Shakespeare: A Life (46 page)

farther back from the river. Here Peter Streete, who pledged to finish
in twenty-eight weeks, led his men in building a new theatre to be
called the Globe.

There were problems
almost at once. Allen sued for trespass, claiming Streete had taken
material worth £800 which was rightly Allen's because it stood on his
land -- and litigation was to last nearly two years. Also, building
costs ran high. On 21 February, the Burbages agreed to meet 50 per
cent of the costs, and, without precedent, brought in five sharers,
each to put up 10 per cent as co-owners or 'housekeepers' in the
venture. The five new 'housekeepers' were Shakespeare, John Heminges,
Will Kempe, Thomas Pope, and Augustine Phillips: and thus actors (in
the path of old James Burbage) became proprietors. Collectively, they
had one half-share in the Globe's ground-lease, but in due course
Heminges arranged for William Leveson, a mercer, and Thomas Savage, a
goldsmith down from Lancashire, to be trustees in a deed which allowed
the five to alter their terms to 'tenancy in common'. That enabled an
actor to dispose of his share, and so when Kempe quit the troupe at the
year's end, his share was taken by the other four.

Thanks to the Brends, on whose land the Globe was built, it is possible
to consider for the first time in a biography six documents which,
interestingly, mention Shakespeare's name. A modern scholar refers to
'Sir Thomas Brend', but he never had a title, nor was he of gentlemanly
rank. In fact he had died in September 1597, and when an inquisition
into Brend's heritable assets was at last completed on 16 May 1599,
his estate's properties in St Saviour's parish included 'a House [that
is, the Globe] newly built with a garden attached'
('una Domo de novo edificata cum gardino')
which is then 'in the occupation of William Shakespeare and others'
('in occupatione Willielmi Shakespeare et aliorum').
Significantly, this implies that in May 1599 Shakespeare was thought to
be the most prominent Globe tenant, and also that the Globe had a
partial existence by that month. The second document comes two years
later. When Nicholas Brend -- Thomas's son -- mortgaged his Southwark
properties, including the Globe, to his stepbrother John Bodley, on 7
October 1601, he signed a deed of trust which lists eighteen tenants
including ' Richard Burbage and

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William Shackspeare, gent.' -- and here the troupe's leading actor and
its regular dramatist are the Globe's chief tenants. In a third
document, they also appear as such on 10 October 1601 -- when Bodley's
control of the property was enhanced just two days before Nicholas
Brend died.

The Globe's effective
owner for the last fifteen years of Shakespeare's life was John Bodley,
but the story is a little involved. Technically, Bodley was a trustee
for Nicholas's older son Matthew, and, for a few years, Bodley was
obliged to share ownership with two partners. After Bodley's first
partner died, the other partner, his uncle John Collet, sold his
interest to Bodley in 1608, at which time a deed mentions the
'playhouse' and ' Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare, gentlemen'.
Those two are thus linked again as the foremost tenants in a company
known, by then, as the King's Servants. Even after his own death, '
William Shakespeare gent' is named as tenant of the playhouse in a
decree of 21 February 1622 (since it was common for such descriptions
to be repeated for years after a tenant was dead and buried). On 12
March 1624, the deceased friends Burbage and Shakespeare are both listed
as tenants with the still-living Cuthbert Burbage and Heminges, and
finally, nine years later, on 20 June 1633, the Globe is described as
'now or late in the possession or occupation of John Herminge,
Cuthbert Burbage, Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare or any of
them, their or any of their leagues or assignes, &c.'
³¹

So much, anyway, for legal deeds. Shakespeare as a 'housekeeper' or
part-holder of the Globe tenancy benefited from new income and new
stimulus in 1599, as a beautiful theatre opened its doors. Yet
competition from rivals did not vanish, nor did censorship, Puritan
fury, or threats of long closure in plague. What exactly did the Globe
look like? To speak of the
first
Globe which lasted until June
1613, the various drawings by Norden, Visschcr, Hondius, Delaram, and
others show it as either circular, hexagonal, or octagonal, and minus
stair turrets. We lack any sketch of its stage or tiring-house.
Happily in modern times, or since October 1989, fascinating
archaeological data has come from the Globe's site, now mostly under
Southwark's Anchor Terrace and Southwark Bridge Road, but the whole
site has yet to be exposed. We have more to learn about this theatre.
Still, ingenuity can make use of

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fragmentary clues, and a full-sized replica of Bankside's Globe,
opened in 1997, gives one a thrilling sense of what performances may
well have been like at ' Shakespeare's factory'.
³²

Streete, at any rate, had set good foundations of chalk rubble around
wooden stakes. Using the old Theater's high timber frame, he cut
costs as much as he dared, and the Globe rose as a many-sided polygon,
roughly a hundred feet in diameter, with sophisticated stair turrets
giving access to tiers of galleries.
³³
With false economy, the roof was not tiled but thatched, with the
result that the whole structure was to burn to the ground in 1613.

As with other theatres, there would be no lavatories, but buckets
must have been available to those seeking relief in the galleries:
bottled ale sold well. Streete's builders attended to one enemy of
Londoners-the sun. It was felt that the sun gave city faces a tanned,
peasant look, while fading costly garments. A high gallery roof kept
the sun out of nearly everyone's eyes. Actors were sheltered by a
colourful 'Heavens', a guttered stage-cover, which served partly as a
sounding-board and had painted stars, planets, and other astrological
emblems.

Competition soon appeared.
In 1600 Streete began to erect the Fortune theatre outside
Cripplegate, as Henslowe's and Alleyn's response to the Globe. In
worried confusion the Privy Council soon licensed Worcester's men to
play at the Boar's Head, and tolerated children's companies as well as
other adult troupes in the capital. The Globe must have opened not
later than the end of May 1599.

And
its bright flag, visible across the river to those watching for it, as
well as to watermen carrying over clientele, a trumpeter on the high
roof, and clamour and bustle with apprentices and artisans in the
crowded yard as the galleries filled up with the élite -- must all have
seemed very promising to the Chamberlain's Servants. Their poet
needed this yellow-topped magnet -- in which lavish display seemed
natural. Even more vital for him, one suspects, was his troupe's
experience over the past five years of hard times, mistakes,
disagreements, and experimentalism. His fellow sharers did not see eye
to eye, though some of them had lately shown a willingness to work
together by pooling their money. Here in the Bankside among bordellos
and

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bear-pits and sharp entrepreneurs, the actors faced a challenge with a
new sense of tension. Not since Hunsdon's plan in 1594 had they been
free from a threat of bankruptcy, and enemies were near at hand. The
vestry of St Saviour's, Southwark, first called for an end of playing
and then tried to gain from it by taxing the local theatres.
Shakespeare took lodgings in the area for a while, before moving back
across the river nearer his friends Heminges and Condell, who were in
the parish of St Mary, Aldermanbury.

The sharers needed to go 'up-market' to hold the gentry, and that in
itself may have caused friction. After leaving the troupe and
undertaking a morris dance from London to Norwich, Will Kempe was to
call his enemies 'Shakerags' -- perhaps a mild fling at Shakespeare or
his hirelings. Vigorous and athletic, Kempe was famous for obscene
jigs of a kind not to be repeated on Bankside. Just what led to his
quitting a profit-making troupe is still unknown, but his exit may be
the tip of an iceberg of after-hours' arguments, debate, and jockeying
politics. Even long before Kempe left, the actors' troubles with
Blackfriars, with Allen, or with different venues surely caused anxiety.
As an artist, what did Shakespeare make of the company's politics? He
may not have sketched their debates, but he was familiar with their
political behaviour when he wrote
Julius Caesar
.

Thomas Platter, a young doctor from Basle, saw a tragedy about
Julius Caesar
at a Bankside theatre in the autumn. Visiting England from 18
September to 20 October 1599, Platter reported to his Swiss relatives
in a difficult dialect, a peculiar 'form of sixteenth century Alemannic'
as Ernest Schanzer calls it, which today can be 'obscure even to
German scholars'. But Platter describes London's theatres, and -unless
he refers to a rival play -- he has seen
Julius Caesar
at the new
Globe. 'On the 21st of September, after dinner, at about two o'clock,
I went with my party across the water. In the straw-thatched house
[streüwine Dachhaus]', as Platter writes,

we saw the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar, very pleasingly
performed, with approximately fifteen characters; at the end of the
play they danced together admirably and exceedingly gracefully,
according to their custom, two in each group dressed in men's and two
in women's apparel.

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One suspects that the Swiss doctor paid for excellent, cushioned seats.
(He notes of the theatres, 'Yedoch sindt underscheidene gäng unndt
ständt da man lustiger unndt basz sitzet' (literally: 'However, there
are separate galleries and places, where one sits more pleasantly and
better').
³⁴

And Platter's memory of a cast of about 'fifteen characters' fits
Julius Caesar
pretty well (if one discounts a number of smaller parts), and the
graceful dancing at the play's end is an interesting feature. Kempe then
had not yet left, so he could have been among the dancers -- though
Shakespeare's play lacks a good part for a clown.
Julius Caesar
is spare and grave in style, befitting the dignity of Rome and the awe
aroused by Caesar's murder, or the chief secular event in the world's
history. Often popular in modern classrooms, the tragedy took up a
hero whose story was even taught to Elizabethan children. "Julius
Caesar", one reads for example in
The Education of children in learning
( 1588), 'the first and greatest Emperour that ever lived, with a
most pure stile, set foorth the histories of his times and certayne
bookes of Grammar'.
³⁵
Subtle as the tragedy is, Shakespeare might have recited it without a
qualm to his own daughters. He mainly avoids sexual puns and any
display of petty vices -- even Antony's sensuality is kept at a distance
-- and gives his Globe audiences dignified, heroic Romans who speak
in a 'pure' language in keeping with high politics. Also he celebrates
the stage's power. Re-enacting Julius Caesar's murder, the actors
perpetuate him by making him as interesting as he may have been in life,
and the play's effects hinge partly on a careful, tight structure
built round the three soliloquies of Cassius, Brutus, and Antony, and
the orations over Caesar's corpse by both Brutus and Antony.

Shakespeare's ironies mock his audience. In one sense, Antony's refrain over Caesar's corpse flatters their wit:

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,
And Brutus is an honourable man.

(III. ii. 94-5)

Yet this also suggests that all city crowds are gullible, though the
word 'honourable' might prefigure Antony's lofty praise of the dead
Brutus in Act V.

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At all events,
Julius Caesar
was popular. Its manner can seem 'plain as a Doric portico', in Arthur Humphreys's phrase.
³⁶
Somewhat less awed by Caesar than by Caesar's Tudor prestige,
Shakespeare, in his respect for Roman clarity and Roman simplicity,
imposes unusual restraints on his art. By closely following his main
guide Plutarch, more closely here than he ever followed Holinshed, he
begins to acquire a confidence with Roman topics which will increase
with
Coriolanus
and
Antony and Cleopatra
. Plutarch
Lives
(in North's version) is rather more concerned with political
behaviour than with character, but every trait of Shakespeare's Brutus
is really traceable to Plutarch's Brutus. Even as Plutarch
reductively sketches his Romans, so in this play Cassius is --
basically -- an austere and sceptical Epicurean, Brutus is an idealizing
Stoic, and Mark Antony is a sensual opportunist.

One radical difference in characterization, though, appears in the
poet's intuitive method, or in his inventing for each of his heroes a
psychology allowing for subtle variations from a norm. For that he had
no literary source, though he perhaps had theatrical politics or the
internal affairs of his own troupe among other models. As a
'housekeeper' he had motives to attend closely to relationships in his
company. Since he did not think in a literal way, one hardly expects to
find Will Kempe in Cassius, but, then, this dramatist's mind did not
function in an imaginative cocoon in which the 'miracle' of genius alone
told him how men interact in crises. Leaning on Plutarch, it is true
that he was in some respects all too faithful to his main source. This
play lacks an objective commentator, but clearly gives Brutus a
vital, plausible intellectual life, and in delicately suggesting the
errors in Brutus's thought and feeling Shakespeare most usefully
responds to the stimulus of Jonson, especially his neo-classical
ideas, and to poets associated with the Inns of Court. With this play,
he also prepared himself to write something more intimate, more
personally committed and confident, in his next tragedy -- for his best
'leap ahead', the largest single advance he made in his career as a
dramatist.

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