An Introduction to Shakespeare

The Dramatist in His Context

Peter Hyland

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN:
  9780333598801
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350318366
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Peter Hyland provides a highly readable account of the historical, social and political pressures of Shakespeare's England and the material conditions under which his plays were written, including a comprehensive description of the development and status of the theatrical profession. Half of the book is given over to a survey of the plays and examines numerous controversial issues that arise when we ask precisely what we can 'know' about them. For those who are daunted by the volume or the impenetrable prose of much recent writing on Shakespeare, Hyland's book will be a stimulating introduction.

1

Life and Times

LIFE

According to the Parish Register of the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in the county of Warwickshire, ‘Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere’ was baptised on 26 April 1564. He was probably but not certainly born on 23 April. His mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a wealthy landowner, and his father, John Shakespeare, was a glovemaker who held a number of prominent positions in local politics. In the year of William’s birth more than 200 Stratford people out of a population of fewer than 1500 died of bubonic plague. The harshness of life at the time can be gauged from the fact that of John and Mary’s eight children only five survived into adulthood.

John Shakespeare’s father had been a farmer, but John himself was apprenticed to become a glover and leather-dresser. This was a good trade, and he seems to have done well enough in it to attract the attention of the affluent Arden family. As well as bringing him a good settlement, his marriage to Mary Arden was a move upward in the social scale, for the Ardens were minor gentry. By 1556 John was prosperous enough to be able to buy and convert the two houses that were to become William Shakespeare’s birthplace. He was also active in local politics; in 1558 he became town constable, and then held various important offices, but around 1576 it appears that he got badly into debt, and his affairs went into a decline.

It is impossible to tell how this decline affected William because very little is known about his life in Stratford. As for his formal education, there is no documentary evidence, but the evidence to be found in his plays indicates that he had a good one, and there is no reason to doubt that he attended the King’s New School in Stratford. This was an excellent grammar school, which provided its scholars with much more than the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. They would have been trained in rhetoric, logic and history, and would have read widely in Latin literature and contemporary European humanist writing and less widely in Greek (in his elegy on Shakespeare Jonson refers to Shakespeare’s ‘small Latin, and less Greek’, but he was inviting comparison with his own erudition, of which he often boasted, and we should not take this comment too literally). The Arden family were staunch Catholics, and Shakespeare himself may have had Catholic leanings, but his religious education would have been orthodox Protestant. From 1559 everyone was required to attend church, and there were mandatory readings from the Bible, the Prayer Book and the Homilies. Whether or not Shakespeare accepted these teachings uncritically, hearing them week after week he could hardly have avoided taking them in as a rich part of his mental furniture, and there are echoes of more than 40 books of the Bible in his works.

Amongst the few events from Shakespeare’s Stratford years that are documented is his marriage, in November 1582, to Anne Hathaway. Shakespeare was 18 at the time, and Anne, seven or eight years older, was pregnant (their first daughter Susanna was christened in May of the following year). Two years later twins were born (Hamnet and Judith, christened 2 February 1585). There has been a lot of the obvious kind of speculation about the circumstances of this marriage but in truth we know nothing about it. We do not know, either, whether Shakespeare had any trade to support his family, although there has been speculation about this too, and in legend he has been apprenticed as a butcher, a lawyer, a physician, a schoolmaster. The foreign settings of many of his plays have suggested to some that he must have been a soldier or sailor, and the desire to romanticize his image has led others to turn him into a drinker and a poacher. Some or none of these legends may be true; the fact is that for the years from 1585 to 1592, the so-called ‘lost years’, there is no documentary evidence whatever to suggest what he might have been doing. All that is known is that at some point during those years he left Stratford for London and began working in the theatre.

He would certainly have had the opportunity to develop an interest in theatre while he was living in Stratford. He could have seen one of the last performances of the miracle plays in nearby Coventry. He must have seen performances by some of the London acting companies, who toured the provinces when there was plague or excessive heat in the city. A number of them visited Stratford between 1569 and 1586, and it is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare in some way became connected with one of them, since it is unlikely that he would have been able to go to London and seek his fortune in the profession without some such contact. It is possible that he became attached to the Earl of Leicester’s Men, at that time one of the most prestigious of the acting companies. Leicester’s Men were led by James Burbage, builder of the first public playhouse in London; he was the father of Richard Burbage, who became a long-time associate of Shakespeare’s in the company that started out as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. This is only a matter of speculation, for the next time we hear of Shakespeare is in 1592, when he was already a working playwright.

There had been bands of travelling actors in England for many years, but the first permanent public playhouse, the Theatre, did not open in London until 1576. At around the same time the Children of the Queen’s Chapel, one of a number of companies of child actors that had for many years entertained the nobility with amateur performances, acquired a permanent hall in the Blackfriars precinct, which was operated as a private theatre. Other theatres quickly followed, and with them developed an exciting and risky profession. Amongst the earliest writers for these theatres was a group known as the University Wits, one of whom was Robert Greene. A brilliant university-educated man who squandered his talents and himself in dissolute living, Greene tried his hand at all kinds of writing: plays, poems, pamphlets and prose romances. He was not particularly successful, and was deeply embittered by this. In 1592 when he was close to death, though barely in his 30s, he wrote a pamphlet entitled Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit, as a warning against a life like his. In it appears this attack on one of his rivals:

there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide, supposes he is well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake- scene in a country.¹

It has been suggested that the ‘Shake-scene’ derided here is Christopher Marlowe, a writer who ‘bombasted out’ many a blank verse and who, by 1592, had certainly made a name for himself as a playwright. It has also been suggested that Greene was not referring to a playwright at all, but to the clown Will Kempe, or to the well-known actor Edward Alleyn, whose ranting style of acting probably could be said to ‘shake the scene’.² But the orthodox view of this passage seems sound: that it contains clear allusions to Shakespeare, and that it therefore constitutes the earliest known evidence of his presence in London.

The hostility in Greene’s tone could be attributed to a sense of his own intellectual and social superiority to this ‘upstart’, or simply to resentment of Shakespeare’s success. His motives are not important, however; what concerns us here is what we can learn of Shakespeare’s career. What Greene tells us is that Shakespeare must have been in London for some years, because by 1592 he was already successful enough to generate such resentment. The term ‘Johannes Factotum’ means ‘Jack-of-all-trades’; Shakespeare had probably begun his career as an actor (‘player’) before taking up writing, and he may have gained entry into play-writing by providing additions to extant plays by established dramatists like Greene (this is one possible meaning of ‘beautified with our feathers’, though this phrase could also be an accusation of plagiarism, implying that Shakespeare made his plays out of materials stolen from others). The comment about the tiger’s heart is a reference to a line in 3 Henry VI: ‘O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!’ (1.4.137), so it is reasonable to assume that Shakespeare had written all three parts of that history play by this time. Apart from this, we can only conjecture, because the chronology of his early plays is obscure, but it is possible that he had also written Richard III, The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, and the revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus. If so, then the popularity that so incensed Greene is not surprising, for we see him experimenting with all three of the main dramatic forms (history, comedy, tragedy) current at the time.

Greene was one of the better-known of the dramatists working at the time when Shakespeare began to write for the stage. He was a member of the group of academic writers already mentioned, the University Wits; others of them, notably George Peele, Thomas Lodge and Thomas Nashe, also wrote plays, for both children’s and adult companies, though only Peele had much success. A more important figure was John Lyly, who wrote for the children’s companies, and whose comedies had an important influence on Shakespeare’s early work. Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy had an extraordinary and long-lived popularity, but he appears to have written nothing else of importance. The most significant dramatist was Marlowe, a notorious figure who nevertheless, with plays that included Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus, had made an astounding start to a writing career that was cut sadly short by his violent death at the hands of one Ingram Frizer, a spy and informer.

Few playwrights were also actors, but Shakespeare may well have continued to act for as long as he worked in the theatre. The only plays that he certainly acted in are two by his fellow dramatist and rival Ben Jonson, the comedy Every Man in His Humour (1601) and the tragedy Sejanus (1603). We know that he also acted in his own plays, because at the beginning of the First Folio there is a list of ‘the principal actors in all these plays’, and Shakespeare’s name appears at the head of it. Nothing is known about the roles he took, though legend has it that he played the ghost of Hamlet’s father and the old servant Adam in As You Like It, which are both minor roles. If he had been a notable actor there would surely be some contemporary evidence about his acting skills, as there is, for example, about those of Richard Burbage and Will Kempe, respectively the leading actor and the comedian in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Faced with the lack of any evidence to the contrary we can only conclude that he was not an outstanding actor.

By 1593 Shakespeare had a patron, to whom he dedicated his narrative poem Venus and Adonis, and in the following year another long poem, The Rape of Lucrece. The cause of this burst of non-dramatic writing is not clear, but in 1592 there was a severe outbreak of the bubonic plague which led to a two-year ban on performances in playhouses, and it is possible that this temporary relaxation of the need to turn out plays led him to direct his energies elsewhere. His patron, Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, was a brilliant, handsome young man who encouraged other poets and writers besides Shakespeare. Many scholars believe that Southampton was the ‘Fair Youth’ addressed in the poet’s sonnets, and it is indeed likely that Shakespeare began to write his sonnets around this time, though they were not published until 1609 and there are many doubts as to their sequence and dating. For the moment we can limit ourselves to asking why Shakespeare needed a patron. At that time, it was virtually impossible for poets, or indeed any writers apart from those working in the theatre, to make a living out of writing. Some nobles wrote poetry as a kind of hobby, but writers without an independent income depended on wealthy and influential patrons to give them financial support or lucrative positions (Edmund Spenser is a good example of this; his epic poem The Faerie Queene was, amongst other things, a massive attempt to win the favour of Queen Elizabeth). It may be that Shakespeare, still new to the professional theatre, was hedging his bets, seeking powerful patronage in case he failed as a dramatist. He need not have worried.

We do not know which acting company Shakespeare worked for when he first arrived in London. It may have been Leicester’s Men, or he may have joined the company belonging to Ferdinando, Lord Strange, who became the Earl of Derby in 1593. Lord Strange’s Men included a number of actors who later became members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, including Will Kempe and John Heminges. However, according to the title pages of some of Shakespeare’s plays, they were acted by various companies: Pembroke’s Men and the Earl of Sussex’s Men, as well as the Earl of Derby’s. It is possible that, at the beginning of his career, Shakespeare had to offer his plays to whomever would take them. When the theatres re-opened in 1594 after the plague epidemic, he joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, then newly-constituted, as actor–playwright; we know this because he is listed along with Kempe and Burbage as being paid for court performances for the Christmas season.

Shakespeare remained with this company until he retired in 1612. It was the most successful of the acting companies of the day. During Elizabeth’s reign its closest rival was the Lord Admiral’s Men, led by the famous tragedian Edward Alleyn, but their relative popularity can be judged from the fact that, in 1603 when James I acceded to the throne, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were honoured by being allowed to change their name to the King’s Men, while their rivals had to be content with the patronage of his son Prince Henry. When Shakespeare joined them the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were performing at the Theatre, which was built on land leased from one Giles Alleyn. When the lease expired the company became involved in an argument with Alleyn over its renewal, and so on 28 December 1597 they dismantled the building and carried its timber across to the other side of the Thames, where they began the construction of what was to become the Globe. Shakespeare himself was a shareholder in both the building and the company; this, rather than his plays, was the source of his later great prosperity.

During his early years with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men Shakespeare continued to write history plays, and also the series of romantic comedies that culminates with As You Like It and Twelfth Night. During these years his only attempt at tragedy after Titus Andronicus was Romeo and Juliet, though some of his histories, most notably Richard II, have a tragic structure. Around the year 1600 his writing took on a new direction with a series of puzzling plays, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That End’s Well and Measure for Measure, that may be called comedies but are much harsher in tone than anything he had written before. He also embarked on his major tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Some critics have accounted for the darkening of tone in his works by assuming that there must have been some personal tragedy in his life, but there is no evidence for this. It seems more likely that he simply needed to move in a new artistic direction, or that he was responding to the growing mood of pessimism and uncertainty in the country that developed during Elizabeth’s declining years and was not dispelled for long by the accession of James. Around 1608 he changed direction again, ending his career with the group of plays of forgiveness and reconciliation known as romances. One reason for this change must have been that in 1608 the King’s Men took over a second theatre, the Blackfriars; this was a private indoor theatre that catered for a more sophisticated audience than those that attended public theatres, and the romances would have been intended to provide suitable fare for them.

The Tempest, the last of these romances, has often been seen as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, since its central figure, Prospero, is a creator of illusions who finally breaks his magic wand and throws away his books. He does indeed give a speech that seems to dismiss the magic of the theatre:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

[. . .]

the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.

(4.1.148–50, 153–6)

However, if we have to equate Prospero with Shakespeare all manner of problems are raised in the play; for the present, suffice it to say that it is always risky to assume that any voice is speaking directly for the dramatist. Nevertheless, it appears that Shakespeare did intend The Tempest to be his final play, because he retired to Stratford after it. He came out of retirement at least twice, to collaborate with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen, and to write Henry VIII. This latter play was first performed on 29 June 1613 at the Globe; during the performance the theatre caught fire and burned to the ground.

In 1597 Shakespeare had bought a house in Stratford called New Place, and it was there that he spent his last, sadly few years, from his retirement in 1612 to his death on 23 April 1616 at the age of 52. Nothing is known about the circumstances of his death. He lies buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford; on his gravestone are these words, popularly supposed to have been written by Shakespeare himself:

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear

To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blessed be the man that spares these stones

And cursed be he that moves my bones.

As we shall see, there have been those who wanted very much to move Shakespeare’s bones.

In his own time Shakespeare seems to have been amongst the most popular of the many writers working for the stage, and he was certainly the most successful. The publication in 1623 of the First Folio collected edition of his works indicates that, ten years after he had ceased to write, his plays were still of commercial value to the King’s Men. There have been numerous attempts to calculate his income from the theatre; the most probable figure seems to be around £200 a year.³ This can be compared with the earnings of Ben Jonson, who claimed in 1619 that ‘Of all his plays he never gained two hundred pounds.’⁴ If these figures are accurate it means that Shakespeare earned from the stage in a year as much a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prefatory Note
• Introduction: Approaching Shakespeare and His Stage
• 1 Life and Times
• 2 Theatrical Professions
• 3 The Plays
• Notes
• Chronology
• Suggested Reading
• Index