Shakespeare: The World as Stage

by Bill Bryson

  The Globe had a distinction in that it was designed exclusively for theatrical productions and took no earnings from cockfighting, bearbaiting, or other such common entertainments. The first mention of it in writing comes in the early autumn of 1599 when a young Swiss tourist named Thomas Platter left a pretty full account of what he saw-including, on September 21, a production of Julius Caesar at the Globe, which he said was “very pleasingly performed” by a cast of about fifteen players. It is the first mention not only of the Globe, but also of Julius Caesar. (We are much indebted to Platter and his diary for a large part of what we know about Elizabethan theatrical performances in London-making it all the more ironic that he spoke almost no English and could not possibly have understood most of what he was seeing.)

  The new theater immediately outshone its chief competitor, the Rose, home of Edward Alleyn and the Admiral’s Men. The Rose was only a stroll away down a neighboring lane, and only seven years old, but it was built on boggy ground that made it always dank and uncomfortable. Unable to compete, Alleyn’s company retired to a new site across the river, on Golden Lane, Cripplegate Without, where they built the Fortune, which was even larger than the Globe. It is the one London theater of the period for which architectural details exist, and so most of our “knowledge” of the Globe is in fact extrapolated from it. It burned down in two hours in 1621, leaving the Admiral’s Men “utterly undone.”

  The Globe itself didn’t last long. It likewise burned down in 1613, when sparks from a stage cannon ignited the roof thatch. But what a few years they were. No theater-perhaps no human enterprise-has seen more glory in only a decade or so than the Globe during its first manifestation. For Shakespeare this period marked a burst of creative brilliance unparalleled in English literature. One after another, plays of unrivaled majesty dropped from his quill: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra.

  We thrill at these plays now. But what must it have been like when they were brand new, when all their references were timely and sharply apt, and all the words never before heard? Imagine what it must have been like to watch Macbeth without knowing the outcome, to be part of a hushed audience hearing Hamlet’s soliloquy for the first time, to witness Shakespeare speaking his own lines. There cannot have been, anywhere in history, many more favored places than this.

  Shakespeare also at this time produced (though he may of course have written earlier) an untitled allegorical poem, which history has come to know as The Phoenix and the Turtle, for a book of poems published in 1601 called Love’s Martyr: or Rosalind’s Complaint, compiled by Robert Chester and dedicated to Chester’s patrons, Sir John and Lady Salusbury. What relationship Shakespeare had with Chester or the Salusburys is unknown. The poem, sixty-seven lines long, is difficult and doesn’t always get much notice in biographies (Greenblatt in Will in the World and Schoenbaum in his Compact Documentary Life both, rather surprisingly, fail to mention it at all) but Frank Kermode rates it highly, calling it “a remarkable work with no obvious parallel in the canon,” and praising its extraordinary language and rich symbolism.

  Yet-and there really is always a “yet” with Shakespeare-just as he was feverishly turning out some of his greatest work and enjoying the summit of his success, everything in his private life seemed to indicate a pronounced longing to be in Stratford. First he bought New Place-a strikingly large commitment for someone who had not owned a home before-and followed that with a cottage and plot of land across the road from New Place (probably to house a servant; it was too small to make a rentable investment). Then he acquired 107 acres of tenanted farmland north of Stratford for £320. Then, in the summer of 1605, he spent the very substantial sum of £440 to buy a 50 percent holding in tithes of “corn, grain, blade and hay” in three neighboring villages, from which he could expect earnings of £ 60 a year.

  In the midst of these purchases, in the early winter of 1601, Shakespeare and his fellows faced what must have been an unnerving experience when they became peripherally but dangerously involved in an attempt to overthrow the queen. The instigator of this reckless exercise was Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex.

  Essex was the stepson of the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth ’s longtime favorite and consort in all but name for much of her reign. Essex, though thirty years Elizabeth’s junior, was in his turn a favorite, too, but he was also headstrong, reckless, and foolishly, youthfully disobedient. Time and again he tried her patience, but in 1599 royal exasperation turned to furious displeasure when Essex, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, concluded a truce without authority with Irish insurgents, then returned to England against orders. Enraged, the queen placed Essex under strict house arrest. He was forbidden to have contact with his wife or even to stroll in his own garden. Worse, he was deprived of the lucrative offices that had supported him. The confinement was lifted the following summer, but by this point the damage to his pride and pocket had been done, and he began, with a few loyal followers, to cook up a scheme to foment a popular uprising and depose the queen. Among these loyal followers was the Earl of Southampton.

  It was at this point, in February 1601, that Sir Gelly Meyrick, one of Essex’s agents, approached the Lord Chamberlain’s Men enjoining them to present a command performance of Richard II for a special payment of £2. The play, according to Meyrick’s specific instructions, was to be performed at the Globe, in public, and the company was expressly instructed to include the scenes in which the monarch was deposed and murdered. This was a willfully incendiary act. The scenes were already so politically sensitive at the time that no printer would dare publish them.

  It is important to bear in mind that to an Elizabethan audience a history play was not an emotionally remote account of something long since done; rather, it was perceived as a kind of mirror reflecting present conditions. Therefore staging Richard II was bound to be seen as an intentionally and provocatively seditious exercise. Only recently a young author named John Hayward had found himself clapped into the Tower after writing sympathetically about Richard II’s abdication in The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV- an error of judgment he further compounded by dedicating the work to the Earl of Essex. This was no time to be trifling with regal feelings.

  Yet the Lord Chamberlain’s Men dutifully performed the play as commanded on February 7. The next day the Earl of Essex, supported by three hundred men, set off from his home in the Strand toward the City. His plan was first to take control of the Tower and then Whitehall and then to arrest the queen. It was a harebrained scheme. His hope, evidently, was to replace Elizabeth with James VI of Scotland, and it was his confident expectation that he would accumulate supporters along the way. In fact, no one came forward-not a soul. His men rode through eerily silent streets, their rallying cries unanswered by a sullen and watching citizenry. Without a mob behind them, they had no hope of victory. Uncertain what to do next, Essex stopped for lunch, then fell back with his small (and swiftly evaporating) army toward the Strand. At Ludgate they ran into a party of startled soldiers, who in some confusion drew weapons and managed to fire some shots. A bullet passed through Essex ’s hat.

  His revolution descending into farce, Essex fled back to his house, where he spent what remained of his liberty trying desperately-and a little pointlessly, one would have thought-to destroy incriminating documents. Soon afterward a detachment of soldiers turned up and arrested him and his arch-supporter, Southampton.

  Augustine Phillips spoke for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the investigation that followed. We know little about Phillips, other than that he was a trusted member of the company, but he must have made a persuasive case that they were innocent dupes or had acted under duress, for they were excused of any transgression-in fact were summoned to stage another play before the queen at Whitehall on the very day that she signed Essex’s death warrant, Shrove Tuesday, 1601. Essex was executed on the day following. Meyrick and five other supporters were likewise beheaded. Southamp
ton faced a similar unhappy fate, but was spared execution thanks to his mother’s influential pleadings. He spent two years imprisoned in the Tower of London, albeit in considerable comfort in a suite of apartments that cost him £ 9 a week in rent.

  Essex would have saved his own head and a great deal of bother if only he had been born with a little patience. Just over two years after his farcical rebellion, the queen herself was dead-and swiftly succeeded by the man whom Essex had given his life to try to put on the throne.

  Chapter Seven. The Reign of King James, 1603-1616

  BY THE WINTER OF 1603, if an account left by a French envoy, André Hurault, is entirely to be trusted, Queen Elizabeth I had become a little odd to behold. Her face was caked permanently in a thick mask of white makeup, her teeth were black or missing, and she had developed the distracted habit of loosening the stays of her dress so that it forever hung open. “You could see the whole of her bosom,” noted Hurault in some wonder.

  Shortly after Twelfth Night, the court retired to the royal palace at Richmond and there in early February the Chamberlain’s Men, presumably with William Shakespeare among them, performed before the queen for the last time. (The play they performed is not known.) Soon afterward Elizabeth caught a chill and slipped into a dreamy, melancholic illness from which she never emerged. On March 24, the last day of the year under the old Julian calendar, she died in her sleep, “mildly like a lamb.” She was sixty-nine years old.

  To the joy of nearly everyone, she was uneventfully succeeded by her northern kinsman James, son of Mary, Queen of Scots. He was thirty-six years old and married to a Danish Catholic, but devotedly Protestant himself. In Scotland he was James VI, but in England he became James I. He had ruled in Scotland for twenty years already and would reign in England for twenty-two more.

  James was not, by all accounts, the most visually appealing of fellows. He was graceless in motion, with a strange lurching gait, and had a disconcerting habit, indulged more or less constantly, of playing with his codpiece. His tongue appeared to be too large for his mouth. It “made him drink very uncomely,” wrote one contemporary, “as if eating his drink.” His only concession to hygiene, it was reported, was to daub his fingertips from time to time with a little water. It was said that one could identify all his meals since becoming king from the stains and gravy scabs on his clothing, which he wore “to very rags.” His odd shape and distinctive waddle were exaggerated by his practice of wearing extravagantly padded jackets and pantaloons to protect himself from assassins’ daggers.

  We might allow ourselves a touch of skepticism here, however. These critical observations were, in truth, mostly made by disaffected courtiers who had every reason to wish to see the king reduced by caricature, so it is difficult to know how much of a shambling wreck he really was. In one five-year period he bought two thousand pairs of gloves, and in 1604 he spent a staggering £47,000 on jewels, which clearly doesn’t suggest a total disregard for appearance.

  Yet there is no doubt that there was a certain measure of differentness about him, particularly with regard to sexual comportment. Almost from the outset he excited dismay at court by nibbling handsome young men while hearing the presentations of his ministers. Yet he was also dutiful enough to produce eight children by his wife, Queen Anne. Simon Thurley notes how in 1606 James and his brother-in-law, King Christian IV of Denmark, undertook a “drunken and orgiastic progress” through the stately homes of the Thames Valley, with Christian at one point collapsing “smeared in jelly and cream.” A day or two later, however, both were to be found sitting circumspectly watching Macbeth.

  Whatever else he was, James was a generous patron of drama. One of his first acts as king was to award Shakespeare and his colleagues a royal patent, making them the King’s Men. For a theatrical troupe, honors came no higher. The move made them Grooms of the Chamber and gave them the right, among other privileges, to deck themselves out in four and a half yards of scarlet cloth provided by the Crown. James remained a generous supporter of Shakespeare’s company, using them often and paying them well. In the thirteen years between his accession and Shakespeare’s death, they would perform before the king 187 times, more than all other acting troupes put together.

  Though Shakespeare is frequently categorized as an Elizabethan playwright, in fact much of his greatest output was Jacobean and he now produced a string of brilliant tragedies-Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus-and one or two lesser works, notably Timon of Athens, a play so difficult and seemingly incomplete that it is rarely performed today. James made his own contribution to literary posterity, too, by presiding over the production of a new “Authorized Version”-the King James Version-of the Bible, a process which took a panel of worthies seven years of devoted labor from 1604 to 1611 to complete and in which he took an informed and leading interest. It was the one literary production of the age that rivaled Shakespeare’s for lasting glory-and, not incidentally, played a more influential role in encouraging a conformity of spelling and usage throughout Britain and its infant overseas dominions.

  By the reign of James, comparatively few Britons were any longer truly Catholic. Whereas Shakespeare had been born into a country that was probably (albeit discreetly) two-thirds Roman Catholic, by 1604 few people alive had ever heard a Mass or taken part in any Catholic rite. Perhaps as little as 2 percent of the populace (though a higher proportion of aristocrats) were actively Catholic. Thinking it was safe to do so, in 1604 James suspended the recusancy laws and even allowed Mass to be said in private homes.

  In fact the severest Catholic challenge to Protestant rule was just about to be mounted, when a group of conspirators placed thirty-six barrels of gunpowder-ten thousand pounds or so by weight-in a cellar beneath the Palace of Westminster in advance of the state opening of Parliament. Such a volume of explosives would have been sufficient to blow the palace, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall, and much of the surrounding neighborhood sky-high, taking with it the king, queen, their two sons, and most of the nation’s leading clerics, aristocrats, and distinguished commoners. The reverberations from such an event are essentially unimaginable.

  The one drawback of the scheme was that it would inevitably kill innocent Catholic parliamentarians. In the hope of sparing them, an anonymous tip-off was sent to a leading Catholic, Lord Monteagle. Hopelessly compromised and fearing an excruciating reprisal, Monteagle handed the letter straight to the authorities, who entered the palace’s cellar and found one Guy Fawkes sitting on the barrels, waiting for the signal to strike a light. November 5 has been celebrated ever since with the burning of Fawkes effigies, though the hapless Fawkes was in fact a comparatively minor figure in the Powder Treason, as it became known at the time. The mastermind was Robert Catesby, whose family owned an estate just twelve miles from Stratford and who was distantly related to William Shakespeare by marriage, though there is no suggestion that their lives ever meaningfully intersected. In any case Catesby had spent most of his adult life as a faithful Protestant and had reverted to Catholicism only with the death of his wife five years earlier.

  The reaction against Catholics was swift and decisive. They were barred from key professions and, for a time, not permitted to travel more than five miles from home. A law was even proposed to make them wear striking and preposterous hats, for ease of identification, but it was never enacted. Recusancy fines, however, were reinstated and fiercely enforced. Catholicism would never be a threat in England again. The challenge to orthodoxy now would come from the other end of the religious spectrum-from the Puritans.

  Though Shakespeare was increasingly a person of means, and now one of the most conspicuous men of property in Stratford, surviving evidence shows that in London he continued to live frugally. He remained in lodgings, and the value of his worldly goods away from Stratford was assessed by tax inspectors at a modest £5. (But a man as pathologically averse to paying taxes as Shakespeare no doubt took steps to minimize any appearance of wealth.)

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p; Thanks to the scrupulous searching of Charles and Hulda Wallace and the documents of the Belott-Mountjoy case, we know that Shakespeare in this period was living in the home of the Huguenot Christopher Mountjoy, on the corner of Silver and Monkswell streets in the City-though he may not have been there continuously, as plague once again shut the theaters in London for a year, from May 1603 to April 1604. It was also during this period, as may be remembered, that Mountjoy fell out with his son-in-law Stephen Belott over the financial settlement concerning Belott’s marriage to Mountjoy’s daughter-a matter that must have generated a good deal of heat in the household, judging by the later depositions. It is diverting to imagine a tired and no doubt overstressed William Shakespeare trying to write Measure for Measure or Othello (both probably written that year) in an upstairs room over a background din of family arguments. But of course he may have written elsewhere. And the Belotts and Mountjoys may have fought their wars in whispers. We know that one of their other lodgers, a writer named George Wilkins, was a man of violent temper, so perhaps they were too cowed to raise their voices.

  The reknowned Shakespeare authority Stanley Wells thinks Shakespeare might have taken time off from the company to return to Stratford to write plays. “He retained a close interest in Stratford throughout his life, and there is nothing to suggest that he didn’t retire there from time to time to write in peace,” Wells told me. “The company may well have said to him, ‘We need a new play-go home and write it.’ He owned a rather grand establishment. It is not unreasonable to suppose that he might have wanted to spend time there.”

  Except that he was creatively productive, nothing of note can be stated with certainty about Shakespeare’s life from 1603 to 1607 and 1608, when first his brother Edmund and then his mother died, both of unknown causes. Edmund was twenty-seven years old and an actor in London. Shakespeare’s mother was over seventy-a ripe old age. More than that we do not know about either of them.