Shakespeare (10 page)

At that age Shakespeare was writing comparative trifles—
Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, and
The Comedy of Errors
are all probably among his works of this period. Marlowe by contrast had written ambitious and appreciable dramas:
The Jew of Malta
,
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
, and
Tamburlaine the Great.
“If Shakespeare too had died in that year,” Stanley Wells has written, “we should now regard Marlowe as the greater writer.”

No doubt. But what if both had lived? Could either have sustained the competition? Shakespeare, it seems fair to say, had more promise for the long term. Marlowe possessed little gift for comedy and none at all, that we can see, for creating strong female roles—areas where Shakespeare shone. Above all it is impossible to imagine a person as quick to violence and as erratic in temperament as Christopher Marlowe reaching a wise and productive middle age. Shakespeare had a disposition built for the long haul.

 

Kyd died the next year, aged just thirty-six, never having recovered from his ordeal at Bridewell. Greene was dead already, of course, and Watson followed him soon after. Shakespeare would have no serious rivals until the emergence of Ben Jonson in 1598.

For theatrical troupes the plague years were an equally terminal moment. The endless trudge in search of provincial engagements proved too much for many companies, and one by one they disbanded—Hertford's, Sussex's, Derby's, and Pembroke's all fading away more or less at once. By 1594 only two troupes of note remained: the Admiral's Men under Edward Alleyn, and a new group, the Lord Chamberlain's Men (named for the head of the queen's household), led by Richard Burbage and comprising several talents absorbed from recently extinguished companies. Among these talents were John Heminges, who would become Shakespeare's close friend and (some thirty years in the future) coeditor of the First Folio, and the celebrated comic Will Kemp, for whom Shakespeare would (it is reasonably presumed) write many of his most famous comedic roles, such as Dogberry in
Much Ado About Nothing
.

Shakespeare would spend the rest of his working life with this company. As Wells and Taylor note, “He is the only prominent playwright of his time to have had so stable a relationship with a single company.” It was clearly a happy and well-run outfit, and its members were commendably—or at the very least comparatively—sober, diligent, and clean living.

Shakespeare seems to have been unusual among the troupe in not being a conspicuously devoted family man. Burbage was a loving husband and father of seven in Shoreditch. Heminges and Condell were likewise steady fellows, living as neighbors in the prosperous parish of Saint Mary Aldermanbury, where they were pillars of their church and prodigious procreators, producing no fewer than twenty-three children between them.

In short they led innocuous lives. They did not draw daggers or brawl in pubs. They behaved like businessmen. And six times a week they gathered together, dressed up in costumes and makeup, and gave the world some of the most sublime and unimprovable hours of pleasure it has ever known.

N
EARLY EVERYONE AGREES THAT
William Shakespeare's career as a playwright began in about 1590, but there is much less agreement on which plays began it. Depending on whose authority you favor, Shakespeare's debut written offering might be any of at least eight works:
The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentleman of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, King John
, or the three parts of
Henry VI.

The American authority Sylvan Barnet lists
The Comedy of Errors
as Shakespeare's first play with
Love's Labour's Lost
second, but more recently Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, in the
Oxford Complete Works
, credit him with ten other plays—more than a quarter of his output—before either of those two comes along. Wells and Taylor place
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
at the head of their list—not on any documentary evidence, as they freely concede, but simply because it is notably unpolished (or has “an uncertainty of technique suggestive of inexperience,” as they rather more elegantly put it). The Arden Shakespeare, meanwhile, puts
The Taming of the Shrew
first, while the Riverside Shakespeare places the first part of
Henry VI
first. Hardly any two lists are the same.

For many plays all we can confidently adduce is a
terminus ad quem
—a date beyond which they could not have been written. Sometimes evidence of timing is seen in allusions to external events, as in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, in which seemingly pointed references are made to unseasonable weather and bad harvests (and England had very bad harvests in 1594 and 1595), or in
Romeo and Juliet
when Nurse speaks of an earthquake of eleven years before (London had a brief but startling one in 1580), but such hints are rare and often doubtful anyway. Many other judgments are made on little more than style. Thus
The Comedy of Errors
and
Titus Andronicus
“convey an aroma of youth,” in the words of Samuel Schoenbaum, while Barnet can, without blushing, suggest that
Romeo and Juliet
came before
Othello
simply because “one feels Othello is later.”

Arguments would run far deeper were it not for the existence of a small, plump book by one Francis Meres called
Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury
. Published in 1598, it is a 700-page compendium of platitudes and philosophical musings, little of it original and even less of it of interest to history except for one immeasurably helpful passage first noticed by scholars some two hundred years after Shakespeare's death: “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. For comedy, witness his
Gentlemen of Verona
, his
Errors
, his
Love Labour's Lost
, his
Love Labour's Won
, his
Midsummer Night's Dream
, and his
Merchant of Venice
; for tragedy, his
Richard the Second, Richard the Third, Henry the Fourth, King John, Titus Andronicus
, and his
Romeo and Juliet.
”

This was rich stuff indeed. It provided the first published mention of four of Shakespeare's plays—
The Merchant of Venice, King John, The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, and
A Midsummer Night's Dream
—and additionally, in a separate passage, established that he had written at least some sonnets by this time, though they wouldn't be published as a collected work for a further eleven years.

Rather more puzzling is the mention of
Love's Labour's Won
, about which nothing else is known. For a long time it was assumed that this was an alternative name for some play that we already possess—in all likelihood
The Taming of the Shrew
, which is notably absent from Meres's list. Shakespeare's plays were occasionally known by other names:
Twelfth Night
was sometimes called
Malvolio,
and
Much Ado About Nothing
was sometimes
Benedick and Beatrice
, so the possibility of a second title was plausible.

In 1953 the mystery deepened when an antiquarian book dealer in London, while moving stock, chanced upon a fragment of a bookseller's inventory from 1603, which listed
Love's Labour's Won
and
The Taming of the Shrew
together—clearly suggesting that they weren't the same play after all, and giving further evidence that
Love's Labour Won
really was a separate play. If, as the inventory equally suggests, it existed in published form, there may once have been as many as 1,500 copies in circulation, so there is every chance that the play may one day turn up somewhere (a prospect thought most unlikely for Shakespeare's other lost play,
Cardenio
, which appears to have existed only in manuscript). It is all a little puzzling. If
Love's Labour's Won
is a real and separate play, and was published, a natural question is why Heminges and Condell didn't include it in the First Folio. No one can say.

In whatever order the plays came, thanks to Meres we know that by 1598, when he had been at it for probably much less than a decade, Shakespeare had already proved himself a dab hand at comedy, history, and tragedy, and had done enough—much more than enough, in fact—to achieve a lasting reputation. His success was not, it must be said, without its shortcuts. Shakespeare didn't scruple to steal plots, dialogue, names, and titles—whatever suited his purpose. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare was a wonderful teller of stories so long as someone else had told them first.

But then this was a charge that could be laid against nearly all writers of the day. To Elizabethan playwrights plots and characters were common property. Marlowe took his
Doctor Faustus
from a German
Historia von D. Johann Fausten
(by way of an English translation) and
Dido Queen of Carthage
directly from the Virgil's
Aeneid
. Shakespeare's
Hamlet
was preceded by an earlier Hamlet play, unfortunately now lost and its author unknown (though some believe it was the hazy genius Thomas Kyd), leaving us to guess how much his version owed to the original. His
King Lear
was similarly inspired by an earlier
KingLeir
. His
Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
(to give it its formal original title) was freely based on the poem
The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet
by a promising young talent named Arthur Brooke, who wrote it in 1562 and then unfortunately drowned. Brooke in turn had taken the story from an Italian named Matteo Bandello.
As You Like It
was borrowed quite transparently from a work called
Rosalynde
, by Thomas Lodge, and
The Winter's Tale
is likewise a reworking of
Pandosto
, a forgotten novel by Shakespeare's bitter critic Robert Greene. Only a few of Shakespeare's works—in particular the comedies
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost
, and
The Tempest—
appear to have borrowed from no one.

What Shakespeare did, of course, was take pedestrian pieces of work and endow them with distinction and, very often, greatness. Before he reworked it
Othello
was insipid melodrama. In
Lear
's earlier manifestation, the king was not mad and the story had a happy ending.
Twelfth Night
and
Much Ado About Nothing
were inconsequential tales in a collection of popular Italian fiction. Shakespeare's particular genius was to take an engaging notion and make it better yet. In
The Comedy of Errors
, he borrows a simple but effective plot device from Plautus—having twin brothers who have never met appear in the same town at the same time—but increases the comic potential exponentially by giving the brothers twin servants who are similarly underinformed.

Slightly more jarring to modern sensibilities was Shakespeare's habit of lifting passages of text almost verbatim from other sources and dropping them into his plays.
Julius Caesar
and
Antony and Cleopatra
both contain considerable passages taken with only scant alteration from Sir Thomas North's magisterial translation of Plutarch, and
The Tempest
pays a similar uncredited tribute to a popular translation of Ovid. Marlowe's “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?” from
Hero and Leander
reappears unchanged in Shakespeare's
As You Like It
, and a couplet from Marlowe's
Tamburlaine
—

—finds its way into Henry IV, Part 2 as

Shakespeare at his worst borrowed “almost mechanically,” in the words of Stanley Wells, who cites a passage in
Henry V
in which the youthful king (and, more important, the audience) is given a refresher course in French history that is taken more or less verbatim from Raphael Holinshed's
Chronicles
.
Coriolanus
, in the First Folio, contains two lines that make no sense until one goes back to Sir Thomas North's
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
and finds the same lines
and
the line immediately preceding, which Shakespeare (or more probably a subsequent scribe or compositor) inadvertently left out. Again, however, such borrowing had ample precedent. Marlowe in his turn took several lines from Spenser's
The Faerie Queene
and dropped them almost unchanged into
Tamburlaine
.
The Faerie Queene
, meanwhile, contains passages lifted whole (albeit in translation) from a work by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto.

In the rush to entertain masses of people repeatedly, the rules of presentation became exceedingly elastic. In classical drama plays were strictly either comedies or tragedies. Elizabethan playwrights refused to be bound by such rigidities and put comic scenes in the darkest tragedies—the porter answering a late knock in
Macbeth
, for instance. In so doing they invented comic relief. In classical drama only three performers were permitted to speak in a given scene, and no character was allowed to talk to himself or the audience—so there were no soliloquies and no asides. These are features without which Shakespeare could never have become Shakespeare. Above all, plays before Shakespeare's day were traditionally governed by what were known as “the unities”—the three principles of dramatic presentation derived from Aristotle's
Poetics
, which demanded that dramas should take place in one day, in one place, and have a single plot. Shakespeare was happy enough to observe this restriction when it suited him (as in
The Comedy of Errors
), but he could never have written
Hamlet
or
Macbeth
or any of his other greatest works if he had felt strictly bound by it.

Other theatrical conventions were unformed or just emerging. The division of plays into acts and scenes—something else strictly regulated in classical drama—was yet unsettled in England. Ben Jonson inserted a new scene and scene number each time an additional character stepped onstage, however briefly or inconsequentially, but others did not use scene divisions at all. For the audience it mattered little, since action was continuous. The practice of pausing between acts didn't begin until plays moved indoors, late in Shakespeare's career, and it became necessary to break from time to time to trim the lights.

Almost the only “rule” in London theater that was still faithfully followed was the one we now call, for convenience, the law of reentry, which stated that a character couldn't exit from one scene and reappear immediately in the next. He had rather to go away for a while. Thus, in
Richard II
, John of Gaunt makes an abrupt and awkward departure purely to be able to take part in a vital scene that follows. Why this rule out of all the many was faithfully observed has never, as far as I can make out, been satisfactorily explained.

But even by the very relaxed standards of the day, Shakespeare was invigoratingly wayward. He could, as in
Julius Caesar
, kill off the title character with the play not half done (though Caesar does come back later, briefly, as a ghost). He could write a play like
Hamlet
, where the main character speaks 1,495 lines (nearly as many as the number spoken by
all
the characters combined in
The Comedy of Errors
) but disappears for unnervingly long stretches—for nearly half an hour at one point. He constantly teased reality, reminding the audience that they were not in the real world but in a theater, as when he asked in
Henry V
, “Can this cockpit hold the vastie fields of France?” or implored the audience in
Henry VI, Part 3
to “eke out our performance with your mind.”

His plays were marvelously variable, with the number of scenes ranging from seven to forty-seven, and with the number of speaking parts ranging from fourteen to more than fifty. The average play of the day ran to about 2,700 lines, giving a performance time of two and a half hours. Shakespeare's plays ranged from fewer than 1,800 lines (for
Comedy of Errors
) to more than 4,000 (for
Hamlet
, which could take nearly five hours to play, though possibly no audience of his day ever saw it in full). On average his plays were made up of about 70 percent blank verse, 5 percent rhymed verse, and 25 percent prose, but he changed the proportions happily to suit his purpose. His history plays aside, he set two plays,
The Merry Wives of Windsor
and
King Lear
, firmly in England; he set none at all in London; and he never used a plot from his own times.