Shakespeare: A Life (23 page)

Ovid Metamorphoses is literally brought on stage in Act IV. Still it is
by means of his intellect, even his academic excess, that Shakespeare
in this case preserves his integrity; his use of Ovid helps him to
organize a story, impose a meaning on events, and also consolidate his
outlook, so that the play relates even to the comic Two Gentlemen,
the Shrew, and his other early works in which metamorphoses in being,
attitude, or awareness occur.

And
Titus is a work of immense promise for his constructive abilities. His
lovely, varying, and ominous uses of nature help him to highlight the
bestiality he depicts. To some extent he brings into the work just
such a view of London as a sensitive countryman might bring from the
fields and forests of the Midlands. He had seen a workable, civilized
order (by and large) within London's walls, beyond which were the
vulnerable and chaotic suburbs. What preserves an urban society? What
threatens it? His Tamora is an emblem of corruption, a woman no longer
nurturing but bestialized, rather like the women who were reduced to
selling their bodies for male pleasure at Bankside or Shoreditch
brothels. Much that he had known at Stratford was replicated in the
capital, but not the lawless sordidness, the dens, procurers, and
syphilitic women whom the actors talked about. From a mean, often
debased, life of the theatre areas he at first drew little, but
implicit in Titus is the corrupt, desperate face of a London that
would have impressed him most as new in his experience.

He has relied in the play not only on the precedents of Kyd, Marlowe,
and Peele, but on Ovid, Seneca, and the Roman historians. No other
urban playwright had drawn on so many diverse sources to produce such a
coherent, well-planned work, though a few of the élite saw little
beyond its dazzling show.

At some
point most likely between 1604 and 1615, Henry Peacham was to draw a
'composite' scene from ' Titus in which the chief actors are seen in
Roman dress, the others in Elizabethan. Whether or not he had seen the
play, he gives a visual idea of it: his pen-sketch displays Aaron the
Moor wielding a sword, while a tall Tamora on her knees pleads for
her two rapist sons. Earlier, on 1 January 1596, Jacques Petit, a
Gascon servant of Anthony Bacon, had been struck chiefly by the work's
visual effects. This play had more value in the show
('la monstre')

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than in the subject, as he wrote of a country-house production by
London players that he had seen at Burley-on-the-Hill in Rutland.
¹⁰
(That was about a hundred miles from London, and Shakespeare may
have been among the actors if the Chamberlain's Servants came that far
north.) Also, a cartoon which circulated with a broadside ballad,
perhaps in the 1590s, shows Lavinia, blonde hair down to her knees,
prettily holding a pan with her stumps to catch blood squirting from
the neck of a Goth who has raped her.
¹¹

The play's spectacular nature and its Kyd-like qualities dated it, and in later years Ben Jonson mocked the mode of
'Andronicus'.
Yet Shakespeare was altering the traditions of the English tragic
hero, especially in his depiction of Titus's pain and suffering. From
this portrait there were lessons he would use later in representing
Othello, Timon, or King Lear. Titus's verse is revealing in and
through the stunning force of its beauty, as when in bitter isolation
and despair he declares,

If there were reason for these miseries,
Then into limits could I bind my woes.
When heaven cloth weep, cloth not the earth o'erflow?
If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,
Threat'ning the welkin with his big-swoll'n face?
And wilt thou have a reason for this coil?
I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow.

(111. i. 218-24)

Writing to suit a troupe's strength, Shakespeare experimented with
more complex plots and romantic stories. It seems The Taming of the
Shrew was also staged at an early point, in all probability before June
1592, by Strange's men.

Based on
old, brutal folk-myths of the young wife 'tamed' by a husband who beats
and terrifies her, this play ostensibly focuses on an economic issue. A
self-reliant suitor, on his travels, only need marry a wealthy
gentleman's daughter to prosper. But the daughter is a 'shrew', and
her wealth means less in the suitor's eyes than the game of
shrew-taming. Granted that one Katherine Minola, of Padua, will not be
dictated to by a man, how is a well-born Petruccio of Verona

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to make her yield her independence? Intensely erotic, the story takes
on issues of subservience and power, a male dread of dominant
females, and a Renaissance fear of women in domestic rebellion.

All of which tasks Shakespeare's structural talent. He weaves in three
plot-strands -- Kate in relation to Petruccio, her sister Bianca with
suitors, and an Induction (or framing device) involving the drunken
Midlands tinker Christopher Sly -- and does so with a skill that may
seem to leave Titus and The Two Gentlemen behind. He also opens a
Pandora's box, and his view of his materials is ambiguous and
unresolved. He has not quite made up his mind about shrew -- let alone
about a society which can isolate a woman and quickly rob her of
everything but her courage. Petruccio's and Kate's talk is colloquial,
earthy, often bawdy, sharp as a slap in the face, enriched by snippets
from country folk-tales and legends. The playwright looks into the
mirror and over its edge into remembrances of his past, so that the
Shrew in effect greatly expands his supply for play-making.

He considerably opens up Warwickshire at any rate and his allusions
in the Induction are fascinating. Christopher Sly's name relates to that
of Stratford's own Stephen Sly, who later resisted enclosure at
Welcombe. Duped by a bored, prankish nobleman into thinking himself a
wedded aristocrat, Sly has a 'wife' in the young page Bartholomew,
whose name is that of the poet's brother-in-law, lately returned to
Shottery and the sibling closest to Anne Shakespeare in age. Sly is
from 'Burton-heath', which suggests the hamlet of Barton-on-theHeath of
the poet's uncle and aunt Edmund and Joan Lambert, whose son and heir
was sued by John and Mary Shakespeare -- with one
'Willielmo Shackespere filio suo'
-- in vain in 1588.
¹²
(Since Shakespeare is named in that legal action he must have heard of
it, and his Barton relatives remained a thorn in his father's flesh.) A
servant mentions ' Cicely Hacket', and Sly refers to ' Marian Hacket,
the fat alewife of Wincot'. Here we are about four miles from Stratford
-- a Hacket family lived at Wincot's very small hamlet at the time of
the play. On 21 November 1591, Robert Hacket's daughter Sara was
baptized in Wincot's parish church at Quinton. The Induction also
evokes a local playing troupe such as that of Frances Hathaway's
husband, Davy Jones.

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For the playwright such allusions are memory-devices, echoes of use,
comic connections with a recent past. But the Induction also has an
odd, hallucinatory sheen of memory, and Sly lives in a waking dream
between falsehood and reality as he sits down to watch a play, 'a kind
of history', as his 'wife' Bartholomew calls it, and The Taming of
the Shrew unfolds before their amazed eyes. Or has Sly dreamed up all
the action that follows?

Sly, in
fact, is important enough to be in both scenes of the Induction, and he
may well have been brought back to comment on the action
after
Act V (thus with Warwickshire scenes surrounding those of Padua).
However, he reappears only at the end of a very similar play called
The Taming of a Shrew. Did actors on the road reconstruct the weaker A
Shrew, from memories of performing in Shakespeare's The Shrew?
Scholars debate this point; we do not know. Clearly though, there was a
disruption in Strange's company: for example Titus Andronicus went
out of their hands to be acted by Pembroke's men, and later, it seems,
successfully at the Rose, by Sussex's players.

The most serious convulsion we know about in the amalgamated
Strange-Admiral troupe split it apart. In May 1591, Alleyn had cornered
the crusty impresario James Burbage in the Theater's tiringhouse, at the
back of the stage, to ask what had become of money due the players.
As usual, his friend knew nothing of money. Alleyn heated up. On
behalf of others, he told Burbage sarcastically that 'belike he meant
to deale with them, as he did with the poor wydowe', the survivor of
Burbage's partner in the Theater -- Margaret Brayne. If things came to
that, he, Alleyn, would complain to the Lord Admiral! With an oath,
Burbage shouted that he cared nothing for the three 'best lordes of
them all'.

The result was that Alleyn
withdrew from Shoreditch. He took leading actors, such as Bryan,
Pope, Augustine Phillips, and possibly John Heminges, down with him to
Henslowe's Rose on Bankside, married Henslowe's stepdaughter within a
year for good measure, and led the Strange-Admiral troupe in evil
times of touring during plague. Shakespeare may possibly have stayed
behind at the Theater with men such as Richard Burbage, Sincler,
Condell, Tooley, and Beeston.
¹³
Some of these actors, at any rate, soon turned up in Pem-

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broke's company, which had several Shakespeare plays in its repertory
and came to such grief on the road its members had to pawn their own
playing apparel.

Annihilation of some
of the troupes and the closing of all theatrical venues in and near
London was at hand. Like others, Shakespeare had very little security
as a theatre man, but before the plague he had attempted something
new; in taking English history as his subject he had begun to make one
of the most sustained efforts of his life.

In a sense, he had begun to do so just in time. His dramatization of
Henry VI's reign drew comments in a plague year -- 1592 -- during the
latter half of which no London theatre was open. But all three parts of
Henery VI must have been penned before the plague, and he may
already have begun to write Richard III or completed that fourth work
in a historical sequence or tetralogy about the Wars of the Roses.

His subject -- the fifteenth-century Lancastrian wars -- sent him to
the English chronicles, and here he found many problems. To justify
his own claim to the throne Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had hired
an Italian humanist named Polydore Vergil to write a proper history of
England. Whitewashing the Tudors, Vergil had portrayed Richard III
as a blood-mad fiend whose death at Bosworth in 1485 had brought
Henry's own glorious line to power. In an ironic biography Sir Thomas
More had further established an image of Richard III as a lipgnawing,
crook-backed killer whom people loved to hate.

But chroniclers wrote more and more about reigns before the Tudors,
and early in the 1590s antiquarian works of many kinds came from
London's presses and beyond. By 1576 Cambridge had its own press after
appointing John Kingston as their printer, and eight years later
Oxford's Convocation had loaned £100 to the bookseller Joseph Barnes
to set up a press of its own. New data about the British past
increased national pride and self-consciousness, but also whetted
interest in royal power and abetted a certain popular cynicism. People
were sceptical about authority, disenchanted by economic hardship.
Royal pageantry and civic ritual abounded in London as if to show the

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smooth, superficial face of authority, whereas the chroniclers, now and then, offered intimate glimpses of power.

Strange's men had featured Henry VI as a vague morality-play hero in
Seven Deadly Sins. But to look for a king in history or to attempt to
see him realistically was to plunge into a welter of annalistic
detail-for instance in Robert Fabyan New Chronicles ( 1516), Edward
Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster
and York ( 1548), which lifts
in extenso
from Polydore Vergil,
or Richard Grafton's Chronicles ( 1562-72), John Stow Chronicles and
Annales (dating from 1565), or the immense composite Chronicles of
England,
Scotland's and Ireland
( 1577 and 1587) which we call
Repheal Holinshed's, though they incorporate work done by other Tudor
historians for over seventy years.

In the expanded edition of 1587, Holinshed Chronicles -- three folio
volumes with seven title-pages, and 3 1/2 million words -- was to be
an oceanic source for at least thirteen of Shakespeare's plays. This
work is not limited to any single ideology or historical thesis, and
although it divides its chronicle, starting with William the Conqueror,
into reigns, it opens up history on the basis of a giant random
inclusiveness. It does not overrule the viewpoints of its many component
sources. For Shakespeare this great text was a spacious library and
supplier of detail; its jumbled vastness, multiple viewpoints, and
fertile inconsistencies allowed space for his imagination to play. He
reacted to Holinshed -- somewhat as he did to Golding's version of
Ovid -- as to a very literal, unfanciful version of what was in the
true 'thing' itself, in this case the documents of British historical
experience, with judgement about the 'thing' left open. Beset by
problems of form, he seems to have found that Hall Two Noble and
Illustre Families at least gave a shape to the fifteenth century in
depicting a curve of events over eight reigns from Richard II (
1377-99) -- from the time of the Mowbray-Bolingbroke quarrel -- to
Richard III's death in 1485 and the union of the red and white roses
of Lancaster and York under the first Tudor king. Hall moralizes,
without really showing the hand of God shaping events. Before Richard
III, Shakespeare eschews any emphasis on a 'providential plan' in
history, but gains coherence in his use of abrasive conflict, ritual,
and sharp ironies in all three parts of Henry VI.

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