Shakespeare: A Life (28 page)

Among Gray's members from the south, none was a keener patron of the
arts than a delicately handsome Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of
Southampton. Historically, the Inns had sponsored drama almost as a
loyal duty to the monarch, and they had poets and future dramatists in
residence; also they were hives of sonneteering in the 1590. Michael
Drayton of Warwickshire refers to the Inns, and to judge from his
sonnets he knew unpublished lyrics by his Stratford countryman.

In brief, The Comedy of Errors was staged in a milieu not uncongenial
to its author. As Shakespeare's funniest play it advertises his
considerable technical powers. It outdoes its main source, or Plautus's
funny, unsentimental
Menaechmi
about identical twins, by having
two sets of twins for confusion, even as it deftly mixes poignant
comedy and farce. Shakespeare's Antipholus of Syracuse is a foreigner --
as Johannes Shagbag is said to be -- who fails to cope with a
dauntingly quick-paced, haunted society of Ephesus, which takes him
for his twin. He is like a confused actor who has lost track of his
own identity, as if he has had too many bizarre roles to play, and
though he falls in love with an urbane, pretty Luciana, the sister of
his brother's wife Adriana, he never quite imposes himself on a
foreign society.

Mistaking him for
her husband and shocked by his coldness, Adriana beseeches him as one
terrified by loss of love. Her pathos in its tragic aspect is urgent
and unanswered, as if she were replying to the Poet of the so-called
Dark Lady sonnets. 'Ay, ay, Antipholus, look strange and frown', she
cries imploringly,

How
comes it now, my husband, O how comes it That thou art then estrangèd
from thyself? -Thy 'self' I call it, being strange to me That,
undividable, incorporate, Am better than thy dear self's better part.
Ah, do not tear away thyself from me; For know, my love, as easy
mayst thou fall A drop of water in the breaking gulf, And take
unmingled thence that drop again Without addition or diminishing, As
take from me thyself, and not me too. ( II. ii. 113, 122-32)

-164-

Does Adriana in effect address the author from a ' Stratford
viewpoint'? Interestingly, Shakespeare most nearly indulges in
autobiography in a play when depicting illusory states of mind. Errors
is a many-layered comedy with hints of Stratford's life in it. The
'confusions' of the Antipholi, though farcical, result in sharp,
realistic mercantile tensions before the denouement: old Egeus, saved
from death, is reunited with his wife the 'Abbess', who is as
practical about medicinal herbs as about faith. Like the dramatist's
father, Egeus has lacked money at a crucial time, and also faced a law
as arbitrary as the Tudor usury statutes which affected John
Shakespeare. He yearns less for his wife than for his progeny, and his
Syracusan son, Antipholus, has been as bereft of family as a
travelling actor might be.

Such
autobiographical aspects of the play -- which I risk overemphasizing
here -- at least help the author to detach himself from the tone of
his literary sources. Whereas the Latin Menaechmi is hardedged and
cynical, The Comedy of Errors tells a healing story befitting a drama
twice performed on Innocents Day. Shakespeare explores problems of
lasting intellectual importance to himself, such as the fear of
non-being, or the need for self-redemption, and this light comedy
really looks ahead to matters of identity in Hamlet and to
reconciliations in the late romances. If it was written after September
1592, as is probable, Errors also suggests that he was more deeply
troubled by the attacks oil his integrity in Greene Groats-worth than
is often supposed. Errors is not so much a vindication of himself as it
is an enquiry into the matter of how he can judge himself at all.
Unrecognized by other people, Antipholus of Syracuse has no 'self' to
be certain of, or to defend. Adriana's selfliood, even the nature of
her 'blood', depends not merely on her own behaviour, but on her
husband's. Funny as it is, Errors is in some ways a troubling work by a
proficient author seeking to know himself. Gray's students -- if the
play was audible -- must have been amused by mentions of the 'Phoenix'
(the sign of a shop in Lombard Street and of a London tavern) and
'Porpentine' (a Bankside inn), as well as by a tour of modern Europe
and America focusing on fat Nell's geography and by bawdy jokes on
baldness. Losing his hair perhaps at about 30, Shakespeare finds
baldness a sign of wit, or syphilis, or both.

-165-

It has been suggested that he also wrote Love's Labour's Lost during
or just after the plague and with an audience of students and lawyers
in mind. The work has bawdy enough for Inns of Court 'termers'. It was
to be staged at the royal court, and it must have served in a public
amphitheatre. Though its verse is adroit, Love's Labour's Lost has signs
of having been penned very quickly in a relatively unplanned way. It
opens with the King of Navarre's quixotic, limp wish to defy
'cormorant' time and win fame with his lords in three years' study
during which no woman is to sully their academe; but the scheme is
quickly subverted, and the drama nearly runs out of plot. Its
wooing-games and funny shows of the Muscovites and of the Nine
Worthies are at least well improvised by Shakespeare, and before
Mercadé arrives with news of the King of France's death in Act V, the
play is an exquisite frolic -- a Lylyan work in which wit, word-play,
and drama about words aspire to music's condition.

Biron, the most astute of the lords, for example uses the word
light
gracefully and half a dozen times in three lines, quite as easily as he breathes --

Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile; So ere you find
where light in darkness lies Your light grows dark by losing of your
eyes. ( I. i. 77-9)

He also summarizes the whole truth of Navarre's 'academe' at the outset with little or no effort:

Necessity will make us all forsworn Three thousand times within this
three years' space; For every man with his affects is born, Not by
might mastered, but by special grace. ( I. i. 147-50)

Yet -- within a leisurely framework -- Shakespeare appears to carry
out in part an exercise in recollection, or in comic criticism of his
own early attachment to prosody and rhetoric. The ambience, in some
respects, might be Church Street's in the 1570s. The hothouse of the
grammar school is resurrected with affectionate gusto. Armado,

-166-

Holofernes, and Nathaniel all together suggest Upper and Lower School
pedantry -- but Holofernes does not have the name of Pantagruel's tutor
in Rabelais for nothing. He is no mere fool, since he thinks the best
poet who ever woke up in Italy was Ovid, or Naso, the great nose
('for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy'). Indeed,
'Ovidius Naso was the man' ( IV. ii. 123-5). In his Ovidveneration, he
speaks for his creator. What might seem, in Act IV, to be a satire
aimed at a modern writer's excessive dependency upon Ovid turns into
astute praise for Naso, or the Nose. Shakespeare's affection for Ovid
mutes or qualifies an exceedingly mild criticism here of
grammar-school ideals, as if Ovid's charm at one time had suffused the
air of Church Street and softened Master Jenkins's very benches.
Primed by Ovid, Holofernes has learned from Book X of Quintilian that,
for poetry, imitation alone is not sufficient ('imitatio per se ipsa
non sufficit') and that grace, facility, and invention count most, as
they did for Naso.
²⁵
So he offers an expert critique of a Biron sonnet, and Act IV itself
seems to point Shakespeare away from a dramatic career and towards a
lyric poet's one.

If Holofernes is
indulged by the dramatist, so is Biron. This lord's role appears to
have been slightly expanded as a result of Shakespeare's second
thoughts,
currente calamo,
during the actual writing of Love's
Labour's Lost. And in the action, Biron is the most fully defined ghost
from the Gild hall's overhall. Suitably chastised, he frames a vow
to give up taffeta phrases in a speech which is itself a perfect sonnet
( V. ii. 402-15), and his penance will be the hardest of the lovesick
lords. If he visits the groaning sick and makes a 'painèd' impotent
smile, as Rosaline asks, the power of his dancing wit is likely to be
confirmed by invalids.

The question
might be whether Shakespeare could give up Bironic lyric grace, or
could find a way to adapt lyric gifts further to his uses. Love's
Labour's Lost suggests his diminishing commitment to the theatre, and
in some ways a failure in dramatic nerve. Its women after all are
remote, untested, enigmatic, and seemingly not in need of love of any
kind. The play looks out on its time very tentatively -- though it is
filled with newsworthy names. The Earl of Essex had banqueted with
Navarre or Henry IV, with Biron the French general, and with

-167-

Longueville the Normandy governor in 1591. The play's topical parallels
are vague, and its satirical targets are not clear (if it really had
any). Armado's page-boy Mote at least is not an explicit caricature of
Nashe, though a boy actor could have mimicked Nashe's swagger, or
shown off his funny, angled teeth.

Nashe may well have heard Biron compared with the real Armand de
Gontaut, duc de Biron, since he noted how 'busie wits' look for
nonexistent allusions. 'Let one but name bread', wrote Nashe, 'they will
interpret it to be the town of Bredan in the low countreyes; if of
beere he talks, then straight he mocks the Countie Beroune in France.'
²⁶

Shakespeare in the play mocks very little, so far as we know, apart
from the euphuistic style and his light, parodying glances at Marlowe
or Spenser. But if the attack in Groats-worth and the long, discouraging
closure of the playhouses did nothing to reconcile him to the
theatre, it is likely that hardships had made a new path ahead for him
more attractive. In his refined dramas, he had aimed to please actors
and large crowds -- but not without implicit defiance of his calling.
He had written with an elegance that belied the normal constraints and
tawdriness of an actor's days. Financially insecure at the best of
times, he and his fellows had to predict what the crowds might like,
and what might not offend authority. In the bitter hiatus of the
plague, the solvency of every troupe was at risk, no matter what dramas
they had on hand or how cleverly they were performed.

Furthermore, there is evidence of Shakespeare's acute and undiminishing
concern for his own (and his Stratford family's) respectability. He
would have been tempted to adopt a new calling if he profitably could,
and as a sanguine and energetic man he might hope to find the
ingenuity to please a great poetry-patron of England. Having spent his
working life in the theatre, he cannot have been certain of his way
ahead. There can be a prospect of self-betrayal in new undertakings.
His Sonnets, to the extent that they are autobiographical, approach
his identity uneasily, as if he were taking the lid off a jar of worms.
They are urgently preoccupied with illusions of selffiood, and a
picturing of the self. In any case during the plague, so far as we know,
he looked beyond the stage to a new circle, a new audience, and with
some hope to a remarkable young man.

-168-

How can it, O, how can love's eye be true,
That is so vexed with watching and with tears?

(Sonnet 148)

Well aware of a sophisticated readership among courtiers, lawyers, and
others in the professional and mercantile ranks, Shakespeare published
two erotic works in the plague years. These poems were meant for
readers of either sex. Yet they were especially well suited to young
men with leisure to admire tales of rape, seduction, and female grief
told with Ovidian grace and wit. With Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, he
made a strong bid to be recognized as a poet by refined society.

And the poems contrast with a bleak, plague-ridden London. Early in
1593 Shakespeare had done much. If he had suffered as an upstart
'Shake-scene', he had Chettle's apology in print. And now for a few
weeks actors resumed work in London, until plague closed the theatres
on 28 January. Strange's and Sussex's players lingered near a wintry
city before returning to the road. In fact, Sussex's troupe did not
get a Privy Council warrant to play beyond a seven-mile radius of
London until 29 April. Strange's larger group had a warrant on 6 May,
by which time they had left with Alleyn for Chelmsford. In the
interval the acting companies prepared for hard tours, which took the
likes of Kempe, Pope, Heminges, and other sharers with hired men and
boys as far north as Newcastle and York.

London's streets -- in this year of Venus and Adonis -- were

-169-

thronged with beggars, some of them maimed soldiers back from abroad.
Among greasy crowds at Paul's Churchyard, booksellers did a fair
business, but in the suburbs there was misery enough. Philip Henslowe,
of the Rose, turned to pawnbroking, gouging clients at a 50 per cent
rate of interest and taking in meagre, cloth-wrapped bundles of
children's clothing, mainly from women.

Shakespeare would have been of use to a troupe readying for the road,
and there is reason to think he had a collaborative task at about
this time. He must have seen his dramas altered by improvising actors
or other hands, and perhaps already had written some of Edward III, a
work still outside the accepted Shakespearean canon, though scholars
usually agree that he contributed to its first two acts. A history play
with a fresh view of kingship and a moderate view of France, Edward
III concerns a king's efforts to govern his own nature. Shakespeare's
style is evident, for example, in a scene in which a nobleman advises
his daughter in a grave list of school-like
sententiae
on the corruption of power:

. . .poison shows worst in a golden cup;
Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
¹

Shakespeare used the last line, word for word, in Sonnet 94. Other
phrases from the play are in his Sonnets -- which relate lightly to
Edward III's text.

This year it is likely that he collaborated on a more volatile play; and the theatrical manuscript of
The Booke of Sir Thomas More
may give us -- briefly -- a chance to see him at work at about the time of his Venus.
²
We know that Anthony Munday -- a government informer fond of volatile
topics -- had a major hand in working up a script on Sir Thomas More,
who had been martyred by the Queen's father. The play was timely. It
involved London's 'Ill May Day' riots against foreigners in 1517; these
were ominous, unforgotten risings which had been echoed in a Southwark
riot of 11 June 1592 -- the very cause of an official closure of
theatres two months before the plague alert of August. On the latter
occasion, mobs were angered by the government's slowness in protecting
apprentices from competing 'strangers'

-170-