Shakespeare (17 page)

The consequences were felt by his unfortunate family. A few days later a warrant was issued for the search of all suspected houses in Warwickshire and the arrest of suspicious persons. This investigation was considered urgent because, in the words of the officer in charge, “the papists in this county greatly do work upon the advantage of clearing their houses of all shows of suspicion.”
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Edward Arden was taken at the London house of the Earl of Southampton; Mary Arden and others of her family were arrested by Sir
Thomas Lucy. The Ardens were tried at the Guildhall in London, and were found guilty of treason. Mary Arden was pardoned, but her husband was hanged, drawn and quartered in Smithfield and his head placed on a pole at the southern end of London Bridge. John Somerville hanged himself in Newgate, but his head joined that of his kinsman in its prominent position. And with them was decapitated the Arden family of Warwickshire.

Did John Shakespeare, husband of another Mary Arden and putative kindred of the martyred Ardens, come under suspicion? Did his son? It was a time of terror for anyone even peripherally concerned or related. The key-cold stone of the Tower, torture and a horrible death, were genuine possibilities. It may well have been at this juncture that John Shakespeare concealed his Catholic testament in the rafters of Henley Street. We know only that when the Shakespeares submitted their coat of arms to the College of Heralds, some sixteen years after the events here related, the device of “ermine fess cheeky”
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used by the Ardens of Park Hall had been removed. There is one other stray fact. In
Henry VI, Part Three
, Shakespeare invents a native of Warwickshire and gives him the name of John Somerville.

If ever there was a time when William Shakespeare might have appreciated the relative anonymity of the capital, then this was it. But he chose to remain with his family in Stratford for the duration. In February 1585 his twins, Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare, were baptised in the parish church. They were named after Hamnet and Judith Sadler, friends and neighbours who owned a baker’s business at the corner of High Street and Sheep Street. When the Sadlers had a son, they named him William. The young Shakespeare, despite his immortal longings, was still very much part of the local community. The name of the boy, so fraught with association, could have been pronounced and spelled Hamblet (chimney was pronounced as chimbley) or of course Hamlet. The mystery of twinship, unique and indissoluble, also provokes Shakespeare to dramatic speculation; in two of his plays,
The Comedy of Errors
and
Twelfth Night
, a twin is confronted by his or her lost counterpart in some dream-like landscape.

The birth of the twins in the early spring of 1585 suggests that, despite Aubrey’s “guesse,” Shakespeare was still with his wife in the spring of 1584. But no children were conceived by the Shakespeares after that date. In this he did not follow the pattern of his parents, who produced eight children over twenty-two years. He did not even follow the pattern of the time, in which
large families were common. At the birth of her twins Anne Shakespeare was only thirty years old, and well within the age of child-bearing. It may have been that the birth of Hamnet and Judith was in some way injurious.

In the conditions of Henley Street, however, it would have been inevitable that Anne and her husband slept in the same bed; in this period, too, there were no properly effective means of birth control. They may have abstained by mutual consent from sexual intercourse. All the evidence suggests, however, that Shakespeare was of a highly sexual nature; it is unlikely that, in his early twenties, he could have abstained without very good reason. The better explanation is also the more obvious one. He was not there. So where was he?

I
t has become
a commonplace of Shakespearian biography that, from roughly his age of twenty to his age of twenty-eight, we encounter the “lost years.” But no years are ever wholly lost. There may be a gap in the chronology, but the pattern of a life may be discerned obliquely and indirectly. It is known that he became a player. It has been surmised that he joined a company of travelling players, perhaps when they were passing through Stratford. It has been suggested that he journeyed to London in the hope or expectation of joining one of the companies already performing there. His previous association with Sir Thomas Hesketh’s players, and with Lord Strange’s Men, may have facilitated some form of introduction. A clever young actor, and an aspiring dramatist, might have been welcome.

Did he join a company of travelling players when such a group was performing in Stratford? There is no record of this, and it is in any case an unlikely form of recruitment. But, in the seasons from 1583 to 1586, at least eight sets of players performed in the guildhall at Stratford—among them the Earl of Oxford’s Men, Lord Berkeley’s Men, Lord Chandos’s Men, the Earl of Worcester’s Men, and the Earl of Essex’s Men. Among Worcester’s players was Edward Alleyn, sixteen months younger than Shakespeare, who became a formidable presence on the London stage and a direct rival of Shakespeare’s own company. But it has also been argued that Shakespeare joined the Earl of Leicester’s Men, in part because of a remark in a letter
from Sir Philip Sidney referring to “William my Lord of Leicester’s jesting player.” Sidney, however, may have been alluding to the celebrated William Kempe.

One other company of players, who came to Stratford in 1587, deserves further notice. The Queen’s Men had been re-established four years before by the Lord Chamberlain and the Master of Revels, partly in order to provide what might now be called dramatic propaganda on behalf of Elizabethan polity. They were a privileged group of players who were formally chosen to play before the monarch at court. They were paid wages as the queen’s servants and granted liveries as “grooms of the chamber”; Shakespeare was to receive a similar honour in later years. The twelve actors had been selected from other companies, and were considered to be at the height of their profession—among them two comic wits, Robert Wilson “quick, delicate, refined” and Richard Tarlton “wondrous plentiful and pleasant.”
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Tarlton epitomises the nature of the theatre which Shakespeare joined. He was the first great English clown, and the most popular comedian of the Elizabethan age. As a fellow actor put it, “There will never come his like, while the earth can corn. O passing fine Tarlton!”
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He was said to have been discovered by the Earl of Leicester while keeping swine for his father, and the earl was so delighted with his “happy unhappy answers” that he enlisted him in his service. His jigs and ballads became famous in the 1570s, and he became attached to Queen Elizabeth’s Men on the formation of the group in 1583. There can be no doubt that Shakespeare witnessed his elaborate and idiosyncratic performances. Tarlton was also a playwright and wrote a comic drama entitled
Play of the Seven Deadly Sins
. He was a favourite of the queen, and became her unofficial court jester. After his death in Shoreditch in 1588, an anthology entitled
Tarlton’s Jests
became a popular favourite. In his will he named as his trustee a fellow actor, William Johnson; Johnson also became in turn Shakespeare’s trustee for the purchase of a house in Blackfriars. There is a connection, in other words, and it has often been suggested that Hamlet’s reminiscence of Yorick is a recollection of Tarlton himself.

Tarlton’s costume was a suit of russet and a buttoned cap; he carried a great bag by his side and wielded a large bat; he played on the tabor and pipe; he had a squint eye, a moustache and a flat nose. He was, according to Stow, a “man of wondrous plentifull pleasant extemporal wit”; he was “the wonder of his time.”
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He was material for endless anecdotes and allusions, he was the subject of nursery rhymes, and many alehouses were named after him complete with his portrait. It was said that the sight of his face alone, peeping
from behind the stage, was enough to send audiences into hysterics; he played the role of the country innocent in the city, complete with what might be called physical comedy. It meant that the comic actor became more important than any character or role he was performing. Tarlton would break off from his part and indulge in improvised repartee with the audience, for example, and would introduce jigs or comic business in the middle of the dramatic action. He specialised in grotesque faces, and would pull them at inappropriate moments. He can claim to be the first “star” of the English stage.

The stage clown had a long pedigree. He was related to the Lord of Misrule who presided over the festival rituals of medieval England. He was also connected to the fools and jesters of the court but, more importantly, he also derived from the tradition of the Vice on the medieval stage. The Vice is preeminently the character who works with, rather than before, the spectators. Where the actors see only each other, he observes the audience. He is part of its life; he shares asides and jokes with it; he colludes with it. For him the play is a game in which everyone can participate. He is representative of all the vices of humankind and, as such, is both impresario and conspirator. He is the showman of the medieval theatre, who feigns tears or sympathy and who persuades or cajoles the actors into sin. He sings and rhymes and jokes; he often plays a musical instrument such as a gittern. He indulges in physical comedy such as tumbling or dancing. He engages in soliloquies filled with puns and double entendres. Shakespeare often mentions the fact that he carries a wooden dagger, with which he pares his nails. It is obvious that he is the source of much English humour, and the inspirer of much stagecraft. He is a paradigm for the variegated clowns and fools of Shakespearian drama, and the prototype of villains such as Iago and Richard III. He is one of the primal characters of the theatre, with an ancestry buried far back in folk ritual and a heritage stretching forward to the nineteenth-century music hall and the latest television comedy. He is part of Shakespeare’s inheritance.

The Queen’s Men began touring almost as soon as they were formed, in the first months journeying to Bristol, Norwich, Cambridge and Leicester. In the summer they travelled; in the winter they returned to London, where they performed at the Bell and the Bull in the City and at the Curtain or the Theatre in the suburbs. From the end of December to February they played at court. As the sovereign’s own men they were welcomed wherever they went, and were well recompensed for their trouble. They seem to have
earned almost double the amount of other companies. They were not just actors in the contemporary sense but acrobats and comics; they hired a Turkish rope-dancer, and there is a reference of payment “to the queens men that were tumblers.” Richard Tarlton had his own “act,” like that of any modern comedian.

It is an indication of the hardness or roughness of the travelling life, however, that at Norwich there was an affray in which several of the actors joined and in which one man bled to death, having been struck by a sword. The testimony of witnesses brings the incident to life before us, with a participant crying out: “Villan wilt thowe murder the quenes man?”
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It seems that the fight started when one of the crowd demanded to see the play before he would pay for his ticket or token, a reminder of a more primitive era of the English theatre. Five years later one member of the company killed another in a brawl. Despite the patronage of the queen, actors still had an unenviable reputation.

Their name has been associated with that of William Shakespeare because of the remarkable coincidence of the plays that they performed, plays that still have a distinctly familiar ring. They include
The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, King Leir, The Troublesome Reign of King John
and
The True Tragedy of Richard III
. The supposition has been, therefore, that Shakespeare somehow joined himself with the Queen’s Men in 1587, when they came to Stratford, and that these plays are his early versions of ones that he subsequently revised. The theory has the merit of simplicity, although the world of Elizabethan playing companies is not in itself a simple one: it displays a history of splits and amalgamations, quarrels and reconciliations, hiring and firing.

In 1588 the Queen’s Men were divided into two separate groups, with separate repertoires. They were sadly depleted with the death of Richard Tarlton. One group then joined forces with the Earl of Sussex’s Men. It may be that, at this time, Shakespeare also left them for another company. But this is to move too far ahead in this history that now, in 1586 and 1587, must first bring the young William Shakespeare to London.