Shakespeare (24 page)

Like literary young men in London, too, he and his contemporaries tended to congregate together. In his lifetime Peele was associated with Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene—all of them “university wits,” spirited, reckless, drunken, promiscuous, wild, and in the case of Marlowe dangerous. As Nashe said of his erstwhile companions, “wee scoffe and are iocund, when the sword is ready to goe through us; on our wine-benches we bid a Fico for tenne thousand plagues.”
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They were the roaring boys of the 1580s and 1590s, doomed to early deaths from drink or the pox. It would be mistaken to view them as some coterie, but they were part of the same literary (and social) tendency. Shakespeare knew them well enough, but there is no evidence that he consorted with them. He had too great a respect for his own genius, and thus a much greater sense of self-preservation. He was too sane to destroy himself—or, rather, he had a much greater need for permanence and stability. It is not known how Peele reacted to a collaboration with this apparently uneducated young actor from the country, but it provoked fury and resentment in at least one of his university colleagues.

So the stage was always ready for new voices. Even as Lyly was being performed at court and in the undercroft of St. Paul’s Cathedral, there were new dramas and new dramatists coming into the ascendant. Shakespeare entered London at a moment of dramatic revelation. Thomas Kyd’s
The Spanish Tragedy
had caused something of a sensation, and it was swiftly followed by Christopher Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine. The Spanish Tragedy
inaugurated the fashion for revenge tragedy on the London stage; it directly inspired a very early version of
Hamlet
, which there is some reason to suppose was written by the young Shakespeare.
The Spanish Tragedy
has many parallels with the more famous play. It has a ghost; it has a variety of murders; it has scenes of madness, real and feigned; it stages a play within a play that promotes revenge; it has a great deal of blood. Unlike the later version of
Hamlet
, however, it is suffused by an unvarying rhetoric of vengeance and retribution that
thrilled its first auditors. It was an immensely powerful and seductive language filled with sensationalist imagery. It became a form of secular liturgy. When Hieronimo advances upon the stage, in a state of undress, he calls out (II, v, 1-2):

The lines became catchphrases, repeated and parodied by other dramatists. They were picked up and redeployed by Shakespeare in
Titus Andronicus
, when Titus appears in a similarly discomposed state to cry: “Who doth molest my contemplation?” (2106).

Kyd himself was still a young man when he wrote the play. He was born in 1558, just six years before Shakespeare, and was the son of a London scrivener; like Shakespeare he endured a relatively brief education at grammar school, and seems then to have entered his father’s trade. Little is known about him because, as a writer for the playhouses, little was required to be known. One of the few references to him is that of “industrious Kyd,” which suggests that he wrote a great deal for his daily bread. He seems to have begun his career as a playwright for the Queen’s Men in 1583, but by 1587 he and Christopher Marlowe had both entered the service of Lord Strange’s Men. Shakespeare may have followed them.
The Spanish Tragedy
was enacted by that company, as was Marlowe’s
The Jew of Malta
and
The Massacre at Paris
.

It is important to note that playwriting was a young man’s occupation—Kyd and Marlowe being no more than twenty-three or twenty-four (and perhaps even younger) when they began their work. “My first acquaintance with this Marlowe,” Kyd later wrote in an exculpatory letter, “rose upon his bearing name to serve my Lord [Strange] although his Lordship never knewe his service, but in writing for his plaiers.”
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This immediately raises an intriguing possibility. If Shakespeare joined Lord Strange’s Men in 1586, then he would very soon have become acquainted with Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe; he would, as it were, be part of the same affinity of writers. He acted in their plays. He may even have collaborated with them. It has often been observed how, in his earliest dramas, Shakespeare seems alternately to imitate and parody both dramatists. What could be more natural in a junior member of this confraternity than to copy those whom he was ambitious
to succeed? It was the time, after all, of their maximum effectiveness and success.
The Spanish Tragedy
was so popular that it propagated a number of imitations and was revised in 1602, after the playwright’s death, with additions by Ben Jonson. So for almost twenty years it remained part of the staple fare of theatrical entertainment. What else would the young Shakespeare do but copy it?

There was one other association between Kyd and Shakespeare. Neither had been to university. As products of the grammar school only, they were both criticised by the “university wits” for their lack of learning. They were condemned by Nashe, Greene and other graduates as ex-scriveners or ex-schoolmasters, in terms that make it very difficult to know which of the two is being addressed. So there was a connection.

It was a small and intense world. These young dramatists stole lines and characters from one another. They criticised one another. Their plays were put on in competition, one with another, like the works of the Greek tragedians. The success of
The Spanish Tragedy
in 1586 seems to have inspired, or provoked, Marlowe into writing another play of bombastic eloquence. The two parts of
Tamburlaine
were acted at the end of the following year, but the speed of production and performance suggests that Marlowe had already written the plays in outline. They did constitute a revolution in English drama, however, but like other young artists Marlowe quickly acquired notoriety for his life as much as for his art. He was generally regarded as an atheist, a blasphemer and a pederast. He had become, after his first success upon the stage, a notorious renegade.

He was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker who was first shaped by the same kind of grammar-school training that Shakespeare experienced at Stratford; but, unlike Shakespeare, he moved on to university. Even before he attained his degree, however, he was involved in some kind of clandestine government activity. Like the salamander he seemed to live and thrive in fire. His comments, repeated at second hand, were themselves incendiary. He is supposed to have said that “all protestantes are Hypocritical asses” and “all they love not Tobacco and Boies were fooles.” He has been associated with the “school of night,” as we have observed, and is reported to have remarked that “Moyses was but a Jugler & that one Heriots being Sir W Raleighs man Can do more than he.” Heriot and Raleigh were members of that esoteric
society. Marlowe was also engaged in various forms of surveillance activity, particularly in regard to Catholics, but it is not at all clear whether he was a government agent, a double agent, or both. He was not in any case someone to be trusted. In 1589 he and another “university wit,” Thomas Watson, were assailed by the son of an innkeeper; Watson stabbed the man to death, with the result that Watson and Marlowe were consigned to prison. Both Watson and Marlowe lived and worked in the theatre district of Shoreditch, which is perhaps where the young Shakespeare encountered them.

Marlowe was in one sense the marvellous boy of English drama. He was the same age as Shakespeare and made the journey to London at approximately the same time. It is convenient to consider Shakespeare as somehow “after” Marlowe, but it is more appropriate to see them as exact contemporaries, with Shakespeare having fewer obvious advantages.

The success of the two parts of Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine
, for example, was immediate and profound. It was an act of dramatic independence on his part to present a pagan protagonist without in any sense disavowing him. Since it is in large measure a drama of conquest and success, it has been suggested that there is no play of contraries to enliven the action; but the contraries exist in the relationship between author and audience. He is perhaps the first dramatist in English to assert himself in the manner of the poets. The drama of the preceding period had remained to a large extent communal or impersonal; but Marlowe changed all that. He introduced a personal voice. It is the voice of Tamburlaine, but within its register there is the unmistakable accent of Marlowe himself (I, ii, 175-8):

It excited the audience because it caught the burgeoning mood of ambitious purpose and spirited individualism. It was an Elizabethan voice. If Tamburlaine was guilty of hubris, then so were many other Elizabethan adventurers. It was the penalty of “aspiring minds,” to use Tamburlaine’s own phrase. The thumping rhythm of the verse, comprised of what were called “high astounding terms,” earned the rebuke of a young playwright clearly envious of Marlowe’s sudden success. In a pamphlet published the year after
the productions of
Tamburlaine
, Robert Greene complained that he was being criticised “for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the fa-burden of Bow Bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlan …”
⁵
Another Elizabethan pamphleteer, Thomas Nashe, was also caustic about Marlowe’s declamatory verse, describing it as “the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon.”
⁶
It was such a new voice that it had suddenly become disconcerting.

It was a voice that Shakespeare heard and internalised; it became one of the many voices that he could call upon at will. In such a relatively small and enclosed world, of course, influences and associations can be traced in every direction.
Tamburlaine
influenced the shape of Shakespeare’s history plays, and the history plays in turn seem to have affected Marlowe’s composition of
Edward II
. It is even possible that they collaborated on aspects of the trilogy concerning Henry VI. As has already been observed, the young Shakespeare no doubt also acted in
The Jew of Malta
and
The Massacre at Paris
. That he was mightily impressed and influenced by Marlowe is not in doubt; it is also clear that in his earliest plays Shakespeare stole or copied some of his lines, parodied him, and generally competed with him. Marlowe was the contemporary writer who most exercised him. He was the competitor. He was the antagonist to be mastered. He haunts Shakespeare’s expression, like a figure standing by his shoulder. But Shakespeare’s muse was an envious one, ready to deflate or destroy any contestant.

It is possible, however, that the young Shakespeare kept his personal distance from Marlowe. Marlowe’s reputation always preceded him. In the language of another era, he was generally considered to be mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But there was another distinction between the two playwrights. Marlowe, like the other writers trained at university, came to the theatre from the outside. Shakespeare was the first who emerged as a writer through the ranks of a company. He came from the inside, as a fully theatrical professional. He did not consider actors to be hirelings, or servants, but as companions. It is a fundamental difference. In a later play,
The Second Return to Parnassus
, the actors Burbage and Kempe criticise the “university wits” for writing plays that “smell too much of that writer Ovid, and talk too much Proserpina and Jupiter.” In contrast to these allegorising and mythologising writers “our fellow Shakespeare … it’s a shrewd fellow indeed … puts them all down.” The emphasis here is upon
“our fellow,” one of the actors, an integral part of the company rather than some hired hand. It is significant that at first Shakespeare surpassed his university contemporaries in stagecraft rather than in plot. His association with Kyd and Marlowe, through Lord Strange’s Men, nourished strange rivalries.

W
ithin a few years
Lord Strange’s Men had acquired an enviable reputation. This can be measured by the fact that when Leicester’s Men were disbanded, on that nobleman’s death in 1588, many of the players chose to join Strange’s Men. They had good material with which to work. Two of Shakespeare’s earliest plays were already part of the repertoire. We can trace some of their tours in this early period—Coventry in 1584, Beverley in 1585, and Coventry again in 1588—and their likely London venues are well known. In the 1580s, with Shakespeare as one of their number, they played at the Cross Keys Inn, the Theatre and the Curtain. The eclipse of the Queen’s Men after 1588 helped Lord Strange’s Men rise to eminence, and by 1590 they were sometimes acting jointly with the Admiral’s Men as the paramount companies of the period. This meant that they had also acquired the services of Edward Alleyn, the prime actor of the Admiral’s Men and already regarded as the great tragedian of the period. It was he who made such a success of Marlowe’s plays, having taken the leading parts in
Tamburlaine, the Jew of Malta
and
Doctor Faustus
. Since he acted with Shakespeare, and may have played Talbot in
King Henry VI
as well as the title role in
Titus Andronicus
, his acting style is of some interest.