Shakespeare

The Poet in his World

M. C. Bradbrook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136558245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1978. In this study, Shakespeare's own life story and the development of English theatrical history are placed in the wider context of Elizabethan and Jacobean times, but the works themselves are the final objective of this 'applied biography'. The main contention of the book is that Shakespeare's life was the lure of the stage itself which inspired him to transform what everyday life provided into the worlds of Hamlet, King Lear and Prospero.

The world he made

5 The poet of love

In 1604 Dekker wrote The Wonderful Year, celebrating the splendours and miseries of King James’s happy succession to the English throne in 1603, the new outburst of plague, and many other marvels. Shakespeare’s wonderful year had come exactly a decade earlier, in 1594. His art had leaped into another dimension, and the life of the poet is henceforth the life of his art. His love poetry celebrated that happy state in which the beloved constitutes the whole world, and in that presence all things become harmonized.

‘You are my all the world’ or ‘the better part of me’ (Sonnets 112, 39) so that ‘What is it but mine own when I praise thee?’ ‘Incapable of more, replete with you’ (Sonnet 113), he does not need love tokens. Perhaps in the end he does not need the bodily presence, for the vision has been made fully part of himself. ‘Those who belong together don’t need to stick together,’ said Freud to one of his colleagues; and Ibsen went so far as to suggest that for the artist some act of separation was necessary (later he came to think the price too high). The beloved is the best and only record of his own nature.

Who is it that says most which can say more

Than this rich praise – that you alone are you?

(Sonnet 84, 1–2)

Eloquent praise becomes ‘a tomb’. The opposite is also true. The friend of the sonnets has been reincarnated in an ‘eternal summer’ of beauty and goodness. Out of this exclusive devotion came a new world that the poet made; he might say with Donne,

Let sea-discoverers to new world have gone,

Let maps to others, world on world have shown,

Let us possess one world, each hath one and is one.

(The Good Morrow)

Gradually the initiating experience faded – the friend, the rival poet, the dark beauty, provided energies for actions on the public stage and were not merely transplanted there.

On 5 June 1594 Henslowe began to record performances at the little theatre in Newington Butts by ‘my Lord Admiral’s men and my Lord Chamberlain’s Men’ – the two troupes that were to dominate for the next thirty years. They played Titus Andronicus and The Taming of a Shrew – which may not be Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew – with a Hamlet that cannot be his (though Peter Alexander thought it could¹). After 15 June the players went on tour, but on 8 October the Lord Chamberlain was negotiating with the Lord Mayor for the use by ‘my new company’ of the Cross Keys Inn in the coming winter. This had been Burbage’s headquarters in the old days. Five men from the company of the deceased Earl of Derby (formerly Lord Strange) came over – Will Kempe, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustin Phillips and George Bryan. The new company also included William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage. In the following Christmas season at Court, the Chamber accounts record a payment for performances ‘to William Kempe, William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, servants to the Lord Chamberlain’ of £13.6.8, with Her Majesty’s reward of an additional £6.13.4! In other words, Shakespeare was among the leading sharers of the new company, ranking with its chief comic and tragic actors. He had arrived. For the rest of his working life he was to stay in fellowship with these men, and after his death ‘Old stuttering Heminges’, by then the doyen of the group, was to collect his plays. Kempe left in 1600, Bryan took service in the royal household as an ordinary groom of the chamber, but Phillips and Pope stayed; the most successful and the longest lived of all Elizabethan acting troupes, under the title of the King’s Men, persisted through fifty glorious years till the closure of the theatres during the Civil War in 1642.

Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, was Elizabeth’s first cousin, the son of Mary Boleyn. His son Sir George Carey, Governor of the Isle of Wight, we have met as the protector of Nashe; in 1596 he succeeded his father, and the players would still wear the badge of the Hunsdons, the flying swan, on their sleeves. The Hunsdons, father and (eventually) son, were in charge of all Elizabeth’s entertainments and of her household, while detailed supervision of plays was delegated to the Master of the Revels. Although the Queen had set up a troupe in 1583 (as mentioned on page 31), that plan had not worked well. ‘Twelve of the best men’ had been chosen from all the companies in London; but it might have been guessed that a troupe of stars would not hold together. The separate members went their ways, and the name became attached to a very second-rate body. From 1594, the new troupe of the Lord Chamberlain replaced them as the leading group of actors; they worked as a team, and they were, in effect, under royal patronage, although they did not acquire the royal title.

The Lord Chamberlain was in a much stronger position than the Queen to keep a firm hand on his players, to ask privileges for them and, by his influence or merely the power of his name, to smooth their way with all sorts of minor officials.

Alleyn headed the troupe of the Lord Admiral, Lord Charles Howard (who had at one time himself been Lord Chamberlain), afterwards created Earl of Nottingham. Alleyn had long been attached to Howard; such continued attachment doubtless brought its rewards: even when he directed the Earl of Derby’s Men, he did not change his personal allegiance from the White Lion. Lord Hunsdon, it will be recalled, had been the patron of James Burbage from early days (above, p. 32). His splendid tomb in Westminster Abbey, in black and gold, with great obelisks, challenges royalty for pomp. His cheerful, bluff, countryman’s face – and his son was very like him – suggests a good master of the old English type. Unlike the sensitive Italianate Ferdinando, Earl of Derby, or the rivals Ralegh and Essex, with their dark moody charm, Hunsdon looks the sort of man who drank beer rather than wine, knew the ways of hawks and hounds and kept his hair cut short. When an attorney tried to settle on the Isle of Wight, George Carey had the man hunted out of the island with a pound of lighted candles at his breech and bells fastened on his legs like a morris dancer.

Hunsdon’s company used the Cross Keys for winter performances, The Theatre in Shoreditch for summer. They very seldom went on tour. It was not necessary. But they came back to London denuded of playwrights. Greene was dead, Marlowe was dead, Peele was sick, Lodge and Lyly had given up writing plays. Chapman began writing for Henslowe and the Admiral’s Men – but he was a newcomer.

As Court favourites fought in their close-locked groups round the ageing Queen, the great houses became centres for party views and loyalties – Cecil House in the Strand, near Essex House, with Southampton House in Holborn, Lord Hunsdon’s grander residence at Somerset House and his more modest quarters in Blackfriars – and centres of entertainment too, where plays might be commissioned. We know that on 9 December 1595 Sir Edward Hoby invited Sir Robert Cecil to supper to see a play on King Richard (i.e. Richard II). On New Year’s Day, the players went down at the height of the season to Sir John Harington at Burley-on-the-Hill where by way of festivity they performed Titus Andronicus. The Inns of Court would invite the players to perform at their Christmas festivities, and on 28 December 1594 Gray’s Inn enjoyed The Comedy of Errors.

New theatres opened; new plays were constantly needed. Shakespeare seems, because he was an actor, to have kept some control over all the plays he had written. Presumably he brought them with him as his contribution to stock, otherwise the early pieces that are included in the First Folio of 1623 would not have been the property of the King’s Men. Henry VI and Richard III, which a Greene or a Peele would have sold, were kept by the Upstart Crow, evidently with some care.

The company had to be ready with something acceptable to a very varied audience; at The Theatre their audience was of all kinds. No doubt the Londoners would flock to see a play that had been given before the Queen (still, theoretically, the only reason for playing at all), and possibly the Queen would be equally influenced – through her Lord Chamberlain – by whatever had taken the fancy of the city. She prided herself on being ‘mere English’, and her tastes were catholic: Ascham tells us that she admired metaphors and rhetorical balance.

William Shakespeare was already well known. He was in a field virtually bare of rivals, and stimulated by new experience in two years’ absence from the public theatre. He brought a new reputation with him, and perhaps he brought a new play – Love’s Labour’s Lost. Mounting like a rocket, he produced four masterpieces in two years, each of an entirely different kind: Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice. Every one was a tremendous success. Romeo and Juliet was piratically printed in 1597 (so perhaps was Love’s Labour’s Lost); with Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice, it remains the stand-by of all hard-pressed troupers. A sixth play, which perhaps belongs to the very end of the old era or the beginning of the new, offering yet another model, is The Taming of the Shrew.²

The full splendour of the late Elizabethan drama was built by Shakespeare on the foundations of others; but it was his personal construction. He wrote no more poems (that chapter was closed) but proceeded in 1596 to get his coat-of-arms; and the next year he bought the best house in Stratford – rather ruined, but substantial, with two orchards and two gardens. He was creating his own little demesne. The years were bad ones in the country: crops failed, the poverty and starvation was cruel. But the city prospered again. Shakespeare became a man with two centres for his life – of course it was the ambition of every tradesman to buy an estate in the country and become a country gentleman. Later writers for the stage were to make savage jests out of such pretensions. But Shakespeare kept in touch with his Stratford neighbours the Quineys and such, although we cannot know how much time he spent in his native town. In London, he lived casually near his work.

Love’s Labour’s Lost has enough private jests to show it was aimed at a small circle; but it is also a full drama and in the last thirty years has revived wittily enough. It is written both from the ‘inside’ and also from the ‘outside’ of high life. The unusual number of women’s parts suggests that it was first written for private production with some co-operating boys’ group; the Southamptons looked on it as ‘their’ play at a later date. All sorts of people have tried to interpret it, from Frances Yates’ theory that it satirized Walter Ralegh and John Florio to Leslie Hotson’s theory that it is about the Inns of Court and ‘his’ candidate for Shakespeare’s friend, one William Hattecliffe.³

This delicious romp, laughing at learning and also laughing at love, is set far from the city in a green park where a king and three lords, vowed to three years’ celibate study, are met and defeated by the Princess of France and her three ladies – the escadron volant. In this pastoral world, a series of wooing games which are very largely word-games is played – almost danced; supposedly in the kingdom of Navarre – not much bigger than the Earl of Derby’s kingdom of the Isle of Man – really on some English estate, where Antony Dull is constable and Costard the swain runs errands.

Yet this enchanting retreat is finally penetrated by a sombre messenger of death, recalling the Princess to duty and preventing the conventional happy ending. ‘Jack hath not Jill’; the ladies impose severe penance on their foresworn lovers, Berowne the mocker-in-chief being sent ‘to jest a twelvemonth in a hospital’. We are back with the plague, which has been kept outside the park; the life of artifice, whether of study or wooing, closes in a humble rustic song of the seasons which reminds everyone of time’s vagaries.

All learn what their creator had learned – the educative power of what used to be called ‘the best society’. Schooled by ‘beauty’s tutors’, the gentlemen have all profited enough to justify themselves in poems, of which the King’s is much the worst and young Dumain’s the most charming.

On a day – alack the day! –

Love, whose month is ever May,

Spied a blossom passing fair

Playing in the wanton air …

Do not call it sin in me That

I am forsworn for thee;

Thou for whom Jove would swear

Juno but an Ethiope were;

And deny himself for Jove,

Turning mortal for thy love.

(4.3.97–116)

Every character in this symmetrical play has his own style, from the stolid persistence of Constable Dull i...