Shakespeare (25 page)

He was very tall, and at a height of over 6 feet towered over contemporaries who were on average 6 inches shorter than their counterparts in the twenty-first century. As a result he was very striking, and excelled in what
were known as “majesticall” parts; Ben Jonson alluded to him at a later date in
Discoveries
with references to
“scenicall
strutting and furious vociferation.” His role in
Tamburlaine
, for example, became a byword for “passionate” or “stalking” action—a success all the more remarkable because he was only twenty-one at the time. Nashe said of him that “not Roscius and Aesop, those tragedians admired before Christ was born, could ever perform more in action than famous Ned Allen.”
¹
He was in the tradition of non-naturalistic acting, grand and exaggerated. He could, in the phrase of the time, tear a cat upon the stage. It is likely that Shakespeare condemned his style in the words of Hamlet, where “it offends mee to the soule, to heare a robustious perwigpated fellowe tere a passion to totters, to very rags … it out Herods Herod” (1736-7); and indeed Alleyn was better suited to Kyd or to Marlowe. Shakespeare worked much more successfully with Richard Burbage; Burbage was a tragic actor who may have rendered character and feeling with less circumstance and, as it were, subdued himself to his parts. But it would be unwise and unhistorical to draw too broad a distinction between the two actors. Both were conventionally compared to Proteus for their ability to assume a part, and Elizabethan acting was never—and never could have been—“naturalistic” in the contemporary sense. It was always in part a rhetorical performance. The playhouses exhibited the art of speech. The twin reputations of Burbage and Alleyn also throw an interesting light on the larger conditions of the theatre. The 1570s and the 1580s had been the decades of the comic actors, Tarlton and Kempe principal among them, while the 1590s and early 1600s witnessed the rise of the tragic actor as a symbol of Elizabethan drama itself.

In 1590 the Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men had come to some reciprocal arrangement whereby the Admiral’s performed at the Theatre and Strange’s at the adjacent Curtain. In plays that required a large number of performers, they acted together in one or the other of the playhouses which were both now owned by James Burbage. In the following season of 1591-2 the joint company was commanded to perform six times at court. Since Lord Strange was related to the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, there may have been some prejudice in their favour. But they could not have been a disappointment; they returned to court in the following Christmas season, with three separate performances. We have a picture, then, of the young Shakespeare acting before the queen. Among the other twenty-seven actors in Lord Strange’s company, and thus Shakespeare’s colleagues, were Augustine Phillips, Will Sly, Thomas Pope, George Bryan, Richard
Cowley and of course Burbage himself. The remarkable fact is that all of these actors worked with Shakespeare for the rest of his life, and that their names are appended to the First Folio of his work published in 1623. They eventually joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Company with him, and stayed within it. It is a plausible supposition that they formed a small body of talent that remained relatively stable in very difficult circumstances. Shakespeare was loyal to them, remembering some of them in his will, and they remained loyal to him.

The titles of some of their early plays have survived, and we can assume that the young Shakespeare at some point acted in such popular dramas as
The Seven Deadly Sins, A Knack to Know a Knave, Friar Bacon, Orlando Furioso
and
Muly Molloco
. There is a “plot” or stage précis of one of these plays,
The Seven Deadly Sins
, in which many of the actors are named—among them Pope, Phillips, Sly and Burbage. There is also a stray reference to the actors who played female parts—among them Nick, Robert, Ned and Will. “Will” is interesting. It may seem implausible that an actor, now in his mid-twenties, would play a female role; but it is not inconceivable. It is, in any case, intriguing.

In these early years Shakespeare’s relationship with Lord Strange himself may have been amplified by a poem. “The Phoenix and Turtle” has puzzled many critics and scholars with its recondite meaning and esoteric vocabulary; but its purpose has also proved perplexing. It is not known to whom it is addressed or upon what occasion. It might have been written for Lord Strange’s sister upon her marriage in 1586.
²
If that is indeed the case, then the young dramatist’s relationship with this noble family was equivalent to that of a household poet. It has sometimes been suggested that Lord Strange himself directly commissioned Shakespeare to compose the cycle of history plays, as a tribute to Elizabeth and the nation equally. Shakespeare, in his historical narratives, awarded Lord Stanley’s ancestors with notably patriotic and benevolent roles. Lord Strange’s relatives, the Stanleys and the Derbys, are prominent in all three parts of
Henry VI;
in
Richard III
the victorious Henry Bolingbroke is crowned by the Earl of Derby. The praise of Clifford in
Henry VI
, for example, may well be a reflection of the fact that Lord Strange was the son of Margaret Clifford. What better way of acknowledging a patron?

It is not at all clear, however, when Shakespeare began writing these histories,
or when he embarked upon comedies such as
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
and melodramas such as
Titus Andronicus
. Biographers and scholars have argued over these dates for years, if not for centuries, and there is still no agreement. The theatrical records of this period are notoriously imprecise and muddled. The provenance and ownership of early plays are notoriously difficult to prove. Companies of players owned certain plays, as did the managers of the London theatres. There was a great deal of movement between companies, and actors sometimes brought plays with them. Companies also sold plays to one another.

Various inferior plays have been ascribed to Shakespeare as juvenile work, written when he first became acquainted with the stage. Other, more mature, plays have been described as later versions of his apprentice work. Perhaps his first plays have simply disappeared, lost in the voracious maw of time and forgetfulness. Certain surviving plays bear traces of the young Shakespeare’s additions and interpolations. In his first years he may have worked as a reviser of botched or incomplete plays. He may simply have revived old plays by adding new colour. There may, in other words, be a great deal more Shakespeare than is currently included in scholarly editions. Did he collaborate with other dramatists? It is impossible to tell. In his early years he may not even have been particularly “Shakespearian.”

The supposition must be that he began to write long before he came to London—poetry, if not drama, came instinctively and easily to him. Given the large number of plays that have been ascribed to him, it is also fair to assume that he began writing drama soon after first joining the theatre as an actor. His earliest known plays are so expert in construction and so plausible in speech that it is hard to believe that they represent the first exercise of his pen, adept though that pen was. There are certain early plays that may be in part or in whole his work. There was an early version of
Hamlet
, and perhaps of
Pericles
. There are other plays which bear the unmistakable impress of Shakespeare’s imagination,
Edmund Ironside
and
Edward the Third
. They are well shaped and confident, with a steady mastery of the verse line and a fine ear for invective and declamation. They lack the Shakespearian timbre or tone, but even Shakespeare had to begin somewhere. And there are the strangest moments of recognition—of half-familiar cadences and half-shaped images—as if the shadow of Shakespeare had passed over the page. Textual analysis also suggests that
The Troublesome Raigne of King John
and
Edmund Ironside
were both written by the same person, a “young writer, glowing but dimly in the predawn darkness of Elizabethan drama, just before the morning
stars sung together.”
³
There is one other question that has never satisfactorily been laid to rest. Who else could have written them?

Their inclusion in any list of tentative Shakespearian titles is not surprising, since in many instances they represent the germ or seed from which his more recognisable plays emerge. Nor is it inconceivable that he revised his apprentice work at a later date. It is generally accepted that he continued to revise his plays all his life, keeping in mind the demands of performance and contemporaneity. The suggestion has been rejected by some editors and textual scholars, on the very good grounds that it would make their task of publishing a “definitive” edition of any play quite impossible. But there is every reason to believe that the plays currently available in print offer only a provisional version of the plays actually performed.

So we see Shakespeare attending the plays of John Lyly and George Peek as well as watching the first performances of
Tamburlaine
. He knew
The Spanish Tragedy
very well. He was all too aware of Marlowe’s brilliant success. Contemporary literature was also around him. The manuscript of the first three books of Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene
was in London, and the second edition of Holinshed’s
Chronicles
had just been published. If he now felt impelled to write for the stage, all these sources and influences were at hand. We also have the alleged “early” plays by Shakespeare that, at a conservative estimate, account for three years of his writing. Indeed they all fall within the period 1587 to 1590. During this period, too, the pamphleteer Robert Greene mounted a number of attacks upon an unnamed dramatist, whom he considered to be both unlearned and a plagiarist of other men’s styles. Who was that particular dramatist?

R
obert Greene himself”
was one of the “university wits,” a friend to both Nashe and Marlowe, who like many of his Oxbridge contemporaries was obliged to earn his living by hack-work. He was very popular at the time—plays like
The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
and
The History of Orlando Furioso
were “box-office successes” for Philip Henslowe at the Rose Theatre. His pamphlets are still considered to be unrivalled accounts of the life of sixteenth-century London. But he was sensitive to slights and extremely envious of his talented contemporaries.

He first attacked Shakespeare overtly in 1592. But earlier and more circumspect criticisms were also directed against him and Thomas Kyd. In 1587 Greene condemned those “scabd lades” who among other things “write or publish anie thing … [which] is distild out of ballets.”
¹
The argument still continues whether the plot of
Titus Andronicus
is derived from a ballad. It was a slight and fleeting reference, but suggestive. In the following year Greene’s companion and fellow wit, Thomas Nashe, continued the assault with an attack upon those writers who “seek with slanderous reproaches to carp at all, being often-times most unlearned of all.”
²
Kyd and Shakespeare were the only “unlearned” playwrights who had achieved success upon the public stage by this time. In 1589 Greene composed a romance entitled
Menaphon
in which a “countrey-Author” “can serve to make a pretie speech”
but his style is “stufft with prettie Similes and far-fetched metaphors.”
³
These would become characteristic criticisms of Shakespeare’s style.

In the preface to
Menaphon
, Nashe amplified the attack. In 1589, Shakespeare was twenty-five years old. Nashe had just come down from Cambridge, and had decided to live upon his wits; he was the son of a curate from Lowestoft, and his subsequent career seems to fulfil the Greek proverb—son of a priest, grandson of the devil. He colluded with his friend Greene, and soon carved out a career for himself as a satirist and pamphleteer, poet and writer of occasional plays. He was well acquainted with Shakespeare; he hovered in the immediate vicinity of Lord Strange and the Earl of Southampton, looking for patronage and praise, and did not always evince the benign spirit of his contemporary. He was three years younger than Shakespeare and seems to have possessed the hardness or cruelty of early ambition; he resented the success of Shakespeare, and wished to rival or even surpass it. He never could accomplish that goal, and quickly became a bitter and disappointed young man. He was incarcerated in Newgate and died at the age of thirty-four or thirty-five.

In the preface of 1589 Nashe first attacks certain unlearned writers who are happy to appropriate the work of Ovid and of Plutarch and “vaunt” it as their own. “It is a common practice now a daies,” Nashe writes, “amongst a sort of shifting companions, that runne through every arte and thrive by none, to leave the trade of
Noverint
wherto they were borne, and busie themselves with indeuors of Art, that could scarcelie latinize their neck-verse if they should haue neede.” The trade of Noverint was that of the law-clerk, to which we have tentatively assigned Shakespeare in his youth. The charge that he could scarcely Latinise may be an anticipation of Jonson’s remark about “small Latin and less Greek,” with the obvious implication that this unnamed writer had not attended university. Nashe goes on to remark that “yet English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences, as
Bloud is a begger
, and so foorth; and if you entreat him faire in a frostie morning, he will afford whole
Hamlets
, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches. But o griefe! Tempus edax rerum, where’s that will last always?” So whom is Nashe attacking? The reference to “English Seneca”—the unnamed writer did not have enough Latin to read it in the original—would yield the thunderous melodrama of
Titus Andronicus
. The reference to
Hamlet
is self-explanatory, and in its original form this play may very well have tried to out-Seneca Seneca. And the quotation?
“Tempus edax rerum”
appears in
The Troublesome Raigne of King John
, the clear forerunner of Shakespeare’s
more famous
King John
. It is now also a critical commonplace that Shakespeare adapted Ovid and Plutarch.