by Shakespeare
That is why this is properly seen as the age of the adventurer and the projector, the dreamer of vast schemes. The formation of joint stock companies and the promotion of colonialist enterprises, the voyages of Martin Frobisher and Francis Drake, were all part of the same quickening energy and activity. It was a young man’s world in which aspiration and ambition might lead anywhere and everywhere. This was where Shakespeare belonged.
CHAPTER 21
The Spirit of the Time
Shall Teach Me Speed
The city was expanding quickly. It lured both the poor and the wealthy, the immigrant and the agricultural labourer. The aspiring youth of the country came to the Inns of Court, while the gentry haunted the legal courts and royal court of Westminster. The London “season,” for gentry and nobility, really only developed between 1590 and 1620. But there were also more beggars in London than in the rest of the country combined. The city was in a ferment of building and rebuilding, with tenements being erected on any and every vacant spot or spare piece of land. Proclamations of 1580 and 1593 attempted to halt the spread of new construction, but they might as well have tried to halt the tides. Houses and hovels were built away from the streets and the alleys, in gardens or in courtyards, and existing houses were divided up into smaller and smaller dwellings. The graveyards had houses built upon them. A population of approximately fifty thousand in 1520 had reached two hundred thousand by 1600. The shock of the new, for the young Shakespeare, was in part the shock of great numbers of people huddled together in a vast effusion of life.
That is why the city was pushing westward and eastward, too, beyond the city walls. The road between London and Westminster was as busy as the streets within the City, filled with litters and hackney coaches, carts and drays, wagons and pack-horses and four-wheeled carriages called “caroches.” Shakespeare may have been surprised by the narrowness of some of these streets that had not been built for the access of new traffic: the principal streets of Stratford were wider.
London was unique. It was the only city of its kind, and of its size, in England. So there grew a unique form of self-awareness among Londoners. It would be absurd to suppose some sudden change of consciousness – most citizens were too busy to be reflective in that manner – but there was an instinctive awareness that they were engaged in forms of life that had no real precedent. This was no longer a medieval city. It had suffered a sea-change. It was a new kind of thing, an urban mass comprised of people who related to each other in specifically urban ways. It is of vital consequence in the context of Shakespeare’s plays.
The city created, and existed upon, confusion. Thomas Dekker, in The Honest Whore, asked: “Is change strange? ’Tis not the fashion unless it alter …” The rise of the gentry and the merchant class steadily eroded the position and privileges of the old nobility. Kinship counted for less, and civic society for more; privately sworn obedience gave way to more impersonal bonds. It has been described as the transition from a “lineage society” to a “civil society.”
Costume is of the utmost significance in determining the quality of the Elizabethan urban world. Appearance indicated status and position as well as wealth. The emphasis among all groups of citizens – apart, that is, from the Puritan elect and the more staid members of the merchant aristocracy – was upon brightness or originality of colour and upon the wealth of minute detail lavished upon each article. One fashion was that of wearing a very large rose, made of silk, on each shoe. The nature of your dress also indicated the nature of your profession. Even street-sellers dressed in the clothing that would signify their role. Prostitutes made use of blue starch to advertise their trade. Apprentices wore blue gowns in winter and blue cloaks in summer; they were also obliged to wear blue breeches, stockings of white cloth and flat caps. Beggars and vagrants dressed in a way that would elicit pity and alms. In the theatres themselves infinitely more money was spent on costumes than on hiring playwrights or actors. It was a young city in this sense, too. More and more significantly the city itself became a form of theatre. London was a forcing house for dramatic improvisation and theatrical performance. It encompassed the ritual recantation of the traitor at the scaffold and the parade of the merchants in the Royal Exchange. It was the world of Shakespeare.
The city became the home of the pageant, in which all the spectacle and colour of the urban world were on display. On these festival occasions, arches and fountains were especially built, thereby turning London into a piece of moving scenery; the members of the various guilds and the aldermen, the knights and the merchants, dressed in their appropriate costume and were accompanied by ensigns and bannerets. There were platforms and stages upon which tableaux were performed. There was no real distinction between those who participated in, and those who watched, the moving displays. It was a piece of intense theatricality in which life and art were lit by the same pure, bright flame. It was also a means of expressing the power and wealth of the city. In the same spirit an historian has noted, of Elizabethan style, that “it was magnificent by design and saw magnificence the sum of all virtues” with “a glorious ostentation of random craftsmanship” that endlessly diverts: “it never rests; it demands response and elicits pleasure; there is no concession to order or to simplicity.”1 It might in part be a definition of Shakespeare’s own art. The predilection was for bold colour, and intricate pattern, all designed to elicit wonder or amazement. These were also the characteristics attributed to Shakespearian drama. In any one period, all the manifestations of a culture are of a piece.
This sense of magnificence was particularly pertinent to royalty. Elizabeth I declared that “we Princes are set as it were upon stages in the sight and view of the world,” an opinion echoed by Mary Queen of Scots who at her trial explained to her judges that “the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.” Shakespeare, with sure dramatic instinct, populated his stage with monarchs and courtiers. It is the world of his history plays, where ritual and ceremonial play so large a part. But there are surely risks in such an enterprise. A player can be a king, or a queen. What if the sovereign herself were no more than a player? It is a potentially delicate question that he broaches in Richard II and Richard III.
As the Church became desacralised, its candles and its images removed, so urban society became more profoundly ritualistic and spectacular. This is of the utmost importance for any understanding of Shakespeare’s genius. He thrived in a city where dramatic spectacle became the primary means of understanding reality. The pulpit just outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, known as Paul’s Cross, was defined as “the very stage of this land”2 where the preacher played his part, and John Donne declared that “this City is a great Theatre.” An early dramatist, Edward Sharpham, echoed this sentiment with his observation that “the Cittie is a Commedie, both in partes and in apparel, and your Gallants are the Actors.”3 Just as in more recent times New York has become a cinematic city, known primarily through the images in film and television, so London was the first theatrical city. The success of the drama in London, whether presented at the Globe or at the Curtain, had no parallel in any other European capital. From the production in 1581 of Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, there were innumerable plays that used the city as their setting.
The London playhouse was a new kind of building, erected for the first time in this period. People watched the actors in order to learn how to behave, how to speak and how to bow; the audience applauded individual speeches. The drama was also used as a means of conveying a social or political message to those assembled. A preacher complained that “plays are grown nowadays into such high request, as that some profane persons affirm they can learn as much both for edifying and example at a play, as at a sermon.”4 For the majority of the English, the drama of the mystery plays and the morality plays had until recent times been the major vehicle for spiritual instruction and doctrinal fable. It still retained its authority as an instructor. It was not simply an entertainment in the modern sense.
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br /> There was a profound recognition of life as a play. Jaques’s metaphor, “All the world’s a stage …” in As You Like It, was already a Renaissance commonplace. In sixteenth-century London, however, the truism acquired a more powerful resonance. For some the conflation of life and theatre was a source of comedy and high spirits; for others, like the Duchess of Malfi in Webster’s melodrama, it provoked sadness rather than mirth. Whatever its precise connotation, it consorted with what may be called the London vision. This has a direct bearing on Shakespeare’s drama. If life was a play, then what was a play but heightened life? The action on stage might be artificial, and might even draw attention to its artificiality, but it was still deeply authentic.
What were the characteristics of this London vision? It combined mockery and satire, discontinuity and change. It included cruelty and spectacle, where bears were tied to the stake and baited until death. It was mixed and variable, conflating satire and tragedy, melodrama and burlesque. It was the context for what Voltaire described as “les farces monstrueuses” of Shakespeare. It often depended upon coincidence and chance encounter. It was interested in the behaviour of crowds. It was bright and garish. It jostled for attention: Walt Whitman believed that Shakespeare “painted too intensely.” It was also implicitly egalitarian. Once the actors had taken off the robes of king or common soldier, all were equal. On the stage itself the queen shared the same space – had the same presence – as the clown. As Hazlitt said at a later date, “it raises the great, the remote, and the possible to an equality with the real, the little and the near.” This was Shakespeare’s experience of the city.
CHAPTER 22
There’s Many a Beast Then
in a Populous City
Visitors to London registered their surprise or disapproval at the level of intimacy between the sexes. Erasmus mentions that “wherever you come, you are received with a kiss by all; when you take your leave, you are dismissed with kisses.”1 It was customary, at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, for women to wear dresses in public that exposed their breasts.
The proximity of brothels and playhouses was always a matter for comment among contemporary moralists; they were both erected beyond the strict jurisdiction of the city, outside the walls or on the south bank, but there was a closer connection. The owners of the playhouses, the respected Henslowe and Alleyn among them, were also the owners of brothels. Alleyn’s wife was paraded in an open cart because of her connection with one such place of assignation. There were over one hundred bawdy-houses in the suburbs, and Shakespeare mentions the sign of the blind Cupid over their doors. Near the theatres, too, were “garden walks” and “garden alleys” where prostitutes gathered. The young women came from all over England. Contemporary legal documents reveal that two young girls, contemporaries of Shakespeare, had come from Stratford-upon-Avon to find an illicit income. There is a clear association between play-going and sexual indulgence, perhaps because both represented a temporary relief from the usual world. The theatre and the brothel both offered a release from conventional ethics and social morality. Shakespeare’s plays are filled with bawdy and sexual innuendo. He was catering to the tastes of a large section of the crowd.
Of disease, there was no end. The playhouses were closed down at the time of plague, precisely because they were considered to be the prime agent of infection. Waves of epidemic illness swept away the urban crowd in the most terrible ways. In 1593 more than 14 per cent of the population died of plague, and twice that number were infected. Sex and disease were closely associated. The plague was ascribed by some to “sodomitical sins.”2 Plague was also associated with the characteristic smell of the city, so that London became an organism of death as well as depravity. Few could ever have been wholly well. Mortality and anxiety were part of the air that the citizens breathed. The frontispiece of a production by Thomas Dekker in 1606 reads as The Seven Deadlie Sinns of London: Drawn in seven severall Coaches, Through the seven severall Gates of the Citie. All of Shakespeare’s plays allude to disease in one or other of its myriad forms, to agues and fevers, to palsy and sweating-sickness. In his drama, the notion of infection is associated with breathing itself.
The poor and the vagrant, also, have always been part of London’s life. They are the shadow that the city casts. In this period they comprised some 14 per cent of the population. There were the labouring poor who eked out their livings as porters or sweepers or water-bearers. There were the “sturdy beggars” who as often as not were whipped out of the city; a second or third appearance would incur the penalty of death. There were the masterless men who earned a small living by plastering or building or other casual trades. There were the destitute who lived off the parish and begged in the streets. These are “the famisht beggers” in Richard III (3374) who are “wearie of their Hues.” Shakespeare was acutely aware of this group of the dispossessed who appear, appropriately enough, in the margins of his plays; but, unlike the pamphleteers and the divines, he did not launch any great invectives against the conditions of the time. The parlous conditions of the poorer sort emerge fitfully in Coriolanus, for example, but without any great expressions either of pity or contumely.
The presence of these outcasts, who had little or nothing to lose, encouraged crime and violence on a large scale. It has been estimated that there were thirty-five serious disturbances or riots in the city between 1581 and 1602. There were food riots, riots between apprentices and the gentlemen of the Inns of Court, threats of riots against immigrants or “aliens.” In the first part of Henry IV the king blames “moody beggars staruing for a time” for causing “pell-mell hauocke and confusion” (2578). Of course in a city where male citizens customarily carried daggers or rapiers, apprentices had knives, and females were armed with bodkins or long pins, there was a constant danger of violence. Daggers were generally worn on the right hip. Shakespeare would have carried a rapier or a broadsword as a matter of habit. Cases of violent assault, brought before one of the under-sheriffs, were as common as cases of theft or over-pricing. There were criminal gangs, difficult to distinguish from gangs of disbanded soldiers, threatening the stability of certain areas of the city such as the Mint by the Tower and the Clink in Southwark.
In the course of his life Shakespeare came to know this city very well. He resided at various times in Bishopsgate, in Shoreditch, in Southwark and in Blackfriars. Well known to his neighbours and fellow parishioners, and recognisable by sight to the citizens who crowded the public theatres, he was in no sense an anonymous person. He knew the bookshops of St. Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Row; the title pages of his plays published in quarto list some sixteen different premises, from the sign of the Fox near St. Austin’s Gate to the sign of the White Hart in Fleet Street. He knew the taverns, where Rhenish and Gascony wines were sold, and the inns where beers and ales were purveyed. He knew the eating houses, or banqueting houses, such as the Oliphant in Southwark and Marco Lucchese’s in Hart Street. He knew the Royal Exchange, where free concerts were held on Sunday afternoons in the summer. He knew the fields to the north of the walls, where wrestling and archery contests were held. He knew the woods that encircled the city and, when in his plays he arranged meetings in the woods outside the town, the majority of his audience would have thought of London’s retreats. He also became very well acquainted with the Thames in all of its moods. He crossed it continually, and it became his primary form of transport. It was shallower, and wider, than it is now. But in the stillness of the night it could distinctly be heard, rushing between its banks. “Tut, man, I mean thou’lt loose the flood, and in loosing the flood, loose thy voyage.” So speaks Panthino in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (607-8). Shakespeare did not need to address London directly in his work; it is the rough cradle of all his drama.
CHAPTER 23
Sir I Shall Study Deserving
In his first arrival in London, how did he appear to his contemporaries? When in The Taming of the Shrew Lucentio leaves
Pisa to “plunge” into Padua, that “nurserie of Arts,” he arrives expectantly and “with sacietie seekes to quench his thirst” (298). The young Shakespeare was eager for experience, in all of its forms; in some way he wished for “satiety” in the manifold life of London. In his fancy, or fantasy, he might “heare sweet discourse, conuerse with Noble-men” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 318). His aspiring spirit might there find its true setting. He also wished to test himself in the forcing house of thought and drama. This youthful ambition emerges in the most surprising contexts. In Antony and Cleopatra (2120-1) Antony remarks of the morning that it resembles:
… the spirit of a youth
That meanes to be of note.
Was he then eager for the fame that, as the King of Navarre puts it, “all hunt after in their lyues” (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1)? Many have assumed it, but the fame of an actor or a dramatist was in this period a highly perishable commodity. He would have felt the mental power of the city, however, and with it an inkling of his own destiny.
We might remark upon Shakespeare’s intense and overwhelming energy. It manifests itself at all stages of his career, and in his youth it must have been irrepressible. We might also remark upon his buoyancy, an inward easiness of spirit. As an actor he was trained to be quick and nimble, but that vitality was an essential part of his being; the images of his plays are filled with flight and with swift action, with movement and lightness. He is the poet of speed and agility. His characters are not of the study or the library but of the busy and active world. His is a drama of the sudden moment or change, and one of his most powerful images is that of the lightning strike “which doth cease to bee / Ere one can say, it lightens” (Romeo and Juliet, 892-3). All the myriad imagery, from the social as well as the natural world, suggests that he was a man of preternatural alertness. And he was known, like the characters within his comedies, for the quickness of his repartee. John Aubrey, acquiring his information from the theatrical Beeston family, noted that Shakespeare possessed “a very readie and pleasant smooth Witt” and also scribbled down that “he was a handsome well-shap’t man.”1 Actors, with the exception of those who specialised in comic roles, were expected to be handsome and well shaped.