Shakespeare (60 page)

A
horoscope was consulted
to determine the exact day for the opening of the Globe. The play chosen for that auspicious occasion was
Julius Caesar
and, from allusions in the text itself, it is clear that it was first performed on the afternoon of 12 June 1599. This was the day of the summer solstice and the appearance of a new moon.
¹
A new moon was deemed by astrologers to be the most opportune time “to open a new house.”
²
There was a high tide at Southwark early that afternoon, which helped to expedite the journey of the playgoers coming from the north of the river. That evening, after sunset, Venus and Jupiter appeared in the sky. These may seem to be matters of arcane calculation but to the actors and playgoers of the late sixteenth century they were very significant indeed. It has been demonstrated, for example, that the axis of the Globe is 48 degrees east of true north, and so was in fact in direct alignment with the midsummer sunrise. Astrological lore was a familiar and formative influence upon all the affairs of daily life. It is also the context for the supernatural visitations and prognostications in
Julius Caesar
itself.

There is other evidence of the play’s summer opening. In June 1599 the takings at Philip Henslowe’s Rose, neighbour to the new Globe, registered a sharp fall which must have been the result of new competition. It is a matter of record that Henslowe and the actor-manager Alleyn soon decided to depart with the Admiral’s Men from the Rose, and to resume acting at the
newly built Fortune in the northern suburbs. The proximity to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had been bad for business. Henslowe was too good a manager to lose an asset, however, and he leased out the Rose to Worcester’s Men.

Julius Caesar
was Shakespeare’s first Roman play, attuned to the gaudy “classicism” of the Globe interior. A Roman setting, complete with marbled pillars, needed a Roman play. The stage-directions for
“thunder”
and for “
thunder and lightning
” also provided an opportunity to display the sound effects of the new theatre. Unlike the extravagant playhouse, however, the play itself is a triumph of simple diction and chaste rhetoric; it is as if Shakespeare had somehow been able to assume the Roman virtues and to adopt the Roman style. His deployment of forensic oratory is so skilled that it might have been composed by a classical rhetorician. He had the ability to blend himself with different states of man. In the very cadence and syntax of the words, he is Caesar. He exists within the formal periods of Brutus’s prose and within the self-serving mellifluousness of Antony’s verse.

The novelty of the new playhouse also aroused Shakespeare’s ambitions, since in this play there is a more subtle sense of character, of motive, and of consequence. The emphasis is not so much upon event as upon personality. The action is so skilfully balanced that it becomes impossible to apportion praise or blame with any certainty. Is Brutus deluded or glorious? Is Caesar matchless or fundamentally flawed? Shakespeare seems almost deliberately to have established a new kind of protagonist, whose character is not immediately apparent or transparent to the audience. Shakespeare always finds it difficult to defend those things towards which he is most sympathetic, and in this particular play the distrust of the new is matched only by scepticism about the old. It is a play of oppositions and of contrasts in which there is no final resolution. In this same spirit it can be seen as a history play or as a revenge tragedy, or as both combined. It is a new kind of drama. He knows the sources, North’s translation of Plutarch principal among them, but he changes their emphasis and direction. He invents Caesar’s deafness, too, as well as the scene in which Brutus and his co-conspirators steep themselves in the murdered Caesar’s blood. There were other Roman plays in the period, written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, but they were content to give the historical narratives a spectacular and theatrical decoration. Shakespeare goes to the heart of the matter.

Ben Jonson resented its production, not least since it came from the pen of a man who had “little Latin.” Jonson’s play,
Every Man out of His Humour
, was performed later in the same year and within it are references to
Julius Caesar
which may be construed as playful or sarcastic. At one point the dying fall of
“Et tu, Brute!”
is satirised; this in itself is a clear indication that the original phrase was now known to playgoers. Among Shakespeare’s audience in 1599 were two young men who knew very well the nature of betrayal. A letter of the period reveals that “my Lord Southampton and Lord Rutland come not to the Court … They pass away the tyme in London merely in going to plaies every day.”
³

There is a reference
to Julius Caesar
in
Henry V
, which was composed a few months after. There are also references in
Henry V
to the expedition by the Earl of Essex to Ireland that was rumoured to have failed by the summer of 1599 and ended in disgrace that autumn; so
Henry V
is likely to have been written before those dates. Whatever the question of date, however, the two plays are complementary. The English history is just as much an exercise in ambiguity, in opposition and contrast, as
Julius Caesar;
but it is screwed to an even higher pitch. Is Henry a bullying thug or a great leader of men? Is he made of valour or formed from ice and snow? Is he an image of authority or a figure fit for ridicule? The scenes of military prowess and achievement are framed by a comic plot that subtly deflates this heroic tale of success. The king’s speech beginning “Once more vnto the Breach, deare friends …” (1038) is immediately succeeded by the braggart Bardolph’s “On, on, on, on, on, to the breach …” (1073). The burlesque may not have been deliberate. Shakespeare did not have to stop and think about it. He did it naturally and instinctively. It was as inevitable as a pianist using both the black and the white keys.

On the character and motives of the king, black or white, it is possible that Shakespeare himself was not sure. But, clothed in the shimmering veil of Henry’s rhetoric, they do not matter; Shakespeare was entranced by the idea of magnificence, and there is nothing like the exercise of power to create memorable lines and powerful scenes. Henry overbears judgement; he transcends or dissolves questions of morality. As William Hazlitt said in discussing
Coriolanus
, “the language of poetry is the language of power.”
⁴
It is not of much consequence whether that power is nobly or ignobly used. The imagination itself is a form of power, and will incline towards any sympathetic object. That is why the presence of Henry, even in the comic scenes, is
continually invoked. It is worth remarking, too, that the cadences of Henry’s speech are uncannily similar to those of Richard III.

When Shakespeare follows Holinshed, his principal source, he runs the risk of tedium; when he follows his instincts, he is sublime. His “Muse of Fire” rises into the air, and his imagery is concerned with soaring. The long speeches are rich in texture and strident in delivery. There is one phrase, however, that has a more particular resonance. At one point the Chorus of the drama, generally performed by Shakespeare himself, beseeches the audience to sit and watch, “Minding true things, by what their Mock’ries bee” (1780). It is a true indication of Shakespeare’s imaginative sensibility. Whereas most craftsmen judge the false according to their knowledge of the genuine, Shakespeare works the other way round.

Henry V
is in fact the culmination of Shakespeare’s preoccupation with kingship. Shakespeare invented the role of the player king. Certainly, more than any other dramatist before or since, he popularised the role of sovereign and managed infinitely to extend its range, while the imagery of the player king is unique to him. In his history plays, of course, the part of the monarch is the most significant and effective on the stage; but there are also Lear, Macbeth, Duncan, Claudius, Ferdinand, Cymbeline, Leontes and a host of noble rulers. He uses the word “crown” 380 times, and Edmond Malone commented perceptively that “when he means to represent any quality of the mind as eminently perfect, he furnishes the imaginary being whom he personifies, with a crown.”
⁵
One of his abiding images is that of the king as sun and, in his dramaturgy, he loves what is stately and what is grand. He was concerned with tragic narratives only in so far as they were concerned with persons of high degree; tragedies of “low life,” which were written in this period, held no interest for him. But kings appear in his comedies as well as in his tragedies. They may not always be portrayed in a flattering light, but nevertheless he evinces collaborative sympathy with them. It is notable that in his tragedies the person of highest rank speaks the last lines of the play, and in his later comedies it is always the king or principal nobleman who pronounces the verdict upon what might be called the final state of play. There is a prince in the concluding scene of thirteen out of his sixteen comedies.

It should not be forgotten that throughout his career he was a regular receiver of court favours and that in the latter part of his life he wore the royal livery as the king’s true servant. There was of course a Renaissance tradition
of the courtier as actor and, as John Donne wrote, “Plays were not so like Courts, as Courts are like plays.”
⁶
In turn the tone and attitude of Shakespeare’s sonnets prompted the late Victorian critic and biographer, Frank Harris, to describe him as a snob. That is not the correct description for a man of infinite sympathies. A writer who can create Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet is not a snob. But he was possessed, or obsessed, by the inwardness of the ruler rather than the ruled. The role of monarch seems to spring naturally and instinctively from his imagination, and one close student of Shakespeare’s imagery has pointed out “how continually he associates dreaming with kingship.”
⁷
Did he enjoy fantasies and day-dreams of power? There is indeed a natural consonance between the player and the king, both dressed in robes of magnificence and both obliged to play a part. It may have been one reason why Shakespeare was attracted to the profession of acting in the first place.

Among his contemporaries he was well known for playing kingly parts upon the stage. In 1610 John Davies wrote a set of verses to “our English Terence, Mr. Will Shake-speare” in which he declared that

The assumption seems to be that his manners would have been gracious and “gentle” enough to enjoy high companionship, had it not been for the fact that he was an actor. In another poem the same author considered that “the
stage
doth staine pure gentle
bloud.”
In
Measure for Measure
there is an implicit comparison between the powers of the playwright and the power of the ruler of Vienna, guiding and moving human affairs from a distance.

Shakespeare did indeed play “kingly parts.” It is surmised that he played Henry VI in the trilogy of that name, and Richard II against Burbage’s Bolingbroke. Long theatrical tradition maintains that he played the ghost of the dead king in
Hamlet
, and that he might have doubled as the usurping king. The assumption of these parts was no doubt the result of an instinctive grace and authority, deepened by the theatrical assumption of
gravitas
, but it may also be evidence of some natural predilection. He had a noble bearing and a graceful manner. Yet, somewhere within him, there is always the voice of Bardolph mocking the king.

He is unlikely to have played the king in
Henry V
. That role was reserved
for Burbage. Shakespeare is much more likely to have taken on the part of the Chorus, addressing the playgoers as “Gentles all” and referring to “this Woodden O” of the Globe in which the action of the play is about to take place. It is an appropriate opening to be spoken by Shakespeare himself; he is, for example, alternately deferential and self-confident. The persona of this Chorus has often been compared with the persona of the sonnets, and there is indeed some resemblance in that powerful combination of enormous pride in creative achievement and personal self-abnegation. And so he paces upon the stage with sovereign words: