Shakespeare (28 page)

It is a curious fact that the earliest productions of writers and dramatists contain the seeds of their future works, as if in embryo, so that in
Titus Andronicus
we can see the first stirrings of Caliban and Coriolanus, Macbeth and Lear, all as it were vying for attention. On more than one occasion Shakespeare adverts to the “prophetic soul.” Great writers are much more likely to be inspired by their unknown future than by their known and constricted past. Expectation, rather than experience, fuelled his genius.

And then, as seems to have been his custom, he revised the play in later years for different actors or for different productions. He even added an entire scene that has very little relation to the plot but does bear upon the revelation of character. It seems likely that he had a ready and instinctive grasp of stagecraft before he turned his attention to expression. Unlike his contemporaries he was already possessed by a firm idea of characters in action and of characters in response to action. When they emerged from his pen they were already engaged in the game.

So from a possible early version of
Hamlet
to
Titus Andronicus
we have some six or seven plays which might have been composed by the young Shakespeare in the first two years after his arrival in London—among them
The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The Taming of a Shrew, Edmund Ironside
and
The Troublesome Raigne of King John
. It has been objected in the past that he could not possibly have written so many plays in so short a space of time—at any reckoning, some three or four a year. But that is completely to misapprehend the conditions of the sixteenth-century theatre. He was not a modern dramatist. The wonder is that he did not write more. Indeed other plays, or parts of plays, have been ascribed to him. Plays were composed,
performed and discarded at an astonishingly rapid rate—with seven or eight new plays performed by each of the companies in any one season. Contemporaries like Robert Greene produced them on demand, and were lucky if their works had a dramatic life of a month or a week. They were not considered to be literature in any sense. In addition Shakespeare wished to make his name, and fortune, in the theatre. Comparisons with his later rate of production are not appropriate. He wrote quickly, and furiously, filled with the first momentum of his genius.

There is a portrait of a young man known as the Grafton Portrait, from its ownership by the Duke of Grafton in the 1700s. In this picture the age of the sitter is given as twenty-four, and the date of composition is 1588. On the back has been written “W + S.” Its association with Shakespeare might be easily dismissed as wishful thinking, except that the young man bears a striking resemblance to the engraving of the older Shakespeare in the First Folio. The mouth and jaw are the same, as are the ridge of the nose and the almond-shaped eyes. The whole set of the expression is the same. This young man is dark-haired, slim and good-looking (in no way precluding the image of the somewhat stout and bald gentleman of later years); he is dressed in fashionable doublet and collar, but his expression is alert if also somewhat pensive. He is one who could, if necessary, take on the romantic lead. It has been suggested that the young Shakespeare, at the age of twenty-four in 1588, could not possibly have afforded such fashionable and expensive clothing. And how could he or his father have paid the portraitist? But if he were already a successful dramatist, what then? It is in any case a glorious supposition.

S
o a picture emerges
of the young dramatist, still in his mid-twenties but already achieving considerable popular success with a multifarious range of histories, comedies and melodramas. He turned his hand to anything with the expedition and confidence of one who seems able to give his words wings. He wrote; he collaborated with others. The qualities with which he was later associated, abundance and copiousness, were evident from the beginning. Yet he was also earning his living as an actor, a “hired man” who was already playing demanding roles. He had moved to Lord Strange’s Men by 1588, confirming Henslowe’s later note that the company owned a play entitled “harey the vi.” In the early months of 1589 they were travelling in the country. But there is a lacuna in the records, and it is impossible to trace the course of their theatrical journeys. They were back in London by the autumn of that year at the very latest, however, where they are recorded as playing at the Cross Keys Inn.

There had been some public controversy over certain farces referring to religious disputes of the time, and the Lord Mayor of London summoned the Admiral’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men to prohibit them from performing in the city. It was an indication of the constant tension between the civic authorities and the playing companies. A letter from the Lord Mayor, of 6 November, declared that the Admiral’s Men had obeyed the request but that Lord Strange’s Men “in very Contemptuous manner departing from me,
went to the Crosse keys and played that afternoon, to the greate offence of the better sorte that knewe they were prohibited.” As a result “I coulde do no lesse but this evening Comitt some of them to one of the Compters.”
¹
It is possible that Shakespeare was one of those consigned to prison.

Lord Strange’s Men then proceeded from the Cross Keys, where they were now banned, to the Curtain, which was outside the jurisdiction of the city authorities. The Curtain was their “summer” house, but it was fortunately empty in this period. In the early months of 1590 they were performing such entertainments as
Vetus Comoedia
while their rivals, the Admiral’s Men, were playing beside them at the Theatre. But by late 1590 they were collaborating again. In the performances given at court before the queen, in December 1590 and February 1591, the company is officially named Strange’s in one document and Admiral’s in another. They had become indistinguishable, in other words, and together they would have had the resources to mount the large and lavish productions that were never rivalled in later years. And this combined company was the one in which Shakespeare and his principal history plays were to be found.

But where was he to be found in a more local sense? John Aubrey described the young dramatist as “the more to be admired because he was not a company-keeper; lived in Shoreditch; wouldn’t be debauched; and if invited to, writ he was in pain.” He acquired this information at second hand, but it was accurate enough. Shoreditch was the neighbourhood where actors and playwrights consorted together in the same lodgings and taverns. There were even specific streets where the actors were located. This was the pattern of habitation in sixteenth-century London, where trades and tradesmen congregated. Shakespeare lived where he worked, close to the playhouses in which he was engaged, a neighbour of his fellow actors and their families.

Among Shakespeare’s neighbours in Shoreditch in the late 1580s were Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, together with their respective families, living in Holywell Street. The comedian Richard Tarlton resided in the same street with a woman of dubious reputation known as Em Ball. Gabriel Spencer, the actor later murdered by Ben Jonson in a brawl, lived in Hog Lane. The Beeston family also lived in this lane. A few yards down the thoroughfare, in a small enclave known as Norton Folgate, lived Christopher Marlowe and Robert Greene. Thomas Watson, the playwright, also lived there.

If Shakespeare had wished to be “debauch’d” there were plenty of opportunities in that neighbourhood. The presence of the theatres attracted inns and brothels. It was in Hog Lane that Watson and Marlowe were involved
in a murderous fight with the son of an innkeeper, for which they were committed to Newgate. In
The Trimming of Thomas Nashe
, the neighbourhood is described as one where “poore Scholers and souldiers wander in backe lanes and the out-shiftes of the Citie with never a rag to their backes” in the society of “Aqua vitae sellers and stocking menders” together with prostitutes “sodden & perboyled with French surfets”; there were fortunetellers and cobblers and citizens on the search for “bowzing and beerebathing.” When Shakespeare introduced the “low life” of his plays, the pimps and the pandars and the prostitutes, he knew at first hand of what he wrote. There was a row of houses along both sides of Shoreditch High Street and it is possible that the young Shakespeare lodged in one of them, within a few yards of the old stone-and-wood church of St. Leonard where were eventually buried many of the players with whom he worked. If he had not returned to Stratford before his death, this might have been his last resting place. It was famous for its peal of bells.

By late 1590 the Admiral’s Men were once again playing at the Theatre and Lord Strange’s Men at the Curtain; there is evidence, for example, that the former acted
Dead Man’s Fortune
at one theatre and the latter performed
The Seven Deadly Sins
at the other. Shakespeare was working alongside the greatest tragedians of his generation, Alleyn and Burbage, as well as assorted comics and character actors. It was a highly combustible mixture of individual talents, and there is much historical evidence of violence, argument and affray between actors, between actors and public, between actors and managers. One incident occurred in the winter of 1590, when the widow of John Brayne—who, as we have seen, was one of the original owners and builders of the Theatre—fell into dispute with James Burbage over the division of the takings. The widow and her friends arrived at the gallery entrance, one November night, and demanded their share of the money. Burbage then described her as a “murdering whore” and went on to say, according to later court testimony, “hang her hor” and “she getteth nothing here.” Richard Burbage, the tragic actor, then came forward with a broomstick in his hand and began to beat the widow’s men. They had come for a moiety of the takings, he said, “but I have I think deliuered a moytie wt this & sent them packing.” When someone spoke out in defence of Mrs. Brayne, “Ry. Burbage scornfully & disdainfullye playing wt this depotes Nose sayd that yf he delt in the matter he wold beate him also and did chalendge the
field of him at that tyme.”
²
It is part of the rumbustious texture of the sixteenth-century London world and would deserve no notice here, were it not for the fact that certain scholars have traced the presence of this quarrel in Shakespeare’s rewriting of
King John
. Shakespeare of course often introduced contemporary material for the sake of his audience. In this production it is likely that Richard Burbage played the quasi-heroic figure of the bastard Faulconbridge. To have Burbage playing himself—as it were—as well as Faulconbridge would have been the cause of some amusement. We can never hope to recover the full range of allusions that Shakespeare introduced within his drama, but it is important to realise that they are nonetheless embedded in his texts.

A theatrical quarrel of more serious consequence took place six months later, in the spring of 1591, when Edward Alleyn was engaged in a dispute with James Burbage. The precise cause and nature of their controversy are not known, but no doubt it had something to do with money. Burbage may have been treating his actors in the same high-handed manner which he had shown to the widow Brayne. The consequence was that Alleyn decamped to the Rose, the theatre on the other side of the Thames that was owned and managed by Philip Henslowe. He also took with him a large part of the combined Admiral’s and Strange’s company of players as well as certain play-books and costumes. Richard Burbage of course stayed in the northern suburbs, in the theatres owned by his father, together with a group of players who had not wished to set up with Alleyn in a new playhouse. Among those who stayed with Burbage were John Sincler, known as Sinklo, Henry Condell, Nicholas Tooley, and Christopher Beeston. All of them, with the exception of Tooley, would also work with Shakespeare for the rest of his life. It is interesting that, in his revision of
King John
, Shakespeare gives Richard Burbage the most heroic part in the play. From the evidence of the surviving playbooks, too, it can be assumed that he was one of those who decided to stay with the Burbages and the others at the Theatre. They were eventually granted the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke, and became known as Pembroke’s Men.

Shakespeare no doubt decided to remain with Burbage and his men because he would then be the principal writer of the company. It was gratifying to have a company at hand to give expression to his vision of the world. As resident playwright he seems also to have brought some of his plays with him, as if he exercised a proprietorial right over them. This was unusual, since the plays generally belonged to the companies or to the managers of the
playhouses, but it suggests that even at this early stage he was not lacking a certain business acumen or professional expertise. That is how Burbage’s players were able to perform
Titus Andronicus
and
The Taming of a Shrew
.