Shakespeare (66 page)

S
hakespeare was on stage
their last parts before the ageing queen. They performed at Whitehall on 26 December 1602 and at Richmond on 7 February 1603. Six weeks later Elizabeth was dead, worn out by age and power. In the last stages of her life she had refused to lie down and rest but had stood for days, her finger in her mouth, pondering upon the fate of sovereigns. The theatres had been closed five days before her death, since plays were not appropriate in the dying time.

By many, including the imprisoned Southampton, she was considered to be a tyrant who had exercised power for too long. Shakespeare was at the time criticised for writing no encomium on the dead queen—not one “sable teare” dropped from his “honied muse” as part of the national exequies. He had been asked to sing the “Rape” of Elizabeth “done by that Tarquin, Death,”
¹
with reference to his earlier
Rape of Lucrece
, but he declined the honour. There was a ballad of the moment exhorting “you poets all”
²
to lament the queen. Shakespeare was at the head of the list of the poets invoked, among them Ben Jonson, but he made no response. In truth he had no real reason to mourn the queen’s passing. She had beheaded Essex and several members of Essex’s affinity whom Shakespeare knew very well.

Yet he was not altogether silent. He did produce in this period one work that cogently reflects the somewhat rancid and fearful atmosphere at the
court of the dying queen. It was not an exequy, but a play entitled
Troilus and Cressida
in which all the certainties and pieties of court life are treated as material for jest and black humour. It has been surmised that the failure of the Essex rebellion in 1601 helped to create the atmosphere of gloom and discomfiture that pervades the play. It has even been suggested that there are allusions to the Earl of Essex within the text, where he is to be seen as Achilles skulking in his tent. There have been traced parallels among the other Greeks with various members of Elizabeth’s
ancien régime
such as Cecil and Walsingham—but one hypocritical and self-serving courtier looks very much like another.

It is unlikely that the censor would have forbidden publication of the play, in any case, since it is set in the ancient and mythical period surrounding the fall of Troy. It was a period favoured by Elizabethan poets and dramatists, and only four years before George Chapman’s translation of seven books of Homer’s
Iliad
had been published. Yet the publisher of
Troilus and Cressida
in the Stationers’ Register, James Roberts, is given the right to print “when he hath gotten sufficient aucthority for yt,” an unusual phrase that suggests some problem with its licensing.

The legend of Troy was one of the most popular of all the classical stories that circulated in Elizabethan England; it was the stuff of Homer and of Virgil. London itself was considered by many antiquarians to be New Troy, “Troynovaunt,” founded by the lineage of the refugees from the fallen city. Yet in
Troilus and Cressida
Shakespeare sets out deliberately to subvert the legends. It is a play in which the orthodox pieties of Trojan courage and Greek valour are quite overturned, revealing a callous, brutal and hypocritical reality underlying the acts of both sides. There are no values except those that are traded by time and fashion; traded is here the operative word, since every value is a commodity to be bought and sold in the market-place. This may indeed be a form of displaced patriotism. Shakespeare was prohibited from lamenting the condition of his own country on the London stage, but the presentation of the ancient world was treated with considerable leniency by the censors. What could be more natural than to vent his conservative fury in a safer context?

Troilus and Cressida
is a savage and satirical comedy upon the themes of love and war, treating them both as false and fickle. The love between Troilus and Cressida is exposed as counterfeit, or temporary, when Cressida is seduced by a Greek warrior. It is in part Shakespeare’s revision of Chaucer’s poem
Troilus and Criseyde
, in which he supplants medieval grace and good
humour with the language and vocabulary of a harsh and unsettled time. The diction itself is highly Latinised, with many “hard” words as well as an odd or convoluted syntax. As in
Julius Caesar
Shakespeare wished to give the verbal impression of an alien and classical world, and it is not too much to speculate that in
Troilus and Cressida
he tried to make English resemble what he considered to be Greek. He may also have been trying to rival Chapman’s translations of Homer. It has been remarked that his was an envious muse. He had to outdo Chaucer as well as Chapman, to rewrite the heroic myth of the Greeks and the Romans.

But in
Troilus and Cressida
the pertinence of satire and sarcasm, raillery and buffoonery, cannot be doubted. It is unlikely to have been performed in the queen’s presence, but it was played at the Globe. The entry in the Stationers’ Register states that the play will be “as yt is acted by my Lord Chamberlens Men” and the printed version, published some six years later, declares that this is the play “as it was acted by the Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe.” So
Troilus and Cressida
was played during the reign of Elizabeth, and during the succeeding reign of James I. This suggests that it was a popular play, perhaps pandering to the popular dislike of the Greeks as opposed to the Trojans who were the presumed ancestors of Londoners. It has been argued that at some point it was performed at one of the Inns of Court.
³
A prologue and an epilogue were composed for that occasion, the latter of which has a private air of salaciousness. This would account for an “epistle” written for the quarto version in which the play is described as “a new play, neuer stal’d with the Stage, neuer clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulgar” or “the smoaky breath of the multitude.” If Shakespeare had revised the play for the particular delectation of a legal audience, then it could pass by convenient fiction as a “new play”.

Nevertheless it remains Shakespeare’s most savage drama, with the possible exception of
Timon of Athens
, and has prompted more romantic biographers into assuming that the dramatist suffered some kind of “nervous breakdown” in the middle of composition. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was never more sharp-eyed. There is a slight confusion among his publishers, however. The quarto edition describes it as a “Historie” but the “epistle” to that quarto refers to it as a comedy; in turn the later Folio version refers to it as a “Tragedie.” This suggests some uncertainty concerning its final or ultimate tone.

That is why it is a mistake to attribute some kind of private motive behind Shakespeare’s choice of material. Nothing in his life and career gives
any reason to suggest that he chose a theme or story with any specific intention other than to entertain. He had no “message.” The most likely explanation for his choice of the Trojan wars lies within the context of theatrical competition. In 1596 the Admiral’s Men performed a play that Henslowe simply noted as “troye.”
⁴
Three years later Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle were paid for a play entitled “Troyeles & creasse daye” and then, at a later date, for one entitled “Agamemnon”(first listed as “troylles & Creseda”). So the fate of the unfortunate Trojan pair were elements in the new theatrical environment. It seems highly likely, then, that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men asked Shakespeare to provide a drama upon the same theme. As soon as he began to write, however, the power of his genius colluded with the forces of his age to produce a complete statement. His words were magnetic. All the particles of a decaying court culture, a decaying world of individual heroism and nobility, flew towards them.

T
he queen was dead
. Long live the king! Elizabeth had died at two in the morning of 24 March 1603; nine hours later, a crowd of courtiers and nobles who had assembled on the west side of the High Cross in Cheapside listened to a proclamation by Cecil and then shouted out “God save King James!” As one courtier put it, quoting a psalm, “We had heaviness in the night but joy in the morning.” The news was brought to the prisoners in the Tower of London and Southampton, among them, rejoiced. Southampton had been condemned to life imprisonment for his part in the ill-fated Essex rebellion, but he was quickly released from his confinement by the new king.

King James had made a slow procession from Scotland, and did not arrive at his palace in Greenwich until 13 May. Then, six days later, letters patent were issued
“pro Laurentio Fletcher et Willielmo Shakespeare
….” permitting them to perform as “well for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure when we shall think good to see them,” both “within their now usual house called
The Globe”
and all the other towns and boroughs of the kingdom. They were no longer to be known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. They were the King’s Men. A few months later they were appointed “grooms of the chamber” and their social status therefore greatly improved. They were given the right, indeed the duty, of wearing the royal livery of red doublet, hose and cloak. Shakespeare was placed first in
the list, by the Master of the Great Wardrobe, for receiving 4½ yards of scarlet cloth for his uniform.

It is perhaps odd to consider Shakespeare as a royal servant, following in procession on ceremonial occasions, but there is no reason to believe that he questioned the privilege. It was, in a real sense, the height of his social accomplishment. Gone were the days when players were classified with strolling vagrants, and were often turned back by the aldermen of various towns. Gone, too, were the days when the actors were merely tolerated rather than welcomed in the capital. The new king, very early in his reign, had bestowed his favours upon them. Before the reign of James, the Globe players had been called upon to perform at court on approximately three occasions each year; in the first ten years of his reign they were asked to play fourteen times each year. So the court was a source of profit, as well as patronage, to the King’s Men.

There were of course those of a jealous disposition. A play by Francis Beaumont on the subject of social climbing,
The Woman Hater
, struck a glancing blow at Shakespeare’s elevation with the remark that “another payre you shall see, that were heire apparent legges to a Glover, these legges hope shortly to bee honourable.” Shakespeare’s modest origins were by now well known.

It is significant that William Shakespeare and Laurence Fletcher were first mentioned in the letters patent. Fletcher, hitherto never mentioned as one of the Globe players, had in fact been leader of a group of Scottish actors who had in previous years been patronised and welcomed by James when he was James VI of Scotland; he had even protected them against the depredations of the Kirk. Fletcher had been known as “comedyan to his majestic” So he travelled south with the new English monarch and, as the sovereign’s true servant, had been placed with the new company of the King’s Men. The fact that he is named before Shakespeare in the letters patent suggests, however, that by common consent Shakespeare was the leader or principal man of the Globe players.

Many of Shakespeare’s earlier plays were now revived for royal performance. The King’s Men put on new productions of
The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Henry V
and
The Merchant of Venice
. If James had not previously been acquainted with the work of Shakespeare, the oversight was now remedied. He seems particularly to have enjoyed
The Merchant of Venice;
he asked for it to be performed again, perhaps because the legal scene between Portia and Shylock satisfied
his own taste for disputation. But it is more significant that all of Shakespeare’s new plays—those written after 1603, in other words—were performed at least once before the king. Some of them were performed several times. The records of payment demonstrate that, whenever the King’s Men performed at court, the king himself watched the proceedings.

The presence of the new monarch, then, had an effect upon the dramatist’s art. It could hardly be otherwise. The London theatre always had to look towards the sources of power and of patronage. The monarch was the lord of the spectacle. So it is no real cause of wonder to discover that, after the accession of James, Shakespeare was ready to shape certain of his plays to reveal the figure of the king somewhere in the design. This is the case with
Macbeth
and, to a certain extent, with
Measure for Measure
. The plays reflect, for example, James’s well-known fear of witchcraft—especially the form of magic aimed against a ruling sovereign. They reflect his fear of crowds, and his habitual dislike of Puritans. The ruling family’s great liking for masques also affects the staging of tableaux and dumb-shows in Shakespeare’s last plays, where music and dance play a large part in the concluding action.