The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (6 page)

Othello
and
Measure for Measure
can be dated quite precisely. Both have references which suggest Shakespeare was at work on them in 1603, and both were performed at court towards the end of 1604 (their first recorded performances, though not necessarily their first performances).
³⁸
By contrast,
All’s Well
and
Timon
have no documentary dating. Neither was printed before its appearance in the First Folio of 1623, and no early performances are recorded. (The recording of King’s Men performances is anyway very sketchy: there exists no ledger for the Globe comparable to Philip Henslowe’s diary, which lists performances and box-office takings at the neighbouring Rose.)
All’s Well
is generally dated to
c
. 1604 because of its affinities with
Measure
, and
Timon
to
c
. 1605 because its verbal parallels with
King Lear
seem more likely to be anticipations than echoes.
³⁹
Lear
itself, that mightiest of works, was first performed at the end of 1606, and its early gestation can also be placed, in a purely topographical sense, on Silver Street.

It is in many ways a curious list. Bookended by two of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies are these three rather odder, less popular works. One could call them ‘experimental’ but Shakespeare was constantly an experimenter, so perhaps one means they are experiments which do not wholly come off.

Measure for Measure
and
All’s Well
are two of that group traditionally called the ‘problem plays’, or the ‘dark comedies’ - also in this group is the earlier
Troilus and Cressida
(
c
. 1602), which falls outside my defined time-period but belongs with it in mood. The term ‘problem play’ is old fashioned but still more or less serviceable. It was coined by F. S. Boas in 1896, taking a tinge of the chief dramatists of the day, Ibsen and Shaw. Shaw tended showily to disparage Shakespeare, but liked these particular plays, where he found Shakespeare ‘ready and willing to start at the twentieth century if the seventeenth would only let him’
⁴⁰
- as perverse a statement of Shakespeare’s intentions as one could hope to find.

They are ‘problem’ plays because they are hard to categorize. Their tone is elusive, blurred, faintly unwholesome. ‘The air is cheerless,’ in Dover Wilson’s aphoristic summary, and ‘the wit mirthless’. The admirable characters are not entirely likeable, and the likeable characters not at all admirable. The humour is bitter; it has ‘a grating quality which excludes geniality and ensures disturbing after-thoughts’.
⁴¹
They are also ‘problem plays’ in a more direct sense: plays which deliberately pose problems - ethical conundrums, tangled motives, characters ‘at war ’twixt will and will not’. They continue, in a different register, the mood ushered in by
Hamlet
at the beginning of the new century - nervy, questioning, ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’; and sickly also in the perception of malaise and corruption beneath the veneer of society: something ‘rotten in the state’. This is a particular theme of
Measure for Measure
, where the city’s ills lie less in the visible squalor of its prisons and brothels than in the concealed corruption of those in government:

Authority, though it err like others,
Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself
That skins the vice o’ th’ top . . . (2.2.135-7)

The overall quality of these plays is summed up by A. P. Rossiter - one of the most eloquent of the mid-twentieth-century analysts - as ‘shiftingness’:

All the firm points of view or
points d’appui
fail one, or are felt to be fallible . . . Like Donne’s love-poems, these plays throw opposed and contradictory views into the mind, only to leave the resulting equations without any settled or soothing solutions. They are all about ‘
Xs
’ that do not work out.

Or as it is sinuously expressed by the sceptical Lafeu in
All’s Well
: ‘Hence it is that we make trifles of our terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear’ (2.3.3-6).

In formal terms - indeed in terms of theatrical fashion and therefore partly market-driven - these plays are Shakespeare’s experiments in tragicomedy. The term originates with Plautus, the Roman comic dramatist much admired by Shakespeare, who called his play
Amphitryon
a ‘tragicomoedia’ because it improperly mingled gods and ordinary middle-class Romans. In Shakespeare’s day the new models were Italian writers like Giovanbattista Giraldi Cintio (known in England as Cinthio) and Giovanbattista Guarini, both products of the sophisticated court of Ferrara. The poet and diplomat Guarini, whose pastoral tragicomedy
Il Pastor Fido
(‘The Faithful Shepherd’) was translated into English in 1602, offers some interesting precepts. ‘True’ tragicomedy, he writes, avoids the ‘great themes’ of tragedy. It is realistic rather than fantastic, it blends ‘contrary qualities’, and it brings the characters through dangers and perplexities - through what he calls the ‘feigned knot’ (
il nodo finto
) of the story - to happiness.
⁴²
These elegant definitions, from an essay published with the English
Pastor Fido
in 1602, could well have been in Shakespeare’s mind when he was writing
All’s Well that Ends Well
a year or two later. The very title of the play is a somewhat ironic definition of tragicomedy, though at the end of it the best the King can muster is ‘All seems to be well.’

Hamlet
has a humorous comment on these fashionable hybrids, as Polonius struggles to itemize the repertoire of the players newly arrived in Elsinore - they are, he assures us, ‘the best . . . either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical- pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral . . .’ (2.2.397-400).

The keynote of this new kind of tragicomedy is its mingling of disparate tones and emotions - what Guarini calls ‘contrary qualities’. Again
Hamlet
is a prototype, with its intrusions of sharp and sometimes seamy banter into the traditionally relentless format of Senecan revenge-tragedy. This is precisely the quality praised in what is probably the earliest surviving critical comment on the play. In his preface to
Daiphantus
(1604), the mysterious ‘An. Sc.’ hopes his own poem will be popular with the ‘vulgar’ (he means ordinary people; the phrase is not here pejorative), like ‘Shakespeare’s tragedies, where the Comedian rides when the Tragedian stands on tip-toe: faith, it should please all, like Prince Hamlet’.
⁴³

In
All’s Well
, the mingling of tones is particularly elusive. Its central narrative is based on old folk-motifs (‘Healing the King’, ‘The Clever Wench’), and there is a jarring between this fairy-tale tendency and the more modern timbre of scepticism and paradox. We are lulled by the sweet autumnal melancholy of the verse, and then we are laughed at for giving in so easily. With their intrinsic ambiguities, and their testing of credibilities, the problem plays have been called ‘Mannerist’
⁴⁴
- in other words, they share something with the distorted figures and perplexing perspectives of mid-sixteenth-century Italian painters like Parmigianino and Bronzino.

The heyday of Jacobean tragicomedy comes later - Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster’s
The Devil’s Law Case
, Massinger - but already in 1603 John Marston had produced a very idiosyncratic, urban type of tragicomedy,
The Malcontent
, which showed how the form could be adapted to the concurrent taste for satire and topicality. This play has analogies with
Measure
and was probably another spur - a competitive one - to Shakespeare.
⁴⁵

A simple and beautiful synopsis of these plays’ appeal is found in a couplet from
Othello
-

These sentences to sugar or to gall,
Being strong on both sides, are equivocal. (1.3.216-17)

To paraphrase prosaically - these sentences tend equally to sweetness or to bitterness, both of these qualities being powerfully present in them. The lines are spoken by Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, and have their own business within the dramatic moment, but extracted they serve as a kind of emblem or motto for Shakespeare’s tragicomedies.

If the tragicomedies balance, more or less measure for measure, their helpings of sugar and gall,
Timon of Athens
is pure gall. It is the bleakest of all Shakespeare’s plays, and vies with
Cymbeline
(though for different reasons) as the least staged work of Shakespeare’s mature years. It dramatizes a story he found in Plutarch’s
Lives
, of a rich Athenian whose followers and flatterers deserted him when the money ran out, and who turned his back on the world and lived wild in the woods: ‘Timon
misanthropos
’. The play has some magnificent patches of poetry, but the overall tone is harsh.

As it comes down to us - in the only contemporary text available, that of the 1623 Folio -
Timon
seems still in parts rough, unpolished, with loose ends ungathered. One reason for this irregularity is that the play was a collaboration. Shakespeare’s co-author was Thomas Middleton, a Londoner in his early twenties: a rising young star.
⁴⁶
He had begun as a poet in the satirical vein of Marston. His
Microcynicon
(1599), with its ‘six Snarling Satyres’, had been among the ‘unseemly’ works called in by the Archbishop’s censors in 1599. In the new century he began to work in the theatre, initially for the Admiral’s Men, chief rivals of Shakespeare’s company. Henslowe records payment to him in May 1602 for his contribution to a lost historical drama (‘Caesar’s Fall’, also called ‘Two Shapes’), a patchwork collaboration that also involved Dekker, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday and the young John Webster. Then comes the wonderful series of brash, smutty ‘city comedies’ that made his name -
The Phoenix
was performed at court at Christmas 1603, followed over the next few years by
The Family of Love
,
A Trick to Catch the Old One
,
A Mad World, my Masters
,
The Puritan
(also called
The Widow of Watling Street
),
Your Five Gallants
and others, mostly written for the children’s companies. Jonson called Middleton a ‘base fellow’, but the list of authors he disliked was a long one. Versatile, prolific and full of promise, Middleton was a prize catch for the King’s Men.

Shakespeare was no stranger to collaboration, but he did not, one suspects, take naturally to it, and as far as the evidence remains his partnership with Middleton was the first for about a decade. Early in his career he had tacked and botched with other writers: the hand of Nashe has been discerned in the
Henry VI
plays, and that of Peele in
Titus Andronicus
. In around 1593-4 he contributed to ‘Sir Thomas More’, a play which survives only in manuscript and was perhaps never performed.
⁴⁷
But once his career gets going he is remarkably solo. Over at the Rose - on the evidence of Henslowe’s accounts and diaries - it was the norm for a play to be written by anything from two to five writers. Few of the collaborations listed by Henslowe made it into print - we have lost such plays as Ben Jonson’s
Hot Anger Soon Cooled
, written with Henry Chettle - but among the younger writers in the new century collaborations were frequently printed as such -
Eastward Ho!
by Chapman, Jonson and Marston;
Westward Ho!
and
Northward Ho!
by Dekker and Webster;
The Honest Whore
and
The Roaring Girl
by Dekker and Middleton; and many works by Beaumont and Fletcher. It seems to have become a selling point - two or three talents (often very different kinds of talent) for the price of one.

Though
Timon
cannot be called an unqualified success, the passages now assigned to Middleton - which include almost all of Act 3 - are powerfully written, and it seems his connection with the King’s Men prospered. In about 1606 he turned out two fine tragedies for them:
The Revenger’s Tragedy
(published anonymously in 1607) and the short, topical
A Yorkshire Tragedy
(published in 1608). The title-page of the latter credits the play to ‘W. Shakspeare’.
⁴⁸
Similarly the first edition of Middleton’s comedy
The Puritan
(1607) is attributed to ‘W.S.’. These are opportunistic title-pages, marketing ploys, but they express accurately a new literary twinning. It is possible Shakespeare contributed some passages to the
Yorkshire Tragedy
.

Shakespeare may have been edged into this collaboration by professional pressure. He may have felt (or others in the company may have felt) that he needed the input of younger, sharper-edged writers like Middleton and, a little later, George Wilkins, who was sharp-edged in an altogether more dangerous way.

These are, in broad outline, the literary aspects of Shakespeare on Silver Street - the ‘bitter and complex music’ of the tragicomedies; the flawed collaboration with Middleton; the impending mental tempest of
King Lear
. It is a period of transition, of experiment, of paradox and contradiction: ‘a mingled yarn, good and ill together’ (
All’s Well,
4.3.67).