Shakespeare: A Life (26 page)

contrast. Civic disruption in a major epidemic was enormous. Masters
often discharged servants and apprentices; trade dwindled, marts shut
down, grain might become scarce. What Shakespeare observed of wishful
males and sensible females is submitted to a high-courtly comic order
in Love's Labour-s Lost, and ideas for that play were confirmed by what
he heard or saw in plague-time.

Lord
Strange's men, for example, were at Bristol, devoted to makebelieve and
applause. In London were some of their womenfolk, contending with
hunger, terror, or death. An actor such as Alleyn felt that devoutness
and a few nostrums would protect his wife Joan back in plague-ridden
Bankside. 'My good sweet mouse', he writes, 'kepe yo
ur
house fayr and clean w
hi
ch I knowe you will and every evening throwe water before yo
ur
dore and in yo
ur
backsid
e
and have in yo
ur
windowes good store of rwe [rue] and herbe of grace.'
⁷
Alleyn was then anxious to have Joan darken the colours of his fine
woollen, orange-tawny stockings before he came home. Philip Henslowe,
Joan's stepfather, wrote that Joan as a good wife was imploring the
Deity to cease punishing with a Cross. Over 700 men, women, and
children were dying in the plague at Shoreditch, it appeared; over a
thousand people had died in London in one week. On the Bankside over
against the Clink, the plague had been in one house after another, as
Henslowe writes to Alleyn in a hasty passage that deserves a
translation:

Rownd a
bowte vs yt hathe bene all moste in every howsse abowt vs & wholle
howsholdes deyed & yt my frend the baylle doth scape but he
smealles monstrusly for feare & dares staye no wheare for ther hathe
deyed this laste weacke in generall 1603 . . . & as for other
newes of this & that I cane tealle youe none but that Robart
brownes wife in shordech & all her chelldren & howshowld be
dead & heare dorcs sheat vpe
⁸

[Round about us it [the epidemic] has been almost in every house about
us and whole households have died, and [I can tell you] that my friend
the bailiff does escape but he smells monstrously for fear and dares
stay nowhere, for there have died this last week, in general, 1,603 . .
. and as for other news of this and that I can tell you none but that
Robert Browne's wife in Shoreditch and all her children and household
be dead and her doors shut up.]

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Robert Browne, an actor who was then in Germany with Worcester's men,
evidently lost his wife, all of his children, and every household
servant. In the country, troupes were often thought to be carrying the
plague and so could be barred from towns and villages. Actors and
their boys had begun to die of hunger or exhaustion, and at least one
troupe was never heard from again. As for Strange's players, they had
been afoot with baggage for almost the entire second half of 1592.
However, when the worst suffering in the lanes, alleys, and subdivided
tenements of London's suburbs lay ahead -- and players had been on
the road for less than three months -- both Shakespeare and Alleyn, as
the chief actor of Strange's troupe, received some encouragement.
Early that September, Thomas Nashe in the city published his racy,
nervy social satire Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell.

Taking the form of a witty address to the devil, this pamphlet was
popular in plague-time. It was twice reissued in 1592. Before citing
Alleyn's talents, Nashe praises a 'Tragedian' who has been playing in 1
Henry VI with enormous success. 'How would it have joyed brave Talbot
(the Terror of the French)', writes the pamphleteer,

to
thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee
should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones new embalmed
with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall]
times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they
behold him fresh bleeding.
⁹

The indirect praise of Shakespeare is strong -- this is the first
printed allusion to his plays -- but it came from an odd quarter.
Nashe was partial to scholars who saw play-writing as their own
preserve. At 24 he was the sharpest, most original satirist among the
Wits, making the pamphlet a vehicle for scorching but brisk polemic,
humanist critiques, and stylistic verve. He seemed a wonderful boy. Thin
and slight with a haystack of hair and a merry gaggle-toothed look as
his teeth poked out at angles, he had come down from St John's
College at Cambridge with a BA in 1588. He sympathized with the plight
of men who worked for the theatres, and his early writings are
influenced by fellow graduates. Asked in 1589 to write a preface to
Greene's story Menaphon, he surveyed the tight little world of the
theatre-poets. Nashe now adopts Greene's views. Opposed to
university-educated

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poets, he argues, are parasitic actors and fluent 'Art-masters', or
'Alcumists of eloquence' who 'thinke to out-brave better pennes with
the swelling bumbast of bragging blanke verse'.

But just whose are the unlearned pens?

Fond of punning on proper names -- as when in Anatomy of Absurdity he
evokes the puritanical Phillip Stubbes as one who will 'stubbe up sin
by the rootes' -- Nashe paints a picture-frame into which an enemy
might fit Shakespeare's face. He seems to have in mind a follower of
Thomas Kyd. Such a man 'will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say
handfuls of Tragicall speeches' to exhaust bloody Seneca, writes Nashe,
'which makes his famished followers to imitate the Kid in
Æsop'.
¹⁰

Perhaps neither Kyd nor Shakespeare meant to hang himself after
reading this. Nashe was then just down from Cambridge -- a university
as hostile to the players as Oxford. Officials at Cambridge were about
to petition to renew an edict of 1575 banning 'any open show' there or
for five miles round. At Oxford of course travelling players were
banned by the university but oddly not by the town, which forbade them
only the use of municipal buildings. In fact Oxford's town chamberlains
record a payment of 6
s.
8
d.
'geven to the lord Stranges
players', and if Shakespeare was with the troupe he may have acted
near Oxford's High Street on 6 October 1592.
¹¹
But the Vice Chancellor was reduced to the humiliating policy of
giving good money now and then to the troupes of actors of various
noblemen (
diversorum nobilium histriones
) simply to leave
Oxford quietly. Nashe regrets that any graduate must compete with
ignoramuses, but he hopes graduates will save English poetry and
sounds a clarion call for the Wits. With a flourish he mentions as
possible revivers of the Muse Matthew Roydon, Thomas Acheley, and
George Peele. ( Marlowe's name may be missing from the short list
because he had of late offended Greene.)

At any rate, Nashe takes one close to the dilemma of the University
Wits. As author of a fine 'Elegie', Matthew Roydon enjoyed prestige,
and George Chapman dedicated two works to him. With an Oxford MA,
Roydon had come down to study law at Thavies Inn in Holborn, where
Acheley may have joined him. Both young men would have found the law
more profitable in the city than poetry, of which there was a glut;
few of their works survive.

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Peele was of very different mettle, but after depleting his first
wife's inheritance he found he could barely support himself. At Christ
Church, Oxford where he took his MA in 1579 he had been the fellow
student of such men as Richard Hakluyt, author of the Voyages, Sir
Philip Sidney, and the dramatists Richard Edes, Leonard Hutton, and
William Gager; the three last became clergymen, but Gager had praised
his verse, and Peele wrote pageants as well as his pastoral The
Arraignment of Paris, which a children's company played at court.
However, his courtly chances were few, and he earned less from
pageants than Shakespeare's fellow dramatist Anthony Munday would earn
from producing Lord Mayor's shows. He did not forget to honour a
player-patron when he could, as in his lines for the Accession Day tilts
in 1590:

The Earle
of Darbies valiant sonne and heire, Brave Ferdinande Lord Straunge,
straunglie embarkt, Under Joves kinglie byrd, the golden Eagle.
¹²

Few hopeful poets failed to nod at Lord Strange. However, Peele's
play-writing was neither flexible nor abundant, and he sank into
poverty and stasis. He might have illustrated Nashe's point that
graduates are ill-used by players, and rivalled by too many other pens.
The trouble was that, after leaving supportive medieval halls at the
colleges, young men who were set on being poets found only a splintered
community of fellow graduates in London; the Wits were proud,
abrasive, quarrelsome, more or less in competition with one another,
and they lacked institutional power.

But among Nashe's friends, Robert Greene, at least, had learned to
thrive, although he saw actors as his enemies. Boldly prolific and
talented, he had plunged into the sleazy, liberating life of Bohemian
neighbourhoods with delight and a certain proud, dignified reserve as a
gentleman of academic mark. Baptized near Norwich on 11 July 1558,
and of a family that may have had prosperous connections with Yorkshire
gentry, Greene had taken his BA at St John's College, and MA at Clare
Hall in Cambridge five years later. Married, but having left his wife
and child, he seemed 'a good fellow' in the suburbs among women and
cronies, an artist in greasy silk stockings and what Nashe

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calls a 'very faire Cloake' with sleeves of 'goose turd greene'. He was
'of face amiable, of body well proportioned', says Henry Chettle,
'his attire after the habite of a schollerlike Gentleman, onely his
haire was somewhat long'. The hair was a concession to his poetic
life, but there was something immaculate, precise, and showily trim in
Greene's look, even apparent in a printed cartoon which shows him at
work though attired in a winding-sheet. Over his green cloak was his
pendant 'jolly red' beard, long and pointed 'like the spire of a
steeple'.
¹³
Thriving on books, adapting the Greek romances, and keen on Ovid, he was much concerned to show off his brilliance.

Though his workmanship often lacked polish, Greene discovered so much
as an artist that Shakespeare studied his work with profit. In
opening up many sources in his prose tales and bringing a Greek zest
to them he was to have an influence on Pericles and Cymbeline as well
as The Winter's Tale. In 1592 he had in his rogue pamphlets about
pickpockets, cut-purses, and other con men of the city extended literary
diction and subject-matter fascinatingly downwards. Greene did not
interview pick-pockets and purse-cutters, 'foisters' and 'nippers', but
the dens and brothels gave him authority to use written sources
freshly. Troubled, and unable to impose a moral system on his facts,
he avoided moralistic comment by depicting the trickster as hero. His
career had run parallel to and a little ahead of Shakespeare's.
Fascinated by Ovid, he had written about wonder, about love and the
mind's 'inward metamorphosis', and far from merely imitating John Lyly
he had expressly reformulated Lyly Euphues in his own Mamillia to
comment on lust. Again, he took up Castiglione Il Cortegiano, not to
comment on the perfect courtier, but to explore love and eloquence in
his story Morando.

Yet he was capable
of plagiaristic excess. At a troubled time not long before he died,
he replied to the fussy, scholarly Gabriel Harvey of Cambridge in a
fine pamphlet, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, most of which, though
in easy prose, is closely copied from Francis Thynne verses in The
Debate Betweene Pride and Lowlines which was in print by the 1570s.
Rather more cynical was Greene's irresponsibility in exploiting
national prejudices. In his play James IV he humbles Scotland and then
depicts a reconciliation between that country and

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England on the understanding that the Scots are an inferior, bemused
people. In the play, the English teach a sharp lesson, killing 7,000
Scottish lairds in battle -- far exceeding the facts of Flodden
Field-after which the Scottish king is sentimentally forgiven for
trifling with the English: 'Youth has misled -- tut, but a little
fault. 'Tis kingly to amend what is amiss' (lines 2509-10)

Yet Greene was obsessed by his own moral lapses, and in
'repentance'pamphlets he took up his sins. He has given himself to drink
and women. ('In one year hee pist as much against the walls', Nashe
told Gabriel Harvey, 'as thou and thy two brothers spent in three'.)
Taking a prostitute as his mistress, he left this anecdote about women
in The Royal Exchange ( 1590) without comment, though he claimed he
was translating from an Italian source: ' Tymon of Athens who was
called Mysanthropos, seeing a tree whereon divers women had hanged
themselves, wished that everie tree might yeelde such fruite.'
¹⁴
Repeatedly he told the sad tale of his decline into writing plays,
and used a favourite image from Aesop for the players, as when he has
Cicero rebuke the Roman actor Roscius in Francesco's Fortunes:
'Why, Roscius, art thou proud with Esops Crow, being pranct with the glorie of others feathers?'
The 'feathers' were words supplied by artful, hard-working playwrights, and so an actor had no reason to 'waxe proud'.
¹⁵

But his complaints ran a little deeper than this. He found in
playwriting, which he respected, no way to come round -- or to discover a
satisfactory picture of himself or the stability he needed. He looked
into the same situation that underlay Shakespeare's career, and saw
that the making of scripts for a mercenary theatre subject to vulgar
taste reduced the maker, the poet, to gross servitude. Shakespeare
pursued his artistic life in public as a kind of popular entertainment
and so far had found that circumstances 'did not better for my life
provide' than 'the public means'. But whereas Greene saw himself as a
puppet of the actors, Shakespeare had regarded them so far as
protectors, intimate associates, and allies.

And yet even in 1592 Greene's plays were popular on the London stage. Friar Bacon had been bringing in an average of 23
s.
a day for Henslowe, and seemed so attractive that it demanded a sequel, the

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