Contested Will (39 page)

We have also had drummed into us that he was Shakespeare of the Globe – though that playhouse was only built in the closing years of Elizabeth's reign. Long forgotten are the other playing spaces in and around London in which he had built his reputation over the previous decade: the Theatre, the Curtain, Newington Butts, the Rose, Richmond, Whitehall, perhaps a brief stint at the Swan. I'm as blameworthy as the next in this respect, having spent years researching and writing about the construction of the Globe and what was taking place in the closing years of Elizabeth's reign. The Globe has become an icon, a once-again familiar sight on Bankside in London. I'm not sure if it's an urban legend, but I have heard that dozens of replicas of it have sprouted round the world.

But had you asked anyone on the streets of London in the winter of 1610 where you could go to see Shakespeare's latest play, there would have only been one answer: ‘Blackfriars.' The Blackfriars Theatre means little today to most admirers of Shakespeare; so far as I know, only a single replica of it has ever been erected, in rural Virginia, which attracts both spectators and scholars. The story of the Blackfriars Theatre is also the story of the Jacobean Shakespeare, and of the particular challenges he faced toward the end of his playwriting career. And that, in turn, helps explain why only Shakespeare could have written his late plays that were staged there.

The story dates back to February 1596, when James Burbage purchased a building in the fashionable London precinct of Blackfriars. Burbage's lease on Shakespeare's company's outdoor playhouse in Shoreditch, the Theatre, was about to expire, and his plan was to transfer the company to a permanent playing space. The new site had a lot going for it. For one thing, it was located in the heart of the City, which was much more convenient for London playgoers. For another, it was indoors, so that players could perform in inclement weather, year-round. And because of the site's ecclesiastical origins – it had been a Dominican priory before the dissolution of the monasteries – Blackfriars was technically not under the jurisdiction of London's City fathers, which meant that professional actors, who at the time were relegated to London's suburbs, could perform in the centre of town without fear of retribution. Burbage sank a lot of money into turning the building into an intimate playhouse, capable of holding perhaps six hundred spectators in a crammed rectangular playing chamber that was forty-six by sixty-six feet. But he failed to anticipate the stiff resistance to his plans by influential locals, including the company's own patron, the Lord Chamberlain, who did not want a theatre in the neighbourhood that would attract unruly crowds. The rest of the story is familiar: in 1599 the company moved instead to Southwark and began playing in an outdoor playhouse built out of the timbers of the dismantled Theatre, which they named the Globe.

Many years passed before the dream of inhabiting Blackfriars became a reality for Shakespeare and his fellow players. Soon after the Globe was up and running, hoping to recoup some of his late father's enormous outlay, Richard Burbage leased the Blackfriars site to Henry Evans, an enterprising scrivener who had been working with various children's companies since the 1580s and who wagered correctly that those living near the Blackfriars stage wouldn't object to a children's company performing there a few times a week. Evans now had a theatre but he didn't have enough boy actors, so he brought in Nathaniel Giles, Master of the
Children of the Chapel Royal at Windsor, who had the legal authority to abduct potential ‘choristers', much as sailors were impressed to man the English fleet. By late 1600 the children were thriving at Blackfriars and threatening the dominance of the adult players. Shakespeare was well aware, as he writes in
Hamlet
, that the ‘public audience' are ‘turned to private plays, / And to the humour of children'.

By 1604, however, following a terrible outbreak of plague that closed the theatres and swept away a sixth of London's population, Evans became ‘weary and out of liking' with his long-term lease and approached Richard Burbage about cancelling it, but they never came to terms. Evans must have been relieved, for his company's fortunes soon improved after a patent was issued placing the company under the patronage of Anna of Denmark, James's queen. Renamed the Children of the Queen's Revels, the company soon attracted the most talented young dramatists of the day, including John Marston, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. The repertory of the adult companies tended to range over all genres, and included a lot of old crowdpleasers. The Children of the Queen's Revels, lacking a backlist of old favourites to draw upon, stuck to a more restricted fare, mixing tragicomedies with irreverent satires. Its novel offerings catered to upscale playgoers willing to pay sixpence for the cheapest seat (six times the entry price charged at the Globe) and as high as two shillings and sixpence for those who wanted a box seat adjoining the stage. Gallants could pay more and sit on stools on the stage itself, to see and be seen, just a few feet from the action.

The adult players kept a close eye on these developments. There was concern that the satiric bent of the dramatic fare at Blackfriars crossed the line and might land all of London's players in trouble – a point made around 1608 by the veteran Thomas Heywood, who warned in his
Apology for Actors
of the new breed of writers who hurl ‘liberal invectives against all estates', and do so in ‘the mouths of children, supposing their juniority to a be a privilege for any railing, be it never so violent'. It wasn't long before a string of
outrageous plays – including
Eastward Ho, The Isle of Gulls
and especially a lost play called
The Silver Mine
that mocked the King himself as a foul-mouthed drunk – angered James enough to call for the dissolution of the children's company (the King had reportedly ‘vowed they should never play more, but should first beg their bread'). Henry Evans, now paying
£
40 a year rent but forbidden to stage any plays at Blackfriars, decided that it was time to move on, and surrendered his lease to the Burbages in August 1608.

It's at this point that Shakespeare and his fellow King's Men reenter the picture, having tacitly secured the permission that had been denied them a dozen years earlier to perform in this space. Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, Thomas Evans, John Heminges and William Sly formed a syndicate and became housekeepers in the potentially lucrative indoor playhouse. They chose not to abandon the Globe, however, playing at Blackfriars from October until Easter and outdoors at the Globe during late spring and summer. The first few years of the new venture saw both challenges and setbacks. In contrast to the Globe venture nine years earlier, they were moving into an established playhouse with a regular and demanding clientele who brought certain expectations about the kind of drama they wanted to see. In addition, Blackfriars needed significant renovation. More troublingly, plague now returned with renewed force and it wasn't until 1610 that the King's Men began performing at Blackfriars on a regular basis.

The King's Men had motives for the move beyond finding a dry place to play in winter. The core of their veteran company was getting on in years and an infusion of fresh blood was badly needed. The attrition of late had been severe. Thomas Pope, one of the founding members of the Chamberlain's Men and a co-owner of the Globe, had died by 1604. We hear no more of Sinklo after that year, either. Shakespeare, we can be pretty sure, had stopped acting regularly for the company around this time as well. Augustine Phillips, another member of the original fraternity and a co-owner
of the Globe, died in 1605. William Sly died in 1608 soon after signing on to the Blackfriars syndicate. The survivors were ageing, and the Jacobean theatre – no less for professional playwrights than for actors – was, they knew, a young man's game. That the King's Men were keen on absorbing some of the young talent on display at Blackfriars is confirmed in a lawsuit in which the Burbages acknowledged as much:

Richard Field, William Ostler and John Underwood were the pick of the litter – and having reached the age of twenty or so were ready to take on adult roles. All three would soon become sharers in the King's Men (though it took the enterprising Field a few more years before his move became final). This was a full partnership, combining the next generation of star actors with some of London's most beloved and established players. We can see the result in one of the few cast lists from the period to survive. Audiences lucky enough to watch the King's Men perform John Webster's
The Duchess of Malfi
at Blackfriars saw the parts of Ferdinand, the Cardinal, Antonio and Delio performed by Burbage, Condell, Ostler and Underwood respectively. While no cast lists for individual Shakespeare plays survive, Underwood, Field and Ostler are listed in the 1623 Folio among those who acted in his plays.

In taking over Blackfriars, the King's Men also took on board playwrights who had made their reputations writing for its coterie audiences. The company could now boast that the five leading playwrights in the land – Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont – were now writing for them. Biographical critics like to imagine that some
mid-life crisis or a longing to reunite with his wife and daughters led Shakespeare to turn to tragicomedy at this time. It's more likely that his turn to romance and tragicomedy in his late and collaborative plays was dictated by the popularity of these kinds of plays at Blackfriars, amounting to a house style.

By 1610, then, Shakespeare was writing for a new group of actors and alongside (as often as not collaboratively) a new generation of playwrights. And he was doing so in a new playing space. He had always written plays that could be converted from one venue to another, expecting that many of the plays first performed at the outdoor amphitheatres would be restaged at various royal palaces, at aristocratic houses and in touring provincial productions in all kinds of venues. That's one reason that there are so few props and so little fancy stage business in his plays. But Blackfriars brought a particular set of challenges. Gone are the fight scenes – like the thrilling duel at the end of
Hamlet
. The cramped stage at Blackfriars, crowded with playgoers on stools, couldn't accommodate them (which explains why, for example, a much anticipated fight at the end of
The Two Noble Kinsmen
is only reported, not staged). Another great difference had to do with lighting. While Blackfriars plays were performed in the afternoon, the playhouse windows didn't admit enough light. So performances were illuminated by candlelight. In addition to creating a different mood in the intimate space, the candles needed to be trimmed in the course of a three-hour performance. This was handled at Blackfriars by intermissions between the acts, a far cry from the situation at the Globe, where action onstage was uninterrupted. By the time he wrote
The Winter's Tale
, with its sudden passage of sixteen years in mid-play, Shakespeare had clearly begun to make creative use of these breaks.

Audiences at Blackfriars expected to be entertained during the time it took to trim or replace candles. So when the King's Men took over from the children's company, they wisely acquired the skilled musicians who had accompanied them at Blackfriars. As a result, the plays that Shakespeare was now writing for the company
included a great deal more music. Gone, then, from Shakespeare's works from 1610 on, are the trumpets and drums of his earlier plays from
Titus Andronicus
onward, instruments which the actors themselves could easily handle, replaced by far more subtle musical effects. You can hear it in
Cymbeline's
call for ‘solemn music', the music that awakens Hermione in
The Winter's Tale
, the ‘sad and solemn music' in
Henry the Eighth
, the ‘sudden twang of instrument' in
The Two Noble Kinsmen
, and especially in
The Tempest
, with its repeated calls for ‘solemn and strange music' and ‘soft music'. Dancing, too, began to figure regularly in Shakespeare's plays. Only six of his first thirty-three plays incorporated dancing scenes; after the move to Blackfriars, dancing would figure in all of Shakespeare's plays.

Most of these dance sequences revolve around a formal masque, a court-centred art form that drew together dance, music and the spoken word. Ben Jonson, one of the innovators of this genre, was also the first to introduce elements of the Jacobean court masque onto the Blackfriars stage in 1605. Shakespeare's first attempt at a masque, written not long after, appeared in
Timon
at the Globe. After the move to Blackfriars they start appearing with surprising regularity, in
Cymbeline, The Tempest, Henry the Eighth
and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
.

The Jacobean court masques attracted some of the most talented artists in the land. Shakespeare never wrote a masque for court, but as his late works make clear, he had a keen eye for the form, and members of his company were familiar enough with the genre, having been recruited to play the part of anti-masquers at court performances after 1609. It wouldn't be long before Shakespeare offered his own version of the anti-masque, which Caliban and his mates provided after the dance of the Spirits in
The Tempest
, a play aptly described by Stephen Orgel as ‘the most important Renaissance commentary' on the masque. Playgoers at Blackfriars may have been privileged relative to those at the Globe, but only a small number of playgoers at either theatre had the chance to witness the lavish masques performed before King
James's court; the masques Shakespeare incorporated into his plays were the next best thing.