Shakespeare (51 page)

The poet’s passionate attachment to the young man of the sonnets, whether real or assumed, suggests that Shakespeare had an understanding of devoted male friendships. We have already noticed the presence of such friendships in the plays. It is also the case that Shakespeare was a “born” actor, and it has become apparent through the ages that actors are often possessed by an ambiguous sexuality. A great actor must always have a uniquely sensitive and yielding temperament, capable of assuming a thousand different moods, and psychologists have often assumed this to be a “feminine” component inherited from love or imitation of the mother. We do not need to go far down the by-ways of psychology to find this an eminently sensible observation. From
the time of the Greek dramas of the fifth century BC, actors have been classified as wanton or effeminate, and in the late sixteenth century London preachers and moralists inveighed against the uncertain sexuality of the players. Acting was also deemed to be unnatural, an attempt to escape from nature and an act of defiance against God. It does not prove anything about Shakespeare, but it does help to explain the context and society in which he worked.

In his writing he knew what it was like to be both Cleopatra and Antony, both Juliet and Romeo. He became Rosalind and Celia, Beatrice and Mistress Quickly. More than any of his contemporaries he created memorable female roles. This does not imply that he was in any sense homosexual but suggests, rather, an unfixed or floating sexual identity. He had the capacity to be both female and male, and the scope of his art must have affected his life in the world. We may recall here the recently discovered portrait of the Earl of Southampton apparently dressed as a woman. In the late sixteenth century it was considered natural and appropriate that high-born males should assert the feminine aspect of their natures; it was a part of the Renaissance humanism considered essential for “gentle” conduct. The concept of divine androgyny was an element in the popular and fashionable teaching inspired by Renaissance Platonists. This is the proper context in which to understand Shakespeare’s invocation of the “master-mistress” of his passion. His was not an invitation to sodomy, which remained a capital offence in sixteenth-century England together with heresy and sorcery. Even arguably homosexual poets such as Marlowe draped their allusions in appropriately classical garb. It has also been demonstrated that, in sixteenth-century texts, what may be described as theoretical homosexuality was considered to be a predilection of the noble and the well-born; so it would not have been unthinkable for the “gentle” Shakespeare to make poetical allusions to the subject. It was a love not of the phallus, but of the mind.

It is instructive to compare the women in his plays with the “Dark Lady” of the sonnets. His comic heroines are lively and self-assured, which may also be an implicit reference to their sexual vitality; they have enormous powers of will, in a world where “will” also meant sexual power and potency. Will Shakespeare was fully aware of this. But there are other females touched by more desperate and dangerous forces. Ted Hughes has noticed in the plays evidence of Shakespeare’s loathing of the lustful female together with an “obsession with chastity.”
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This may be true of the late plays, where Miranda and Perdita and Imogen are altogether non-sensual beings. But it is not
clear in these accounts whether the preoccupations of Shakespeare have been confused with those of his commentators. There is really no typical Shakespearian woman, in other words, and it is perhaps more interesting to study the responses they elicit from men. The most obvious and most common reaction is one of sexual jealousy, whether Othello at Desdemona or Leontes at Hermione. This is also the dramatic situation of the sonnets. There is much suspected betrayal and some real infidelity. It has become a commonplace of Shakespearian biography, of course, that Shakespeare suspected his absent wife of unfaithfulness. It is plausible but unprovable. We can only say that infidelity, true or false, plays as large a part in the plots of his plays as in the sequence of the sonnets.

It is of course true that most of Shakespeare’s plays involve the promise and the problems of love, in all its forms, and that his is the most profound treatment of love in the English language. It is natural and inevitable, therefore, that he should be preoccupied with sexual, as part of amatory, relationships. But that does not explain why sex is often treated with shame, horror and disgust. In his treatment of love he frequently uses the metaphors of warfare. The only couple who seem to be happily married in the plays are Claudius and Gertrude in
Hamlet
although, of course, Macbeth and his wife are not without fondness for each other. But these fortunate pairs are hardly what in the modern world would be called “role-models.” Unhappy love and amatory conflict are the staple of drama, and dramatic convenience does not necessarily reflect Shakespeare’s personal misgivings. There is no need to introduce a poignant autobiographical note.

J
ames Burbage had died
at the end of January 1597, and was buried in the little church of Shoreditch in the presence of his family and of the players. It has been assumed by some that he expired from disappointment or depression at the failure of his scheme to convert the Black-friars refectory into a playhouse, but he was probably too tough and experienced a manager to succumb to local difficulties. He was in any case past his mid-sixties, and in sixteenth-century terms had reached an advanced age. He left everything to his two sons who had continued in their father’s theatrical business. He gave the Theatre to Cuthbert Burbage, company sharer but not an actor, and the Blackfriars property to Richard Burbage, actor and company sharer; both properties may have seemed to his sons at the time to be the theatrical equivalent of the poisoned chalice, especially since Cuthbert was still not able to reach a satisfactory agreement with the landlord of the Theatre. The ground lease was set to expire in April 1597; Giles Allen agreed to an extension of the lease, but then objected to Richard Burbage as one of its guarantors. So it seems that in the late spring and early summer of 1597 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at the Curtain, while dispute continued over the now deserted Theatre. It was at the Curtain that the two completed parts of
Henry IV
were played.

Shakespeare had in fact stopped work upon the second part of
Henry IV
in order to concentrate upon
The Merry Wives of Windsor
. It is generally supposed that this latest comedy was written for the Garter Feast celebrated at Whitehall on 23 April 1597. Specifically it was a feast held in honour of the election of George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, as Knight of the Garter; he had just been appointed Lord Chamberlain after the death of Lord Cobham and had become the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The actors’ winter under Cobham’s rule had turned to glorious summer with the son of their former patron and supporter. The first Lord Hunsdon had been a welcome patron, and it seemed likely that his son would carry on that honourable tradition. It is reported that the queen asked for a drama about Falstaff in love, as we have already observed, and it is further reported that Shakespeare wrote the play in two weeks. Lord Hunsdon doubtless relayed the royal request, and Shakespeare immediately set to work. It is clear enough, given the number of their performances at court, that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were singled out for royal attention. Shakespeare may not have been court poet, but he was certainly favourite dramatist.

The Merry Wives of Windsor
was set in Windsor simply because the new knights were ceremonially installed at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. There is no indication of any full-length drama being presented at such Garter celebrations, but the masque at the end of the play in which Mistress Quickly, absurdly disguised as the Fairy Queen, trips a measure, might have been perfomed at the castle rather than at the feast in Westminster Palace. A fortnight seems a reasonable time for its composition, together with other incidental stories or pieces of dialogue. Shakespeare then subsequently wrote the rest of the play to lead to this celebratory climax.

The characters of Falstaff and Shallow, Pistol and Bardolph, were just too good to relinquish; by dint of popular applause they came back. In the first printed edition the principal attraction is made clear in the description of “an excellent and pleasant conceited commedie of Sir John Faulstof and the merry wyves of Windesor.” Shakespeare may also have included material that he was unable to use in the history plays themselves. He was thrifty in such matters. He also added a contemporary note. One of the exasperated husbands in the play, concerned about his wife’s possible adultery with Falstaff, takes on the assumed name of “Brooke.” It seems to be a clear if harmless hit against the Brooke family whose
paterfamilias
, Lord Cobham, had recently died. Yet it may also be a hit against Sir Ralph Brooke, the York Herald who was disputing the Shakespeares’ right to bear arms. Whatever
the truth of the matter Shakespeare was obliged by the Master of the Revels to turn “Brooke” into “Broome.” The joke is in any case lost upon posterity. There were other jokes, one about a German count who had been made a knight
in absentia
, suggesting that Shakespeare still had an eye for contemporaneous affairs.

The fact that the drama flowed so fluently from his pen suggests that it was an emanation from his natural wit—which means, in turn, that it can be interpreted as a traditional English comedy. Here are all the ingredients of English humour—a continual bawdiness of intention, a salacious narrative, and a man farcically dressed in “drag” as Falstaff escapes detection by posing as the fat woman of Brentford. There is also a comic Frenchman and, in true native style, a sudden turn towards supernaturalism at the end. More importantly, perhaps, sexual desire is continually transformed into farce. It is the stuff of a thousand English comedies, and in this place the sexual innuendo and the blue joke find their
locus classicus
. Others have noticed how in the play the English language is twisted and turned in a hundred different ways, in the mouths of a Frenchman and a Welshman, but this is only another aspect of the variability and variety of Shakespeare’s style when he is writing at the height of his invention. Words themselves become farcical in a world where improbability and incongruity are the only standards. In one sense
The Merry Wives of Windsor
resembles the “citizens’ plays” that had become very popular, but it is governed by a more genial spirit. By setting it in a country town, outside London, Shakespeare avoids the kind of urban satire that Jonson and Dekker employed.

The comedy would have been a gift to his players, too, with the emphasis on mistaken identities and sudden changes of plot. If Kempe continued to play Falstaff, he would have proved a singular “hit” dressed up as the fat woman of Brentford; the spare Sinklo would have played Slender. It has often been supposed that Shakespeare borrowed his comic plots from Italian drama, but in the crossing they have suffered a sea-change. It is characteristic of the English imagination, of which he is the greatest exemplar, to incorporate and to alter foreign models.