Shakespeare (32 page)

I
n 1591 and 1592
it is likely that the young Shakespeare was working on more than one play at once for Pembroke’s Men. There is no reason why he could not move from comedy to history or tragedy, since he mingles these within individual scenes and even speeches.
The Tragedy of King Richard III
seems to have occurred to Shakespeare as he was completing
The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York
. The character emerges in the earlier drama but in subsequent revision, as we have observed, Shakespeare deepened and darkened the portrait in anticipation of the more accomplished play. It was a role for Burbage himself.

Richard Burbage did indeed become the principal interpreter of Shakespeare’s plays for the rest of the dramatist’s life. The recognised leader of the company, he specialised in heroic or tragic roles. It was written of him that

It was he who played the first Lear, the first Hamlet and the first Othello. It is also likely that he introduced Romeo and Macbeth, Coriolanus and Prospero,
Henry V and Antony, to the English stage. No other actor in the world has ever achieved so much. The naturalness and liveliness of his “personation” are often mentioned. He was considered to be a Proteus of changing identity, “so wholly transforming himself into his Part, and putting off himself with his Cloathes, as he never (not so much as in the Tyring-house) as-sum’d himself again until the Play was done … never falling in his Part when he had done speaking, but with his looks and gestures maintaining it still unto the heighth.”
²
He was perhaps Shakespeare’s most familiar companion. The dramatist left him money to purchase a ring, but the names of Burbage’s children are perhaps a better token of their intimacy. He had a daughter named Juliet, who died young; he had a son called William and another daughter named Anne.

And so we see Burbage, at the age of twenty-one, walking onto the stage as Richard III. The medieval Vice was the traditional way of representing evil. Yet Richard seems to emerge fully armed even as Shakespeare thought of him, as if he had come from his imagination even as he had ripped his way out of his mother’s womb. For the first time on the English stage the Vice is capable of growth and change: Richard experiences the first faint stirrings of conscience on the eve of the battle of Bosworth. It is only momentary, but his powerful lines prefigure the agonies of Macbeth and Othello: “What do I feare? my selfe? theres none else by”.

Shakespeare was too great a dramatist to rest with the conventions. He had to reinvent the paths of human consciousness in order to stay true to his interior vision. He had transcended his sources and influences—Hall, Holinshed, Seneca with the rest—by combining them in fresh and unexpected ways. The high chant of formal rhetoric is mixed with comic asides, the melodramatic with the erotic. The rough wooing of Lady Anne springs to mind, although it is hard to think of any Shakespearian scene between the sexes that is not touched by malice or competition. He had not forgotten his lessons from Marlowe, and there are echoes of
Tamburlaine
and
The Jew of Malta
in
Richard III
.

Now it was Marlowe’s turn to learn from him. It is generally agreed that his
Edward II
derives part of its inspiration from Shakespeare’s play. And why should it not be so? The theatre was a place of continual imitation.
The Tragedy of King Richard III
was the longest and most ambitious play that Shakespeare had written. (Only
Hamlet
is longer.) It moves from one climax of invention and feeling to the next, never slackening its pace. In this play Shakespeare blossoms and unfolds. He loves the villainy and malice of the crook-back. He exults in them. There is an atmosphere of mystery and of
prophecy—of ancient archetypes and mythical encounters—that raises English history to a new level of significance and meaning. That was one of Shakespeare’s great gifts to English drama.

Richard III
quickly became popular, with an almost unprecedented eight reprints of the quarto text, three of these after Shakespeare’s death. The despairing cry, “A horse, a horse, my kingdome for a horse,” was parodied and repeated in a hundred different contexts. Thus we have “A man! A man! A kingdom for a man!”
(Scourge of Villanie
, 1598), “A boate! A boate! A full hundred marks for a boate!”
(Eastward Ho!
, 1605) and “A foole! A foole! My coxcomb for a foole!”
(Parasitaster
, 1606). It would not be at all surprising to discover that it became a popular catchphrase on the streets of London.

We can only speculate about Burbage’s performance as Richard III. There is, however, one small clue: “The king is angrie, see, he gnawes his lip.” Catesby notices this mannerism, but it is one that Burbage also employed in the part of Othello. “Alas,” Desdemona asks, “why gnaw you so your neather lip?” There is a reminder of Burbage’s power as an actor in an anecdote in the diary of a citizen called John Manningham.

It is an unproven and unprovable story, but the anecdote was repeated in the mid-eighteenth century within Thomas Wilkes’s
A General View of the Stage
. Wilkes could not have copied it from Manningham’s diary, since that diary did not emerge until the nineteenth century. It would be reasonable to assume that the young Shakespeare was not immune to the delights of London life, although this anecdote emphasises his quick-wittedness rather more than his lechery.

So there are two comedies, and one history, that can plausibly be attributed to Shakespeare’s connection with Pembroke’s Men and to his early association with Richard Burbage. And then there is the unsettled question of
Edward
the Third
. Many scholars believe that it was not written by Shakespeare, but it has elements of his early genius, not least in the choice of sonorous phrase:

The last line reappears in the ninety-fourth of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and bears all the marks of Shakespeare’s profoundly dualistic imagination.

The fact that certain scenes in the play, particularly those concerning the wooing of the Countess of Salisbury by the monarch, are more accomplished than others, has raised the question once more of collaboration with unnamed dramatists. Shakespeare is supposed, at various times of his career, to have collaborated with Jonson and Fletcher, Peek and Munday, Nashe and Middleton. There is no reason at all why he should not have done so. It has been estimated that between one-half and two-thirds of all plays written during Shakespeare’s lifetime were composed by more than one hand. Some plays were written by as many as four or five different authors. That is why plays tended to be the property of the company or the playhouse rather than of an individual. The emphasis was upon speedy and efficient production. It is even possible that writers formed groups or syndicates for the writing of dramas, on the same pattern as the roving bands of medieval illuminators, the members of which specialised in different aspects of the art of painting. Collaboration between dramatists was a familiar and conventional procedure, in other words, with various acts going to various hands or plot and sub-plot being given separate treatment. There were some writers who specialised in comedy, others in pathos. Shakespeare was the exception, perhaps, in the sense that he excelled in all branches of the dramatic art. He may have been exceptional, too, in retaining proprietorship of his own plays. There is of course also the possibility that passages or scenes were added to his plays at a later date by other writers. This may have happened, for example, with
Macbeth
and with
Othello
.

Collaboration in its most extreme form is represented by the extant manuscript of a play entitled
Sir Thomas More
, that has been tentatively dated to the early 1590s. It is the one play in which there is evidence of Shakespeare’s handwriting. The authenticity of this fragment of 147 lines, written in what has become known as “Hand D,” has been disputed by palaeographers over
the years. But the weight of proof now seems to tilt in Shakespeare’s favour; the spellings, the orthography, the abbreviations, all bear his characteristics. The key is variability. Shakespeare’s spelling, and his formation of letters, change all the time. He capitalises the letter “c,” and tends to use old-fashioned spelling; he veers between a light secretary hand and a heavier legal hand. There are signs of haste and, in the course of that rapidity, a certain indecision.

In the scene that Shakespeare was called upon to write, the titular hero of the drama, Thomas More, speaks to certain citizens of London about to riot against the presence of foreigners in the city. It is likely that, after the success of the scenes of rebellion in
The First Part of the Contention
, he was considered to be “good” at crowds. We may refine this further by noting that Shakespeare excelled at scenes in which authority confronts disorder where, by the use of colloquialisms and other devices, the figure of authority is able to communicate with the discomfited crowd. Once more it suggests the duality of his genius.

He is also believed to have written a passage in which More soliloquises on the dangers of greatness; again it appears that the dramatist already had a reputation for meditative reflection by renowned or noble characters. The history plays would have left just such an impression. The chief author of
Sir Thomas More
was Anthony Munday, but one of the other collaborators has been identified as Henry Chettle—the same Chettle who was obliged to apologise for Greene’s animadversions on Shakespeare in
Groats-worth of Witte
. If it was a small world, it was also forgiving.

Sir Thomas More
seems not to have been performed, perhaps because it was too close in matter to certain London riots of 1592, and is now remarkable only for the presence of Shakespeare’s handwriting. The subject of Shakespeare’s handwriting is in itself important, since there is now no other means of tracing his physical presence in the world. We might note, for example, that in each of six of his authenticated signatures he spells his surname differently. He abbreviates it, too, as if he were not happy with it. It becomes “Shakp” or “Shakspe” or “Shaksper.” The brevity may, of course, equally be a sign of speed or impatience. The best analysis of one signature suggests that its inscriber “must have been capable of wielding the pen with dexterity and speed. The firm control of the pen in forming the sweeping curves in the surname is indeed remarkable … a free and rapid, though careless, hand.”
⁴

The differences in the spelling of his surname can of course be ascribed
to the loose and uncertain orthography of the period rather than to any perceived lack of identity, but it does at least suggest that his presence in the world was not fully determined. In a mortgage deed and a purchase deed, signed within hours or even minutes of each other, he signs his name in two completely different ways. It is even supposed by some calligraphers that the three signatures on his will are written by three different people, since the dissimilarities “are almost beyond explanation.”
⁵
The author, as if by some act of magic, has disappeared!