by Shakespeare
It has the distinction of being Shakespeare’s shortest play, but it is not without its subtleties of characterisation. We see here what might be called the natural bent of Shakespeare’s imagination, with the superiority of servants over their masters and the natural good sense of women contrasted with the wilful obtuseness of men. There also appears, in this comedy of twinship, the theme of self-division that runs through much of Shakespeare’s mature drama:
… oh how comes it,
That thou art then estranged from thy selfe? (500-l)
The fact that these lines are uttered by a wife, who believes that she has been abandoned by her husband, may add a private note of self-communing. In this play, as in so many others of Shakespeare, a family is reunited after many vicissitudes, and lost children are restored.
Self-estrangement has become so obvious a topic of Shakespearean commentary that it is often forgotten that it is peculiar to, and symptomatic of, his genius. Whether Shakespeare divined within himself the play of contraries, or whether it was the fruit of observation, is an open question. As a country boy come to London, as a player with aspirations to gentility, as a writer as well as an actor, he had ample scope for contemplation. We also have the interesting spectacle of an utterly practical and business-like man who was able to create a world of passion and of dream. That is perhaps the greatest mystery of all. He had within himself legions. He saw the human truth in any argument or controversy. All the evidence of his plays suggests that if he expressed a truth, or even an opinion, an opposing truth or opinion would then occur to him – to which he would immediately give assent. That was for him the natural condition of being a dramatist. It has often been noticed that in the plays there is no sense of Shakespeare’s personality, and that the characters themselves do all the thinking. It has also been suggested that there is a consistent and characteristic “doubleness” within the plays, whereby heroic or mighty action is duplicated by the fools and clowns. There are also occasions when an action can be interpreted in two different ways, or a passion such as sexual jealousy can seem both justified and unjustified. But doubleness is not the right word. Kings and clowns are all part of the essential singularity of his vision.
CHAPTER 34
They Thought It Good
You Heare a Play
In 1591 and 1592 it is likely that the young Shakespeare was working on more than one play at once for Pembroke’s Men. There is no reason why he could not move from comedy to history or tragedy, since he mingles these within individual scenes and even speeches. The Tragedy of King Richard III seems to have occurred to Shakespeare as he was completing The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York. The character emerges in the earlier drama but in subsequent revision, as we have observed, Shakespeare deepened and darkened the portrait in anticipation of the more accomplished play. It was a role for Burbage himself.
Richard Burbage did indeed become the principal interpreter of Shakespeare’s plays for the rest of the dramatist’s life. The recognised leader of the company, he specialised in heroic or tragic roles. It was written of him that
whatever is commendable in the grave orator is most exquisitely perfect in him; for by a full and significant action of body he charms our attention. Sit in a full theatre, and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears while the actor is centre … for what we see him personate we think truly done before us.1
It was he who played the first Lear, the first Hamlet and the first Othello. It is also likely that he introduced Romeo and Macbeth, Coriolanus and Prospero, Henry V and Antony, to the English stage. No other actor in the world has ever achieved so much. The naturalness and liveliness of his “personation” are often mentioned. He was considered to be a Proteus of changing identity, “so wholly transforming himself into his Part, and putting off himself with his Cloathes, as he never (not so much as in the Tyring-house) as-sum’d himself again until the Play was done … never falling in his Part when he had done speaking, but with his looks and gestures maintaining it still unto the heighth.”2 He was perhaps Shakespeare’s most familiar companion. The dramatist left him money to purchase a ring, but the names of Burbage’s children are perhaps a better token of their intimacy. He had a daughter named Juliet, who died young; he had a son called William and another daughter named Anne.
And so we see Burbage, at the age of twenty-one, walking onto the stage as Richard III. The medieval Vice was the traditional way of representing evil. Yet Richard seems to emerge fully armed even as Shakespeare thought of him, as if he had come from his imagination even as he had ripped his way out of his mother’s womb. For the first time on the English stage the Vice is capable of growth and change: Richard experiences the first faint stirrings of conscience on the eve of the battle of Bosworth. It is only momentary, but his powerful lines prefigure the agonies of Macbeth and Othello: “What do I feare? my selfe? theres none else by”.
Shakespeare was too great a dramatist to rest with the conventions. He had to reinvent the paths of human consciousness in order to stay true to his interior vision. He had transcended his sources and influences – Hall, Holinshed, Seneca with the rest – by combining them in fresh and unexpected ways. The high chant of formal rhetoric is mixed with comic asides, the melodramatic with the erotic. The rough wooing of Lady Anne springs to mind, although it is hard to think of any Shakespearian scene between the sexes that is not touched by malice or competition. He had not forgotten his lessons from Marlowe, and there are echoes of Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta in Richard III.
Now it was Marlowe’s turn to learn from him. It is generally agreed that his Edward II derives part of its inspiration from Shakespeare’s play. And why should it not be so? The theatre was a place of continual imitation. The Tragedy of King Richard III was the longest and most ambitious play that Shakespeare had written. (Only Hamlet is longer.) It moves from one climax of invention and feeling to the next, never slackening its pace. In this play Shakespeare blossoms and unfolds. He loves the villainy and malice of the crook-back. He exults in them. There is an atmosphere of mystery and of prophecy – of ancient archetypes and mythical encounters – that raises English history to a new level of significance and meaning. That was one of Shakespeare’s great gifts to English drama.
Richard III quickly became popular, with an almost unprecedented eight reprints of the quarto text, three of these after Shakespeare’s death. The despairing cry, “A horse, a horse, my kingdome for a horse,” was parodied and repeated in a hundred different contexts. Thus we have “A man! A man! A kingdom for a man!”(Scourge of Villanie, 1598), “A boate! A boate! A full hundred marks for a boate!”(Eastward Ho!, 1605) and “A foole! A foole! My coxcomb for a foole!”(Parasitaster, 1606). It would not be at all surprising to discover that it became a popular catchphrase on the streets of London.
We can only speculate about Burbage’s performance as Richard III. There is, however, one small clue: “The king is angrie, see, he gnawes his lip.” Catesby notices this mannerism, but it is one that Burbage also employed in the part of Othello. “Alas,” Desdemona asks, “why gnaw you so your neather lip?” There is a reminder of Burbage’s power as an actor in an anecdote in the diary of a citizen called John Manningham.
Vpon a tyme when Burbidge played Richard III there was a citizen grone soe farr in liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night vnto hir by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare ouerhearing their conclusion went before, was intertained and at his game ere Burbidge came. The message being brought that Richard the Third was at the dore, Shakespeare caused returne to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.3
It is an unproven and unprovable story, but the anecdote was repeated in the mid-eighteenth century within Thomas Wilkes’s A General View of the Stage. Wilkes could not have copied it from Manningham’s diary, since that diary did not emerge until the nineteenth century. It would be reasonable to assume that the young Shake
speare was not immune to the delights of London life, although this anecdote emphasises his quick-wittedness rather more than his lechery.
So there are two comedies, and one history, that can plausibly be attributed to Shakespeare’s connection with Pembroke’s Men and to his early association with Richard Burbage. And then there is the unsettled question of Edward the Third. Many scholars believe that it was not written by Shakespeare, but it has elements of his early genius, not least in the choice of sonorous phrase:
… poison shows worst in a golden cup;
Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
The last line reappears in the ninety-fourth of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and bears all the marks of Shakespeare’s profoundly dualistic imagination.
The fact that certain scenes in the play, particularly those concerning the wooing of the Countess of Salisbury by the monarch, are more accomplished than others, has raised the question once more of collaboration with unnamed dramatists. Shakespeare is supposed, at various times of his career, to have collaborated with Jonson and Fletcher, Peek and Munday, Nashe and Middleton. There is no reason at all why he should not have done so. It has been estimated that between one-half and two-thirds of all plays written during Shakespeare’s lifetime were composed by more than one hand. Some plays were written by as many as four or five different authors. That is why plays tended to be the property of the company or the playhouse rather than of an individual. The emphasis was upon speedy and efficient production. It is even possible that writers formed groups or syndicates for the writing of dramas, on the same pattern as the roving bands of medieval illuminators, the members of which specialised in different aspects of the art of painting. Collaboration between dramatists was a familiar and conventional procedure, in other words, with various acts going to various hands or plot and sub-plot being given separate treatment. There were some writers who specialised in comedy, others in pathos. Shakespeare was the exception, perhaps, in the sense that he excelled in all branches of the dramatic art. He may have been exceptional, too, in retaining proprietorship of his own plays. There is of course also the possibility that passages or scenes were added to his plays at a later date by other writers. This may have happened, for example, with Macbeth and with Othello.
Collaboration in its most extreme form is represented by the extant manuscript of a play entitled Sir Thomas More, that has been tentatively dated to the early 1590s. It is the one play in which there is evidence of Shakespeare’s handwriting. The authenticity of this fragment of 147 lines, written in what has become known as “Hand D,” has been disputed by palaeographers over the years. But the weight of proof now seems to tilt in Shakespeare’s favour; the spellings, the orthography, the abbreviations, all bear his characteristics. The key is variability. Shakespeare’s spelling, and his formation of letters, change all the time. He capitalises the letter “c,” and tends to use old-fashioned spelling; he veers between a light secretary hand and a heavier legal hand. There are signs of haste and, in the course of that rapidity, a certain indecision.
In the scene that Shakespeare was called upon to write, the titular hero of the drama, Thomas More, speaks to certain citizens of London about to riot against the presence of foreigners in the city. It is likely that, after the success of the scenes of rebellion in The First Part of the Contention, he was considered to be “good” at crowds. We may refine this further by noting that Shakespeare excelled at scenes in which authority confronts disorder where, by the use of colloquialisms and other devices, the figure of authority is able to communicate with the discomfited crowd. Once more it suggests the duality of his genius.
He is also believed to have written a passage in which More soliloquises on the dangers of greatness; again it appears that the dramatist already had a reputation for meditative reflection by renowned or noble characters. The history plays would have left just such an impression. The chief author of Sir Thomas More was Anthony Munday, but one of the other collaborators has been identified as Henry Chettle – the same Chettle who was obliged to apologise for Greene’s animadversions on Shakespeare in Groats-worth of Witte. If it was a small world, it was also forgiving.
Sir Thomas More seems not to have been performed, perhaps because it was too close in matter to certain London riots of 1592, and is now remarkable only for the presence of Shakespeare’s handwriting. The subject of Shakespeare’s handwriting is in itself important, since there is now no other means of tracing his physical presence in the world. We might note, for example, that in each of six of his authenticated signatures he spells his surname differently. He abbreviates it, too, as if he were not happy with it. It becomes “Shakp” or “Shakspe” or “Shaksper.” The brevity may, of course, equally be a sign of speed or impatience. The best analysis of one signature suggests that its inscriber “must have been capable of wielding the pen with dexterity and speed. The firm control of the pen in forming the sweeping curves in the surname is indeed remarkable … a free and rapid, though careless, hand.”4
The differences in the spelling of his surname can of course be ascribed to the loose and uncertain orthography of the period rather than to any perceived lack of identity, but it does at least suggest that his presence in the world was not fully determined. In a mortgage deed and a purchase deed, signed within hours or even minutes of each other, he signs his name in two completely different ways. It is even supposed by some calligraphers that the three signatures on his will are written by three different people, since the dissimilarities “are almost beyond explanation.”5 The author, as if by some act of magic, has disappeared!
CHAPTER 35
There’s a Great Spirit Gone
Thus Did I Desire It
It the beginning of 1593 Pembroke’s Men resumed playing at the Theatre. Shakespeare’s early plays were part of their repertory. The playbooks or official texts of Titus Andronicus, The True Tragedy of the Duke of York and The Taming of a Shrew, when they were eventually published in volume form, all advertise the fact that these plays were “sundry times acted by the Right honourable the Earle of Pembrook his seruants.” In the playbooks of The True Tragedie and The First Part of the Contention there are very precise stage-directions that suggest the intervention of the author.
But they could not have performed in London for very long. On 21 January, as a result of an epidemic of the plague, the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor ordering him to prohibit “all plays, baiting of bears, bulls, bowling and any other like occasions to assemble any numbers of people together.” So Shakespeare and his companions were obliged once more to leave the capital. They travelled west to Ludlow, part of the Earl of Pembroke’s territory, by way of places such as Bath and Bewdley. At Bath they received 16 shillings, less 2 shillings’ recompense for a bow they had broken. Perhaps it was one of those mentioned in the stage direction of The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, “Enter two keepers with bows and arrows.” In Bewdley they were awarded 20 shillings as “my Lord President his players.” The Earl of Pembroke was known officially as President of Wales. In Ludlow they received the same sum, but were also granted “a quart of white wine and sugar.” In Shrewsbury it was advertised that “my Lord President’s players” were “coming to this town”; here they received no less than 40 shillings.
When they returned to London later in 1593 they were less fortunate. The Theatre, and the other playhouses, were still closed by “the sickness.” It was late June, or early July, and the summer heat was approaching. In this year the epidemic disorder killed fifteen thousand Londoners, more than one-tenth of the population. While on tour in Bath, Edward Alleyn wrote to his wife instructing her “every evening throwe water before your dore and in your bakesid [back of the house] and haue in your windowes good store of rue and herbe of grace.”1
Something else was happening in London. Threats against French, Dutch and Belgian immigrants had been pasted or nailed on the streets. On 5 May a bi
tterly xenophobic poem of fifty-three lines had been placed on the walls of the Dutch churchyard. It had been signed “Tamburlaine.” Not unnaturally, perhaps, these attacks were considered to be the work of professional writers. So the authors of these “lewd and malicious libels” were to be arrested and examined; if they refused to confess “you shal by auctorities hereof put them to the torture in Bridewel, and by th’extremitie thereof.”2 One of the first arrested was the author of The Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Kyd, who was duly put to the torture. He named Christopher Marlowe as a blasphemer. It has been suggested that the entire affair was an elaborate trap by the authorities to snare Kyd and, through Kyd, to detain Marlowe himself.3 Marlowe was called and examined by the Privy Council for two days; he was then released, on condition that he reported daily to their lordships. Ten days later he was dead, stabbed through the eye as a result of an apparent brawl in Deptford. Kyd himself died in the following year. It is hard to overestimate the impact of these events on the fraternity of players. One of their leading playwrights had been killed, in most suspicious circumstances, and another had been tortured almost to death at the instigation of the Privy Council. It was a series of shocking events, of which no one could see the outcome. The uncertainty and anxiety were intense, the fearfulness rendered even worse by the prevalence of the plague and the closure of the theatres.