Creators

by Paul M. Johnson

  Such work might have served. But when the theaters reopened in May 1594, an opportunity opened to participate, as actor, writer, and investor, in a new theatrical venture, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a group of skilled professionals who soon made themselves, and remained, the leading theatrical company in London (and so in the world).6 Shakespeare was named from the start as part of the undertaking, which began at the “private” theater at court in January 1594, when plays were performed indoors in artificial light to select audiences of 500 or so. The company then went on in the summer to lease the theater north of the Thames in Shoreditch, which was “public,” seated over 1,000, and worked by daylight. This playhouse was the first to be professionally designed and built (in 1576). It was created by the father of Shakespeare’s great acting colleague Richard Burbage. James Burbage was a joiner, and the theater was a work of highly sophisticated carpentry, built to provide endless dramatic opportunities.

  Here, and later at another professional theater on the South Bank, the Curtain, Shakespeare matured as a dramatist. In 1599, he, Burbage, and others formed a syndicate to dismantle the timber of the theater and use it, plus much other material, to build a newly designed state-of-the-art theater, the Globe, also on the South Bank at Southwark, to escape the jurisdiction of the London city fathers, who were puritanical and anti-plays. The Globe could seat 3,000 and was a highly profitable venue, supplemented in winter, from 1609 on, by a “private” indoor theater, the Blackfriars.7 As a “sharer,” Shakespeare held ten percent of the Globe shares, and a similar portion of other enterprises of the Chamberlain’s Men (after the accession of James I in 1603 they were known as the King’s Men). His company played more often at court than any other did: between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605 the company presented eleven plays, seven by Shakespeare (Love’s Labours Lost, written specially for court performances; The Comedy of Errors; Measure for Measure; Othello; and—twice—The Merchant of Venice).8 Shakespeare made a good deal of money out of the theater, a fact to which his investments in land and housing in Stratford testify; and he remained connected with the company till his death. No other playwright had such a long and continuous connection.9

  Shakespeare’s practicality also expressed itself in his willingness to write, and his skill at writing, plays suitable, in general and in detail, for the theater to be played in; the actors available to perform; and the public, both “public” and “private,” to be entertained. (The public audiences paid one penny minimum; the private audiences sixpence.) Shakespeare made brilliant use of all the facilities of the new professional theaters in his staging—the underfloor, the stage, the canopy level, the top level, and the apparatus for raising and lowering actors—while bearing in mind the limitations of the indoor “winter” theaters. It is notable that, as theatrical facilities expanded, Shakespeare’s plays made more use of them. For instance, in Cymbeline Jupiter descended by machinery, as did Diana in Pericles and Juno in the masque in The Tempest. But machinery and big theaters were never essential to Shakespeare’s effects; this is one reason why his plays were, and are, easier to stage well than those of his leading contemporaries: Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Webster.10 Shakespeare was always willing to write and rewrite to order or to suit the resources available. He was particularly successful in writing women’s roles played by the teenage boys who formed an essential part of the company. He wrote, as a rule, short but emphatic and incisive parts (Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, Ophelia). He was also capable of writing much longer and subtler characterizations (Rosalind, Cleopatra) if an outstanding boy was available. As for the public, Shakespeare was adept at appealing to both the elite and the “vulgar” or “groundlings” in the same play. Still (as the scene in which Hamlet instructs the players indicates), he was striving to improve the public taste, especially in acting. Like all the greatest artists, he created his own public, teaching the audiences to appreciate what he had to offer, and he left the theater a much more subtle and sophisticated world than he found it.11

  Linked to Shakespeare’s practicality were his distrust for the abstract and his dislike of theory. He was in no sense an intellectual, that is, someone who believes ideas are more important than people. His plays are essentially about people, not ideas. He was not, in the eyes of intellectuals like Ben Jonson, an educated man; and though he knew a lot, it had all been picked up by word of mouth—listening to people talk about what they knew well—and by private reading. He had no whiff of the university, no “system,” whether from the medieval scholars or the ancient Greek philosophers. He was not trying to deliver a new “message.” Though associated with the young earl of Southampton, and through him with the dangerous earl of Essex—who tried to overthrow the stable Elizabethan regime in 1601, thus getting himself beheaded and Southampton imprisoned—Shakespeare never dipped his pen in ink to give them a word of support. He was not a revolutionary in any sense or in any field. Quite the reverse. He valued stability. He had the instincts of a provincial middle-class tradesman who was doing well. He was a conservative who actively disliked radical ideas, as he made clear in his most openly opinionated play, Troilus and Cressida. He reiterated the dislike strongly and often in his history plays, where he deplores all attempts at a general redressing of wrongs, especially by violence against the existing order.12 Shakespeare’s conservatism, his preference for the present order of society with all its imperfections (of which he was well aware and which he frequently exposed), was tempered by a desire for “improvement,” in public morals and private manners, by the gradual and peaceful adoption of better ways of doing things. This love of “improvement” rather than revolution would have made Shakespeare an eminent Victorian.

  He rarely allows his opinions open expression, preferring to hint and nudge, to imply and suggest, rather than to state. His gospel, however, is moderation in all things; his taste is for toleration. Like Chaucer, he takes human beings as he finds them, imperfect, insecure, weak and fallible or headstrong and foolish—often desperate—and yet always interesting, often lovable or touching. He has something to say on behalf of all his characters, even the obvious villains, and he speaks from inside them, allowing them to put forward their point of view and give their reasons. Charles Lamb, a keen student of Shakespeare’s characters, took the view that only the “bloat king” in Hamlet was without redeeming qualities. Yet even King Claudius is sharp and shrewd in pointing out—to himself, too—the difference between worldly standards (which are his) and divine ones: he knows the difference between right and wrong. Actors, as Shakespeare intended, have found ways to play Iago, Macbeth, and Shylock in such splendor as to turn these bad men not indeed into sympathetic characters but into powerful studies in distorted values, who grip our attention and make us shiver. And there are literally scores of figures who flick across his scenes and whose weaknesses and follies amuse rather than disgust us. They are the common stock of humanity: flesh, not stereotypes; individuals with quirks and peculiarities; men and women who have stepped out of the street onto the stage to be themselves. They form a mighty army of real people.13

  Shakespeare gives his characters things to say that are always plausible and often memorable. “The wheel is come full circle.” “All the world’s a stage.” “There is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon!” “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.” “Sweet are the uses of adversity.” “It was Greek to me!” “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” “Oh, that way madness lies.” “Thy face is as a book where men may read strange matters.” “Throw physic to the dogs—I’ll none of it!” “To the last syllable of recorded time.” “Murder will out.” “A blinking idiot.” “A Daniel come to judgment.” “A good deed in a naughty world.” “Ill met by moonlight.” “Night and silence—who is here?” “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” “A heart as sound as a bell.” “Put money in thy purse.” “Thereby hangs a tale.” “The green-eyed monster.” “Trifles light as air.” “A
foregone conclusion.” “This sceptred isle.” “Call back yesterday.” “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” “I am not in the giving vein today.” “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” “A plague o’ both your houses!” “I am Fortune’s fool.” “The dark backward and abysm of time.” “A very ancient and fish-like smell.” “Time hath a wallet at his back in which he puts alms for oblivion.” “Dost thou think, because thou are virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” “Why, this is very midsummer madness.” “My salad days, when I was green in judgment.” Shakespeare fills seventy-six pages of the Oxford Book of Quotations.

  Indeed, if there is one area in which Shakespeare lacks moderation, it is the world of words. Here he is, in turn, excitable, theoretical, intoxicated, impractical, almost impossible. He lived in a period drunk with words, and he was the most copious and persistent toper of all. He was an inventor of words on a scale without rivalry in English literature—Chaucer, fertile though he was, came nowhere near. There are different ways of calculating how many words Shakespeare coined: one method puts the total at 2,076; another at about 6,700. There were 150,000 English words in his day, of which he used about 20,000, so his coinages were up to 10 percent of his vocabulary—an amazing percentage.14 Some were words he took out of the common stock of speech and baptized in print: abode, abstemious, affecting, anchovy, attorneyship, weather-bitten, well-ordered, well-read, widen, wind-shaken, wormhole, zany. He created words by turning nouns into verbs and vice versa, or by adding suffixes. There are 314 instances of his using “un-” in this way, as when Holofernes says in Love’s Labours Lost that Dull is “undressed, unpolished, unconcealed, unpruned, untrained or, rather, unlettered, or, rather, unconfessed fashion.” Some of these “un-” words, such as uncomfortable and unaware, rapidly became common use. He added “out-” too—outswear, outvillain, outpray, outfrown. Some of these neologisms did not catch on. There were 322 words that only Shakespeare ever used. Others, as noted above, caught on fast—bandit, for instance; ruffish; charmingly; tightly. Some words were rejected at the time but then rediscovered in his texts by romantics such as Coleridge and Keats—cerements, silverly, and rubious, for example. Sometimes Shakespeare just had fun with coining words like exsufflicate or anthropophaginian. Or he flicked off expressions in sheer polysyllabic exuberance—“corporal sufferance” instead of bodily pain, or “prenominate in nice conjecture.” Among his new, long words were plausive, waffure, concupiscible, questant, fraughtage, prolixious, tortive, insisture, vastidity, defunctive, and deceptious. (The last is a rival to “dublicitous,” coined by an American secretary of state in 1981.) But although he could be polysyllabic and prolix for effect, Shakespeare used short English words of Anglo-Saxon origin to drive the plot forward and produce action, as in the tense, tightly written murder scene of Macbeth, where everything is cut to the dramatic bone. And he used short words for beauty, too, as in what many think his most striking poem, The Phoenix and the Turtle (1601), on the chill but powerful subject of pure, deathless love. These thirteen quatrains followed by five tercets are composed with virtuosic skill almost entirely of short, usually one-syllable, words.15

  Phoenix was clearly written to be read aloud—if well spoken it is much more easily understood—and to a musical background, possibly to be sung. Reading Shakespeare to oneself, or watching it acted on a purely spoken stage, is a falsification, for the musical dimension is omitted. The age was musical, the last spasm of the polyphonic art of the Middle Ages in which England led the world, and the theater reflected this love of music. Even the grim and gruesome Henry VIII composed music, and his daughter Elizabeth fought tooth and nail to preserve the sacred musical splendors of her Chapel Royal from the Puritan vandals. Shakespeare, as his verse—whether blank or rhymed—testifies, had a wonderful ear for sound, and that he loved music is unquestionable—it runs in and out of his plays at every available opportunity, not just in the hundred songs but at almost every part in the acting. Elizabethan theater companies included actor-musicians and professional instrumentalists who could play difficult instruments like hautboys (oboes), horns, and trumpets in a variety of ways. Music was used to accompany onstage battles, duels, processions, and ceremonies; to signal doom or increase tension (as in movie and television drama today); to mark changes in character or tone in the action; to enhance magic and masques; and in general to add depth to a play. The prosperity of the Chamberlain–King’s Men, the increasing size of their theaters, the taste of the times, and, not least, Shakespeare’s own passion for music and his ingenuity in working it into his scenarios and verse meant that music played an increasing role in his work, especially in his last plays. The Tempest is a musical play, like the earlier, experimental Midsummer Night’s Dream; so is A Winter’s Tale. Shakespeare emphasized musical abstraction by casting his lines overwhelmingly in verse rather than prose and by stressing imagination and the metaphysical—even the supernatural—rather than realism, though, being the worldly man he was, he interpolates the earthy and the real, as in The Tempest, with vivid scenes of shipwreck and drunken comedy, to keep the feet of his audience firmly on the ground even while he was mesmerizing their senses.16

  On many occasions Shakespeare’s atmospheric musicians paraded openly onstage. At other times they played behind curtains or under the stage, which had a trapdoor and cavity for the use of gravediggers, prisoners, and similar underground characters.17 Shakespeare several times made use of “sleep music” to induce slumber in his characters for dramatic purposes. In The Tempest Ferdinand is sung to sleep by the enchanting “Come unto these Yellow Sands.” For Henry IV, Part 1 (as we shall see), Shakespeare had use of a Welsh-speaking teenage boy who played the monoglot daughter of Glendower and sang her husband Mortimer to sleep with a Welsh lullaby. Shakespeare also used music and singing to broaden his character studies. Thus in Measure for Measure, Marianna’s self-indulgence is emphasized by the song “Take, Oh Take, Those Lips Away!” In Twelfth Night Feste’s beautiful song “O Mistress Mine” tells us about the relationship between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek and their sovereign lady. In A Winter’s Tale, at the end of the fifth act, Paulina brings Queen Hermione’s statue to life with the words “Music! Awake her! Strike! Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more. Approach!” It is not difficult to imagine the music accompanying these dramatic words, which are immediately followed by the reconciliation between Hermione and her husband, King Leontes, and the rebirth of love with which the play ends.

  Though some textual indications (alarums, excursions, etc.) indicate particular instruments—trumpets signify the anger of battle; “ho’boys” signify fear creeping in—the texts rarely indicate the musical comments that were frequent throughout a play. As Shakespeare grew more experienced, it is possible to trace a steady and impressive increase in artistry, both in the use of music and in the many art songs themselves, in presentation. So modern productions that are not “scored” or “orchestrated” leave out a dimension of the plays. That of course is one reason why Shakespeare’s texts lend themselves so easily (and often) to opera. The 200-plus operatic versions mentioned earlier do not include the fashion for “music plays” of the seventeenth century, which may have begun during Shakespeare’s lifetime but which certainly dominated the reopened stage after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when a music-starved public flocked to listen to musical adaptations of plays, especially Shakespeare’s. Purcell and Dryden played important roles in this development, which saw Macbeth, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream established as favorites. The Dream also inspired Purcell’s Fairy Queen (1692), though the latter is more a series of masques than a play and does not include settings of Shakespeare’s words.18 The rage for musical versions of Shakespeare was a nineteenth-century phenomenon that continued into the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. In musical inspiration Shakespeare is easily ahead of all rivals, Goethe coming next with ab
out sixty musical settings; then Byron and Scott, with fifty-five each; and Victor Hugo with fifty-two. Very occasionally the composer excels the playwright—thus Verdi’s Falstaff is a better opera than The Merry Wives of Windsor is a play. But in almost every other case the subtle verbal music of Shakespeare’s texts defies improvement by the composer. Verdi’s early opera Macbeth is a travesty of that monument to poetic horror, Shakespeare’s play; and the musical Kiss Me, Kate, though highly successful and often revived, mainly serves to set off the theatrical fun and brilliance of The Taming of the Shrew.

  Shakespeare, then, was a virtuoso in words and sounds; and in his plays, though anxious always to follow a story line which is plausible and (when appropriate) historically accurate, he is equally, perhaps more, keen to create opportunities for his virtuosity. He quickly learned that, in the theater, an unsophisticated, perhaps uneducated, audience does not necessarily need to understand precisely everything that is said onstage in order to enjoy displays of verbal dexterity, ingenuity, and sheer poetry—a point also well understood by Molière, Shaw, and Stoppard. Shakespeare never forgot the groundlings, but he never lowered his sights either. He always gave his best, and stretched his intelligence and genius for words to its limits, knowing he could pull the public after him.

  The two parts of Henry IV, written toward the end of the 1590s as the climactic year 1600 (the peak of Shakespeare’s invention, the miracle time) approached, are wonderful exercises in stagecraft and sheer invention, creativity at its most active and unexpected. The last years of Elizabeth were a time of strident patriotism and also of war-weariness, the coexistence of two such incompatible emotions being precisely the kind of psychological paradox that Shakespeare understood and relished. He wanted to make a theatrical epic of the doings of the great soldier-king Henry V, who combined an overwhelming victory with a superb peace. But to do this he needed—or felt he needed—to present Henry’s youth and show how Henry became the man he was as king. This was not easy. The historical records, as reflected in sources like Holinshed’s Chronicles, Hall, and so forth, show that “Harry of Monmouth” began his military experience in his early teens on campaign with Richard II in Ireland, and that thereafter, with heavy military responsibilities in Wales and on the northern borders—sometimes both at once—he was rarely out of the saddle and camp. But like other battle-hardened young men he could also be dissolute, and stories about an unruly youth got about. Shakespeare, unwilling to accept the marvelous Henry V as a natural development from the teenage warrior Harry, seized on such tales to create a prolegomenon to his epic, a satisfying study in repentance and redemption.19 It did not quite turn out like that. Creative forces in a writer, as Shakespeare was always discovering and as anyone who studies the creative process knows well, have an inveterate habit of taking over and calling the score. Thus Henry IV elongated itself into two formidable plays, among the best Shakespeare ever wrote, which proved enormously popular, being printed during Shakespeare’s lifetime in quarto and duodecimo, more often than any other of his works.