effectively her prime minister. Burghley saw to his education and, when Southampton was just seventeen, sought to have him marry his granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth de Vere, who was in turn daughter of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and longtime favorite among those who think Shakespeare was not Shakespeare. Southampton declined to proceed with the marriage, for which he had to pay a colossal forfeit of £5,000 (something like £2.5 million in today’s money). He really didn’t want to marry Burghley’s granddaughter.

  Southampton, it appears, enjoyed the intimate company of men and women both. He had a mistress at court, one Elizabeth Vernon, but equally while serving in Ireland as Lord-General of Horse under his close friend the Earl of Essex, he shared quarters with a fellow officer whom he would “hug in his arms and play wantonly with,” in the words of one scandalized observer. He must have made an interesting soldier, for his most striking quality was his exceeding effeminacy. We know precisely how he looked-or at least wished to be remembered-because Nicholas Hilliard, the celebrated portraitist, produced a miniature of him showing him with flowing auburn locks draped over his left shoulder, at a time when men did not normally wear their hair so long or arrange it with such smoldering allure.

  Matters took a further interesting lurch in the spring of 2002 when another portrait of Southampton was identified at a stately home, Hatchlands Park in Surrey, showing him dressed as a woman (or an exceedingly camp man), a pose strikingly reminiscent of the beautiful youth with “a woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted” described with such tender admiration in Sonnet 20. The date attributed to the painting, 1590-1593, was just the time that Shakespeare was beseeching Southampton ’s patronage.