Shakespeare (20 page)

The poor and the vagrant, also, have always been part of London’s life. They are the shadow that the city casts. In this period they comprised some 14 per cent of the population. There were the labouring poor who eked out their livings as porters or sweepers or water-bearers. There were the “sturdy beggars” who as often as not were whipped out of the city; a second or third appearance would incur the penalty of death. There were the masterless men who earned a small living by plastering or building or other casual trades. There were the destitute who lived off the parish and begged in the streets. These are “the famisht beggers” in
Richard III
(3374) who are “wearie of their Hues.” Shakespeare was acutely aware of this group of the dispossessed who appear, appropriately enough, in the margins of his plays; but, unlike the pamphleteers and the divines, he did not launch any great invectives against the conditions of the time. The parlous conditions of the poorer sort emerge fitfully in
Coriolanus
, for example, but without any great expressions either of pity or contumely.

The presence of these outcasts, who had little or nothing to lose, encouraged crime and violence on a large scale. It has been estimated that there were thirty-five serious disturbances or riots in the city between 1581 and 1602. There were food riots, riots between apprentices and the gentlemen of the Inns of Court, threats of riots against immigrants or “aliens.” In
the first part of
Henry IV
the king blames “moody beggars staruing for a time” for causing “pell-mell hauocke and confusion” (2578). Of course in a city where male citizens customarily carried daggers or rapiers, apprentices had knives, and females were armed with bodkins or long pins, there was a constant danger of violence. Daggers were generally worn on the right hip. Shakespeare would have carried a rapier or a broadsword as a matter of habit. Cases of violent assault, brought before one of the under-sheriffs, were as common as cases of theft or over-pricing. There were criminal gangs, difficult to distinguish from gangs of disbanded soldiers, threatening the stability of certain areas of the city such as the Mint by the Tower and the Clink in Southwark.

In the course of his life Shakespeare came to know this city very well. He resided at various times in Bishopsgate, in Shoreditch, in Southwark and in Blackfriars. Well known to his neighbours and fellow parishioners, and recognisable by sight to the citizens who crowded the public theatres, he was in no sense an anonymous person. He knew the bookshops of St. Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Row; the title pages of his plays published in quarto list some sixteen different premises, from the sign of the Fox near St. Austin’s Gate to the sign of the White Hart in Fleet Street. He knew the taverns, where Rhenish and Gascony wines were sold, and the inns where beers and ales were purveyed. He knew the eating houses, or banqueting houses, such as the Oliphant in Southwark and Marco Lucchese’s in Hart Street. He knew the Royal Exchange, where free concerts were held on Sunday afternoons in the summer. He knew the fields to the north of the walls, where wrestling and archery contests were held. He knew the woods that encircled the city and, when in his plays he arranged meetings in the woods outside the town, the majority of his audience would have thought of London’s retreats. He also became very well acquainted with the Thames in all of its moods. He crossed it continually, and it became his primary form of transport. It was shallower, and wider, than it is now. But in the stillness of the night it could distinctly be heard, rushing between its banks. “Tut, man, I mean thou’lt loose the flood, and in loosing the flood, loose thy voyage.” So speaks Panthino in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
(607-8). Shakespeare did not need to address London directly in his work; it is the rough cradle of all his drama.

I
n his first arrival
in London, how did he appear to his contemporaries? When in
The Taming of the Shrew
Lucentio leaves Pisa to “plunge” into Padua, that “nurserie of Arts,” he arrives expectantly and “with sacietie seekes to quench his thirst” (298). The young Shakespeare was eager for experience, in all of its forms; in some way he wished for “satiety” in the manifold life of London. In his fancy, or fantasy, he might “heare sweet discourse, conuerse with Noble-men”
(The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, 318). His aspiring spirit might there find its true setting. He also wished to test himself in the forcing house of thought and drama. This youthful ambition emerges in the most surprising contexts. In
Antony and Cleopatra
(2120-1) Antony remarks of the morning that it resembles:

Was he then eager for the fame that, as the King of Navarre puts it, “all hunt after in their lyues”
(Love’s Labour’s Lost
, 1)? Many have assumed it, but the fame of an actor or a dramatist was in this period a highly perishable commodity. He would have felt the mental power of the city, however, and with it an inkling of his own destiny.

We might remark upon Shakespeare’s intense and overwhelming energy.
It manifests itself at all stages of his career, and in his youth it must have been irrepressible. We might also remark upon his buoyancy, an inward easiness of spirit. As an actor he was trained to be quick and nimble, but that vitality was an essential part of his being; the images of his plays are filled with flight and with swift action, with movement and lightness. He is the poet of speed and agility. His characters are not of the study or the library but of the busy and active world. His is a drama of the sudden moment or change, and one of his most powerful images is that of the lightning strike “which doth cease to bee / Ere one can say, it lightens”
(Romeo and Juliet
, 892-3). All the myriad imagery, from the social as well as the natural world, suggests that he was a man of preternatural alertness. And he was known, like the characters within his comedies, for the quickness of his repartee. John Aubrey, acquiring his information from the theatrical Beeston family, noted that Shakespeare possessed “a very readie and pleasant smooth Witt” and also scribbled down that “he was a handsome well-shap’t man.”
¹
Actors, with the exception of those who specialised in comic roles, were expected to be handsome and well shaped.

No remarkable young man or woman is devoid of energy, but many are also beset by self-consciousness and embarrassment. It is the price of eminence. There are many passing references in Shakespeare’s drama to blushes and to flushed faces, when emotions suffuse the countenance in unanticipated ways; it is an almost unwitting habit of Shakespeare to include such details. Charles Lamb mentions his “self-watchfulness.” There are also references in his dramas to stage-fright.

Everyone remarked upon his sweetness and courtesy. He was variously called “ciuill,” “generous” and, most often, “gentle.” Despite spiteful allusions to his past as a law-writer or country schoolmaster he was generally considered to be well bred and indeed “gentle”—not meaning mild or tender, in the modern sense, but possessing the virtues and attributes of a gentleman. He would later demonstrate to the world that he was indeed “well bred.”

Gentility implies instinctive courtesy towards those of inferior rank or position, pleasing modesty towards those of equal status, and proper respect towards superiors. Bernard Shaw put the point differently when he speculated that Shakespeare “was a very civil gentleman who got round men of all classes.”
²
The vogue for Castiglione’s
The Courtyer
, published in English translation in 1561, had not yet passed; it was a manual of civil conduct to which all gentlemen (including lawyers and the wealthier merchants) subscribed.
It is clear, from many allusions, that Shakespeare had read it. His own plays have indeed been read as a “pattern book” in courteous speech. That is why he was described by his contemporaries as “mellifluous” and “honie-tongued.” Castiglione himself recommends one who is “in companie with men and women of al degrees [and who] hath in him a certaine sweetnes, and so comely demeanour, that who so speaketh with him, or yet be-holdeth him, must needes beare him an affection for ever.”
³
Did this come to Shakespeare instinctively, as most have surmised, or was it in part the result of practice and education?

This view of his character was in any case established very early when, in 1709, Nicholas Rowe depicted him as “a good-natur’d Man, of great sweetness in his Manners, and a most agreeable Companion.”
⁴
This comes as a surprise to those romantics who believe that he must have shared the horrors of Macbeth or the torments of Lear. He is not jealous Othello, nor rumbustious Falstaff, except in the moment of conceiving them. Sophocles, the author of some of the most desperate Greek tragedies, was known as the happy playwright. Authors, at least when they are in the company of other people, can be most “unlike” their work—and Shakespeare generally was in company. It was not an age of privacy.

John Aubrey also passed on the information that he was “very good company.” He was affable and convivial, according to contemporary testimony. He was amiable, and undoubtedly funny. Much of the surviving testimony concerns his sudden jokes, and a prevailing wit which tended towards irony. He manifested a continual subtle humorousness, like some stream of life. J. B. Yeats passed on a remarkable insight to his son, W. B. Yeats, in a letter of 1922. “I bet that the gentle Shakespeare,” he wrote, “was not remarkable for his gravity, and I think that in his plays, he is always maliciously on the watch for grave people as if he did not like them.”
⁵

He did not stand out as a man of eccentric or extraordinary character, and it seems that his contemporaries sensed a deep equality with him. He effortlessly entered the sphere of their interests and activities. He was in that sense infinitely good-natured. The apparent ordinariness of extraordinary men and women is one of the last great taboos of biographical writing. It would not do to admit that nineteen-twentieths of a life, however great or enchanted, is plain and unexciting and not to be distinguished from the life of anyone else. But there should be a further admission. The behaviour and conversation of even the most powerful writer, or statesman, or philosopher,
will in large part be no more than average or predictable. There is not much to differentiate the mass of humankind, except for some individual action or production. Shakespeare seems to embody the truth of this.

That is why his contemporaries came away from Shakespeare’s company with no overwhelming sense of his personality. Would he have recounted his sexual conquests or commented upon other writers? Would he have become drunk, in an effort to douse his furious energy? Ben Jonson remarked upon his “open, and free nature,” echoing Iago’s description of Othello. Open may mean accessible and transparent; but it can also mean receptive, like an open mouth. His amiability may not have been so apparent in his professional capacity. It has often been pointed out that he did not become engaged in the more pugnacious writers’ quarrels of the period, and seems in general to have steered clear of public conflict and controversy. They were a waste of time and energy. But he parodied his contemporaries’ styles in his plays, and caricatured their persons in figures such as Moth. It is easy to exaggerate Shakespeare’s poise and detachment; he may not have been argumentative in public, hating controversy of every kind, but he may have been sharp and acerbic in private.

Much speculation has been devoted to his “feminine” characteristics and, in particular, to his extraordinary compassion and sensitivity. Yet many men have been known for their yielding sympathy and consideration; as attributes, these are not sexually exclusive. It was not because he had some “soft” aspect of his character that he chose not to enter into fights and disagreements, but because he could see every side of every argument. It was once said of Henry James that he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it; we might say of Shakespeare that he had a sympathy so fine that no belief could injure it.

But, when he left the company of others, what then? In remarkable people there is always an inward power propelling them forward. Shakespeare was very determined. He was very energetic. You do not write thirty-six plays in less than twenty-five years without being driven. So, on his first arrival in London, his contemporaries would have encountered a highly ambitious young man. He was ready to compete with his more educated contemporaries, from Marlowe and Chapman to Greene and Lyly. In certain respects he resembles the adventurers in other fields of Elizabethan endeavour, and he would come to master the contemporary drama in all of its forms. To succeed in Elizabethan society, too, it was necessary to be quick, shrewd and exceedingly determined. We may assume that he was not sentimental.
The young men in his early plays are remarkable for their humour and their energy, amounting almost to self-assertion; they are not troubled by inward doubt. Shakespeare himself had a sure sense of his own worth. One of the themes of his sonnets, for example, lies in the full expectation that his verse would be read in succeeding ages. It is hard to believe, however, that he was free from interior conflict. His plays are established upon it. He was a man who had left behind his wife and children, and whose plays are filled with images of loss, exile and self-division. He had a desire to act, even at the cost of his reputation as a poet, and the sonnets are in any autobiographical reading touched by melancholy brooding and even self-disgust.