by Judith Cook
It is quite possible to believe that the three met up in Warwickshire that spring; indeed the Bell Inn at Welford just outside Stratford claims to be the meeting place. Drayton, now an established poet, lived in Nuneaton, an easy day’s ride away, while Jonson took any opportunity to call on friends out of town. To this day local tradition has Shakespeare either walking back home along the path beside the Avon, which still exists, or riding back on horseback along the Evesham road. Either way he is said to have become thoroughly soaked. If this was the case and if, as was probable, he had retired to Stratford exhausted and drained from his vast output of work, then he might indeed have died of ‘pulmonary congestion’, in other words, pneumonia.
The Burial register reads: ‘1616 April 25. Will Shakespeare, gent.’ His position in the town entitled him to be buried inside the church within the chancel rail and it is for his standing in the local community, not his reputation as a playwright and poet, that he lies where he does. He is said to have been buried seventeen feet down but this is hardly possible so close to the River Avon. He is also credited with writing his own epitaph:
Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To dig the duste encloased here;
ET
Blest Be Y Man YU spares thes stones
And curst be he Y moves my bones.
An entire industry has grown up around his epitaph alone and constant requests have been made to open up the grave in the hope that by so doing his authorship might in some way be ‘proved’. But those who still prefer to believe that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare have never been able to explain how he was able to fool the actors among whom he worked for the best part of a quarter of a century, during which time he also lived among and mixed with all the other playwrights of the day from Marlowe through Jonson to Middleton and Fletcher. Or why, in his will, he left to ‘my fellows’ John Hemings, Henry Condell and Richard Burbage ‘a peece [that is money] to buy them rings’. Not to mention Ben Jonson’s poetic tribute to him as ‘Soul of our age!, the applause! the wonder of our stage!’, telling how he outshone Lily, ‘sporting Kyd and Marlowe’s mighty line’. That he will stay alive so long as his works live:
Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage.
Prospero had finally left his magic island, abjured his ‘rough magic’, broken his staff, drowned his books and set the creatures of his imagination free. He had nothing more to say.
THIRTEEN
An Insult to Spain
The Poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown; the Poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing,
A local habitation, and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination.
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, i
In the March of 1618 another major theatrical light went out with the death of Richard Burbage. He had risen with Edward Alleyn in the late 1580s, matched him for ten years, then, as Alleyn gradually withdrew from the stage at the end of the century, had gone on to become the greatest actor of his day, unrivalled over a span of twenty years. He had not only done his writers proud, he was both respected and much loved within his profession and in an age of gossip and the hothouse atmosphere of that profession it is impossible to find anyone who had a bad word to say of him.
Those who saw him act vied with each other afterwards to describe the effect he had on audiences. There are several versions of the Funeral Elegy on the death of the famous Actor Richard Burbage: who died Saturday in Lent, the 13 March 1618:
The Play now ended, think his grave to be
The retiring house of his sad Tragedie,
Where to give his fame this, be not afraid
Here lies the best Tragedian ever played.
No more young Hamlet though but scant of breath
Shall cry revenge for his dear father’s death:
Poor Romeo never more shall tears beget
For Juliet’s love and cruel Capulet:
Harry shall not be seen as King or Prince,
They died with thee, dear Dick
Not to revive again. Jeronimo
Shall cease to mourn his son, Horatio,
Edward shall lack a representative,
And Crookback, as befits, shall cease to live.
Tyrant Macbeth with unwash’d bloody hand,
We vainly now may hope to understand.
Brutus and Marcus henceforth must be dumb
For ne’er their like upon our stage shall come
To charm the faculty of eyes and ears,
Unless we could command the dead to rise . . .
Heartbroke Philaster and Amintas too
Are left forever with the red-haired Jew,
Which sought the bankrupt merchant’s pound of flesh
By woman lawyer caught in his own mesh.
The list of characters referred to in the Elegie, of which this is only a part, shows that, as well as his roles in Shakespeare’s plays in his own day, Burbage was equally famed for his performances in those of Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other contemporary dramatists.
Richard Corbet wrote of how, by his brilliance, he could ‘change with ease from Ancient Lear to youthful Pericles’:
What a wide world, the Globe thy fittest place!
Thy stature small, but every thought and mood
Might thoroughly from thy face be understood.
After listing various roles Burbage had made his own he concludes:
Thereafter must our poets leave to write,
Since thou art gone, dear Dick, a tragic night
Will wrap our black-hung stage. He made a Poet.
And those who yet remain full surely know it.
For having Burbage to give forth each line
It filled the brain with fury more divine.1
But renowned as he might have been as Jonson’s ‘subtle Alchemist’ and Volpone or Kyd’s Hieronimo in Spanish Tragedy, it is his creation of Shakespeare’s roles that still overshadows them all. He is first remembered as a young actor playing one of the Antipholus twins in Comedy of Errors, followed by Petruchio, Romeo, and Benedict. Thomas Nashe wrote of him that when he played the chivalrous Talbot in the Henry VI plays, it had seemed to him during the time he was in the theatre that England’s great military hero actually ‘lived again’. ‘Crookback’ Richard III also came early but it was a role Burbage would play for the rest of his life so convincingly that ‘a simple innkeeper mistook a player for a King’, not least when he cried real tears on Bosworth Field. There were so many more, Richard II with his splendid poetry, Prince Hal growing into Henry V, Shylock ‘in a red wig’, ‘the grieved Moor’ Othello, and ‘ancient Lear’. Tradition has it that in common with a number of serious actors today he also played Malvolio. Prospero is not listed in the many contemporary tributes but it is hard to imagine that he did not also play that last great role.
No actor since has ever had written for him such a range of parts. Writer and player found each other at exactly the right point in time. ‘He made a Poet’, wrote Corbet. Shakespeare was indeed magnificently served by his great friend and colleague, but ‘made a Poet’? If this is true, then it might also be said that the Poet made the Actor.
It was during that same summer that Ben Jonson was to pay his famous, or notorious, visit to Sir William Drummond at his Scottish home, Hawthornden Castle.2 Jonson walked the whole way from London, presumably from choice since he was well able to afford the hire of a horse. Dekker describes Jonson’s appearance at this time as ‘having a face like a bruised, rotten russet-apple, or a badly pock-marked warming pan’. As he stomped steadily north he had plenty of time to consider both his past life and his present situation. He no longer fought duels nor would he again risk prison for the sake of a good
joke; his wilder years now lay behind him. He had suffered loss, first his baby daughter then, in 1601, his eldest son had died of the plague as the result of which, he was to tell Drummond, he suffered a strange experience. At the time of the boy’s death he was staying in the country with Sir Robert Cotton, when he suddenly awoke in the middle of the night to see a vision of the boy ‘with a mark of a bloody cross on his forehead as if he had been cut with a sword’. Thoroughly shaken, the next morning Jonson told his host of his nightmare. Cotton’s response was to reassure him that it was ‘but an apprehension of his fantasy’ and to take no notice of it, but shortly afterwards Jonson received a message from his wife, Anne, telling him that the boy was indeed dead. All that was left was for Jonson to write his epitaph:
Rest in soft peace and asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson, his best piece of poetry.
There had been no more children and the Jonsons had drifted apart. As he told Drummond later, he had not ‘bedded’ Anne for five years.
With regard to his work his plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, remained popular and he had also had considerable success with the more recent The Devil’s an Ass, performed by the King’s Men. The story is that of an apprentice demon who feels he is being given tasks far beneath his ability and so persuades Satan, much against the latter’s better judgement, to send him up to earth to corrupt the City of London. Arriving in the heart of the City, he assiduously sets about trying to corrupt the merchants, bankers and city fathers only to find he is completely outclassed. Finally, unable to cope, he has to beg Satan to rescue him, promising that he will make ropes out of sand and catch the wind in a net, rather than ‘stay me here a thought more’. Whereupon an infuriated Satan arrives in a clap of thunder to take his failed demon back to Hell. Since financial malpractice, corruption and conmen are still with us, it is not surprising that a recent production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was a great success.
But Jonson was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the theatre due to the the popular passion for elaborate masques. While he was prepared to write these, since he was well paid for doing so, he felt as many writers do today that his work was being swamped by what we would call designers’ theatre. Paired most often with the most famous stage designer of the day, Inigo Jones, he was finding that his words were now secondary to exotic sets and magnificent costumes, leading him to confide to Prince Charles that ‘when he wanted a word to express the greatest villain in the world, he called him “an Inigo”’.
When he arrived in Scotland his first port of call was Edinburgh, where he received a civic reception in recognition of the publication of his works two years earlier, even though there were those back home who had accused him of arrogance for so doing. It was also to acknowledge that he was about to receive an honorary degree from the University of Oxford. While in the city he was caught up with none other than John Taylor, ‘the water poet’, he who had been howled off the stage of the Hope Theatre for failing to entertain a rowdy audience with a supposed insult competition and his poetry. He, too, had walked the whole way but through necessity rather than choice and by the time he reached Edinburgh he was in a sorry state. His must have been the first sponsored walk for before setting out he had persuaded a number of people to pay sums of money to him on his return if he successfully completed the round trip. He must have been in a bad way, for Jonson felt sufficiently sorry for him to help him out financially.
He then went on to Hawthornden. Presumably Drummond had actually invited him to stay but he could hardly have known what he would be in for. Soon Jonson was nightly regaling his host and his friends with London Court scandal and theatrical gossip. As he began drinking his way steadily through Drummond’s cellar he also moved on to his favourite subject: himself. How when young he was ‘much given to venery’, that he thought ‘going to bed with a maid nothing to the enjoyment of the wantonness of a wife’ (someone else’s wife, that is), and that while married he had lain with another woman diverse times who allowed him all privileges ‘except that last act that she would not agree to’. Quite possibly many women did not allow full sexual intercourse with their lovers; Elizabethan or Jacobean women of childbearing age and normal fertility were playing Russian roulette every time they made love.
Whether Drummond, who seems to have been a quiet and studious kind of person, appreciated such confidences he does not say. He made a note of Jonson’s opinions of other writers, such as ‘that Chapman’s translations of Homer and Virgil . . . were but prose; that Donne, for not keeping of the accent [beat] deserved hanging; that Sharpham, Day and Dekker were all rogues . . .’. That ‘Drayton feared him’, ‘Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses’ (a case of the pot calling the kettle black), ‘that he once beat Marston and took his pistol from him’ and that Marston ‘wrote his father-in-law’s preachings and his father-in-law his [Marston’s] comedies’. That the boy actor, Nathan Field, was ‘his scholar’, and that ‘Markham was a plagiarist and a base fellow like Thomas Middleton’. Also that Shakespeare, in a play, had ‘brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where there is no sea nearer than some hundred miles’.
As for the Court, Queen Elizabeth ‘never saw herself in the mirror after she became old’, Leicester’s wife, affirmed Jonson, ‘poisoned him with a potion given to her to cure faintness’, while Sir Philip Sidney had been ‘no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples’. He claimed close friendship with Sir Walter Ralegh, who had been foolish enough to have sufficient faith in him to send him to France with his own son to keep an eye on the lad. Jonson blamed his own subsequent activities, concerning ‘damsels’ and getting drunk, on the proclivities of young Ralegh who, from time to time, had to haul his mentor back to their lodgings ‘on a cart’. He also confided in Drummond that during his time in prison after killing Gabriel Spenser, he had for a short time become a Catholic convert, a recusant, ‘and that at his first communion, in true token of reconciliation, he had drunk out all the full cup of wine’. After the way he was getting through his host’s wine, Drummond was hardly surprised to learn that on occasion, after a heavy evening’s drinking, ‘he [Jonson] hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he has seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians fight in his imagination’.
Finally, to Drummond’s great relief, Jonson at last set off back home to London, leaving his host to contemplate a cellar full of empty bottles. ‘He is’, wrote Drummond,
a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others, given rather to lose a friend than a jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him (especially after a drink which is one of the elements in which he liveth), a dissembler of ill parts which reign in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth, thinketh nothing well but what either he himself or some of his friends and countrymen hath said and done. He is passionately kind and angry, careless either to gain or keep, vindictive but if he be well answered, at himself. Interpreteth best saying and deeds often to the worst, oppressed with fantasy, which hath ever mastered his reason: a general disease in many poets.3
Either unaware or uncaring of the reputation he had left behind, on 10 May 1619 Jonson wrote to Drummond asking if he would undertake a little research for him on a project on which he was engaged, sending along with his good wishes to Drummond his regards to a formidable list of people he had met while staying with him. There is no record of Drummond’s reply but he deserves a vote of thanks for recording Jonson’s stay in such detail and also how the fame of the London dramatists had spread far enough north for people to want to hear about them at first hand.
The golden age of the playwrights was now rapidly drawing to its end although the early 1620s still produced some interesting work, one example being a play rushed on to the stage while the events on which it was based were still a talking point. The Witch of Edmonton was a joint collaborati
on by Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley. Rowley, a contemporary of Ford, wrote almost entirely in collaboration with other people. In 1609, after making little headway as a dramatist in his own right and somewhat against the trend, he became an actor with the Duke of York’s (late Prince Charles’s) Men mainly playing comedy parts. He would, however, continue to collaborate on scripts, not least with Middleton on The Changeling.
The Witch of Edmonton was given its first performance not long after the supposed witch, who gives the play its title, was hanged for witchcraft at Tyburn on 16 April 1621. On 27 April, only eleven days later, a pamphlet was published, The Wonderful Discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer, Witch, Late of Edmonton, written by ‘Henry Goodcole, Minister of the Word of God, and her continual visitor in the Gaol of Newgate’, in which he detailed her supposed witchcraft and the crimes she was alleged to have committed, a copy of which must have been picked up by one or other of the writers. Given the eerie thrill such a subject was likely to give an audience, it must have seemed to them that a play based around such an immediately topical instance of witchcraft was likely to be a real crowd-puller. For there is no doubt that most of the population shared the views of King James, believed in witches and would continue to do so for some considerable time. Twenty years later Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins was to oversee the hanging of sixty women in Essex who had been accused of witchcraft.
In a period when any eccentric old woman, especially if she was unfortunate enough to have some physical deformity, could all too easily be made a scapegoat for all local ills, Elizabeth Sawyer fitted the picture only too well as by all accounts she was an unprepossessing-looking woman with only one eye. During her interrogation she was asked how she had suffered this loss, to which she replied: ‘With a stick which one of my children had in hand; that night my mother did die it was done, for I was stooping by the bedside and by chance did hit my eye on the sharp end of the stick.’ The means by which she was made to ‘confess’ to witchcraft hardly bear thinking about but during the inquisition she told her torturers that the Devil had appeared to her in the shape of a dog, sometimes black, sometimes white, and that he had ‘sucked’ her blood from a special teat which she had for that purpose. He had asked for her ‘body and soul’, or he would tear her to pieces, and when she agreed taught her a three-word Latin spell. She had finally been brought to the attention of the authorities by a local JP, Arthur Robinson, who had carried out a ‘test’ to ‘prove’ she was a witch. The test consisted of setting fire to some thatch from her roof while she was out and if this brought her running back, then it would prove her guilt. Needless to say, seeing the smoke, she did run back home and on such flimsy ‘evidence’, followed by interrogation, she was convicted.