ON 17 NOVEMBER 1588 the church bells rang out as usual across the land for Queen Elizabeth’s accession day, but this year’s commemoration took on a new meaning with lavish public celebrations of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This was the defining event that brought the religious conflicts of the previous thirty years of her reign into sharp focus. That summer the country had been under arms: beacons at the ready, watchers set up along the coasts. Even in towns far from the sea, such as Stratford, men were called up to fight. Along with their fellow countrymen, Stratford’s recruits marched to the port of Tilbury, but they were not needed: the Armada had already lost the gun battles waged along the south coast from Plymouth to Kent. Then came the grim night when fireships were sent in to wreak havoc among the Spanish ships anchored off Gravelines, after which there was nothing left for the demoralized remnants but to attempt to return home the long way round the north of Britain, only to be battered to destruction on the rocks of Galway and Donegal. To loyal English Catholics, just as much as to the Protestant majority, the defeat of the Spanish invasion force was a deliverance, and it inaugurated a brief surge of optimism throughout the land.
So in London that morning the queen and all her councillors made their way down Cheapside to St Paul’s for a particularly heartfelt service of thanks-giving. The day was bright, the rain held off, and the peals of the bells floating over the city were audible miles away. Arriving from the north of England or the Midlands at that time, heading for one of the northern gates, Aldersgate or Bishopsgate, the traveller would have seen London in all its splendour: a capital now fast on the way to becoming a world city.
The best view was from the windmills across Finsbury Fields. From here the eye could take in the entire three-mile stretch of the city from Westminster to St Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch. And from this viewpoint an almost photographic panorama was drawn by an artist some time in the first few years of Shakespeare’s theatrical career. If, as is thought, he arrived here from Stratford at this time, this is the London he would have seen.
Far away to the right, across the loop of the Thames at Lambeth, are the Surrey hills, and in the foreground the huge roof of Westminster Hall and the Abbey, finials and weathervanes glinting. In front of the Abbey lies the smart suburb of Westminster, with its royal buildings, grace and favour apartments, tennis courts and tilt yards. The wooden palings of the garden of Gray’s Inn help to date the image: they were rebuilt in brick in the late 1590s. Closer still, travellers are moving out of Gray’s Inn Road, and the covered wagons of long-distance carriers from Smithfield are setting out for the Midlands. A cluster of men are practising at archery butts; on Moorfields the stainers are laying out their dyeing frames, and laundry women are emptying their ‘flaskets’ and laying out their washing to dry on fields where cows graze.
Beyond them in the distance the eye is taken to the towers of the archbishop’s palace over the river, and then to the great halls of the lawyers in the foreground. Gilded lanterns, sundials and stained glass catch the early light at Gray’s Inn (where Shakespeare would play his Comedy of Errors), Arundel House and the Middle Temple (future venue for a memorable Twelfth Night). Now the red roofs of the western end of the city come into view, the great private mansions around Holborn and the Strand, and the undulating expanse of tiled rooftops sloping down the Fleet valley and up to St Martin’s Ludgate. To see such a magnificent sight in the twenty-first century, one would have to go to Assisi, Toledo or Cuzco.
From the forest of brick chimneys smudges of smoke rise from fires of wood and seacoal. As the gaze shifts eastwards, the suburb of Clerkenwell comes into view, and behind it the huge bulk of St Paul’s with its great Gothic gable and tower, still 300 feet high, even though the spire, which took it well over 500 feet, has been gone for nearly thirty years now. Further on lies the mass of the late medieval city: the towers and spires of twenty-five churches, many going back to Anglo-Saxon times; and the huge mansions of the rich, sunlight occasionally catching their vermilioned crests and painted campaniles. Over the jumble of rooftops around the Guildhall and the Royal Exchange we can make out the weather-stained turrets of the Tower of London. Looking east again, Greenwich and the hills of Kent come into view, clear and blue. And everywhere, rising with the smoke into the still air, is what we can never hear now with all the traffic noise: the human roar of a great pre-modern city.
To visitors from home and abroad, Elizabethan London was a phenomenon. Its population was nearly 200,000 and rising fast. The great livery companies, the goldsmiths, merchants, mercers and clothiers, had grown in power and ostentation: their civic rituals and processions were grand public occasions on which fountains ran with wine, and cherubim with gilded wings and trumpets saluted the genius of the city. And in the last twenty years the suburbs had spread in every direction, filling up with tenements for the new urban poor.
With such wild extremes, the city itself would soon become the focus of a whole new genre of city comedies. In one memorable contemporary image London was likened to a ‘perspective picture’ which, depending on the viewpoint, yielded beauty and ugliness, peace and war, charity and aggression: prodigiously overflowing with wealth, yet sucking the life blood of the countryside as thousands of immigrants poured in to sustain its conspicuous consumption. Yet it was a place of tremendous opportunity, especially to an aspiring playwright in the autumn of 1588.
Back at the windmills in Finsbury Fields, the sounds of the city are still rising. Close by, wheels are rumbling and creaking up the rutted track towards Holloway as covered wagons head north with armed guards to fight off the robbers who haunt the wooded hills around Highgate. Looking east, there are two more windmills in open fields by the road leading down to Aldersgate, their sails turning as they grind flour for London’s bread. Beyond them are yet further windmills, half hidden among the suburban sprawl of Shoreditch. Here was London’s first theatre district.
Shoreditch had expanded hugely in the last fifty years, the result of an uncontrolled growth of unlicensed infills by landlords who used every available space to capitalize on the huge influx of unemployed people from the impoverished countryside. And the theatres were in the middle of it. Just over Moorfield ditch the Curtain peeps over the rooftops in our panorama, and 200 yards to the north is a great wooden octagon topped with a huge flag. This is the Theatre, the first custom-built professional playhouse in the modern world. Here in the autumn of 1588 the audience would have been able to see some of the most popular shows of the early Elizabethan drama. From our vantage point in Finsbury Fields, carried on the wind, you can imagine the distant roar of the crowd.
When this eternal substance of my soul
Did live imprison’d in my wanton flesh.
Each in their function serving other’s need,
I was a courtier in the Spanish court
My name was Don Andrea …
So begins the first great verse tragedy of the Elizabethan new wave. With its dark mix of courtly grandeur and corruption, its vistas of eternal torment and its hints of bloody revenge to come, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy caught the anxious mood of the time. It was probably written the year before the Armada, as was Marlowe’s explosive first play, Tamburlaine. What an exciting time for a young man with ambitions to be a writer.
Drama had always been an important element of English vernacular culture, and it is no coincidence that the end of the medieval mystery plays was followed by the swift rise of the professional theatre. London was at the heart of this new venture, which started with the Red Lion in 1567, followed by Newington Butts in 1575, then Burbage’s Theatre in 1576 and the Curtain the next year. These were the famous theatres of Shakespeare’s early career. The grander Rose, Swan and Globe on the south bank would follow later, as would the Fortune in the north of the city. There were also many inn yard theatres, some specially adapted as permanent stages, such as the Bull in Bishopsgate, the Bell and the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street and the huge Bel Savage outside Ludgate. All these were public venues for audiences of both sexes and the widest social background. For a higher-class clientele there would soon be indoor auditoria, such as the Blackfriars and the Cockpit. Many private institutions also regularly staged plays in magnificent settings, such as the great lawyers’ halls of the Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn. And of course Shakespeare’s company would regularly provide entertainment at grand festivities in royal palaces, such as Hampton Court, Whitehall, Richmond and Greenwich.
The English drama came out of the medieval tradition. But the professional theatre – with its mass audience, its specialized urban venues, its new and often demanding scripts and its fast turnover – was a new phenomenon. The first professional, custom-built acting arena, Burbage’s Theatre, was the model for the big wooden amphitheatres that followed, the largest of which could accommodate up to 3000 people. Foreign visitors, such as Thomas Platter from Switzerland, give us an idea of what they were like:
These places are built in such a fashion that the players perform on a raised stage so that every one can see what happens. Nevertheless there are different gangways and places where one sits more comfortably, but then you have to pay more. If you stand below you pay one English penny, but if a seat is required you have to go in through another door and pay an extra penny. If you wish to sit on cushions in the most comfortable seat, so that you can not only see everything but can be seen yourself, you enter by yet another door and pay a further penny.
In just a few years the theatre had become the major public art, the single most effective platform for entertainment, ideas and debate. It was the subject of tremendous interest at home and abroad, and the constant object of attention from the authorities, secular and religious; and, for that reason, strictly subject to the censor. In late 1580s’ England history was at stake, and theatre was political in the widest sense.
The Curtain and the Theatre, where Shakespeare first worked, lay a mile north of the city wall, outside city jurisdiction. This was an important consideration in a time when Puritans were making moves against any kind of stage performance, which they regarded as an encouragement to immorality and a threat to the most basic principles of the Protestant religion. The road to Shoreditch from the city at the end of the 1580s was, as the antiquarian John Stow’s guidebook notes, lined with houses, ‘many of them recently built with alleys backward, and too much pestered with people (a great cause of infection) up to the bars’. There were many lodging places here, including houses owned by the actor Edward Alleyn and his brother. Further north, closer to the theatres, lived the Bassanos, a family of Venetian musicians who had arrived in the days of Henry VIII: they owned three houses by St Mary’s Spital, just before the bars crossing the road, which marked the end of city jurisdiction.
Burbage’s Theatre was built inside the precinct of a medieval nunnery at an ancient ‘holy well’. Sold off by Henry VIII back in the 1540s, the abbey church and buildings had been quarried for building stone, and the granary and brewhouses were now occupied by smallholders. The old stone perimeter wall still stood, enclosing gardens and the former convent orchard, which was now the private garden of Burbage’s landlord, Giles Allen. The Theatre itself was a half-timbered, three-storey lath and plaster building with a tiled roof and two external staircases. Nearly 100 feet across, it was squashed in between an allotment garden on the north, the Great Horse Pond to the east, and the Great Barn, part cattle pen and part slaughterhouse, on the south. On the west side, towards Finsbury Fields, along the common sewer ran a brick perimeter wall in which a hole had been broken to give spectators access. To this unprepossessing place audiences rode out from the city up Bishopsgate, leaving their mounts tethered at the Great Horse Pond. Until it was demolished in December 1598, when its timbers were removed to build the new Globe on Bankside, this was Shakespeare’s main London workplace.
Shoreditch was a rough area. Like all his class, Shakespeare wore a sword and not just for show: some of his fellow playwrights and actors – Knell, Spencer and Porter – were killed in duels, and several – Towne, Day, Marlowe and Ben Jonson – killed other people. The records of the Middlesex Sessions include constant reports of riot, affray and murder associated with the playhouses, whose ‘lewde jigges songs and daunces’ were felt to be dangerously attractive to ‘cut-purses and other lewde and ill disposed persons’. Already by February 1580 the authorities had become alarmed by
unlawful assemblies of the people to hear and see certain interludes called plays exercised by the said James Burbage and divers other persons unknown at a certain place called the Theatre in Holywell in the aforesaid county. By reason of which unlawful assembling of the people great affrays assaults tumults and quasi-insurrections and divers other misdeeds and enormities have been then and there done by very many ill-disposed persons to the great disturbance of the peace…
Fuelled by drink, prostitution and crime, then, the stage crackled with low life and buzzed with the language and edginess of the street. To be sure, it often churned out mindless drivel, sentimental pap or blatant government propaganda, seamed with bigotry, jingoism and racism. But at its best it could be elevated, explosive and oppositional, and it would leave its mark on the culture of England – and the world – from that day to this.
The government cottoned on early to the potential importance of the theatre for the dissemination of ideas. In her first year as queen Elizabeth had issued a decree controlling the performance of plays; all scripts were subject to censorship, and patronage of the main companies usually depended on leading noblemen with strong government links. It had been Elizabeth’s spymaster Walsingham, for example, who had set up the Queen’s Men, taking the best talent from everywhere: not because he loved the theatre – there is no evidence he ever went to a play – but because he wanted to put the most influential medium of the day to his own use.
Little is known of Shakespeare’s first patrons, his early contacts and friendships – the obvious things that lead a person to a particular place or employment; but it is certain that at some point in the late 1580s he came to work in London. In the previous twenty-five years there had been a revolution in dramatic style. The plays of his schooldays had been either the traditional mysteries and moralities, or academic tragedies and comedies; in the mid-1580s the rhyming verse of the Queen’s Men had become all the rage. But the rise of a new kind of blank verse during that decade would soon turn the drama into an effective mass medium with appeal across the board. And when Shakespeare hit London the trendsetters were Thomas Kyd and above all Christopher Marlowe.
Marlowe was the same age as Shakespeare, and from the same class. But, unlike Shakespeare, he had been to university. His presumed Cambridge portrait gives you the man: the gold buttons, the expensive slashed doublet with firelicks of red silk, the folded arms and the faintly superior look. Most eye-catching of all is the motto: ‘What nourishes me destroys me.’ A boast, and a forecast. Recruited as a secret agent at Cambridge, Marlowe was a young firebrand with an indiscreet tongue. There are hints, too, of a dangerous and unstable character; described by those who knew him as a man ‘liable to sudden and privy injuries’, he had been implicated in the killing of a man in the streets of Shoreditch. But he was a dazzling talent. A classical translator and poet with a fabulous, effortless lyric sense, a dark irony and black humour, Marlowe was sadistic, iconoclastic, hip. And though Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy launched the new wave, it was Marlowe who ran with it. In 1587 the twenty-three-year-old Marlowe captivated London audiences with Tamburlaine, the story of an oriental Napoleon. He wrote in the new form of blank verse rather than the ‘jigging’ rhymes of the Queen’s Men, at which he sneered in contempt. The new style was a ten-syllable line so flexible and interesting that foreign visitors – even the French! – would compare it favourably to their own: ‘Their plays are in a kind of blank verse which suits an ordinary language better than our metre, and makes some melody. They think it irksome to have the ear continually tickled with the same cadence, and say that listening to heroic verses spoken for two or three hours is not so natural or so pleasing.’
Blank verse had come out of native poetry, but was influenced by the Latin line in rhythm and syntax, and loaded with classicisms with which university types like Marlowe couldn’t resist larding their lines:
As when the seaman sees the Hyades
Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds
Only the nobs in the boxes would have known that the Hyades were the seven stars that presaged rain, and that Cimmerian simply meant black (the classical Cimmerii lived in perpetual darkness). But it sounded great.
So a revolution was taking place not only in the acting companies and the professional playhouses, but in the verse itself. The English language at this time went through a sudden expansion, borrowing from everywhere. And with that came a vision appropriate to such an expansionist time, when ships sailed back to Tilbury and Deptford loaded with bounty looted from Spanish carracks: Yucatan gold and Potosi silver. The stage now could embody the whole globe ‘from the farthest equinoctial line … into the Eastern India’; writers piled on exotic names willy-nilly, plundering their Ovid, and their new maps, for ‘Cubar, where the negroes dwell’ and ‘the wide, the vast Euxine sea’.
As befitted a violent age, the theatre was full of casual cruelty. But there was empathy in it, too. Although a classic Shakespearean quality, it was possessed by all the great writers of the period and came from their education. Marlowe, for example, allows the penny punters to get inside the head of the Scythian tyrant Tamburlaine with his implacable love and cruelty, and even to feel for his religion:
By sacred Mahomet, the friend of God,
Whose holy Alcoran remains with us,
Whose glorious body, when he left the world,
Clos’d in a coffin mounted up the air
And hung on stately Mecca’s temple roof ….
Above all this, though, are the great set-pieces of the world conqueror. This is what Ben Jonson called Marlowe’s ‘mighty sounding rhyme’:
Now clear the triple region of the air,
And let the majesty of heaven behold
Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.
Smile, stars that reign’d at my nativity,
And dim the brightness of their neighbour lamps;
Disdain to borrow light of Cynthia
For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth,
First rising in the east with mild aspect,
But fixed now in the meridian line,
Will send up fire to your turning spheres
And cause the sun to borrow light of you.
It was the sound that everyone wanted, and that all other artists sought to imitate: the standard by which any aspiring young playwright in London in the late 1580s had to measure himself.
The late Elizabethan theatre was an industry with high pressure and a quick turnover. There was a different show every afternoon, and a play might only get three performances before a company pulled it off. Only big hits might get a decent run and perhaps even a revival. So there was a tremendous demand for scripts. It is interesting that during a modern run of 150 shows at the Royal Shakespeare Company only four plays are presented. The theatre impresario Philip Henslowe’s diary reveals the same number of performances in an Elizabethan season but with twenty-eight different plays, half of them new. His players could do as many as fifteen different shows in one month. Obviously, this was only possible in a memorizing culture – so all that learning by rote at school in Stratford would have come in useful.
So it was a young man’s game with a demanding routine. Rehearsals for the next show took place in the morning, followed by a quick lunch (but no drink – actors’ contracts show that turning up on stage drunk was a sacking offence). The current show would then start at two and ended around five, earlier in winter; with make-up, wigs and costumes off, actors made their way back into town to eat at six or seven in the evening in their lodgings or in an ‘ordinary’, a simple eating and drinking place where they could relax. Along the road back to Bishopsgate there were several ordinaries, of which the Three Tuns at number 39 was typical: long and narrow, with a stable yard stretching back from the road, a small kitchen, a snug in front with a fire and a big shared garden.
Shakespeare’s first known address was close by, just inside the city walls in the parish of St Helen’s Bishopsgate. Here he probably lived through the early to mid-nineties, and perhaps for some time before. It was a tiny parish, a mere 300 yards long with only seventy-three rateable households, conveniently placed for work in Shoreditch. Most of his London is irretrievably gone now, of course, but this area was not destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, and many of the buildings Shakespeare knew survived into the 1850s. Victorian photographs still show sixteenth-century city-scapes, and from this rich archive, together with Tudor and seventeenth-century maps and the detailed guide to the city published by John Stow in 1598, it is possible to bring to life the area of London in which Shakespeare first lodged.
Walking back in the evening from Shoreditch, just outside the old city on the right you passed the Bedlam hospital for lunatics (the site is now under Liverpool Street Station). Next door was the church of St Botolph (the patron of travellers) with ‘a fair churchyard adjoining the town ditch’, says Stow, ‘upon the very bank but enclosed by a comely wall of brick’. Next to the church gate was ‘a fair inn’, the White Hart, built in 1480 with three storeys overhanging the street. Over the road, on the corner of Houndsditch was the famous Dolphin inn, the London base for carriers from Suffolk and Norfolk and typical of those inns described by William Harrison in 1587, that could ‘lodge and with ease feed two or three hundred people and their horses at short warning, in a manner which would seem incredible’.
Against the outside wall of the Dolphin second-hand clothing stalls were set up on the stone-paved street of Houndsditch, along with a metal foundry and ‘many shops for brokers, joiners, braziers and such as deal in old linen clothes and upholstery’. A recent influx of ‘baptised Jews’ traded as clothiers and pawnbrokers. They attracted some hostility and were denigrated in one contemporary account as ‘a base kind of vermin’. But the area remained a Jewish quarter, and London’s oldest synagogue still stands nearby. The year after he left Bishopsgate, Shakespeare would write a play about Jews.
Here outside the gate the sharp growth in population had led to new building encroaching on the ditch: next to St Botolph’s churchyard a causeway led alongside the brick wall to what had recently become known as Petty France. Here lived a community of French Huguenot refugees, crowded into tenements from where (so their neighbours accused them) they polluted the ditch ‘with sewage of the houses and with other filthiness cast into the ditch water which was now forced into a narrow channel and almost filled up with unsavoury things, to the danger of impoisoning the whole city’. So with the billowing smoke from the braziers, the joiners’ dust and clamour, and the smell of sewage, it was perhaps best to cover your nose as you walked through the gate into the city.
Inside the gate, Bishopsgate Street was filled with a tide of wagons, pack animals and jostling crowds. Lined with three-, four-, and five-storey jettied houses, no street in London was so well furnished with inns, eating places and houses of entertainment. Facing you, says Stow, were ‘divers fair innes, large for receipt of travellers’, the biggest of which were the Wrestlers and the Angel. These were favoured especially by landowners and traders from East Anglia (the richest agricultural lands in England) who lodged here in Bishopsgate right up to the coming of the railways in Victoria’s day A few yards on, there was the Vine, the Four Swans, the Green Dragon, and next door the Black Bull, the famous theatre inn from which carriers rode to Cambridge and wheeled wagons trundled into northern Essex, to Saffron Walden and over the shire border to Hadham and Hertford.
All these places were typical Elizabethan city inns. You entered through a long gate passage into a big yard surrounded with stables on the ground floor and chambers above. Many were of three storeys, sometimes with an attic floor too. ‘Every man may use his inn as his own house in England,’ it was said in Shakespeare’s childhood. ‘Nowhere in the world are there such inns for cheap good entertainment after the guests’ own pleasure.’
This was the pre-modern system in every town and large village: your horse would be taken from you, unsaddled, walked, rubbed down, fed and watered; you were given your own room key by the chamberlain, who unloaded your bags and in winter kindled your fire.
Your room was ‘well furnished with bedding and tapestry’ and you slept in ‘clean sheets wherein no man hath been lodged since they came from the laundress’. For food, you were free to inspect the kitchens and could eat with the host, at common table, or in your private chamber. London inns also had a wide choice of foreign wines, complemented by local beers with weird and wonderful names: ‘huffecap’ (a ‘heady ale’), ‘angels’ food’, ‘dragon’s milk’, ‘mad dog’ (clearly to be avoided) and, most mysteriously, ‘left leg’.
It was best to choose a place you knew, or one that had been recommended by a reliable source, however, for London inns had a bad reputation for ‘cozening’ or cheating. Country visitors were warned to be on their guard against conmen and cheats, and hosts or room boys who might be in league with robbers. This low-life culture Shakespeare would later bring to life in the tavern scenes in Cheapside in his Henry IV plays: Falstaff’s robbery of travellers at Gadshill is planned from his inn. In a great city, of course, criminality always thrives around places of rest and entertainment. And in just such an inn the country boy from Stratford may have first lodged, paying a penny a night for food and bed without stabling.
The Bishopsgate inns were also centres of theatrical shows. Most famous was the Black Bull, which Shakespeare would have known and where he may have acted. Early in Elizabeth’s reign it was converted into a theatre inn with a permanent stage, which was still to be seen a century later. Although shows could be staged indoors in the hall or ‘great chamber’, a seventeenth-century plan suggests that here the players used an inner yard. Shows started at around four o’clock, and were announced by the actors with drums and trumpets in the main street, literally drumming up business. The Black Bull had become such a well-known venue when Shakespeare was a boy that John Florio mentions it in his English-Italian phrase book of 1578 (‘Where shal we goe? To a playe at the Bull’). In 1583 it was licensed as a regular London venue for the Queen’s Men and they played here ‘oftentimes’. So if Shakespeare was indeed with the Queen’s Men in the late 1580s, this is where he would have played in London. A little way down Bishopsgate in Gracechurch Street, opposite the main fish, meat and herb markets, were two other famous actors’ inns well known to Shakespeare. The Bell, like the Black Bull, was licensed as a venue for the Queen’s Men from 1583, and the shows of Tarlton and ‘his fellowes’ were long remembered there too. Next door was the Cross Keys, Shakespeare’s most important London venue inside the city, where he may have played with Lord Strange’s Men in 1589, and certainly did with the Chamberlain’s company in 1594.
So, though almost forgotten now, the Bishopsgate area is entitled to be seen as another of Shakespeare’s theatre neighbourhoods. It was very different in character from the better-known ones of Shoreditch and Southwark. The streets and properties here were clean, well built and well ordered, with good facilities. There was fresh water from a conduit flowing in from the hills above Clerkenwell. Tucked away in the warren of lanes east of the main street were (and still are) the Leathersellers’ hall and the company almshouses. These abutted St Helen’s, Shakespeare’s local church and a former nunnery. Around its courtyard were great merchant houses, of which the grandest was Crosby Place, built in the 1460s. Richard III once lived here, as did Sir Thomas More when writing both his Utopia and his book on that king. Shakespeare, working on his Richard III late in 1592 and using poetic licence rather than historical fact, treats Crosby Place as Richard’s London base, the centre of his plots and secret machinations. He sets two scenes in the house: the death of Henry VI in 1471 and Richard’s marriage to Lady Anne in 1473. Neither event actually took place here: it is just one of those instances where the locality in which Shakespeare lived gave him an idea for scenes in a play.
Although audiences were smaller here, there were many advantages over Shoreditch: not least that theatregoers were spared the mile walk or ride out of the city on cold winter afternoons when it was dark by the time the show was over. In bad weather the unheated Theatre, situated as it was between the common sewer and the Great Horse Pond, was perhaps a little bleak. Also the resident population of Shoreditch included many poor; here in Bishopsgate were audiences with disposable income. And, not least, the inns could offer better facilities for spectators, including of course access from private rooms in the galleries within easy reach of food, drink, music and the other and varied pleasures of the Elizabethan world.
How different it must all have seemed from Stratford. A country town could be busy, to be sure, especially on market days and when the big seasonal fairs were held, but this was a great city. Every day from early in the morning the place was full of noise, smell, colour and life as carters delivered their loads of coal, wood, beer, milk and hay, shopkeepers and street vendors drummed up custom, and carriages and the regular pack trains created a Tudor traffic jam as they blocked the streets. This was the cityscape that we can imagine the young Shakespeare encountering when he dropped his bags and settled into his room close by the Bull in Bishopsgate, with the hum of city life rising outside. The start of his London career was propelled not only by the excitement of a new art form, but by the sheer exhilaration of the city itself.
Years later, in his sonnets, Shakespeare appears to look back in very revealing words on the days when, a diffident provincial from the yeoman class, he first came to London to make his name:
How careful was I, when I took my way,
Each trifle under truest bars to thrust,
That to my use it might unused stay
From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust
Shakespeare was a guarded person, who protected himself and those he knew. And here he tells us that he did so from the very start of his career. His character, as we have seen, was shaped by his background, although this is perhaps characteristic of artists for whom outward life is often distanced, subordinated to the intensity of artistic endeavour and expression. But this sonnet also offers a picture of a provincial wary of the sophisticated society in which he now has to move and work, and other examples of this guardedness will emerge later in this story.
It is even possible that an image of the young Shakespeare has survived. In the John Rylands Library in Manchester is a painting found in a house in Darlington in 1906. It is the portrait of a man done in Armada year, 1588, at the age of twenty-four – the same age as Shakespeare. The young man is not a noble: his doublet is plain pink-red with slashing and there are no fine buttons or ruff: he is plainly of the Tudor middle class. Nothing can be safely said about the personality of the anonymous sitter beyond a suggestion of diffidence and the fact that the face bears a very close resemblance in looks and proportions to the only certain portrait of Shakespeare, the Folio frontispiece. What makes this more than mere conjecture is that the painting came originally from the village of Grafton in Northamptonshire, close to Abington where Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth died. Elizabeth had inherited the poet’s possessions through her mother, Susanna, and the last inventory mentions not only books but ‘goods and lumber’ from Stratford. It is enough of a hint to make it possible that this is indeed the twenty-four-year old William Shakespeare at the start of his career.
Having a portrait painted was the sort of thing you might do when you got the livery of a lord or were awarded a degree. For Shakespeare, entering the service of his first patron, Lord Strange, might have been such a moment. If the Grafton picture is indeed of him, it does no harm to suppose that, like any successful young Elizabethan man, he bought himself a nice doublet and had his picture painted to send back to the family: proof to proud parents, and to his wife and children, that he was doing well. And whilst all this is pure speculation, the portrait does help us to imagine him at this point in his life and to get rid of the received image of Shakespeare as a balding middle-aged man in a ruff – an establishment figure. Here is a young Elizabethan who could be the artist who would soon write the greatest cycle of plays since the medieval mysteries and the ancient Greek dramas – his early histories, all of which were written in his twenties. Shakespeare looked like this: a young blade, diffident, sensitive, intelligent, witty, ambitious; a provincial poet making his way in the world, a face glimpsed in the seething crowds around the yards and carriage gates of Bishopsgate and Shoreditch.
So let us suppose that some time in the winter of 1588–9, Shakespeare joins a company based in London. Three or four years later he emerges as a playwright with several hits to his name; by the end of 1592 he has written his first great character, the villainous Richard III, and his fame is assured. But here’s the mystery: what did he do in between, and with whom did he work?
It is assumed that his earliest solo plays were written around 1588–90, but nothing is certain. Precious clues come from the title page of what may be his earliest play, the Roman tragedy Titus Andronicus. When this was published in 1594 its title page named three companies, including that of Lord Strange (who had become Earl of Derby the previous year), which had successively put on the play: ‘The Earl of Derby, Earl of Pembroke, and Earl of Sussex their Servants’. If this order is right, it is possible to sketch a very tentative picture of his early career that goes something like this:
In September 1588 the Queen’s Men lose both their star, Tarlton, and a key patron, Robert Dudley. That autumn, or early the next year, Shakespeare joins the company of Ferdinando, the new Lord Strange, a member of the great Lancashire family of the Stanleys. They probably play summers in Shoreditch and winters at city inns like the Cross Keys, where they are in November 1589. He spends nearly two years with Strange’s Men, and writes Titus Andronicus for them at this time. For Strange he also writes the two plays that begin his great series on English history: The Contention of the Houses of York and Lancaster and Richard Duke of York (which we know as Henry VI Parts 2 and 3). They are his first great successes. Then, in May 1591, Strange’s company splits up. The original core group go to Henslowe’s new Rose theatre south of the river, while the young Richard Burbage, loyal to his father, remains at the Theatre in Shoreditch. Shakespeare stays with him with his scripts, which now include the Henry VI plays, Titus and The Taming of the Shrew. In late 1591 (probably at speed with a collaborator) he writes Henry VI Part 1 – the ‘prequel’ to The Contention, which is acted at the Rose by a company of players from both Strange’s Men and the Admiral’s Men, for whom Edward Alleyn, Marlowe’s star actor, performed the main roles. At this time Shakespeare would have got to know Alleyn and Marlowe personally.
Then, in 1592, Pembroke’s Men, very likely the missing link in Shakespeare’s still mysterious early career, come into the picture. Shakespeare and Burbage probably act for a while with this company. The Pembroke family are the greatest patrons of poetry at this time – the earl’s young wife Mary had a special interest in drama – and this is the beginning of the relationship with the family, which will last for the rest of Shakespeare’s life.
A young writer fired by his early success, Shakespeare already has in mind a sequel to the three Henry VI plays, and Richard III may have started life for Strange (in it the poet flatters his patron by inflating the historical role of his ancestors, the Stanleys, at the battle of Bosworth). He perhaps finishes the play in mid- or late 1592 for Pembroke’s Men (the play has a little puff for one of Pembroke’s ancestors too). But the following spring a devastating outbreak of plague, in which more than 10,000 people died, hits London. The theatres are immediately closed for fear of contagion; in the summer Pembroke’s Men find themselves out of work and the company folds. Just turned twenty-nine, Shakespeare is forced to seek a new patron and another source of income. In the winter of 1593–4, he and Burbage work for Sussex’s Men. Finally in May 1594 they both join the newly formed Chamberlain’s Men with old friends and colleagues from Strange’s Men, and return to The Theatre in Shoreditch. From now on we are on firm ground. From confusion and speculation we can move to a clearer narrative of Shakespeare’s career as a professional writer.
The hypothetical picture above gives a rough idea of the wheeler-dealing by which Shakespeare built up a career, finally committing himself at the age of thirty to the Chamberlain’s Men with a group of actors and entrepreneurs whom he had known for a long time. In those early years there were a number of theatre owners, several noble patrons and lots of companies – as many as thirty are recorded from that time. But the circle of actors and writers in London can never have comprised more than a couple of hundred people. In this little world of shifting groupings Shakespeare worked for more than one entrepreneur and his plays passed through the hands of more than one company. He swapped patrons and theatres, sometimes with rival companies playing the same building. Living at times hand to mouth, it was a precarious profession: companies folded, the plague struck, the city authorities clamped down, theatres were closed. A steady income was never guaranteed. You lived on your wits.
Shakespeare’s early professional career, then, was like that of any writer in theatre or film today, working for a number of masters. But loyalty to the group was very important. And for some reason, perhaps simply because they liked and trusted each other, the Burbages were his preferred people, although no one yet knows how the relationship started.
The order in which the young Shakespeare wrote his first hits is largely speculation. As we have seen, the earliest tragedy was Titus Andronicus. The latest linguistic analysis suggests that this was a collaboration with another writer, George Peele, who wrote for the Queen’s Men. It’s a young man’s play full of rhetoric and violence, the Elizabethan equivalent of a Quentin Tarantino movie. No doubt those in the cheaper seats loved all the blood and guts – but then they saw it in the streets outside every day. Heads are cut off and eyes gouged out in other Elizabethan plays, of course, but there is something peculiar about Shakespearean violence and aggression. Gentle Will he may have been to his friends, but a key part of his psychology is aggression and violence, as when Marcus discovers his mutilated daughter:
Why dost thou not speak to me?
Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips
Titus is so grotesque and horrible that earlier generations than our own found it hard to believe that it was really Shakespeare who wrote it. But this was the rhetoric of the time: a shadowing of speeches made on the scaffold before even more terrible violations of the human body were done for real as punishment and edification – another kind of public theatre. When Olivier played Titus in Poland in the late 1950s the play was seen as true to life by packed audiences, for whom nothing in it seemed improbable in the light of the unexampled cruelties of the midtwentieth century. If anything, the ornate control of the verse keeps the lid on the horrors, as it does in the sonorous Latin of his model, the Roman Seneca.
Shakespeare also wrote lyrical romantic pieces at this period. Maybe The Two Gentlemen of Verona (or at least an earlier version of it) is another youthful play – perhaps even his first solo effort. The accomplished elegance of the verse shows he had developed his writing skills and suggests considerable experience as a jobbing man of the theatre. But the play is dramatically unambitious and he has not yet learned how to use his actors. It does contain beautiful poetry, however, including the famous speech that capitivated Viola de Lesseps, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character in the film Shakespeare in Love:
What light is light if Silvia be not seen?
What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by –
Unless it be to think that she is by,
And feed upon the shadow of perfection.
Except I be with Silvia in the night
There is no music in the nightingale
The prose of the comic Launce, on the other hand, sounds like something straight out of a Stratford guildhall show, written in the Elizabethan equivalent of a Birmingham accent: ‘I think Crab, my dog, be the sourest-natured dog that lives. My mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel hearted cur shed one tear. He is a stone, a very pebble-stone, and has no more pity in him than a dog ….’ There follow twenty lines piling misconstruings on top of each other as Launce plays out for the audience what is literally a shaggy dog story: ‘This hat is Nan our maid. I am the dog. No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog. O, the dog is me, and I am myself ….’
And so on, for as long as the performer could milk the audience. A speech like this is simply the fossilized record of a fluid text done ‘extempore’, as he would have said. The success of the scene depended on the improvising skills of the clown and his ability to play the crowd. The clowns were the stars of the first main phase of the professional theatre, before the great tragedians like Alleyn took over. The best of them was the Queen’s Men’s Tarlton, who died in September 1588, and was so funny that on one memorable occasion the queen had to ask him to leave the stage because she was laughing so much. Many of his gags became staples for the next generation; and one of them, as it happens, concerned a dog. Crab’s scene-stealing non-speaking role was never repeated by Shakespeare: it is his only part for a dog. So was Two Gentlemen a version of a show originally written for the Queen’s Men and Tarlton – or did Shakespeare simply take the gag from an old Tarlton show, recycling it for his own company after the clown’s death? This seems more likely. Perhaps Shakespeare was harking back to a great comic act, rather as a modern West End show might bring, say, Morecambe and Wise back to life. But, wisely, it was not a trick he would play twice. Legends are best left alone.
Although his early hits were history, not comedy, Shakespeare’s essential bent is comic – he can’t resist it, even in tragedy. His contemporaries thought him ‘best for comedy’. Unsurprisingly, not all his jokes have stood the test of time. Some are topical, some are in-jokes, some depend on the sort of word play beloved of Elizabethans but that can strike us as rather laboured today, especially when he is sucking up to the literary pretensions of an aristocratic or legal audience. But what is so wonderful is that in our modern world so much of Shakespeare is still such great fun, even when he is in tragic mode. Indeed, it is perhaps his sense of comedy that makes his tragedies work so well on stage. These days we may not understand all his words, nor did they get everything at the Theatre or the Globe, of course; but in the twenty-first century Shakespeare at his best is still the most fun we can have in a theatre.
Nevertheless it would be with histories, not with tragedies or comedies, that Shakespeare would overtake Marlowe and soon have his rival chasing him, imitating him. Eventually his brand of history would run the Queen’s Men out of town and out of business. Especially in the aftermath of the Armada, there was a big nationwide audience, built up by the Queen’s Men’s ceaseless tours, for plays dramatizing the national story. This was where Shakespeare’s interests lay.
His Henry VI plays began a brilliant sequence for which he quarried the Tudor chroniclers of the Wars of the Roses, Hall and Holinshed. Yet Shakespeare’s obsession with history was surely driven not only by the box office but by his own psychology. He had been brought up with stories of old England and its kings, the medieval Catholic past, the splendour and cruelties of English history, and he loved them. But even when he was only in his mid-twenties, his plays could be distinguished from the Queen’s Men’s propaganda. He had an instinctive feel for the complexities of history, where right and wrong exist on both sides and where a multiple perspective can suggest the chaotic reality, the ‘pressure of the time’.
His fascination with history would lead him to write, by 1593, the most ambitious theatrical entertainment written by a single artist since the ancient Greeks. The only parallel in English was the Mystery Cycle, whose conventions were now plundered by him for secular passion plays – plays in which Richard of York, scourged with a paper crown and chastising Queen Margaret as a ‘tiger’s heart in a woman’s hide’, would become a new Man of Sorrows. Shakespeare was in the process of a journey from Mystery through History to Tragedy.
But still there is no certain mention of him by name. In late 1590 there is an intriguing reference in print by Edmund Spenser, author of the The Faerie Queene. That December Spenser’s Teares of the Muses appeared, with an address to Lady Alice Strange, a renowned literary patron and wife of Shakespeare’s Ferdinando. In it Spenser praises ‘our pleasant Willy’ as a brilliant writer who, mysteriously, ‘dead of late … chooses to sit in an idle cell than so himself to mockery sell’. As Shakespeare was quite possibly in Strange’s service at this moment, does this refer to him? And if so, what does ‘dead of late’ mean and what ‘mockery’ had he suffered? Given that Shakespeare was soon to receive a critical mauling at the hands of one of London’s most famous pamphleteers, Robert Greene, it may be that in 1590 he had already excited the jealousy of his rivals.
The previous summer, the preface to Greene’s Menaphon addressed ‘to the gentlemen of both universities’ by his journalist friend Thomas Nashe had sneered at the ‘very mechanical mates … [who] in servile imitation of vainglorious tragedians … leave the trade of noverint [lawyer’s clerk] whereto they were born and busy themselves with endeavours of art’. He talks of those who ‘could scarcely latinise their neck verse’ yet try to write ‘English Seneca … afford you whole Hamlets … imitate the Kidde [in] home born mediocrity …’. While ostensibly aimed at Kyd, the attack is in the plural – on more than one playwright who is imitating ‘vainglorious tragedians’. And none was more up and coming than the man who, that year perhaps, had done that exercise in English Seneca, Titus Andronicus.
The next year, 1591, Spenser may mention Shakespeare again in a discussion of contemporary poets, this time wrapping him in a classical metaphor: ‘last but not least Aetion … a gentler shepherd may no where be found, whose Muse full of high thoughts invention doth like himself heroically sound’. That word ‘gentle’ stuck with him all the way through. And if this description is indeed of Shakespeare, Spenser’s remarks are very important because they show he was no longer just a theatrical jobber but was recognized as a man with a gift. Everywhere now English poetry was felt to be on the rise, and for the movers and shakers, patrons like the Stranges and the Herberts and practitioners like Spenser, new and extraordinary talent was something they wanted to foster. Shakespeare was now a fully fledged poet.
On stage Shakespeare was soon outdoing Marlowe: even his early plays exhibited deeper moral concerns than Marlowe’s. Their styles, of course, are very distinctive: Shakespeare had a more natural feel for ordinary people and their speech – an enviable common touch. And Shakespeare also had a feel for what his audiences liked. He knew a good story when he saw it; whereas Marlowe’s choice of material, though always interesting, was not always entirely successful. When, for example, Marlowe tried to outdo Shakespeare with a history play, Edward II, he chose a reign oddly lacking in significance and a plot that cannot have endeared him to some in high places. Shakespeare, on the other hand, was always careful in his choice of plots: very few don’t work. In fact the only one that doesn’t, Timon of Athens, he sets aside unfinished. He was a derivative writer in the best sense, usually borrowing and adapting an existing plot and always going after the inherited, ‘right’ way of working it, with a great feel for the basics of storytelling. Also, although some of his contemporaries denied it, he paid close attention to structure. He must have known the debate in Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie on how to construct a dramatic plot, with, for example, its dissection of Euripides’s Hecuba, which Shakespeare may have studied at school.
Probably already picked out by Spenser, ‘our Willy’ was shaping up as a talented young artist with a winning manner. In contrast to Marlowe’s arrogance, class envy and atheism, Shakespeare was ‘smooth’, ‘honey tongued’ and ‘sweet’. From the start he knew what his patrons liked, and, as he said later through the mouthpiece of his Prospero, the aim of his project was above all ‘to please’.
He was not a man to court controversy. The early 1590s were edgy times to be an artist: the theatre was increasingly viewed with suspicion by the city authorities; there were fanatics on all sides, and Elizabeth was as worried about Puritan extremists as she was about the Catholic underground. There were strange prophecies and unsettling news stories. On 19 July 1591, a crazed Puritan fanatic, William Hacket, who had proclaimed himself the Messiah from a cart in Cheapside, was hanged, drawn and quartered.
That year English armies were fighting in France and Ireland, and alongside the Protestants who were struggling to gain independence from their Spanish overlords in the Netherlands. Here and in Normandy the Spanish were close to establishing bases from which they could mount a far more effective invasion of England than they had in 1588. Rumours abounded of another Armada. At home, out of work war veterans, many maimed or crippled, were to be seen everywhere on the roads, even between Stratford and Warwick. Huge numbers of people were on poor relief. All this added to a growing public mood of disillusionment with the regime.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s government was still prosecuting the war against internal and external enemies. That winter further English contingents were raised and sent to help their Dutch allies in the Low Countries. Elizabeth’s state archive in the Public Record Office contains lists of payments to secret agents, along with the keys to their ciphers. Robin Poley, one of the most dangerous of them, turns up in Brussels, Antwerp and Flushing ‘on her majesty’s secret business’. Marlowe, too, was swimming in these dangerous waters at this time. For while his plays were packing in audiences at the Rose in London, in December, in his other role as a secret agent, he went to Flushing.
Looking out over the wide, sandy estuary of the Schelde, the fortified town of Flushing was a solid point amid miles of marshy shores and a hinterland plagued by malaria, which had killed far more English troops than had enemy action (among them the poet Philip Sidney, whose brother was now English governor in Flushing). It was the entry point for the English forces: munitions, supplies, profiteers and double agents all came through here. And that winter, already charged and acquitted in one murder case, Marlowe was arrested on more dangerous charges: an informer with whom he had shared a room had reported that he had talked about going over to the Catholic side, and that he had been experimenting with counterfeiting money. The charges may seem unbelievable, and possibly were trumped up. But then Marlowe was a man who sailed close to the wind in more than just his penchant for tobacco and boys. Evidently someone thought the wind he was catching was the Counter Reformation blowing from Rome. After an interview with the governor he was sent back by sea to England, to face his spymaster Walsingham.
That same winter the storm clouds rumbling over the Netherlands were echoed in England. In Stratford national and international politics continued to make themselves felt. A massive swoop on Baddesley Clinton in October had narrowly failed to net all the main Jesuits with their local supporters. In late November 1591 the government announced new laws against Catholics, inflamed by the writings of hardliners such as Robert Persons, who hated the queen, and William Allen, whose printed diatribes called her a heretic, an antichrist and criminally insane. It was easy, of course, for men such as Allen, safe in exile, to use such inflammatory language. For those on the ground, however, it only worsened the intolerable situation in which the English Catholic community found itself. The Jesuit missionaries themselves now lived in permanent fear of the terrible fate that awaited them. The queen’s agents in the shires stepped up the pressure on recusants; the safe houses were all under surveillance by informers; in a desperate letter the head of the Jesuits, Henry Garnet, wrote: ‘There is nowhere left to hide.’
Early in 1592 the government began a new squeeze of the disaffected. Recusancy lists were drawn up in every town, and in March John Shakespeare was named in a list of Stratford citizens who had ‘obstinately’ refused to go to church for Easter communion, although his excuse – that he had absented himself because he feared being served with a writ for debt – was accepted. It was an old excuse: John clearly still had friends in the town. But the battle for the soul of old England was almost lost. It would be left to John’s son to carry it down in a different guise to later generations.
Back in London, safe in the thronging masses of the big city, William Shakespeare’s work was now rapidly broadening out to include richly comic and romantic pieces, often about men and women who fall in love despite the pressures of society, family and convention. One early show, The Taming of the Shrew, represented his first foray into a favourite area, the battle of the sexes. In this reworking of an older comedy, he questioned some of the patriarchal assumptions of Tudor society, but in the ending rather lamely (to our taste at least) acquiesced in the male view. But throughout the 1590s he would quarry these themes with increasing assurance and humour and write great women’s parts that pricked the pretensions of men. The many women in his audience would surely have expected no less.
His early history plays reveal other characteristic preoccupations. He was obsessed with justice, aggression, the violence of the state, the battle of conscience and power – not to mention his fascination with role playing, with people who are other than they appear. All these were threads that would run through his plays until the end. And whether the drama was about love between men and women, or about the affairs of state, things were seen from a multiple perspective. He was always setting up opposed worlds, characterized by contrasting image systems. This kind of rhetorical exercise went back to the curriculum at school, but it became one of his entrenched writing habits. All writers, of course, have their tricks, structural and verbal, as he was later to remark ruefully:
Why write I still all one, ever the same
And keep invention in a noted weed
That every word doth tell my name
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
In April 1592 Henry VI Part 1, the prequel to his Contention of the Houses of York and Lancaster and Richard Duke of York, was acted at the Rose on Bankside. It continued through May and June with fifteen shows, and Henslowe’s account book shows that 16,344 people paid to see it from the galleries alone – a figure that should be more than doubled to calculate the total box office. So he was pulling in between 2000 and 3000 a performance. Shakespeare had a big hit on his hands. At this very moment an English army was fighting in Normandy, on the old battlefields of the Hundred Years War, and there was huge public interest in the unfolding events. A play on the last great war fought by the English abroad could hardly have been better timed, and in August the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe wrote about the great popular success of the English hero Talbot in Henry VI:
How it would have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least … (at several times) who in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.
It was what one might call Shakespeare’s first rave review History, comedy, English, Italian – he could do it all. And to some in the literary establishment that was cause enough to accuse him of being a conceited upstart, and even a plagiarist.
In late summer 1592, for the second time in six months, the commissioners in Stratford were adding Shakespeare’s father’s name to a list of ‘obstinate recusants’. In London, we can imagine William working on Richard III in his room in Bishopsgate. Around that time the pamphleteer and Queen’s Men writer Robert Greene, now dying, wrote an embittered open letter to three leading lights of the theatre, the university wits Marlowe, Nashe and Peele. At the centre of it was an extraordinary attack on young Shakespeare.
In words livid with resentment Greene started by disparaging actors, mean players with no loyalty who will sell writers down the river, ‘puppets that spake from our mouths, those antics garnished in our colours’. Then he turned to the chief object of his fury in the most famous passage written about Shakespeare during his lifetime:
There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes Factotum [Jack of all trades, universal genius, a Mr Do-it-all], is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
That it is Shakespeare who is under attack is plain from the pun on his name and from the allusion to the scene in Henry VI Part 3 (italicized by Greene to make sure his readers got the point) where Richard of York taunts Queen Margaret as a ‘tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide’. As far as Greene was concerned, Shakespeare was an upstart actor who had the effrontery to emulate authors who were his betters. Implied here too perhaps was the charge that he had been plagiarizing their scripts (which in this context would suggest the Queen’s Men’s plays – and it was true that a number of Shakespeare’s plays had plots lifted from the Queen’s Men’s shows).
We know that Shakespeare was upset at Greene’s attack on his talent and integrity. As Spenser perhaps had suggested, it may even have made him want to hide away But one thing was clear from such a high-profile attack. He had made it.