Shakespeare (47 page)

But we must never forget the stridency of the Elizabethan theatre. Shy-lock would have been played with a red wig and bottle nose. The play is, after all, entitled the “comicall History.” The play retains strong elements of the
commedia dell’arte
, and can indeed be seen in part as a grotesque comedy which includes the figures of the Pantaloon, the Dottore, the first and second lovers, and of course the zanies or buffoons. But Shakespeare cannot use any dramatic convention without in some way changing it. In
The Merchant of Venice
the usual rules of the
commedia dell’arte
are subverted. The fact that it also incorporates fanciful elements from other sources, such as Portia’s riddle of the caskets, only serves to emphasise the highly theatrical and dream-like world in which it is set. There was perhaps a masque introduced in the course of the narrative, which in turn suggests that at least one version of the play was designed to be performed at Burbage’s newly refurbished Blackfriars; an indoor playhouse was the appropriate setting for an elegant entertainment of that sort. There are, indeed, images of music throughout the play which reach the peak of their crescendo in the last scene at Belmont (2340-4):

All of the scenes are wrapped in the greater unreality of sixteenth-century theatrical convention, which veered closer towards nineteenth-century melodrama or pantomime than twentieth-century naturalistic theatre.

There were a small number of Jews in sixteenth-century London, as well as ostensible converts from Judaism known as Marranos, generally living and working under assumed names. In 1594, only two years before the first production of
The Merchant of Venice
, the Earl of Essex had been instrumental in the apprehension, torture and death of Roderigo Lopez, a Jewish doctor accused of attempting to poison the queen. There is an allusion to that affair in the play itself. But the stage image of Jews essentially came from the mystery plays, where they were pilloried as the tormentors of Jesus. In the dramatic cycle Herod was played in a red wig, for example; it represents the origin of the clown in pantomime. It was the costume of Barabas in Marlowe’s
The Jew of Malta
. It is, in effect, the image with which Shakespeare was obliged to work. Yet out of the character he created something infinitely more interesting and sympathetic than the stock type. As a result Shylock has entered the imagination of the world.

L
ess than three months
after Hamnet’s death, John Shakespeare was awarded a coat of arms by the Garter King of Arms. He became a gentleman, and of course his son would share that appellation by inheritance. It is more than likely, in fact, that Shakespeare himself was responsible for the renewal of an application that his father had made—and then dropped—twenty-eight years before. The cost of obtaining the coat of arms had then seemed prohibitive but, in the milder climate of Shakespeare’s new-found affluence, that impediment had gone. It is difficult to be sure of the time needed to procure such a suit, but Shakespeare must have entered his father’s submission before Hamnet’s death. It would have been fitting and appropriate for Shakespeare to wish to pass on his new status to his only son, a natural succession that Hamnet’s death frustrated.

The coat of arms was a rebus, or pun on the name of Shakespeare. On the grant of arms an heraldic drawing was sketched at the top of the page; it showed a falcon, holding a spear, perched above a shield and crest. The falcon is displaying its wings, in the action known as “shaking.”
¹
The motto included here,
“Non sainz droict,”
means “Not without right.” The shaken spear was of gold tipped with silver, as if it were some courtly or ceremonial staff, and the falcon itself was considered to be a noble bird. The livery of the Earl of Southampton contained four falcons, and it is possible that Shakespeare was claiming some kind of relationship with him. The whole device is somewhat
assertive, and no doubt reflected the conviction of the Shakespeare males (or at least of one of them) that they were indeed gentlemen.

The Garter King of Arms had granted these arms to John Shakespeare “being solicited and by credible report informed” that his “parentes & late Grandfather for his faithfull & valeant service were advaunced & rewarded by the most Prudent Prince King Henry the seventh of famous memorie.”
²
This seems to have been sheer invention on the Shakespeares’ part; there is no record of any Shakespeare being honoured by Henry VII. But it may have been one of those “family stories” that are believed without necessarily being investigated.

Shakespeare seems to have been preoccupied with heraldry. In
Richard II
he displays considerable technical knowledge of the subject, while Katherine says in
The Taming of the Shrew
(1028-30):

To which Petruchio replies:

There is in the same play an episode clearly taken from a volume of heraldry, Gerard Legh’s
Accedens of Armory
³
suggesting that Shakespeare was reading such books as early as the 1580s. He wished to demonstrate, and to publicise to the world, his “gentle” state. It was a way of setting himself apart from the still ambiguous reputation enjoyed by most players. It was also an indirect way of associating himself with the Ardens of his mother’s line. In a more immediate sense he was restoring his family’s reputation after the sudden and perplexing withdrawal of John Shakespeare from public business.

At this late date it may seem a mere contrivance, an honorific without meaning, but in the late sixteenth century it was a sign and emblem of true identity. It afforded the bearer proper individuality as well as a secure place within the general hierarchy of the community. By combining emblem and reality, spectacle and decoration, heraldry truly became a Tudor obsession. There were no fewer than seven standard texts on the subject. In this, at least, Shakespeare was very much a man of his age. The world of his drama is that of the great house or of the court; none of his central protagonists is “low born,” to use the phrase of the time, but is a gentleman, a lord or a monarch.
The only exceptions are the protagonists of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, citizens all. The common people are, in the mass, described by him as “the rabble.”

But John Shakespeare’s right to bear arms was not without critics. From the late 1590s onwards the York Herald, Sir Ralph Brooke, had challenged the decisions of the Garter King of Arms, Sir William Dethick, in granting arms to apparently unworthy recipients. There were accusations of malfeasance, if not explicitly of fraud and bribery. In Brooke’s list of twenty-three “mean persons” who had been granted arms wrongly, the name of Shakespeare came fifth. The qualities of the recipient were called into question, to which William Dethick replied that “the man was a magistrate of Stratford-upon-Avon: a Justice of the Peace. He married the daughter and heir of Arden, of a good substance and ability.” There is at least one false note in this defence. Mary Arden was the daughter and heir of a very obscure branch of the Arden family, and it is likely that the Shakespeares exaggerated her ancestry. As in their former claim of a forefather rewarded by Henry VII, the ambition outran the reality.

The fact that the dispute had become public knowledge must have been an irritant, to put it mildly, to Shakespeare, whose assertive emblem and motto had now been cast into doubt. This did not prevent him, however, from applying three years later for the Shakespeare arms to be impaled with the arms of the Arden family. He may have done this “to please his Mother, and to be partly proud” (35-6), as the citizen says of Coriolanus, but it suggests the persistence and quality of his interest in such matters.

He also received some barbed criticism from a dramatic colleague. In
Every Man out of His Humour
Ben Jonson introduces a vainglorious rustic, Sogliardo, who acquires a coat of arms. “I can write myself a gentleman now,” he says; “here’s my patent, it cost me thirty pounds, by this breath.” The arms include a boar’s head to which an appropriate motto is suggested, “Not without mustard.” This has generally been taken, not without reason, as an allusion to Shakespeare’s “Not without right.” The mustard may also refer to the bright gold of the Shakespearian coat. So his newly found eminence did not go without some malicious comment.

Yet, characteristically enough, Shakespeare was also able to satirise his own pretensions. In
Twelfth Night
, performed in the period when Brooke was challenging Dethick’s bestowal of arms upon the Shakespeares, the steward Malvolio has pretensions to gentility. He is persuaded to wear yellow stockings “cross-gartered”—with a garter crossing on each leg—and his lower body
would therefore have been seen as a grotesque parody of Shakespeare’s coat of arms.
⁴
These arms were also yellow, with a black diagonal band. Malvolio is by far the most deluded and ridiculous character in the entire play, and in the cross-gartering episode he ambles and simpers upon the stage in a caricature of gentility. “Some are borne great … Some atcheeue greatnesse,” he declares. “And some haue greatnesse thrust vpon them” (1516-20). If Shakespeare played the part of Malvolio, as seems to be likely, the joke could not have been more explicit. It would have come naturally to Shakespeare—to parody his pretensions to gentility at the same time as he pursued them with the utmost seriousness, to mock that which was most important to him. It was a part of his instinctive ambivalence in all the affairs of the world.

J
ames Burbage’s plan
to convert part of Blackfriars into a private I theatre, and thus circumvent the authority of the City fathers, was not advancing. In the early winter of 1596 it was criticised by thirty-one residents in the immediate vicinity. Their petition objected to the erection of “a common playhouse … which will grow to be a very great annoyance and trouble, not only to all the noblemen and gentlemen thereabout inhabiting, but also a general inconvenience to all the inhabitants of the said precinct, by reason of the gathering together of all manner of lewd and vagrant persons.” There were allusions to “the great pestering and filling-up of the same precinct,”
¹
and to the loud sound of drums and trumpets coming from the stage.

Another piece of playhouse business was responsible for Shakespeare’s next entry in the public records. He had played some part in aborted negotiations for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to use Francis Langley’s theatre, the Swan, on Bankside. It was a readily available alternative to the Curtain and the disputed Theatre. The Swan had been erected by Langley two years before in the neighbourhood of Paris Garden. It was the latest, and grandest, of the public theatres. There is a famous drawing of it by Johannes de Witt, and such was the ubiquity of this print that for many years it was taken as the model of all the sixteenth-century playhouses. Since each playhouse differed
from every other, it was an unwarrantable assumption. In his notes de Witt explains that the Swan is “the largest and most magnificent” of the London playhouses, capable of holding three thousand spectators; it was constructed of “a mass of flint stones (of which there is a prodigious supply in Britain), and supported by wooden columns painted in such excellent imitation of marble that it is able to deceive even the most cunning.” He also disclosed that “its form resembles that of a Roman work.”
²
Langley’s intent was that of somewhat cheap magnificence. Despite its exterior lustre, however, the Swan never achieved any great theatrical eminence. If the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had moved there, in the winter of 1596, its theatrical history would have been very different.