Shakespeare: A Life (45 page)

ennui, the tired absurdity of her pretending to obey her father's will,
the smugness of Christian aristocrats, Antonio's amorality, and
Jessica's shallowness -- all of these are out of balance with the faith,
integrity, and nerve of Shylock, whose dignity is not lessened even
by his maddened bargain for Antonio's flesh. Intentionally or not, the
poet appears to subvert his design with figures such as Hotspur,
Falstaff, Shylock, and Malvolio, who beat with an intenser life than do
their associates. In this case, a revulsion at his affluence in the
wake of his son's death seems to have affected Shakespeare's
dramaturgy. His outlay for a large Chapel Street house was striking at
a time when frightful scarcities and high prices did not allow the
poor to buy enough barley, beans, oats, or rye.
²⁰
The attempts of the towns to look after the hungry accused the
well-to-do, and Shakespeare highlights the evils of moneylending and
turns against materialism. Shylock is thoroughly punished, but the
drama's chief interest exits with him -he leaves behind a thematic gap
never again filled.

Less paradoxical
and on the whole more objectively written, Much Ado about Nothing and
Twelfth Night display a mature wit, pace, and deftness of portraiture
developed through Shakespeare's series of romantic comedies, and both
plays have an intellectual edge in their attacks on social
complacency. The testing of suitors in the
Merchant
has a parallel in the role-playing duels of Beatrice and Benedick. The love plots in
Much Ado
and
Twelfth Night
relate to popular Italian or French tales by writers such as Matteo
Bandello and François de Belleforest, and one of Shakespeare's
innovations is to impart to the changed, dramatized tale a
psychological dimension, so as to use 'love' as a means of exploring a
capacity for self-deception.
Twelfth Night
, written soon after
Hamlet,
is deliberately like an overripe plum in its comic scenes; a critic
such as Richard Hillman is even oppressed by an entropic, muggy aspect
of its imagined Illyria, and by the 'fantasy-ridden self-indulgence
of its inhabitants'. Philip Edwards finds the author exposing 'his
comedy to questioning at every point'.
²¹
Implicitly, the authorial self is also in question, and, as different
as the stiff, toadying Malvolio is from Shylock, the author again
sympathizes excessively with an aggrieved, self-deluding outcast.

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His own reputation had been setting Shakespeare apart from all other
theatre-poets. A few of his plays had been issued in quarto anonymously
before an auspicious change in 1598. Not only were second quartos of
Richard II
and
Richard III
printed with his name that year, but
Love's Labour's Lost
(as 'By W. Shakespere') appeared in its first extant edition.
Publication of his love plays whetted interest in their author. John
Manningham, a law student at the Middle Temple where
Twelfth Night
was staged in 1602, jots in that same year, in his
Diary
,
an anecdote which perhaps fittingly bedevils Shakespeare's
biographers to this day. An assumption has been made that Manningham
heard it from his room-mate Edward Curle, but the informant's name is
too obscurely written to be positively identifiable. One student of the
Diary
's handwriting plausibly holds that Manningham in all likelihood wrote '(Mr. Towse)' just after this anecdote.
²²
William Towes, or Towse, of Hingham, Norfolk, was a member of the
Inner Temple, a purveyor of stories about the illustrious, and one of
the diarist's chief informants. In its mild scurrilousness and
historical allusiveness the story, at any rate, is in tune with wry,
fictive anecdotes told at the Inns of Court Christmas revels which
lasted into January. Recorded in March 1602, the story is that once,
after playing Richard III, Richard Burbage arranged a tryst with a
lady besotted by him; but they must have talked too loudly, for Will
Shakespeare overheard their talk, reached the lady first, and was
'entertained, and at his game ere Burbidge came'. When a message
arrived to say Richard III was at the door, the poet slyly sent word
that William the Conqueror had preceded Richard III.
²³
Students relished the idea of a poet's outwitting the famous actor
Burbage, and the tale was retold, embellished with new details, and
printed in Thomas Wilkes
A General View of the Stage
in 1759, long before Manningham
Diary
came to light.

More soberly indicative of Shakespeare's fame is a work by an
enthusiastic clergyman, Francis Meres, which appeared in 1598 as
Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury. Being the Second part of Wits Common wealth
.
Born a year after Shakespeare and hailing from Lincolnshire, Meres
describes himself in this stubby octavo (and also in his first

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printed sermon,
God's Arithmetic
)
as a 'Master of Arts of both Universities'. As a scholar, he is lazy.
He lifts his classical allusions mainly from a handbook known as the
Officina
by J. Ravisius Textor, but in a section entitled 'Poetrie' he is keen
to show, in a style laden with similitudes, what was felt at the time
about living English poets.

Meres's
value, for us, lies in his lack of originality and his reflection of
popular views. Most of his panegyrics are undiscriminating, and he
flatters Michael Drayton with more words and mentions than anyone
else. Yet he writes two significant paragraphs, in the first of which an
Elizabethan view of Shakespeare's relationship with Ovid is well
given. 'As the soule of
Euphorbus
was thought to live in
Pythagoras
', Meres offers with a show of erudition, 'so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous & hony-tongued
Shakespeare,
witnes his
Venus
and
Adonis
, his
Lucrece
, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, ȧc'.
²⁴
The 'sugred Sonnets', it might be thought, represent a few of the poems printed in the
Sonnets
( 1609). So one assumes, although Meres could be referring to some
fourteen-line poems and other amatory lyrics by Shakespeare now lost.
His second paragraph has other mysteries. 'As
Plautus
and
Seneca
are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines', he writes,

so
Shakespeare
among y
^e
English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witnes his
Gentlemen of Verona
, his
Errors
, his
Love labors lost
, his
Love labours wonne
, his
Midsummers night dreame
, ∧ his
Merchant of Venice
: for Tragedy his
Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry the 4. King John,
Titus Andronicus and his
Romeo
and
juliet
.
²⁵

That list invaluably tells us about dramas which must have existed by
7 September 1598, when Meres's book was registered. He was in London
in 1597 and 1598, and his survey is up to date, since he mentions
Everard Guilpin
Skialetheia
, registered eight days after
Palladis Tamia
; but he does not produce exhaustive lists. He omits
Henry VI
for instance, and names six comedies and six 'tragedies' to illustrate Shakespeare's double superiority. If
Much Ado
, then, was not yet acted, could it be the same play Meres calls
Love's Labour's Won
?
The latter became less of a ghost in 1953 when a London bookseller
found a scrap of paper, used to make a hinge for a volume of sermons,
which

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turned out to show a stationer's notes on books stocked in August
1603. Under "Love's Labour Lost" is the manuscript entry, "Love's
Labour Won". Meres, then, was not mistaken to list that title, but
whether
Love's Labour's Won
describes a missing work, or is an alternative title for an existing drama such as
Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado
, or
All's Well
, is still unknown.

For a poet involved in writing scripts for actors,
Palladis Tamia
was likely to be only a naïve amusing irrelevance. The theatre was
concerned with practices of the day and the tastes of contemporary
audiences, and very little with supposed literary values. In
Hamlet
Shakespeare may lightly mock the pretensions of
Palladis Tamia
.
Meres's verdict, 'Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for
Comedy and Tragedy', seems to be echoed by Polonius just after his
fantastic catalogue of the stage-play genres. 'Seneca cannot be too
heavy, nor Plautus too light', he weightily instructs Prince Hamlet,
as if the latter were a kind of dim grammar-school boy who could
hardly tell the difference between dark tragedy and bright comedy.
²⁶

At all events, the earnest criticism which attends Shakespeare's fame had begun.

To some extent the successful revival of Marlowe ne
Jew of Malta --
which with Kyd
The Spanish Tragedy
had been one of Henslowe's two most profitable works at the Rose --
would have alerted the Chamberlain's men to the potential of their own
Merchant of Venice
. We lack a diary to tell us how often the
latter was played at the Theater or the Curtain but Shylock was a
success, and there are signs that the
Merchant
did uncommonly
well in a public amphitheatre and at court. Hence it can seem
surprising that the Chamberlain's men found themselves in deep trouble
by 1597, and that their repertoire did not save them: their survival
was in question. The troupe lacked cash, they lacked a secure theatre,
they lacked a safe venue, and, facing bankruptcy, they began to sell
off their playbooks. The extent of their difficulties by the middle of
1597 has been considerably underestimated.

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Ironically it was a far-sighted plan of James Burbage which led to a
disaster for Shakespeare's group. A year earlier, the old man had sunk
£600 of his reserves in the 'upper frater' chamber of a former priory
at Blackfriars. This large room, conveniently near a well-heeled
clientele in the city's west would, he hoped, serve as an
indoor
venue. All playgoers, according to Burbage's plan, would have seats, and this would allow for a minimum entry price of 6
d.
with cheap seats in high balconies at the rear, and costlier ones in
the pit or stalls, or in boxes flanking the stage (this roughly
anticipated the pricing and seating patterns of our modern theatres).
²⁷
In November however, thirty-one residents of Blackfriars petitioned
the Privy Council against having a common public theatre in their
midst -- and signing the petition as if to deserve a reply of 'Et tu,
Brute' was the company's new patron, George Carey, the second Lord
Hunsdon. The project collapsed.

With
his capital sunk in Blackfriars, old Burbage died three months later.
Cuthbert and Richard then had to hunt for a new venue, if the company
were to survive. The Theater stood on land owned by one Giles Allen --
a man of broadly Puritan sympathies -- who refused to renew the
lease. He played a nasty game, at last agreeing to a lease on inflated
terms, and then refusing to sign because he would not accept Richard
the actor as surety. While Cuthbert tried, with no success, to get a
new lease, the troupe could have used Langley's Swan on Bankside before
their Shoreditch lease expired on 13 April 1597, but they clung mainly
to the less than wholesome Curtain while cash ran low and the Theater
stood in 'darke silence, and vast solitude'.
²⁸
Money did not flow in. Gatherers waited at theatre doors, without
seeing much of it. Just why this happened is after all a little
mysterious; but dwindling cash was a worry for any troupe, and the
spectre of bored, listless ranks of the gentry defecting, or staying
away for any reason, was a nightmare. Actors had to eat; hirelings had
to be paid. The poet's fellows valued his scripts as prime assets,
and they can only have felt it a hurtful, oppressive loss in 1597 and
1598 when they sold the playbooks of
Richard III
,
Richard II
,
1 Henry IV
, and
Love's Labour's Lost
to Andrew Wise as a cash-raising device.

These were popular works. Sold to Wise, they were printed in quarto,
with the result that the first three became the only playbooks

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by Shakespeare to sell as well as dramas such as Thomas Heywood
If You Know Not Me, Part 1
( 1605), Samuel Daniel
Philotas
( 1605), the anonymous
How a Man May Choose a Good Wife
( 1602), or Beaumont and Fletcher
Philaster
( 1620), to judge from the number of times a drama was reprinted in
the twenty-five years after it was published. But the release of four of
Shakespeare's playscripts to Wise was an act of desperation, and one
stresses the point not only because Shakespeare's biographers neglect
it but because they have so little to say of his acting company and
think of his success as an unbroken phenomenon.

And what did his fame mean? Plays in print advertised his name, but
could also signal his troupe's urgent need for cash, or their declining
attractiveness. Rival companies left each other's repertories alone;
but his fellows clearly believed one of their dramas was stolen, and
cannot have been eager to release many of their holdings.
²⁹
If his histories or romantic comedies were well liked on stage,
colleagues might want more of the same and he risked repeating
himself. On the other hand, if he relied on older forms which he
handled well, he could jeopardize his troupe's effort to keep up with
new fashions in performance to maintain their prestige. Nothing he had
done guaranteed his troupe's solvency.

A doubtfully legal trick saved them. Some of his colleagues lived
near the Rose on Bankside, and here the Burbages took out a
thirtyone-year lease on a vacant site in December 1598. The winter
brought hard frosts, says Stow. The Thames froze at London Bridge
before Christmas, and then there was a thaw, followed by icy,
cheerless weather on St John's Day, the 27th, and a heavy snowfall on
the 28th, when the river 'was againe nigh frozen'.
³⁰
Taking advantage of the snowfall to work undetected, Cuthbert and
Richard Burbage, Peter Streete the carpenter, and about a dozen
workmen dismantled the old Theater at Shoreditch. Its heavy timbers
were piled on wagons, which would have found ice on the streets
hazardous. The timbers could not have been dragged over a 'nigh
frozen' Thames, so they probably went over London Bridge, before being
unloaded at a Southwark site that had been inherited by Nicholas
Brend, whose father, Thomas, had bought the land in 1544. Just to the
east of the Rose, this was

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