Shakespeare: A Life (34 page)

offstage; he favoured them both with 30s. bequests and left lesser sums
to other actors. Richard Burbage, whose tragic roles concern us
especially, became the leading actor of his time and an adept, amateur
painter who peers today, rather abjectly, from a supposed self-portrait
at Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London. He had a reputation for
temper, but, unspoiled by success, he was one of the troupe's more
stable elements. Shakespeare, it is said, was obsessed with money -- but
this myth has been partly dispelled by recent evidence. Neither he
nor any of his settled, married friends among the sharers, to judge
from allusions to their finances, was very money-hungry, though all
cared for social status and the troupe's profitability. Famous as he
was, Burbage had land worth only £200 to £300 a year when he died
-about the annual worth of Shakespeare's total property in 1616 (and a
trifle compared with the riches of the Admiral's star, Alleyn, who
could invest £10,000 in a manor at a stroke).
⁸

Without obvious compromise, they attended to patrons and authorities,
and may have buttered them up. Burbage befriended the wealthy William
Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, even before that patron had the
chamberlaincy, and Shakespeare and Heminges dealt with licensors of
the Revels Office, whose trust Heminges very clearly won. 'Teste [so
states] W. Shakespeare', one finds in a note in an early
seventeenth-century hand about the author of George a Greene, a comedy
revived at the Rose. In the play, George a Greene is 'Pinner of
Wakefield', an officer in charge of impounding stray beasts. If one
can trust the note, an official (such as Sir George Buc) had asked the
poet about the play's authorship. George a Greene was written by 'a
minister', Shakespeare is reported to have said amiably, 'who acted the
pinner's part in it himself'.
⁹

In an Elizabethan company, all the sharers performed in each play,
though there must have been many exceptions. Recent evidence from
computer studies, involving the lexicon or vocabulary of each of his
dramatis personae, in quarto and folio texts, yields a rather eerie,
problematic view of Shakespeare acting. Much of his play-writing, it
appears from these studies, was done in his favoured 'season' for
sitting at his writing table, November to February, but he acted the
year round, often taking two or three minor parts instead of a major
one.

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His striking, more energetic, roles in his own works, or so we are
told, included that of black Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Antonio in
Twelfth Night, and Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida. He played several
kings (as it was reported in the seventeenth century that he had
done), but more typically old men, churchmen, or 'presenter figures'
-- such as
Henry V'
s fine Chorus -- roles which called for
eloquence rather than much acting skill. He spoke on average as few as
300 lines in a performance, chose parts that took him on stage in
opening scenes (sometimes to a drum-roll or trumpet-flourish), and
often had the first line in a drama. In his Romeo and Juliet,
Shakespeare, as we hear, played Friar Laurence and later the Chorus.
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, he was usually content to be Duke
Theseus, who discourses on poetry. On separate occasions in the same
drama, he played either Mortimer or Exeter in I Henry VI, Ferdinand or
Boyet in Love's Labour's Lost, and Leonato or the Friar and Messenger
in Much Ado. He doubled as old Gaunt and the Gardener in Richard II,
impersonated King Henry in both parts of Henry IV, as well as Rumour
in Part 2, the Garter Inn's Host and then Master Ford in Merry Wives,
the King in All's Well, and Duncan in
Macbeth.
Shakespeare
perhaps liked to stun the groundlings with finely tonal, 'aria'
speeches. He consistently took the sentimental Egeon's role in The
Comedy of Errors, and he did play Adam in As You Like It and the Ghost
as well as the First Player in
Hamlet.

All of this, anyway, is what computer analysis says or implies: he
would have had to memorize a role to act it, so with high frequency,
in theory, his 'rare' or seldom-used words in that role will crop up in
his subsequent work to tell the computer that he did take each of the
parts just mentioned, or such minor parts as Flavius in Julius Caesar,
or Desdemona's scandalized old parent Brabanzio in Othello. Anyway,
so much for theory. Facts are another matter: the computer's results
may be explained in some other way, and, so far, at best, we have
frail hints as to his acting roles -- not proof.
¹⁰

But there is no hint that he took major parts; he was likely to be
protected because his composition rate was high, and his friends knew
it. Collaborators often had a hand in more titles overall, but few
poets wrote more than an equivalent of two whole new plays a year. He
was exceptional before he joined the Chamberlain's men, but even with

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his deep, abiding tensions and his regret -- not about the money he
was earning, but, it seems, about the way he earned it -- he excelled in
a fairly stable troupe in which membership did not quickly change.
Stage demands suited his rapid intellect, and his writing suggests a
needed release. His productive tensions may be related to an obscure,
residual, and not quite unevidenced self-contempt, and to the problem of
unbalanced excesses from time to time in his work; but it is a good
deal less speculative to say that in the late 1590s he lived to an
unusual degree in and through other viewpoints. Like most Tudor
playwrights he was not especially proprietary about his scripts, and he
gave the actors chances to mock their calling and also their poet, as
in several of his solemnly absurd plays-within-plays. His troupe's
solidarity-which he abetted -- would have kept outsiders and the curious
at bay while helping him to know the sweating, hard-worked actors
well. He took pains to show how lightly he regarded himself, or at any
rate there are more 'in-jokes', theatre references, and
self-deprecating allusions in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Hamlet than
in all the dramas by his rivals. In a small group of managers, with
close colleagues among the steadiest, he worked in the midst of a troupe
to achieve results -- and as they acted his plays the troupe
expressed his own inner being.

His
company was under threat from a puritanical Guildhall, from
competition, plague, and dwindling receipts, but the public theatres
were more stable than before 1594. The audiences included many
habitual play-goers. Not only leading actors, but Phillips, Shakespeare,
and individual boys in their wigs and luxurious dresses would have
been identified on stage, and if Burbage missed a line in Richard III,
it was perhaps shouted down at him. Audiences knew Shakespeare and he
knew them, so that despite disruptions, there might be a complex,
subtle communicative exchange when a play was acted.

Thus he had some incentive to pursue his interests, and he might have felt he had little to lose. He did not write
Romeo
or the
Dream
much before 1596, but in their fresh, artful use of locale these
plays at least begin to show what he found in the Chamberlain's group.
They are in part correctives; they make up for a feeble sense of
locale in
Lucrece,
or for a nervous, overwrought ingenuity in some of its

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stanzas, as well as for slack, almost timid, imitativeness in a few of
the Sonnets. He has found naturalness, the right detachment, and he
succeeded not only because of his talent. The more self-abnegating he
became, the more his imagination really flourished. His daily
selfeffacing duties would have given him a sense of routine as he sat at
his table, and he found he could supply his troupe best by
complicating his work and giving it multiple layers of appeal. In the
same play, he can affirm and repudiate popular attitudes, and in a
sense, by writing plays with subversive, troubling aspects, he
remained inside and outside his vocation, and abetted his own
development.

Performing even in minor
roles, he learned from acting; and the paradox is that he drew now
from an audience's intelligence and energy, only to overturn the
city's static, predictable attitudes. In fact he challenged Londoners
and their views in his soaring, witty, lyric styles, as he told them
about love in his two greatest works so far.

In the summer of 1595 Londoners were alarmed by severe rioting over
food prices. At Southwark butter was snatched from vendors who were
paid for it at
3d.
a pound, instead of
5d.
asked, and such
highhandedness led to violence. At Tower Hill crowds of apprentices and
other youths throwing a hail of stones and inspired by a trumpet-call
drove local warders back into Tower Street.

Not only the Lord Mayor, but the Crown took alarm. A curfew was
decreed, public assemblies were banned. All theatres were closed by
order. By 26 June Shakespeare had lost his means of livelihood. By
then the Rose had shut, and the Admiral's men toured to stay solvent.
The Burbages' troupe suffered until late in August -- when acting
resumed -- but as if to mock Hunsdon and Howard's plan, the new Lord
Mayor recognized no truce and asked that the Theater and the Rose be
pulled down.
¹¹
How long would an ailing, elderly Lord Hunsdon protect his troupe?
Shakespeare prepared Romeo and Juliet for a tense city, and his
tragedy reflects the civic tension and obtuseness that make violence
endemic in life.

A great love story which he knew in Arthur Brooke poem Romeusand Juliet

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and Juliet dictated an Italian setting. Italy suited Shakespeare's
experiments, and with her pagan, triumphal Rome so often compared with
the English capital, this was the cultural land of his schooldays. The
beauty and elegance he associates with Italy have a curious effect
upon him, freeing his pen from normal inhibitions even as he adheres
to an outmoded Petrarchism in his Sonnets. His path to Elsinore is
partly Italian. He set most of his early comedies and six of his ten
tragedies in Italy or ancient Rome -- and no other country gave him
freer leave to test unbalanced extremes in his dramaturgy. In creating
absurd, febrile lovers in The Two Gentlemen or the sharply articulate
pain of his Roman Titus, or the piercing beauty of Juliet, or the
pithy, unassimilated grandeur of his Italian Shylock, he supplied the
stage while opposing its norms, boundaries, stereotypes, and
predictability-and there is a note of defiance in Romeo and Juliet. The
author, as
poet,
upsets his medium and redefines tragedy, but
on the other hand his play's rhymes, sonnets, intense bawdy wit, and
soaring images drenched with the classics almost topple his new work
into bathos.

No doubt economic and
social facts of the theatre were influencing him even as he took
rivals into account. Keeping in step, his own company and the Admiral's
both soon had plays on Henry V, Jack Straw, Owen Tudor, King John,
Richard III, or Troilus and Cressida. The Admiral's took a
conservative 'good citizen's' attitude to love and marriage, but
Shakespeare's fellows, offering more radical and subtle love-dramas,
were getting a following among Inns of Court students, courtiers,
members of Commons, lawyers, merchants, and their ladies. Beyond these
were ranks of tradespeople, carriers, labourers, and many
apprentices, and the latter were of no small interest to the
entertainment industry. Most of the city's apprentices -- contrary to
what is often said -- were not boys but young people in their late teens
or early twenties, who might wait years in the metropolis or return
home before they could marry.
¹²
If the bordellos and bear-pits drew some of them, so did love plays
and even popular history plays in the suburbs. With its numerous young
of both sexes, London by the mid1590s was the nation's training
college. The trainees of course had reason to complain, but they
indulged in no mass riot after 1595 and

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many would have come to see Romeo and Juliet at the Curtain -- and to see its author.

In the play, Shakespeare's Friar propounds a theme in Act II, scene
ii, reminiscent of thoughts that an English boy might have heard from a
vicar's clerk. 'O mickle' -- or much -- as he says over a basket of
greenery,

is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities.

(11. ii. 15-16)

Does botany offer instruction in life?

Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence, and medicine power

. . . . . . . . . . .

Two such opposèd kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs -- grace and rude will.

(II. ii. 23-4, 27-8)

Grace and rude will -- or love and hate -- inhabit all sensate things
and so must occur in each heart, each town. That truth may relate to
the author's childhood, but it is borne out here with a dazzling
sophistication and particularity which exalt brief love ironically above
all else.

Romeo and Juliet begins
as a romantic comedy. After servants of the Capulets and Montagues
appear there is a minor street fight, and Romeo -- as a Montague
besotted by a black-haired Rosaline -- even sounds like the butt of a
romantic farce: 'O me! What fray was here?' he asks his friend
Benvolio,

Here's much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything of nothing first create
. . . . . . . . .
This love feel I.

(1. i. 170, 172-4, 179)

But if love-struck and unaware, he is not rash. His family's enemies

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