IN 1602 SHAKESPEARE was at the peak of his career, the foremost dramatist of late Tudor London. And now for the first time we have detailed first-hand knowledge of his private life. Indeed, our sources enable us to go right into his street, through the front door of the house in which he lived – and even to hear his voice. In this year, when it is now agreed that Othello was written, he was living once again north of the river, in a house on the corner of Silver Street and Monkwell – known to locals, with a delightful synchronicity for today’s Harry Potter fans, as Muggle Street.
Shakespeare’s neighbourhood lay just inside the city wall in its northwest corner, where crumbling bastions towered over a warren of tenements and livery halls, looking out over sewage-filled ditches to the northern suburbs. This may have been an area his father knew: the Glovers had a small hall close by at the western end of Beech Lane. Shakespeare now lodged with a French Huguenot family, Christopher and Mary Mountjoy. Their house was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, its successor in the Blitz, and the site itself vanished during post-war development under the central reservation of the carriageway at London Wall. Yet this is one of the most vividly documented corners of the old city, with wonderful detail in Tudor street maps, parish books, local court records, the archives of the guild companies and even plans of individual tenements.
The Mountjoys are often described as wigmakers but they were in fact makers of tires, fantastical court headdresses of gold and silver thread woven with pearls and jewels, the kind of thing worn only by royalty and aristocrats. One of Queen Elizabeth’s tires was described as ‘a jewel, being a ship of Mother-of-Pearl garnished with rubies and pearls’. Among the Mountjoys’ clients while Shakespeare was living with them was James I’s wife, Queen Anne. Shakespeare refers to such creations in several plays: Falstaff, for example, speaks of ‘a ship tire, the tire valiant, or any tire of Venetian admittance’ – the art came originally from Venice. So Mountjoy was an artist and craftsman of substance, tire-maker to the court and to well-to-do families who came in from the provinces for their fittings.
As its name suggests, Silver Street was known for its goldsmiths and silversmiths. The Mountjoys’ was one of the ‘divers fine houses’ described by Stow in his 1598 survey, and it is shown in the Agas map – conventionally drawn – with two big gables. Like its neighbours, it must have been of three and a half storeys with jettied upper floors. It is pleasant to imagine Shakespeare living in one of the upper front rooms that looked across to St Olave’s Church, and over undulating rooftops to the massive bulk of Old St Paul’s half a mile away. The Property Commission maps drawn up after the Great Fire show it L-shaped, with a 63-foot frontage and the same depth down Muggle Street. The ground floor would have had a shop and a workshop glittering with silk, Venice gold and silver thread and jewels, its benches covered with ‘cloth of gold’ and ‘tissue’ – gold woven on a light silk base. Although the women servants did the sewing, the male apprentices milled the gold thread and assembled the tires. These were high-quality craftspeople, working on one of the most esteemed of the upper-class decorative arts in turn-of-the-century London.
The Mountjoys’ connections were with court, country and the theatre world. Christopher’s friends included the families of Hemmings and Condell. And they were a family with tales enough to provide the plot for a domestic drama all on their own. Christopher was a difficult sort; Mrs Mountjoy had affairs. In 1597 she went to the astrologer and physician Simon Forman privately, thinking she was pregnant (by her lover Thomas Wood who lived nearby in Swan Alley?). It is intriguing to think she could have rubbed shoulders in the waiting room with the likes of Winifrid Burbage, Emilia Lanier and Philip Henslowe. The parish register for that year records the death of an infant as ‘Mrs Mountjoys child’. And before too long, the family’s ups and downs drew in their famous lodger.
A year or two after he came to live in their house, Shakespeare found himself playing a part in one of his own plots. Mountjoys apprentices lived in the house, and one of them, Stephen Belott, was a nice boy with good prospects. Mrs Mountjoy seems to have taken a shine to him and was keen to arrange a match with her daughter, but Belott was slow on the uptake and she asked Shakespeare to be a go-between (a common practice, incidentally, in Tudor marriage negotiations). Whether or not it was ‘honey-tongued’ Shakespeare who did the trick, the couple did indeed marry, in St Olave’s on 19 November 1604. Belott set up in business on his own, but quarrelled with his father-in-law over the promised dowry. The case ended up in court and has left us 26 documents that name Shakespeare, one of them with his signature, along with the depositions of household members, apprentices and servants. Among them was Joan Jonson, who told how Mrs Mountjoy ‘the defendant did send and persuade one Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house to persuade the plaintiff to marriage’. When it comes to his turn, we hear Shakespeare speaking in his own voice.
He says Belott was a ‘very honest and good fellow’ who ‘did well and honestly behave himself and was a very good and industrious servant in the said service, though he did not in [Shakespeare’s] hearing avouch that he had got any great profit and commodity by the service’. The poet remembered that Mr Mountjoy ‘did bear and show great goodwill and affection’ and had often spoken well of his apprentice ‘and did make a motion unto the complainant of marriage with Mary, and Mrs Mountjoy did solicit and entreat the said deponent [Shakespeare] to move and persuade Belott to effect the said marriage’. Shakespeare was perhaps close to Mrs Mountjoy, though to suggest he might have been responsible for her pregnancy in 1597 is perhaps to overstretch the evidence. Shakespeare says he did speak to the couple, and ‘made sure by him they gave their consent and agreed to marry’; unfortunately, however, he did not remember the terms of the marriage portion beyond a cash sum and a load of household movables and tools. In the end, since no one could agree on that crucial point, in a Solomonic judgement the court referred the case to the arbitration of the elders of the Huguenot church. They decided that both sides were a bad lot (tous pere e gendre desbauchez) and awarded Belott £6 13s 4d. Mountjoy never paid up.
For a professional anatomizer of human foibles and follies, perhaps it all raised a smile. Another idea jotted down in his notebook. But such a tale only highlights the rich web of contacts offered by his daily life in that tiny area jammed in between the city wall and the goldsmiths’ quarter. Around St Olave’s there were interesting neighbours. The musician Henry Sandon was a fellow parishioner, as was the painter William Linby. John Hemmings lived a few yards away in Addle Street in a property owned by Thomas Savage, the goldsmith who had funded the Globe deal. In the neighbourhood were several scriveners, useful for getting clean copies of plays fast. A few yards away Nicholas Hilliard lodged in Gutter Lane, in a tenement sometimes so cold in winter that he couldn’t paint his minutely observed miniatures.
But Shakespeare also rubbed shoulders with the poor. If he went down Muggle Street, he was in a fascinating little neighbourhood tucked into the very corner of the old city wall. Fifty yards or so up the street on the left was a gateway that led up a little lane to the hall of the Barber Surgeons, the doctor-physicians of the time. Here, four times a year, they held public lectures with autopsies on convicted felons. At least two doctors were near neighbours: Dr Gifford lived only a few yards away in Silver Street, Dr Palmer on the north side of the hall. On the other side of Muggle Street, butting on to the back of Shakespeare’s house, were twelve almshouses for ‘aged and poor’ people, their faggots and bags of charcoal stacked outside for the cold weather. And a few yards beyond them was a group of buildings owned by the Clothworkers: recent infill in the property boom of the last twenty-five years. Thanks to the guild’s site maps, we can effectively walk inside them.
If you stood at the end of the street with the city wall facing you, on your left was a narrow gate by a brick wall: head down the entry towards the corner tower and you would come out into a yard facing a three-storey tenement block that backed on to Dr Palmer’s house. This was a warren of little rooms occupied by single men – some of the vast number of domestic servants in the city. Among them was an Irishman, Patrick ‘Murfee’. Past them was Mr Beastie’s house and garden, under the city wall. To the right, across the yard, was the old medieval chapel and hermitage of St James, now known as Lambe’s chapel; and jammed up against it was Mr Speght’s grammar school, a three-storey house with a hall and parlour, a little kitchen and an outside latrine. Among Speght’s boys was John Chappell, who at this time became a member of the Chapel Children playing at Blackfriars. The sound of the school bell would have been just audible from the Mountjoys’ house.
So those were the neighbours Shakespeare rubbed shoulders with in the street or the taverns – or at Dr Palmer’s, if the venereal troubles described in the last sonnets were real ones. If he needed an alehouse that served food, there were several local ‘ordinaries’: the Mitre in Wood Street and the Dolphin in Milk Street were the best known, but there was a small inn in Silver Street itself, later known as the Coopers Arms. Such places usually had a kitchen with an oven and a taproom, and a range of small chambers and outbuildings of two or three storeys round a yard: good places to write, as food and drink could be served privately if desired, and candles were free. Lying just inside the wall at Cripplegate, on the main route out to the north, were several great carriers’ inns for long-distance travellers. North of the Mountjoys’ house, for example, by St Giles, was the White Hinde, used by Durham and Yorkshire carriers. The Maiden Head, the Worcester carriers’ base, was maybe the one used by Shakespeare, Condell and Hemmings – Midlanders all. The largest were the Swan with Two Necks, and the Castle, a fifteenth-century establishment with an inner yard 40 yards across. Bigger than theatres and, like them, galleried on all sides, the carriers’ inns occupied the entire space between Lad Lane, Wood Street and Aldermanbury. From here, trains of pack animals left bearing the produce and luxuries of London and of a wider world.
This, then, was Shakespeare’s neighbourhood when he wrote his greatest plays. Travellers and loaded pack animals were constantly crowding into the inns in the warren of narrow alleys round about, so it must have been full of noise, colour and vitality. Nothing yet regularized and therefore nothing monotonous, this was the life of a great pre-modern city that we can no longer see in the developed world. All these coaching inns had been demolished by the late nineteenth century, although until not so long ago you could still have seen the badge of a swan with entwined necks carved in the rubbed stone lintel of an old carriage gate, just round the corner from Shakespeare’s old haunts.
So it was probably in the Silver Street house, or at the tables of the ‘ordinaries’ where he ate in the evenings, that he wrote Othello, which out of the darkness and inwardness of Hamlet, emerges with a painful clarity and emotional intent. The story, set in sixteenth-century Venice, overtly falls in with the exotic history plays which started with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Its background is the clash of Christian and Muslim. For the Elizabethan audience its immediate historical context was the greatest political theatre of the day: the Mediterranean in the time of Philip II. But that’s only the backdrop to a story of racism and jealousy of a white man towards a black man, and of how love is destroyed by jealousy. Othello is the noble older warrior married to the beautiful white woman Desdemona. Iago is the man who destroys him, who hates Othello’s marriage with a white woman and who lays a ‘train’ to trap him whilst affecting to love him.
Venice, as we have already seen, was a place of special interest to Shakespeare: meeting place of east and west, home to his Jew and now his Moor. There was no single model for Othello – Shakespeare took the basic story from Cinthio’s popular Hundred Stories, one of his staple source books. But other reading shaped its imaginative world and the fabulously rich hinterland that he creates for his characters. Among the new books he had just read were Leo the African’s Geographical History of Africa, published in November 1600, and Lewis Lewkenor’s book on the Constitution of Venice (Lewkenor and Shakespeare could have met at Wilton in December 1603 in the company of the Venetian ambassador). Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation of Pliny’s History of the World was another source. A Coventry schoolmaster, Holland was dubbed the ‘translator general of the age’ for his great renderings of Pliny, Livy and Plutarch. Shakespeare loved his work, and for Othello he quarried it for its fabulous exotica: medicinal gum of Arabian trees, mines of sulphur, chrysolite and mandragora all come from the rich prose of Holland, whose description of the Pontic Black Sea ‘which evermore floweth and runneth out into Propontis … and never retireth back … sometimes frozen and all an yce’ Shakespeare deftly shapes into a magnificent cadence reminiscent of Marlowe:
Like to the Pontic sea
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er keeps retiring ebb but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont
But real-life encounters go into such plays too. Othello was not the only drama about Moors in the last years of Elizabeth. The fascination with the exotic ‘other’ was shared by the groundlings and the court – where soon, in a ‘masque of Blackness’, the Queen and her ladies would wear black make-up to appear as ‘Ethiopes’. A play about racism towards black people, then, was touching on a current preoccupation on the streets of London. So what was Shakespeare’s experience of black people? As we have seen, there is a tantalizing possibility that his mistress had been a dark-skinned woman of Venetian Sephardi Jewish origin; but he must also have met ‘moors’ of North African, and even West African, origin.
He may have met black women as prostitutes, especially in nearby Turnmill Street in Clerkenwell, where the famous Lucy Negro, a former dancer in the Queen’s service, ran an establishment patronized by noblemen and lawyers; Lucy was famous enough to be paid mock homage in the lawyers’ revels at Grays Inn. Shakespeare’s acquaintance, the poet John Weever, also sang the praises of a woman whose face was ‘pure black as Ebonie, jet blacke’.
There were probably several thousand black people in London, forming a significant minority of the population. They were employed in particular as servants, but also as musicians, dancers and entertainers. In the months before Shakespeare wrote the play their presence had become a major issue since their numbers, recently increased by many slaves freed from captured Spanish ships, had caused them to be designated a nuisance. In 1601, the year Shakespeare was thinking about Othello and reading Leo the African, the Cecil papers (still held at Hatfield House) disclose the kind of government policies we have already seen in relation to gypsies and itinerants: ‘the queen is discontented at the great numbers of “negars and blackamoores” which are crept into the realm since the troubles between her Highness and the King of Spain, and are fostered here to the annoyance of her own people’. A plan was mooted to transport them out of the country. In July 1602 Cecil was dealing along these lines with merchants, one of whom wrote: ‘I have persuaded the merchants trading to Barbary, not without some difficulty, to yield to the charges of [pay for] the Moors lately redeemed out of servitude by her Majesty’s ships, so far as it may concern their lodging and victuals, till some shipping may be ready to carry them into Barbary.’
No more than now should we take a government’s pronouncements on such matters at face value. But it is an interesting question how they thought this might be done, for by now many black people, baptized Christians, were living as citizens in London, Bristol and other cities. For example, in the records of the small parish of St Botolph’s outside Aldgate, among French and Dutch immigrants and one East Indian (from today’s Bengal) we find twenty-five black people living in Shakespeare’s lifetime. They were mainly servants, but one man lodged at the White Bell next to the Bell Foundry in Whitechapel Road and perhaps worked there (was he a West African skilled in bronze casting?). Some are given high-status Christian funerals by their employers, with bearers and black cloth. Among the names are these:
Christopher Capperbert [Cape Verde], a blackemoore
Suzanna Pearis a blackamoore tenant to John Despinois
Symon Valencia a blackamoore
Cassangoe A blacke A moore tenant to Mrs Barbor
Easfanyyo a neagar servant to Mr Thomas Barbor a merchaunt
Robert a negar
A Negar whose name was suposed to be Frauncis. He was servant to Mr Peter Miller a beare brewer dwelling at the sign of the hartes horne in the libertie of Eastsmithfield
Among later names we find ‘Anne Bause a Black-more wife to Anthonie bause trompetter’; ‘John Come Quicke, a Blacke-Moore, servant to Thomas Love a captaine’; and, saddest in this list, ‘a blackamoore woman that died in the street, named Marie’.
Forgotten lives and forgotten histories. Sometimes these stories cross over with other sources: a woman, for example, who was concerned about the health of her black servant’s little daughter took her to Simon Forman. In his notebook Forman diagnosed the little girl as ‘cold of heart’: evidently she was suffering from profound depression. Human stories, as always, tell a different tale from official papers. But this too was the reality of Shakespeare’s London, and it can hardly have escaped him.
So black people may well have been part of his daily life around St Helen’s Bishopsgate or Silver Street, and his knowledge of them could have deepened over the twelve years or so since he had written the part of the conventional stage villain Aaron the Moor in his early play Titus Andronicus. But had he come to know any black people intimately? It is possible, as we have seen, that he had had a black mistress. But that he could have met at least one noble high-ranking Moor is well documented.
In 1600 an embassy from Morocco came to London and stayed half a year. The Moors’ temporary neighbours were fascinated by their daily routine of prayers and, then as now, foreign cooking and eating customs occasioned much comment, not all of it particularly open-minded. The publisher of Leo the African’s History dedicated the book to the ambassador, who during his stay sat for an Elizabethan portrait painter. The work, which still survives, is inscribed: ‘Abdul Guahid the ambassador of Barbary, 1600, aged 42’ and presents a powerful image of a noble Moor. As it happens, the Chamberlain’s Men played for the ambassador during Christmas 1600, so Shakespeare would have seen Abdul Guahid, and may even have met him.
The noble Moor, and indeed the child with a frozen heart, could both have been part of his experience. Such hints, brief as they are, suggest a surprisingly rich hidden narrative for black people in Elizabethan England and help us see in a different light those government calls for repatriation. Clearly Shakespeare knew more about black people and racism than modern critics have cared to admit, and than we give him credit for. And attracted by the tale in Cinthio’s Hundred Stories, he decided to write a play on the subject.
Shakespeare’s commitment to Othello is shown by its wonderful quality, and by the care with which he subsequently revised it after the promulgation of the Act to reform the abuses of players in 1606. Its enduring power is shown by its effect wherever it has been performed since. In his day it was played at court, and on tour in the provinces: John Rice’s Desdemona in Oxford in 1609 moved the audience to tears. Later audiences, however, didn’t always like what they saw. A seventeenth-century English critic sneeringly saw the moral of the play as ‘a caution to Maidens of quality without their parents consent to run away with Blackamoors’. In the early nineteenth century US President John Quincy Adams famously felt that ‘the fondling of Desdemona with Othello onstage is disgusting’ and took the great moral lesson of the play to be ‘that black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the laws of Nature’. Audiences in the pre-Civil War South also found the play ‘Unfit to be permitted in any southern state, revolting, an outrage, the duty of every white man to resent; if Shakespeare the writer of the play were caught in any southern state, he ought to be lynched for having written it.’ Even in 1950s’ Britain, audiences were shocked that Paul Robeson should kiss Peggy Ashcroft on stage. In the liberal first decade of the twenty-first century the issues it raises are still everywhere, as was shown by a powerful recent TV film transposing Othello’s role to that of London’s first black commissioner of police. In 1602 Shakespeare was holding up a mirror to human nature. And in it, once again, he shows us ‘the stranger’s case’.
By 1602 journalists, pamphleteers, gossip columnists and astrologers were all hanging on Elizabeth’s failing health. It was still forbidden to speculate in public about the succession. But everyone knew it would soon be the end of an age, and the older generation hoped for a change for the better. Astrologers and horoscope-makers were increasingly tempted to make prophecies: there were fears, hopes and, in some quarters, dire forebodings. The mood was captured in many poems of the day. There was much talk of James VI of Scotland becoming king: indeed, over the border they had been waiting for this moment. From Scotland came all the right noises. But still Elizabeth refused to commit herself.
Shakespeare’s company’s last performance for the queen was at Richmond Palace on 2 February 1603. On the 19th the theatres were closed in anticipation of her death, which occurred at the palace on the 24th. There was no tribute to her from Shakespeare. Is this significant? At least two fellow writers noted his silence: one, indeed, bluntly begged him to put pen to paper, but he did not. Shakespeare does appear, however, to comment on the event in a sonnet to his friend, the young man. Theirs was still, apparently, a close friendship – a long loving friendship now – which had endured separation for a time. For several years it had been intense, passionate – a tearful homoerotic intimacy. But things were calmer now, and the poem he now wrote linked the personal and the political – the inner and the outer worlds. Elizabeth, often identified with the chaste goddess of the moon, Diana or Cynthia, had finally endured her eclipse, but the aftermath had confounded all the prophets of doom. Internal references suggest that this may be Shakespeare’s response to Elizabeth’s death:
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos’d as forfeit to a confin’d doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur’d,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage:
Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him I’ll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes.
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.
After forty-five years of religious and political conflicts and economic troubles, Elizabeth’s death carried with it a weight that is hard for us to imagine now. Hopes of peace in ‘this most balmy time’ reflect the first months of 1603, when the surprisingly smooth transition to James’s rule took place. What might take the modern reader aback is the pointed reference to ‘tyrants’ at the end of a sonnet which may be about the death of the old queen.
Meanwhile, the wheels of patronage were turning fast. The Chamberlain’s Men were the premier acting company, with influential friends – the Pembrokes in particular seem to have been anxious to take the lead in driving James’s early cultural agendas. Almost immediately, on 19 May, Shakespeare, Burbage, Philips and the rest were given letters of patent to be the king’s acting company, in the kind of language of which Polonius would have heartily approved:
freely to use and exercise the Art and faculty of playing Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, interludes, Morals, pastorals, Stage plays and such others like they have already studied … for the recreation of our loving Subjects as for our Solace and pleasure when we shall think good to see them … as well within their usual house called the Globe, as also within any town halls or moot halls or other convenient places within the liberties and freedom of any other City, university town, or borough whatsoever ….
So they were now royal servants, the King’s Men, their future assured – a balmy time indeed. In those early days of James’s reign, many believed or hoped that religious change and renewal were imminent. The new king was a Protestant, but he had Catholic forebears and a Catholic wife. A true philosopher king, he hated religious extremism on both sides, and there were rumours that he would return England to Catholicism, or at least grant freedom of worship. On the other side, a group of Puritan clergy presented James with a petition on his way to London, hoping he would oversee further reform of the Church. Within the Church itself the climate encouraged many sermonizers not to rock the boat but to maintain the status quo. In court this cracking open of a closed shell saw those outcast or ignored by Elizabeth – people like Southampton, Shakespeare’s first patron – rise again, looking for new opportunities.
In this mood many English poets saluted James with congratulatory poems, but again, not Shakespeare. After Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, he, unlike his peers, had not composed eulogies or funeral elegies for the great and good, and he did not break that habit now. But many poets felt that the event marked the beginning of a new cultural climate, one in which religious verse would be highly praised. A number even switched from secular to sacred or philosophical poetry, and there was a veritable outpouring of religious verse in the period 1603–5. James himself had a track record as a patron of poetry. At his accession he republished his book Basilikon doron, which had first appeared in 1599, with instructions to his young son Prince Henry on poetry, specifically the poetry of virtue. Such moves announced James to the London literati as a man of high philosophical and poetic ambition.
The king made his leisurely way down from Scotland during April and May 1603, staying at noble houses en route. But as he reached London, news came of a terrible outbreak of plague, the severest for ten years. That spring the theatres were closed. Across the city the parish books filled with page after page of burials as the death toll mounted to 1000 a week. In Shakespeare’s tiny parish the first deaths came in June, rising to a climax in the hot weather of August. The royal musician Henry Sandon was buried on the 1st, along with his daughter Susan, the painter William Linby and his wife Margaret, the goldsmith Thomas Ellis and a dozen servants who lodged and worked in this corner of the city. Many children died, too. There were eighty-five deaths in August and September alone, in a parish of only 100 or so taxable houses. It was the devastation of Shakespeare’s community. The minute books of the Barber Surgeons describe the cancellation of feasts, the money given ‘for reliefe of the most miserable poor and needie persons that it shall please almighty god to visit’.
In such a climate it is dangerous and pointless to stay in town if you have the money and a place to go. Shakespeare and the company moved out to stay by the river at Mortlake, where Philips had recently bought a house. This was to be their base for the next few months. James had been forced to delay his ceremonial reception in London while plague still raged. That autumn he made a stately progress through Hampshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, ending up in October with the Pembrokes at Wilton, where he remained until early December. There the King’s Men, too, seem to have stayed for some time, earning a large fee of £30 for entertainments which included a play that was probably As You Like It, enacted before James on 2 December. Among the guests was Nicolo Molin, the Venetian ambassador.
So, as might be guessed from those sonnets written in 1603, Shakespeare still had close contacts with the Pembroke family. Wilton was in effect the alternative court during the plague months, and a glittering circle was there that winter. Mary Herbert herself was still going strong: the famous patroness of poets, editor of her brother’s Arcadia and author of a play that Shakespeare would in due course use in manuscript for his own Antony and Cleopatra. The King’s Men’s prolonged stay at Wilton included a show to the town (a recent discovery in Trowbridge Record Office reveals that the burgesses paid £6,5s to the company). This detail does much to cement the picture of a continuing relationship between Shakespeare and Pembroke. The earl and his brother were great theatregoers and masquers, and loved to dress up and participate in courtly tilts and shows. The King’s Men would fit in a masque for the marriage of Pembroke’s brother the following year, between performances of Measure for Measure and The Comedy of Errors.
In London, plague deaths declined with the onset of colder weather. At the almshouses in Muggle Street the inmates sat round their wood fires and charcoal stoves and tried to stay warm. The city was silenced by a blanket of snow. On Christmas Day ambassador Molin made his way back from Wilton and wrote home: ‘I got to London on Friday evening. No one ever mentions the plague, no more than if it had never been. The city is so full of people that it is hard to believe that about sixty thousand deaths have taken place.’
But with the Globe still closed, the company stayed out of town and relied for the time being on the patronage of the court. James’s first winter in England was spent at Hampton Court, where the provision of entertainment was shared by the King’s Men and two other leading companies. Upwards of thirty plays were made ready for the royal choice, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and other staples, such as The Fair Maid of Bristol. Although chief writer for the company, and perhaps also what we would call a director, Shakespeare was still acting, too: solid, middle-of-the-road parts, such as John of Gaunt, Henry IV and the Ghost in Hamlet. This winter he also played in Sejanus, by his rival Ben Jonson. It was a flop, and there is a certain pleasure in realizing that Shakespeare must have known what it was like to be in one!
Around this time Shakespeare wrote a small cluster of sonnets that, though framed with his customary reserve, seem to offer fascinating circumstantial details of his life, and even hints about his personal feelings. Following the sonnet about Elizabeth’s death, these refer pointedly to politics – reinforcing the idea that in his private poems he was not writing mere artistic exercises, Petrarchan or otherwise, but putting down what he really felt. In the 154 sonnets there are in fact very few mere exercises (even the last two, versions of the epigram from the Greek Anthology, are chosen for their relevance to the tale). Most, on the contrary, are serious in a way that suggests he was mainly writing for himself, to get things off his chest, and, though some of them circulated among his friends, it is by no means certain that he showed every one to other people. In these sonnets from the momentous year of 1603–4 he surely says exactly what he wants to say.
Two in particular focus on the ceremonies for James’s entry into London, and it is very interesting to see why this should be. Now a King’s Man, Shakespeare was not merely an actor but a royal courtier, a Gentleman Groom of the Most Honourable Privy Chamber. And for the royal entry Shakespeare, Burbage and their colleagues were issued with a length of scarlet woollen cloth, listed in the account book of the royal wardrobe. In this classconscious society the sumptuary laws were very strict about which cloth could be used by which social rank, and wool was definitely for commoners. Along with stablemen, gunners, cooks and even royal bakers, three acting companies are listed: Alleyn’s Admiral’s Men, Beeston’s Queen’s Men, and the King’s Men with Shakespeare at the top of the list. To each went ‘scarlet red cloth: 4 and half yards’. This has always been understood simply as a gift, but the yardage was the amount needed for a gentleman groom’s livery jacket and breeches in the king’s livery. One might speculate that the famous Folio portrait of Shakespeare – which, along with his funeral bust, is the only certain image of the poet – shows him in that scarlet livery jacket with its lozenge pattern of gold braid on the sleeves, its gilt buttons and its stiffened collar.
So did Shakespeare actually walk in the procession with the other royal servants? As we know that the actors played roles in the procession (Edward Alleyn, for example, made a speech to the king as the Genius of London), it is likely that Shakespeare and his colleagues also had a ceremonial function in their fine scarlet, perhaps with a speech to declaim at one of the great ornamental gates erected on the procession route.
Thomas Dekker, who scripted the pageant that accompanied James’s grand entrance, described the crowds: ‘a sea of people so the street could not be seen: women and children crowding every casement’. The Venetian ambassador, Nicolo Molin, recorded his impressions in a letter home:
At eleven yesterday morning the king left the Tower.
He was preceded by the magistrates of the City, the court officials, the clergy, Bishops and archbishops, Earls marquises Barons and Knights, superbly apparelled and clad in silk of gold with pearl embroideries; a right royal show! The prince was on horseback, ten paces ahead of the king, who rode under a canopy borne over his head by twenty-four gentlemen, splendidly dressed, eight of whom took it, turn and turnabout [author’s italics]. The Queen followed with her maids of honour, and seventy ladies mounted splendidly dressed. In this order the procession moved from the Tower to Westminster, a distance of three miles all through the City.
Even a well-travelled diplomat like Molin was swept up in the mood of optimism that heady day. Among those riding behind the King were Shakespeare’s old patrons, the Earl of Pembroke and, newly released from the Tower, a relieved and chastened Earl of Southampton. But in his two sonnets reflecting on the occasion Shakespeare, at this moment forty years old and worldly wise, was strangely cool, notably so in a specific reference in Sonnet 125 to the role of royal servants holding the canopy in the procession:
Were’t aught to me I bore the canopy,
With my extern the outward honouring,
Or laid great bases for eternity
Which prove more short than waste or ruining?
Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour
Lose all, and more, by paying too much rent ….
Which is to say, it’s all spin – it’s all show. The line about carrying the canopy does not necessarily mean that the King’s Men were among the gentlemen bearers, but the use of the procession as a metaphor seems plain. The ‘great bases’ are perhaps the huge wooden arches with their brightly painted plaster figures, garish temporary stage sets for the royal show. These constructions with their obelisks (‘pyramids’ to contemporaries) had the crowds gawping. But in Sonnet 123 Shakespeare is again ambivalent:
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange,
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old;
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow, and this shall ever be,
I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.
The use of ‘foist’ tells its own story (and he would soon mock the novelty of ‘pyramids’ again in an extended joke in Antony and Cleopatra). ‘What we see doth lie’, then, means not only the illusion of the world but the outward show of power. Measured and allusive, both these sonnets are shot through with an inwardness worthy of Hamlet, but also with a disdain for public honour, for the pretensions of the rich and for the elaborate show of state. At the end of Sonnet 125, connecting the outer world of politics with the inner world of conscience, Shakespeare draws a powerful and startling metaphor from contemporary politics:
Hence, thou suborn’d informer! a true soul,
When most impeach’d, stands least in thy control.
Ever sceptical of power and mistrustful of those who use it, our Mr Shakespeare. And if we had any doubt what he is thinking about in this cluster of poems, in the contemporary Sonnet 124 – a brilliant poem that melds the personal and the political, and in which the word ‘love’ almost seems to stand for ‘faith’ – he announces to our surprise what sounds like a personal credo. This is about as far as he ever shows his hand. Whether he is protesting too much, given his liveried role at the heart of the ceremonial, is for the reader to judge:
If my dear love were but the child of state,
It might for Fortune’s bastard be unfather’d,
As subject to Time’s love, or to Time’s hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather’d.
No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled discontent,
Whereto th’inviting time our fashion calls:
It fears not policy, that heretic,
Which works on leases of short-number’d hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic,
That it nor grows with heat nor drowns with showers.
To this I witness call the fools of time,
Which die for goodness, who have liv’d for crime.
In the last couplet ‘witness’ is generally taken as referring to religious martyrs (as the scholar John Foxe had pointed out, ‘martyr’ is from the Greek word for ‘witness’), and this meaning is also supported by his use of ‘heretic’ to describe ‘policy’, that is, government. But this poem is not meant to be closely pinned down. It is an enigmatic, dense meditation on politics and individual conscience, the ‘child of state’ and the martyrs, criminals who died for goodness; vague and unspecific, it nevertheless evokes a world in which values are topsy-turvy, in which people of different religious faiths die horribly for their beliefs. These, for an old Elizabethan poet, were the terrible real-life pressures on love and conscience. And if this is not delusory, don’t these sonnets show us the same personality we have seen earlier? He is guarded and sceptical of power; a man who believes that conscience is an individual matter; who is diffident and self-deprecating (was that a class thing?) and yet is confident in his own great powers; a writer and observer who stands apart from the pageant and outward gloss of political power and stands ‘hugely politic’, sure that his verse will outlive this show. And with all this, is there not also a faint suggestion of contempt (or even malice?) for those who enjoy it so ostentatiously?
So, as always, Shakespeare leaves us with ambiguities. Public and private, conscience and power: antitheses that are at the very core of the sonnets – and, indeed, of the great tragedies. And, as always, there is the multiple viewpoint, even (or especially) when looking at himself. He had achieved high status, he was a royal servant wearing the king’s livery, he was a gentleman with a coat of arms. He had coveted this, and he surely celebrated it, even though he wrote such words in private.
The appointment as a King’s Man and as a Gentleman Groom of the Most Honourable Privy Chamber marked the achievement of those social ambitions he had left Stratford to fulfil; ambitions stemming from his father, who had first applied for a coat of arms before the collapse of his business in 1576. Shakespeare had craved acceptance and status, and now he had it: the coat of arms, the royal livery, Clopton’s house. There were those who were pleased for him, who felt that his kind, though not high-born, were of an instinctive, natural gentility that marked them out. But, needless to say in such a class-conscious city, there were also those who mocked. Ben Jonson’s ‘gentle Shakespeare’ was always a double-edged compliment, part felt, part needling. Others, though, were more direct: in the College of Arms a rival colleague of the herald Dethick marked the poet down in a list of those unworthy to be gentlemen, among the self-made, upwardly mobile ‘new people’ of James’s London. A mere ‘player’. And in a play of this time, an ambitious young gentleman playwright, Francis Beaumont, threw a wounding sneer at him, using John Shakespeare’s former trade to mock the pretensions of his courtier son. In a speech condemning social climbing in the new courtly world of James he refers to excessive bowing and scraping: all those bending legs, ‘some of which once so poor they were sockless … and one pair, that were heir apparent to a Glover, these legs hope shortly to be honorable’.
Given the acute sensitivity to class inferiority that runs undisguised through the sonnets, this was maybe not shrugged off quite as easily as water from a duck’s back. But, resplendent in scarlet, the King’s Men now found themselves with roles to play in the ceremonies, as well as in the entertainments that studded James’s first exciting months in London.
An unmartial prince, who hated war, James made an ambitious start, hopeful that after years of international tensions in Europe he could initiate a ‘peace process’ that might procure a lasting settlement. In the early summer of 1604 the Spanish were invited to send an embassy to London, and the royal accounts show that Shakespeare and the King’s Men were in attendance on the Spanish ambassador from 9 to 27 August at the end of the peace treaty negotiations at Somerset House. This time they were not to be actors, but to play courtiers: to wait on the visitors and stand around looking good in their scarlet cloaks and breeches. Plenty of bowing and scraping for Shakespeare and Burbage, then, and a lot of hanging about. Chafing to be back on stage, perhaps: it is easy to imagine that this time of enforced lay-off might have prompted the odd verse expressing disenchantment with pomp.
Among Catholics there were at first high hopes for the new reign: James was canny, clever, could hold his own in university debate; and he made all the right moves, among them freeing Southampton. Many people, including Catholics who had been frozen out in the stifling favouritism of Elizabeth’s later years, now re-emerged into public life. Fascinating new light on James and Anne of Denmark’s private views has recently emerged from the record of their conversation ‘in the privacy of their bedchamber’. He was Protestant (but with a Catholic mother, of course), she Catholic, which he had no problems with, so long as she was discreet. James loved plays, loved the King’s Men (and young men, of course, too!). And from now on the court calendars recorded regular performances by the King’s Men. James’s ambitions in the diplomatic field meant a constant crowd of ambassadors at court and the demand for shows shot up: sometimes fourteen, fifteen or even twenty in one Christmas season.
One of the hazards of the job – as with the entertainments presented to Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Master of the Revels, Philostrate – was that a play the King’s Men had ready might not be ‘preferred’. Sometimes the court went for something popular but less demanding, especially masques, which on occasion the King’s Men performed, although the courtiers themselves loved to dress up and act in them. These elaborate poetic allegories with music and stage effects, scripted by top writers like Jonson and designed by the most talented artists and craftsmen, such as the architect Inigo Jones, were not, however, always edifying occasions. One entertainment for the King of Denmark in 1606 included a masque of noble ladies who became so inebriated that the ‘Queen of Sheba’ fell into the king’s lap; the royal visitor himself had to be carried to bed drunk, ‘not a little defiled with the presents of the Queen, which had been bestowed upon his garments; such as wine, cream jelly and cakes’. For a King’s Man such things, it would appear, went with the job.
Shakespeare the writer – as opposed to the courtier-player – was now in a phenomenally creative period, driven by the possibilities of the new age; by fears and hopes; by artistic maturity – the ability to write what he wanted; and by his relationship with his audience and the skill and experience of his company. In short he was, in Pablo Neruda’s felicitous phrase, in full powers.
Where did Shakespeare do his writing? Alone with an oil lamp in an upstairs room in Silver Street? Or in a crowded ‘ordinary’ nearby – the Mitre, say, in Bread Street, where two pence bought a table and food, and candles were free? Or perhaps at a favourite small local tavern, in a back room through the main taproom and beyond the kitchen? Recently he has been portrayed as a frequenter of brothels, who wrote about the seedy world of Turnmill Street from first-hand experience. But the seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey records a story to the contrary: that ‘he was not a company seeker’. That he was a drinker is more likely, especially after what he describes as his ‘hell of time’ in the late 1590s. Ale was an important part of the diet in his day, even for children; he had vintners as friends; and, as now, his was a very stressful profession and its members were no doubt high in the league table of drinkers (Ben Jonson wrote whole poems about his favourite inns). Again, we don’t know, but he writes drink scenes with unerring realism, and, as we shall see, there is a story that it was drink that got him in the end.
And what of his writing habits and discipline? With morning rehearsals and afternoon shows at the Globe, when did he write? At night? Or did he get up at six and do three hours before breakfast? This again we shall never know; but, remarkably, we do have an example of his writing in progress.
These pages, apparently in his own hand, form part of the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, a play about the scholar and former Lord Chancellor executed by Henry VIII and later sanctified by the Catholic Church. There is still some dispute over this, and it is not clear why Shakespeare should have done something for another company at this point in his career. But collaboration in his theatrical world was frequent and casual, and the writing of the More scenes, the imagery, the grammar and spelling, are all characteristically his. Handwriting experts also confirm that the hand matches the few known specimens of Shakespeare’s signature. If so, it is interesting that he should have been approached about a play on More just after Elizabeth’s death: this would have been a problematic subject while she was alive. More was revered among Catholics for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church in England, and the first draft (even though it omitted this crucial motivation) had been cut short by the censor in the early 1590s with a string of interventions that still mark the manuscript, including a curt ‘Leave this in at your peril!’
The manuscript is the work of five writers: a typical collaboration of the period. Three pages only are in Shakespeare’s hand; a fourth page by him was written out by a professional scrivener. What is fascinating is that in this draft we can see his corrections, his second thoughts, a hint of the way he worked, enabling us to understand better the famous remark by his colleagues that ‘his mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers’. It may be only a draft, but it is impressive stuff: a classic Shakespearean analysis of order. In this scene More faces the mob on the so-called ‘Ill May Day’ of 1511, when London was convulsed by an anti-immigrant riot: the kind of thing still grimly familiar in our own time, it was a little local attempt at ethnic cleansing. More confronts the crowd with an appeal to reason, to God and to their common humanity. In what follows the punctuation is Shakespeare’s (three commas only), except for a question mark added to help the sense. Apart from a slip in line six, Shakespeare’s only change of thought was to put ‘with’ instead of ‘and’ in line two.
imagine that you see the wretched strangers
their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage
plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation
and that you sit as kings in your desires
authority quite silenced by your brawl
and you in ruff of your opinions clothed
what have you got? I’ll tell you, you had taught
how insolence and strong hand should prevail
how order should be quelled, and by this pattern
not one of you should live an aged man
for other ruffians as their fancies wrought
with self same hand self reasons and self right
would shark on you and men like ravenous fishes
would feed on one another
It is a classic Renaissance image; a classic case, too, of Shakespearean empathy; the ‘stranger’s case’, the idea of putting ourselves in the shoes of the persecuted, feeling for the suffering of the downtrodden victims of prejudice and violence – and the further idea of seeing beyond the immediate hot prejudice of rival groups and imagining ourselves as strangers in a world where such things are the norm. It is a lesson we have still not learned 400 years on; in our news bulletins we have all seen the wretched strangers with babies at their backs in Bosnia or Rwanda. In the end More asks the mob to consider where would they go if they were in the strangers’ shoes, what they would do if they were thrown out of England.
Why you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That breaking in hideous violence
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you …
… What would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers case,
And this your mountainish inhumanity
Sir Thomas More remained a draft – the play was never staged. A quick rewriting job for someone else: a favour, perhaps, during the period when the theatres were closed by the plague? But for a draft it is awesomely coherent. All writers are different, of course, and technology, then as now, influences the means of production (for one thing, paper was expensive). But with the stress in sixteenth-century education on memory training and oration, perhaps pre-modern habits of organizing thoughts and constructing speeches were more disciplined than ours.
Hemmings and Condell say Shakespeare never blotted a line, to which Jonson responded that he wished Shakespeare had blotted a few more, criticizing him for not crafting more carefully. However, Jonson also says that Shakespeare was a poet ‘not born but made’, that he was a craftsman who would ‘strike the second heat/upon the Muse’s anvil, turn the same/(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame’.
So he didn’t often blot, but he also struck the second heat. Perhaps in the end these two ideas are not contradictory: from the manuscript of More it is clear that the act of writing itself served to prompt thoughts and changes (in one passage he replaces unconvincing ‘watery pumpkins’ with ‘sorry parsnips’!). These are the nuts and bolts of the creative process: he puts it on paper, crosses out and improves. But the draft is still well ordered, the sequence of thought and image worked out. Perhaps, as befits one working in an oral medium, he shaped the structures of verse speeches in his mind even when there was no paper in front of him, as he walked about the city. And one assumes his habits of thought were more disciplined than, say, those of Proust, who rewrote even his proofs. There is, after all, a world of difference between a ten-volume novel drawing on memory, in which the very act of proofreading elicited still more remembrance, and the construction of a tightly knit verse play of maximum three hours’ length for a demanding mass audience of whom a lot was expected in terms of understanding and concentration. Even if, as Shakespeare puts it in the epilogue to The Tempest, the chief goal of his ‘project’ was simply ‘to please’.
But it was never so simple, one imagines, for the mature Shakespeare, to settle just for pleasing. None of the plays of this period is a throwaway as, say, The Merry Wives of Windsor was. Measure for Measure, his first play for James, is a characteristic meditation on morality, sex and lust, with a pronounced Catholic colour, catching the mood of 1604 when the Puritans attempted to push James further to the right in religious policy. Even his least successful show from this time, All’s Well That Ends Well – a strange satire of human manners, as if in response to Jonson’s manifesto for comedy – has its moments. All the plays of 1604–6 grapple with serious moral themes; but the best are the greatest of all works of drama.
Questions of morality, then, were clearly at the front of Shakespeare’s mind at this time. But as for where his religious faith was, this is impossible to answer with any certainty. The plays don’t betoken a religious trajectory: some have a broadly religious resolution, of course, and in this phase religious imagery is thicker on the ground – not only did he recall old things such as prayers, rituals and texts, but his current reading included Catholic material. Recently it has been strongly argued that the mature Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic – some have even painted him in his youth as well nigh a trainee Jesuit. But this seems overstated. The reality is likely to be less dramatic, and more consonant with the history of so many English people of his time. By 1603–4, after all, Shakespeare could be criticized by a Catholic writer (‘I C’) in a text published by a secret Catholic press, for being a secular poet, not Christian or edifying enough. Is there a suggestion here too that he was a former Catholic who had betrayed the cause?
Shakespeare was born of a Catholic family, but perhaps lost his parents’ religion as an adult, although what he imbibed with his mother’s milk and through his Warwickshire roots stayed with him in his heart, as those things shaped by childhood almost always tend to. The thin evidence for his private life in London suggests that he was not a regular churchgoer, and perhaps even avoided going to church; unlike Hemmings and Condell, he never belonged to a London parish; and he lived for some time with Huguenots, who attended the French church and were not obliged to obey the Church of England rules on Sabbath-breaking. Most curious is the fact that, although his name appears in a tax demand dated 6 October 1600 as a resident of the Liberty of the Clink, and he may well have lived there from 1599 to 1602, he has not been found in any of the annual lists of residents of the local parish, St Saviour’s, compiled by the church officers who collected tokens purchased by churchgoers for compulsory Protestant Easter communion. This is intriguing, and perhaps significant. Did he tell the churchwardens that he had taken Easter communion in Stratford? Such hints might tend to suggest that the absence of personal revelation in his works, which has so exercised his modern readers, and fuelled the fantasies of the conspiracy theorists, is no accident but a deliberate act of self-concealment on his part. This would make complete sense in someone of his background, whose family religion was defined by the law as treason, and whose father was pursued by the government’s bounty hunters and thought police. In this world of ‘suborned informers,’ as he put it, the stoic poet stood aloof.
What we know of his inner life looks the same. He listened to Protestant sermons, and he also knew about the ‘touch of the holy bread’ and the ‘evening mass’. He read both Henry Smith and Robert Southwell, and probably took both with a pinch of salt. Along with Ovid and Plutarch, the Bible was still his book. Now he probably owned the Protestant Geneva version; but there are echoes in his plays of Tyndale, the old Bishops’ Bible (used at church and school when he was young) and the Catholic Rheims version. In short, as one would expect, he was a Christian, but his mind was wide and his scepticism of any system of power was pronounced. Conscience was a personal matter. If he retained in his heart a sympathy for the Old Faith of his parents, he kept his cards close to his chest. That this was his character he tells us in Sonnet 48: ‘How careful was I when I took my way’, that is, when he started out on his journey. ‘Each trifle under truest bars to thrust … From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust … Within the gentle closure of my breast.’
So during his life, like many of his generation Shakespeare found himself moving between these worlds, with friends, sympathies and loyalties in both. Brought up in a Catholic family, his habits of mind (his use of allegory and symbolism, for example) never resemble those of a Protestant writer. We will never know how he saw himself, but one would guess that, like the former Catholic John Donne, he came to feel that the points of difference between the Roman and Reformed churches were not sufficient to justify killing and persecution. ‘The channels of God’s mercies run through both fields,’ wrote Donne, ‘they are sister teats of his graces … and the issues between them are all of things not essential to salvation.’
One’s feeling – and it can only ever be a feeling – is that William would have agreed.
With the plague contained, if not entirely over, the theatres reopened in 1605 and Shakespeare found himself back in the old routine: acting at the Globe in the afternoons, rehearsing new plays and revivals in the mornings. They probably rehearsed the first scenes on Monday morning, the next ‘act’ on Tuesday, and so on through the week – the custom in repertory in England up to the 1920s. Their role as the King’s Men put more pressure on this already tight schedule. With a new court establishing new canons of taste, but also curious to see old plays, revivals were in demand: Merry Wives and The Comedy of Errors were put on before Christmas 1604, for example, and Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merchant of Venice (a favourite of James’s) early in 1605.
It would be fascinating today to see the shows that the King’s Men played alongside Lear and Macbeth when Shakespeare was at his peak as the company’s writer-in-chief. We would surely see his own plays more in context, and maybe also understand his audience better. Non-Shakespeare shows at the Globe between 1604 and 1606 included A Larum for London, a grim anti-Spanish diatribe about the siege of Antwerp; a social comedy, The London Prodigal; the controversial Gowry, about the Gowrie conspiracy; a very popular older show, The Merry Devil of Edmonton; and The Fair Maid of Bristol, one of the best-loved romances of the time; and, to ring the changes, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, which offered social realism with domestic violence and murder. It is always instructive to remember that the great Burbage had to learn these kinds of parts as well as Lear and Antony. And although Shakespeare’s plays were surely the main draws, the rest of the repertoire offers a revealing insight into the company’s judgement of their audience, and into the artistic compromises that they had to make to ring the changes. Some shows, like Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy are lurid, fast-moving théâtre noir with sparkling, hard-edged poetry; but others, like Rich’s Devil’s Charter, were second-rate stuff; and at least one, Thomas Lord Cromwell, was a third-rate work by third-rate jobbers.
The nature of the repertoire suggests how competitive the professional theatre must have been. A dozen or more London playhouses, four of them huge places that could each hold between 2000 and 3000 people, and three of them within sight of each other on Bankside, all vied for trade. And that is not to take into account bull- and bear-baiting and the other attractions of the south bank. On top of this the King’s Men were playing at court, sometimes in the evening, and doing special runs for big court occasions. They kept on touring, too – in October 1605 going all the way down to Devon, for example. With an active repertoire of twenty or thirty shows – of which they might be called on to perform a dozen or more over Christmas for the King – this constitutes a workload that could only be achieved by a company strong on flexibility and multi-skilling and with formidable esprit de corps.
So time for new writing – and reading – had to be found when and where it could. Nor can there have been many opportunities to nip off home for a few days. It is easy to believe John Aubrey when he says that Shakespeare only went ‘home to his own country’ once a year. Anne brought up the children on her own.
On 29 October 1605, if you had strolled down from Silver Street to the conduit at St Michael le Querne, you would have seen Cheapside thronged with people. Every casement and balcony on the five- and six-storey shops and merchants’ houses was bursting with spectators, for this was the day of the Lord Mayor’s pageant. The theme this year was of the moment: ‘The triumphes of re-united Britania’.
In a series of tableaux in the streets, with kingdoms personified and Neptune on a lion, the entertainment told the mythic history of ancient Britain with its capital, New Troy, by the Thames, ‘which was once one sole monarchy, but now divided into three several estates with hurt and inconvenience ensuing’.
It was a political parable for the time. Ideas about the unification of Britain and of Britishness – and, conversely, of the threat of division of the kingdom – were in the air. In Parliament King James had outlined his views on the advisability of making one ‘Great Britain’, and a stream of pamphlets and historical treatises had followed. So artists, poets and playwrights were naturally also thinking about these themes. And that autumn Shakespeare himself was working on a play about the dismemberment of Britain and the collapse of rulership.
The initial optimism at James’s accession had not endured. Catholic hopes of religious reform, now seen to have been misplaced, were supplanted by hopes that the unjust ruler might be overthrown. The almanacs for 1605 prophesied dramatic change, eclipses ‘presaging greevous and wretched accidents’. And that sense of spiritual crisis permeated Shakespeare’s writing too that autumn. The ‘late eclipses of the sun and moon’ to which he refers took place in September and October, and chimed with the ‘Wonderful Predictions’ which prophesied that ‘piety and charity shall wax colde, truth and justice shal be oppressed … and nothing shall be expected but the spoyle and ruine of the common society’.
It nearly happened. That November saw the great crisis of the reign, the Gunpowder Plot, when the whole body politic was almost upturned. So Shakespeare’s latest play was written during a time of sensational and fateful events, and it brings the trajectory of his career to an amazing climax. The play was King Lear.
The story begins with the time-honoured love test. The old king foolishly asks his daughters how much they love him: the two wicked sisters are good at deceit and first flatter, then ruin, him. The youngest, Cordelia, loves him but refuses to enter into such a charade. From there Shakespeare remorselessly takes us into horrors, almost cruelly insisting that we watch them. Lear’s world falls apart; the kingdom is dismembered; order is turned upside down; children destroy their parents. In the end the wicked die, but only after the characters we care about most die too. Lear’s beloved Cordelia is killed, and the old king dies of a broken heart. Clutching at straws, it might be said that love conquers, even in death, but the play is exacting, harrowing and staggering in its range.
The tale itself was a very old one, appearing in the work of the twelfth-century romancer Geoffrey of Monmouth, and more recently in Sidney’s Arcadia. But most important to Shakespeare as a source was an old play based on the Lear story. Only published in late 1605, the play – no tragedy but with jigging rhymes and a happy ending – had been in the repertoire of the Queen’s Men way back in the 1580s. So Shakespeare had known it twenty years earlier; maybe he had even acted in it. And it was a tale that had nagged at him all through his career.
So one day in the autumn of 1605, let us imagine, Shakespeare wandered down Cheapside, past St Paul’s churchyard, and browsed in John Wright’s shop at Christ Church door by Newgate Market. There, in a freshly inked pile of quartos on the flap board of the shop, lay this old favourite, now available for the first time in print: ‘The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters … As it hath been divers and sundry times lately acted’. Given his long fascination with the tale, Shakespeare could not have resisted it. Of the new Lear play he wrote based on it, two versions have come down to us. One is Shakespeare’s first draft, printed by Nathaniel Butter in 1608 ‘for his shop at the Sign of the Pied Bull in Pauls churchyard’. Butter was not a good printer and it’s a bad text, but he seems to have had an unusually difficult manuscript to work from, as if for once the author’s rethinks and changes had blotted more than a line or two. A second version, printed in the 1623 Folio by his colleagues, seems to represent the author’s considered revisions after the experience of watching it on stage. So he committed much thought to the play; and it shows. In the eighteenth century it was deemed so horrible that it was regarded as unplayable; prevailing taste demanded a happy ending. In modern times it is often called the greatest of all dramas.
The text of Lear contains tiny hints that seem to find echoes in the Silver Street neighbourhood. For example, on 1 December the christening took place in St Olave’s Church of a baby girl, the daughter of his neighbour, the well-to-do embroiderer William Taylor. She was baptized Cordelia: the first appearance of the name in this form. Did Shakespeare, one wonders, stand godfather to her?
Near neighbours, too, were the doctors Palmer and Gifford. Both Lear and Macbeth, the other play written in 1605–6, include doctors among their characters. Interesting, then, is Lear’s grim reference to dissecting Regan to find out why she is so cruel: ‘Let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes this hardness? what is it breeds around her heart?’ Might this have been suggested by the public dissections carried out 50 yards away from Shakespeare’s house by his surgeon neighbours?
So, like any professional writer, Shakespeare was a sponge: stories of the street, things he saw, people he met, news of the day, sermons and tracts, all went into the mix. But he was a voracious reader, too, and books played their part. On his desk that autumn, for example, was John Florio’s translation of Montaigne, which he often used. This time his attention focused on the essay ‘On the Affections of Fathers to Their Children’. He looked back, as he often did, at Erasmus, whose Praise of Folly he mined for the Fool’s deconstructions of power. He also dipped into Sidney’s Arcadia for his version of the Lear story. But one book he read at that time over-reached them all psychologically, and offers a striking insight into how he thought about a source and appropriated its ideas for his art. It concerned the bizarre case of the Jesuits and the Devils of Denham.
The book had been printed in the last month of Elizabeth’s reign by an acquaintance of his, James Roberts, whose printing house lay over the wall beyond Cripplegate in the Barbican. It was a Protestant polemic sponsored at the highest level of government: ‘A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, to with-draw the harts of her Majesties Subjects from their allegeance, and from the truth of the Christian Religion professed in England, under the pretence of casting out Devils’.
This nasty piece of anti-Catholicism contains a sensational account of a series of exorcisms performed by Jesuit priests many years before at a house in Denham in Buckinghamshire. It includes a documentary appendix of verbatim confessions and interrogations of those exorcized, many of them poor people: serving women like Sara Williams and her sister Fidd. The author, Samuel Harsnett, was a Privy Councillor and chaplain to the Bishop of London: a learned and cultivated man of taste and imagination, but with that streak of cruelty often found among people in power at those times when the theologian and the executioner go hand in hand. His book was intended as part of a national campaign against belief in the spirit world, possession and exorcism – one of the atavistic holds the Catholic priesthood was felt still to possess over its naive and old-fashioned adherents in the countryside. But it also raised much wider questions about the nature of power and authority, the existence of spirits and miracles. So the story was of peculiar significance to those in power. And it was of additional interest to Shakespeare since the text mentions the executions of people he knew – his kinsmen Edward Arden and John Somerville, and his teacher’s brother Thomas Cottam.
One of the exorcizing priests, Robert Debdale of Shottery, must, in fact, have been known to him personally. Years before, Debdale had gone to Rome with Shakespeare’s schoolmaster Simon Hunt. He had returned with Campion and died on the scaffold in 1586. During his time underground, Debdale had been chaplain of a Catholic recusant family in Denham, the Peckhams. (Tucked away in a leafy suburb by the river Colne, their house is still there, though recently restored as a golf clubhouse – any remaining ghosts have surely departed now.)
The exorcisms had been performed in 1586, in the frightening build up to the Babington Plot. Using the interrogations of the participants with the eye of a dramatist, Harsnett tears the actions and beliefs of the Jesuit exorcists to pieces. Conjuring up spirits, like praying for the dead and ‘incantation’, was a papist charade. As far as he and his sponsors were concerned, the age of ghosts and devils was over.
For Shakespeare (as for the modern reader) it seems to have been a disturbing text, only lightened by Harsnett’s breezy showman’s patter. The testimonies are gruelling, and the cumulative effect is both compelling and revolting; after a while the reader’s mind reels at the smell of the potions used as emetics, the needles in legs, the acrid incense and the gruesome relics. Although the concepts behind the cult of exorcism were not so alien to a seventeenth-century person as they are to us, the words and images convey a sense of stumbling into another world. Troops of devils come forward one after another – Pippin (who makes his victims ‘to lie in fields and gape at the Moone’), Hilco, Smolkin, Lustie huffe-cap, Hiaclato (‘the monarch of the world … whose only followers were two men and an urchin boy’) and the extraordinary gang of devils who torment poor Sara Williams: ‘Maho, Killico Hob and these four, Frateretto, Fliberdigibbet, Hoberdidance, Tocobatto, were devils of the round or Morrice whom Sara in her fits tuned together in measure and sweet cadence’ (‘lest you should conceive that the devils had no musicke in hell’, adds Harsnett, helpfully).
Here, in short, was a documentary record of what it is like to be mad: a graphic depiction of physical and mental torment and a conjuring of the archaic imaginal world that the ideologues of the Protestant Reformation sought to do away with. To a professional writer interested in the pathology of possession it was a gift. The tale is a series of short dramas, and Harsnett tells it with stage directions, using all the theatrical metaphors from comedy and tragedy to the farcical and the grotesque. Here literally, was the incoherence of which John Donne would write. And Shakespeare’s use of the text suggests that he did not just skim it, as he sometimes did. He read it with deepening fascination, perhaps noting down phrases and ideas in his commonplace book; digesting it before he wrote his play. In the storm scene in Lear, for example, he uses the names of the devils who appeared to the serving woman Sara Williams; except that this is a world, he will show us, where there are no devils. Inhumanity is the real evil, and he is going to show us what happens when human beings ‘shark on each other’.
Many of the words and phrases he borrows from Harsnett he had never used before – ‘playing bo-peep’, for instance. Outlandish ones especially caught his eye: ‘auricular’, ‘apish’, ‘gaster’, ‘asquint’ and ‘pendulous’ are just a few. His borrowings, though, concentrate on Harsnett’s vicious lexicon of pain: images of the human body beaten, pierced, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured, pierced and finally broken on the rack. In the exorcisms, for example, one particular action is repeated as each of the victims is bound tightly in a chair, sick on magic potions, choking on incense, grim relics stuffed in their mouths. Anne Smith tells how three times ‘they did bind her so fast … in a chair as they almost lamed her arms and so bruised all parts of her body with holding tying and turmoiling of her’. Another old lady is ‘an old body unapt and unwieldy, as an old dog to a dance … to teach an old corkie woman to writhe and tumbel’. And just as the devils come back in the gobbledegook of Poor Tom in the storm in Lear, so does this image. Shakespeare uses the word ‘corky’ for the first and only time in his plays in the horrific scene when Gloucester is tied to a chair and blinded:
GONERIL: Pluck out his eyes ….
CORNWALL: Bind fast his corky arms … Bind him I say.
REGAN: Hard, hard! O filthy traitor! …
CORNWALL: To this chair bind him ….
Harsnett’s book, of course, must have been all the more affecting to Shakespeare given his Catholic upbringing. It was a kind of sadistic blockbuster, surreal, savage, literary, full of black humour, and it stuck with him. There are strong echoes of its language in three of his late plays, and also in his revision of Othello. So the book penetrated Shakespeare’s imagination deeply, its contents transmuted into the much bigger canvas he was creating, with its iterative imagery of human suffering. Nor was it just a question of borrowing words, names and images. For out of it seems to have emerged the central metaphor of the play: the storm as a kind of exorcism (indeed, the play as a kind of exorcism?). In mulling over Harsnett, then, he seems to have found a key to transform the old story, and the old source play, into metaphor: creating the terrible apocalyptic surge to which the play rises in the middle, when the bonds are loosed and the storm of man-made evil and cruelty engulfs humankind so that human life becomes as cheap as that of beasts in the face of pitiless gods: ‘As flies to wanton boys … they kill us for their sport.’
We are left with the same question as at the end of Euripides’s greatest tragedies: if that is all life is, what is life? Lear was, in a sense, Shakespeare’s answer to Harsnett. Or at least to the culture, the mind-set and the structures of power that produced it, and to the events it describes. Wherein lies authority? Can the principle of nature be elicited and defined by reason? Is humanity on its own? Is authority an attribute of the divine, its exercise – as James himself declared – an aspect of the supernatural? Are there still miracles and prophecies? Or is the age of miracles dead?
The language in which he does this was the culmination of the style he had developed since Hamlet. A fantastically rich vocabulary drew on everything from popular song and madmen’s jingles to Latinisms, French words and his own coinages. But the crucial emotional tone of the play comes from good old English words – often monosyllables. ‘See’ and ‘feel’, for example, are at the heart of the play (‘I see it feelingly,’ says Lear towards the end.) ‘Kin’ and ‘kind’ form another favourite semantic cluster, which opens up rich possibilities of meaning: spreading from its basic linguistic root, which defines a relationship between human beings, to become an expression of the most important necessary human quality of those relationships, kindness. Such words he worries like a dog (as in Hamlet: ‘a little more than kin, and less than kind’). And in Lear always it is these monosyllables that carry meaning most feelingly:
Thou knowst the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry …
Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! …
Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones! …
For as I am a man I think this lady to be my child ….
And so I am, I am ….
It is tempting, too, to look back to the plain language he heard in the streets of Stratford: the words his mother and father spoke, and those of the peasants in the fields. To simple country people words are like physical objects: things to touch and see. Indeed, in their simplicity there is almost a moral value, and in Shakespeare the strongest emotions are expressed not in Latin or French words, or in scholastic phrases – resonant though they sometimes are in the mouths of kings or upper-class Roman heroes – but in old English monosyllables: kith, kin, kind, hate, kill, live, die, good, love ….
And so in Lear, with such a range of language, he takes us into the world of horrors and the dispossessed. Here are the kind of people we have met in the town books of Warwickshire in the 1580s, the blind ‘idiot’ child, the Bedlam beggars, the people he rubbed shoulders with in the plague-ridden streets by his London lodgings. These are the people the king has not cared for as he should:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
Plainly this has not just been written to please the nobs, to get bums on seats, or as a quick rewrite of an old play to discharge a contract. It is as demanding as popular entertainment can get – a testimony to the intelligence of his audience, to their capacity for language and to their range of response. Shakespeare turns a sectarian rant into a tale of people trapped by the evil of the times, an evil that is man-made. In the end, in Lear’s speech to Cordelia he seems to remember Robert Southwell’s meditation on prison, liberty and the divine mysteries from the Epistle of Comfort, with its image of birds in a cage:
LEAR: Come, let’s away to prison;
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness; so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses, and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.
EDMUND: Take them away.
LEAR: Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense. Have I caught thee?
He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,
And fire us hence like foxes. Wipe thine eyes;
The good years shall devour them, flesh and fell,
Ere they shall make us weep: we’ll see ’em starve first.
Come.
Under what circumstances a person writes verse like this we can only guess. Even in its moments of tenderness, the amplitude of the language in King Lear is violently, outrageously indecorous. Did he really come up with this sort of thing in the back room of a crowded ‘ordinary’? Does this not feel more like solitary, midnight writing?
Nor does a dramatist write like this without the actors to perform it: the text always has to be tailored to the company. After the demise of Kemp, there are no parts for clowns in Henry V and Julius Caesar. Female characters grow in stature after the arrival of John Rice and William Ostler. And here is the old team, together for so long, mature, able to do anything – and evidently with total faith in their writer: Burbage as Lear, Hemmings with his fussy old courtier parts as Gloucester, Armin as the Fool singing his weird rhymes, jingles and songs.
Shakespeare was a great comedy writer: he had a natural feel for it (did that come from his ‘merry-cheeked’ father?) and for the poignant way the comic intermingles with the tragic, to say nothing of his natural comic verve. But he also knew that destruction is the nature of the angel of history. Old worlds are destroyed, new ones come into being; our dearest things are lost, but the wounds heal in time. Some of them.
Aristotle, in his famous definition of Greek tragedy in the Poetics, says that tragic drama is an imitation of life: ‘an imitation of an action which is serious and complete, and which has a kind of magnitude. Its language is well seasoned, with each of the kinds of seasoning used separately in its different parts. It is dramatic, not narrative form. And through pity and fear it accomplishes a purgation of the emotions.’ It was a definition of a Greek art form, of course, not an English one; but in his greatest plays, such as Lear, Shakespeare does this. He shows us the worst and offers us, through tragic catharsis, a retrospect of life and a foretaste of death, heartening us through our survival to take an ethical stance and to ‘bear us like the time’. As we have discovered from his family background, his childhood and schooldays, he learned to see from both sides in a time when coherence had gone and chaos had come. And he makes his greatest drama about that, almost deliberately piling on the suffering for the audience. And yet, as is the nature of tragic drama, the play’s nihilism is softened by the ultimate destruction of the wicked, and by some strange consoling force of what can only be called providence.
But is it a Christian providence, or is it more like the Greeks would have understood it? The play has been variously labelled Christian, pre-Christian and even post-Christian. And although the story is safely located in British myth and pagan prehistory, there is an element of truth in all three. Lear is Christian in the sense that this is art created for a Christian audience, art whose author has quarried religious imagery, words and stories. This is as one might expect from a lifetime Bible reader like Shakespeare (the Book of Job, for example, is another obvious influence hovering in the play’s background). But what kind of Christianity? The play is not Protestant, of course, but it is not Catholic either, although there is evidence that Catholics saw it as a commentary on their times.
But Lear cannot be forced into such particular distinctions. A sprawling, indecorous, prophetic miracle play with religious and political subject matter, it harks back to the mystery plays Shakespeare saw on carts in Coventry as a kid, to the old Queen’s Men’s play with its happy ending. At times realistic, satirical, obscene and scatological, with its snatches of songs, mad rhymes, devils’ names, jigs and street slang, this is a tale situated in a landscape of violence and alienation. It is easy to see why it so appealed to twentieth-century writers, such as Samuel Beckett. And whether we read it as pre- or post-Christian, it spoke about the spiritual condition of Shakespeare’s England.
One last point remains, and it is about the author’s intentions. This is a play for the king by the King’s Men: a play that passed the red pen of the Master of the Revels (although some differences between the two versions of Lear are now thought to be due to censorship). It is a play about a king and the disastrous division of his kingdom. There were things put in it to flatter and interest the royal patron. But at the same time, in its subtext the drift of the play is oppositional, and it is hard to believe that this was not intentional.
Four hundred years on, perhaps we delude ourselves in thinking that we can really get close to Shakespeare as he composes a work such as this. But maybe we can get an inkling of the way his mind was working when we remember his obsession with the Lear tale going back to the old Queen’s Men’s play. It was a story he had first alluded to years before, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona; a tale that flickers through his career (it crops up again in The Merchant of Venice and Richard II); and he would revise it later, rewriting Lear’s most famous scene for even more power and nuance, a sure sign that the play really mattered to him.
Ben Jonson attacked him for having no moral stance, as did Samuel Johnson two centuries later. In the twenty-first century we know that he is always true to life. Lear gives the lie to the idea that Shakespeare’s art is not in some sense oppositional. He is not didactic, like Sidney or Jonson. He doesn’t tell you what he thinks, or what you should think, and he never preaches. Rather he sets up oppositions, multiple viewpoints, and then holds his mirror up to nature. So in Lear, in his topicality, in his use of such loaded and contemporary sources, maybe we can get a glimpse of a Jacobean public artist working at the very highest level. And here we can sense, too, underneath his customary reserve, Shakespeare’s deadly seriousness as an artist: what one modern critic has called ‘his cool and cunning authority in the face of his times’.
His company performed Lear before the King and court at Whitehall on St Stephen’s Day 1606, the year after the Gunpowder Plot and on one of the few old saints’ days still observed in the Anglican Church. This gives us a measure of how far he felt he could go with his patrons, and how far his patrons felt they could go with him. Seen in that light, the show that night at Whitehall is as emblematic a moment in the history of Western culture as Michelangelo’s last working day, breaking the Rondanini pietà, in the spring of Shakespeare’s birth, or Descartes’ dream of the union of all science in a wall stove in Ulm three years after Shakespeare’s death. It is a bridge between the old and the new, between the no longer and the not yet.