Shakespeare (69 page)

It may be an inadvertent recollection on Jonson’s part, but does it suggest that Shakespeare was in some sense “like” Othello? The theme of sexual jealousy runs deeply through many of Shakespeare’s plays. Could Jonson have known that Shakespeare harboured suspicions about his wife in Stratford? It has become a well-known theory, promulgated among others by James Joyce and Anthony Burgess, but it must remain wholly theoretical. It might just as well be said that, because both Julius Caesar and Othello suffer from epilepsy, Shakespeare was personally acquainted with the disorder.

If a boy played Desdemona, he must have been a skilful and remarkable actor. He had to suggest a certain eroticism within Desdemona’s innocence; as the German philosopher Heinrich Heine put it, “What repels me most every time are Othello’s references to his wife’s moist palm.”
²
The boy actor would also have had a good voice, able to sing popular ballads. Since Desdemona’s willow song is absent from the first published version of the play, however, it is likely that for some performances he was unavailable for the part.

It might come as a surprise to contemporary audiences that Iago, customarily seen as the epitome of evil in modern productions, was initially played by the company’s resident clown and fool, Robert Armin. Iago was in the comic mode, and spoke to the audience in his confidential soliloquies. Charles Gildon, at the end of the seventeenth century, disclosed that

Iago’s role as comedian also fits the essentially comic structure of the play itself. Of course Gildon is alluding here to the sexual bawdry and innuendo in which Iago indulges with Desdemona, but he is being less than fair to Shakespeare. The dramatist loved sexual slang, and would not have considered it as writing “down” to any audience. It was a part of his imagination. As for being “serious” for “a whole Play” there is not one drama of Shakespeare’s which aspires to that unity of mood or tone. Comedy and tragedy were equal parts of his art.

There are elements of Roman new comedy and Italian learned comedy in this play with the presence of the zany and the cuckold who is also the
Spanish braggart. But again they are here enriched beyond measure. Shakespeare used “types” as a matter of course, but they were simply the structure upon which he built. It is also worth observing that
Othello
is unique in being a tragedy largely established upon comic formulae. That may even have been the task that Shakespeare set himself. He establishes a comic structure, in which the locales of Venice and Cyprus have little connection with the main action, but then all begins to go awry. In the process he manages to enter the very rhythm of his characters in the world. They are deeply embedded in their language, with their own particular vocabulary and even cadence, so that we can as it were see Shakespeare living and breathing in unison with them. It is a miracle of transference. And we can feel the propulsion of his imagination. When a character mentions the “enchafed flood,” the immediate response is that the Turkish fleet be not “ensheltered and embayed”; the syllables push him forward into new paths of thought.

It has been suggested that in some way Iago is a refraction of the dramatist, an unmoved mover whose intellectual agility far outruns any moral conscientiousness, but in fact he is closer to the medieval Vice who stirred up trouble with the unwitting connivance of the audience. No doubt, however, Shakespeare derived great pleasure from creating a villain who orchestrates his victims like a dramatist while at the same time proclaiming his honesty and sympathy on every occasion.

T
hree days
after the performance of
Othello
in the Banqueting House,
The Merry Wives of Windsor
was performed in the same setting. There is a description of the king attending a performance. When the king entered

But the hall, with “ten heights of degrees for people to stand upon,”
²
seems by general consent to have been too large for comfort. It was 100 feet long, with 292 glass windows. It had been erected by Elizabeth twenty-three years before, and King James described it as an “old, rotten and slight-built shed.”
³
The Great Hall at court was prepared, instead, for the production of Shakespeare’s second new play of the year,
Measure for Measure
.

Before that event, however, another play was to emerge from the King’s Men only to disappear very rapidly. It was entitled
Gowry
and purported to be a dramatic version of the “Gowrie conspiracy” against James four years before. The play no doubt celebrated the courage and virtue of the new sovereign
but, despite its patriotic tone, it was deemed unsuitable for public performance. One courtier wrote on 18 December that

It was indeed considered to be unfit, and the play disappeared never to rise again. The courtier had hit upon the right explanation. It was considered
lèsemajesté
to portray a reigning monarch upon the public stage, in whatever circumstances. It served only to emphasise the theatricality of the king’s role. The author of the forbidden play remains unknown, although it is not beyond conjecture that Shakespeare may have contributed to it.

James could not have been wholly displeased by his players since, a week later, they performed before him
Measure for Measure
. In this play a ruler, Duke Vincentio, disliking crowds and noise of “applause, and Aues vehement,” pretends to absent himself from his land in order better to survey it. In his absence a rigidly puritanical deputy, Angelo, proves himself unworthy of his superior’s trust. There are enough contemporary allusions here to have occasioned volumes of commentary, not least the resemblance between the Duke and King James himself. The king was known to dislike crowds and “Aues” to the same degree as the imaginary ruler. The unflattering portrayal of the Puritan, Angelo, must be seen in reference to the current controversies involving those sectarians in the new kingdom. That, at least, is how contemporary playgoers would have viewed it. Earlier that year, for example, the king had been presented by the country’s foremost Puritans with a “Millenary Petition,” containing proposals on dogma and ritual that the king rebuffed. The conclusion of the play, in which the Duke redeems those who have been judged guilty, can also be said to reflect current controversies over the privileges of the king. James believed that Parliament depended upon royal grace, and the ending of
Measure for Measure
can be construed as maintaining the divine right of kings. The title of the play itself may be taken from a sentence from James’s own treatise on divine right,
Basilikon Down
, in which he writes: “And, above all, let the measure of your love to everyone
be according to the measure of his virtue.” The King’s Men were precisely that, the sovereign’s servants, and part of their role was to advertise the virtues of their patron. Since the play is also set in Catholic Vienna, with a Catholic nun as the principal female and the Duke disguising himself as a Catholic friar, Shakespeare seems to be reflecting the increased level of tolerance for those who professed the old faith. It is pertinent, perhaps, that in this play as in
Romeo and Juliet
and in
Much Ado About Nothing
, the friar counsels deceit or concealment for the sake of a greater good. Shakespeare seems always to have been preternaturally alert to the prevailing atmosphere of his time. He was such a sensitive instrument in the world that he could not help but reflect everything.

Shakespeare derived some of the story of
Measure for Measure
from the same source as
Othello
. This suggests that he had riffled through Cinthio’s
Hecatommithi
in search of likely plots. An anthology of stories, such as this one, was a mine of gold. When he found this particular plot to be of interest, he looked up an earlier dramatisation of it—George Whetstone’s
Promos and Cassandra
, written in 1578—to see if there were any extra scenes or characters he might borrow. There were more immediate models to hand, also, since the theme of the ruler in disguise was a popular one in the London playhouses. It is important to grasp the immediacy of Shakespeare’s inspiration. If there were two or three plays using a plot or character that had proved popular, the chances are that he would use them. Even though
Measure for Measure
is ostensibly set in Vienna, its real setting is early seventeenth-century London with its stews and suburbs, bawds and pandars. It is the world of Southwark and the Globe.
Measure for Measure
is in part a sketch for
King Lear
and
The Tempest;
here the Duke abandons the governance of his dukedom, but the space from this play to
King Lear
is measured in the shift from comedy to tragedy. It is also worth noticing that the first scenes of the play are also the most inventive. That is frequently the case in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, where he is often most spirited and emboldened at the beginning of each enterprise.

At court, the day after the performance of
Measure for Measure
, the Earl of Pembroke helped to assemble and present a masque with music entitled
Juno and Hymenaeus
. The text has not survived, but Pembroke may have obtained some assistance from the king’s leading dramatist. Then, on the next day,
The
Comedy of Errors
was performed. This was followed on 7 January with
Henry V
. It was something of a Shakespeare festival, marked a day later by a special production of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
at the London house of the Earl of Southampton. This was the play that seems to bear references to the Southampton coterie or “circle” which in previous years had included some of the king’s most fervent supporters. Sir Walter Cope, the Chamberlain of the Exchequer, wrote to Robert Cecil earlier in the month that

“Burbage” here is likely to be Cuthbert rather than Richard. It is highly unlikely that the leading tragedian of the day would be employed as a “messenger” between two servants of the state, although the association of players with “Juglers & Such kinde of Creaturs” shows little respect for the social standing of the theatrical profession.

The epistle is interesting for the fact that it also marks a definite occasion when Shakespeare’s “old” plays can be enumerated. We can calculate that in the last two years he had written
Othello
and
Measure for Measure
, and that in the succeeding nine years he would write twelve more plays. It is sometimes assumed that this represents a general or gentle decline in his production of new drama as a result of age or debility but, on the assumption that he began his playwriting career in 1586 or 1587, then the rate of composition remains approximately the same throughout his life. The fact that the plays to be written include
King Lear, Macbeth
and
The Tempest
is clear enough proof that there was no loss of power.

The performance of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
in the second week of January was noted by Dudley Carleton when he remarked that “It seems we shall have Christmas all the yeare and therefore I shall never be owt of matter. The last nights revels were kept at my Lord of Cranbornes … and the like two nights before at my Lord of Southamptons.”
⁶
Then, in the following month, there
were two performances of
The Merchant of Venice
. No contemporary dramatist had ever been so honoured by the ruling family. In this year, too, the fourth quarto of
Richard III
was published; the play was still successful almost fifteen years after its first performance.