by Shakespeare
The play, with the title of The Moor of Venis by “Shaxberd,” was performed for the king and his court on 1 November 1604 in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. It was not written for private performance, of course, and it had already been played at the Globe and in the guildhalls of the company’s provincial tours. Richard Burbage, as Othello, would have “blacked up.” There was no occasion for subtlety in the presentation. A versifier later commented upon Burbage’s role as “the grieved Moor.” One curiosity concerns the part of Othello. When Ben Jonson described Shakespeare’s own character he considered that he “was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature.”1 He is quoting almost verbatim from Iago’s description of Othello (677-8):
The Moore is of a free and open nature,
That thinkes men honest, that but seeme to be so.
It may be an inadvertent recollection on Jonson’s part, but does it suggest that Shakespeare was in some sense “like” Othello? The theme of sexual jealousy runs deeply through many of Shakespeare’s plays. Could Jonson have known that Shakespeare harboured suspicions about his wife in Stratford? It has become a well-known theory, promulgated among others by James Joyce and Anthony Burgess, but it must remain wholly theoretical. It might just as well be said that, because both Julius Caesar and Othello suffer from epilepsy, Shakespeare was personally acquainted with the disorder.
If a boy played Desdemona, he must have been a skilful and remarkable actor. He had to suggest a certain eroticism within Desdemona’s innocence; as the German philosopher Heinrich Heine put it, “What repels me most every time are Othello’s references to his wife’s moist palm.”2 The boy actor would also have had a good voice, able to sing popular ballads. Since Desdemona’s willow song is absent from the first published version of the play, however, it is likely that for some performances he was unavailable for the part.
It might come as a surprise to contemporary audiences that Iago, customarily seen as the epitome of evil in modern productions, was initially played by the company’s resident clown and fool, Robert Armin. Iago was in the comic mode, and spoke to the audience in his confidential soliloquies. Charles Gildon, at the end of the seventeenth century, disclosed that
I’m assur’d from very good hands, that the Person that Acted Iago was in much esteem for a Comoedian, which made Shakespeare put several words, and expressions into his part (perhaps not so agreeable to his Character) to make the Audience laugh, who had not yet learnt to endure to be serious a whole Play.3
Iago’s role as comedian also fits the essentially comic structure of the play itself. Of course Gildon is alluding here to the sexual bawdry and innuendo in which Iago indulges with Desdemona, but he is being less than fair to Shakespeare. The dramatist loved sexual slang, and would not have considered it as writing “down” to any audience. It was a part of his imagination. As for being “serious” for “a whole Play” there is not one drama of Shakespeare’s which aspires to that unity of mood or tone. Comedy and tragedy were equal parts of his art.
There are elements of Roman new comedy and Italian learned comedy in this play with the presence of the zany and the cuckold who is also the Spanish braggart. But again they are here enriched beyond measure. Shakespeare used “types” as a matter of course, but they were simply the structure upon which he built. It is also worth observing that Othello is unique in being a tragedy largely established upon comic formulae. That may even have been the task that Shakespeare set himself. He establishes a comic structure, in which the locales of Venice and Cyprus have little connection with the main action, but then all begins to go awry. In the process he manages to enter the very rhythm of his characters in the world. They are deeply embedded in their language, with their own particular vocabulary and even cadence, so that we can as it were see Shakespeare living and breathing in unison with them. It is a miracle of transference. And we can feel the propulsion of his imagination. When a character mentions the “enchafed flood,” the immediate response is that the Turkish fleet be not “ensheltered and embayed”; the syllables push him forward into new paths of thought.
It has been suggested that in some way Iago is a refraction of the dramatist, an unmoved mover whose intellectual agility far outruns any moral conscientiousness, but in fact he is closer to the medieval Vice who stirred up trouble with the unwitting connivance of the audience. No doubt, however, Shakespeare derived great pleasure from creating a villain who orchestrates his victims like a dramatist while at the same time proclaiming his honesty and sympathy on every occasion.
CHAPTER 77. Why, Sir, What’s Your Conceit in That?
Three days after the performance of Othello in the Banqueting House, The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed in the same setting. There is a description of the king attending a performance. When the king entered
the cornets and trumpets to the number of fifteen or twenty began to play very well a sort of recitative, and then after his Majesty had seated himself under a canopy alone … he caused the ambassadors to sit below him on two stools, while the great officers of the crown and courts of law sat upon benches.1
But the hall, with “ten heights of degrees for people to stand upon,”2 seems by general consent to have been too large for comfort. It was 100 feet long, with 292 glass windows. It had been erected by Elizabeth twenty-three years before, and King James described it as an “old, rotten and slight-built shed.”3 The Great Hall at court was prepared, instead, for the production of Shakespeare’s second new play of the year, Measure for Measure.
Before that event, however, another play was to emerge from the King’s Men only to disappear very rapidly. It was entitled Gowry and purported to be a dramatic version of the “Gowrie conspiracy” against James four years before. The play no doubt celebrated the courage and virtue of the new sovereign but, despite its patriotic tone, it was deemed unsuitable for public performance. One courtier wrote on 18 December that
The Tragedy of Gowrie, with all actions and actors, hath been twice represented by the King’s Players, with exceeding concourse of all sorts of people; but whether the matter or manner be not well handled, or that it be thought unfit that princes should be played on the stage in their lifetime, I hear that some great councellors are much displeased with it, and so it is thought it shall be forbidden.4
It was indeed considered to be unfit, and the play disappeared never to rise again. The courtier had hit upon the right explanation. It was considered lèsemajesté to portray a reigning monarch upon the public stage, in whatever circumstances. It served only to emphasise the theatricality of the king’s role. The author of the forbidden play remains unknown, although it is not beyond conjecture that Shakespeare may have contributed to it.
James could not have been wholly displeased by his players since, a week later, they performed before him Measure for Measure. In this play a ruler, Duke Vincentio, disliking crowds and noise of “applause, and Aues vehement,” pretends to absent himself from his land in order better to survey it. In his absence a rigidly puritanical deputy, Angelo, proves himself unworthy of his superior’s trust. There are enough contemporary allusions here to have occasioned volumes of commentary, not least the resemblance between the Duke and King James himself. The king was known to dislike crowds and “Aues” to the same degree as the imaginary ruler. The unflattering portrayal of the Puritan, Angelo, must be seen in reference to the current controversies involving those sectarians in the new kingdom. That, at least, is how contemporary playgoers would have viewed it. Earlier that year, for example, the king had been presented by the country’s foremost Puritans with a “Millenary Petition,” containing proposals on dogma and ritual that the king rebuffed. The conclusion of the play, in which the Duke redeems those who have been judged guilty, can also be said to reflect current controversies over the privileges of the king. James believed that Parliament depended upon royal grace, and the ending of Measure for Measure can be construed as maintaining the divine right of kings. The title of the play itself may be taken from
a sentence from James’s own treatise on divine right, Basilikon Down, in which he writes: “And, above all, let the measure of your love to everyone be according to the measure of his virtue.” The King’s Men were precisely that, the sovereign’s servants, and part of their role was to advertise the virtues of their patron. Since the play is also set in Catholic Vienna, with a Catholic nun as the principal female and the Duke disguising himself as a Catholic friar, Shakespeare seems to be reflecting the increased level of tolerance for those who professed the old faith. It is pertinent, perhaps, that in this play as in Romeo and Juliet and in Much Ado About Nothing, the friar counsels deceit or concealment for the sake of a greater good. Shakespeare seems always to have been preternaturally alert to the prevailing atmosphere of his time. He was such a sensitive instrument in the world that he could not help but reflect everything.
Shakespeare derived some of the story of Measure for Measure from the same source as Othello. This suggests that he had riffled through Cinthio’s Hecatommithi in search of likely plots. An anthology of stories, such as this one, was a mine of gold. When he found this particular plot to be of interest, he looked up an earlier dramatisation of it – George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra, written in 1578-to see if there were any extra scenes or characters he might borrow. There were more immediate models to hand, also, since the theme of the ruler in disguise was a popular one in the London playhouses. It is important to grasp the immediacy of Shakespeare’s inspiration. If there were two or three plays using a plot or character that had proved popular, the chances are that he would use them. Even though Measure for Measure is ostensibly set in Vienna, its real setting is early seventeenth-century London with its stews and suburbs, bawds and pandars. It is the world of Southwark and the Globe. Measure for Measure is in part a sketch for King Lear and The Tempest; here the Duke abandons the governance of his dukedom, but the space from this play to King Lear is measured in the shift from comedy to tragedy. It is also worth noticing that the first scenes of the play are also the most inventive. That is frequently the case in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, where he is often most spirited and emboldened at the beginning of each enterprise.
At court, the day after the performance of Measure for Measure, the Earl of Pembroke helped to assemble and present a masque with music entitled Juno and Hymenaeus. The text has not survived, but Pembroke may have obtained some assistance from the king’s leading dramatist. Then, on the next day, The Comedy of Errors was performed. This was followed on 7 January with Henry V. It was something of a Shakespeare festival, marked a day later by a special production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the London house of the Earl of Southampton. This was the play that seems to bear references to the Southampton coterie or “circle” which in previous years had included some of the king’s most fervent supporters. Sir Walter Cope, the Chamberlain of the Exchequer, wrote to Robert Cecil earlier in the month that
I have sent and bene all thys morning huntyng for players Juglers amp; Such kinde of Creaturs, but fynde them harde to finde, wherfore Leavinge notes for them to seeke me, Burbage ys come, amp; Sayes ther ys no new playe that the queen hath not seene, but they have Revyved an olde one, Cawled Loves Labore Lost, which for wytte amp; mirthe he sayes will please her exceedingly. And Thys ys appointed to be playd to Morowe night at my Lord of Sowthamptons … Burbage ys my messenger Ready attending your pleasure.5
“Burbage” here is likely to be Cuthbert rather than Richard. It is highly unlikely that the leading tragedian of the day would be employed as a “messenger” between two servants of the state, although the association of players with “Juglers amp; Such kinde of Creaturs” shows little respect for the social standing of the theatrical profession.
The epistle is interesting for the fact that it also marks a definite occasion when Shakespeare’s “old” plays can be enumerated. We can calculate that in the last two years he had written Othello and Measure for Measure, and that in the succeeding nine years he would write twelve more plays. It is sometimes assumed that this represents a general or gentle decline in his production of new drama as a result of age or debility but, on the assumption that he began his playwriting career in 1586 or 1587, then the rate of composition remains approximately the same throughout his life. The fact that the plays to be written include King Lear, Macbeth and The Tempest is clear enough proof that there was no loss of power.
The performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost in the second week of January was noted by Dudley Carleton when he remarked that “It seems we shall have Christmas all the yeare and therefore I shall never be owt of matter. The last nights revels were kept at my Lord of Cranbornes … and the like two nights before at my Lord of Southamptons.”6 Then, in the following month, there were two performances of The Merchant of Venice. No contemporary dramatist had ever been so honoured by the ruling family. In this year, too, the fourth quarto of Richard III was published; the play was still successful almost fifteen years after its first performance.
Another play, of curious construction and tone, seems to date from this period. All’s Well That Ends Well is generally considered to be a comedy, but it is one dressed in sombre hues. The plot of the infatuated orphan, Helena, pursuing the fatuous and disdainful Count Bertram is not the most edifying; it might almost be a sourly dramatic version of the relationship between the lover and the beloved proposed in the sonnets, with the “lascivious” Bertram as an image of the “Lasciuious grace” of the poems’ recipient. When Helena writes a letter, it takes the form of a sonnet. But the play does have a redeeming character in the portrayal of the elderly Countess of Rossillion, described by George Bernard Shaw as “the most beautiful old woman’s part ever written.” A certain unevenness of tone in the writing prompted Coleridge to speculate that the play “was written at two different, and rather distinct periods of the poet’s life,”7 and it used to be believed that it was a rewriting of the early play Loue labours wonne attributed to Shakespeare. Yet it is best to accept the play as a complete and coherent achievement.
Shakespeare adopted the plot from an anthology of stories, William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, but the original or parent source is Boccaccio’s Decameron. This was a book from which Chaucer also purloined some of his plots. Shakespeare intensified the action while at the same time introducing riddling complications that display his sheer love of invention. He provides plots and sub-plots that work in parallel, and in part parody one another. He creates patterns of imagery that are like the shadows of paper-lace upon a wall. He has also invented the character of Parolles, the military braggart, a creature of prolific and meaningless words who can now be firmly identified as a Shakespearian “type.” Shakespeare loved those who dwelled in a wilderness of words.
It is a difficult play in the sense that in characteristic fashion Shakespeare conflates several disparate elements, with the folk tale vying with realistic comedy and the elements of fable coexisting with the elements of farce. The verse itself is often very difficult, with meaning wrestling against syntax and cadence. Helena laments “the poorer borne,” for example (182-5),
Whose baser starres do shut vs vp in wishes,
Might with effects of them follow our friends,
And shew what we alone must thinke, which neuer
Returnes vs thankes.
It is a demanding poetry once more recalling that of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Donne. It is even possible that there was in this period a fashion for difficult poetry, which Shakespeare mastered just as he mastered every other form. It is a difficult play but it is also a dry play, an abortive exercise in comic form. We do not need to suppose any great crisis in Shakespeare’s creative or personal life, as some biographers have suggested, in order to explain this loss of power. A dark thought took wing into a dark valley which, once thoroughly investigated, proved barren and boring. That is all.
CHAPTER 78. The Bitter Disposition of the Time
On 24 July, 1605, Shakespeare invested £440 in tithes or, as the official docu
ment states, “one half of all tythes of corne and grayne aryseing within the townes villages and fieldes of Old Stratford, Byshopton and Welcombe” as well as “half of all tythes of wooll and lambe, and of all small and privy tythes.”1 A tithe had originally been a tenth part of the produce from the land, paid by farmer or tenant to the Church; this archaic form of tribute had then been passed to the Stratford Corporation at the time of the Reformation. Shakespeare was leasing his tithes from the corporation for a period of thirty-one years. At this late date it sounds a complicated matter, but at the time it was a conventional and familiar way of securing a reasonable income. The sum laid out by Shakespeare was in fact a very large one, and he could not raise the whole amount at one time; a year later he still owed some £20 to the vendor, Ralph Hubaud. He expected an annual return on his investment of something like £60, which was in itself a reasonable income. There were, however, one or two additional costs. He collected the tithes but was obliged to pay an annual fee of £17 to the Corporation of Stratford for the privilege. Nevertheless he still gathered a large amount.
The fact that his tithe lease ran for thirty-one years is evidence that he was intent upon securing his family’s future after his death. It was a question of social, as well as financial, status. As the owner of tithes he was classified as a “lay rector,” and had earned the right to be buried within the rails of the chancel of Stratford Church; it was a right that was taken up at his behest or on his behalf. Meanwhile his purchase of New Place had given him the right to a reserved pew in the church. He seems always to have been concerned about his precise social standing in his old town. It was in this period, too, that he rented out the eastern part of the family house in Henley Street to brewers by the name of Hiccox.