Shakespeare (26 page)

There is then a description of those dramatists who “intermeddle with Italian translations, wherein how poorelie they have plotted,” a plausible allusion to one of the earliest of Shakespeare’s extant plays,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
. The playwright is also deemed to “borrow invention of Ariosto”; the plot of
The Taming of a Shrew
derives in part from
I Suppositi
of Ariosto. It concludes with a reference to those who “bodge up a blanke verse with ifs and ands”; then, on a more personal note, they are accused of “having starched their beards most curiouslie.” There are later references to starched beards, as well as other allusions to law-clerking and schoolmastering as the unfortunate attributes of a certain country writer. It is an interesting mixture, out of which seems to emerge the elusive form of Shakespeare—indeterminate, not yet full shaped, not yet wholly familiar or recognisable, but Shakespeare.

There are many other specific references, rushing headlong over one another in Nashe’s cryptic and densely allusive prose. “To be or not to be” is ascribed to Cicero’s
“id am esse am non esse.”
The author is accused of copying Kyd and of trying to “outbrave” Greene and Marlowe with his own brand “of a bragging blank verse.” Can we see also in a reference to “kilcowconceipt” a nod to Shakespeare’s alleged origins in a butcher’s shop? The conclusion must be that these allusions are all pointing in the same direction, to the unnamed author who by 1589 had written early versions of
Turn Andronicus, The Taming of a Shrew, King John
and
Hamlet
. Who else might it have been? It was a relatively small world with a limited number of occupants, and there are very few other candidates as the targets for the combined scorn of Greene and of Nashe.

In 1590 Robert Greene returned to the attack. In
Never Too Late
he abuses an actor whom he names Roscius, after the famous Roman player. “Why Roscius, art thou proud with Esops crow, being pranct with the glorie of others feathers? Of thyself thou canst say nothing …”
⁴
He repeats this attack two years later, when he refers to his opponent as “Shake-scene.” But common sense would suggest that this was a long-running campaign inaugurated by a “university wit” who believed himself to be unfairly criticised or neglected in favour of an “unlearned” and imitative “countrey-Author”—who, it seems, never once responded to the attacks upon him.

If the intended target is indeed Shakespeare, then we have evidence that he had a distinctive presence in the London theatrical world by the late 1580s.
This means that he had begun writing for the stage very soon after his first arrival in London. The fact that he is also named as “Roscius” suggests that he had already won some acclaim for his skills as an actor. Scholars and critics disagree about any and every piece of evidence; but there is an old saying that, when doctors disagree, the patient must walk away. The figure walking away from us may be the young Shakespeare.

S
o we can create
a plausible chronology of this earliest period. In 1587, when part of the Queen’s Men, Shakespeare wrote an early version of
Hamlet
. This juvenile
Hamlet
has disappeared—except that from Nashe’s account of 1589 we know it contained the words “to be or not to be,” as well as a ghost crying out “Revenge!” There is a long tradition of anecdotal evidence that Shakespeare played that ghost, which would also make sense of Nashe’s otherwise incomprehensible aside on the unnamed writer—“if you entreat him faire in a frostie morning.”

Was
King Leir
, also written in 1587, an earlier version of Shakespeare’s tragedy? It begins with the famous division of the kingdom, but then diverges from the later version; there are more elements of conventional romance, derived from the popular stories of the period. In particular
King Leir
has a happy ending in which Leir and his good daughter are reunited.
King Leir
was performed by the Queen’s Men at a time when it is conjectured that Shakespeare was part of that company, and it is in many respects an accomplished and inventive piece of work. But it is so utterly unlike anything written even by the young Shakespeare that his authorship must be seriously in question. Another possible form of transmission suggests itself. If Shakespeare did indeed act in it, the plot and characters of the original may have lodged in his imagination. In the other early dramas related to Shakespeare, there is a notable consonance between lines and scenes. There is no such resemblance
between
Leir
and
Lear
, except for the basic premise of the plot. So it seems likely that, on this occasion, Shakespeare was reviving an old story without much reference to the original play.
King Leir
is utterly unlike
King Lear
.

There is a third play that can be dated to 1587, if only because of a reference to it in
Tarlton’s Jests
. “At the Bull in Bishops-gate was a play of Henry the fift, where in the judge was to take a box on the eare; and because he was absent that should take the blow, Tarlton himselfe, ever forward to please, took upon him to play the same judge, beside his owne part of the clowne.” The Bull here is the Red Bull; the clown, Tarlton, died in 1588 and so this version of
King Henry V
must predate that time. Tarlton was also a member of the Queen’s Men, so the associations are clear enough.
The Famous Victories of Henry V
, “as it was plaide by the Queenes Maiesties Players,” has survived in an edition published in 1593. It is not a particularly graceful or elegant piece of work, but it does contain scenes and characters that were later taken up by Shakespeare in the two parts of
Henry IV and
in
Henry V
. In particular the “low” acquaintances of Prince Harry, Falstaff and Bardolph and the others, are anticipated in the crude but effective humour of Ned and Tom, Dericke and John Cobler, in
The Famous Victories
. Other incidents in Shakespeare’s plays are also based upon scenes in this earlier drama. Again, as in the case of
King Leir
, it seems likely that he acted as a member of the Queen’s Men in
The Famous Victories
and then at a later date employed the elements of the plot that most appealed to him.

There are other intriguing productions that, from internal and external evidence, we may ascribe approximately to 1588. One of the most significant is
The Taming of a Shrew
, which without doubt is the model or forerunner of
The Taming of the Shrew
. There are of course differences between
A Shrew
and
The Shrew. A Shrew
is set in Greece rather than Italy, employs different names for most of the characters and is little more than half the length of the more famous play. But there are also strong resemblances, not least in the storyline, and a large number of verbal parallels—including exact repetitions of such recondite phrases as “beat me to death with a bottom of a brown thread.” The conclusions are clear enough. Either Shakespeare took over lines and scenes from the work of an unnamed and unknown dramatist, or he was improving upon his own original. On the principle that the simplest explanation is the most likely, we can suggest that Shakespeare’s
The Taming of the Shrew
was a revision and revival of one of his first successes. The later version is immeasurably deeper and richer than the original; the poetry is more accomplished, and the characterisation more assured. Since they were published some twenty-nine years apart, the author certainly had time and opportunity to re-create or reinvent the text. We may use a simile drawn from another art.
A Shrew
is a drawing, while
The Shrew
is an oil-painting. But the difference in execution and composition, the difference between a sketch and a masterpiece, cannot conceal the underlying resemblance. This was obvious enough to the publishers and printers involved in producing editions of both plays; they were both licensed under the same copyright. The publisher of
A Shrew
went on to print editions of
The Rape of Lucrece
and the first part of
Henry IV
, so he retained his Shakespearian connections.

The most intriguing factor, however, in this early play of Shakespeare is the habit of purloining Marlowe’s lines; most of the interpolations were removed at a later date, when they were no longer considered timely, but to a large extent they characterise
A Shrew
. The two parts of
Tamburlaine
had been performed in 1587, and when
A Shrew’s
Fernando (aka Petruchio) feeds Kate from the point of his dagger, he is satirising a similar scene in Marlowe. The young Shakespeare also continually parodies the language of
Doctor Faustus
, which strongly suggests that it was the successor of
Tamburlaine
on the stage in 1588. There is the old proverb about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, and from the evidence of
A Shrew
Shakespeare was mightily impressed by Marlowe’s rhetorical verse. But it is clear that he already had a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, and realised that the bravura of Marlovian poetry might seem inept in a less rarefied context. At a later date he would contrast the high rhetoric of the heroic protagonists with the low demotic of the ordinary crowd. The young Shakespeare had, in other words, an instinctive comic gift.

In both versions of the drama he also reveals a highly theatrical sensibility. The play is set within a play; the themes of disguise, of changing costume, are central to his genius; his characters are very good fantasists who change identity with great ease. They are all, in a word, performers. The whole essence of the wooing between Kate and Petruchio is performance. There is here a plethora of words. The young Shakespeare loved word-play of every kind, as if he could not curb his exuberance. He loved quoting bits of Italian, introducing Latin tags, making classical allusions. For all these reasons the
play celebrates itself. It celebrates its being in the world, far beyond any possible “meanings” that have been attached to it over the centuries.

The Taming of a Shrew
was in turn satirised by Nashe and Greene in
Menaphon
, published in 1589, and in a play entitled
A Knack to Know a Knave
, reputed to be the fruit of their collaboration. We must imagine an atmosphere of rivalry and slanging which, depending on local circumstances, was variously good-humoured or bitter. Each young dramatist quoted from the others’ works, and generally added to the highly coloured and even frenetic atmosphere of London’s early drama. Only Shakespeare, however, seems to have quoted so extensively from his rival Marlowe; the evidence of
A Shrew
in fact suggests that there was some reason for his being accused, by Greene, of decking himself in borrowed plumes. It is all very high-spirited stuff, and
A Shrew
is nothing if not swift and vivacious, but the egregious theft of Marlowe’s lines suggests that he did not intend the play to be taken very seriously. It was simply an entertainment of the hour. Yet, like many English farces, it proved to be a popular success.

If he could already triumph in comedy, there was no reason why he should not have tried his hand at history. Two of the other plays emerging in 1588, plausibly attributed to the young dramatist, are
Edmund Ironside
and
The Troublesome Raigne of King John. Edmund Ironside
has been the subject of much scholarly dispute,
¹
the controversy further inflamed by the fact that a manuscript version of the play can be located in the Manuscript Division of the British Library. It is written in a neat legal hand, on partly lined paper also used for legal documents, and displays several of Shakespeare’s characteristic quirks of spelling and orthography. The eager student may call up the document, and gaze with wild surmise on the ink possibly drawn from Shakespeare’s quill. Like the mask of Agamemnon and the Shroud of Turin, however, the relics of the great dead are the cause only of bitter rivalries and contradictory opinions. Palaeography is not necessarily an exact science.

The play itself concerns Edmund II, best known for his spirited defence of England against Canute in the early eleventh century. Canute and Edmund are seen in conflict, military and rhetorical, but their high intentions are often thwarted by the machinations of the evil Edricus. When the play ends in concord Edricus, in uncanny anticipation of Malvolio, stalks off the stage with the words “By heaven I’ll be revenged on both of you.” The part
of Edmund may have been meant for Edward Alleyn, fresh from his success as Tamburlaine and Faustus. The drama is in any case fluent and powerful, with a steady attention both to rhetorical effect and to ingenuity of plotting. It still seems fresh upon the page which, by any standard, must be a criterion for its authorship. It was not immediately licensed for performance, however, because the spirited dispute between two archbishops in the play was considered indecorous in a period when the clergy were lampooning each other in the religious squabble known as the “Martin Marprelate Controversy.” It was not in fact performed until the 1630s.