Shakespeare (27 page)

It is in essence a revenge tragedy, on the model of
The Spanish Tragedy
, complete with the amputation of hands and the mutilation of noses. It also marks, in Edricus, the first appearance of the theatrical Shakespearian villain:

The genuine Shakespearian note once more emerges, the words an obvious preliminary to those of Richard III.
Edmund Ironside
has been described as the first English history play, but in fact that honour can be claimed by the unknown play on the exploits of Henry V staged at the Red Bull. But
Edmund Ironside
is the first history play derived from an imaginative reading of historical sources; the story is in part based upon Holinshed’s
Chronicles
, the source from which
King Leir
also springs. It uses Ovid. It uses Plutarch. It uses Spenser. It is permeated by legal and biblical phraseology in a manner to which successive generations of Shakespearian scholars have become accustomed. It incorporates “low” comedy in prose beside high rhetoric in verse, placing both in an intriguing perspective. It shares the same misunderstandings of classical mythology as does the work of the young Shakespeare. It uses the imagery of “butchery” for the first time in English drama, imagery which became something of a Shakespearian speciality. It has the phrase “all hail,” and the immediate reference to Judas, which is a hallmark of Shakespeare’s plays.
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There is also an odd interpolation on the subject of the parting of a newly wedded couple:

All the characteristics conspire to make one pertinent question. Who else but the young Shakespeare could possibly have written it in 1588? Marlowe, Kyd, or Greene? None seems so appropriate or so convincing as Shakespeare himself.

Edmund Ironside
can be adduced, then, as evidence of the young Shakespeare’s talent for re-creating historical narrative on stage. Other dramatists copied him, Marlowe’s
Edward II
being the most famous example, but none had his instinctive ability to create memorable action out of the sometimes laboured descriptions of the chroniclers. He was able to depict character in expressive speech, to summarise the manifold causes of action with significant detail, and to invent memorable plots. His greatest and earliest gift, however, was perhaps the introduction of comedy as a respite from tragical or violent action. He had a perfect “ear” for variation and change.

These early plays are not admitted into the official Shakespeare “canon.” Many scholars believe there is no evidence, external or internal, to indicate who wrote them. Could it be simply that they are not considered sufficiently “Shakespearian”? But Shakespeare himself was not
immediately
“Shakespearian.” Early Wilde was not “Wildean,” and the young Browning was not in the pattern of the mature Browning. Shakespeare’s plays were published long after they were written and performed; many were not printed until after his death. He had time, in other words, to revise and embellish.

His earliest plays are written in the approved “new” style of his contemporaries; they are fluent, even if on occasions they show facility rather than inventiveness. They use end-stopped declamatory verse with Ovidian and Senecan flourishes; they include Latin tags and general classical allusiveness. They are also written with great spirit and bravura, as if the words and cadences emerged effortlessly from some source of overflowing energy and confidence. But he was also learning his craft all the time, and the astonishing fact of his early development is the speed of his progress. He learnt from the reactions of the audience, and the responses of the players; the range of his language was immeasurably enlarged and deepened as he experimented with the various forms of drama. He was highly attuned to the language all around him—the poems, the plays, the pamphlets, the orations, the speech of the street—and he absorbed everything. There was perhaps no greater assimilator in the history of English drama.

It has also been plausibly conjectured that in 1588 Shakespeare wrote another play, based upon the chronicles, which was later published as
The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England
. Shakespeare’s
King John
is certainly
closely modelled upon it, to the extent that it can best be seen as a revision or adaptation of the older play. There is not one scene in
King John
which is not based upon an original scene in
The Troublesome Raigne
. One nineteenth-century critic remarked that “Shakespeare has no doubt kept so closely to the lines of the older play because it was a favourite with the audience.”
³
It is much more likely, however, that he kept closely to the earlier scenes because he had written them. Otherwise once more we are presented with the strange anomaly of Shakespeare extensively purloining the work of an unknown and unnamed writer and passing it off under his own name. He even copied the historical errors of the original.

The later publishers of
The Troublesome Raigne
, in 1611 and in 1622, were in no doubt about the matter; they accredited it as the work of “W Sh” and “W. SHAKESPEARE” without ever being corrected. It is sometimes suggested that sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century publishers were in some way incompetent or negligent, and that they regularly put false names on their title pages. This is in fact not the case. They were stringently regulated by their guild, the Stationers’ Company, and could incur large fines for any breach of standards. There were of course occasional rogue printers who would try to pass off inferior work as that of “W.S” or some other suggestive name, but the printer of the 1611 edition of
The Troublesome Raigne
, Valentine Simms, was well known to Shakespeare and was responsible for the first editions of four of his plays. He would not have put “W Sh” on a book without some warrant for doing so.

The play itself takes its place in the continuing rivalry between the playwrights of the period. It is written in two parts, imitating Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine
of the previous year. But its address to “the Gentlemen Readers,” printed as a prologue in imitation of the prologue to
Tamburlaine
, criticises “the Scythian Tamburlaine” as an “Infidel” and thus an inappropriate subject for the stage of a Christian country. Where in his own prologue Marlowe scoffs at the “jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,” the author of
The Troublesome Raigne
is at some pains to compose many such rhymes.
The Troublesome Raigne
was in turn parodied by Nashe in the following year. All this was part of the battle of the young writers, which in this period was conducted at a level of comic aggression and burlesque. It gives Shakespeare a context, however, and a character.

But the extant play does provide difficulties of identification and interpretation that, incidentally, throw light upon the dramatic conditions of the period. There is one scene in
The Troublesome Raigne
, concerning the pillaging
of an abbey for its gold, which is utterly unlike anything Shakespeare ever wrote. It is a comic scene, but of a very degraded kind. So we might infer that someone else added this scene—perhaps the comic actor who played one of the parts. It was quite usual for the comedians to write their own lines. The fact that Shakespeare did not include this scene in his revised
King John
suggests that it was not his work. So we have a play of mixed parentage.

We can then see the genesis of his drama in three separate but related circumstances. He wrote several early dramas that he later revised; he acted in certain plays, particularly when he was a member of the Queen’s Men, which he then recalled and re-created in his own versions; he collaborated with other dramatists and actors. It is a muddle that cannot at this late date be resolved, but it has at least the virtue of indicating the confused and confusing circumstances in which Shakespeare emerged.

T
here is little argument
that the young Shakespeare did indeed write most of
Titus Andronicus
, a stirring classical melodrama, a blood-and-thunder piece designed for the popular market of the public playhouse. The first act was almost certainly composed by George Peek and Shakespeare was brought in to finish the work, another example of early collaboration. It is just possible that Shakespeare wrote the entire play, having decided to imitate Peek’s ceremonial and processional style, although the motive for doing so is unclear.

Titus Andronicus
is a play that attempts to beat Kyd and Marlowe at their own game, a revenge tragedy on a large and bloody scale. Shakespeare borrows structure and detail from Kyd’s
The Spanish Tragedy
, and renders them more colourful and theatrical; already his sense of stagecraft is much more assured than that of his older contemporary. He took his stage villain, Aaron, from the model of Barabas in Marlowe’s
The Jew of Malta;
but he made him much more wicked. He echoes Marlowe all the time, just as he had explicitly done in
The Taming of a Shrew
. The drama has lashings of Ovid and Virgil, as if to prove the point that Shakespeare had also been given a classical education. He quotes lines from Seneca in the approved fashion of the day, and at one point a copy of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
is brought on stage like some memorial to his schooldays. But in dramatising Ovid, as it were, he is engaged
in quite a new enterprise. He is in a sense dramatising poetry itself. He was developing his own earliest gifts.

Titus Andronicus
has violent deaths, and equally violent mutilations and amputations. The heroine, Lavinia, has her tongue cut out and her hands lopped off. She is then obliged to write down the name of her murderer with her remaining stumps, holding a stick in her mouth. The right hand of Titus is cut off on stage. The horror reaches a climax in the concluding scene when the wicked queen eats the flesh of her two sons, baked in a pie, before being stabbed to death by Titus, who is himself murdered. It is so extravagant a drama—and one still very shocking to a contemporary audience—that it has been supposed that Shakespeare was parodying the worst excesses of the genre. But there is no evidence at all for that assumption. It would also run against all the practice of the sixteenth-century stage, where the revenge tragedy was still too novel and exciting a form to be ridiculed in that self-reflecting manner. It is unlikely, for example, that an Elizabethan audience would have laughed at the sight of Lavinia with her hands chopped off; it was still a punishment deployed in public places. There is a case for saying that Shakespeare pushed the spectacle of bloodshed to its extremes precisely because he was writing for citizens inured to violent and painful deaths. He wished his audience to sup its full of horrors, and he entered the spirit of the proceedings with such gusto and relish that he forgot or abandoned any sense of theatrical decorum. It was a case of declamation rather than explanation. It may of course be doubted whether such a sense of decorum existed in public playhouses that could also be used for bear-baiting and bull-baiting. Everything was permitted at this early stage in public and professional drama; there were no rules and no conventions.

His is in any case the pure joy of invention, beyond the boundaries of comedy or tragedy. He is captured by the sheer enthusiasm for display and rhetoric and spectacle. That is why he wrote fluently and quickly, even borrowing a line verbatim from
The Troublesome Raigne
in the process. There were a few dramaturgical errors and inconsistencies, but we may recall the words of the German critic A.W. Schlegel when writing of
Titus Andronicus
. “It is even highly probable,” he suggested, “that he must have made several failures before he succeeded in getting into the right path. Genius is in a certain sense infallible, and has nothing to learn; but art is to be learned, and must be acquired by practice and experience.”
¹

Titus Andronicus
was in any case not seen as a “failure” at the time. A
hugely popular play, still praised and performed thirty years after its first production, it conferred upon the young Shakespeare reputation and prestige. The actual date of the first production cannot now be verified; it might have been first performed under the title of
tittus & vespacia
before being revised three or four years later. It had music and spectacle. It required a large cast for the various ritual and processional scenes. It was so scenically interesting, in fact, that it inspired the first known drawing of a Shakespearian production; this was executed by Henry Peacham, the author of
The Complete Gentleman
, but it is not at all clear whether it is a record of a stage performance or of some idealised reconstruction. The action and the attitudes, however, can be taken as authentic of Elizabethan acting.