The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (57 page)

Into this world came the young William Shakespeare (1564–1616) from Stratford-on-Avon. Son of a prominent and prosperous alderman, he seems to have had a solid elementary education at the grammar school, but he had not gone to the university. At the age of eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, twenty-six, of a substantial family in the neighborhood. They had a daughter and then twins, a boy and a girl. By 1592 he was acting in London, and was well enough known to invite the often-quoted sarcasm of Robert Greene, a prominent rival playwright. “There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his
Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide
supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes Fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.” The first publication of this jack-of-all trades (fac totum) “upstart crow,” William Shakespeare, was
Venus and Adonis
(1593), in the courtly mythological tradition, and dedicated to the Earl of Southampton.

He followed it the next year with his “graver labour,”
The Rape of Lucrece
, another long poem dedicated to the earl. His best poetry, outside the plays, would be found in his 154 sonnets, published in 1609 and dedicated to a cryptic “Mr. W. H.” But Shakespeare was most committed to the newly flourishing entertainment art. Despite his not entirely respectable occupation he became a gentleman in 1596, when the College of Heralds finally granted his father a coat of arms.

We know little else about Shakespeare’s private life during these twenty years when he wrote the great body of drama and poetry against which all later creators of English literature would be measured. He prospered, and very soon, at his new occupation in London. By 1597 he was well enough off to buy the Great House of New Place, the second largest dwelling in Stratford. It was three stories high with five gables, on a city lot sixty by seventy feet. Within the next few years he also purchased a 137-acre tract near town for £230 cash, and invested the considerable sum of £440 in the lease of tithes. In 1613 he bought for speculation the Blackfriars Gate-House property in London. His remunerative loans and continuing litigation proved him a man of substance. Shakespeare became for a time the most popular playwright of the London stage. Prudent investments and his good reputation would enable him to leave his heirs a solid estate.

When the First Folio of Shakespeare’s thirty-six plays was published in 1623, seven years after his death, eighteen plays appeared in print for the first time. Printing a play was a way of squeezing some profit from a playwright’s work when it could not be acted because of the plague or when the stage version had failed. Players’ companies guarded successful scripts against competitors. In 1598, when Sir Thomas Bodley began building the collection for the great Oxford library that still bears his name, he persuaded the Stationers’ Company in London, which had a monopoly of English printing, to agree to send his library in perpetuity a copy of every book. But he cautioned his librarian in Oxford against collecting the “many idle books and riff-raffs … almanacs, plays, and proclamations,” of which he would have “none, but such as are singular.” Of plays, he explained, “hardly one in forty” was worth keeping.

Printing the texts of plays was a way of giving the theater and the new profession of playwright an aura of respectability. In 1616, when Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s rival, published a folio of his
Workes
it was the first time the collected plays of an English author had been published. The First Folio of Shakespeare in 1623 was only the second. Jonson was ridiculed for dignifying his plays as if they were serious literary “Workes.” Plays printed before 1616 appeared in the unbound form common for almanacs and joke books. To print plays in a large handsomely bound folio as was done with
collections of sermons or ancient classics claimed a new longevity for the playwright’s work.

Shakespeare’s contemporary public were not readers but listeners. While our age of omnipresent print, and of photographic and electronic images, relies on the eye, Elizabethans were experienced and long-suffering listeners. Once in 1584, when Laurence Chaderton, Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the town’s preacher for a half century, had preached for only two hours the disappointed congregation cried out, “For God’s sake, sir, go on! we beg you, go on!” He and others urged that listening was more profitable than reading. The spoken word brought “the zeale of the speaker, the attention of the hearer, the promise of God to the ordinary preaching of His Word … and many other things which are not to be hoped for by reading the written sermons.” Those who lived by the spoken word made every sermon a performance. Reading the classic sermons of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Donne (1573–1631), we miss the histrionic talent that kept his audiences on edge for hours.

Shakespeare could prosper only by pleasing these audiences. As Dr. Samuel Johnson would note on the opening of the Drury Lane Theater in 1747, “we that live to please must please to live.” Shakespeare’s posthumous fame proved a surprising coincidence of the vulgar taste of his time with the sophisticated taste of following centuries. For Shakespeare the claims of immortality were not pressing. It was more urgent to please contemporary London playgoers. Beginning in London as the actor who annoyed Robert Greene in 1592, he appeared as a “principal comedian” in Ben Jonson’s
Every Man in His Humour
in 1598, and a “principal tragedian” in Jonson’s
Sejanus
in 1603, and he continued to act until he retired to Stratford in 1611.

His acting talent also gave him an advantage in selling his plays. An Elizabethan playwright usually wrote a play to the order of a playing company, then read it to the actors for their approval. If his work was approved he was paid six pounds and his role was over. Some playwrights, like George Chapman, did not even go to see their plays performed. But Shakespeare, we are told, paid close attention to the production. By 1594 he was an acting member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, which had its problems. In 1597 a seditious comedy,
The Isle of Dogs
, by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson led the Privy Council to shut all playhouses. Jonson and two of the actors were sent to prison. In 1598, when the theaters reopened, Shakespeare enjoyed a great success with
Henry IV
, Part One, introducing Falstaff. The company also did well with Jonson’s
Every Man in His Humour
, in which Shakespeare acted.

When the company lost their lease at the Theatre they pooled the actors’ resources to build a new theater across the Thames south of London. With
timbers from Burbage’s dismantled historic Theatre they erected the new Globe Playhouse in July 1599. Taking the motto
Totus mundus agit histrionem
(A whole world of players), the Lord Chamberlain’s Company flourished with its rich repertory by Shakespeare, Jonson, and others, despite increasing competition from new theaters and the boys’ companies. Shakespeare himself held an investor’s share and as an actor was entitled to another portion of the company’s receipts, adding up to about 10 percent. His share fluctuated over the years. For the first time these actors had financed the building of their own theater. And the greatest English dramatist acquired a substantial stake in the popularity of his work in his own day. The public was becoming a patron.

On his accession, King James designated the former Lord Chamberlain’s Company as the King’s Company. Letters patent (May 19, 1603) expressly authorized nine of its members (including William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage) “freely to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, Interludes, Morals, Pastorals, stage plays … as well for the recreation of our loving subjects as for our solace and pleasure.” The company acted before the court six times during the next Christmas holidays.

Shakespeare continued to write and act for the King’s Company at the Globe and in the Blackfriars, their “private” playhouse during winter. The Age of Shakespeare at the Globe had a dramatic end on June 19, 1613. During a gala performance there of Shakespeare’s
Henry VIII
“with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty,” the cannon discharged from the thatched roof to announce the entry of the king set fire to the thatch. “Where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within an hour the whole house to the very ground. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric; wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.” By the following spring the prosperous members of the King’s Company, including Shakespeare, had paid for having the Globe “new builded in a far fairer manner than before.” But Shakespeare, who now owned a fourteenth share in the enterprise, had retired to Stratford. Within his twenty-year London career he had produced the poems and plays that made him the idol of English literature. The English-speaking community in all future centuries would be united by familiarity with “the Bible and Shakespeare.”

Shakespeare had arrived at a crucial moment for a creator’s collaboration with the city audience. The city theater, as we have seen, had just now
provided new incentives and opportunities to reach out to a listening public hungry for entertainment. The reborn spectator offered the literary man a new chance for feedback, which meant a new stimulus and a new resource for creators. In the soliloquy itself, a newly developed literary convention, the actor shared his private thoughts with the audience. We hear the hesitating Hamlet blame himself:

The sense of nationhood, inspired by a vigorous virgin queen and by a generation of world explorers, challenged by a formidable Spanish rival, was enriched by a national vernacular recently conscious of itself. As John of Gaunt boasts in
Richard II:

By reaching recklessly out to imaginary creations of other times and places the Elizabethan stage violated the traditional canons of Aristotle’s
Poetics
, which still insisted on the duty of all artists to imitate nature. “Art imitates nature as well as it can,” observed Dante, “as a pupil follows his master, thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.” These Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action would make the unreality of the stage less disturbing. And a play
read
, it was said, “hath not half the pleasure of a Play
Acted:
for … it wants the pleasure of Graceful Action.”

Sir Philip Sidney expressed the liberated Elizabethan spirit in his
Apologie for Poetrie
(1580; published, 1595):

And he translated the plain biblical theology into literature: man the creator fulfilling the image of his Creator. “Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s with the efficacy of nature; but rather give right honor to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to his own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which is nothing he showeth so much as in poetry.”

The dramatist, no longer to be blamed for “deceiving” his audience by misrepresenting nature, should be applauded, for “that which they do, is not done to
Circumvent
, but to
Represent
, not to
Deceive
others, but to make others
Conceive
.” In the next century John Dryden would actually defend the dramatist’s mission as a welcome kind of “deception.” Sidney’s
Apologie for Poetrie
had been a prophetic defense of the poet’s power to reach
in
, to carry the listener into the playground of his personal imagination. For the poet mere imitation (
mimesis
) was not enough. Writing before any of Shakespeare’s plays had appeared, while still defending the Aristotelian unities, he deplored the poor products on the London stage.

We do not know that Shakespeare ever read Sidney. But Sidney’s declaration of independence from the imprisoning archetype of nature spoke for Shakespeare, too, and opened a world for the adventuring word. This new stage, this new scene of collaborative conception and deception, Shakespeare peopled beyond even Sidney’s imagining. The poet and his audience would journey inward to bizarre new worlds where creation somehow preceded conception. The spectator was no longer a mere victim but a full collaborator, without whom the poets’ work was unfulfilled. The vast new world within, a new “nature” of the poets’ own creation, stretched infinitely in all directions.