Shakespeare: A Life (21 page)

sum of its gaucheries; he has a natural bent for romantic comedy
-already he is out-distancing Greene -- and a genial tolerance of
absurdity, which may be one reason why actors liked him.

We know nothing of the
Two Gentlemen
's
Tudor performances. But in 1598 Francis Meres cites it first in a
list of Shakespeare's comedies, so it had had a vogue. The play was
mainly conventional, but witty enough to flatter refined London
tastes. Its movement is brisk and light, its courtly symmetry
pleasing. Its greatest character may be Crab, who speaks no line at
all. Julia's role suggests the author's talent for tragedy, and at
about the time when the
Two Gentlemen
was new, two writers of tragedy had begun to transform the London stage.

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UP Fish Street! Down Saint Magnus' Corner! Kill and knock down! Throw them into Thames!

( Jack Cade,
2 Henry VI
)

Shakespeare's likely evolving duties in a troupe, as well as his
attitudes to Marlowe and Kyd, his own plays, and even what is known of
his London milieu, give us a chance to examine him rather closely.
What is unique in his inward development? After some experience as an
actor and theatre-poet, how did he make the most use of his talents?

Even in comparison with John Lyly, he bursts into flower as a poet
with astonishing suddenness. Lyly had had the two elegant prose
romances of Euphues and Euphues and his England behind him when he
wrote his first play. Soon after school, Shakespeare must have penned
something other than epistles and orations; his amateurish 'hate away'
sonnet, no. 145, is not beyond the skill of a bright grammarschool boy,
and it is likely that he wrote more ambitious works during his
courtship; a few years later in London he may have revised or added to
works by other writers.
¹
Yet in a work such as Two Gentlemen he proved his real value to a
troupe. His exotic, rather Petrarchan and Italianate manner suited a
fashion, as though he had been able to capitalize on a vogue and
please Inns of Court men, city gentry and their wives, and foreign
visitors. As Thomas Nashe put it in 1592, the afternoon was 'the
idlest time of the day', and London had many idlers waiting to be
charmed, such as 'Gentlemen of the Court, the Innes of Courte, and the
number of Captaines and Souldiers about'.
²

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Meanwhile as a receptive, impressionable actor Shakespeare was
picking up hints on stage to guide his pen. His early work is saved from
gross dramaturgical faults because it is a reciprocal affair; as a
player himself for five or six days a week, he appears to suit players
whom he meets. Tudor actors were quick to suggest and to adapt in
order to survive. Work in a group abetted his stage sense, as if he
had so many extra pairs of ears and eyes, and this was one of his
advantages over Greene, Peele, Watson, and other 'Wits'.

Yet he was in danger of letting his facility outrun his experience of
life, and of being too rushed to develop his talents well. As an actor
he had to charm nut-cracking groundlings, and put up with clownish
acts and lewd jigs, to which he seems to allude acidly in the Cade
episodes of 2 Henry VI (for example, in III. i. 356-65 and IV. vii.
118-22). As a poet he had to please a tightly knit group, find time in a
busy schedule to concentrate, and avoid the luxury of writing to suit
himself. His first extant plays (in revised texts) are clear in
structure, alive in imagery, and often felicitous in blank verse --
but they can show stiff, wooden, academic writing, poor exposition,
and some of the worst vices of school rhetoric. A few of his devices
are extremely feeble, as when a barbarian 'army of Goths' comes on
stage in Act V of Titus Andronicus to restore civil manners to Rome.
He is more bookish than observant, despite what actors tell him. His
grasp of psychology is latent but undeveloped in Richard III, and
several voices in Henry VI speak in the same well-oiled,
undifferentiated manner; this was a fairly general fault in plays of
the 1580s and early 1590s, and can be illustrated even from some of
the plays of Marlowe and Lyly. At the outset he brings less deft
felicity to exposition, or even to scenic structure, than may appear
until we compare him with others; and, so far as we know, he did not
supply scripts regularly until he was past 25. Few good contemporary
playwrights found their stride so late.

At first, he would have had to live near other actors, and the facts
are interesting. The Exchequer's Subsidy Rolls show that by October
1596 he was lodging at St Helen's parish in Bishopsgate ward, about a
mile from the northern theatres. This was a well-to-do neighbourhood
near rows of small, narrow shops at St Ethclburga's and All Hallows on
the Wall; it was divided by a teeming, bustling Bishopsgate

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Street, which led down into Fish Street (of 2 Henry VI) and the area of
Falstaff's Eastcheap taverns and on to London Bridge. To the north
the concourse led outside the walls to the liberty of Norton Folgate,
muddy Hog Lane, and the theatre suburb of Shoreditch.

He came to know Shoreditch (which Stow also calls 'Soresditch' and
'Sewersditch') very well, and so did his fellow actor Christopher
Beeston, whose sons Augustine, Christopher, and Robert were baptized at
St Leonard's, Shoreditch, and buried there between 1604 and 1615.
Beeston's younger son William -- John Aubrey's acquaintance -lived near
the theatre suburb as late as the early 1680s. Shakespeare must have
seen its high street on many a dark morning, for when at St Helen's he
had to follow a northern route to reach Burbage's Theater or the
Curtain, and this took him among rickety, propped-up tenements and
smelly alleys.
³

Known for 'wenches and soldiers' Shoreditch also harboured unlicensed
barber-surgeons, procurers, beggars, and others of no legal trade. The
Privy Council noted in such an area 'dissolute, loose, and insolent'
persons among dicing-houses, bowling-alleys, brothels, taverns, and
alehouses,
⁴
but Burbage's men found the suburb convenient. Its cheap entertainments
made it popular with young actors. Later the inquisitive Aubrey -- it
seems after hearing what William Beeston told him of the playwright's
habits -- jotted this undated note over Shakespeare's name:

the more to be admired q [
quia:
because] he was not a company keeper lived in Shoreditch, wouldnt be
debauched, & if invited to writ [that] he was in paine.
⁵

Shakespeare is tactful by habit, if this is a valid memory in a family
of theatre people. When actors invite him to carouse, he writes that
he is 'in paine' (with toothache or worse) to avoid being debauched in
a famous red-light area. How often did he use the same excuse? But
Aubrey crossed out this report (for what reason we do not know) and of
course failed to say when Shakespeare may have 'lived in Shoreditch'.
Plague deaths were numerous there in 1592-4, and he perhaps moved a
mile south when he could afford a more salubrious room.

In any case, he saw the suburb when he came up from St Helen's.

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Passing the so-called Artillery Fields and Bethlehem or 'Bedlam'
hospital for the insane, he would have come to Norton Folgate -- where
the poets Watson and Marlowe lived in 1589. To the north was Hog
Lane; beyond were the bordellos that so troubled the Queen's Council, a
four-aisled church, and a yard where actors were buried. To the west
in trampled fields stood Burbage's Theater and the Curtain. By night
the suburb must have been as lurid as Eastcheap -- where Doll
Tearsheet, Poins, and Pistol of
Henry IV
would disport
themselves. But in the early 1590s as a poet bringing his aspirations
and rhetorical training to his work, Shakespeare was slow to draw on
the capital's common life; he had much more to do with players,
book-sources, and scripts. Playwrights were concerned with company
loyalty, parody, and imitation, and above all with fashion and
'box-office receipts'. They studied the successes of rivals, and so he
came under the influence of a poet who was his senior by two months
-- Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe's
provocative artistry affected Shakespeare more deeply than did works
by other modern writers, and this poet's background was not entirely
unlike his own.

Marlowe, too, was
raised in a craftsman's house and schooled in the 1570s when the
humanist curriculum was settled. Like Shakespeare, he received some of
the best training ever available for English boys who would become
poets. Most accounts of both his and the Stratford poet's schooling
overlook the change that had come over intellectual life from the
1530s and 1540s, when new Latin texts poured from presses and the life
of the mind was keen at Cambridge (spurred on by Cheke, Ascham,
Haddon, Carr, and Christopherson among others) and, a little later, at
Oxford. Masters carried over that stir into grammar classrooms, and
Marlowe benefited from an excessive emphasis on poetics and rhetoric.

At Canterbury's fine King's School, he heard ritual in chapel,
discovered Ovid, listened to an able master. Then as the son of a
debtridden shoemaker who was to prove untrustworthy as warden
treasurer of a local guild, he matriculated at Corpus Christi College,

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Cambridge, and took on clandestine work for the Crown's secret service at some point before taking his MA degree.

His showy, blasphemous wit concealed a sensitive nature. Some of his
reported statements might be no more than parodies of his gambits, and
his wit, at least, is more evident in his verse than in what he is
supposed to have said, such as that 'all protestantes are Hypocritical
asses', or the homoerotic 'all they that love not Tobacco and Boies
were fooles'. The wittiest of his supposed remarks as reported by the
dubious, fairly stupid, Richard Baines compares Moses with a juggler:
'He [ Marlowe] affirmeth that Moyses was but a Jugler & that one
Heriots being Sir W Raleighs man Can do more than he.'
⁶
At any rate, down in London Marlowe was known among cronies for
atheism, papist leanings, and buggery, the charge often depending on the
literalness of those who listened to him. His escapades, even before
his final one, could be lethal. In September 1589 he was set upon in
Hog Lane by the innkeeper's son William Bradley. Intervening, his
fellow poet Thomas Watson fatally drove a blade into Bradley's chest.
Both poets went to prison, but Shakespeare (whether or not he 'wouldnt
be debauched') may well have frequented theatre alehouses and seen
Marlowe between 1590 and 1592, after the latter's release. In a comic
image in
Venus and Adonis
( 1593) for example, he seems to remember

shrill-tongued tapsters answering every call, Soothing the hurnour of fantastic wits.

(lines 849-50)

The lines may be a Norton Folgate joke, with Marlowe among 'wits' in
need of soothing, but we leave it to romantic biographers to take us
inside smoky, suffocating alehouses. His Cambridge degree made Marlowe
a gentleman, dividing him socially from a mainly unknown player, but
the player seems to have acted in the Cambridge poet's The Jew of
Malta -- a work Shakespeare recalled closely in his own plays and
which was not in print.

However,
Marlowe helped him in other ways in a climate of feeling marked by the
reign's most renowned event: the defeat of Spain's Armada of 1588.
War with Spain continued through the decade of

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Shakespeare's history plays, and the enemy was nearly supreme on the
Continent in armed might and cultural vigour. (Sailing with the Armada
had been a young unknown Lope de Vega, who with Tirso de Molina and
Calderón became one of Madrid's prime playwrights.) The events of 1588
were memorable enough. At Tilbury before the sea-battle, the Queen
had appeared at camp dressed. in her armour 'like an Amazonian
Queene', and other reports of her are possibly echoed in Shakespeare's
portrait of Joan la Pucelle in 1 Henry VI. Channel winds and
four-wheeled gun-carriages had broken a giant, crescent-shaped
flotilla, whose captured ensigns were later flown in London over
Traitors' Gate or displayed at Paul's Cross.

In reaction, playwrights cannily wrote of earlier victories at
Agincourt, Crécy, and Flodden Field. Not that the sea-victory quite
preceded the making of history plays in London: we know that the actors
Knell and Tarlton took parts in the popular The Famous Victories of
Henry V at some point before the Armada's date. (Both actors died in
or before 1588, and Knell's widow married John Heminges in March of
that year.) But the Spanish war did set a mood for history scripts
with strong political implications, and around 1587 and 1588 Marlowe
appealed to that mood with his two-part
Tamburlaine.

His hero -- starting as a Scythian shepherd -- rises as 'the amazement
of the world' to defeat witless, effete, or blustering monarchs, and
so suggests that most regimes are corrupt at the top. Mocking royalty,
Tamburlaine famously shouts at his captive kings who trudge with bits
in the mouth --

Holla, ye pamper'd jades of Asia!
What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day . . . ?

(Pt. 2, IV. iii. 1-2)

Other daring plays followed from Marlowe, with intellectual features
that affected Shakespeare's attitude to form and meaning. Doctor
Faustus and The Jew of Malta mix tragedy with farce, and in dramatizing
belief they suggest a defiance of the tyranny and prejudices of all
ideologies. The Massacre at Paris, despite its Francophobia, probes
into roots of state violence in Machiavellian speeches of its Duke of
Guise that seem to have affected Shakespeare's own style --

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