Shakespeare (40 page)

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were a success, and became something of a royal favourite. The extant records show that on this first occasion the Lord Admiral’s Men performed three times, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played twice, but in later years the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were called more often. In the winter season of 1596 and 1597, for example, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played six times and the Lord Admiral’s Men did not appear at all. A reference to William Shakespeare occurs in the payment for the royal entertainment at Greenwich in 1594, when £20 was granted to “William Kemp, William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage” for “two comedies showed before Her Majesty in Christmas time last.” It is an indication of Shakespeare’s seniority in the company that he should be listed before the principal actor—unless, of course, he was the principal actor. It suggests in
any case that he was a leading member at the time of its inception, and already active in the company’s business. The entry in the treasurer’s account has the distinction of being the only official reference to Shakespeare’s connection with the stage.

On the night of the last day they performed at Greenwich, 28 December 1594, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men also gave a performance of
The Comedy of Errors
in the hall of Gray’s Inn. The play was part of the Christmas revels of that Inn, presided over by a lord of misrule known as “the Prince of Purpoole.” Shakespeare may have been chosen as the dramatist through his association with Southampton; Southampton was a member of Gray’s Inn. The play of twins and of mistaken identity, with all the complications of evidence involved, was naturally popular among students of the English law. For the purposes of the Inn, Shakespeare also revised
The Comedy of Errors
. He introduced more legalisms and two trial scenes. A special stage had been built for the production, as well as “Scaffolds to be reared to the top of the House, to increase Expectation.” So there was to be an element of spectacle in the proceedings. But the play hardly received a fair hearing. The numbers of invited guests were so large, and the event so badly managed, that the entertainments had to be curtailed. The senior members of the Inner Temple, who had been invited by their colleagues, left the hall “discontented and displeased”; spectators then invaded the stage to the obvious detriment of the players. A report in
Gesta Grayorum
concludes that “that Night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon it was ever afterwards called,
The Night of Errors”.
Two days later the members held a “mock trial,” one of the enduring features of the Inns, at which “a Company of base and common Fellows” from “Shoreditch” was berated for making up “our Disorders with a Play of Errors and Confusions.”
²
It was not a serious rebuke, and the allusion to the “base and common” actors is an arch legal joke. The person blamed for the fiasco was in fact a member and “orator” of the Inn, Francis Bacon, a keen spectator of the drama and a writer sometimes deemed to have composed Shakespeare’s plays himself. The contemporaneity of the two men has itself led to “nothing but confusion and errors.” Shakespeare has been accused of writing Bacon, and Bacon accused of writing Shakespeare, while a third party has been held responsible for the productions of both men.

The connection between the legal Inns and the drama is a very close one. Many of the poets and dramatists of the age were attached to one of the four Inns of Court—Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, the Middle Temple and the Inner
Temple—and it has plausibly been asserted that formal English drama itself originated in those surroundings. One of the earliest of English tragedies,
Gorboduc
, was written by two members of the Inner Temple and first performed at the Inns of Court. The “moots” or mock trials, as well as the legal debates and dialogues that were performed by the students, bear an interesting relation to the short interludes of the early sixteenth century. The Inns were also famous for their organisation of masques and pageants; the writers of these masques then began to write for the boy actors of the private theatres, St. Paul’s and Blackfriars. The Middle and the Inner Temple were next door to the theatre at Blackfriars. There is contiguity as well as continuity.

The legal ceremonies at the courts in Westminster Hall of course involved their own kind of theatre. Lawyers, like actors, had to learn the arts of rhetoric and of performance. It was known as “putting the case.” In the course of their disputations the students of law were instructed to assume the voices of different characters in order to promulgate different arguments; they were taught how to frame narratives that might include improbabilities or impossibilities in order to lend conviction to their
suasoria
and
controversia
. At a certain stage in their respective developments, then, the set speeches of English drama and the oratorical persuasions of English law looked very much alike. In sixteenth-century London, as in fifth-century BC Athens, public performance was always seen in terms of competition and contest.

In certain of his plays Shakespeare introduces references and allusions that were understood only by the students of the law; they in fact formed a large or at least recognisable part of his audience. They were the “coming men,” trained to be the judges and administrators and diplomats of the next generation. Many of Shakespeare’s own friends and acquaintances came from that circle. It was also widely reported, and believed, that the members of the Inns harboured papistical tendencies; Lord Burghley was obliged in 1585 to write to the treasurer of Gray’s Inn, for example, complaining that “to our great grief we have understood that not only some seminary popish priests have heretofore been harboured in Gray’s Inn but also have their assemblies and masses.”
³

The members of the Inns were known as “Afternoon’s Men” for their habit of frequenting the playhouse in those hours, and were described by one contemporary as the “clamorous fry” who stood with the groundlings in the pit or “filled up the private rooms of greater price.”
⁴
A moralist, William Prynne, stated that “this is one of the first things they learne as soone as they
are admitted, to see Stage-playes.”
⁵
One judgement in the civic courts charges a member of Gray’s Inn “for that he brought a disordered company of gentlemen of the Inns of Court”
⁶
to the playhouse. They were clamorous because they hissed and booed with their fellows in the pit, but they were also known for shouting out themes or topics to be addressed by the actors; the actors would then extemporise comically or wittily. This was an extension of their practice at their “moots” in the Inns, and is again an indication of the association between law and drama in London.

It is important to understand this connection, if only to bring life to Shakespeare’s use of law and of legal terms in his plays and in his poetry. A drama like
The Merchant of Venice
can be properly understood only in this context, with the civil law of Portia pitted against the common law of Shy-lock. It is one of the defining structures of Shakespeare’s imagination.

T
he new company had the
benefit of new, or almost new, plays. It is clear enough that Shakespeare revised
The Comedy of Errors
, and it is likely that he “improved” the other plays he had already written. But it is also worth noting the new vein of romantic drama that Shakespeare began at this time, the principal plays of this period being
Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Love’s Labour’s Lost
and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. The precise order cannot now be ascertained and, in any case, it is not of much consequence. The general tendency of his art is of much more significance. The hard edges of the early Italianate comedies, and the ornate rhetoric of the first history plays, now give way to extended lyricism and to more tender or perhaps just more complex characters. He was assured of a range of actors who could convey every mood and every sentiment. He was now the single most important dramatic poet of the period, and he had the incalculable advantage of a stable group of actors for whom to write.

We may plausibly imagine the cast list of
Romeo and Juliet
. We know that Will Kempe played Peter, the bawdy servant of the Capulets, and that Richard Burbage played the leading role of Romeo. One of the boys played Juliet, and another boy—or perhaps an older actor—played the garrulous Nurse. It is generally assumed that Shakespeare played the part of the Friar and the Chorus, as we have seen, but Dryden, in “Defence of the Epilogue”
to
The Conquest of Granada
(1670), says that “Shakespeare showed the best of his skill in Mercutio, and he said himself that he was forced to kill him in the third Act, to prevent being killed by him.” Mercutio is the bawdy, gallant, quicksilver friend of Romeo whose speech on the activities of Queen Mab is one of the most eloquent and fanciful in all of Shakespeare; his is the soaring spirit, buoyant and fantastical, unfettered by ideals and delusions, which Shakespeare had to kill in order to make way for the romantic tragedy of the play’s conclusion. Such a free spirit does not consort well with a tale of love’s woe. There is melancholy as well as bawdry in Mercutio’s speeches, and it becomes clear that much of that melancholy springs from sexual disgust. Dry-den believed that this voice was closest to that of the dramatist himself, who could not delineate a tragedy without introducing farcical elements and who evinces all the manifestations of the same disgust. Mercutio has been described by some critics as heartless, even cold, but then so has been Shakespeare. That is perhaps why even in the midst of this lamentable tragedy there is more than a trace of
commedia dell’arte;
it has even been surmised that there were certain scenes staged in dumb-show.

The mood and imagery of the play is that of summer lightning, flashing across the sky (892-3):

Shakespeare had heard the phrase “Gallop apace” in Marlowe’s
Edward the Second
, and had remembered it; he gives it to Juliet as she yearns for the end of the day. “Enter Juliet,” Shakespeare puts in a stage-direction, “somewhat fast, and embraceth Romeo.” It is a play of youthfulness, of youthful impulsiveness and of youthful extravagance; it is a play of dancing and of sword-play, both measuring out an arena of energy with sudden violence and swift transitions. In this play he incorporates sudden changes of mood and of thought; he follows the quicksilver thread of consciousness in expression. But if it is seized by transitoriness it is also touched by mystery. As Juliet and her Nurse converse on Romeo, an unnamed and unknown voice off-stage calls out “Juliet”; it is as if some guardian spirit were entreating her.

It has often been stated that
Romeo and Juliet
are all that lovers were, and all that lovers ever will be, but it is important to notice the sheer artistry with which Shakespeare entwines them. They echo each other’s speech, as if they
saw their souls shining in each other’s faces, and in one wonderful passage a formal sonnet emerges out of their dialogue like Aphrodite rising out of the sea (666-9):

This had never been achieved on the English stage before, and must have been as miraculous for the first auditors as it has been for subsequent generations. Shakespeare had taken the conventions and traditions of courtly love poetry, and had dramatised them for London audiences that had probably never picked up a sonnet sequence from the stationers’ stalls. There are other themes that seem to exfoliate through Shakespeare’s drama—the theme of banishment, of inequality in love, of honour and reputation—but the dramatic invocation of love remains the central and abiding impression.

The play ends in a house of tears, but that is where all dreams end. It concluded formally with a funeral procession, one of the standard spectacles of Elizabethan drama, but the dirge was succeeded by a merry jig. This was assisted by the presence of Will Kempe in the final tragic scene. He accompanied Romeo to his rendezvous with mortality at the tomb, and no doubt clowned his way through the soliloquies on dust and death. It is another indication of the essential stridency of Elizabethan drama, where there is no necessary composure or middle tone. All extremes are possible.
Romeo and Juliet
can be interpreted as a comedy as much as a tragedy, but of course it can also represent both.

Shakespeare had taken the story from a poem by Arthur Brooke, entitled
The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet
, but he condensed it; he shortened the time span, from nine months into five days, and imposed upon the narrative a careful and intricate pattern of symmetries. More significantly, perhaps, he alters the moral scheme and burden of the narrative by overtly sympathising with the lovers. That is the difference between poetry and drama. The religious imagery of the play has often been discussed, in particular its atmosphere of the old faith. Any play set in Italy is bound to be mingled with Catholicism, of course, but there is a larger point. It is characteristic of those who have forsworn their faith to cling to its vocabulary, and never more so than when describing the profane. Shakespeare also introduced
far more bawdry and comedy, giving Mercutio in particular a greater role. He also changed Juliet’s age from sixteen, in Brooke’s poem, to thirteen. He was aware that he was thereby catering to the lasciviousness of the citizens, but he was a shameless master of effects. He recognised, too, that the crowds would enjoy the sword-fight that opens
Romeo and Juliet
.