Shakespeare

Shakespeare and the Drama

Overview Shakespeare’s family, early marriage and obscurity.First mentioned as a London player and playwright at the age of 28, he came in on the crest of a wave of new poetic drama. Kyd and Marlowe died, leaving the stage to him. He averaged two plays a year for twenty years: first comedy and history (a form he perfected), then tragedy and finally romance. He retired early, half of his plays being preserved only in the First Folio, introduced by his successor, Jonson.

Shakespeare's life William Shakespeare was born in 1564 at Stratford, a market town on the river Avon in Warwickshire. He was the eldest son and the third of eight children of John Shakespeare, a glover, and Mary Arden, a landowner’s daughter. In 1568 John was bailiff (mayor) of Stratford. Education at Stratford school was based on Latin grammar, rhetoric and composition; to speak English was forbidden in the upper forms. At church, Holy Trinity, which William attended by law with his father, he would also have learned much. At home there were three brothers and a sister (three sisters died as children), and around the home there were river-meadows, orchards and parks. He saw the public life of the town, too, although his father’s part in this declined. Strolling players visited Stratford, and at nearby Coventry there was a performance of the cycle of Mystery plays on the feast of Corpus Christi. He left school, probably at 15, and at 18 married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior. At the time of the church wedding she was expecting a child, born in 1583 and christened Susanna. In 1585 Anne had twins, Hamnet and Judith. When next we hear of William, in 1592, he is in the London theatre, attacked in print by a university writer who warns other graduates against an ‘upstart crow’ who ‘supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you’. This upstart is ‘in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.’ Shake-scene is Shakespeare, whose name is found in various forms, some of them playful.

How had he lived between 1579 and 1592, the ‘lost years’? Nothing is known, but in 1681 an actor whose father had known Shakespeare told John Aubrey that Shakespeare ‘had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country’. Shakespeare may be the William Shakeshaft, apparently a player, who in 1581 was left money in the will of Alexander Houghton, a Catholic landowner in Lancashire. Houghton’s neighbour, John Cottom, was master of Stratford school when William was there. There were notable Catholics at Stratford school: after John Cottom left Stratford, his brother was executed as a priest, with Edmund Campion, in 1582. Perhaps John Cottom went back to Catholic Lancashire and found a place as a tutor in Houghton’s very Catholic household for ‘Shakeshaft’; who could then have joined a company of players which came to London. Unproven possibilities. But the old faith was strong locally, and the Shakespeares had Catholic loyalties. The poet’s mother, Mary Arden, came from a noted Catholic family; a cousin was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1583. Shakespeare’s father, John, lost his municipal positions in the 1580s and was reported for recusancy (not going to church) in 1592. In 1757 a bricklayer working on the Shakespeare house found hidden under the tiles a ‘soul testament’, a lengthy declaration of faith prepared for Catholics likely to die without a priest, signed ‘John Shakespeare’ at the head of each paragraph. This document, since lost, was published in 1790.William Shakespeare may have had Catholic sympathies, but occasionally gone to church, as did many ‘church papists’. He was not a recusant, but nothing recorded is inconsistent with crypto-Catholicism. His daughter was reported as being ‘popishly affected’: she did not take communion at Easter 1606, a few months after the Gunpowder Plot. (On 5 November 1605 a plot by Catholic extremists to blow up Parliament had been unmasked; the plot had Warwickshire links.) Her father was later said to have ‘dyed a papist’. The writings show a positive Christian understanding together with a questioning Renaissance humanism. The plays are full of symbolic ways of representation; they show no signs of anti-symbolic Reformation theology. William kept up his links with Stratford, but his professional life was in London, writing and acting. He was a partner in the leading company of actors, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, founded in 1594. It played at Court and in the theatre, the Curtain, and in its own Globe theatre, built in 1599. Shakespeare shared in the substantial profits of what in 1603 became the King’s Men. They played at Court as well as at the Globe and, from 1608, at the indoor Blackfriars theatre, especially in the winter. In 1596 William’s son Hamnet died, aged 11. In 1597 William bought the largest house in Stratford, New Place. In 1601 his father died. In 1607 his daughter Susanna married; she bore a daughter in the following year. In 1609 his mother died. From 1610 he spent more time in Stratford. In February 1616 his daughter Judith married, and on 23 April 1616 he died: he was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity, Stratford. There, before 1623, his monument was erected.

The plays preserved At his death in 1616, half of Shakespeare’s plays had not been printed, but in 1623 two of his fellow-actors brought out a collected edition: thirty-six plays in a book of nearly nine hundred double-column pages in a large Folio, entitled Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. In the poet’s lifetime, nineteen plays had come out in little Quartos, pirated versions which provoked the players to bring out better quartos. Later they also brought out quartos of much-performed plays. There is no sign that the author corrected texts set up from his papers. Without the Folio, English literature would have been very different. Without the Authorized Version of 1611, England would still have had a Bible. But if Shakespeare’s friends not printed his plays, half of them (including Macbeth and The Tempest) would have been lost; the Folio is his true monument. (The suggestion that the plays must have been written by someone else, a man of rank or with a university degree, reveals something about those who entertain it.) The Folio is prefaced by a poem by Ben Jonson (1572-16), who in 1616 had published his own Works as if he were a classical author. In To the memory of my beloved, the author Mr William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us, Jonson prefers Shakespeare to earlier English poets, and wishes he could show the tragedies to Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles. But in comedy his Shakespeare could stand the comparison: Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. Triumph, my Britaine, thou hast one to showe, To whom all Scenes of F.uropehomage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time!The conclusion is an apotheosis: Shakespeare, hailed as ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’, is raised to the heavens as a ‘constellation’, the ‘Starre of Poets’. This is a witty poetic puff. But the claim that Shakespeare is not only the greatest European dramatist but also ‘for all time’ stands up well. Jonson had a high idea of poetry, and was a critic hard to please. He wrote of Shakespeare that he ‘loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any’. John Milton wrote in the Second Folio (1632) of the ‘deep impression’ made by Shakespeare’s ‘delphick lines’ and echoes Jonson in calling him ‘my Shakespeare’. Writers adopted Shakespeare early, critics followed later. The idolatry Jonson eschewed dates from the Stratford Jubilee in April 1769, led by David Garrick and James Boswell, when false relics of ‘the Bard’, as he was called, were sold by the thousand. Thereafter Jonson’s witty promotion of Shakespeare to semi-divine status was taken seriously in Germany and even in France. In 1818 Keats entitled a  poem ‘On sitting down to read King Lear once again’. The Bard was now more read than  performed.

Luck and fame But Shakespeare lives because he is a playwright: his plays are re-created in daily performance in and beyond the Englishspeaking world. He joined the theatre as it entered its great period, a time of general intellectual ferment, cultural confidence and linguistic exuberance. Materials were to hand - classical and European literature re-created in translation - and models of English verse in Sidney and Spenser, and of lively drama in Lyly, Kyd and Marlowe. Shakespeare has been lucky in that his English remains largely intelligible. Chaucer’s ‘verray parfit gentil knyght’ can be misunderstood: verray meant true, parfit complete, and gentil noble. Compared with Chaucer, Shakespeare takes more risks with words; yet senses have changed less since his day. He also lived at the beginning of the modern age: his ideas of the world were shaped by the Christian and humanist ideals which have fed most of what has so far followed. Lucky in his school and home, he then had to make his way in the world. At the age of 20 he was himself a father of three. The theatre offered him a living.

The drama It was two centuries since drama had moved out of the church and into the street, although the Mystery plays, which dramatized biblical stories in all-day cycles on summer holy days, continued into Shakespeare’s time. The Reformation had transferred much pageant and spectacle to the State. The Church was cowed, and the theatre was the chief place where the concerns of the day could, with care, be ventilated. There was public appetite for drama, which explored the interests of a large new audience. Theatres were erected by commercial joint-venture companies outside the City, chiefly on the South Bank of the Thames, the home of diversions not permitted in the City.

The commercial theatre Strolling players did not make money: audiences melted away as the hat went round. In London inn-yards of the 1550s, the spectator put his penny in a box at the entrance (hence ‘box-office’). Then in 1576 James Burbage, a carpenter-actorimpresario, built The Theatre for the Earl of Leicester’s players, who had a Royal Patent. This was the first purpose-built permanent public theatre. Although its title (and perhaps its shape) echoed classical theatre, Burbage would have been surprised to learn that what passed on the stages he built is valued more than the non-dramatic poetry of his day.In 1599 the new Globe stood three storeys high, near Southwark Cathedral, surrounded by other theatres, houses, inns, churches, shops, brothels, cockpits and bearpits. Puritans feared the theatre; the Court watched it; plays were licensed. Built by Shakespeare’s company out of the old timbers of The Theatre, the Globe could hold 3000 - a huge audience, although the atmosphere of the rebuilt modern Globe (opened in 1996) is surprisingly intimate. There were then five other big theatres in a London of about 200,000 inhabitants. Ten days counted as a long run, and revivals were unusual; new plays were always needed. The plays were put on in the afternoon in this enclosed yard with its roofed stage and thatched galleries. Shakespeare mentions ‘the two hours’ traffic of the stage’: there was no scenery to change. As one scene ended, another would begin: an actor would enter saying ‘This castle has a pleasant seat’ or ‘Is this a dagger that I see before me?’, so that the audience would know what to imagine. The audience did not suspend disbelief within a darkened theatre: it collaborated in daylight makebelieve. Plays did not pretend to be real: the sultry, mature Cleopatra was played by a boy, as were all women. Verse is itself a convention, as is the soliloquy and the aside. So is invisibility: in broad daylight an actor would whisper ‘I am invisible’. He was not invisible to the ‘groundlings’, who stood on the ground at his feet visible, audible and inhalable, crowding round the stage. Each of those who paid one penny to stand cannot have heard or grasped every flying word. But high-sounding and patterned language appealed in itself; crowds flocked to hear ornate sermons. Theatre was popular; the Globe could hold a sizeable fraction of Londoners free to attend. They participated, as at a provincial Italian opera, a Spanish bull-fight or a British pantomime. The cultural mix meant that popular vigour and crudity rubbed shoulders with poetry and intelligence. Shakespeare came in on a rising tide. After 1594 Marlowe and Kyd were dead, and he was the leading playwright, sharing in the profits of his Company. He began with the sexual knockabout of The Taming of the Shrew, the classical atrocities of Titus Andronicus, and the martial pageantry of Henry VI, but in his romance comedies combined action with literary high spirits. Public drama was crude and refined, sensational and complex; private theatres were indoor, smaller, quieter. But the theatres drew high and low, fine and coarse: it was the popular draw which gave the medium its cultural power, without which its enactment of current and recurrent human issues would have lacked the structure of humanist thinking, and drama might have lacked humour.

Predecessors Chapters 2 and 3 followed drama from Mystery and Morality through interlude to academic Roman comedy and Senecan tragedy. As for Shakespeare’s immediate exemplars, Jonson wrote: ‘how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,/Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line’. After Euphues, Thomas Lyly (1554-1606) wrote for schoolboys and the choristers of the Chapel Royal, who played in a private theatre made in the ruins of Blackfriars. His Campaspe (1583) told how Alexander loved a beautiful captive but allowed her to wed the artist Apelles, whom he had commissioned to paint her. A humanist debate, conducted in elegant prose with choral interludes, showed greatness giving way to art. But the great Gloriana proved a mean patroness to Lyly, and the theatre and the press did not support subsequent university wits: Robert Greene (1558-92), whose play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay gave hints to Marlowe for Dr Faustus; and Thomas Lodge (1558-1625), whose prose romance Rosalynde was the source for As You Like It. Lyly is polite, but Greene, Lodge and Nashe wrote for new middle-class patrons of mixed tastes. ‘Sporting’ is not the obvious epithet for Thomas Kyd (1558-94), author of The Spanish Tragedy; or, Hieronymo is Mad Again; perhaps Jonson thought his art immature. Kyd pioneered the revenge play; the performance of his tragedy at the Rose in 1592 may have been a revival. It has an isolated, agonized avenger, lurid characters and a brilliantly intricate plot. In the prologue a ghost cries out for vengeance, and the mad Hieronymo uses a play-within-a-play to avenge his son Horatio. The stilted end-stopped lines build little momentum, but the bloody ending is successfully horrific; it was hugely popular. Kyd may also have written a lost play about Hamlet.

Christopher Marlowe Shakespeare outshone Kyd, but learned from his own contemporary, Christopher Marlowe (b.1564), who was killed in a tavern in 1593. Marlowe announced his talent in Tamburlaine the Great

The order of the plays Shakespeare wrote on average two plays a year between c.1588-90 and 1611, except in 1592-4 when bubonic plague shut the theatres. His contemporaries saw or read Shakespeare play by play, as we do in the theatre or at school. But the Folio gave Shakespeare as a whole to readers, and before approaching representative plays the order of his writing is worth a look, both chronologically and in terms of genre. He began with comedies of love, and chronicle-plays. The first decade produced nine plays called after kings of England, ten comedies of love and two non-historical tragedies. The second decade shows more critical comedies, with tragedies and Roman plays, followed by four romances, ending with The Tempest. Ten years after Elizabeth’s death he worked with Fletcher on Henry Vlll and on Two Noble Kinsmen.

Histories The Folio classification by kinds is rough (the Greek and Roman histories are classed as tragedies) and has caused trouble, for Shakespeare did not follow the classical division of dramatic experience into comedy and tragedy. He often put comedy into tragedy and vice versa, upsetting the classically-minded. The history, perfected and defined by Shakespeare’s example, is not a pure or classical kind of play. He wrote ten English histories in all, listed in the Folio in the order of the reigns of the kings in their titles. But the order of reigns was not the order of composition. The first tetralogy - the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III - was written in 1590-3. We shall look at the second tetralogy - Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V - composed in 1595-9. The three Henry VI plays are loosely-constructed pageant-like epic drama - patriotic, military and spectacular. In contrast to these dramatized chronicles, Richard III is a drama. The Quarto title was The Tragedy of Richard of York, and it has tragic form. Compared with what followed, it is relatively crude, as are The Comedy of Errors, The Shrew and Titus Andronicus, early plays based on unsentimental classical precedents. Richard III is based on More’s prose History of Richard III (written in 1513 in Latin and English), a study in tyranny. Shakespeare’s twisted plotter comes from More (see page 80). Compared with medieval chroniclers who construct their narratives in terms of divine providence and personal character, humanists like More wrote analytic history in the mode of the Roman historian Tacitus (AD 55-after 115). Although he is modelled on the Vice figure from the Morality plays, Richard is not merely malignant. A central figure whose soliloquies show internal consciousness is found in the Morality play Everyman, but Richard is the first Shakespearean protagonist to soliloquize. Shakespeare’s reigns-on-stage stop with Richard III and the advent of the Tudors. Henry VIII’s three children had each in turn reversed preceding religious policy. As Shakespeare began writing, Mary Queen of Scots - mother of Elizabeth’s heirapparent, James VI of Scotland - lost her head. Dynastic historiography was dangerous. From 1547 the Tudors made sure that their subjects heard regularly from the pulpit about their duty to obey the Crown. Church attendance was the law, and nine times a year homilies were read on the divine appointment of kings and the duty of subjects to order and obedience. The manuscript of a play of c.1594 on Sir Thomas More survives, with contributions by six hands, one thought to be Shakespeare’s; it was not staged in the Queen’s lifetime. It was ten years after Elizabeth’s death that Shakespeare collaborated in a Henry VIII. The portrayals of More and of Katherine of Aragon are sympathetic. Shakespeare’s histories draw on the Chronicles of Holinshed (1587), and on plays such as Woodstock, about the murder of Thomas Woodstock, uncle of Richard II. On the afternoon before his attempted coup in 1601, supporters of the Earl of Essex commissioned a special performance of Richard ll. The players at first demurred, saying that the play was stale. The Queen said on this occasion that it had been played forty times (that is, since 1595). It was not stale, however, for she also said ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’ Richard had been deposed (and murdered) by Lancastrians, from whom the Tudors inherited their right to the throne. Essex was executed.

Shakespeare