Shakespeare: A Life (25 page)

Wits on his career, must have seemed comparatively minor matters. Yet
the attack upon him in Chettle and Greene's Groats-worth of Witte
belongs as much to our picture as do the effects of the plague. Before
we turn to the epidemic and to the 'Wits', however, it will be well to
consider a little further his relations with the London theatres.

In the worst of the plague to come, deaths in theatre suburbs -- in
Shoreditch and Southwark -- were to be proportionately much higher in
number than those in London's heart. The central parishes were
surrounded by a less than well-to-do riverside belt and by poor,
tawdry districts north and east, and yet recent studies have shown that
in each urban parish there was a wide range of wealth. It is true that
those in the same trades might congregate in the same districts:
there were for example shipwrights and sailors in St Dunstan's parish,
weavers and cobblers in St Giles Cripplegate, and silk-weavers in
Allhallows Honey Lane. But even the West End was not purely gentrified,
since one might find goldsmiths in Holborn, the Strand, and Fleet
Street, or cutlers and engravers, locksmiths and silversmiths elsewhere
in the west. Each part of London was socially varied, and the various
ranks were not segregated in daily life.

Generally, the public theatre reflected the 'mix' of parishes. By 1592,
this theatre was nearly a universal one -- it could be plebeian and
courtly, ribald and refined in the same afternoon or play. All sorts,
certainly, had come to see Titus, the Shrew, or Henry VI, and
Shakespeare had deliberately appealed to varied audiences since he
needed to bring in receipts. So far, one might add, he has not
suggested London's real variety in any production. In Henry VI he
writes as if he could hardly see below the heads of nobles; his social
contexts are surprisingly weak, vague, or thin. He looks at the urban
populace with reserve, an aloofness, and now and then, as in the Cade
episodes, with mild disdain, as if he had an eye upon a fastidious
patron. How fairly has he pictured a society in
any
epoch? His
vulgar clown in Two Gentlemen seems an afterthought; and nostalgia and
memory help to prompt Warwickshire earthiness in the Shrew. In
behaviour or in rank his protagonists are aristocrats, and it may not be
enough to say that he shared with many Londoners the notion that life
in its 'fullness' could be realized only by the gentry and nobility.

-146-

In his concern for elegance -- despite schoolish excesses -- he had
written as a poet who might find his fulfilment offstage, or without
any very deep commitment to the theatre. His early plays are better
than those of his contemporaries, with the exception of Marlowe at his
best, but not astonishingly 'original'. They have more in common with
other dramas of the 1590s than they show in differences. In Henry VI
he strips drama of bombast or turgidity and makes it more intelligent,
but this achievement suggests not so much his faith in the public as
his dislike of mere sensation and crude sentiment.

On the other hand, we cannot suppose that he was not extremely attentive to 'sharers'. He hardly let the
actors
down. 'Your Poets', says Gamaliel Ratsey to players in Ratsey's
Ghost, a fictive Jacobean account of a real highwayman, 'take great
paines to make your parts fit for your mouthes'.
¹
And he had taken pains to make parts fit for mouths and memories --
his rhymes, striking images, and rhythmical styles made his early
works fairly easy to memorize. (He would not be so kind to actors
later on.) He cares little about historical causation in Henry VI --
one never quite knows why York quarrels with Somerset, or Gloucester
with Winchester -- but tapsters and silversmiths at the Rose may not
have cared much either, and it is more important that he tried to suit
London's amphitheatres. At these venues an actor confronted a high,
abrupt cliff of spectators ahead, to the right, the left, and people
in the yard below. Those watching the stage also watched and reacted
to each other, and as a wave of excitement swept round, the emotive
intensity of speeches in Henry VI would have had a strong effect, with
the audience's reaction forming part of the drama.

Shakespeare learned from that reciprocity and he and the public, in
the months before the bubonic plague, were beginning to develop
together. Lyly's, Peele's, Marlowe's, and his own works prepared the
public for more subtle dramas, and chapels and churches, while
denouncing the theatre, also aided it. Puritan vestries as in St Botolph
Aldgate had 'concionators' -- special lecturers
²
-- who gave up to three talks a week: these frequent disquisitions
trained the popular ear, and listeners might develop an appetite for
livelier fare at the Rose, Curtain, or Theater. Bishops and grudging
universities helped too,

-147-

at least by sending more Doctors of Divinity to town, and by the 1590s
few non-graduates were being instituted to an urban cure of souls.

Yet opponents of the theatre were stronger than ever -- and some of
its fiercest detractors, in effect, were among its enthusiasts. No one
on record complained of snow, rain, hail, or frozen feet at an
amphitheatre. Londoners accepted the stage as a sport, an open-air,
allweather game. With jostling, shouting, hurled missiles, and a noisy
stage, a playhouse could be a wild, alarming chaos. Stephen Gosson
complains of actors in a 'heate' with 'their foaming, their fretting,
their stampinge', and though he was no friend to actors he could
expect to be believed.
³

City authorities eyed the theatre as a sink of disease, lethal in
epidemics and unhealthy at other times -- though some playhouse customs,
oddly, may have warded off death. We know that the rat-flea carrying
the bacillus of bubonic plague is repelled by some odours-including the
smell of nuts. If the loud cracking of hazel nuts in the middle of
Romeo's love-scenes at the Curtain upset actors, the practice seems
nonetheless to have been a healthy one. The flea that carried Yersina
pestis -- that tiny destroyer of Renaissance London-was hardy. Infected
in October, it could awake to transmit plague in March after nestling
in white fabrics, bedclothes, or neutral-coloured garments; since the
rat-flea favoured these colours, the bright clothes of the public and
the actors were fortuitous. Alert to a disease that was mysterious,
savage, and evasive, aldermen and their advisers forbade acting when
the weekly plague-toll rose sharply. When it stayed below a certain
number -- such as twenty or thirty deaths -- play-acting might be
allowed, though officials took varying views as to what constituted a
crisis, and the city or Privy Council could impose a 'precautionary
restraint' for nearly as long as they wished.
⁴

Crowds disturbed the authorities for other reasons, too. Political
unrest, destruction of property, disorder and rowdiness, or the
disaffection of apprentices and the falling off of work might, among
other ills, be blamed on the theatres. One drama such as Jonson and
Nashe Isle of Dogs (in the restraint of 28 July to 11 October 1597)
might cause a suspension of all play-acting in the capital. Official
views of the stage were constant mainly in their arbitrariness.

-148-

In common with other actors, Shakespeare viewed the plague as a fact
of life -- and stoicism befitted his calling. As for other kinds of
interference with the stage he exercised his wit on a large variety of
grievances. 'Tired with all these, for restful death I cry', as he
writes in Sonnet 66 with its allusions to

strength by limping sway disablèd, And art made tongue-tied by
authority, And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill, And simple
truth miscalled simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill.

No doubt he feels the weight of these things -- or of some of them
-though the complaints are commonplace and his delight in his poem's
wit and smart concinnity is apparent. On the other hand, his stoicism
in the Sonnets is convincing partly because its contexts are relatively
fresh. For example, he is nearly immune to the external environment
in Sonnet 124 -- inasmuch as his supposed sturdy passion, his 'love'

suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls Under the blow of thrallèd
discontent Whereto th'inviting time our fashion calls. It fears not
policy, that heretic Which works on leases of short-numbered hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic.

Such an elegant declaration seems written by an imaginative man
pleased with himself and well removed from Henley Street's flock
bolsters, truckle bedsteads, 'the Roome over ye celler', or simple
wooden stools, coffers, and chests in his father's house.
⁵
Yet the elegant lines take us closer to the theatre man, and the
attitude of being 'hugely politic' or boldly and supremely prudent was
a concomitant of Shakespeare's stoicism.

At 28, he had become prudent and enduring enough. His most basic
professional strength was his constructive power or his ability to
supply practicable scripts, and this was the power that would bring
him rewards. To exercise it and survive as an actor-playwright, he had
to be rough and ready, thick-skinned despite his sensitivity, humorous
or lightly ironic. Good actors needed to find setbacks amusing

-149-

in order to keep their equanimity in a profession known for its
violence, and he could not have worked six months in the theatre
without normal pluck and simple, shoulder-shrugging endurance. It is
certain that, for as long as he felt he could be in the theatre, he
meant to keep on 'making things' to get money. His acting, so far as
we can tell, aided his constructive facility by acquainting him with a
troupe's needs, and so far his talents may have seemed to him
adequate to the purpose.

But his
situation would have become more doubtful than this after Henry VI. As
he gained notoriety and became an object of envy, his relations with
other actors could change: and such a man benefited from harmony in a
troupe. His modesty, agreeableness, and unpretentious 'open' manner were
natural and yet self-protective -- and he might have seemed, in 1592,
as free and easy as Ben Jonson would find him. Amusingly, in both the
so-called Chandos Portrait (in the National Portrait Gallery, London)
and in his effigy in Stratford's church he is unbraced and relaxed.
In the portrait, which may date from the Jacobean era though its
authenticity has been debated, the sitter has unbuttoned the collar of
his shirt and untied the dangling strings of a neck-band. In the
effigy Shakespeare's fine gown, laced with silk, hangs easily open in
front. The conventional poses prove nothing, but they might have
seemed appropriate to Jonson, who implies that Shakespeare was
normally frank, unaffectedly candid, not at all secretive.

And if he lost himself in his imaginative constructions or identified
with his Titus, his Katherine, or even his Richard, and found
fulfilment in humiliating himself, he was also hard-headed: concerned
with the whole structural order of a script, at least as practical and
down-toearth as other suppliers of dramas, and evidently did not seem
to be a protean wonder in daily life. He found it wise to be 'open'
and simple: so much depended on his normal relations with his fellows
that his amenity had a value. He brought rewards to players, and he
was responding to much in the theatre such as its richness of colour
and costume, its endless possibilities in the challenge of staging.
But he was not likely to forget the low status of his calling or that
his livelihood depended on chance, luck, and official whim.

-150-

Late in June 1592, Shakespeare found London's playhouses forbidden to
him. Authorities shut the theatres after a public riot near the Rose,
and their restraint was supposed to last until Michaelmas, or 29
September. Then in midsummer, official notice was taken of plague in the
city, and, except for two short winter sessions, the theatres were
shut (in principle) for twenty months.

Apart from Lent, Shakespeare normally knew no let-up in
repertoryplaying which might have allowed him to visit Stratford, though
he may have contrived to see his family each year (as Aubrey
believed). Actors needed to work the year round. When London was
closed, most companies were forced to break up or to go on tour, and
though touring was a normal duty (not an act of desperation), Lord
Strange's large group went on the road with difficulty:
'oure Companie is greate, and thearbie o
u
r chardge intollerable in travellinge the Countrie',
these actors petitioned Whitehall, 'and the Contynuaunce thereof wil
l
be a meane to bring us to division and separacion, whearbie we shall
not onelie be undone, but alsoe unreadie to serve her ma
jes
tie when it shall please her highenes to commaund us'.
⁶
It was 'hugely politic' to refer to the Queen since her Privy Council
acceded to the notion that she needed plays for her 'solace'. And the
Queen lost little by throwing crumbs to actors. Strange's men were
paid in arrears at a standard £10 for a court performance -- a sum of 10
marks (£6.13
s.
4
d.
) as the official fee plus another 5 marks (£3. 6
s.
8
d.
)
as her gratuity -- and the Queen paid for no plays at all during
eight or nine months of a year (her fee barely equalled the total
weekly profit of a troupe's chief actors). Her Council did agree,
perhaps this season, that the Rose might stay open if free of 'the
infection of sicknes', but in September there was no abatement of
plague.

Lord Strange's company had
been touring since 13 July; now they were forced to remain out of
London for many more weeks. Whether or not Shakespeare travelled with
them, he would have been aware of new setbacks. The sickness worsened
slowly. Then, after a brief abatement in winter, plague returned to the
city with a virulence which might have made the hardships of actors on
the road seem trivial by

-151-