by Shakespeare
It may be that the role of the declining king was played by Shakespeare himself, while the part of Bolingbroke was taken by Burbage. Yet, characteristically, Shakespeare does not judge between the deposed monarch and his supplanter. Henry Bolingbroke emerges as the victor, but there is no hero in this race. That is why Shakespeare only alludes to the possibility that Richard II was responsible for the murder of his uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, even though it was the pivotal plot of a very successful contemporary play entitled Thomas of Woodstock, which may have been part of the Lord Chamberlain’s repertory; it is clear that Shakespeare relied upon the audience’s knowledge of it as a preliminary to his own less partisan drama. It was not a question of right or wrong; it was a question of magnificence. The English loved spectacle and rhetoric; they loved sweet and powerful orations. That was what the sixteenth-century stage was about.
It has been surmised that there is some lost source play for Richard II, but the material for the tragedy was already to hand. There were of course the chronicles of Hall and of Holinshed, from whom he lifts some lines almost verbatim. But there was also the particular example of Samuel Daniel’s The Civile Warres betweene the two houses of Lancaster and Yorke, published in 1595, although it is not altogether clear who borrowed from whom. Daniel was a poet of courtly, rather than theatrical, circles; his sonnet sequence, Delia, had been published in 1592 and had some influence upon Shakespeare’s own ventures in that medium. There was a further association with the dramatist. Until this time Daniel had been part of the household of the Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton; he was tutor to her son, William Herbert, with whom Shakespeare may have had a direct connection through those same sonnets. Daniel was also the brother-in-law of John Florio, whom Shakespeare knew well. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of the Earl of Essex; once more the Essex affinity emerges in this narrative.
If Shakespeare borrowed from Daniel, then in turn the poet borrowed from the dramatist; some effects from Antony and Cleopatra become part of Daniel’s verse drama on the same theme. So there was, in a sense, a meeting of minds. Samuel Daniel is an image of what Shakespeare might have been – a writer of obscure country origins who, by dint of learning and skill, fashioned a career for himself as poet and retainer. There is even the story that, in 1599, Elizabeth had chosen him as unofficial poet laureate in succession to Edmund Spenser; whatever the truth of the matter, there is no doubt that Daniel was considered highly at court.
The Lord Chamberlain’s Men returned to that court for the Christmas season of 1595 about three weeks after their performance at the house of Sir Edward Hoby in Canon Row. It is not known whether they played Richard II before the ageing queen. Six years later she told a visitor to Greenwich Palace that “I am Richard the Second, know ye not that?” and complained that the tragedy “was played fortie times in open streets and houses.” It is not clear what she meant by “open streets” but by “houses” she must have been alluding to private performances of the play, indirectly providing further evidence that the players were indeed hired by nobles or rich men. So, at the very least, she was aware of the play’s existence. Could it have been acted at court at the end of the year?
There was a gap in their performances from 28 December to 6 January, in which interval they travelled to Rutland. In the household of Sir John Harington, at Burley-on-the-Hill, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men gave a performance of an old favourite, Titus Andronicus, as part of the New Year celebrations of 1596. They acted on the evening of their arrival, and left on the following day. Presumably they were well rewarded. It may seem unusual for an entire company to travel over a hundred miles into the heart of Rutland, in order to give one performance of an old play, but as is so often the case in the sixteenth century there are relations and affinities that help to explain the journey. Sir John Harington was an intimate friend of the same Hoby of Canon Row, with whom he had been at Eton. In addition the French tutor in the household, Monsieur Le Doux, was later financed by the Earl of Essex on various expeditions to the continent as an intelligence agent. The mystery deepens in the knowledge that Anthony Bacon’s confidential secretary, Jaques Petit, was also at Burley-on-the-Hill this Christmas and was according to one report posing as Monsieur Le Doux’s valet.7 It was he who wrote a letter describing the performance of Titus Andronicus.
So we have Shakespeare and his company paying an especial favour, or tribute, to one of Essex’s affinity. It reaffirms the suggestion that Shakespeare himself was close to the circle of Essex’s supporters, most notable among them the young Earl of Southampton. The familial association between Hoby and Cecil – Hoby’s maternal uncle was William Cecil, Lord Burghley – renders this whole network of friends and relations even more significant, especially since in this period Essex and the Cecils were on friendly terms. Shakespeare, if only briefly, was moving in a world of confidential agents and secret missions, of plot and counter-plot. It was a world that many of his contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe chief among them, knew very well. It must have been a world that Shakespeare himself understood.
So there is an air of unfamiliarity, and perhaps mystery, about his appearance in the grand house at Rutland. It has even been suggested that “Monsieur Le Doux” was a pseudonym for an English secret agent, and perhaps even a pseudonym for a resolutely undead Christopher Marlowe.8 On a more prosaic note we may simply record that Jaques Petit said in his letter that “on a aussi joué la tragédie de Titus Andronicus mais la monstre a plus valu que le sujet.”9 The “monstre” or spectacle was more interesting than the plot. The same might be said of this particular gathering. The stage of Rutland is suddenly lit, and Shakespeare is glimpsed in the company of people with whom he is not ordinarily associated. If ever there was a “secret Shakespeare,” as a hundred biographies testify, it lies in obscure moments such as these.
CHAPTER 49
Ah, No, No, No,
It Is Mine Onely sonne
The immediate problems of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had not been lifted by royal or noble favour. The city authorities still seemed eager to close down the Theatre and the Curtain, and James Burbage had already been making plans to convert part of Blackfriars into a roofed playhouse; since Blackfriars was a “liberty,” an area where the City’s powers of arrest did not run, it was not under official jurisdiction. Burbage had also been involved in difficult negotiations with the landlord of the Theatre, Giles Allen, who wished to profit from the success of the playhouse. He increased the ground rent from £14 to £24 per annum, and Burbage agreed that Allen would eventually be able to take possession of the building after a number of years. But Allen seems to have gone too far in his demand that the Theatre become his property after only five years; Burbage demurred, and began to invest in Blackfriars. Throughout the summer of 1596 he was engaged in tearing down tenements, and converting an old stone building known as the “Frater” or refectory in the precincts of the ancient monastery. It was his insurance policy. He even arranged that his master carpenter, Peter Streete, should move down to the river in order to be close to the site.
On 23 July 1596 Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, at the age of seventy, died at Somerset House. His successor as Lord Chamberlain, Lord Cobham, was much less sympathetic to the theatrical profession; one of his ancestors, Sir John Oldcastle, had been mocked in the first part of King Henry IV. So relations between the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were not necessarily benevolent. The players may even have feared that Cobham would support the Lord Mayor’s request permanently to close down the public playhouses. As Thomas Nashe put it in a letter of this time: “howeuer in there old Lords tyme they thought there state settled, it is now so uncertayne they cannot build upon it.”1 The players had begun a tour of Kent soon after Hunsdon’s death – they were playing at the market hall of Faversham on 1 August – but once more they found themselves in an insecure profession.
A few days after playing in Faversham, however, Shakespeare suffered a greater blow. His son of ele
ven years, Hamnet Shakespeare, died. There is every reason to suppose that Shakespeare hastened from Kent to Stratford, for the funeral on 11 August. The death of a young son can have many and various effects. Did Shakespeare feel any sense of guilt, or responsibility, at having left his family in Stratford? And how did he respond to his grieving wife, who had been obliged to care for the children without his presence? The questions cannot be answered, of course. There are some powerful lines in the second part of Henry IV, written shortly after these events, when Northumberland’s wife blames his absence for the death of their son (985-6). The child
Threw many a Northward looke, to see his father
Bring vp his powers, but he did long in vaine.
Many of Shakespeare’s later plays have the pervasive theme of families reunited and love restored. In The Winter’s Tale the son, Mamillius, dies as the result of his father’s conduct; the boy who plays this part doubled as Perdita, the daughter who at the end of the play is restored to her errant father. In her form and figure the dead son is also revived.
The death of children was much more common in the sixteenth than in the twenty-first century. Elizabethan families were also more “extended,” with various cousins and other kin, so that sudden death had a natural buttress against prolonged or severe grief. It is not necessary to fall into the delusion that sixteenth-century parents were less caring or less emotional than their successors, but it is important to note that the death of a child was not an unusual experience. The cause of the death of Shakespeare’s son is not known, although at the end of this year Stratford suffered a severe rise in mortality from typhus and dysentery. Hamnet’s twin sister Judith, however, lived to the great age of seventy.
So Shakespeare had lost his only son, the recipient of his inheritance. In the sixteenth century the blood line was charged with significance, and in his subsequent will he went to elaborate lengths to provide for an ultimate male heir, suggesting that the matter still provoked his attention and concern. He had lost the image of himself.
It is of course impossible to gauge the effect upon the dramatist. He may, or may not, have become inconsolable. He may have sought refuge, as so many others have done, in hard and relentless work. The plays of this period have nevertheless been interpreted in the light of this dead son. One critic has described Romeo and Juliet as a “dirge for the son’s death”;2 this stretches chronology, if not credulity. In James Joyce’s Ulysses Stephen Dedalus declares that his “boyson’s death is the death-scene of young Arthur in King John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare.” Indeed it cannot be wholly coincidental that Shakespeare was drawn at a later date to the tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, who is haunted by the spectre of his dead father. In Twelfth Night, the story of identical twins – boy and girl – is resolved by the miraculous reappearance of the male child from apparent death. The twin is restored to life. In the period immediately following Hamnet’s death, as Stephen Dedalus noted, Shakespeare also rewrote the play concerning King John. One of his additions is a lament by Constance on the untimely death of her young son, which begins (1398-1405):
Greefe fils the roome vp of my absent childe:
Lies in his bed, walkes vp and downe with me,
Puts on his pretty lookes, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffes out his vacant garments with his forme;
Then, haue I reason to be fond of griefe?
Fareyouwell: had you such a losse as I,
I could giue better comfort then you doe.
It may not be appropriate to draw strong lines between the art and the life but, in such a case as this, it defies common sense to pretend that Constance’s lament has nothing whatever to do with Shakespeare’s loss of Hamnet.
The comicall History of the Merchant of Venice, or otherwise called the Iewe of Venyce, written in this same period for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, begins in mournful tone. It is one of the strangest, and most arresting, openings in Shakespeare:
In sooth I know not why I am so sad,
It wearies me, you say it wearies you..
It is often assumed that Shakespeare himself played this part of Antonio, implicitly enamoured of his friend Bassanio. Antonio appears at crucial moments of action, but he is generally a lower-keyed figure who in rehearsals could have guided the others. The play does not linger on his sentimental tragedy, however, but mounts higher with the story of Shylock and his bloody bargain.
It was Shakespeare’s practice to combine elements from what would seem irreconcilable sources, and thereby create new forms of harmony. For The Merchant of Venice he no doubt plundered an old stage drama, The Jew, which had been played at the Bull Theatre almost twenty years before; a spectator there described it as representing “the greedinesse of worldly chusers and bloody mindes of Usurers.”3 That itself is a reasonable if brief summary of Shakespeare’s play. It would have been just like Shakespeare’s ordinary practice – to take an ancient “potboiler,” which he must have seen and remembered, and to infuse it with fresh life. He had also witnessed The Jew of Malta, since the role of Shylock is in part based upon that of Marlowe’s Barabas; the instinct for imitation is implicated in the desire to out-write his dead rival. The story of Shylock acted as the catalyst, whereby these two plays came together in new and unusual combination. He also makes use of an Italian story from Ser Giovanni’s Il Pecorone; it had not been translated into English at this time, and so we are led to the conjecture either that Shakespeare could read Italian or that he picked up the story at second hand. He remembered, too, the story of the Argonauts from his schoolboy reading of Ovid. There are of course other sources, many of them now unknown or forgotten, part of the texture of Shakespeare’s mind; but with the plays, the Italian story and the school reading of set texts, we may gain some inkling of the combinatory power of Shakespeare’s imagination.
The character of Shylock has provoked so many different interpretations that he has turned into the Wandering Jew, progressing through a thousand theses and critical studies. He may have been the model for Dickens’s Fagin but, unlike the entrepreneur of Saffron Hill, he could never become a caricature; he is too filled with life and spirit, too linguistically resourceful, to be conventionalised. He is altogether too powerful and perplexing a figure. It is almost as if Shakespeare fully intended to create a character drawing upon conventional prejudices about an alien race, but found that he was unable to sympathise with such a figure. He simply could not write a stereotype. He would later explore the nobility of an alien or “outsider” in Othello. It is likely that the sound and appearance of Shylock led Shakespeare forward, without the dramatist really knowing in which direction he was going. That is why he is perhaps, like so many of Shakespeare’s principal figures, beyond interpretation. He is beyond good and evil. He is simply a magnificent and extravagant stage representation.
But we must never forget the stridency of the Elizabethan theatre. Shy-lock would have been played with a red wig and bottle nose. The play is, after all, entitled the “comicall History.” The play retains strong elements of the commedia dell’arte, and can indeed be seen in part as a grotesque comedy which includes the figures of the Pantaloon, the Dottore, the first and second lovers, and of course the zanies or buffoons. But Shakespeare cannot use any dramatic convention without in some way changing it. In The Merchant of Venice the usual rules of the commedia dell’arte are subverted. The fact that it also incorporates fanciful elements from other sources, such as Portia’s riddle of the caskets, only serves to emphasise the highly theatrical and dream-like world in which it is set. There was perhaps a masque introduced in the course of the narrative, which in turn suggests that at least one version of the play was designed to be performed at Burbage’s newly refurbished Blackfriars; an indoor playhouse was the appropriate setting for an elegant entertainment of that sort. There are, indeed, images of music throughout the play which reach the peak of their crescendo in the last scene at Belmo
nt (2340-4):
… looke how the floore of heauen
Is thick inlayed with pattens of bright gold,
There’s not the smallest orbe which thou beholdst
But in his motion like an Angell sings.
All of the scenes are wrapped in the greater unreality of sixteenth-century theatrical convention, which veered closer towards nineteenth-century melodrama or pantomime than twentieth-century naturalistic theatre.