Shakespeare: A Life (22 page)

Give me a look, that, when I bend the brows,
Pale death may walk in furrows of my face.
A hand, that with a grasp may gripe the world;
An ear to hear what my detractors say;
A royal seat, a sceptre, and a crown.

(I. ii. 100-4)

After Marlowe was murdered in 1593, Shakespeare was to pay a certain
elegiac tribute, not to the craftsman or maker of plays, but to the
poet of Hero and Leander. Marlowe had achieved a level of writing in
Hero that Shakespeare probably felt he himself could not reach, and in
fact his quoting a line of Marlowe's poem in As You Like It ('Whoever
loved that loved not at first sight?') was an unusual gesture, though
some professional esteem had been mutually signalled between the two
poets. As Tamburlaine affected the form of Richard III, so the
Stratford writer's early chronicle plays evidently helped Marlowe to
write his spare, almost apolitical Edward II. And Shakespeare learned
from a poet who had located drama in new psychological techniques. By
isolating a Guise, Faustus, or Barabas, and letting him 'speak past'
interlocutors, Marlowe showed other poets how to dramatize a
fascinating, aberrant psyche, display its suffering, and get a mind to
lend its tone to a drama. Shakespeare seems to borrow from these
methods for his Titus, Henry VI, and Richard of Gloucester, and to
develop them later with egocentrics such as Hamlet, Coriolanus, and
Timon.

'Kind Kit Marlowe' -- as he
was recalled -- forgave 'Wits' for attacking him in print. Shakespeare,
too, could be amenable and forgiving; at least, after being attacked
in a work published by Henry Chettle, he was 'civil' with Chettle. But
he was never likely to imitate Marlowe's personal braggadocio,
sensation-hunting, or relish of confrontation. As a man obliged to
work in a troupe, Shakespeare practised a certain husbandry with such
experience as he had. If he played many parts in a season, he was not
eccentric, picturesque, or attention-seeking after rehearsals; he was
taken by most of his fellows for the clever and reliable colleague he
seemed to be. He was an agreeable, cautious person, whose offstage
experience, so far, had been intense rather than very wide, as his
early plays and sonnets suggest.

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Yet, if slower than Marlowe to do so, he was now showing a remarkable
power of development, and this marked him out in the 1590s. That power
depended, in part, on an excellent memory which must have served him
in boyhood among 'grammar gods', as later it surely did on stage.

As we have seen, other Tudor actors, of course, retained many lines,
and what is quite unusual is not the tenacity of Shakespeare's memory
but its evocative power. In recalling the countryside he invokes the
tones, feelings, and ambience of a Midlands past, and his recollecting
complicates and renews his life of the sensations and intellect. He
draws on a deep, fresh well of impressions of provincial life; he
connects easily in Titus Andronicus with the Roman culture of his
schooldays, and elsewhere with known, curricular lessons pointing back
to history's grandeur. In effect he repossesses his grammar-school
learning to elaborate on it, and Shakespeare's plays exhibit school
techniques, as in
controversiae
and
imitatio,
which become
ever more refined and sophisticated. He appears to benefit from early
complications at Shottery, and what he knows of courtship culture is
recalled with exactitude in London. It is not in writing tragedy or
chronicle plays that he is at case at first (or lucky enough to avoid
expository blunders), but in writing romantic comedy. His past
continually instructs him, and with a conservative impulse he carried a
good deal of Stratford to London.

Moreover, one source of tension helping him to develop is illuminated by
recent, close investigations of his Midlands town and of aspects of
sixteenth-century London. He knew contrasting social orders: from the
almost medieval, well-regulated parish of his youth he had come into
the anarchic, splintered world of the suburbs, where success in the
theatre depended on chance, luck, agility, and quick rational effort.
Stratford had its mercantile competitiveness, too, but it was also a
place of older, communal and religious values, with traditions in
behaviour and feeling opposed to those of the pragmatic, opportunistic
stage. Formed largely by the pieties and temper of his home he was
likely to exert himself without feeling quite satisfied with anything
he did, and he had some reason in the tatty suburbs to regret the
theatre.

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In his Sonnets, he smartens feelings that he knows well. One problem he
alludes to more than once is the vulgarity of acting, or the stain
imparted to the actor and the actor's reputation, and so he implies in
Sonnet 111 that a 'guilty goddess' -- such as Fate or Ill Luck -- has
placed him in an unseemly, raw, exposed calling which offers no better
way of getting a living, 'Than public means which public manners
breeds.'

He appears to apologize
stylishly for a calling of low to middling repute, no doubt with a
wish to please friends or patrons who read his sonnets. But his
behaviour suggests that he could not forget the related matter of his
own family's need for respectability in a Midlands town. Some facts of
the matter are clear in official borough Minutes and Accounts. As we
know, his father had absconded from the brethren's council, and the
brethren, of course, had lost patience: in 1586 they had deprived John
Shakespeare of an alderman's gown. A series of harvest failures lay
ahead, but early in the 1590s Stratford's economic plight was already
acute; the crafts and trades could not employ all the talented, able
young. Gossip was sharp in a market town, and unlikely to diminish in
bitter times. William Shakespeare had three brothers who needed work,
two daughters who might require husbands, and a boy in Hamnet who
might finish school at Church Street. His own choices had not enhanced
his social status; he needed money to help his family, but the public
mercenary actor had never emerged from a certain shade. It is not
unpaid actors, but those who go on the stage for reward ('propter
praemium in scenam prodeunt') who are blameworthy, as the Roman jurist
Ulpian had declared. Modern Oxford took up that theme. Who vulgarizes
our theatre? as William Gager asked in a scene he added to Seneca's
Hippolytus
at Oxford in February 1592. And he answers in his own Latin:

Qui sui spectaculum
Mercedis ergo praebet, infamis siet.
Non ergo quenquam Scena, sed quacstus, notat.
⁷

[Whoever puts on a show for gain, let him be infamous. Not acting on a stage, but doing so for reward, disgraces a man.]

And yet, though he cannot have been insensitive to notions of

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respectability, Shakespeare was sanguine enough to hope to improve
his lot, and to move into some position of safety and profitability. He
could hardly return with equanimity to the circumstances at Stratford.
And the theatre offered him anonymity, at least; only a few actors'
names had resonance with the public. The city's
cognoscenti
might know who wrote the best scripts, but attention fixed on stars,
lively dramas, or scandal, not on the scriptwriters. Marlowe's name
meant so little that the two
Tamburlaine
dramas were printed
without it in 1590 -- and only a chance remark, by Heywood, tells us
that Kyd wrote the most influential English play of the sixteenth
century, The Spanish Tragedy.

Shakespeare was quick enough to admire profitable works. Thomas Kyd
had not been to university -- a defect unlikely to be forgiven by some
'Wits' -- but his father, a city scrivener, had sent him to Merchant
Taylors' School under the gifted Richard Mulcaster. With a rare gift
for play structure, Kyd around 1587 may have written Hamlet, the missing
revenge tragedy now famous as 'ur-Hamlet' since it must have been a
source for Shakespeare's later tragedy. Revived at Newington Butts on 9
June 1594, when even a Marlowe play did poorly, Hamlet earned a
paltry 8s. for Henslowe.
⁸
But if (as we think) it played at the Theater and Paris Garden it
held the stage fitfully for perhaps thirteen years before Shakespeare
turned to the subject.

In The
Spanish Tragedy, his masterpiece, of uncertain date but perhaps of the
late 1580s, Kyd uses a patterned manner to evoke extremes of
impassioned feeling. The effect upon Shakespeare might have been as if
Mulcastcr's rhetoric lessons at Merchant Taylors' had been superimposed
abruptly on those of Jenkins' at Stratford. Kyd's hero -- Hieronimo --
is a decent Spanish magistrate driven to wild grief and then to a
crazed, clever, bloody revenge in a play-within-the-play after his son
is murdered. Alleyn or young Ben Jonson, as old Hieronimo, may have
shattered the groundlings' hearts--

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O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
O life, no life, but lively form of death;
O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!

(III. ii. 1-4)

That was easily parodied -- as were Marlowe's lines on the harnessed
kings. But Londoners responded to Kyd's aural symmetries, and
Shakespeare was to appeal to the same gusto of delight in orchestrated
language. Also, Kyd's play has rich seams of interest. He uses a
revenge theme cleverly to bring in a variety of other appeals and
concerns, such as justice, sexual passion, politics, duplicity, even
playacting, as in Shakespeare Hamlet. His Spanish court is believable,
and he shows how the concerns of a well-meaning king thwart or impel
those caught up in a diabolic tangle of court policy.

South of the river at the Rose, Kyd and Marlowe in fact made high
tragedy profitable. They emboldened Shakespeare, who needed to enhance
his usefulness as times became harder. Miseries of war and inflation
threatened all the players -- even before death came massively to the
city, as we shall see. And Whitehall was capricious. Lately the
Puritans had made a bold case for church reform in a series of illegal,
vituperative 'Martin Marprelate' tracts. At first the government
employed theatre-poets to reply to the outrageous 'Martin', and then
turned viciously against their own helpers.

In fact, the Privy Council warned sharply of 'matters of Divinytie and of state' unfit to be suffered on a stage.
⁹
But actors feared penury as much as prison, and around 1590 Shakespeare had begun to take his chances.

After some of them had been in prison, an exceptional group of men
and boys had met west of Shoreditch's taverns in 1590. Comprising
former members of Strange's and the Lord Admiral's troupes, this was
an amalgamated company which lasted for four years under Lord
Strange's (or the Earl of Derby's) patronage as the most successful

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body of actors in England. To their book-keeper, Shakespeare appears to have given his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus.

Just when he wrote this play is uncertain, and it could have had a
debut at Henslowe's Rose rather than at Shoreditch. But he planned the
work on a grand scale: its first act requires at least twenty-six
players if we allow for 'doubling' in roles. Stagehands and 'gatherers'
might take parts at a pinch, but Titus was meant for a large company
such as Lord Strange's, which is the first troupe listed on the
title-page of John Danter's quarto edition of the play in 1594.

Shakespeare counted on skilled tragedians, too, and much talent had
come to Shoreditch. Famous in the new amalgamation was Edward Alleyn
himself, a golden voiced 'fustian king' of about 26, and a glittering
figure as he turned on a platform in a long, brocaded coat or the
crimson velvet breeches he had worn in Marlowe Tamburlaine. Such a man
wore large, false mirroring jewellery with metal lace to catch the
afternoon light. Burbage's son Richard was on hand -- not yet
rivalling Alleyn -- and so was a thin, spindly John Sincler, soon to act
in The Taming of the Shrew. Other actors had been abroad: George
Bryan, Thomas Pope, and Will Kempe had entertamed the Danes at Elsinore,
and Pope and Bryan had gone on to the Elector at Dresden before
coming to Shoreditch. Kempe, the clown, was back in London by 1590,
and if he did not join Strange's group at once, he soon played in
their comic A Knack to Know a Knave.

Shakespeare faced a troupe hungry for success, aware of their
excellence. He was, in effect, their servant. His personality and even
his play are related to his lack of status in these years: even as a
sharer he was not to be so important to a troupe as its most famous
actors, and amenity, modesty, agreeableness, and a certain jocular,
detached attitude to his script would have served him well. At this
point, he wrote parts that might be instantly familiar to those who
would act them. Titus, in some respects, is cautiously imitative; its
black, Moorish villain Aaron, laughing at atrocities, is like a Marlowe
villain, just as its aggrieved, half-crazed hero Titus resembles Kyd's
Hieronomo.

Notoriously Shakespeare
fills his action with bizarre, numbing atrocities: dripping pig's
blood is called for. The worst happens offstage, but three hands in this
tragedy are chopped off, and a tongue is

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torn out. Titus kills one of his offspring in fury, another in shame.
Most of the characters are emblematic puppets, but the play ably
exploits visual properties in a well-painted, sensuously pleasing
theatre and posits a malignant, nightmarish 'wilderness of tigers', a
Rome featuring sizzling entrails, rape, dismemberment, slit throats,
vivid torture, cooked heads in a pie, a cannibal feast. Titus's and
Aaron's roles have life, and it may be valid that the playwright's
first wholly successful portrait is that of a black man. (Though not
the first Elizabethan to praise black skin-colour, Shakespeare is
without much competition the most eloquent: Aaron's 'black-is-beautiful'
speeches in Act IV are compelling.) But Aaron is only a speechless
supernumerary in Act I. Titus's own faults are hardly emphasized as he
enters Rome with his dead and living sons, a captive Queen Tamora of
the Goths, and her paramour Aaron, and in cold piety orders a son of
Tamora to be butchered. His political mistakes expose him and the
Andronici to exquisite torture, and at first there is no consolation
whatever. When Lavinia totters on stage in Act II, raped, tongueless,
without hands, she is greeted by her uncle Marcus with a picturesque
speech imitated from Ovid.

The
play, however, can be much better to see than to read, and stylistic
defects which we imagine in the text can magically disappear in a good
stage production. More than a young poet's insecurity is evident.
Meeting the demands for a Kyd-like revenge script, he manages to
absorb what others were discovering about tragedy. He is in some ways
less tactful than Ovid in Metamorphoses or Seneca in Thyestes in
handling myth, but he brings a well-considered attitude to events. He
represents carefully a Tudor view of ancient Rome, a city which in its
republican phase seemed to have benefited from austere family
virtues, before sinking into impiety and hedonism under the later
empire. His materials help him to think of cities old and new, of Rome
and London. He finds an emblem in Philomela's change into a
nightingale after her particularly cruel rape by Tereus, and in woods
where Lavinia is raped, a change for all Rome is signalled in Marcus's
allusions to Ovid's myth.

The
classical myth of transformation in the play is somewhat febrile and
overstrained, though it is anxiously pointed up, as when a copy of

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