Shakespeare: A Life (17 page)

eager to imitate, to observe, to adapt himself to new demands. His
alert impressionable nature, with his energy and agility, would have
made him hope to prove his talent as a player.

Influence was then working on his behalf, if at any time 'in the
Countrey' he had made a connection that helped him in the mid1580s. A
summons to the theatre may have promised little, but he would take
advantage of his chances. We cannot be sure that the young Ferdinando,
Lord Strange provided those chances, but 'Shakeshafte' had been well
recommended to Sir Thomas Hesketh, and the Heskeths were intimate with
Ferdinando and the Earl of Derby. At some point in the bewilderingly
rapid evolution of the playing companies, Shakespeare contributed to the
success of Strange's actors.

His departure was likely to be trying for his family, to judge from his mockery of sentimental farewells in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
.
His life would be arduous, but he had surely been prepared for
workaday London by many reports of it. His father had visited the
city, and Stratford and Warwickshire apprentices had hoped to succeed
there; a few, no doubt, had set themselves up in urban comfort. He
would have known the value of social connections, and perhaps would
not be slow to take advantage of countrymen who could help him. In any
case, on a day of doubtful promise to himself, he would have bid
farewell to his parents, three small children, and Anne, and set out on
a road leading to the teeming, colourfal, and oddly dangerous south.

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Lyfte up thy heart and corage eke,
be bolde and of good chere;
For fortune most doth favoure those,
that all thynges least do feare. . . .
Great shame it is that vertue shoulde,
for monsters hyde her face:
Go to therefore leave of thy lettes,
and walk the depth apace.
(Barnabe Googe's translation of
Palingenius's 'Taurus' -- an
Elizabethan grammar-school text
in the Latin version, 1560)

It appears, by their bare liveries, that they live by your bare words.

Valentine,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
)

Streets and conduits

Elzabethan London deeply impressed or astonished its visitors -even if
they knew beforehand of its long rows of shops and four-storey houses,
thronged suburbs and magnificently built-up London Bridge, or of its
fine, painted theatres and rich waterfront palaces. Foreigners praised
the city, and some apprentices knew it as bewildering or lethal. More
people died in London than were born there -- but nothing stopped an
influx of workers. Taking the city, its suburbs, and

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Westminster together, one found here the nation's largest market and
port, the nation's parliaments, great royal palaces and the hub of the
Queen's administration, a centre of education in the Inns of Court
and of Chancery, a royal mint, and even an ecclesiastical centre at
Lambeth Palace and the Court of Arches at St Mary-le-Bow. The capital's
many functions assured its growth -- to about 200,000 people by 1600
-- and its educational establishments, booksellers, theatres, and high
level of literacy tempted citizens to think of the rest of the nation
as a cultural desert.
¹

Shakespeare, in his early twenties, was not unprepared to succeed
there. Whether or not he had joined an acting troupe, he was ready for
work; he had been trained in elocution by a London-born schoolmaster
and would be likely to be
heard.
We cannot doubt his energy. In
'the Countrey' or at home, he must have become practised as a singer
or musician -- and he knew that a good player must have versatility.
Better groups than the 'companye' of Frances Hathaway's husband had been
entertaining his town: Worcester's men had come back to the Gild hall
in the 1580s with a swelling reputation, after including in their
main troupe Edward Alleyn, a promising tragedian -- and two troupes in
Stanley livery had played at Stratford. Under the auspices of the
Earl of Derby or of his son Lord Strange, these had been separately
paid by bailiff's order, as the chamberlains' accounts show:

Paid to my lord Straunge men the Xj
^th
day of february at the commaundment of M
^r
Baliffe V
^s
[5
s.
]
²

Paid to the Earle of Darbyes players at the commaundement of M
^r
Baliffe

Viij
^s
, iiij
^d
[8
s.
4
d.
]
³

And there is no need to assume that Shakespeare, on leaving home, imagined that his
only
chance of success lay in the theatre. He soon had an eye on help
outside that of player-patrons, to judge from the courtly tenor of his
early writings. He might use a lucky recommendation to a nobleman of
wealth, and it is unlikely that he hoped for no eventual future other
than a player's.

Slow, jolting
carriers' wagons took people south. Whether he walked or rode, there
were two main routes from Stratford to London -- and on horseback
later he seems to have known both.

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One way led through Oxford and High Wycombe, the other by Banbury and
Aylesbury. The shorter route took the traveller from Clopton's bridge
over sweeping low hills to Shipston on Stour, then to Long Compton,
Chipping Norton, Woodstock -- where schoolmaster Jenkins of the King's
New School once lived -- and on through Oxford, High Wycombe,
Beaconsfield. For the other route one went from Pillerton Hersey over
Edgehill to Banbury; on a side-road just eight miles south of
Buckingham lay the village of Grendon Underwood where Shakespeare stayed
over on a midsummer night and met a constable who became the model
for Dogberry -- but this is to believe a report of John Aubrey that
may include wishful gossip.
⁴
From Buckingham, the way led over a small stone bridge and causeway into Aylesbury, then past the two Chalfonts to Uxbridge.

And here the two routes met, so that one highway took travellers past
Shepherd's Bush, the stark Tyburn gallows, the Lord Mayor's
banqueting house in Oxford road, and the pleasant rural setting of St
Giles-in-the-Fields into the suburb of Holborn. From there, one went
to Oldborne Bridge -- and the sight of William Lamb's new, lead-lined
water conduit over 2,000 yards in length -- and then past the churches
of St Andrew and St Sepulchre to the edge of the historic city at
Newgate.

A high, battlemented prison
with a portcullis and an opening for traffic, Newgate was one of seven
gates on the Roman and medieval walls -- thick, crumbling, running for
more than two miles -- that hemmed in London on three sides. Outside
the walls were 'liberties', or districts within county boundaries but
in some instances free of their jurisdiction and subject to the
municipal one. Wagons and carts of all descriptions, drawn by oxen,
horses, or mules, or pushed or pulled by men, went through the great
gates. On the river side the gate had vanished, but Bishopsgate,
Moorgate, Cripplegate, and Aldersgate separated citizens from a crowded
jumble of liberties and suburbs to the north; Newgate and Ludgate
looked west to Charing Cross and royal Westminster, and Aldgate faced
east. The inner city and the suburbs alike were unsanitary: as animal
corpses rotted in the open, so offal, urine, and faeces were dumped in
London's streets. In mean alleys, the rickety hovels beat back fresh
air and light, and conditions were worse

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in poor areas beyond the walls. The stench of the metropolis was
appalling, its overcrowding severe -- and yet some city wards were
beautiful, with ornate façades, spacious gardens, and numerous wild
flowers.

The city's pride, wealth,
and self-confidence were evident on the Thames, with its hundreds of
high masts, wherries, and barges, and on London Bridge with its
three-storey structures, twelve-foot-wide passage -- dangerous when
sheep or cattle were driven over -- and a garish, barbarous warning of
sometimes as many as two or three dozen traitors' heads stuck up on
poles. There was an unbroken sweep of public and private buildings on
the curving river from the royal city in the west to the Tower of
London in the east. The Tudor chronicler John Stow shows that the
Tower under its turnip-like turrets had a number of functions. It was a
citadel of defence and a royal venue for assemblies and 'treaties', a
prison for the most dangerous, an armoury, a place of coinage, a
treasury, even an archive; Stratford's council, anxious for the town,
sent citizens to the Tower to ferret into its legal records. A recent
writer adds helpfully that couples could be married at the Tower and
that it had a menagerie. ( Paul Hentzner noted in 1598 that this
included lions, a tiger and a lynx, an old wolf, an eagle and
porcupine.)
⁵
But just why Shakespeare alludes more often to the Tower than to any other building is another matter.

A visitor -- at first sight -- might view the Tower romantically.
Though William the Conqueror built it, Shakespeare refers in
Richard II
to ' Julius Caesar's ill-erected Tower'; the myth of Caesar as its
builder linked it with grammar-school days (every boy in Lower School
met Caesar in Lily's first grammar). Royal Westminster pointed to the
classical past, too, in the popular myth that British monarchs were
all descended from a Prince Brutus, who fought at Troy. Yet
Shakespeare hardly let myths keep him from studying an authentic city.
His mind was romantic enough to surfeit of its excesses, so that he
looked for the reason of things; he brought analytical intelligence to
London's past in his early history plays. Penetrating the Tower's
romance, he would see it as a gateway to England's real history -- and
as one enticing, blood-ridden and tragic locale of events.

Passing through Newgate, he would have entered a world of tall,
leaning houses and shops, filled streets, mercantile energy. Though

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quiet by modern standards, the city with its sellers' cries and a
myriad bells would have seemed a riot of noise. It was filled with
young people -- apprentices made up a tenth of its populace -- and
vagabonds, prostitutes, unwed mothers, 'masterless men' and part-time
workers swelled the number.
⁶
There were over a hundred bordellos in and outside the walls: streets
were erotic, with a grotesque bawdiness or a sleazy prettiness in the
air. The Bankside 'Stewes' were closed (and prostitutes were
licensed), but girls solicited even inside St Paul's Cathedral. The
city, in many ways, would feed his talent as a playwright of love,
bawdry, and tragic sensuality while appealing to his image-making
interests.

Much of its working life
was disciplined by guilds or livery companies which controlled trades,
as well as by masters of shops -- who had to support their
apprentices' illegitimate children -- and by preachers, local
officials, and watchful neighbours. One in ten householders, directly
or indirectly, was involved in the government in some way; this figure
rose to about one in three in a wealthy inner-city ward such `as
Cornhill. Despite brawls, cut-purse gangs, and major civic unrest, by
far the worst threat in London was the recurrence of bubonic plague
and other epidemics.

Shakespeare was
later to live among French Huguenots. Aliens, or 'strangers', mostly
from France and the Netherlands, were resented, though the Elizabethan
apprentices -- who broke skulls -- never did riot against them. Poets
and actors came to know 'Petty France' in Bishopsgate ward, 'Petty
Almaine' and 'Petty Flanders' in Thames Street; they learned of Italy
in the city, and met Jews. So-called Marranos, or Portuguese and Spanish
Jews in the east and north-west wards, added to overseas trading
contacts, worked in retailing, the crafts, or medicine, and supplied
intelligence to the Crown before and after the war with Spain began in
1585. A second small community of London's Jews, of sixty or a
hundred, had originated in musicians recruited in Venice by Henry
VIII; some descendants included royal musicians, a few of whom were
likely to be known later to the author of
The Merchant of Venice
.
⁷
Cosmopolitan London broadened Shakespeare's outlook, and foreign
stories and the talk of Europe were to give him dramatic material.

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London's Jews -- some of them observant -- relied on the Privy
Council's tacit approval. But though no more likely to tolerate Jews
than theatres, London's preachers saw the players as the chief, glaring,
abomination: 'The cause of plagues is sinne, if you look to it well',
as Thomas White had preached at Paul's Cross in the shadow of St
Paul's Cathedral in November 1577, 'and the cause of sinne are playes:
therefore the cause of plagues are playes'.
⁸
Even before that syllogism, theatres had been built out beyond the
city within the more lax jurisdiction of county authorities.

Yet the players' situation was complex. Sometimes the Queen's
Council, in fear of riot or disease, saw eye to eye with the irate city
fathers and forbade playing in the suburbs. At other times the city
fathers -- or the Lord Mayor and his aldermen and common councilmen, who
could raise money by regulating vigorous and profitable theatres --
issued such a weak,
pro forma
complaint as to encourage playing within the walls.

When Shakespeare arrived a demand for theatre was growing. As
play-goers for a penny, apprentices might escape for three hours from
their fixed drudgery, rules, and roles. The privileged needed release,
too. The city was becoming a social centre for the gentry, who
thronged there partly to wage their law-cases: London's need for grain
was about 11.5 per cent higher during the law terms.
⁹
Merchants and their wives, courtiers and litigants, sojourners and
students in the Inns of Court and Chancery -- taking afternoons off
from dancing, fencing-school, or even their law-books -- made up
elements of a sophisticated, trainable audience, and the 'termers' or
law students were, in effect, to help train the playwrights. Art
responds to the wit of its receivers, and London audiences helped a
new, paradoxical, immensely powerful drama into being. Even the
Puritan opposition helped. Puritans saved the age from a brittle
rationalism by insisting on the necessity of divine revelation, and
spoke for intense, inward operations of conscience -- upon which high
tragedy depends -- as well as for literacy and the value of the word.

Since the beginning of the reign, plays had been put on in London's
streets, inns, private houses, schools, and colleges. Biographers have
said that the first purpose-built theatre, in use when Shakespeare was

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