Shakespeare: A Life (43 page)

memory', as Anne Barton notices. Phoebe the shepherd-girl summons up Marlowe
Hero and Leander
(which had appeared in two editions in 1598) when she quotes a line of it --

Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?'

(III. v. 82-3)
³⁶

And Rosalind alludes to the poem's subject (though Marlowe's Leander
does not drown) in one of her best anti-romantic comments on love. '
Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club', she tells
Orlando,

yet he did what
he could do to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love.
Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun
if it had not been for a hot midsummer night, for, good youth, he
went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and, being taken with the
cramp, was drowned; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it
was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies. Men have died from time to
time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. (IV. i. 91-101)

Rosalind, as 'Ganymede', has a freedom from fixed personality and
propriety alike in being of both sexes, but retains her vulnerability.
In the green forest, where nature works its subtle change on everyone,
she is the most theatrical of heroines with a mind no less winning
because it resists flattery. 'I was never so berhymed', she says of
Orlando's lyrics, 'since Pythagoras' time that I was an Irish rat, which
I can hardly remember' (III. ii. 172-4). Through her, the author
brightly tests the sensitivity of comedy, as if the comic stage were not
the worst means of postponing any accounting for real loss or
distress. Yet 'The Forest of Arden' is a source of mythical truth as
real as dearth, poverty, injustice, exile, or the blindness of the
human spirit. It offers a romantic setting in which Shakespeare can
exhibit an internalization of values such as fidelity and love, with
strong and sharp emphasis on his lovers' psyches. He exteriorizes
their most intimate, evolving feelings and perceptions, and in this
respect at least he brings himself to the edge of the terrible
introspections of tragedy.

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Ho no, no, no, no! My meaning in saying he is a good man-7 is to have
you understand me that he is sufficient. Yet his means are in
supposition. He hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the
Indies. I understand moreover upon the Rialto he hath a third at
Mexico, a fourth for England, and other ventures he hath squandered
abroad. But ships are but boards, sailors but men. There be land
rats and water rats, water thieves and land thieves -- I mean pirates
-- and then there is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks. The man
is, notwithstanding, sufficient. Three thousand ducats. I think I may
take his bond.

( Shylock, The Merchant of Venice)

Late in Elizabeth's reign -- on St James's Day, 25 July 1601 -- two
men of the theatre went to Bricklayers Hall near Aldgate in the capital
to pay dues to one of the city's guilds, the Worshipful Company of
Tilers and Bricklayers. Both workers paid in arrears -- 2
s.
for the first, and 3
s.
for the second. The first was Richard Hudson, a building worker who
loyally aided the Burbage family from the 1570s to the time of the
second Globe on Bankside.
¹
The other was a gaunt, muscular Londoner who in June 1572 was baptized Benjamin Johnson, but styled himself ' Ben Jonson'.

No doubt Ben Jonson had learned to hate bricklaying, but he took it
up when in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes. After army service in
the Lowlands he had married, become a strolling actor, and then a

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playwright. There is a story (told by Rowe) that he was 'altogether
unknown' when one of his scripts came to the Lord Chamberlain's men,
who treated it 'carelessly and superciliously' and were about to
reject it, 'when
Shakespear
luckily cast his Eye upon it, and
found something so well in it as to engage him first to read it
through, and afterwards to recommend M
^r
Johnson
and his Writings to the Publick'.
²
The story has little to recommend it, since Jonson was not 'unknown'
when the troupe first produced one of his Humour plays in 1598. A
strong demand for new, playable scripts was a fact of life. But
whether or not he saved Johnson from a rejection, Shakespeare must
have approved the play: he acted in its early version set in Italy; and
no doubt also in Jonson's 'Londonized' revision (the one often acted
today). A stylish comedy, in which everyone is under the sway of a
leading trait, or 'humour', Every Man in his Humour pits the brashness
of youth against obsessions of age. It is smart, funny, and lifelike:
any troupe would have prized it.

Soon
after its debut, Jonson displayed a tragic humour of his own. In a
duel on 22 September at Shoreditch he killed Gabriel Spencer, an actor
who had been in the Marshalsea prison with him the year before as a
result of the government's outrage over Jonson's and Nashe's The Isle
of Dogs. This time, to escape the gallows, Jonson pleaded benefit of
clergy: he read his 'neck verse' to prove he knew Latin, and received a
brand with a hot iron at the base of his left thumb, 'T', for Tyburn,
to identify him if he killed again.

Then he returned to bricklaying -- but not for long. In the Induction of
his next work for the troupe, Every Man Out of his Humour, he
mentions his taking 'a good meal among Players' once a fortnight,
though living on 'beans and buttermilk' at home.
³
He must have supped with those who acted in his two Humour plays, and
seen their regular poet. At 26, Jonson was a tall man, thin and
scrawny for his height, with no trace yet of a 'mountain belly'. He
was said to dress in 'rug' (a coarse woollen fabric) and favour a coat
'with slits under the armpits'. He clearly loomed over Shakespeare,
who is not described as tall, and whose normal attire escaped comment,
although that may suggest that he wore the predictable, neat silk
doublet of an actor-manager. With the oddity of a high, slightly
perpendicular fore-

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head if one can trust his portraits, Shakespeare by report was 'a
handsome well shap't man: very good company, and of a verie readie and
pleasant smooth Witt'.
⁴
What was vital to Jonson was that the 'well shap't man' was
potentially a munificent buyer of scripts, and in his mid-thirties the
most famous playwright in London. Shakespeare, at their early
meetings, was confronted with a thin, odd, brilliant, voluble scarecrow,
and Jonson, if haughtily obsessed with himself, remembered the older
poet's naturalness and candour. 'Hee was (indeed) honest', Jonson
recalled of his Stratford friend, 'and of an open, and free nature:
had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions'.
Such phrases slide vaguely between memories of the man and of his
verse; but Jonson claimed in his elegy that the 'father's face lives
in his issue', as if Shakespeare's affable manners still lived in his
'well-turnèd and true-filèd lines'.
⁵

Nevertheless as Jonson's art matured, he viewed Shakespeare as his
principal rival and became by turns awestruck and obsessed, puzzled
and dismissive: ' Shakespeare wanted art', he told William Drummond in
1619, and in retrospect he tried to sum up his friend's chief defect.
'I
remember,
the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to
Shakespeare',
noted Jonson, 'that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn'd), hee never
blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a
thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech'.
⁶
He invented, with a little help from his friends, the image of a
poorly schooled, naturally gifted Stratford poet who, with 'small
Latine and lesse Greeke', had committed silly, egregious faults in a
spume of words.
Julius Caesar
irked him for more than two
decades, because the play should have been more foolish than it was,
to judge from his comments in
The Staple of News
( 1626) and in
Discoveries
(probably written after the fire that burned Jonson's papers in
November 1623) -- yet at his best he judged Shakespeare's merits
acutely.

Legends of their 'wit combats' at the Mermaid tavern on Bread Street are unsound,
⁷
though Jonson was fond of the Mermaid despite its high prices, and
Shakespeare knew its landlord William Johnson by 1613. Once at such a
tavern, when the two poets were in their cups, Jonson supposedly
jotted his mock-epitaph, 'Here lies

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Ben Jonson, | That was once one [?one's son]', and Shakespeare obliged by completing it:

Who while he lived was a slow thing
And now being dead is no thing.

In another story, the older poet had to be godfather to a Jonson son,
and after racking his brains to think of a christening gift came out of
a 'deep study' inspired. 'I'll e'en give him a dozen good latten
spoons', he told Ben, 'and thou shalt translate them.' (The weak pun
is on
latten,
a brass, or brass-like alloy, often used in church utensils.)
⁸

The facts suggest that Shakespeare took pains to oblige the tall,
intellectual young poet by acting in his Humour play and later in his
Roman tragedy Sejanus His Fall, in 1603. And Jonson's early allusions
to his rival are in turn good-natured, neutral, or mildly satirical,
with none of the cutting force of his attacks on other poets. Sooner
or later Jonson offended every troupe he worked for, but he was a
writer the Chamberlain's men tried to please. If the brand on his
thumb was a badge of apartness, he was agreeable when he left his
beans and buttermilk and sought friends among wild-heads, poetizers, and
law students of the Inner Temple: he dedicated his second Humour play
to the Inns of Court. He knew poets such as John Donne of Lincoln's
Inn and Francis Beaumont of the Inner Temple, or Donne's confidant
Henry Goodere and the sharp-minded parliamentarian and essayist
Francis Bacon of Gray's Inn. He had connections with men who helped to
form taste among the gentry. Even younger spirits at the Inns were
influential, and the Chamberlain's actors could lose vital prestige if
the gentry ever defected.

Furthermore, Jonson not only admired new satirists at the Inns, but
expanded on their precedents. He had a friendly enemy in John Marston
of the Middle Temple, born in 1576, whose poems in
Scourge of Villainy
set a precedent in snapping at the city's idle, privileged dandies as in 'Cynic Satire' written at 22:

These are no men, but apparitions,
Ignes fatui, glowworms, fictions,
Meteors, rats of Nilus, fantasies,
Colosses, pictures, shades, resemblances.

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Ho, Lynceus!

Seest thou yon gallant in the Sumptuous clothes,
How brisk, how spruce, how gorgeously he shows?
Note his French herring-bones: but note no more,
Unless thou spy his fair appendant whore.
⁹

Having caught the acid note of classical Latin verse, even as satires
were banned in 1599, Marston had begun to bring his sharp talents to
play-writing.

Fresh young intellects
in these years upset any notion of the merely entertaining play or a
quiescent theatre. Shakespeare, for his part, had little to gain from
vying openly with
littérateurs,
and might have seemed lacking
in competitiveness. It is likely that that aspect of the man struck,
if it did not unnerve, the voluble, truculent Jonson. In talk and
demeanour, Shakespeare might have seemed unconcerned with his worth,
or, at least, been lightly facetious about his real or imaginary
detractors. His jokes might suggest that he was troubled by his ease, or
facility, or by a demon that let him do anything with words; the
difficulty of his projects, even his punning, can look like retorts upon
the demon. With joking gravity, he put himself down, as if glad of a
delicious chance to do so, as in the implicit view of himself in the
Poet of the Sonnets. His Poet is 'tongue-tied' at the notion of a
rival, certain that another poet is a 'better spirit', or that his own
'saucy bark' is 'inferior far'.
¹⁰
The Poet of Sonnet 78, uneasy among the learned, asks his lovely friend to advance 'as high as learning my rude ignorance'.

One sign that Shakespeare made no claim for his erudition is that
Jonson denied he had any, but his friend found the Stratford poet no
meek soul. Shakespeare saw himself as a useful, practical poet working
up chronicle or story material into new forms for the sake of
proficient actors: he was a supplier, leaving within the text of a
play broad guidelines for the actors' interpretation of the work, so he
neither insisted upon a limited view of his meanings nor abrogated
responsibility for what he wrote. Jonson, in contrast, was throwing
the onus of interpretation upon an audience, and writing mainly
sourceless comedies of social insight while driving at the pride,
greed, and chicanery of the age.

Shakespeare was less well attuned to Jonson's self-assertive, cynical

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