IN 1599 SHAKESPEARE was at the mid-point of his career. Already recognized by his peers as the best at both comedy and tragedy, now, in his mid-thirties, he entered an incredibly fertile, creative phase. This was no doubt partly due to changes in his personal life about which we cannot know: age, experience, new influences and, as we have seen, loss, which has been a catalyst in the lives of many great poets. But these changes also came about because of professional pressures – in particular Shakespeare’s response to a new wave of mostly younger dramatists who challenged his supremacy just at the point when he had achieved mastery of his drama of personality. But whilst getting bums on seats was still a prime motivation, another challenge now seemed to be assuming greater importance: an artistic and psychological ambition. He was now on the artist’s journey into the interior.
The first fruit was a quartet of great plays. Henry If As You Like It, Julius Caesar and Hamlet were all being written or drafted that year. Shakespeare would prove himself a master of all forms – history, comedy, satire and tragedy – and it was in this next year or two that he turned to tragedy. Between 1598 and 1601 his art took a leap forward as his verse became much more accomplished; there was a toughening of the language, a new freedom of metaphor and allusion, and a freer handling of the rhythm of the verse line. In this change he was pushed by his rivals, just as Marlowe had earlier driven him. A string of new faces – Marston, Jonson, Chapman and later Middleton – were all experimenting with genres and styles.
Important too at this time were changes in the companies and playhouses. From this time, and for much of the next decade, his rivals were not only the companies he had always competed with but the new boys’ companies that used indoor theatres, artificial light and elaborate stage effects. To sophisticated audiences the newly reopened theatre of the Paul’s Boys by the Cathedral, and the indoor Blackfriars, were more appealing than the rowdy popular theatre – the ‘common stages’, as the shows of Shakespeare and his colleagues were called – up in the suburbs in Shoreditch.
In all this creative ferment, one particular relationship deserves to be singled out. It made its mark in many ways, on and off stage, but in one area of influence it was particularly fascinating. Did Shakespeare come into direct contact with the greatest drama of the ancient world, Greek tragedy, both through Latin versions and through stage productions in London? If so, the catalyst was a cantankerous, turbulent black dog of a man called Ben Jonson.
In the autumn of 1598 the bricklayer, classicist and playwright Ben Jonson killed an actor called Gabriel Spencer with a rapier in a duel in Shoreditch Fields. (They were both irascible sorts: only a few months previously Spencer himself had killed a man in his lodging house in Holywell Street.) At his trial Jonson was found guilty of ‘felonious and wilful killing’; he saved his skin only by reciting what were known as ‘neck verses’ (Psalm 51) in Latin and pleading benefit of clergy, which by long tradition enabled a convicted criminal to pass as a clergyman and so obtain a discharge from the civil courts. Latin was Ben’s thing: it saved him, and it made him.
Now branded with the ‘Tyburn T’ on his thumb, Jonson touted round for work. Down on his luck, and never an easy man to work with (he notoriously bit the hand that fed him), he sent a script to the Chamberlain’s Men. Shakespeare, according to a late but plausible story, saw his talent and gave him a chance. So during the winter of 1598–9 Jonson worked for Shakespeare’s company and got to know him. His first play, Every Man in His Humour, was staged that autumn at the Curtain in Shoreditch. Shakespeare may even have had a hand in retouching the script for the stage.
It was said later that, although Shakespeare had been generous to him, Jonson ‘had not returned the same gentleness’. Jonson was passionate to a fault about the moral and didactic role of theatre, and about the craft required to write for it. Fiercely sure of his literary judgements, although he owed his break to Shakespeare, he thought his colleague’s shows broke all the classical rules of action, place and time: they were not made with appropriate craftsmanship. Still a paid-up member of the bricklayers’ guild, he saw poetry in the same light: after building it up from the sound foundation of a prose draft, he then worked it into verse carefully loaded with Latinisms. In print he even supplied his plays with footnotes to make sure the reader got all his clever references. So when Jonson said later of Shakespeare that he never blotted a line, he meant it to be taken as admiration, but also as criticism.
Jonson’s influence was not only theatrical. As with all creative relationships in the arts, he seems to have spurred on Shakespeare’s ideas and his reading. After 1598 Shakespeare’s use of classical sources changed and broadened; he had a very strong ego and almost always took up artistic challenges. Their relationship would last until Shakespeare’s death, but it was notoriously prickly. Jonson wrote later that he had loved him ‘this side idolatry’ and generously compared him with the ancients. But even in his first play he made snide remarks at Shakespeare’s pretensions to gentility, mocking his newly acquired coat of arms. In a later preface to Every Man in His Humour, he derided those authors who
with three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot-and-half foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars.
and offered instead, with a swipe at Shakespeare’s Henry V, a new kind of play
Where neither Chorus wafts you o’er the seas;
Nor creaking throne comes down, the boys to please;
Although from the same social class as Shakespeare, Jonson saw himself as a scholar, a Latinist. He had a remarkable library of Greek and Latin classics, and was consulted by scholars of the day. That was his province and he saw the magpie Shakespeare, with his grammar school Greek and Latin, as a lesser light. Shakespeare could take offence at slights on his character, but seems to have taken Jonson’s rumblings in good part. A famous joke at his own expense bears a ring of truth. At the baptism of Jonson’s son, Shakespeare stood godfather. Asked what he would give the boy as a present, he suggested some silver alloy (latten) christening spoons: ‘I’ll get him some latten spoons. Then Ben can translate them for me.’
Jonson commonly lent books to his friends and surely did so to Shakespeare. For Julius Caesar, written in early 1599, Shakespeare almost certainly used Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis; and while he may have known Erasmus’s Latin translation at school, the fact that he was writing the play when working with Jonson suggests that he might have borrowed a copy from him. Equally exciting is the possibility that at this time he read Aeschylus, the most ‘mighty line’ of the ancients and the nearest to the Elizabethans in poetic style. This could have been through a Latin printed version owned by Jonson, but it is also possible that in 1599 Shakespeare could have seen an adaptation of Aeschlyus’s greatest tragedy on the London stage. This was the moment when he started to write the first of his great tragedies, Hamlet.
That year at the Rose on Bankside the Admiral’s Men put on two plays telling the tale of the murder of Agamemnon on his return from Troy, and the revenge and madness of his son Orestes. The texts were probably by Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle, working on a script left to the company by Jonson and tinkered with by George Chapman, who had recently published the first part of his famous translation of Homer’s Iliad. In the close-knit world of literary London the Greek classics were in the air, the ‘must-reads’ on everyone’s list. Dekker, for one, excitedly boasted of his knowledge of ‘the real thing’. The Rose plays were called Agamemnon and Orestes’ Furies – titles that match those in the most accessible Latin version of Aeschylus’s Oresteia.
Shakespeare’s Euripidean parallels have long been noticed. Dryden was the first to see his debt to Iphigenia in Julius Caesar. For two centuries now scholars have also noticed close parallels between Hamlet and the Oresteia. These were once attributed to ‘archetypal patterns’; but Shakespeare was a conscious artist who rifled many sources for his inspiration and plots, and it is much more likely that he simply borrowed from one of the greatest of all works of literature. In Hamlet the graveyard scene and the closet scene, neither of which has a parallel in the source texts, seem directly inspired by the Orestes story It is hard not to think that Shakespeare had actually seen it on stage, or read the parallel scenes in Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers (Henri Estienne’s edition had a very user-friendly crib whose Latin was well within Shakespeare’s compass).
Equally suggestive is the role of Hamlet’s faithful friend Horatio, crucial in building the audience’s sympathy for Hamlet but again absent in the play’s sources. Horatio effectively plays the role of Pylades, the faithful friend who supports the wavering revenger Orestes in both Aeschylus and Euripides (the latter Jonson we know had in his library). Dekker and Chettle’s plays have not survived, but even a rough literal translation of the 1550 Latin version of Euripides’s Orestes gives an inkling of what the audience heard at the Rose in 1599:
Oh good Pylades
Nothing is better than a loyal friend
Not gold, nor kingdoms sure can weigh against
A noble heart, a true and generous friend.
Through every danger you have been my guide
And now again do spur my fit revenge
And still are by my side. But yet give pause;
To speak your virtues more would be offence
And I will cease before I praise too much.
This surely reveals the source of one section of the play that Shakespeare was writing in 1599–1600: this is Hamlet speaking to Horatio. The same goes for the scene in the bedchamber with his mother Gertrude, over which hangs the shadow of sex and death; but despite Gertrude’s remarks, it is modelled not, as Freudians have said, on the tale of Oedipus, but on that of Orestes.
In short, Shakespeare, like a top scriptwriter today, was a professional through and through. He had perhaps read Latin versions from Jonson’s library, and more than likely sat in the audience at the Rose and saw Dekker and Chettle’s shows. The impact, even in Chettle’s journeyman versifying, is likely to have been as powerful as it always is when the greatest works of literature are encountered. In the Greek drama, fate and human destiny allow no room for Christian providence and the audience is left with the remorseless power of the gods. Our failure to understand the true nature of the gods – all too human as it is – is no excuse, any more than it will be in King Lear. As the unforgiving Dionysus tells humankind in the Bacchae, ‘You understood too late’.
This is an area of Shakespeare’s creative process of which next to nothing is known, but it is perhaps no accident that his friends praised him as fit to stand beside the ancient tragedians. These recent discoveries perhaps help to explain how Shakespeare came to write full-blown tragedy in the Greek spirit. For this was precisely the territory into which his ambition would now lead him.
He would make that journey with, for the first time in three years, stability in his professional career: as a shareholder in a new playhouse owned by the company. In the winter of 1598–9 Shakespeare and his colleagues decided to make a permanent move south of the river. By Christmas, the long-running feud over the company’s lease in Shoreditch had reached an acrimonious impasse. Their landlord, Giles Allen, was now demanding not only his plot of land but the fabric of the theatre that stood on it. John Hemmings’ friend and neighbour, the merchant Nicholas Brend, had just inherited a plot of land 100 yards from the Rose in Maiden Lane on Bankside. They secured an option on a lease, and decided to take advantage of the Christmas holiday. On the night of 28 December, with snow falling and the Thames freezing over, the Burbages, together with the most experienced theatrical carpenter in London, the contractor for the Rose, Peter Street, plus a dozen workmen and a few armed heavies, marched up to Shoreditch and set about dismantling the Theatre. (This, in fact, was as per their lease, which had permitted old James Burbage to ‘take down the buildings he might erect’.) Over the next few days they carted the pieces through the city and across the frozen river to the new site where, over the next six months, the Theatre would be rebuilt as the Globe.
Early in 1599 the Warwickshire mafia organized a business plan for the new theatre. The rebuilding would be an expensive undertaking and they were still leasing the Curtain for their daily shows, so backers were needed. They approached two Aldermanbury contacts, the merchant William Leveson and Thomas Savage, a goldsmith neighbour of Hemmings and Condell (in one of whose houses Hemmings lived). The Savage connection may have dated back all the way to Strange’s company, for Savage was a Lancashire man from Rufford, the Heskeths’ home village, and his wife was a Hesketh. Then a share issue was made, half to the Burbages, the other half going as one-tenth each to Shakespeare, Hemmings, Condell, Sly and Philips. On 21 February a thirty-one-year lease was signed and construction began.
The site consisted of seven gardens abutting the Bishop of Winchester’s park, bounded by the old park ditch which was now used for sewerage and drainage. On it stood a house and a row of decaying tenements with fifteen residents. The site was liable to flood at the time of the spring tides because the Thames had no embankment, so the theatre had to be constructed on a 130-foot-long wharf of timber piles partly driven into the sewer ditch, which was bridged for audience access. No wonder Jonson called the Globe ‘flanked with a ditch and forced out of a marsh’.
The site was recently located at the junction of today’s Park Street under Southwark Bridge Road. A small excavation was able to determine the exact shape and size of the theatre, which was polygonal (possibly with twenty-four sides), 100 feet across, with a stage almost 50 feet wide, a pit and three galleries. Capacity was an amazing 3300 people – virtually double that of its modern successor on Bankside. Over the stage was a gabled lantern and the motto Totus mundus agit histrionem, which, loosely translated, means ‘All the world’s a stage’. A house was constructed next door; a recently discovered post-mortem document of Brend senior, dated 17 July that year, refers to the ‘newly built house with a garden in the occupation of William Shakespeare and others’.
It had many advantages over Shoreditch: the site was also out of the jurisdiction of the city, but it could be reached in a few minutes by river taxi from Blackfriars and the inns of court; it was close to the bear pit and the bull baiting; the brothels and inns of Southwark were also nearby, crowded around St Saviour’s at the end of London Bridge. Recently, archaeologists have added grim immediacy to our picture of the area and its varied entertainment industries: the latest excavations around Bear Garden Lane have unearthed the skulls of mastiffs smashed by the chained bears; the bones of old blind bears torn to bits by the dogs; and a thick layer of hazelnuts, the equivalent of popcorn for an Elizabethan matinee crowd.
In the first half of 1599, while the Globe was under construction, they were still using the Curtain in Shoreditch. Henry V was first played here – this, then, was Shakespeare’s ‘wooden O’. At this time the company lost an important member, their clown Kemp. A stand-up comic, a virtuoso song and dance man and an unpredictable and uproarious ad libber, Kemp had been the darling of the groundlings. But Shakespeare and the rest of the company were moving towards higher-class shows with a more refined and fixed text, and it may be that ‘artistic disagreements’ were the cause of Kemp’s departure. All we know is that he left before the Globe opened, with words of bitterness and recrimination.
By the end of the year, down on his luck, he decided to raise money by dancing his famous jig all the way to Norwich. Kemp had been a draw in towns right across England, and his sacking made news. He later complained of ‘lyes’ told of him by ‘an impudent generation of ballad makers and their coherents’, among whom may have been perhaps some of his erstwhile colleagues, if the epilogue to the tale of his jig is anything to go by: ‘My notable Shakerags … for that I know you to be a sort of witles beetle-heads, that can understand nothing, but what is knockt in to your scalpes … I knowe the best of ye by the lyes ye writ of me.’ Was it Shakespeare who had sacked him? Whatever happened, such a crowd-puller was not easily replaced. Shakespeare’s two new plays for the season of 1599 had no part for a clown. The show must go on.
The first night at the Globe seems to have been set for a date in June, and that month Henslowe’s takings next door at the Rose dipped alarmingly. As the weather got hotter, there was tension in the streets. On 6 June, while the painters were putting the finishing touches to the Globe, a vicious fight took place between two of Henslowe’s playwrights, John Day and Henry Porter. A collaborator of Chettle’s, Day was a ‘rogue and base fellow’ in some eyes. Porter had been a leading writer for the Admiral’s Men for the previous two years or so; an early collaborator with Jonson on Hot Anger Soon Cold and author of vigorous English social dramas, such as The Angry Woman of Abingdon. He had real promise: the previous year the critic Francis Meres had placed him alongside Shakespeare in a group of the best contemporary comedy writers.
That day, according to the coroner’s jury, ‘moved by the instigation of the Devil, and of malice aforethought’, the raging Day stabbed Porter in the left side ‘with a certain sword, in English, a rapier’. Porter died the next morning – another talent of the age gone. Day got off with manslaughter and capitalized on it over the next few months with topical shows such as The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green in which the duellist Captain Westford, who had been in Spain, was said to be ‘well practised in the desperate fight of a single rapier’. Perhaps Day had been more skilled in such fighting than the unfortunate Porter. But clearly in Southwark all human life was there, and it was swiftly turned into art.
Recent evidence suggests that the Globe theatre opened on 12 June with Julius Caesar, after careful calculations by an astrologer to hit on the most auspicious opening day and hour. On the old calendar that day was the summer solstice, the shortest night, and it coincided with a new moon (which the almanacs judged ‘best to open a new house’). A more practical consideration was that a high tide would spare the posh people in the audience from getting their clothes dirty on a long walk across smelly mudflats.
Grander and more elaborately decorated than the Theatre, the Globe was soon a magnet for Londoners and foreign visitors. Julius Caesar, for example, was seen on 21 September ‘very ably acted by a company of about fifteen’ by a Swiss traveller, Thomas Platter of Basle. It was Shakespeare’s twenty-first play and marked ten years at the top. A grim political piece, it touched on major talking points of the day: how to tell a tyrant from a just ruler? How and when to justify assassination? Somewhat unremitting in its lack of comic relief, it was lit up by brilliant scenes between Brutus and Cassius that used, but surpassed, Euripides’s parallel scenes in his Iphigenia. Gallingly for the self-proclaimed classicist Jonson, it was everything he aspired to write.
The Globe’s opening refuelled old showbusiness rivalries. The Chamberlain’s Men led with their strongest shows; six months later, faced with a declining share of box-office receipts, Henslowe and Alleyn cut their losses, left the Rose and moved north to the new Fortune, near Cripplegate where they would rebuild their audience and mount a new challenge. But with more theatres and bigger audiences, a younger generation of playwrights was now vying for prominence, and the pace of artistic ambition began to quicken in London’s theatre world.
Throughout this time Ben Jonson had been working for Shakespeare’s company, but he had his own ideas about what poetry should do. Comedy, he thought, should be ‘neere the times’, and in the autumn he made his bid for leadership of the avant-garde in London’s theatre world. At the same time a young Middle Temple lawyer, John Marston, writing for a boys’ company, the Children of St Paul’s, came out with a darkly comic satire called The Malcontent. Chapman, the translator of Homer, was competing too, and soon the rules of the game were shifting away from Shakespeare’s history- and comedy-dominated drama of personality to social satire and rhetorically florid, classically influenced tragedy of state. No doubt this was to do partly with artists’ responses to their own society and partly with changing tastes and fashions, but this working out of rivalries within the new wave gives a terrific insight into Shakespeare as a writer responding to trends. For under commercial pressure, with a big investment at stake, his company were soon wheeler-dealing, head-hunting and even pirating other companies’ scripts. In this atmosphere, late in 1599, the War of the Poets began.
At the turn of the new century the craze for boys’ companies in indoor theatres caused even Shakespeare and his colleagues to glance nervously over their shoulders. With Jonson and Chapman as their poets, a remarkable troupe of boy players acted with a charm and grace that seems to have made them more attractive than their adult rivals. They also offered vocal and instrumental music, for which they were specially trained. And sex appeal too: the playwright Thomas Middleton advised the London gallant ‘to call in at the Blackfriars, where he should see a nest of boys able to ravish a man’. Puritan sermonizers, needless to say, were shocked. But there was good acting to be seen, too: Ben Jonson himself praised the power of little Salathiel Pavy, only thirteen when he died, who for three years had been ‘the stage’s jewel’. A foreign visitor from Germany in 1602 spoke of a preshow of music from an organ, lute, mandolins, flutes and violins, and of a boy who sang so delightfully that the nuns in Milan could not excel him: ‘we have not heard his equal in all our travels’.
‘What, are they children?’ Hamlet asks with a twinkle. In reply Shakespeare made Rosencrantz drily dismiss the ‘eyrie of children, little eyases [an obscene pun – ‘eye-arses’], that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for’t’. But he was worried: ‘These are now the fashion, and so berattle the common stages – so they call them.’ (The ‘common stages’, of course, meant Shakespeare and his company.) At the centre of it all was the furrow-browed Jonson. The butt of much barbed satire, he never forgot the violence of the quarrel in which he and John Marston came to blows.
The matter dated back to September 1599, when the twenty-three-year-old Marston, then still a lawyer at the Middle Temple, was making his name as a combative satirist and pamphleteer. It began with a mocking representation of Jonson on stage. But Jonson too liked a fight – after all, he had killed a colleague in one. His new play Every Man Out of His Humour opened at the Globe at about the same time; in it he attacked the kind of romantic comedy at which Shakespeare excelled, and announced his own theory of art and satire.
What Shakespeare felt about this is not known, but young Marston, who greatly admired him, went after Jonson, mocking his slowness and his pretensions to learning with a clever lawyer’s wit. Over that autumn and winter Marston’s Histriomastix (‘The Actor-chewer’) was performed by Children of St Paul’s at the Cathedral theatre. In it, Marston dismissed Jonson as a ‘heavy translatting-scholler’ who looked down on the common sort, sucked up to the judiciary and charged a hefty £10 a play. Some writers might have thought that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But Jonson had a thin skin and he wrote a bitter retort: it was all ‘black vomit’, ‘excrement’, ‘base filth motivated by malice’, and the actors who performed the plays of his whippers were a bunch of ‘servile apes’.
So this was the new climate: metropolitan wit, with lashings of exuberant, over-wordy satire. It was not Shakespeare’s preferred arena, but he felt he should respond to this shift in taste and may have begun his own foray into satire, Troilus and Cressida, around this time. But first, between January and late March 1600, he put on As You Like It at the Globe, probably a revised text of a show first staged the previous year. It was taken from a French romance set in the Forest of Ardennes, which becomes the magical Arden of his childhood, complete with the old resident hermit of legend: the leafy place of exile where they lived ‘like the old Robin Hood of England … in the golden world’. The company had a new clown now, the singer Armin, a goldsmith’s apprentice who played a Jonsonian Touchstone. As a nod to the new wave, Shakespeare inserted the melancholic satirist Jacques (which literally means ‘privy’), but Jacques’s gripes are left behind by brighter, lighter spirits – especially, as so often in his comedies, by the women, who have all the best lines.
According to a later acting tradition, Shakespeare played the aged Adam, but he perhaps doubled as the Warwickshire yokel William. He was by now well known to his audiences as both author and actor, so everyone would have appreciated the joke.
TOUCHSTONE: How old are you friend?
WILLIAM: Five and twenty, sir.
TOUCHSTONE: A ripe age. Is thy name William?
WILLIAM: William, sir.
TOUCHSTONE: A fair name. Was’t born i’the forest here?
WILLIAM: Ay, Sir, I thank God.
TOUCHSTONE: Thank God – a good answer. Art rich?
WILLIAM: Faith sir, so-so.
TOUCHSTONE: Art thou wise?
WILLIAM: Ay Sir I have a pretty wit.
TOUCHSTONE: Art thou learned?
WILLIAM: No sir
Touchstone then shows off William’s lack of learning with a quick flash of Latin pedantry: ‘… ipse is he. Now you are not ipse, for I am he Therefore tremble, and depart.’ Shakespeare was no longer afraid of being mocked for his ‘small Latin’.
And the ‘war’ went on. Marston was next, with Jack Drum’s Entertainment in the spring of 1601. Jonson had now left Shakespeare’s company to put on Cynthia’s Revels with the Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars. Shakespeare’s next show, Twelfth Night or What You Will, with Armin as the clown Feste, was played at the Globe in early 1601. It was Shakespeare’s Ovidian riposte to Jonson’s criticism of romantic comedy in Every Man Out of His Humour. This was romantic comedy combined with social satire and touched by a bitter-sweet melancholy: a tale of lost twins, mistaken identity, gender bending and cross-dressing (an area that Shakespeare always found a very satisfying and intriguing source of comedy) with the battle of the sexes thrown in for good measure.
As its first audiences recognized, the model was the Latin comedy of Plautus; but Shakespeare’s play was in a different league of sophistication. It also contains a series of great songs. Twelfth Night represents the peak of Shakespeare’s festive comedy but with an edge, especially in the merciless (and, to us, unsettlingly cruel) deconstruction of Olivia’s Puritan steward, Malvolio. This is part of a minor but persistent theme in the play, with its jibes at extreme Puritans and Brownists, an early sect of radical nonconformists. Puritans and curates were clearly not his – or his audiences’ – favourite people.
The aftermath of the War of the Poets would rumble on for the next two or three years. It was during this time, when the vogue for satirical drama was at its height, that the Chamberlain’s Men became alarmed enough to purloin one of their rivals’ scripts. The company were short of this sort of stuff – it did not, after all, play to Shakespeare’s strengths, and Jonson had gone to a rival outfit – so they resorted to bare-faced literary piracy. The Children’s company had cheekily performed the Chamberlain’s Men play The First Part of Jeronimo; so they retaliated by procuring Marston’s Malcontent, a very topical show in its tilts at court immorality and intrigue, the prevailing atmosphere of the end of Elizabeth’s reign. The Chamberlain’s Men answered the charge of theft by claiming that the book of the play had been mysteriously lost and then found. Intellectual property rights were hard to assert in Shakespeare’s theatre world. As we would say, that’s showbiz.
But back in 1600, hanging over the quarrels on stage was an altogether bigger dissension. The critical political situation was worsened by several tensions in the body politic, primarily the continuing uncertainty about the succession and the colonial war in Ireland. In the charismatic figure of the Earl of Essex – the English Achilles, as the poet Samuel Daniel had called him – both these strands came together. And they came at the end of a decade of discourse about Ireland from writers as varied as Edmund Spenser (author of The Faerie Queene, who lived there and wrote a tract called ‘The Present State of Ireland’) and John Donne (who in his Elegy no. 20 wrote of ‘Sick Ireland, with a strange war possessed’). Playwrights, too, were now using history to touch on the Irish question: for instance, George Peele in his Edward I, and a lost play about Henry I performed by the Admiral’s Men in 1598, both looked at the beginnings of English empire in Ireland. In his history cycle, especially Henry IV Part 1, Shakespeare also tackled past English wars with Celtic neighbours. Elizabethan audiences were attuned to such nuances and could make the topical connection.
In August 1598, at the battle of the Yellow Ford, the Irish nationalist Earl of Tyrone had defeated the English forces and captured their key fort in Ulster. In autumn the rebellion had spread to the province of Munster, with talk of ‘shaking off all English government’, Ireland’s ‘Norman yoke’. In response, Elizabeth had appointed a new military commander and dispatched him with reinforcements, and in January 1599 had filled the vacant post of vice-regent with her favourite, Essex. It was in Essex’s vice-regency that Shakespeare’s play on a foreign war, Henry V, had been staged at the Curtain and the Globe. In it the chorus likened the 1415 campaign in France to that of ‘the General of our gracious Empress’, Essex, in Ireland. Something in this didn’t please, for the next year the play was published with all of the choruses cut. In his critique of militarism in Henry V, put into the mouths of the common soldiers, some have seen Shakespeare’s misgivings about Essex, his awareness of growing public alarm at the war in Ireland, and a disillusioned ambivalence about the reasons behind, and the consequences of, English empire building. ‘What if the war be unjust?’ ask the famine-stricken soldiers before Agincourt. The soldiers in 1415 had been treated as badly as Elizabeth’s Irish army conscripts had been for the last twenty years, and now maimed Irish veterans were to be seen everywhere on the roads of England.
Essex failed: the unauthorized pact he made with Tyrone caused fury in London, where Elizabeth saw such mediation as an insult to her honour and authority. At the end of September 1599, Essex returned from Ireland. At ten in the morning he burst unannounced, ‘full of dirt and mire’, into the queen’s room at Nonesuch Palace, where he found her ‘newly up’ in a state of undress, ‘hare about her Face’. His political judgement and his personal conduct now combined to damn him. Placed under house arrest and denied access to the queen, he was tried by his peers and stripped of his titles and office, although cleared of treason. But his dramatic and irretrievable loss of favour pushed the increasingly desperate Essex to make a rash bid for the crown, hoping to exploit the worries over the succession. And in February 1601 the poets found themselves living out in real life Jonson’s maxim that theatre should be ‘neere, and familiarly allied to the time’.
Essex’s rebellion of February 1601 was preceded by an amazing incident that, if nothing else, reveals the power that was believed to reside in the theatre. On the 5th the conspirators had a meeting with members of Shakespeare’s company and persuaded them to put on Richard II, which featured the deposition of the monarch, the following Saturday afternoon. These were very dangerous waters: the play was sufficiently sensitive to have had the deposition scene cut in no fewer than three printed quartos. The theme had been particularly controversial since the publication in 1599 of a book by Sir John Hayward that told the same story. It had been dedicated to Essex with a very pointed phrase: ‘great thou are in hope, greater in expectation of a future time’.
Hayward seems to have intended no treason, but he nearly died for it. Just how seriously such things might be interpreted is shown by an abstract in the state papers from the government’s investigation of the book. Like a CIA ‘reader’ in the Cold War, the examiner concludes that Hayward had:
selected a story 200 years old and published it, intending the application of it to this time, the plot being that of a king who is taxed for misgovernment, and his council for corrupt and covetous dealings for private ends; the King is censured for conferring benefits on hated favourites, the nobles become discontented, and the commons groan under continual taxation, whereupon the Kings is deposed, and in the end murdered.
As always in authoritarian states of any colour, the past can serve to discredit the present. The mere narrative or re-enactment of history could be seen as subversive. Elizabeth was furious: believing Hayward’s offence to have been deliberate, she demanded he be tortured on the rack.
The case had wider repercussions, too. In June 1599 the register of the Company of Stationers carried a note ‘That no English histories be printed except they be allowed by some of her Majesty’s privy Council’ and that ‘no plays be printed except they be allowed by such as have authority’. Any book of this nature was to be brought under the control of the archbishops of Canterbury and London and, ominously, ‘such books as can be found or are already taken let them be presently brought to the Bishop of London to be burnt’. Censorship and book burning were all part of the Elizabethan state.
In this light it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that Shakespeare and his company were sympathetic to Essex, who we know had long loved the play’s ‘conceit’. At any rate, Richard II went ahead at the Globe on the afternoon of Saturday the 7th, with the deposition scene: Burbage presumably played Richard. The next day Essex and a group of armed followers tried to get the city to rise up, but to no avail. Essex was captured and his supporters, including the Earl of Southampton, were arrested.
Shakespeare’s company were inevitably commanded to explain themselves. They sent one of their number, Augustine Philips, to speak on their behalf. The Public Record Office preserves the intelligence reports on Essex, interrogations of conspirators and verbatim transcripts of the trial. Among those papers is a fascinating document written on 18 February 1601, the day before the trial opened. Examined ‘upon his oath’ by Lord Chief Justice Popham and two other chief justices, his words recorded by the stenographer, Philips did his best:
He sayeth that on Friday last, or Thursday, Sir Charles Percy, Sir Jocelyn Percy and the Lord Montegle with some three more spake to some of the players in the presence of this examinant to have the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second to be played the Saturday next, promising to give them forty shillings more than their ordinary to play it. Where this examinant and his friends were determined to have played some other play holding that play of King Richard to be so old and so long out of use as that they should have small or no company [audience] at it. But at their request this examinant and his friends were content to play it the Saturday and had their 40 shillings more than the ordinary for it and so played it accordingly.
The sheet is signed by Philips and his examiners. Probably Shakespeare and the rest of the company had instructed him to stick to the money story; as always with interrogators, one should offer only what is asked for.
The trial was over quickly and Essex and Southampton sentenced to death. On 24 February, the night before Essex’s execution, Shakespeare’s company were summoned to perform before the queen. Was that deliberate on her part? Southampton’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment in the Tower, where he was memorialized, lank-haired and sheepish, in a wonderful painted portrait with a black cat. He had been lucky.
There is a fascinating tailpiece to this story, which links Elizabeth, Essex and Shakespeare’s Richard II. That same year, on 4 August, the old antiquarian William Lambarde came to the queen’s private chamber in east Greenwich to present her with his ‘pandecta of all her rolls, bundles, membranes and parcels’, a collection of historical documents retrieved from the Tower. What follows is Lambarde’s account of their conversation:
Her Majesty fell upon the reign of King Richard II.
Saying ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’
LAMBARDE: Such a wicked imagination was determined and attempted by a most unkind Gent, the most adorned creature that ever your Majesty made.
HER MAJESTY: He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was played forty times in open streets and houses.
The exchange leaves one with sympathy for the queen, old and isolated, weighed down now by the burden of office, though still with her finger on the pulse of things: she knew how many times the show had been staged. Later in the conversation, still bothered by it, she came back to the theme: ‘then returning to Richard II. She demanded, ‘Whether I had seen any true picture, or lively representation of his countenance and person?’ As she perused the archive, Elizabeth’s last words were these: ‘In those days force and arms did prevail, but now the wit of the fox is every where on foot, so as hardly a faithful or virtuous man may be found.’
On 27 February 1601, only two days after Essex’s death, another execution took place in London, but in very different circumstances. In a grey, overcast dawn with swirling snow a young Catholic widow, Anne Line, was dragged on a hurdle from Newgate to Tyburn with two priests, Mark Barkworth and Roger Fieldcock who were to die with her.
Condemned as a traitor for having had a priest in her house blessing her candles, Anne Line had been married to Roger Line, from the Hampshire circle of the Southamptons. Her husband – ‘a good man and true’ – had died abroad six years earlier, still only in his twenties, exiled for his faith. The pair had lived a life of poverty and holiness, and at some point had sworn a vow of chastity in their marriage. Now painfully wasted – ‘almost as thin as the rope’, a witness remarked – Mrs Line had to be carried onto the gallows, where she gave away her last belongings and made a speech affirming her beliefs, despite being harangued by a Protestant divine who ‘many times urged her to convert from her professed faith’. Shivering in their shirts, Barkworth and Fieldcock sang a motet by William Byrd as she was hanged, before they themselves suffered the appalling fate of hanging, drawing and quartering. A grim scene, alleviated only by the extraordinary courage of the victims.
Mrs Line was buried in a charnel pit by the scaffold but was exhumed that night by Catholic supporters, perhaps from the household of the Catholic Earl of Worcester, one of the Essex and Southampton circle and a friend of William Byrd, a Catholic who was head of the music of the queen’s chapel. She was reburied in a secret ceremony ‘with greater decorum’ (and with Byrd’s music?) some time after mid-March, though it is still not known where. But the tale does not end there.
That summer a book appeared entitled Love’s Martyr, dedicated to Sir John Salusbury, a Welsh politician from a prominent North Welsh Catholic family linked by marriage to the Lancashire Stanleys. The main item in the book was an old poem by a Salusbury retainer, Robert Chester, ‘Allegorically shadowing the truth of Love in the constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle’, but it also included ‘some new compositions of severall moderne Writers … diverse Poeticall Essaies … Done by the best and chiefest of our moderne writers.’ And it was indeed a glittering array, including Chapman, Marston, Ben Jonson – and Shakespeare. But Shakespeare’s contribution, though on the same theme, was sombre and mystical, and quite unlike anything else he wrote, though some have thought it the most beautiful short poem in English. It has no title, though we know it as The Phoenix and Turtle. It has spawned fantastic theories, including the identification of Elizabeth and Essex as the two birds! It is about a married couple who had been separated for many years – one had died long ago, the other recently in tragic circumstances. The verses are to be recited at a secret ‘session’: a ceremony of interment with a requiem mass conducted by a priest in ‘surplice white’ with ‘defunctive music’. The poem is shadowed with an ominous sense of the malign power of the state, the ‘tyrant’s wing’, and seems to hint at a mysterious melding of the personal and the political. At the end of the poem a threnos (a lament concluding a tragedy) strangely refers to the couple’s lack of children (‘twas not their infirmity, it was married chastity’).
In the middle of the poem is a gorgeous meditation on the Platonic conception of love that reminds us of Keats (‘Two distincts, division none/Number there in love was slain’), and a strange pun that seems to point the reader to Anne and Roger Line: ‘Distance but no space was seen/Twixt this turtle and his queen’. (In the 1571 English translation of Euclid – a book Shakespeare studied at grammar school – ‘distance and no space, length and no breadth’ is the definition of a line.)
This exciting new discovery puts Shakespeare in close touch with a circle of people outside most people’s field of vision late in Elizabeth’s reign – and right outside our usual assumptions about his known network of contacts. A private commission, first done for those who reburied Mrs Line, then given to Chester for his volume Love’s Martyr, The Phoenix and Turtle may take us nearer to Shakespeare’s feelings about a real event of his time than anything else he wrote.
The late spring or summer of 1601 saw the final phase of the War of the Poets play itself out in the edgy artistic climate after the demise of Essex. Marston had replied to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or What You Will with his own What You Will, again for the Paul’s Children. Then Jonson put on his Poetaster with the Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars. Poetaster is about ancient Romans, but it implicitly, and unwisely, contrasted Augustus’s wise rule, the age of poets such as Virgil, Horace and Ovid (all of whom are characters in the play), with an English state dominated by malice, intrigue and envy, in which the talented outsider is done down by envy. In his prologue Jonson, as always, can’t let go of his moralizing (or his wounded self-regard):
know, tis a dangerous age,
Wherein who writes had need present his scenes
Forty-fold proof against the conjuring means
Of base detractors and illiterate apes
All of which, no doubt, was lapped up by the intelligentsia: the students and inns of court lawyers who crowded the galleries for the latest instalment of clever literary references, in-jokes and satirical defamations. Jonson was now a spectator sport all of his own, and the wits queued to see his ‘unwieldy galleon’ outsailed by the breezy sails of his detractors, lighter in the water and quicker on the turn. Topicality was the rage.
But this was never Shakespeare’s forte (or his interest – it would probably have seemed a waste to him to devote a whole play to such controversies). For a reply his company employed the talented freelancer Thomas Dekker, who that autumn got back at Jonson with Satiromastix (‘The Chewer-up of the Satirists’), which was first played by the Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe. But by now Shakespeare himself was sufficiently interested in the controversy to be drawn into writing a lengthy satirical classical play: Troilus and Cressida.
The new play seems to have been taken as another tilt at Jonson – some saw a burlesque of Jonson in the figure of Ajax. Shakespeare was now moving into Jonson’s territory, ancient Greece. Troilus and Cressida was a satire that attacked everything: a play with no moral centre, in which all are as crooked as each other. It is a long play and very learned – Chapman’s weighty Homer was obviously part of his reading. But the play’s registration was delayed and then subject to getting ‘sufficient authority’, which hints at licensing difficulties. It was eventually published as ‘played by Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe’, but then reprinted with those words removed and a new preface claiming, strangely, that there had been no stage performances. This suggests that, like Sejanus, the play had fallen foul of the authorities. Contemporary satirists had often made play with Essex as the English Achilles, and the statesman William Cecil (Lord Burghley) and his son Robert as the greybeards in the Greek camp. If the play was taken in that way by the authorities – had Shakespeare perhaps been ‘intending the application of it to this time’? – it is not surprising it was swiftly taken off.
By then Shakespeare had Hamlet on at the Globe with the added passage about the great brouhaha over the children’s companies, the ‘little eyases’, wryly remarking that ‘the boys carry it off, even Hercules and his load’ (the image of Hercules carrying the globe was on the flag that flew above their own theatre). This effectively marked the end of the War of the Poets, if not of the creative disagreements and abrasive friendship of Shakespeare and Jonson. They resumed relations in 1609–10: Jonson still making jibes at Shakespeare, Shakespeare putting little in-jokes into his plays that only Jonson would have recognized.
So changes in taste, writing and themes came about as a response partly to contemporary politics, partly to new challenges and styles, and partly to the sheer fizz of theatrical rivalry at a time when there were many good writers – some of them really good – and when the younger generation was bidding to outdo the old. Shakespeare, however, always kept ahead of his rivals; he was always somehow new and fresh. And now, typically, he pulled another rabbit out of the hat, by recasting the old revenge tragedy of the late 1580s in a new and thrilling guise.
Hamlet was probably first staged in 1600, and the confusingly different texts – representing his first version, his revision and his abridgement of the revision, with references to the War of the Poets – were written between 1599 and 1601. As with most of his best plays he didn’t invent the main plot but took it from an old play, perhaps by Thomas Kyd, and on one level writing the show now was simply a clever commercial move, as revenge tragedy was enjoying a major revival. Perhaps, as with his reworking of the Queen’s Men’s plays, he was deliberately remaking a popular old play with one eye on the box office, just as Hollywood today will remake a hit of ten or fifteen years before. And when Shakespeare brought out a new show everyone else responded, in much the same way that a successful Hollywood remake will push other studios into action in the same genre. Marston immediately wrote Antonio’s Revenge; and late in 1601 Ben Jonson was paid by Henslowe’s company to update Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, one of the greatest hits of the previous fifteen years.
Hamlet has got the lot: plot, action and speed; love, intrigue and murder. Shakespeare could have longueurs in his plays, but the most theatrical, like Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, have a fantastic energy and speed of plot that lead the audience irresistibly on. The tale is a simple one. Old Hamlet, king of Denmark, is mysteriously dead; his suave brother succeeds and marries his widow, young Hamlet’s mother. The time is out of joint: in the court there is debauchery and cynicism, in the world threats of war and revolution, in the heavens omens of destruction. In a scene of thrilling power and drama, old Hamlet’s ghost – who figured in the original play – tells his son that he has been murdered by his brother and that Hamlet must take revenge. From then on the show goes like a rocket to its final tragic but heroic end, especially in the revised version in which Shakespeare knocked out a few scenes and a couple of lesser soliloquies to keep things racing. (In its uncut length, at four and a half hours it was far too long for an Elizabethan audience used to ‘two hours traffic of the stage’ at the Globe.)
In Hamlet, Shakespeare famously uses the soliloquy – the lone hero on stage talking to the audience – to get to his inner thoughts. And Hamlet’s language uncannily represents a mind in action: anxious, excited, ruminating, always on the move. This psychology, this portrayal of inwardness, was one of the concerns of late Elizabethan culture. In this, Shakespeare was influenced by the contemporary debate over the ‘humours’; but where in Jonson’s hands such ideas could become rather static and preachy, Shakespeare brilliantly worked them into the action.
Hamlet is perhaps the most commented-upon work of art in existence. In its delineation of personality and its portrayal of inwardness modern critics have seen nothing less than ‘the invention of the human’. But on one level Hamlet is just a rattling good story. As in several other shows, Shakespeare uses the device of the play within the play – here both as a metaphor and with electrifying effect in the plot. There is, too, an eclectic plundering of religious themes of the age: Hamlet, for example, is a student at Wittenberg University, Luther’s alma mater, and Calvinist allusions have been detected in the play. But how quickly and easily Shakespeare slips into Catholic ideas of purgatory: a warning to those who pursue his inner beliefs from his public art. Yet after the final curtain the ghost remains in the mind: remembrance; the world of the spirits. Whilst losing none of its theatricality, the revenge play has now cleverly shaded into a requiem for a lost spirit world. The pre-Reformation past is beginning to recede, and now Shakespeare can dramatize it, exorcizing the ghosts.
They loved it: not only the groundlings but the university wits too. English actors were soon taking the show abroad to Danzig, Warsaw and many other places, and a German version of the play survives which was produced in his own lifetime. In 1607 it was even played on a ship off the shore of Africa to an audience that included local dignitaries (see here).
But in Shakespeare’s personal life that autumn there was sorrow. On 8 September 1601, just before Troilus and Cressida was staged and perhaps just before the adapted Hamlet came back at the Globe, John Shakespeare was buried in Stratford. A fathers death is important in a man’s life. It is inconceivable that William did not go back to Stratford – if not for the funeral, then surely to comfort his mother. It is, of course, dangerous to read autobiography into the plays. Hamlet’s father’s ghost was, after all, in the original play in the late 1580s. But the ghost’s fire-and-brimstone description of purgatory makes us pause for a moment, given the timing of the play in the autumn of his father’s death.
The testament found in the eaves of the Henley Street house contained a solemn request to his family, and most of all to his eldest son, to perform the correct Catholic rites – to say masses and to pray for him in purgatory. But had William himself left all that behind? Was he now a patriotic, sceptical Englishman in the new Protestant age? One might guess that for him it was no longer a matter of consolation in religion. His mind was too open, his habit of empathy too deep-rooted, to side with one view any more. By now he understood the nature of the world and the human condition. In John Donne’s telling phrase, the coherence was gone, and in his next dramas, whether consciously or not, he would explore what that meant.
So that autumn, as Troilus and Cressida enjoyed its brief and inglorious run, Shakespeare buried his father in the churchyard by the river. The town to which he had returned was a different place from the one he had known in childhood. Since the 1580s, Stratford’s old generation had been sidelined. Old friends were still there, still conscientious objectors: the Sadlers, the Badgers, the Wheelers. But new people were in charge now, aligned to the Protestant state and its local magnates, such as the Grevilles. In his father’s day the corporation had paid many acting companies to provide entertainment for the town in the guildhall. Soon they would be paid to go away. It was a sign of the times.
What an irony it was, then, that Shakespeare had bought the second biggest house in town with money made from the stage. Stratford was now in the throes of economic depression, exacerbated by the fires of 1594 and 1595 and the downturn in the economy of the country as a whole in the late nineties. The harsh winter of 1601 that hit gate receipts at the Globe affected the countryside far worse. A third of the population of Stratford were officially registered as paupers.
The mood in the town was shifting, too, in the face of growing Protestantization: there were snooping beadles, bothersome constables, creeping Sabbatarianism. Alderman Richard Quiney, a stalwart defender of his townspeople’s rights, was killed in a night brawl with men of the local lord, Fulke Greville. The view from the window of New Place was changing; in the streets there were whispers that the social fabric was disintegrating, rulership failing and nature punishing mankind. Puritan preachers especially were not slow to point these things out. For them, the problem was that the town was still not godly enough.
Looking at the events of that year, Shakespeare could have been excused for thinking, as his John of Gaunt had said, that his native land was ‘leased out like to a pelting farm’. But for his descendants he was determined to carve out his little patch of the sceptred isle. In May 1602 he paid £320 to the Combe family for 107 acres divided into about a dozen strips in the common field. And on 28 September that year he purchased a little cottage in Chapel Lane on a lease from the manor of Rowington, the village from which his paternal grandfather had probably come. Now, at the height of his career, and about to return to the bright lights of London to create his finest work, the fruition of his own personal artistic vision, Shakespeare was nevertheless investing in his roots.